today is Michael Cory Kirila's birthday

Stanley...
in process
...bonnie...Mom
Saying goodbye
learning
where here is

Let me tell you about a friend of mine who changed my life with a book.

Stanley seemed permanent enough at the time. It turned out though that his tentative gentle manner was not only impermanent but was profoundly imbued with something much the opposite.

I say this because he chose, in the end, to attain his fondest wish of ego-loss in a way that struck those who knew him in an immediate and so a violent manner as to seem like a kind of detonation, an interpersonal terrorism perpetrated on the heart.

Bonnie was another one who did this, four years later, without calling it the same thing: attaining ego-loss. Stanley had introduced me to the concept but I wasn't in a place that comprehended the term, neither was Bonnie, I guess. Mostly she was just thoroughly impatient with her husband's drunkenness and had been overwhelmed with the world we were trying to comprehend within the same family that both she and I had married into, unawares.

Both were persons possessed of great personal power hidden among soft tones and what appeared to be pale essences. It seems to me in retrospect that they functioned as individual cautions about self-delusion and free choice, tough teachers offering self-destructibility as a life lesson.

Self-immolation was their choice. Self-destruction was their way. Not the stuff of my understanding, walking wounded, acting out for others their life message. Their final choices were irreversible evidence of the depths of their pain that led them to abandon separate but probably equally intolerable, lonely, abused lives, bruised experience that led them to a final negativity that I was and still am unable to understand or fully accept. But there it is, here I am and here they are not.

They never met one another on this plane of existence, to my knowledge, which seems inconsequent to you, maybe, but to me there was a message both seemed hell-bent to deliver. Two humans embodying pain they could not tolerate; both chose to destroy rather than to sustain.

When they left this world they took more than they gave to those who cared. What a self-indulgence; what freedom ultimately denied even as it was so finally exercised.

If they had met; I wonder, Exactly How would they have seemed to one another. How would they interact, appear, assess one another, eye to eye. Would there have been four blue eyes looking through each other as if transparent, as if the other did not exist? Would their mutual mirroring have been a kind of emptiness that totally excludes the other? Would they have recognized each other as beings whose destinies were the same?

At the time my own life was inundated with what seemed like a limitless array of catastrophe. Maybe it seems that way now at least in part because of their choices to leave this planet even as my most rock-like supporter was being pulled off it.

Josephine. Struggling with that which would take her off the planet even as she loved it and me and all the others who surrounded her.

She, my mother, was one to make the world better with her every intention, gently humoring all those who had doings with her. Even a short shopping trip with her left those she touched feeling as if the world was their oyster. What a way she had.

Watching as she was stricken from this world so inexorably while yet so slowly was a process pain filled, a kind of cruel eracement.

Excruciatingly, everything seemed to be dissolving around me during that time, from her first notice to me that her body was under attack to the moment when I became unable to any longer deny that she had had to say her final goodbye.

How loved I had felt by Josephine. The deprivation I endure even now of her in my life makes for a deeply empty space in my being. Simultaneously into my life came, like a barely detectable ambient support, from Stanley, who saw what he needed and passed it on to me, an atmospheric breath of enfoldment which surrounded me, keeping me upright even as my interior awareness seemed to be crumbling. This, as her once always certain exterior support was slowly being removed from my person.

Stanley gave me a book to replace him in my life.

That book came to him from someone who, I now realize, had joined with his most significant other to devastate his hopes for a future. She gave it to him from the other side of this continent. Instead of what he wanted she gave him something startlingly similar to what his father had bestowed.

Long used to abuse, Stanley's most apparent abiding desire was for an unshakeable love from another on this planet, I still see his face as he told me this. His love for her................
He painted pictures of her beauty for me as we sat on his porch in the sun. Heart aching with loss he described his devastation, accepting it with a grace I found overwhelming.

I had been working with crisis intervention locally, during that time of great upheaval in the lives of all Americans. I was so young, at the time, unprepared for the world I lived within. We were friends so we were sharing our shakiness in the times we found ourselves living through.

The war in Vietnam, campus unrest and a peacelessness that almost entirely surpassed my understanding swept around me like a storm threating everything I knew. And there was Stanley, that day, telling me about her. He excused himself for a short time and went into his house, brought back a purple over-sized soft-back book with white inscriptions on the cover. He gave it to me and only later insisted that it had been just a loan.

He went on to make clear to me that she and his wife (as did his father early on, this I was to learn from his sister in the months ahead, sitting on the same porch after his decision to jump off a roof to end his suffering) had simultaneously abandoned him when he needed them the very most desperately. It was a message of heartbreak and hopelessness. He had been abandoned by another, one who he felt was his only reason to continue.

All I could do was echo to him his pain, and he would only allow me that and no more. He gave that book to me as his shy smile radiated a twinkling secret message. He then went on over the next months to quietly disappear while the contents of that book, word by word and picture by picture introduced me to his vast knowledge of the void. He understood it as that void that other people had left in his heart.

Stanley extended to me, the day he gave me the book, his gratitude for my acceptance of him and his pain and he made plain his decision to leave everything behind and go as soon as he was able. Trained in crisis intervention techniques I suspected his intentions to end his life but found him unshakeable to my feeble attempts to comprehend his pain. His denials of my concerned statements and questions were emphatic. He sent me away rather than allow me to shoulder him at all, he gave me the book as a substitute for his company. It was both a gift and a further denial a denial of my desire to help him, with the few means of assistance I had gleaned in training, little help to me though it was, to grapple with what was a very confusing world to both Stanley and I at that moment.

Not long after I had read the book, which I was unable to put down except for those daily actions otherwise required of me due to previous commitment, he required that I give it back and go get my own copy. He was firm in this, so I did these things.
It was that book that time and that man who changed my life.