No more drowning in my sorrow, no more drowning in my fright

I've always had sort of this wierd obession with death. I'm sure that sounds bizarre to a lot of people...though maybe not so much the readers of this blog. But as long as I can remember, I've felt connected to death. I don't know that I have the time to properly put that into words. But here is an example: I like funerals. Not in some wierd morbid Lydia Deetz kind of way, I don't like death because I like it when people die, but I am attracted to death in how it strips people of all their bullshit. Layers come off in death. Grief is a raw emotion. It isn't that it isn't tragic, I don't want to make light of the losses people suffer in death, especially to a readership of primarily lung diseased young adults, but people seem most "real" to me in their saddness.

One of the problems i have always had in this life is this pervading sense of loneliness. As I've gotten older, I have often attributed it to Cf and the isolation I felt in the disease for so many years, but even now that I am not as isolated because of my internet connections, the lonley bug still hits. It isn't always lonley in a bad way, it's more a trouble connecting with the world. I once wrote:
How do you explain lonely? You have to slow down to do it. I don’t think lonely people ever move fast, that’s part of the problem. You can’t keep up so you give up trying. It’s the way you can be in the middle of a group of people, but you’re the only one trying to hear the background music.

I feel like I can't connect with the world because so many people seem so full of shit. Sometimes I feel like it is clear as day how people are hiding from themselves. You hear them talking but it's almost like "Annie Hall." You can see the meta-thinking inside thier brains, excpet it seems like THEY have no idea. I realize this is already riding the edges of not making sense. I always default to my old standard, you just have to "get it."

But I am not afraid ot talk about death, I am not afraid to cry. And I feel this connection to saddness and grief. I think maybe, besides the losses of people I've loved, I have always held onto this slight sense of grief for myself.

Yesterday my stepmother and the hospital she works with hosted a "Grieving Out Loud" seminar given my a singer named Cindy Bullens. I hadn't heard of her until my stepmom started listening to her after the death of my stepsister. I wasn't all that drawn to the music either, mostly because it just isn't really my style. the workshop was differnt though, it was the story behind the music.

Bullens lost her 11 year old daughter to Hodgkins disease and from that loss came an album called "Somewhere Between Heaven and Earth" and from that came this workshop on grief, which really isn't a workshop at all but just Bullens' story.

At these types of events, you get all types of people: those who just want to be seen, those who truly want to learn, those that come for the free food. I stood rather silently at the reception/hors d'ouerves prior to the workshop just taking people in, watching, doing my alone buisness (part of lonley is my hatred of small talk, if we don't get to the meat of it right quick, I don't want it).

Bullens dips right into the meat of things with her presentation, immediately taking you into her grief in losing her daughter. Coupled with her music, the experience was intense. And that is why i feel an affinity to death. The room was connected, we were sharing our pain. Not everyone there had lost a child. My thoughts strayed from my stepsister Kelly and my stepmother's experience in losing a child, to Paul and the way his death took me to my knees in a way I'd not expected, to the horror of losing my own children, to the fear I think my parents must encounter when they think of losing me.

But it is fear that holds us back, keeps us quiet, trips up our dreams. So when death bubbles that fear up to our surfaces I think we forget about all the other things we are afraid of. So funerals and shared encounters like this workshop sometimes feel to me like the few times where people are truly real. And there is a beauty to that. There is a beauty in the release of a person into death, not by their dying but in our letting go. I think the letting go is the truest act of selflessness and the scariest.

While I feel powerfully about these expereinces, the connections we make in these moments, I can't pretend to say that my own fears don't hold me back. They do.

I can talk to people about death. I can ask them about their loved ones, talk about my own. I am not afraid to say the word 'dead.' I'm not afriad to talk about my own death. but I have not mastered letting to and I have not shed fear. the workshop brought all kinds of feelings about my own mortality and death to the surface and I am not afraid to examine them here in the safety of my blog, but i was afraid to talk about it last night. Not afraid to talk about my death. Afriad to talk about its likley root. I still have not mastered CF talk and I feel it holds me back in some ways. That perhaps for all my talk about the connectedness of sadness and grief I can't let go of my own fears and really tap in. It made me wonder just how full of shit I might really be.

What does my "Annie Hall" meta balloon say??