The 8 x 8 ft POD was dropped off in my Pittsburgh driveway early Friday morning. Filled to the brim with what I had deemed essential “treasures,” from the California house we were selling, I knew the drill. We had till Monday to empty the container and find a place for the POD’s contents in our Pittsburgh home or in our rented storage space several blocks away.My weekend had been dedicated to this monumental, and might I add, emotional task.The items in the POD made it there because they had some special significance or meaning to me or other family members. Some of the items had made the trip across country in the opposite direction in a POD four years ago. For those items, it was a homecoming – the bobbed wire cactus sculpture we put lights on and used as a holiday tree when we lived in Texas, the pair of plaid French chairs that were on their way to antiquedom when I found them at the Good Will in
Detroit over a half a century ago, and the blue handcrafted pottery salad bowl, a gift from a Pittsburgh friend after we had moved here. There were some new-to-us items collected from secondhand stores in the Palm Springs area; a drop leaf dining table, whimsical platters for displaying and serving, grilled food, and a pair of collector item brass bedroom lamps, each featuring a stately peacock.
There were losses in the transit process, beginning with some scrapes and gashes in the bedroom set we had deemed worth keeping, and ending with the PODs injury to one limb of a tree and elimination of a sliver section of the front yard’s ground cover. Much had to be left behind, given away to relatives and groups that serve those in need – with all recipients promising to avoid the gifts ending up in a landfill.
Once unloaded, much in the house and storage space had to be gone through, letting go of what no longer serves our needs, to make space for our future life.
The hardest part was the storage room– being faced with items (and memories) I hadn’t touched in years. Some things I’d given up on ever seeing again, like the scrapbook my mother made for me when I traveled the country as a professional dancer. Remembering where something gets storied is not one of my gifts. I came across some scrapbooks I’d started years ago for my grandchildren, who are 20 something now. Such happy/sad memories. Lots of opportunities to grieve my small life.
While I’m unpacking boxes, cleaning out cabinets and drawers, my phone is blowing up with news and reactions to what the Astrologist Rob Brezsny called a “Cultural Emergency.” News of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs. Wade, though predicted, (planned and prayed for by some since the original ruling nearly 50 years ago), filled the media airways with emotions of early individual and communal grief – confusion, shock, disbelief, anger, rage. Social media, which I avoided, was exploding with the emotions and opinions of both sides of our divided
country. One side’s despair is another side’s elation.
By evening divisions around other matters in my own family had come to the forefront, partly unearthed by the processes of selling a house and moving and rearranging all the items in the present one. I fell into bed overcome by exhaustion and despair. The following day a friend helped me see that my personal grieving processes had most likely been complicated and impacted by the monumental large-scale losses members of my cultural group are grappling with.
In grieving losses, it’s important to name them, and not everyone would call these losses by the same name. Some say that looking to the constitution as originally written is an error that guarantees the removal of human rights and freedom for women. When Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John in March of 1776 while he was meeting with the founders to construct the constitution, she urged him to “Remember the Ladies.” Of course, he and the Continental Congress did not. Women in the U.S only achieved full citizenship and the right to vote a mere
102 years ago.
Looking to an artist’s foretelling of this present moment, author Margaret Atwood said, “I stopped writing it, (The Handmaid’s Tale) several times because I considered it too far-fetched. Silly me. Theocratic dictatorships do not lie only in the distant past: There are a number of them on the planet today. What is to prevent the United States from becoming one of them?”
And then, there is the little matter of establishing a state religion, which of course is forbidden by our ancient document. Margaret Atwood sees the present situation as a return to the situation that inspired her work– the 1700s when the Puritan religion infected the laws and lives of New Englanders. “That which is a sin within a certain set of religious beliefs is to be made a crime for all.”
Nobody tells us how to grieve well our large-scale cultural losses, but I suggest doing what we do in grieving the smaller scale ones –recognize and name what we’ve lost, seek and give consolation to others who share our experience of loss, use art processes and ritual to express and honor these losses, being grateful for what we had for as long as we had it. And then, pause respectfull y to live into the questions –to what life is this loss calling us? And what actions do we
need to take to create that life?
