Love is Louder

Tragic day.....I don't know that the word tragic even details the enormity of the day.  Another mass shooting, another school shooting, more innocent lives taken, one last act of desperation, another totally preventable act not prevented.  And the question we all ask is why!

Call me overly empathetic, big hearted, an idiot-saver, or tell me I have completely lost my mind.  While I feel so deeply for the families and friends left behind after their loved one passes on and out of this cruel world, I feel almost as deeply for the desperate and ill men who carry out these crimes. How does an individual get to this point in their world, where they disconnect from our world and why wasn't anyone able to bring them back over?  I feel desperate and anxious that an individual feels the only way for the pain to stop is to inflict pain and take their own life, if they are lucky. 

So being the positive person I am ( or the most positive I can be), I look not for reasons but for solutions.  Because see, asking why, I think, is simply an excuse for us not to acknowledge what we already know.  We know that our system, our society, our connectedness is broken.  People fall through the cracks, jump in the cracks, wallow in the cracks and the energy it takes to help them out just feels like too much.  In light of this, I pose this question, Is the energy we are spending grieving, questioning, hating, and crying, more energy than we could have spent helping?

Now I'm just as guilty as the next one.  I didn't know this soul, I didn't personally know of his pain, anguish, and anger. But I do know that our world doesn't view mental illness as a sickness.  We view it as choice, something to just get over, deal with, move on from, fix.  But we don't speak of it as we should, as a cancer of the mind.  A cancer of our behaviors. If mental illness were talked about as something where each person you meet is so simply devastated, then rallies around you to support you, brings you the casseroles, and ensures that their lives are now entwined in your recovery, could today's tragedy be prevented?

As the solutions pour in, gun control issues inevitably come to the surface.  I am an advocate for my 2nd amendment rights and I am an advocate for control.  I believe that as a democratic people, we should be able to arm ourselves at the same level as our government.  Because although we have a compassionate leader in our White House today, we may one day have a leader who wants to take his/her power too far.  And I believe the knowledge that the masses are able to defend themselves on the same level as the government, keeps everyone in check.  At the same time, how do we prevent these weapons from getting into ill person's hands? I don't have the answers.  But I do have an idea....

What if we take all the energy, money, time, and thoughts about gun control and put it to use elsewhere?  Put it into health care, support programs to help parents raise their kids, programs that allow families to balance their lives.  What if these "funds" started at birth with parent education, changing/different ways to raise children in a changing world, help for mothers and fathers with newborns, programs to keep a couple's connection alive and thriving.  What if families were assigned a helper when they had children, someone to help with the laundry, shopping, housecleaning, extra work assignments.  A trained person who allows a couple to re-focus on their relationship when it's needed most.  Where are the preventative programs to identify children and parents who are at risk in pre-school and elementary school, psychotherapists, educators, helpers, supporters, so that men, women, and children have a bridge to help.  Work programs that compensate you with time, money, or other incentives to be your best. Colleges and Universities that require check ins on students during stressful time periods.  Hell give them credit towards graduation for doing the hard work of a self-inventory.  And if you don't know what that is, you should find out. You probably need it.

I truly believe the money is there, privately or publicly.  If mental illness can be treated as a cancer, a societal harm that billions of dollars are put behind to help stave it off to start with, could we have prevented the atrocities in CT, Oregon, Arizona, California, Colorado, Virginia, and every other state, institution, school, mall, place of worship, or camp that has experienced this.

And I'm going to take back what I said earlier about not knowing the answers.  I do know the answer, it's compassion and LOVE!  LOVE yourself enough to get help, LOVE your spouse or partner or friend or family member enough to seek out help, LOVE you ex-spouse, ex- partners, ex-bosses, ex anything enough to know when they really need help, and LOVE your neighbor, the stranger on the street, the person on the park bench as your friends.  Because as my friend Laura, who was killed in a mass shooting at her hair salon in Seal Beach, CA in Oct. 2011, would say......
                                           LOVE IS LOUDER!!!!

Rafters of First Loves

Sitting in the rafters of the barn, I sat on a beam rummaging through boxes.  My mother has been asking me for years to go through my college boxes, boxes that contained my only academic memories of class time.  Yep, that's right. The few memories I have of going to class in college generally revolve around one thing......did I take good notes.  Good notes in my mind are not what the notes say, but HOW the notes look.  Do they look organized, is my handwriting perfect, did I write in pencil or pen.....A little OCD, I know.  Every body has their one thing and mine are notes.  But that's not what we are here to read.  We are here to read about that four letter work we love to hate or hate to love. 
So back to the rafters.  I discovered a bundle of letters.  Yes, that's right a bundle.  Tied up in a leather strap with pink, blue, and yellow envelopes.  My heart lept when I saw them.  After all who has bundles of letters anymore.  I had a faint hint of what this bundle would contain.  I am a romantic girl, I like the stories, the cliches.  So I found a semi-comfy place to sit on the narrow beam traversing my childhood barn.  Knot by knot I untied the leather strap holding these drifts into time.  There, on the top of the pile, was a small envelope with a red heart on the inside.  I smiled knowing this wasn't one of the letters I was looking for, but that it was an object of love anyhow.  On the front of the envelope were the letters "AB" written in elementary kid pencil handwriting.  On the backside was the name of my younger brother.  My face lit up with love knowing I not only once received a Valentine from my brother (gasp), but that I had foreseen the specialness of it when I received it. 

Other letters in this bundle included various professional sounding letters from my dad.  Some that I'm pretty sure I'm saving for a blackmail related purpose later in life.  Letters from my deceased grandparents I passed up because they exhibited love.  And to read the letters of love they had for me was just going to be too much.  I wasn't up there to cry my eyes out, I was up there to find LOVE!

And then there it was, the handwriting of my first true love.  The boyhood scribble of a young man who I was completely in love with and had left behind to go to college!!

Speaking of college, I had conceded to my parents in the summer after my senior year to not go to my first choice school, which by the way I picked for three very well thought out reasons.  1. It was located in between both the mountains and the ocean, 2. the brochure folder showed these wonderful green lawns to lay around on (because that is a must in a college), and 3. it was a 24 hour drive from my parents.  So on a whim, I applied to University of Nebraska just in case.  Most of you know the rest of the story.  If you don't, just know that I bleed Red!

So back to the love part.  My first love, BC, was the love of all loves.  We met just before the summer after my senior year of high school.  We had what we now label as the best summer of our lives.  I spent every waking minute I could with BC.  I would get up, go to work, go home and sleep until he was off of work and then be out all night.  We did that for 2 months.  And then I left and here is where the letters come in. 

First let's fast forward a decade and a half and Mr. BC and I reconnect after having not seeing each other for at least 15 years.  We have the same chemistry we had back when we knew nothing about heart break, failed relationships, marriages and life in general.  We spend a good part of a Saturday night catching up, arguing about our (his) political stances, and in general shared long stares in the eyes wondering what might have been. 

I begin to open these letters one by one and read them slowly, aiming to let my youthful memories come back.  The letters profess love, devotion, committment and longing to be together, longing to spend the night together without having to lie to our parents.  :) Some of the letters are late night delirium of words trying to insert the warm feelings of his heart into the paper so that my body might warm just by touching the same note.  And some are the mundane details of college life without your best friend. In any case, I cherished each one today as I did when I retrieved them from my dorm room mail box.  I secretly wanted that relationship back, scratch that. I wanted that love, that devotion of time, thought and space back in my life.  

I fell in love with these letters today. I transcended time and allowed myself to feel those irrestible feelings of love, lust and friendship that come with your first true love. 

As I go to sleep tonight, thinking about my day in the rafters of my barn, remembering what true, devoted, unwavering love felt like again, I wonder, Can you ever love someone as deeply and as whole-heartedly as you did/do your first love?