As a special treat to myself for finishing the play, and to Cary for finishing a 10 week winter quarter teaching German to undergrads at a college 90 miles from home, we went to Las Vegas a couple of days later. It felt good to see the sun, have a few good meals, hang out by the pool, and walk the strip. But on that Friday morning I got a call from my sister, a call that I had been expecting (and not wanting) for a long time. Her ex-husband, Tom, father of my striking 18 and 20-year old nieces, had died earlier that morning from the cancer that he had lived with and battled for about seven years. He died on my youngest niece's 18th birthday, as if it had been his intention to bring her safely to that place in her life where one phase would be ending and another beginning.
And so I got thinking about all kinds of endings and all kinds of beginnings. Right now I see so many of them weaving through the lives of those that I love. One daughter about to move from the west coast to the east coast where her husband will be stationed as a doctor in the Navy. The other applying to grad school at the University of Michigan even as she negotiates the terrain of a new love. My sister closing the chapter of her life revolving around her ex-husband and her daughters and both figuratively and literally writing the chapter that will follow. My wife coming to grips with the likely possibility that the universe has plans for her that don't involve teaching German at a college or University, and struggling to hear her next calling amid the noisy chatter of every day life. My nieces saying goodbye to the man who loved them so fiercely and quite literally lived his life for them over the last several years - all this at a time when they need to deal with school, and romance, and career paths, and all the other new beginnings that 18 and 20-year olds everywhere deal with. Many endings, and many beginnings.
And what about the old Brad-meister? Amid all the major life changes my loved ones are facing it seems trivial to admit that I am struggling with the end of my play. But I am. Or more accurately, I am struggling with picking up my "normal" life after the play. Why? I guess because for a couple of months or so I was engaged in a pursuit that so clearly furthered my personal mission, one that helped the dream of the universe come true, one that created something of value and made connections in a world where all too often there is destruction and disconnection. Don't get me wrong - I am a good lawyer. I take my work seriously and exert all the creativity and good spirits I can to get financing transactions done for my clients (mostly schools, and cities and universities - important and meaningful stuff). But yesterday I spent a disproportionate part of my day agonizing over the logistics of turning a big document around and sending it out over cyberspace to about 20 people who are, for the most part, unlikely even to look at it. Part of the agonizing - testimony to my own debilitating compulsions for making my work internally consistent, I am sure - came as I tried to help my secretary figure out how to make all the quote marks in the document straight (some of them were curly).
The world, with all its current needs and troubles, needs me to focus my talents on some task other than conforming quote marks. But what is it? There's the rub. I'm in the middle place where one phase of my life is ending, or needs to end, and another is beginning, or needs to begin. It is uncomfortable to be in this place because, when I try to see what is next for me, I am pretty much in the dark. But maybe that's as it should be. Michael Meade, storyteller, author, and scholar of mythology, anthropology, and psychology, writes this in his book, The World Behind the World: Living at the Ends of Time:
Each initiatory passage requires that we become lost to all that we know. The keys that unlock the doors of wisdom have to be found in the darkness or else fashioned from some loss. If the keys were in the light everyone would already have found them.
It helps me to know that its more than just all right to be in the dark and to feel loss, it is necessary for growth. In my heart I hope such a notion could help those whom I love, too, as they navigate the rough waters of their new beginnings. But I'm guessing it will take a while, and a few more beginnings and endings, before it does. And so it goes.
