Tempus Neminem Manet Hominem

My aunt died. It's been 2 days, 48 hours exactly. When I allow myself to fully acknowledge the fact that she is gone I am filled with all the sadness you'd expect a bereft niece to feel. But there's so much more to it than grief. 

Joyce Sepanski nee Shields was the second of my father's four older sisters. She gave birth to a son and a daughter, both of them born with muscular dystrophy. Her son lived, her daughter did not. For years, she drove a school bus for handicapped children. She helped, in some ways, to raise her youngest brothers. Her husband was a Korean War veteran who stayed very active in the VFW and American Legion his entire life, and by extension, so was she. She was widowed five years ago. Her voice was low, soft, and gravelly. She didn't really smile or laugh very often that I saw. She loved dogs. This is about all I really know about my aunt. I would learn later that Aunt Joyce was the doer and the planner and the knower of where and when, and just how much her sisters depended on her. 

In addition to his four sisters, my father had three older and two younger brothers. He and my mother (who was an only child) divorced when I was about three. It was bitter. My paternal family was based in the Midwest, my mother's in New York, where I would be raised. It would be decades before I saw of any of my nine aunts and uncles, their spouses, and scads of the cousins they brought forth.

I reunited with Aunt Joyce when I was about 26. The meeting was hastily arranged by my father when I told him I was going to be in Chicago on business. She and my cousin, Larry, came to the hotel where I was staying and we had a short, happy, if not joyful, visit. Aunt Joyce was a reticent woman, and I can be shy and awkward, too. We were complete strangers, yet family, so we did our best to fill some of the less comfortable pauses. She collected elephants and brought me one from her collection. I'm ashamed to say that after several moves I've lost track of that gift.

Labor Day 2008

It would be another 11 years before I saw Aunt Joyce again. The occasion was my father's funeral. I barely remember our interaction, and I daresay she didn't either. When we met at subsequent family reunions, we are always warm. But we really didn't get to know each other well. In my late 30s and into my 40s, I was a rebellious, profane, drinking woman, and I kept company with family members with a similar bent. Five years later, when my father's younger brother died, our family reunions stopped, too, but time continued its relentless march. While I kept in touch with several members of the family, Aunt Joyce was rarely one of them. Of course, we exchanged Christmas greetings and became friends on social media, but that does not an intimate relationship make. 

I think my sadness is colored more by regret than sorrow per se. Dad put us together, but we didn't set. It wasn't an absence of familial love, it was the fact that so much of our lives unfolded without each other in it that we didn't know how to catch that up. Or maybe I just didn't know how to catch that up. 

At this point, I haven't seen my aunt in roughly 10 years. Time can be quite a cunning thief, stealing days, months, years, until we find decades are just gone, all the while lulling us into the belief that there is a nearly endless supply of tomorrows. Until there are no more tomorrows, people are gone, plans go unmade or unkept. And you STILL don't know a damned thing about someone you love.

There is a part of me that wants to lay the blame for this at the feet of my parents. How they chose to comport themselves robbed me of a family. Deprived me of the attachment to aunts, uncles, cousins, and other kith and kin. There is a deep, rich history to which I am related, but of which I am no part. I was never involved in it and by the time I could be, I had no idea how to be. You're damned right I'm angry and jealous and sad that I missed out on what everyone else has as naturally as the air they breathe. 

But I am no child. I am responsible for the choices I make or abdicate as an adult. I closed myself off to an extent. I could have done a hell of a lot more to claim my spot in the family circle. And not just mine, by my son's. Instead, I kept on as I always had, geographically and emotionally distant. So how can I be indignant? I've done no better than those against whom I'd rail. 

Grief, sorrow, loss, regret, emptiness is all that's left me now. If I so choose. There are still two aunts, two uncles, a score of cousins, several siblings, a couple of nieces, a nephew, a son, a mother, and a partner. And if I'm lucky, a few more tomorrows to be a better niece, cousin, aunt, mother, daughter, and partner. 

r. 

On Religion...

I was recently asked, "are you religious?" On the surface, this would seem to be a pretty straightforward, even binary, question. But this is not a surface question, and my answer is nuanced.

The question is two-pronged in my thinking: Do you believe in God? And do you believe in or adhere to an organized religious tradition. The latter question is a little easier: I don't believe in the dogma of any religion in so far as it stipulates that it is the only way to recognize or worship God. To be right in that respect definitionally means all others are wrong, and that just cannot be the case.

Nearly everyone is born into a religious tradition, no matter how loosely or closely held: I was brought up Catholic. I made most of my sacraments, attended mass, baptized my son, own a rosary, and my grandmother's crucifix. That crucifix has hung on the wall of every place I have ever rested my head. I love the ceremony of the Catholic mass (I can recite most of it from memory), the majesty of cathedrals, the music. Midnight mass is my absolute favorite. The fireworks that the Greeks set off at midnight of Easter Sunday to announce, “He is risen!” gives me goosebumps. There is a part of my spirit, soul, or psyche that is deeply touched: I am uplifted, filled with joy, and affected to the point of physical goosebumps. 

I don’t believe in a paternalistic, perturbable, jealous God who must be appeased in order to bestow blessings, or metes out punishment to those who fall short. I don’t believe God, if there is one (and I side with yes, there is) in his heaven, gives a flying fuck whether a Jew puts on his yarmulke, whether a Muslim has a drink, whether man lay down with man, or woman with woman. There are nearly 8 billion souls to look after. Some with their finger on the nuclear button. There are bigger fish to fry, so to speak than to punish the Catholic who had a BLT on any given Friday during Lent.

We have a rulebook in the Commandments as described in the old testament. I can’t say I believe they were written by the finger of God onto a stone tablet on Mt. Sinai and given to Moses to bring to the masses. But it IS a rulebook, and we are accountable. I can get behind every one of them except the first: I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no God before me (yep, typed from memory), or the one about false idols. I believe we are accountable to each other in the present more than we are striving for a favorable position in the afterlife.

I do believe humans make questionable moral decisions, most of which are venal and eminently forgivable. Most of those lapses are against our fellow man, not against God per se, so to ask for forgiveness of sin should be both a human humbling, and a spiritual acknowledgment of weakness, with effort put into strengthening. Those egregious acts such as murder, robbery, rape, assault, go well beyond the venal, and we have a penal system for that. I would imagine the hereafter was NOT on the mind of the perpetrator.

I do believe Jesus Christ walked this earth, that his mother’s name was Mary, his father was Joseph, and both men carpenters. I believe there was a group of people that believed he was the fulfillment of prophecy. I believe Jesus had a ministry, and traveled around trying to teach people how to be good to one another, and was somewhat displeased with the religious establishment at that time. I believe he was put to death in part for his religious “heresies” and political beliefs. He was a perceived threat to church AND state.

I do NOT believe that Jesus was Mary’s only child whether or not his conception was virgin notwithstanding. Even if it were, that would mean Yahweh both cuckolded Joseph AND emasculated him. I don’t buy it. I do NOT believe Jesus didn’t take a wife. I do believe Mary Magdeline was said wife.

I have no issue with the basic tenets of the Christian faith. My issue is with how generations upon generations of humans have perverted it to serve their needs of the moment. I have a HUGE problem with the fact that Christians systematically wiped out nearly every single indigenous religion it encountered. It is horrifying to me that anyone has the hubris to come into someone’s land and not only take it and all its resources, but rob inhabitants of their religious practices. I have called Christianity, as practiced in this way, a scourge. A virus. What else invades and conquers like that? Let’s not even mention the crusades. The acts committed in the name of God, in any of his incarnations, are appalling.

I believe that Allah, Yahweh, Buddha, Krishna, and Christ are all names for the same deity. And they all stand for love, peace, joy, sacrifice, honor, kindness, and compassion.

I practiced yoga for a few years. Based largely on Sanskrit/Hindu teachings, the basic tenet is to recognize the divine within, and that there is balance in all things: Masculine and feminine; creation and destruction, and that each of these things resides within us. I believe that you and I are as much a child of God as Christ was. Just as imperfectly perfect. I believe once we understand that that divinity is within us, and not some external force, we can be more compassionate with ourselves, and therefore to others. It is so much more difficult to desecrate another when you recognize that God lives in them, too.

I believe heaven and hell are personal as well as societal constructs. I believe in reincarnation, a recycling of souls. We come back until we get it right. Then hopefully we can in some way assist less enlightened souls to reach that same height.

I do believe in God. I do believe I haven’t yet gotten it right yet so will be back around a few more times. I do believe in feeding my spirit: in breathing deep, in being present for each moment to the best of my ability without reaching for the next or holding on to the last. I believe I am here to be of service in some way, even if it’s simply to walk one person safely across the street. Or steer for a man who fell asleep behind the wheel. We are all walking extensions of God and his angels. And his demons.