Burying My Youth

I recently came upon this quote from George Elliot while reading Alix Shulman's book Drinking the Rain: "When I buried my youth, I immediately felt 20 years younger." Having turned 50 this year, the quote resonated for me and I found myself asking, "What does it mean to bury your youth?"

Now, I'm not one to get overly dramatic about celebrity deaths. We all die eventually. However, as I was contemplating what it meant to bury my youth, and what it meant to turn 50, Prince died. And I had a reaction. And I tried to suss out what my reaction meant. It wasn't a tearful reaction, but it was palpable. This musical icon of sexual awakening from my teen and young adult years had died. Then I thought back to a moment earlier this year when I saw the new Star Wars movie and they killed off Han Solo. There, too, I had a reaction, one that seemed a bit larger than the moment might warrant. In the case of Han Solo I sobbed. I felt as if a part of my teenage self had been skewered by a light sabre, too. The death scene felt right, as it should be, but it was devastating in a strange way that I couldn't quite explain and that seemed silly when I tried to put it into words.

So when Prince died, while I didn't sob or really get particularly tearful, I did feel a compelling desire to mark the moment, dramatically. I blasted his music and felt it had to be blasted, not just listened to, and the windows of my car had to be rolled down to send the notes spiraling up into the world. I felt I had to wear purple and paisley. I wanted to post lyrics from his songs on my Facebook. Some part of me watched all this and said, "WTF, McGean?"

Is this part of burying my youth? This step by step process of watching idols die and thereby being reminded that none of us are immortal? When those icons of my youth die, it seems some piece of that youthful self goes, too. "What?" she says, suddenly looking up from her high school dances or her spins around the roller rink or her anguished diary entries or endless phone calls with friends or late night college conversations, "What do you mean, dead? Those people don't die, because I don't die. I am now. I am here. Forever."

In fairness, that self had her wake-up call many times over - first when a friend drowned while I was in high school, then in wave after wave of shock and grief during the AIDS epidemic. You'd think she'd have learned this lesson. And yet, she still seems surprised. Back then, she was outraged. Now, she seems to blink, startled, and look about like a small animal that finds itself in the midst of a shopping mall under construction when mere days earlier, it was a nesting ground. "Umm, why is everybody leaving?" she asks, as if she's at some dorm party. "Where are they going? Should I go, too?"She is puzzled, intrigued, confused, and fading. She's fuzzy around the edges. She's lost her relevance but she doesn't realize it. And yet, she still wants to give me things. She wants me to hold on to the parts that matter. She suddenly realizes she has to leave me legacies, she has to make a case for the things she wants me to keep because she's going away and can't be their custodian anymore.

This past summer, I decided to fully embrace the burial of my youth, to take a proactive stance. I remade my home office, where I do most of my writing, by replacing the futon couch, one of the first pieces of "furniture" I had ever owned as an independent young adult, with a magnificent purple love-seat. I rearranged the furniture. I massively decluttered, taking a great many things to Good Will, including many of those talismans of youth that no longer belonged in my life or world. I had several old sculptures I had made but never fired, pieces I had preserved in the safe, dry world of my home over twenty years and multiple moves, including one nude of a former boyfriend and lover. I chose a couple to keep, pieces that still truly spoke to me. The rest I placed in carefully chosen empty pots in my garden, knowing that Portland's rainy season would slowly and organically wear down the unfired clay, which it did, gradually transforming the pieces into shapeless lumps, and that process felt right.

I went through piles and piles and piles of papers and files - well more than twenty-years worth. It was an emotionally wrenching and exhausting task that is not yet finished but allowed me to free up space, physically and psychologically. I went through my bookshelves and gave away piles of books and carefully curated those I held onto. I took things off the walls and hung new things, putting the old art into storage or giving it away. I took photos of a few things I wanted to remember, while letting go of the physical objects themselves. This herculean effort had the complete support of my beloved husband, who helped me find new things and held my hand and gave me hugs as I trudged through the most draining parts of the effort.

When all was said and done (at least, done for now), I had created a soul space that felt so inviting, so warm, so energizing, so healthy, so right for me now that I want to hang out there all the time. It has become a place of creative renewal, a place for healthy reflection and centering, a place of safety and of comfort against new storms. Without ever having made a resolution to do this, I managed to create something externally that met a deep and urgent internal need.  I buried my youth and gave it a proper send-off, and in the process, as Elliot implied, I found myself lightened and reinvigorated.

Value the Moment, Honor the History, Understand the Journey

The day after the recent Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage, I was in Salem, Oregon, for a dragon boat race. My team was warming up on a brick-covered picnic area. I leaned over for a stretch and found myself face to face with the inscribed brick you see pictured here.

I stopped. The park around me seemed to inhale and hold its own breath. Five words and a few numbers sent me falling  through a telescoping tunnel of history, and I wondered, Would everyone see in these letters and numbers what I saw? Because what I saw was an epitaph, a love-letter, a hidden grief. I saw one man with a full name, one without. I saw a date of death in 1991. I saw AIDS, and all the loss and secrecy and grief and politics hidden within it. I saw a time in history when the idea of gay marriage wasn't even part of the conversation, when the hope was for recognition, for the right to acceptance, for safety and community and belonging and love without a death sentence attached to it. I saw another time where a marginalized group was insisting, in the face of bigotry, that their lives mattered. And then, with the mental roar of a jet engine, I fast-forwarded to now, and the significance of the Supreme Court ruling, and the celebrations throughout the country, and a Facebook image posted that afternoon of a friend, a survivor of that terrible era of AIDS, standing, holding hands and saying vows with his partner. These two images - the brick in the park and the photo from Facebook, melded into one and I saw the journey writ large across my mind, overwhelming in its significance.

I blinked and stood up and looked at the circle of people around me who continued about their business. And I went about my business, too, but my heart held the journey - then, and now, and everything in between. I couldn't let it go.

As I thought about that moment and its meaning, and as I tried to explain it to the people around me, I found words inadequate. I stood at a strange crossroads of past, present, and future. 

The day before, I'd been at a high school graduation party and heard a group of young people talking so openly and casually about sexual orientation. It was no big deal who was what. They are the future. Do they know the past? Do they understand the journey that led to this moment? The whole journey? Do I?

There is an incredible young adult book that speaks with exquisite eloquence about this particular convergence of past, present and future. It's by David Levithan and it's called TWO BOYS KISSING. Read it. 

That moment looking at the brick in the park resonated beyond the journey of gay rights and LGBT history for me. As I age, my relationship to time - to the past, present and future - changes. When I was very young, I lived mostly in the present. Soon, my attention shifted to the future. Who would I be when I grew up? What college would I go to? What would I do after college? Where would I live? Would I get married? Would I have children? The future - always the future. But now that I've rounded the corner of middle age, the past - its value and meaning - occupy a growing portion of my attention. 

Friends, contemporaries, face terminal illness or sudden death from heart disease. Children marry and start families. Parents struggle with the challenges of aging. Technology leaves me in the dust. The world around me becomes increasingly different. My neighborhood is changing. I see city blocks with buildings razed, and I find myself asking "What used to be there?" 

That question looms in my mind. What used to be there? Memory, communal memory - that's what history really is and remembering history is more than being "condemned to repeat it." We need to hold and preserve our communal memories in order to understand ourselves, to appreciate our present and to grapple with our future. It is frighteningly easy for that memory to disintegrate like old silk and crumble into nothing. When that memory includes part of your own story, the thought that it will evaporate is heartbreaking and terrifying and infuriating all at once.

We have a responsibility to record the journeys. For some, it is through writing. For others, through film or the visual arts or music. For some, the responsibility lies not in the telling, but in the asking and the listening and the learning. And the noticing - stopping and noticing a small group of words and numbers on a brick on the ground in a park by a river, and registering their significance.