Struggle No More, My Friend

Of course he left a week before my birthday. The one thing I ask everyone is to not further jinx my birthday by dying near it. You know, because it's all about me. Actually, I know he feels bad about that because he has the same sense of doom that I have and is always looking at anniversaries as some kind of omen. Everything has meaning and yet nothing is means anything. I think that is one of the things that bonded us; we are so far outside of the boxes we were born into that it is hard to relate to the relations and most of the rest of the world for that matter.

You don't get to pick your birth family... not according to most belief systems. Kabbalah teaches us that we choose the life lessons to learn and then God makes us first a family, then a gradually widening world from city, state, country and... dare I say, planet with which to teach us what we felt we needed to learn last time. In other words, we are always in school and death is just the bell ringing to end class. Then of course you have the parent teacher conferences for a bit before moving on the whatever comes next.

I like this approach to looking at the circle of life. Shayne, being Jewish, I always thought would give me less trouble about Kabbalah than anyone else in my circles. As a philosophy he thought it something worth looking at but as a faith and spiritual path I think he always thought that I was a little out there. Of course while my distillation of what I learned was the best explanation for some things that he experienced that have no explanation there was never anything that I could tell him about it that would make him start to study. But at least he let me be and keep learning with out the hand-wringing that I got elsewhere. And I let him keep being who he was because he was who he was meant to be. It just took him a long time to realize that.

We accepted each other for who we each were right away. That is a rare thing in a lot of relationships. And even more rare when you meet someone under the circumstances involved with dating websites. Shayne drove up here to meet a few weeks after we had been talking daily. We drove around my home town and out to Old Mission light house. It was late in the Summer when you know the leaves will soon be turning. While we were down at the beach we looked at each other and knew we would not date. We knew we were a kind of soul mate; the kind I like to call Spirit Twins. Not like being Wonder Twins so lets not go activating anything.We had to sit a while because the gout and long drive were making things difficult for him.

That is where we decided that we would adopt each other in spirit. Whether life's circumstances made us feel separate from our relations or we really were/are so different as to be left out of the loop I can not say. My sister would say that it's just me. I think at least one of his brothers would tell him the same thing. In either case we felt better about life and the ability to cope with its changes in considering each to be a sibling to the other. And so, I finally had the big brother that I always wanted.

And of course he's learned what he needs to and I am still stuck here. Good Lord I hope I am not the student teacher or teaching assistant in this whole imperfect metaphor for life. If so I'm going to be saying Goodbye to a lot of people. Shit. That is a depressing thought, everyone else gets to go on recess or graduate and I'm still grading papers.

That would have made him laugh. Somehow we always managed to make each other laugh through our tears. Just so you know, laughter doesn't stop the tears completely. It just keeps you from hyperventilating because crying makes you stop breathing every few minutes while you are trying to hold it in. I think finding in Shayne the kindred-ness that had been lacking for so long is what really made dealing with Dad's passing more bearable.

He never tried to squelch the crying process. Oh trust me, when he was in the throws of heartbreak and disappointment the world was over and if it wasn't it would be cause he would cry buckets enough to make the great flood look like a like spilled milk. And he would always chastise himself for doing so and lament that there were so many tears for so little reason. I'd make a smartass comment and he'd get all indignant. And I would tell him if he was crying there was a reason. He would say it can't be a good reason. I would remind him that no one cries for no good reason... unless it was a gold digger trying to milk a rich old fart. He'd laugh and quote me back to me when Sir Knight ran my heart through the shredder. One of us would quote a song and then everything would be okay for a while.

We kept each other blogging. Before the health issues began to cut into his time he had thought that he would give up the blogging. he is a political guy and felt that the commentary was falling on deaf ears, that he wasn't making a difference anymore. And where the music compilations were concerned, he was having a hard time seeing the top ten lists in a new way. "David Letterman has been doing top ten lists for decades!", he would moan. "You're not David Letterman." I would remind him. Then we would go back and look at the posts that had good comments and see what common bits made them generate the comments as opposed to the posts that didn't. And he would keep writing. Then we made the same critiques on my blog and decided that the only reason we should each keep writing is because it is in our make up to get the stuff out of our head even if the audience in extremely limited. And by extremely limited I mean the audience is just me for him and him for me.

Like I said in yesterday's post. I think he is the only person who really reads these. Which is quite freeing in some respects because I never have to work too hard to edit myself. In other respects, I've been writing to humor myself and Shayne. So I'm not sure how long I will keep blogging here. I mean if he's gonna float around in Spirit he doesn't need to read anything... he's seeing it all in real time.

Make no mistake. I do believe he is floating around in spirit. I know he is. He is wearing a suit with a fedora and for a change he isn't leaning on his cane. There is one draped over his arm for just in case. And he is hanging out by the lake out back. We have the house protected against wandering spirits so he can't come in the house until I get everyone's permission. Not sure where he acquired the yappy lap dog... but the dog isn't coming in. The cat won't approve and neither will anyone who is clairaudient. I'm blessed in that sense to not have to hear that! But it would be nice to be able to have the gift again so that I can have real conversations with those sticking around.