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 Sat Feb 09, 2008 « recent »
* Inkygirl *
Filk FAQ
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 [Feb.10/2008: Updated with more Secret Club advice as well as a link to my new Babylon Five Virgin blog] Above: Tom Jeffers and Sue Posteraro. Sue and Tom came over for dinner last night. After pigging out on Sue's decadent chocolate-iced lemon bundt cake, we listened to some unfinished tracks from the new Dandelion Wine CD. They sound FANTASTIC. Jodi, Allison and I are excited about possibly participating on some of them! Then Sue and Tom went through some of their concert set for Balticon (where I just discovered that Naomi Novik is one of the guests!), and then spent the rest of the evening playing and singing music.  And this is why I originally was attracted to filk; I love making music with other people. Not for performing in public or for showcasing my own songs (I didn't write songs back then and was terrified of performing in public), but just for the pure joy of it, especially music circles where no one minds if someone else sings along or improvises on other instruments. Now that I write songs and perform with Urban Tapestry, I find a whole other level of enjoyment and personal growth within the filk community as well, but I will still often seek out circles at filk conventions which are more big singalongs and jam circles rather than "performer showcase" rooms; Steve Macdonald and Dave Clement are great at nurturing these types of circles. The Secret Club: A Follow-UpLast Thursday, I posted about The Secret Club that no one wants to join and invited people to submit their own nuggets of life wisdom. Thank you so much to everyone who shared. I know some of you have lost loved ones of your own, and not too long ago. Sometimes someone will ask me how I can share some of the highly personal experiences that I do, considering how painful some of those memories can be. My answer: I do it because I'm hoping that someone out there will find it helpful. So that they'll know that they're not alone, that there are others who have lost someone they loved dearly and survived with their life optimism intact. Because maybe some of what I say will help guide those who aren't in the Club but know someone who is. I was deeply moved by many of your posts, so am including them below so that they won't be lost in my Livejournal archives, and be more easily found by people seeking this kind of advice. -------- "If you love somebody, tell them. You never know whether you'll see them again." - mdlbear  "Don't withdraw. Contact with people may seem like it's the source of the pain, but it's the source of many things, including comfort, love, and in many cases, reasons for continuing to be part of the world. People are what force us to better than we are. Withdrawing is a short-term solution with long-term consequences. It's okay to take some personal space for yourself to heal and regain your strenght, but it can't become a way of life." - mdyesowitch  "Pamper yourself. Grief is hard work, both conscious and subconscious, and you need to be kind to yourself throughout." - dan-k-nj -------- "Focus on the living. Margaret and I visited my mother the weekend before she went into the hospital for the last time less than two weeks before she died. Father was very happy we were there before the end. We didn't make the funeral, but we had had a good visit that last weekend." - traveller42  "People can be kinder than you realize. At its best the human race is a support group for mortals. Deliberately or by accident, a person can have many separate lives not fully understood or even imagined by the individuals who know the person. Those separate lives can span the globe, or comprise just one humble incident that happened many years ago that deeply affected one individual. A death does not hurt you the way it is supposed to, in proportion to closeness of the individual. It has more to do with what you imagine might have been--what dreams died with the person. Healing comes with sharing new dreams with the living. The quality of a life can be measured by the laughter at the memorial. Watching death happen did not give me insight or wisdom. Condolences don't have to be articulate--just a word that says someone gives a damn is plenty." - peteralway  "Grief can hit you upside the head in unexpected ways even long after the loss. I try not to force the feelings away, but to at least take a bit of time to feel and remember the person and realize that even years after they've gone, they're still there in my heart, still a part of my life. And I try not to be too embarrassed when someone then asks 'why are you crying?'" - artbeco ------- "For those in and outside the Secret Club, don't be afraid to talk to the members of the club about their people. So many folks, trying to be kind, will eliminate all reference to those who have passed away in an attempt to not trigger the bereaved. Then those within the Secret Club can feel isolated, and alone. And what Peter said, also for me." - judifilksign -------- mickeydaily shared a deeply moving poem by Denise Levertov called Talking To Grief. -------- "Every time I've lost someone, I've changed my life in some way to honor and remember them. When I lost a dear friend, Lan Laskowski, I vowed to cherish my friendships and I still do that *wistful smile.*" - zencuppa  "Avoid fear, take pictures of **people** Fear holds you back. Don't let it ruin your life. At any level. Photographs of you are your friend. Even if they're awful pictures of you as you are now, odds are you will only look worse as you get older! And if you don't somehow, you can point back to "how you looked then". Photographs of others are a treasure. I don't have anywhere near enough pictures of my Dad. We took tons of pictures, but they were often of things like flowers, buildings or famous places. Trust me, you won't give a damn about them after someone is gone. And in this day and age, there is no excuse, none at all. Might as well say the same thing about movies. Take it as read." - clith  "My Mum died in 1983. Her birthday is on Feb 13th. I still miss my valentine. I try to remember the little things she taught me. My favorite is its not what you do for someone on the big days its what you do for them every day the little things that add up. Since my mother-in-law died on jan 20th I try to remember the time we did spend together and what a gift she was.  "I was talking with a friend this evening who was remembering a trip long ago to The Grand Canyon. He walked in and walked out on the same day. The walk out took longer (different trail, 2 miles longer) and he ended up doing part of it after dark. His sage advice: "If you can smell the donkey droppings, then you know you are still on the trail". It's coming up on a year since my mom died just before turning 80. However, it was two years ago that the first of the 24 cousins from her side of the family passed away at 55, after some illness. It took that death to realize how lucky the 5 families had been. Some of us were of Vietnam era age, and could have been in service and died there, but we didn't. Some did join the military, I'm not sure if any served overseas. In high school, my older brother was 5 minutes late to his death ride, that took several friends in an auto accident. So I am glad that my parents, aunts and uncles did not see their children die young (that cousin's dad, did die later that year, also of long term illnesses). Death of a son or daughter, and usually, a young sibling is something that happened a lot in my parent's generation, and so much more in the generation before that. Let it be said of me by my siblings when I die: 'Aw, you mean we have to get rid of all his  "Don't hold grudges. Don't hold negative feelings about others in general; people change. The sooner you like/accept yourself as you are, the sooner you can get on with enjoying life. Smile. Laugh. Every day." - cellio ---- "I try to do little things in honor of the people I've lost. I wear green for Cindy, I painted some of my room turquoise which was Helen's favorite color, my grandmother's needle point hangs on Helen's turquoise wall. They're just little things, like picking up the book that my godmother gave me, or thinking of my great-grandfather when I read talmud, but they matter. Sometimes I think that memory is the only thing that keeps the present meaningful." -- ladymondegreen  "I don't know if this counts, but I've been finding lately that some days at work, a dozen things might happen that could easily make me angry; I'm working on laughing at them instead. Because really, there's something funny about almost any frustrating situation. :) I also try, when I can, to let people know when I notice something wonderful about them. I suppose that's just part of treasuring friendships, but I think that too often it's the wonderful things that go unexpressed. I think you helped me come to this realization with your "Top __ Things" about your friends that you would post on their birthdays; I started trying to do the same, and friends of mine picked it up from me, and friends of friends -- the best kind of ripple effect! Thank you for sharing so many of your stories with all of us. I'm sure some of them might be harder to write about than others, but I really value the reminders (that turn up every now and then in this corner of the internet) to treasure the beautiful things in life and to try to take nothing for granted. There's nothing cliche about trying to live life to the fullest!" - missquirt  "My offer is enjoy the blessed boring routine day for these are the days when life is most challenging we long to go back to. We often complain about the routine things of life but maybe once and again in the middle of the laundry, dishes, a typical day at work we stop an appreciate how wonderful it is to be routine everyone doing well and happy that we all go about life so much that we think it's boring. Then something happens and we wish that it was just a routine day instead. Honor life with a routine day, the simple joy and love of going about a day." - viewoftheworld  "I joined the Club when my mother, June Ann Girouard Leger Holder, died in August of 1995 at the age of 56. She contracted a very rare form of jaw cancer and its slow spread despite chemo, radiation and other treatments consumed the last two years or more of her life. She was the only one in my immediate family who had a clue what to do with a shy, bookish, nearsighted, sensitive middle-child boy, and I still have some anger that a disease took her decades before her life expectancy should have run out -- especially as I firmly believe it was living in two of the union's most polluted states for all but two years did it, and that better regulation of Louisiana's and Texas' petrochemical industries could have helped prevent it. But as I still deal with the humongous hole her death left in my life, I try to remember the ways in which she is still with me -- and not the spiritual/religious belief that her soul survives in Heaven or some such, watching over me (though Catholic-raised boy that I am, I still find myself falling into that wishful thinking). I realize how much her speech patterns have influenced mine, and cherish the pictures and possessions I still have that she gave me. I remember how pleased she was to learn that I do most of my own ironing and can sew a button on a shirt or darn socks. I use the things she taught me, like the self-hypnosis technique for getting to sleep that has been a great boon not only to me, but to my Songbird Mary as well. I remember the wisdom she gave me about dealing with life, shared through books and articles she sent me and long chats in person and on the phone. ("It's not what happens to us that makes us feel bad; it's what we tell ourselves about what happens to us.") And I see her in my brothers' faces as well, now that they have become parents, at least as much as I see our father there." - thatcrazycajun  "One of the things I took away was this: *GO* to the doctor. Take care of yourself. You are not a burden to others if you go have that thing checked out, even if you think it's probably nothing at all. No matter how much of a pain in the ass you think you're being-- if you need to get a ride, if you need to borrow money, if you need to call 911-- it will be much, much worse for your loved ones if they lose you. The winter before my first Consonance is the one I refer to as "the bad winter" for a lot of reasons. One reason was that we lost my aunt Marilyn, who was like a second mother to me, and was my mother's closest sister and effectively her life partner. They'd lived together for years, taken care of each other, depended on each other. The horrible thing was that Marilyn's death felt really sudden... but we found out later that it had been entirely preventable. She'd had cervical cancer. One of the earliest-detectable, and therefore most preventable/treatable (if caught early) forms of cancer there is. But she'd been hiding it-- nobody knew. Nobody knew she'd been suffering bleeding and pain for years; she refused always to go to a doctor. For her own reasons, she couldn't stand the idea. Only my mother had any vague idea that something was wrong, and she didn't really know what; my aunt flatly and sometimes angrily refused to discuss it with her, refused to be persuaded to go to a doctor, hid the extent of how bad it was. So we have no idea how long it had been. Finally when the pain got so bad even she couldn't stand it anymore, she did go to a doctor. But by then it was too late. Cancer had spread and spread, throughout her body, as far as her stomach I believe. She had surgery to remove the cancer, and they did what they could, but it was a LOT to remove-- such a lot for a woman in her late sixties to recover from. She was scheduled to start chemotherapy as soon as she recovered from the surgery. But the surgery left her so weak... she just never recovered. She died in her daughter's house, where they were caring for her, and one of the last things she said was, "I just never thought it would go like this." It was sudden for the rest of us, because one day out of the blue my mother called to tell me that my aunt had been diagnosed with cancer... and it was maybe a couple of weeks later, I think, that I got the second call telling me she'd died. But it hadn't really been sudden at all. It angers me to this day that we lost her to her own stubbornness, to one of the most preventable things that can happen to women. I lost a lot of things when she died. But one thing she always used to say about people was: "Everyone is doing the best they can. Everyone is doing the best they can with what they got." And she would add, "Including you." She did do the best she could with the things she'd had to deal with in her life. So I try to do the best I can with what I've got in mine. But I also tell people, whenever they are going "oh, it's probably nothing:" when in doubt, go. Go to the doctor. Just go and be sure. And if you're a woman: get your yearly pap smear. I have younger female friends who are squeamish about this, and it really needs to be impressed on young women way more than it is in current health/sex education. Your yearly pelvic exam is just about one of the most life-saving things you can do for yourself, whether you're sexually active or not. Take care of yourself, everyone." -- vixyish
"Thanks Debbie, for this post and to everyone who commented. Peter's comment is beautiful and so true. (I'll have to take his advice on the 'healing' part on trust, and I'm happy to do so.) Even (or perhaps especially) if you're a private person, opening up and letting people help you/comfort you is an amazing experience. It can highlight all the best and burn away all the worst in humans. It's not a great way to filter out the dross, but it surely works... Hugs to all and thanks again for all the wonderful comments." - jwordsmith  Other topics of the day...I've started watching Babylon 5 [UPDATE: To avoid spoilers and boredom for non-B5 fans, I'll be posting B5 comments in my Babylon Five Virgin blog]. Many years ago, I tried watching the first episode when it premiered but never got through it. So many of my friends have raved about the series, though, that I thought I'd give it another shot. Still wasn't crazy about the first episode, and the guy with weird hair kind of freaks me out. Also, the cheesy effects are distracting -- but I try to remind myself of how the original Star Trek series (of which I am a Huge Fan) would seem to a first-timer now. The characters seemed two-dimensional to me. But I figured what the heck, I should at least watch the second episode. I still find some of the acting and effects somewhat cheesy, but I couldn't help but be a bit drawn in by the episode premise and the clear indication that there's Something Else Going On. Plus I find myself intrigued by the stoic Russian woman character, Ivanova. I've interviewed Patricia Storms about her new book, You're My Guy Because, and I'm giving away a free copy! (see interview for details) The Canadian Blogging Awards have been announced, and they're using my new award graphics.  | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
