I am frequently amazed by the truly great pieces of writing that end up in my Facebook feed. It is as if the writer were sitting there in the room with me and looking deep into my very heart and knows exactly how I feel and expresses it with perfect clarity. So it is with the writing of Stephanie Bennett-Henry, especially one particular post, that I will share on my own blog, here that she posted on August 2,2015:
“I want the weirdos, the clumsy, fumbling, awkward ones who call themselves a big mess. That’s where it’s at. Give me the one whose eyes are colored with shades of madness. Throw me in a room with the loners, the ones who never found their place. Sit me down at the table with the dreamers, the ones who feel with their eyes and see with their hearts. Surround me with the extraordinary souls who inhale passion through their fingertips and exhale creativity from masterpieces in their bones. I want to dance with the ones who will break their own hearts because they only know how to love too hard or not at all. Build a path with the pieces of the broken ones. I will follow the trail and carry each piece back to its owner, showing them the stained glass pieces of their beautiful, broken magnificence.”
Stephanie Bennett-Henry. Copyrighted.
So yes, there is dignity and loss in defeat. There must be, be some positive dimension for humans since it is so ubiquitous and it does not kill us, it just keeps coming. Is this a realistic interpretation of the human condition, flailing around, coming up short, losing everything, “dying” even, when you are still very much alive? I am a master at surviving deaths. I have had several reincarnations: surviving my childhood, surviving my first and second marriages, and coping with the tragedies that befell my kennel. First, a puppy died unexpectedly. I had forgotten puppies died, as I was so focused on breeding them and on their subsequent arrivals! After, the puppies from my only litter were sent far away by my co-breeder, the one I got to keep was very sickly his first two years of life and was not emotionally sound. This was challenging and I was focused on these events more than it was warranted until the punishing hand of God delivered its final blow: taking my darling husband, prematurely young, from cancer. The only mercy to the story was it was swift.
My dreams of an adult life, happily married with a child and a houseful of dogs, Llewellyn English Setters come to mind since I did not know what borzoi were then, a show kennel and horses in a pasture, and never at a loss for love, was a bitter delusion that I never stopped pursuing long after it was feasible. I pursue it still, and I am a very old woman.
And there lays my psychosis. It is what places me in the room with the eyes colored with shades of madness, thrown in a room with loners who never found their place, who feel with their eyes see with their hearts. And yes, I have wanted to “dance” with the ones I knew would break my heart because they, too were flawed and could not love, so like my parents before them. My life is lived on a path of broken stones and every step is painful. But I see no magnificent stained glass portrait of myself to hang in the window to catch the sun and celebrate my life. I am in a very dark place. The pieces of my life lie on the ground like broken stones, and an urn will hold my ashes in a mausoleum when I die.