Letting Go of the Past
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I love to draw, and for well over a decade I attended a drawing group in San Francisco. There, drawing a new model each time, I would produce ten drawings per night on 18×24 inch sheets of tinted paper. Some were quick gesture sketches; some were completely finished with shading and color. I was faithful, and went every Tuesday night. After ten years, despite pieces I had given away or sold, I had collected what felt like a ton of the drawings in the large tablets. They were so big I needed to store them in the hallway of the loft where I was living at the time, an old factory building. I was able to keep them out of the way by putting them into an alcove no one was using. In 1993, we had a terrible rainy winter in Oakland, where I lived. No thunder, no lightning, which are exceedingly rare in California, but downpours for days on end. Cold rain that came down so hard it hurt to walk in it without an umbrella. Downpours for literally days at a time, causing little rivers along the curbs; the cuffs of my trousers never dried for weeks.
One day I noted that there was a leak in the bedroom that was most unusual. The water ran down the wall like a thin waterfall, a sheet about half an inch thick dripping down the painted concrete wall and through the floor to the loft space below. It was incredible. The whole wall looked as if it was sliding downward. I heard later the workshop down below us was drenched because the water stopped at their floor and flooded it out. In my loft, the water just passed through.
Then I thought of my drawings, stacked in two piles in an alcove in the hallway, so as not to block it. I went out to the hallway in a panic. Same thing had happened there. And had been happening for days, apparently, since all 9,600 drawings I had done were fused into what amounted to a block of papier mâché. Totally lost. Ten years of work. Kaput. Vanished. Forever.
Yes, I did weep. No question. It was so unexpected, so out of the blue. I couldn’t focus for days. When people said to me: “Well, at least you’re okay. They’re just drawings after all,” I wanted to scream. I had given 20 drawings away, and friends had kindly framed them, so it wasn’t an utterly total loss of my decade of drawing, but those 9,600 drawings weren’t “just paper” to me. They were a record of my soul’s emotional states, year by year, as I drew. As I buried my friends. As I led funerals for everyone I ever loved during the AIDS years. The predictability of Tuesday night drawing was what kept me going in some ways. It was the one reliable thing.
I couldn’t focus for weeks. I wanted them back. They were all I could see. Not my loft, not my desk, not my friends…just the drawings. I managed to keep the clot of fused drawing pads for six weeks, hoping against hope that they might dry and could be partially restored. They molded instead. I had to toss them for good. I was heartbroken.
One day I noticed some neighbor kids playing baseball at the local playground near where I went shopping. One of the younger brothers of the pitcher was sitting with his parents in the bleachers, and he held a balloon. A bright red one just like in that famous French short film many of you probably know, The Red Balloon. The game was almost over. As soon as it finished, this little kid, maybe 9 or 10 years old, simply let his balloon go. No fuss. No bother. No crying. He did it deliberately. He watched it rise out of sight without any alarm. His brother’s team had lost, and he felt it was a proper gesture to mark that moment. I was amazed. So were his parents, by the look on their faces.
And that is when I suddenly realized I had been holding on to this loss as if the past could somehow be rewritten, as if I was just waiting for the rainstorm to “unrain,” and give me back my precious work. I realized that I was being foolish, and that unless I let go, and just said to myself, “I have to live in the days to come, not the days that have past,” I wasn’t allowing myself to live, just grasp and resist.
Even though, as I said, I wanted to scream, the man who said to me:
“At least you’re safe, they’re just drawings” was 100% half right.
Most of our losses are not of things, but of people, people who indeed are far more precious than paper.
I understand that very well. What I had to say about the loss of my drawings is also something I had to say about the losses of people in the rest of my life. I made a sad list recently. I have personally buried 87 people that I have loved in my life. Loved deeply. And I’ve lost relationships, too.
Although I grieved deeply for every one of them, I have always had to come to the place where I remember that all of that loss is irretrievably in the past. I cannot change the past. I cannot undo what has been done. In the words of T. Carmi, talking about the Shoah, the Holocaust: “What happened really happened. What happened really happened. What happened really happened. Oh, may I have the faith to accept that what happened really happened.” Does what I am saying push grief away? Not at all.
I still grieve when I think of any one of those people I love. Many years later I light a memory candle, what the Ashkenazy Jews call a Yahrzeit candle, for my best friend on the anniversary of his death. But I know I cannot have him back, and that the love I feel for him now has to go out to others, even as I know very well that my gratitude for his life will never go away even for a minute. Grief in all of its forms is essential to a healthy life in this fragile world. But fiercely and stubbornly clinging to singular events and losses in the past is not so much grief as it is a kind of “stuckness” that truly limits the gift of our present life.
We all have losses; we all make mistakes; we all are hurt and we all hurt. There has been no flawless life yet in the history of humanity. But still, somehow, we choose life.
In his book How Then Shall We Live? Wayne Muller tells a remarkable story about a man named Frank:
Frank was a child of a violent, alcoholic father. Frank spent a great deal of his early childhood with his mother, while his father was away at war. Frank remembers that when his father returned, in his sharp, clean uniform, Frank hid under the table. He was afraid of his father’s explosive temper. Frank would often get hit and then go away somewhere to hide, to watch, to wait until it was safe. Often he had to wait a very long time.
We may have experienced terrible things when we were younger—hiding from a father’s alcoholic rage by crawling under the table is a powerful image, to be sure. My father was not an alcoholic, but I used to hide under the table from his white-hot temper, too, when I was a kid. It was scary, and I had no way to explain it. However, Muller continues:
Fully grown, Frank is a psychiatrist, thoughtful and gentle in his work with people. One day he told me about his daughter, Sarah, who was seven years old. He loved her very much. Frank explained that every weekend he would hike up to Sun Mountain, just outside Santa Fe. It is a lovely mountain, with exquisite views of the city—a quiet, beautiful place. He said he was looking forward to the day when he could take his daughter to the top of Sun Mountain with him. As he spoke of his dream he began to weep, and there was a catch in his voice. His deep love for Sarah and his yearning to share the beauty of the earth with her combined to open a raw tenderness in his heart. His love and kindness came from the very same heart that had been hurt by his father. Love and sadness and hope and joy, all from the same spigot.
This is a beautiful testimony to how the wounds and losses of the past, although they certainly shape us, are not omnipotent. They are not ultimacy, and have no final say unless we give them that power. Love and kindness are still possible in the present. Hope and joy are still possible in the present. Sadness does not disappear—no way—and neither do regrets or the hard lessons we have learned. But it can be balanced by an openness to new life in the coming days, to new relationships and new ideas and, in my case, new drawings. Maybe, I want to hope, another ten thousand before I am through.
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