WAITING FOR MY PINK ULTIMATE CINEMATIC REWARD

Produced with Fish Meal and Guano Fertilizer

I have a tendency to expect something cinematic to happen that will resolve a hard, true something that has happened to me, and make it all seem intentional, meaningful, purposeful, right and necessary.  I broke my  leg severely and spent a vicious year as a teenager in various casts. I lost part of a toe when a pit bull attacked me.  Ted got cancer.  Ted died.  None of these things ever got resolved in Hollywood style.  There was no cinematic reward for my pain...you know...the warm and satisfying end that makes it all worthwhile.  Even the movie "Titanic" seemed to redeem a horror of epic proportions into a love story, complete with a decrepit survivor looking glamourous and wise.  You would think that suddenly, one day, each of us who has had a hard loss would see the why of everything and feel a deep and knowing peace.  Hasn't happened for me. 

My personal truth about being a widow is that there is no cinematic reward for my loss. I can rewrite my story in order to live with it, but when I awaken every morning I am without Ted beside me.  And when I end each day, it is as a widow, alone.  By "re-write my story" I am talking about the mental trick of imagining a different ending, just to get to sleep.  Or even just retelling the Ted and Bridget story to my grandchildren, in order to control it a little more....step away from the pain of it an inch.

This week, I watched a Ted Talk that featured Amy Bickers, whose husband killed himself.  She talks about the cinematic reward in a way that is far better than I ever could.  Her message is one that ultimately helped me feel strong about my life as a widow, and the journey I'm on to rebuild a new life for myself.  It's worth a few minutes of time to hear it.
Watch here:  How to stop saying this happened for a reason

Along the way, I've acquired heroes who have helped me cope with loss, and few have inspired me more than Kevin Kling.  Kevin, as you may know, was born with one deformed arm.  He's an acclaimed story-teller and writer, and in his forties he was in a near-fatal motorcycle accident in which he lost his "good" arm.  Now his deformed arm is his good arm, and his story-telling has a wider audience than ever.  You can find him at his website here:  http://www.kevinkling.com/

I wanted to give you a taste of his storytelling abilities, so I've included a poem he wrote that bolstered me a bit.  Here is Kevin's explanation, and his poem, "Tickled Pink"....

Kevin Kling: 
And so this was a song that I wrote....when you were feeling your best, my mom would say, "You're in the pink," which meant that your insides were pink. And so this poem is called "Tickled Pink":

"At times in our pink innocence, we lie fallow, composting waiting to grow. And other times we rush headlong like so many of our ancestors. But rush headlong or lie fallow, it doesn't matter.

Storyteller, Kevin Kling

One day you'll round a corner, your path is shifted. In a blink, something is missing. It's stolen, misplaced, it's gone. Your heart, a memory, a limb, a promise...... a person. Your innocence is gone, and now your journey has changed. Your path, as though channeled through a spectrum, is refracted and has left you pointed in a new direction. Some won't approve. Some will want the other you. And some will cry that you've left it all. But what has happened, has happened, and cannot be undone.

We pay for our laughter. We pay to weep. Knowledge is not cheap. To survive we must return to our senses, touch, taste, smell, sight, sound. We must let our spirit guide us, our spirit that lives in breath. With each breath we inhale, we exhale. We inspire, we expire. Every breath has a possibility of a laugh, a cry, a story, a song. Every conversation is an exchange of spirit, the words flowing bitter or sweet over the tongue. Every scar is a monument to a battle survived.

Now when you're born into loss, you grow from it. But when you experience loss later in life, you grow toward it. A slow move to an embrace, an embrace that leaves you holding tight the beauty wrapped in the grotesque, an embrace that becomes a dance, a new dance, a dance of pink."


When I listen to or read Kevin Kling, I admit that I do not feel much like a dance of pink. Not yet, anyway.  But his storytelling, Amy Bickers' story....they do one wonderful thing.  They make me feel not alone.  I think that is what telling our stories does for us and others.  Maybe you are like me and you are counting on it.