The Chair

This morning I mourned the loss of a very dear old friend of mine.  The memorial service wasn't held in a church, nor was it in a cemetery.  It was a semi-private affair which took place in the alley behind my house.   Attending the service were some of Denver’s finest employees, but they didn’t really know my friend, nor did they show much reverence during the service.  They probably wondered why a crazy lady with tears in her eyes stood quietly watching them unceremoniously toss a discarded armchair into the back of their dump truck.

The armchair came into my life with a rustic log cabin that I purchased back in the mid-seventies after my first divorce.  It was lumpy and threadbare, but it was the first piece of furniture that I  ever owned and I loved it beyond all reason.    To snuggle between its green upholstered arms in front of the old pot belly stove was sheer heaven.  The seat was indented just enough to fit my butt perfectly.   It was my refuge, my comfort, the symbol of my rite of passage into self-sufficiency.   When I sold the cabin, the chair went with me.  I paid a fortune to have it re-stuffed and re-upholstered, but it was worth the money to buy my friend a little more time.   Like a loyal companion, it accompanied me through all of the transitions and changes of my adult years.  Even when the bottom started sagging and the cat had ripped a huge hole in the arms, I could not bring myself to let it go.  I  just covered the arm with a doily and kept repairing the leg which fell off whenever someone sat in it. 

This summer while re-organizing my office, I assessed the mismatched file cabinets, bookshelves and desks and decided it was time to get rid of all of it.   The usable items went to Good Will and the really decrepit stuff to the dumpster.  Sadly, I had to admit that the chair was in the latter category, so my husband Frank hauled it out to the alley to await its final fate.   Every time I took garbage out to the dumpster and saw it ignominiously rotting in the sun, I felt a guilty twinge for betraying such a loyal and steadfast friend. I kept telling myself it was just an inanimate object, a thing. Yet this morning, when I saw the chair disappear into the bowels of the garbage truck, I realized that it was so much more than that.  From the pang of sadness I felt, I knew that the disposal of my chair represented yet another rite of passage. 

Life is an unrelenting yet enriching series of such passages-- of tearing down and letting go followed by renewal and rebuilding.  As I enter my early sixties, I'm feeling the need to unclutter my life and hold a clearance sale.  Everything must go so that I can more easily move forward into the fall of my life.  I’ve imposed profound changes on myself these past three years.  I’ve gone back to graduate school, changed professions, shed age old intimacy issues and found a traveling partner with whom to journey through my remaining years.  All positive, life-affirming changes, but as any grief counselor will tell you, change and grief go hand in hand.  You cannot move forward until you’ve let go of the past. I know this, yet I have a tendency to latch onto my things like a leech because it gives me the illusion of security just as my attachment to certain habits and behaviors  has given me the illusion of control. Thankfully, I've managed to ditch some of the more self-destructive habits, but it's been somewhat more of a challenge to pry my sticky little fingers from my material things.   I still have the stuffed Humpty Dumpty that 'Santa' brought me when I was twelve.    But I’ve found that the Universe usually has a charming way of whooping me upside the head with a two by four, telling me when it’s time to let go and move on.  I've learned it's a lot less painful to be pro-active, so this morning I blessed my chair and thanked it for all the comfort and support it has offered me over the years.  After I'm done grieving, I'll take a few steps forward into this next passage with a much lighter heart,  unencumbered by things of the past that have served me well, but no longer have a place in my life.    

A Holy Vocation

     Having been raised a strict Catholic, I survived sixteen years of indoctrination by dozens of clergy people who were dedicated to saving young souls from eternal damnation. Since the good nuns and priests believed that the most direct route to heaven was to be found by joining their ranks, they undertook a concerted recruitment campaign that made Marine recruiters look like a bunch of slouches. Pretty much from the first grade on, it was not so subtly implied that those of us who were virtuous enough to get called by God would be rewarded with a “get- out- of – purgatory- for- free” card. “The most sacred thing a person can have is a holy vocation”, Father would tell us when he came to visit the class. I wasn’t sure what having a vocation meant, but I thought it might have something to do with dressing like a penguin and reeking of Yardley lavender soap.


     To have raised a child with a “Vocation” was sort of equivalent to winning the coveted Heisman Trophy for good Catholic parenting. I overheard my Mother wistfully telling a friend one day that her greatest desire was to have one of her girls become a nun. With five daughters, I’m sure my parents believed that the odds were in their favor so they patiently waited for the day when one of us would suddenly announce that we had received “the call”. Although I waited each night with a mixture of anticipation and dread to get called, it never happened. I wondered if God didn’t want me because I wasn’t good enough. But as much as I liked the idea of attaining a luxury suite in heaven, I was relieved when I didn’t get drafted, because I sensed that living in a convent with a bunch of women in scary black robes was utterly out of whack with my true nature.

     By the time I reached my early fifties, even though I had a moderately successful career in video production, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t really my calling. I began to fear that I’d missed the bus and eluded my destiny. Feeling the pressure of my years, I became obsessed with finding my “true” purpose in life for the remaining time I had left on Earth. With a dogged determination to uncover the reason for my existence, I signed up for every class and workshop I could find and regularly haunted the spirituality section of the biggest book store in Denver. Drama Queen that I am, I think I was expecting that my sacred purpose would suddenly be revealed with a brilliant flash of light and a booming voice issuing very clear marching orders. Fortunately, with the help of some wise and wonderful teachers, I made the happy discovery that “The Call” is much subtler and available every day to anyone who cares to listen. I concluded that I no longer had to wait for a disembodied voice commanding me to join the elite ranks of a few Divinely favored individuals.
      The word vocation means “voice” and I have come to believe that my vocation is more about listening to a quiet inner voice which gently invites me to grow and become the woman I am capable of being. If I listen in the stillness I can hear the silent whisper encouraging me to use my God-given abilities and talents to be a blessing to the planet.  It turns out that I haven't missed my calling and I've always had a holy vocation.   Over the years, it has compelled me to do some seemingly unwise things, like quitting a secure job and traveling to foreign lands. Each time I’ve followed it, I’ve been stretched beyond my limits but I’ve always been led into a more fulfilling and meaningful existence.

  While I have the utmost respect for those people who have dedicated their lives to God, the most sacred vocation I can think of is to continue trusting those mysterious inner urges and follow the inner road map that  is always guiding me into new territory.  Maybe it's not the most direct route, but I believe that the unique call that only I can hear is leading me towards the heaven that exists within me.