My parents
were
wonderful.
They were good, decent
people
who raised me, my sister, and my brother to be good, decent
people
with respect for others, with appreciation for
art
and
music,
with care for
the planet,
the environment, and nature.
My father
worked hard as a family doctor, widely
loved
in the local community, equally respected by his peers as a
brilliant
diagnostician.
My mother
was also active in the local community, participating
generously
in charity fund-raising events and soup kitchens providing vital
nourishment for the impoverished. They enrolled the three of us in
excellent schools where we received a quality of education which would
be hard to match today. They gave us a lot, starting us on a path to
live life as responsible human beings who recognized the goodness (if
you will) of
being in integrity,
the joy of being open to and including others, and the discernment to
know it's not all about
moi.
Of all the many gifts they bequeathed upon us, there was one which they
gave us, me in particular, which was more than simply
generous.
For me, it was inestimable, life-altering. The inestimable gift
my parents
gave me, was allowing me to have conversations with them, conversations
for being complete with each other - individually and collectively. It
took a lot to be in those conversations. They required much to be
up-front and on the line. And while I may have used different
words
and vocabulary than they did in our conversations for being complete
with each other (being exposed as I was in some depth to
Werner's work),
we both held what we considered being complete to be, as a ground state
for
life working
for everyone, even if we articulated it differently.
Now the thing for me about being complete, and more than that, the
thing about being complete with
my parents
and them with me, is that it allowed me to be complete with the other
people
in my life. Even if I was incomplete with some
people
in my life, it allowed me to generate being complete with
them, given that I had already experienced what generating being
complete with
my parents
entailed. And the gift that comes from that, keeps on giving.
It's been said that until you're complete with your parents, none of
your relationships will ever be truly complete; until you're complete
with your mother, none of your relationships with women will ever be
truly complete; until you're complete with your father, none of your
relationships with men will ever be truly complete. And since it's
likely true that most
people
don't have conversations for being complete, that's no mean feat. That
was their gift. It wasn't trivial.
It was only later, much later, after both
my parents
had
died
and I was a parent myself, that I was able to see (much to my own
chagrin) where I'd held
my parents
to impossibly high standards. When I became a parent myself, I realized
how much of parenting I had to figure out as I went along. I had
no real experience of being a parent until
my own children
came along. Then I had to figure it out. But that's not a grace I
afforded
my own parents.
With
my own parents,
I assumed they already knew. And when they didn't do what I
knew they knew, I judged them, I chastised them, I blamed
them. I was l'enfant terrible, the child who knew more than the
adults in the room. And for that, if I had one more time to be with
them, I would 'fess up to it, I'd apologize to them for it. In our
context
of being complete, it's all been accounted for, even that which was
unspoken. Yet when I look back on it, it's the one thing I would have
liked to have 'fessed up to and told them while they were
alive.
The other things we completed together. But that one would've been all
on me.
One of the things about transformation is it gives us the power to
reach back into the past and
recontextualize
(I
love
that
word)
it. In this way, it renders the line of
death
permeable, arbitrary. So I'm not thwarted by not having had one more
time to 'fess up to
my parentsface to face
while they were
alive,
how I judged, chastised, and blamed them. It would have been nice to
have told them
directly.
But they're
alive
in me now. So that's my
access
to them.