Sometimes I get sad when I am reminded about certain years of my past. Yesterday my dad emailed me a photo taken right before my grandfather died. I?m riding with my nephew on an amusement park ride (why we were doing this during our family?s last visit to see him escapes me) and we are both looking happy, despite the circumstances. The flashes of memory hit me ? seeing my Gramps in his apartment for the last time, talking about his 35th anniversary of his sobriety, playing with all the strangely not-creepy singing and dancing stuffed toys. These thoughts came and then slipped past without great feeling ? I loved him and respected him, and I don?t have any residual feelings of grief. What has lingered for me since seeing that picture of myself laughing with my darling nephew is how my then-husband had not joined me for this journey to see my grandfather one last time. We knew he was not well, and so all the family members on my mom?s side gathered one last time. Gramps called us The Progeny. Sweet and funny, affectionate and characteristically distant.
Families Represented Samsara
At this time, my first husband and I were living in a cult, and taking leave to do family activities was frowned upon. I made an effort to see my family once or twice a year, and my reputation in our spiritual community was that I didn?t value our collective mission as much as I should, as evidenced by my dedication to my family. I was ?soft? and the way my guru saw it, I wanted to escape the pressures of our spiritual experiment and used my family visits as an excuse to get time off.
So I don?t fault my ex-husband for passing on this particular visit, but it still makes me sad. It makes me more sad than any other thing surrounding this picture and the circumstances of the visit. It makes me sad that he missed the chance to see my nephews at this age. It makes me sad to think he didn?t get to say goodbye to my grandfather. And then my mind goes to how I didn?t get to say goodbye to my ex-husband?s grandparents, either, who I felt close with, because we divorced before they passed. (This is a longer story for another time.) And so the web of family, the net we create through time spent together and supporting one another through difficult times, was weakened in his absence. In the cult, the attitude that we were encouraged to cultivate towards our families was one of tolerance, not love. The general idea was that our families embodied the world of samsara ? the world of illusion ? or Hell. And to be truly enlightened, to live the life of one who has ?pierced the veil of illusion,? we would not have any desire to spend time with people who had not seen the same things we had seen. To do so would inevitably draw us down out of our higher states of consciousness into our more base motives. Sex. Drugs. Rock and Roll.
Essentially, we would ?lose touch? with reality and with everything that is most important, and indulge in feeding our ego, giving in to desires, not renouncing, and falling into an unenlightened state.
Tears in the Family Fabric
This all sounds extreme?and it is. But it?s not untrue. We had so many conversations about this dynamic. And I think that one of the effects was that it made me scared to spend too much time with my family. I venture to say that I was one of the few who went against the grain and made efforts to spend time with my family despite what damage it did to how people perceived me and the negative things my teacher would say about me. But I also believed the narrative, and I would limit my visits to three days in order to avoid extended time in the land of familial samsara. At Christmas I?d arrive late and leave early. I missed the birth of my sister?s three kids. I skipped my aunt?s wedding. The consequences of these decisions are small tears in the net we weave around one another. I wonder frequently how much my family still feels let down by my choices. Do they feel the weakness in the net? Can I ever repair those torn threads? I feel sadness and guilt for time lost over ten years that I can?t recover.
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