As a part of the “working my crazy out” I’ve been doing for the past few months, I’ve found a lot of my memories returning. Oddly enough, I didn’t notice they were missing until they started coming back.

I don’t think I ever fully realized how who you are is a rich, flavorful stew of the yous that you previously were. How all the shadings and gradations of your personality form from all those collected emotions and experiences and judgments and perceptions.

Which is a convoluted way of saying “I haven’t been myself lately.” I figure, at the rate I’m getting memories back, it’s probably fairly accurate to say I’ve been about 1/3 of myself lately–lately being probably the last three or four years.

The culture is reeling right now from the deaths of Ed McMahon (who put us to bed on The Tonight Show and promised that you, too, could win the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes), Farrah Faucett (who served as fodder for either adolescent fantasy or emulation, depending on your gender and orientation), and of course, Michael Jackson.

If you’re a member of Generation X, and haven’t picked up on the fact that the times are changing, you’re not paying attention. We have a biracial, Gen X President in the White House, the King of Pop has joined the King of Rock ‘n Roll in the hereafter, and the record store where we spent our extended adolescence is almost extinct.

On Twitter last night, I noticed that @QueenofSpain was puzzled by the overwhelming reaction to Jackson’s death. I don’t think it’s that surprising–I think it’s a symptom of Gen X coming to terms with our own maturity and our own mortality. Sure, we had River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain to demonstrate that we weren’t immune to death–but their deaths were of the “tragic young artist” variety. They only served to reinforce that we were still the “younger generation.” People are shocked as much by the fact that Michael was 50 as they are by the fact that he has passed. When did MJ become late-middle-aged? How is that even possible? Somewhere in the back of our heads, the math works out, but it still seems wrong.

We’re not the younger generation anymore. We’re the grown-ups. Unquestionably. Unequivocally. And there’s no going back. But there is moving forward.

I had never been a huge fan of Michael Jackson, but his music was the soundtrack of my youth. So I pulled up a song of his on Blip.fm that always reminded me of a really transformative road trip I’d taken in 1993, when Dangerous was the only music I’d had on hand in the car for a 12 hour drive from Louisville to Biloxi. I ended up playing “Keep the Faith” over and over again on that trip, because I needed to keep the faith.

My life was a mess. The last two years, I’d graduated high school, gotten married, started college, entered the workforce full time, and dealt with three pretty significant personal tragedies, two of which were the deaths of family members I loved. I was leaving the only home I’d ever known to move halfway across the country because my husband had come home one day and said “Guess what? I joined the Air Force.”

So I was dropping out of college and leaving behind the full ride scholarship that nobody (most especially me) had believed I could even win in the first place.

I’ve carried the shame and guilt of the belief that I didn’t deserve a college education ever since. In my mind, I screwed up–I blew my one shot. And the major irony in all this is that of all the second, and third, and seventy-times-seven chances I’ve given other people for their screw-ups, I could never allow myself one on this.

Until now.

I find myself now enrolled in fall semester classes at Indiana University Southeast. The same school I dropped out of, leaving behind the President’s Scholarship that my parents told me repeatedly not to get my hopes up about getting. My parents are/were good, loving people. But I can’t count the number of times I heard “Don’t get your hopes up,” growing up. I was probably over 30 before I had the sudden stunning realization that hope is actually a good thing, and that getting your hopes dashed won’t actually kill you.

Ready for more irony? My current tuition is being paid for by a VA program that my dad, of all people, pursued for his adult kids in the last couple of years.

I’m mildly terrified. For reasons that I’m not ready to get into here on this blog. But I’m keeping the faith.

There are no do-overs in life, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t second chances.

So yeah, it ended up being an odd choice of movie. But we really weren’t interested in seeing another bad Eddie Murphy “family” movie, which was our other option. On the whole, it was a good idea–the kids loved it, and by the end, even Chris and I were having a good time.

But–the last movie Chris and I had watched just a couple days earlier was Eastwood’s Gran Torino. And let me tell you, those two movies make for one seriously odd double-feature.

Gran Torino – Begins with the main character, a grumpy geriatric Clint Eastwood, at his beloved wife’s funeral.
UP – After a short sequence showing how they met and fell in love, begins with a grumpy geriatric character voice by Ed Asner, shortly after his beloved wife’s death.

Gran Torino – Fatherless Asian kids next door gradually win him over and coax him into participating in life again.
UP – Asian kid on a quest to get his last Wilderness Explorer badge (so his dad will show up for the ceremony) gradually wins him over and coaxes him into participating in life again.

Gran Torino – Perilous situations ensue because of generally bad, self-centered bullies.
UP – Ditto.

Gran Torino – In the end bad guys are neutralized by a selfless act of sacrifice on the part of the main character.
UP – Ditto.

Aside from the obscenities, constant racial epithets, graphic violence, and whether the hero and/or villain survives to the end, they’re basically the same movie. ETA: I forgot another difference: whether the dog is a yellow lab or a golden retriever who can talk.

Also, so close to Father’s Day, I thought that both movies dealt with the issue of fatherlessness in an interesting way. Both movies explored the effect of fatherlessness on both the kids and the men in question. Eastwood’s Walt has sons with whom he has no real relationship. When he finally confesses to the priest, his biggest regret is that he never really connected with his own kids. UP implies in the opening montage that Carl and his wife Ellie were childless for medical reasons.

As you watch both characters become surrogate fathers, you realize (along with them, I think) the effect of missing out on being a dad. Our modern day myths and stories often focus on fatherless children. And childlessness is often discussed in the context of women’s issues. It’s rare that you see attention drawn to what it means to be a childless man.

Being a dad, it turns out, is as spiritually formative for the dad as it is for the kid.

It’s incredibly peaceful here, swaying gently, and looking out across the fallow corn field that is my neighbor on one side. I could use some peaceful just now.

We lost a good friend of the family Friday night. Miss June was my husband’s best friend’s mom. Quick-witted and sharp-tongued, she treated us like family and we will miss her.

That night, we went to the launch party for Over the Grave, the latest cd from our church’s music ministry. It was held at The Block, a venue that is part of Southeast Christian’s main campus. It’s an oddly… posh?… venue, apparently modeled after the Chicago House of Blues. But it was a beautiful venue with amazing acoustics, and we got the chance to visit with some good friends after the show.

The final song was one that isn’t on Over the Grave, but will be on the next volume of Sojourn’s Isaac Watts project. “Absent from Flesh” was still playing in my head later that night when we got the news that Miss June had passed, and it was richly appropriate. You can hear it in this video, taken at the Advance09 conference.

Sojourn Music “Absent From Flesh” Live 06.05.09 from chuck heeke on Vimeo.

“Absent from flesh, O blissful thought, what joy this moment brings.
Freed from the blame my sin has brought, from pain and death and its sting.
Absent from flesh, O glorious day, in one triumphant stroke,
my ransom is paid, my charges dropped, and the bonds ’round my hands are broke.
I go where God and glory shine, to one eternal day.
This failing body I now resign, for the angels point my way.”

A club is a community with a specific common context and a clearly defined membership. Either you are in the club or you’re not. There’s no ambiguity there.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the clubs that you join against your will. I received a copy of Melody Beattie’s book, The Grief Club last fall when I attended a Celebration Dinner for The Healing Place, a local addiction recovery center. (They’re a client of the advertising agency where I work.)

In the book, Beattie talks about the clubs you never intended to join. It’s not an entirely new concept to me.  I think most of the people I know (myself included) belong to at least one club they would have opted out of, had they been given a choice.

Nobody sets out to join the “diagnosed with an incurable disease” club.  Or the “widowed at 36 with three small kids” club.  I’m pretty sure no one is fighting to get into the “my spouse decided to cheat on me” club.

And yet, the people who end up in these clubs seem to often, somehow, find each other. You bond over coffee and pain and the internet.  You help those who are new to the club not to be afraid–or at least, not to be terrified.  You help and get help seeing where to go next, because generally there’s a safe path through it.  You discover that a sorrow shared with the sorrows of many actually feels less heavy than the individual sorrow you were carrying alone.

In finding each other, you realize that it’s better to be in a club you never wanted to join with a lot of people who also never wanted to be there, than to be what you felt like you were when you first qualified for membership.

Alone.

Occasionally, they even have theme songs, but not always.  

So my theme lately has been “finishing what I started.”  I mentioned a few weeks back that I was going to see my friendly neighborhood Christian counselor.  That was another “finishing what I started” thing.  I started working on what wasn’t really working seven years or so ago.  I made a lot of progress, but I quit before I was really done.

If you’re wondering how that’s going, the short and simple answer is “very well.” The longer and more complicated answer is that cleaning out your psyche is much like cleaning out your closets.  It has to get worse before it gets better.  There’s a short period where all your accumulated useless junk and all the actually useful stuff is all pulled out and strewn in semi-organized piles in the middle of the room.

You’re standing there tired and sweaty and kerchief-headed, thinking “Dang, I had no idea I had all that junk crazy stored up back there!” and feeling generally too exhausted to even think about hauling the useless stuff out to the trash and finding a place for the useful stuff.  

But you do it anyway, because at that point, you’re committed.  You can’t just leave all your crazy just sitting there in the middle of a room you can’t walk through without risk to life and limb.  

If we’re using that as a working metaphor for where I’m at right now, I would say that I can see floor, there are clear paths through the chaos, and a LOT of the junk has been hauled to the waste-wheeler.  So, good progress anyway. 

I was a little hesitant to blog about this.  For one thing, because there is still a big stigma associated with doing therapy or counseling because it implies (GASP!) that you might just not have all your stuff together in all respects.   

I know.  Shock. Awe. 

Plus it’s a little disconcerting when you know for a fact your boss, your closest coworkers, people you respect in your industry, and your H.R. manager all read your blog, to talk about working your crazy out.  

But it’s only scary and intimidating if you actually think that most people aren’t walking around with a little more crazy stuffed in their psyche than they really need.  

But let me just say right now, if you find yourself doing the same stupid stuff over and over again, and it’s just not working, you might just want to consider calling someone up and scheduling an appointment.  Don’t think of them as a therapist or a counselor, if you have an icky association with those words.  Heck, call them a professional (psyche) organizer if you want.  Call a “personal coach”  if that’s what you’re comfortable with.

Contact your H.R. person (who is not as nice as mine is, but is probably still pretty nice as H.R. people tend to be people persons).  Ask if your company has an E.A.P. (which means you can get free or low-cost counseling).  Ask if you have mental health coverage.  It’s surprising how often you do, and just don’t know it.  People always ask about dental and vision–mental health is sort of an awkward subject to broach in your orientation. 

Because it’s just like your overstuffed closets.  If you don’t deal with all that crap, sooner or later it’s going to come spilling out.  Probably in the middle of a birthday party or a family barbecue or something.  

And really, who wants that?