One More Perspective

My thanks to the stranger who, out of the blue, received the below text message from an unknown phone number and kindly chose not to reply.

“Tom – I cannot believe your number popped into my draft text messages as I tried to text Todd.  It’s been several years but I still think about you.  I felt relieved when you finally left this Earth, which seemed to suit you little during your lifetime.  I thought after meeting you you would take interest in us, your new supposed family, but was disappointed to find you took none.  Not even in your new Wife, my Mother.  What a transaction your “marriage” was.  …but you miscalculated.  You didn’t marry a subservient woman with an accent; you married a hugely capable woman who extracted her part like you were seeking to take advantage for yours.  May you rest in peace.” 

It’s been a week and I am feeling much better after COVID (version 2025); I even resumed running.  Wonderful things happen when I get outside with the rising sun, whether to run or walk, meander or just be.  I get to stay largely in the present moment observing everything from potholes to blooming flowers, chatty birds and running foxes.  When thoughts do interrupt my inventory of all things fascinating, those are not recycled laments about one old topic or another, instead, they are brand new thoughts offering a new perspective or (like the click of two Lego bricks), two thought nodes coming together to form a new realization. 

This morning a vivid memory of my first Therapist burst into my consciousness.  I must have been maybe on mile five…settling in.  Though she’s often on my mind.  She may have been the only helpful part of my life between 2004 and 2008 when she graduated from this lifetime, so to speak.  Breast cancer round two.  I still read (and gift to others) her books and gain deeper understanding to what she was teaching us.  She embodied the concept of approaching everyone with an expectation they had something to teach her.  She was also very big on staying mindful of the multiple perspectives perpetually present in all situations, which I took to like duck to water.  It made perfect sense to me and I could readily observe it in everyday life.  I still do. 

Back to this morning, it was a story she, Martha Baldwin Beveridge, told me about how people relate to funerals that popped into my head regarding my text message to Tom’s old number.  Martha said funerals are very tricky.  Depending on how different people experienced the deceased, their individual memories will be along a spectrum of positive to negative.  Pile onto that the differing ways people yield to the societal or community pressure to only say nice things about the dead.  The problem with feeling pressure to say (and to think) only flattering things at someone’s funeral is it can serve to invalidate the experiences of those who fared otherwise through their interactions with the deceased.  Martha had personal experiences around this (and about which she also wrote), so she was very ready to give those she counseled permission to have their own feelings at funerals.  She detailed with great care what she had observed as a social metamorphosis that occurs within hours of someone’s death.  Despite the life they lived and the impact they had on others, the community conditioning takes over and it all gets transmuted into a homogeneously positive legacy.

It was a number of years after Martha passed this brave person went viral for her thoughts about her deceased Father:

https://abc13.com/society/ouch-family-writes-brutal-obituary-for-local-man/1746919/

https://abc13.com/news/woman-who-wrote-brutal-obit-says-she-meant-every-word/1749259/

She received condemnation from a lot of people, but there were those who applauded her for representing herself despite the social pressure to pretend they deceased was a saint.