I M Perfect lady

Chapter 10, in "Hungry" by Dr. Robin Smith.

"We wear the mask that grins and lies."  Paul Laurence Dunbar

"I was sitting in the parking lot at the grocery store talking with my assistant Kim on the telephone.  It was a beautiful, clear, and warm afternoon, and we were discussing the exhaustive to-do list still in front of me. There was so much that remained on my schedule before my day could officially be called "over".  I felt overwhelmed and I knew I would be working late into the evening. All I really wanted to do was to be out and about enjoying the beauty of nature and the day with Kalle."

"I said to Kim, "I just realized something. I am a mortician."

"She said, "Excuse me, what did you say?"

"I replied, "I am a mortician, the best anywhere.  I see dead people."

"Kim was silent.  I knew she was waiting for me to say something clever that would put into context what I had just said. The words themselves seemed totally ridiculous. Actually, touched might be a more accurate description." 

"I realized something today," I explained. "I have spent a lot of my life trying to make dead people and dead things alive." I went on to explain that I had spent years with dead people, in dead relationships, in dead places playing the role of the most skilled mortician. By the time I am finished with them, my handiwork had been so convincing that I believed – as did everyone else- that the dead person or thing had come back to life. But in reality they were merely embalmed in a mixture of make-believe, pretend and false hope. Fear of reality was my partner in this booming mortuary business. How frightening and how dangerous to be dealing with dead things and acting like they were alive!"

"Kim got it, as did others with whom I shared the metaphor later. Many People are in the business of trying to make dead things alive again."  Dr. Robin

An interesting metaphor for a life that isn't being fully lived or one in truth.

I wonder how many therapist and well intentioned friends will try and breathe life into dead relationships and dead individual lives?

I am not even sure most people are aware of the struggle they are engaged in while trying to keep relationships appearing alive, when they clearly are not working.

When my sister had coined the phrase, "I am not willing to pretend to pretend," she was speaking of no longer wanting to be a mortician…of making dead people look alive.  Of living a life of pretending all is well, when it clearly is not.

It oddly seems like you will die and life will end, when you give up trying to make dead relationships live, but instead you actually come alive.

Live and breathe and find deep passion and interest and aliveness in the simple things, for you are not forcing that which is not, to be.

Living among the ruins pretending you have still have a relationship home.

The contortion it requires sucks the life blood out of you…trying to make something from nothing….leaves you with mask overlaid on nothing…and tired.

I wonder if many people call living, the task of turning the dead into a living thing that isn't real?

How many would dare and live without airbrushing their lives?

 How many would drop the role of mortician, and let the dead lie?

Perhaps this is what actually made my estrangement easier, was that the dead did not rise and revolt and fight to be in a relationship with me, but rather they continued to act as they had; dead.

The dead waiting for me to make them alive. Make them a sister, a mother, a brother, it was up to me to paint them into a relationship with me.

I dropped all my pretend brushes and have let life be…