Amazing Grace


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That you started this thread, Brant, with Wesley's haunting hymn - instinctively with music - has so made me remember. Bereavement echoes, I will only speak of my mother's funeral, she died so unexpectedly that I could do nothing but focus on choosing the hymns and composing the eulogy. And after the funeral I could do literally nothing, but listen to Handel and plan my own funeral, because I knew, absolutely, that I had to get it done because there was no reason I should not just drop dead too at any minute, and I still know that. I could do nothing but this, trying to decide at what point to have "O Grave Where is thy Victory" played in the service, for two days. And this interesting interval ended in a DUI which I well deserved.


Carol:

As you probably know, I think you are a remarkable woman.

This rendition of the hymn just does not make it for me...
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Good --Galt! Nor me. It was the Handel part from Messiah , I was listening to. I did not even know there was this hymn, it is not in the Anglican hymnbook.

Please post a clip of the original for me, dear Adam if you would, you know there are some skills I am just not able to learn. It is a duet and there are lots of Deaths Where is thy Stings on the net.

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The incredible beauty of the human voice...

Hope this one works better for you...not real happy with the first thirty seconds with the mouthy lady's over pronouncing performance...

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O Adam! Thank you so much. I know what you mean by the mouthy lady. I try not to watch the singers, as I know the music only from records, and cannot think of people having to do physical things to produce this glory. The version that lives in me, is the old Beecham recording that travelled with me since I was 20, increasingly scratched and battered and looking for old players to be played on, but still playable in 2007. Still with me.

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I keep revisiting this. Art, funerals, what matters.

Anyone who tries to create any form of art knows, what other people think does not matter. Of course acknowledgment is necessary in some degree. If you can do anything, you know it or you don't.

The most important thing I ever tried to write was my mother's eulogy. I never wrote it but I composed it as it came to me, and I did not panic on deadline, it just came to me calmly.

The most important compliment I ever had or will have on my writing, came to me about the words I spoke then. Who said them or what they were are not important to my point here, not just because "self praise is no praise" and so on. That is not what I am talking about. Those words were silver and gold to me, a treasure to lay upon her grave, the last thing I could ever give her.

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Brant,when I wrote my posts above I knew only that you had lost your loved one. Now a friend who is very distressed for you,has toldI me how you lost him. I do not have anything to give you except this, I know what it is to want to die, and to need to die. I know it from authority, and and no I will not quote my sources. I know what it is, to believe you ought to be dead, to know that you ought to be dead more surely than you know anything. As I think you believe me to be honest. I am just telling you what I know. In that lonesome valley there are no others, you gotta walk it by yourself. I would credit the songwriter but I do not who the hell it was.

You know how it is, when people you care about suffer, you just want to do something when you know there is not a damn thing you can do.

This is the only stuff I have Brant, I am pretty sure you would not like one of my casseroles. Most people don't.

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Careful, there, Carol. To some extent you are mixing me up with Rodney and Rodney with yourself. I don't think you know what you know because you were driven mad by methamphetamine. My grief comes from wanting to live. All grief does. You were misinformed, but you're not dead. Your "sources" is a source, of course. It's always singular.

--Brant

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My grief comes from wanting to live. All grief does.

All forms of grief are connected with a loss, and in the most tragic case of losing a loved one, the grief is about wanting him/her back to life. One can also grieve deeply about a loved one not having had the life he/she could have had.

My heart goes out to you, Brant.

Angela

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My grief comes from wanting to live. All grief does.

All forms of grief are connected with a loss, and in the most tragic case of losing a loved one, the grief is about wanting him/her back to life. One can also grieve deeply about a loved one not having had the life he/she could have had.

My heart goes out to you, Brant.

Angela

Yes, and madness is the loss of one's self, while you are still alive, and aware of the loss. This form of grief is so severe that for some it is literally unendurable.

As with postpartum depression which I got with my first baby. I never wanted to kill my baby or myself, but in my terror and utter helplessness, without my husband I might have slid into psychosis and done so.

Hearing of such cases that become famous we all wonder, how could a woman kill her own child? How could she not? In madness you simply know you have to do something, so you do it.

One reason there are nearly six years between my two sons is, I was afraid of getting PPD again. But second time around was the opposite, Andrew Edward Lynam 9 lbs. 6 oz, brought with him "joy in the morning."

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"My grief comes from [terribly] wanting to live [in a way no longer possible]. All grief does."

--Brant

Brant, is that a quotation? I know, the quote marks should give me a clue, but you could just be quoting your own previous comment.

It is art whoever wrote it, heartbreaking truth.

As I read it again it seems to echo dimly as something I have read before. But that's art for you,heartbreaking truth that is just a recognition.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I know what the parents, individually, in Newtown, CT are going through, especially the mothers, but collectively it dissolves into the lead of emotionally incomprehensible horror. As for hurting a child in any way, I can't even imagine doing that so I can't get inside the mind of that murderer and all such explanations of that come across and will come across only as intellectualizations. Social explanations are another matter entirely, but likely to be all over the map, albeit mostly powered to statist conclusions, such is the nature of contemporary American culture.

--Brant

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"Life, after all, is not so much to lose,

But young men think it is. And we were young."

-AE Housman

This doesn't speak to the dead and their mourners of Newton--nothing could. But it has been going through my head all night, all day. Maybe now I have written it down it will go away.

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  • 1 month later...
Best wishes Brant.

We could never really be immortal because if we lived a thousand years we'd only remember the last 50. Cultivate the gift of forgetting.

"If I could live a thousand years and all my dreams come true/ my memories of love would be of you"

-Denver/Domingo

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Pain, not hate, is the other side of love so it's embraced so not to let the loved go so the grief goes on.

--Brant

and on

True. true. true.

Hatred is energizing, even pleasurable, but so self-destructive.

The only way to live fully in this world, it seems to me. is to love what you love more than you hate what you hate .

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Duance wrote:

Hatred is energizing, even pleasurable, but so self-destructive.

end quote


Does it help to hate when playing sports? Are bounties on opposing players good? How
about those cheers during sports games, and those Samoan type pre-game war
chants that are being used? The Baltimore Ravens Ray Lewis gets his team
energized and psyched up with mind control. It is fun to be a sports fan but
some doctors on Fox mentioned that heart attacks go up 15 percent after a big
game in the losers city and suburbs.

Peter




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Duance wrote:

Hatred is energizing, even pleasurable, but so self-destructive.

end quote

Does it help to hate when playing sports? Are bounties on opposing players good? How

about those cheers during sports games, and those Samoan type pre-game war

chants that are being used? The Baltimore Ravens Ray Lewis gets his team

energized and psyched up with mind control. It is fun to be a sports fan but

some doctors on Fox mentioned that heart attacks go up 15 percent after a big

game in the losers city and suburbs.

Peter

Peter, that is not hate, it is the "joy of battle" syndrome (not the bounty part, which is just cynical business practice)

Feeling part of an "army" seems to be an atavistic emotional necessity, them against us, and They are not hated individuals, just an object to conquer in our glory and superiority and unity.

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  • 8 months later...

Hurt, as sung by Johnny Cash

I hurt myself today,

To see if I still feel.

I focus on the thing,

The only thing that's real

The needle tears a hole,

The old familiar sting,

Try to kill it all the way

But I remember everything

What have I become,

My sweetest friend?

Everyone I know goes away in the end.

And you could have it all,

My empire of dirt,

I will let you down,

I will make you hurt

I wear this crown of thorns

Upon my liars' chair,

Full of broken thoughts

I cannot repair

Beneath the stings of time

The feelings disappear,

You are someone else,

I am still right here

What have I become,

My sweetest friend?

Everyone I know

Goes away in the end

And you could have it all,

My empire of dirt.

I will let you down,

I will make you hurt

If I could start again,

A million miles away,

I would keep myself,

I would find a way.

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I made the Hurt post to mark a point in time--a pivot point--for me. Rodney died on November 2, but it was part of a stream of time and events that began just before midnight October 31 and continued in fits and starts until the early morning hours of the 2nd with its horrible and freaky but logical but not necessary denouement. I'm right in the middle of the one-year anniversary of that; it's all pain. After this I need to recreate myself and move out of the zone I've been living in. That starts Monday.

--Brant

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