Calling All Angels

When Robin Williams died, it was the second time I openly grieved a celebrity. The first was a lesser-known, but still lovable actor from the soap opera of my youth and one of the two our antennae could clearly display. It was on that same NBC channel that I had once served as a Junior Weather Forecaster. At the ripe age of 12 and standing alongside Paul Barys of WRCB Chattanooga, I delivered a few lines about the rest of the week’s temperatures and took a tour backstage where I learned that journalists who sit behind full desks often wear jeans and sneakers with their blazer.

Two years after my television debut, however, there was that first celebrity death.

It was more the character, less the celebrity. Tom was the patriarch of the Horton family on NBC’s longest running soap opera, Days of Our Lives. He was a physician, a husband, a father and grandfather and great-grandfather, and the voice that still greets devoted fans…

“Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”

I adored Tom Horton. I wanted him to be my grandpa or great-grandpa. I wanted his wife, Alice, to share her homemade doughnuts with me. I wanted to sit among the many who listened to him read the Christmas Story at University Hospital then joined in the tradition of hanging my own ornament on the Horton family Christmas tree.

I didn’t know Macdonald Carey, the man who played that beloved character from 1965-1994, but when his actual death meant Tom’s death, too, I wept. The Hortons had been part of my childhood, part of my summer afternoons and holiday afternoons and, assuming we had power, snow day afternoons. It was a 1:00p.m. ritual, and it still is for my mom.

But when it came to Robin, it was the person I felt I had lost. Underneath Patch Adams and John Keating and Adrian Cronauer and Euphegenia Doubtfire and the Genie and Armand Goldman and Chris Nielsen there was a kind and funny man with a kind and funny heart. His mission, it seemed, was to live and love out loud. He made so many laugh. He made so many cry. And in an intimate moment with a stranger at LAX in 2014, he comforted a grieving widow carrying her husband’s ashes to another of his requested sites.

Her husband had died by suicide.

When Robin Williams died by the same, I ached. I ached knowing that he had hidden so much pain. I ached knowing that he came to a moment of complete emptiness. I ached knowing how it felt to be a loved one left behind after that moment. I ached because he deserved to hear and believe the most important line he ever spoke on film.

“It’s not your fault.”

As Sean Maguire, the last-resort therapist for a brilliant, yet struggling Will Hunting, Williams delivered that deeply emotional and now iconic scene. It took repetition in the face of rejection for the young genius to hear, for the first time, that the abuse he had known in childhood and carried so deeply into adulthood was not his doing. He did not bring it on himself. He did not deserve it.

It wasn’t his fault.

On a recent trip to Boston, the setting for Good Will Hunting, I unknowingly packed that line inside a book I planned to start during vacation. Daring Greatly, a well-known Brene Brown work on vulnerability, led to a intimate conversation about heterosexual relationships between my partner and I on day 2 of our week-long venture. After reading through Brown’s discussion on the different ways men and women carry shame, I asked for his opinion. He nodded in agreement with Brown’s observation: when it comes to men, we leave no room for weakness, for failure, for criticism, for being human.

“It’s the whole good guy/bad guy thing,” my partner told me. “You hear women say that they want the good guys, but they usually end up with the bad ones. The bad guys are the ones who never look weak, even if they are.”

“Maybe it’s because it’s easier for us to believe we deserve the bad guys,” I said. That surprised us both, though it wasn’t hard for me to understand.

Three weeks later, in a yoga class where my mind tends to go somewhere unexpected, I reconnected with a memory from one of those easier to believe relationships in my past. It was an afternoon Mass in Naples, Florida. I had been visiting my then bad guy to provide care for him after a minor procedure on his knee. He was the other man from my extramarital affair and there was rarely a moment of real peace or joy between us. He held the affair, and everything else, over me as a means of emotional cruelty and manipulation. Whatever he said, I believed. That’s what happens when you hear the same thing over and over and over.

In that memory, I felt the want to be happy and loved. More deeply, I felt the shame of adultery and his lack of approval. I remembered how he lectured me later on the homily. That day, the priest had spoken about the sanctity of marriage. It was ammunition for the bad guy.

He tended to forget that he was part of the affair, too.

In the midst of the memory, I also felt deep gratitude. Even though I could remember how it felt, I was no longer there.

“What would say to her, to that young woman in the red dress who is sitting so still and so quiet and so afraid?” I asked myself between poses. “What does she need to know?”

“I would tell her that I know. That I understand. That I’ve been exactly where she is.”

“So tell her.”

Deep breath…

“Hi,” was the only way I knew how to begin. “I want to tell you something, and you don’t have to say anything back. I want you to know that I know. I understand. I have been exactly where you are and I can tell you that it won’t last forever. I promise. It will last for a little while. I won’t lie to you. And you will hurt and there will be different reasons why you hurt and you are permitted to feel all of that. But that fear you have right now, the doubts about yourself, that’s not forever. You are going to do amazing things. You will take risks and you will surprise yourself. You will figure out how to support yourself because you are a strong woman. You will do the work of presence and listening and helping people who will teach you about life and love. You will write about those things and speak about those things and let me tell you, it will matter. One day, you’re even going to see your words in print. And down the road, you  will meet a kind and gentle man who will love you exactly as you are. I know this. And you’ll take a trip to Boston with that kind and gentle man and…”

There he was. Robin. Sean. An angel. Whatever you want to call him.

“Don’t forget to tell her…”

Right…

“Here’s the most important thing you need to know. And I understand that you might not believe me right now but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

Deep breath…

“It’s not your fault.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“It’s not your fault.”

It was true, both the affirmation and the difficulty of accepting it. But sometimes, when you hear the same thing over and over and over, you start to believe it.

Even years later.

Just before my yoga teacher, Christina, sang us into the evening’s Shavasana with an African lullaby and her guitar, she read my favorite Mary Oliver poem. Another angel, quoting another angel whose lines I have played on repeat during a labyrinth walk and in the midst of a parking lot emotional breakdown…

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

In other words, “It’s not your fault.” And in child’s pose, I whispered the words I could remember. From me, to me…

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.

. . . . .

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
The world offers itself to your imagination,

. . . . .

The day before that memory met that poem, I found myself stopping for one of the same songs I always stop for when Pandora offers a balm. And in office worker’s pose, I took in the words I could feel. From them, to me…

Oh, but if you could
Do you think you would
Trade in all, all the pain and suffering?
Oh, but then you’d miss the beauty
Of the light upon this earth
And the sweetness of leaving

In other words, “I know. I understand. I have been exactly where you are.”

Calling all angels…

And there we were. Robin, Christina, Mary, the Wailin’ Jennys, and me, walking through this one with the young woman in the red dress, calling to her like the wild geese, over and over announcing her place in the family of things.