spirituality

Eulogy for a Son

~ jjebbia ~ 1 Comment

To say someone was “a good man” inevitably reduces them in their humanity. We hear this so often in times of grieving the death of a loved one. “He was a good man,” we say to the spouses, children, siblings. That’s a conclusion, a nice thing to say, and a phrase that means next to nothing.

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PC: Cristian Newman

This weekend I walked among the grieving. I nervously scrolled through Instagram in the ICU waiting room. Several huge families chattered loudly around me, telling stories and laughing. Remember when…Their presence soothed me. Indeed it is in times of great anxiety and subsequent loss when we bend the rules of life and duty to come together. I sat in a plastic chair in the hospital room with two longtime friends, carefully watching them as they gave their life updates (one, working at the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles, the other sharing progress on his girlfriend’s first storefront bakery). As they shared and listened, their eyes twitched frequently to the bed, looking for signs of change, movement, anything. I waited while my partner showered, letting the steaming water run down his face for the slightest relief, just in that moment. And I reminded him to breathe, in, out, every few minutes.

Today we honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. A few of my friends on social media remind us that when Dr. King died, he was not deemed a national hero, he was in fact an enemy of the state. Mugshots. Questions surrounding his doctoral dissertation (did he plagiarize?), his fidelity (affairs?) and even tactics to make change and rise to fame have previously made me uncomfortable. How dare we challenge the greatness of a man whom today we consider one of the most important figures in United States and global history? And yet, how dare we not. How dare we write off Dr. King as a great man with a dream who never made mistakes or misjudged a moral compass. “He was a great man” stops us from recognizing how deeply complicated a human being he was, how deeply complicated we all are. Further, how complicated our relationships are.

In grieving we tend toward the absolute. It is soothing to feel appropriate sadness upon clutching the memories that highlight “the good.” Memories of laughter, of kindness, of pride the deceased felt at our accomplishments. Yet below these scenes rests the complexities of the person that truly defined their humanity, and that now defines our own. These past three days, I listened to many joyous memories of a person who by every means is honored and will continue to be so through the lives he touched. Alone with my partner, I listened to his discomfort about the rising memories that weren’t so joyous. He remembered feeling confusion, anger, even resentment. It was not easy to admit these feelings that still ruminate within, as if he were committing a crime by naming them.

Dr. King was a father, among so many other roles. His youngest daughter Bernice King was only five years old when her father was assassinated. I can’t comment on what kind of father Dr. King was, but I can wonder if he found fatherhood to be one of the most complicated journeys of his life. And I can wonder if his children feel the same about the life of their father- one worthy of timeless honor and full of complexity. When we embrace that discomfort, we truly honor a person, for we honor ourselves as flawed and yet capable. We are not just “great” people, we are all miracles because of the fact that we are people.

I witnessed so much Revolutionary Love this weekend- not without tears and tension. Metta for the grieving, and for those who have and will continue to show up.

Why Honesty is Risky, Sometimes

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I started my Memoir Generator class. There are 12 of us aspiring memoirists. All women identified, all pretty quirky. I have decided after our first meeting we are all hiding something. That’s why we want to write. We are trying to figure out how to unhide. 

PC: Hauke Morgenthau

We read two memoirs before the class so we could tear them apart. I don’t mean in a bad way, like a really tough movie critic- I mean we dissected them, made lists of characters and objects and places, and honed in on the authors’ strategies for effective writing. The books we read were When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi (which I wrote about a few months ago) and The Suicide Index by Joan Wickersham. These memoirs are both about death- the first is about the author’s battle with cancer and his understanding, as a surgeon, of exactly what is happening inside him, and the second is about the author’s father committing suicide and her family’s quest to pick up the pieces for years. Literally, years- Wickersham worked on this book for 14 years. Kalanithi died about a year after he started writing the book. 
I felt so alive in our first class, even after a long day of work, even as the sun set and the bands of gold light turned pink and purple and then darkness flooded the window outside. I love learning, and what’s more, I loved being in a room with writers interested in understanding writing as a deep spiritual, artistic process. We agreed that writing a memoir takes time, reflection, and the final product will leave out quite a lot of what we write. “Don’t think every scene you write isn’t sacred,” our instructor told us. “But don’t think it’ll all be publishable either.” I admit, that statement scares me. But I’m still willing to try the process. I have stories and people and pain to unhide. 
In this first class, I learned something crucial about telling the truth amongst my new classmates. As we delved into the character list for Wickersham’s memoir, someone asked, “Why do you think she only mentions her sister once in the whole book? That seems strange to me. We don’t even know her name.”
It did seem strange- I suddenly wondered if the author was trying to tell us that her sister wasn’t very important to this whole experience, which I found unbelievable. My sister would be, if that ever happened in my family. Before that train of thought could spiral out of control, another student responded, “her sister probably asked not to be in the book. She probably wanted to be private.”
Oh. Yes, that makes sense. I realized in my quest to begin telling my own story how difficult telling the truth is, especially to the world who doesn’t know you and the people you love. Because “the” truth is actually your own truth. We have great power in our hands (literally) when we write down the stories we tell ourselves and share them. We are exposing brokenness and pain and memory that may be locked away for good reason. Someone in my class mused, “you’ll never please everyone when you tell the truth. The truth hurts. And usually we are writing because we are hurt, or we hurt others, and we write about the people who have caused us pain or for whom we have caused pain.”
I thought about my family and our collective secrets. What will happen if I write them down and share them? Even the stories we have exposed are told in a way that everyone feels they have agency. We’ve told these stories over and over, and drafted them in a way that confirms and contributes to the greater narrative of who we are. What if my writing challenges this narrative, shatters our story of “us”?
So I begin by asking “why.” Why do I feel such an ache to tell my story, even though I risk upsetting the people closest to me? For now, the answer is that sharing my story could also put forth the beginning of an honest conversation about our shared family pain that we’ve never addressed before. Telling the truth is risky- and maybe it’s a way for me to build stronger relationships with my family. I hope the memoir process helps me unhide from my own truth, and that I learn to listen for others’ struggles in sharing theirs. 

Why Writing Brings Me Joy

~ jjebbia ~ 1 Comment

It seems like all I can talk about these days, besides my moving woes and the storm that is Welcome Week at a large urban university, is my writing. What joy writing has brought me! Someone asked me recently: “Have you always been a writer?” I have always written papers and blogs and reports, yes- but it has not been until this summer that I have mustered the courage to call myself a writer.

A few weeks ago, I shared my experience at the Kenyon Institute seminar on spiritual writing on this blog. The seminar pushed me to make writing a priority, because of the joy and healing the process evokes. As soon as I returned from Gambier, Ohio, I decided to enroll in a GrubStreet class (a Boston non-profit dedicated to providing resources for writers of all ages), mainly for the accountability to write every week. A six-week Online Memoir Generator was about to begin, so I signed up and began to think about my memoir.

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The first week, my classmates and I discussed the topics of our memoirs in the online forum. Death, heartbreak, illness, leaving a life behind to start another- these all made the list. I struggled to describe my story- struggles with faith, growing up, finding community. My eyes rolled as I typed these words, they seemed so overused. Was I whining? I submitted a scene about losing a wiffle ball over the fence that separated my family’s back yard with our neighbor’s house and our quest to retrieve the ball, knowing full well our neighbor lived with dementia. The story provided a little humor and demonstrated the relationship between childhood me, my sister Mallory, and my dad. As words filled my page, though, something else happened. My soul transported back to that scene, that moment, and I remembered walking home after our quest, unsuccessful in retrieving the ball, and having my first encounter with a religious ritual that was not my own. The meaning is in these small details, I decided.

In the next weeks, my classmates shared their work and we commented on each other’s pieces. I found myself cringing to open their submissions on my computer. Am I ready for this? I wondered. Every time I read about the death of my classmate’s sibling, the struggle to raise a child, the reality of living as a gay man, the feeling in my chest resembled a shame as if I had taken off all my clothes to strut my far from perfect body in a room full of people. How unworthy was I to witness these life experiences with the people who lived them, and then to critique their writing about them?

“Work is love, made visible,” wrote Khalil Gibran, in his famous work The Prophet. The course continued, we completed our assignments, and I began to find joy in the work. I wrote about my struggle to feel like part of a community my whole life. I wrote about the car accident that totaled my big red Jeep and my childhood. I wrote, though didn’t submit, a short piece about my cousin who died far too young by her own hand. She was 28, the same age as me. Through the pain revisited on the page, my classmates took me in, and we held each other. I cried at their losses, their love, their pain. And I began to heal, or at least to feel what healing feels like. “Work is love, made visible.”

The love I felt through this process illuminated the source of the joy that I call writing. The source is the community. Writing is such a personal process- we know our story, we own our methods and tactics for telling it. Yet we write to share (if only with our future selves), to connect with our readers. Finding community has been a real challenge for me my whole life, and yet, it only took a website and some discussion forums to find a group of seven people willing to be vulnerable and intimate, willing to put love into the work.

Running in New York City

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Ah, the fresh smell of filth only semi-recognizable. We arrived in NYC Saturday afternoon and hauled our luggage 6 blocks to the Pod Hotel. A pod hotel offers you a bed that fills the whole room with some storage underneath and a box bathroom. But you can’t complain about being right at 39th and Lexington, right?

We spent the weekend wandering around Art Museums and eating ramen and bao buns that one cannot find in Boston. Every day we walked over 30,000 steps. Our feet ached. We munched on sweets from Milk Bar and Levain Bakery until my throat scratched from sugar overload. I obnoxiously posted pictures of sunsets atop tall buildings on my Instagram. #NYCshortweekend.


On Sunday we hiked all the way from our hotel to the Guggenheim, a museum I had never visited before, and then through Central Park to the American Museum of Natural History. As we trudged through Central Park with dampened t-shirts (it was about 97 F without humidity), I watched the runners on the road as they headed south. Some of them had flashy neon shorts and tank tops, while others donned old grey shirts with track shorts and mid-calf white socks. I marveled at every single person brave enough to sweat it out in that heat.

I have been a runner for almost 14 years now. As a freshman in high school, I joined the cross country team because my dad said it would help me get in shape for basketball. Funnily enough, I ended up not even playing basketball my senior year. But I ran every year, and constantly felt inadequate. My body was larger than my teammates’ and it took more time for me to carry it, mile by mile. 3 miles always felt horrendously long. I remember secretly rejoicing when my IT band became inflamed and I had to take a month off running. Every summer I promised to train and be more prepared for the season, but my times never improved. Yet every year, I ran in my little red shorts and tank top and counted down the number of races left to complete.

The funny thing is, I’ve never stopped running, even though there are times I really hate it. Every few months since high school, my body would get a strange craving to stretch my legs and pound the pavement. I would always feel so sore after running when I hadn’t in so long. The next day, I’d hit my legs until the lactic acid started to move, and I’d be off. The music in my earbuds has ranged from Incubus to Turkish pop stars.

When my friend Taylor asked me (ok, challenged me) to run a half marathon almost a year ago, I scoffed. The longest I had ever ran without stopping was about seven miles, and that was torture. I figured I would start training, have a good few weeks, and then like many initially titillating hobbies, I would find something better to do like bake low-carb cheesecake. But November became December and then the New Year came, and I ran a mile longer every week. The last few weeks in February I ran 11 or 12 miles on Saturdays. I couldn’t believe it- the chubby last-to-finish high schooler was actually doing this! Just as the cherry blossoms bloomed, I finished the half marathon in Washington, D.C. with my friends Taylor, Areeba and Audrey. We ate a big, much deserved brunch after crossing the finish line.

When I see anyone running (on purpose), my respect for the person skyrockets. Perhaps it’s because I have learned how much practice running takes. “It’s just one foot in front of the other,” our coach at the treadmill studio shouts as we sprint for 30 seconds. Sometimes the simplest action takes the most practice. When we meditate, we simply sit on a cushion and stay still. The practice is letting ourselves stay purely in this moment. It can be easy to rush through life with distractions at every turn, but being alone with ourselves can feel excruciating.

Spending the weekend in New York was a blessing, a much-needed distraction from the ever-approaching school year mayhem. I felt a little sad on the bus back home because we our fun had ended so soon. I thought about the runners in the park. If we, runners, ran for the finish, we would quickly give up and find something more enjoyable to do like barre or hip hop yoga. We run because we enjoy the challenge, we thrive on finding presence in the pain. As Haruki Murakami wrote in his memoir about training for the New York City Marathon, “pain is inevitable…but suffering if optional.” Arriving back in our humble Boston studio, I collapsed on the bed and massaged my feet.