My Voice

For a very long time, I thought I had nothing to say. I was intimidated by people with degrees and high positions, experts. Early in my career, I specialized in being quietly creative as a TV morning show producer, a presidential “advanceman,” and an event planner. The emphasis should be on “quietly.”

By the late 1980s I’d found a way to express myself through art. But my art didn’t make a sound. It wasn’t a voice.

Ultimately, I found my voice in a collaboration. I was able to express my thoughts and feelings, and my collaborator would suggest words that turned my silence into sound. I learned in scores of speeches, keynotes, interviews, and sermons that I did have a voice others could hear.

The power of voice reverberates through everything written by Joy Harjo, the first (and current) Native American US Poet Laureate.  Joy once said she felt a responsibility to represent “all voices, all women, all of my tribe, all people, all earth.” Writing, she said, “frees me to believe in myself, to be able to speak, to have voice, because I have to; it is my survival.”

I’ve wished, lately, that I’d be invited to speak in public more often. I don’t need to be seen or recognized; it isn’t about fame. It’s about using my voice to speak for the voiceless, especially women and those who are powerless and mute. Joy’s reason for speaking out in poetry and song is the same as my reason for taking the podium or the pulpit: “I have to; it is my survival.”

In one of Joy’s anthologies of Native writing she quotes the Apache poet Margo Tamez, now a professor in Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia, who understood what it means to have voice. Read this slowly, out-loud:

I come in many forms

Because of me people think differently

Because of me people pray differently

Because of me people sing differently

Because of me people speak differently

Because of me people plan differently

Because of me people live differently

Voice I am

Sacred voice I am

Sacred voice this I am

I’ve never met Dr. Tamez but I know her voice. I recognize it in my own.

The Greatest Gift

I have some wonderful friends. A few are relatively new but some have been close for decades.

Among my friends are the people who go unnamed but know I am writing of and to them. We’ve been together, you and I, through births and miscarriages, splendid weddings and broken marriages, growing children and dying parents. We’ve wept together in hard times and found ways to support each other. We’ve giggled together at moments of ridiculous joy, even marched together when we believed in the cause.  

Friends like you have become more rare with time. A hundred years ago, most people lived in a single community from early-adulthood to old age. They didn’t change jobs, mates, congregations or neighborhoods. They were near each other physically, making it easier (and sometimes harder) to build intimate, sustained relationships.

Not so now. Although I’ve spent much of my adulthood in-and-out of Florida, since leaving Michigan I’ve spent chunks of time in New York, Maryland, Arizona and (now) California. I changed houses and communities. With time, my interests shifted from one form of art to another, each with its own heroes and practitioners and, thus, each with its own community. Although I never intended it, I moved from one group to another, sometimes losing touch with dear people along the way. My children grew into adults, and my interests grew with them especially when I first held my granddaughter.

I haven’t been as faithful in my friendships as I wish I had. For months and, in some instances, years I’ve owed you a card or letter, a thank-you or I’m-sorry. I wonder why someone has grown silent but I haven’t broken the silence with a call or even an email. I love many of you more than you know, I really do. But I haven’t reached out enough to express that love and I wish I had. 

To the good friends who’ve been in my life through all the ups and downs, know this: You are still very much in my life now. I wonder and worry about how you’re doing in dealing with cancer, in living with dementia, in looking for purpose and meaning beyond your extraordinary careers. Is your family intact? Are your dreams still alive? Have I failed you in any way?

Seeing you now in my mind’s eye I’m grateful for you, My Friend. I would not be who I am were it not for you.

Although I might have doubted the political stance of The Happy Warrior, Hubert H. Humphrey, I’ve never doubted the truth of his reflection when he knew his own life was nearing its end: “The greatest gift of life is friendship,” he said, “and I have received it.”

Me too.

Another Close Call

The idea was that, if I had the cataracts pulled from each eye, I’d not need to remember where I left my glasses this time. For reasons I can’t quite understand, my glasses are always missing – not a crisis, but a constant irritant.

The physician I consulted said the cataracts that had formed on each of my eyes constituted a “fairly normal problem for a person of your age.” Thank you.

Fortunately, the surgical removal would be simple -- no reason to think otherwise. They would lift the cataract from one eye first and then, two weeks later, take care of the other. By doing them one at a time, I’d never be reduced to total blindness. That made sense.

Of course, things didn’t go as expected. For whatever reason, the body to which my cataract was attached rebelled. I’ve been told that my breathing stopped and my heart rate hovered between 10-20 beats per minute. I don’t remember the ambulance ride or follow-up confusion. The whole thing is a totally unhappy blur.

I’m doing alright now, well on my way to recovery. I still can’t find my glasses. But in perspective, my cataracts didn’t make last week’s headlines. The news was all about Autocrat Trump’s friend Autocrat Putin and the incredible courage on display in the Ukraine. My cataracts, and my near-death moment, didn’t even merit a footnote – not in the week when innocents are being slaughtered and the magnificent Paul Farmer, MD, died too young.

If I were telling my life story, against the background of AIDS and cancer and the night my heart stopped in Denver midway through a keynote address, I don’t know if last week’s surgical drama would play a prominent role. It was a frightening experience mostly in retrospect, and another close call in a life that seems to have seen more than its share of them.

All in all, I’d like to live which is why I prefer the “near” part of a near-death experience. It reminds me that medical science remains an imperfect art. The late George Carlin used to ask, “Isn’t it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do ‘practice’?” Yes, George, it is.

I emerged from anesthesia’s fog with a dim memory of where I was and what had happened. I didn’t know the details but was pretty sure the main theme wasn’t what had been promised. When I was adequately conscious to understand what was being said, I learned that I’d almost died. Taking that in, I said the first thing that came to mind: “I didn’t finish the will.” And it’s true. The will’s still not done, and that worried me.

I have an enormous stockpile of reasons for gratitude. My life has been, and still is, full and satisfying. I’m keenly aware that having a matched pair of cataracts is not uncommon for someone of my age. Much greater is a world filled with pain, injustice, poverty, bloodshed and the arrogance of autocrats.

If there’s a lasting lesson that I’ve taken from the Emergency Room at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center where I was deposited in the post-surgical scramble, it’s that life is uncertain. We don’t really know over breakfast what lies in wait before dinner. Things may be “routine” but they aren’t guaranteed. We cannot predict what risk will suddenly become reality, what worry will be translated into reality. We know life will end. We don’t, as a rule, know when – but we prefer that it not end now.

The lesson I took home from the hospital this time isn’t complicated. Failure to touch up the will can be fixed; failure to tell someone we love how deeply they’ve mattered to us – such things cannot be fixed.

So hold tightly to those you love. Treasure friends who value you. Waste no time on arrogant tyrants. Accept life as a delicate gift. Take no one who loves you for granted; their lives are as fragile as yours.

And when the evening’s dusk slides over your day, find someone to whom you want to say “thank you for caring,” or “sleep with the angels,” or “know that I love you.”