Well, the road is out before me
And the moon is shining bright
What I want you to remember as I disappear tonightToday is grey skies
Tomorrow is tears
You'll have to wait til yesterday's here- Yesterday is Here, by Tom Waits
It’s Autumn, baby. This is my favorite time of year. Here’s a photo I took of me and Emmitt, my cat.
It looks like I’m taking a photo of my humidifier or my pile of (clean!) laundry, but I’m not. Emmitt was hanging out behind me for some reason and I thought it was funny. We have fun, Emmitt and me.
Anyway, on to the newslettering:
Some memories are like planets. We don't think about them very much but they're always there, orbiting around us. We are under their sway, in the invisible certainty of gravity.
When I picked the title of this issue, I thought people might think I’m announcing that I’m ending of this newsletter. Fear not! I’m not going to stop writing this.
No, I’m just thinking about ends. And planets.
I’ll talk about memory in a second. First, I want to talk about planets.
Did you know that Jupiter has saved our little planet from disaster after disaster? It's so far away but its gravity is immense. Rogue rocks come flying in from somewhere out there and Jupiter is so heavy that it bends space around the whole solar system. Those asteroids go spinning off away from our little marble. Our precious rock, our only home, under the watchful eye of big brother Jupiter's big red spot.
Is Jupiter there in the perfect orbit to defend us, on our perfect orbit, for a reason? Or is Jupiter’s perfect orbit a happenstance compliment our own earth’s happenstance perfect orbit? I don’t know anymore.
Memories are Comets
Okay, memory now: memories want to be remembered. It's their whole reason for being. Sometimes you need to let them have their way. Sometimes they feel like the kind of comet that collides with our brains and makes us nuts, but not really. I don’t like that particular metaphor because it doesn’t capture the repetition. Comets come in and out of our solar system, though. Halley has a comet that does that.
It's okay to let those memories into our orbits sometimes and watch their stories, but this is the crucial part: we have to move them along. We have to make them start their orbit again. They'll be back eventually. But they stick around too long and they cause problems. They mess with the gravity in our lives and by thinking about them too much we start obsessing. No, it’s vitally important to push them away. Crucially, this is also the hardest part.
Something New Is Always Starting
"Stars are not important. There is nothing interesting about stars. Street lamps are very important, because they're so rare. As far as we know, there's only a few million of them in the universe. And they were built by monkeys." - Terry Pratchett
Every morning when you wake up, and your eyes flutter open, and you have a new day, you're one of the luckiest beings in the history of the universe.
Life is so rare that it only exists in one place (as far as we know). We've visited a few other planets in the solar system and there's no life there. Just here.
When you look at yourself in the mirror for the first time in the morning, you've got a front row seat to one of the rarest miracles in the known universe: you.
You. Yes, you. You're the miracle.
You don't even have to do anything.
But then you could say that everybody is a miracle.
Alan Moore gets it. Just because we are surrounded by life doesn’t mean it’s not miraculous.
The thing about these miraculous lives we have is that even on the best days, they're hard. Even lives we know would be easier than our own, if we had everything we wanted or needed, we would still struggle, just in different ways. Your life is immeasurably better than the lives of most people in the long, wild history of human beings. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy!
As soon as you wake up, you're in the thick of it. You've got a face full of problems before you even life your head off the pillow. My advice for you is simple to say but hard to do, and I know that but I’m still going to say it: it’s going to end, at some point.
Do not despair! The end is coming. These terrible times will be over soon.
The white winter peals away to green spring.
Hold on.
Everything is Ending
Everything is happening
Everyone is clapping
- Everything is Ending by the Bird and the Bee
This applies to the bad things, but to the good things, too. Some day even this planetary pattern will end. But not yet! Not today. Not tomorrow. Yes, the end is inevitable, but it’s not here yet.
Just like everything has to begin, everything has to end, too. We endure our ends to make room for the next beginnings. Even a dead human body left to its own devices will also host new life, from bacteria to bugs.
Did you know there’s a place not far from here where dead human bodies decompose out in the open? It’s true, and it’s called a body farm, and it’s in Fayette County. They use the bodies there to study how human beings decompose in different scenarios and environments. Sorry, true crime fans, it’s not open to the public. You can sign up to have your body decompose there, if you like, and maybe your ending can educate somebody.
The Long, Slow Goodbye
I close my eyes, I just can't sleep
Where have you gone again, my sweet?
- The Long, Slow Goodbye by Queens of the Stone Age
I feel like I've had a lot of endings lately. I don’t know if I’ve had more than my share, but there’s not much I can do about them. I try to remember that it’s important to endure endings, no matter how hard they are, so those new things can begin. Losing a parent is one of the big ones, maybe one of the biggest ones, that people have to deal with. There’s no new beginning behind a dead parent. It’s not like I’m going to get a new dad to replace the old one. Humans aren’t baby teeth.
But the end of his story is the beginning of a new part of mine, so that’s kind of a new beginning. I don’t plan on joining him at the top of the long, slow, stairway just yet. I’ve got some chapters left.
It might sound like it, but I'm not complaining about how many endings I’ve had lately. Endings are encoded in everything. The greatest gift we can hope for is a good end. Endings are not fun, but they’re important.
Did you ever hear somebody say “I hate funerals” ? Of course you hate funerals! Everybody hates funerals! Somebody had to die for one to happen, and that’s terrible. It sucks. We don’t have funerals for the fun of them. Even though dying is inevitable, we still don’t like it when people die. It’s a shattering experience. I imagine it’s even more shattering for the person who died. But at least they don’t have to live without them. That’s the burden of the survivor. We get to watch the ends happen and mourn the people we lose.
I think my father had a good end, as far as those things go. He was surrounded by every single member of the family he made with my mom, the family that held together despite everything, sometimes despite him! It’s the family that remains even though he’s gone and the family I am so thankful to have.
This will change, of course. Another inescapable truth about the universe is that it changes. Change is built into everything, too.
Throw yourself into the unknown
With pace and a fury defiant
Clothe yourself in beauty untold
And see life as a means to a triumph
There is nothing, literally nothing, that goes on forever.
Forever exists only in our imaginations. That sounds like I'm downplaying it but I'm really not. The human imagination is what keeps us alive. It drives us ever forward. The real spark of humanity is right there in our imaginations, where new things spring out of the underbrush like startled rabbits.
A Tiny Tincture of Tolkien
Our imaginations have created a concept wherein nothing changes. Tolkien wrote about it a lot, with his elves. His elves did everything they could to preserve an ever-present past. Elves fought wars over gems that preserved the light of dead trees. While men sought to dominate and dwarves sought to accumulate wealth, elves wanted only to keep what they already had. When the rings lost their power, the elves were forced to "diminish." Even Tolkien's forever-obsessed kingdoms eventually went away to the West where they would live in harmony and beauty with the gods.
But even that infinity is actually finite, because the gods and their elves only persist as long as the world exists. When the world ends, and it most certainly will, the elves all end, too. Forever isn’t so ever after all.
I’ve Been Thinking About Death, Again (Again)
You might have noticed that I think about death a lot. I felt guilty and selfish after my father died. It was mixed in with all the sadness, so they took a little bit of time to make themselves known against the backdrop. I felt selfish because I kept thinking about my own death.
I talked to my therapist about this. He is unafraid to call me out on my bullshit, as all good therapists are, so I expected some castigation or excoriation. He said something I’ve seen echoed by poets and philosophers: every death we experience is our own death, too.
It feels selfish but it isn’t, because something that’s universal can’t be selfish. That’s like saying you get “selfish” when you’re “hungry.” How dare you selfishly drink water when you’re thirsty or sleep when you’re sleepy. I’ve had my bad memory called selfish. Can you believe it? People have actually accused me of selfishly forgetting things. Thankfully, the relationships with those people ended. New relationships sprang into the spaces they left behind.
That’s how these things go.
May your endings be swift. I wish you sparkling beginnings. I wish you bountiful newness and joyful conclusions. Hold on, don’t let go. All you have to do is endure.
May your endurance be easy.
Thank you for reading.
Programming note: You’ll see that the spelling of Foremanea has changed. Foremania was a term first coined (in my memory) by extended family member Leigh, who described a gathering of Foremans thusly. There are a lot of us, after all.
I also liked how it kind of resembled the word “miscellanea,” at least by the sound of it. I like to capture both ideas with the archaic flourish of an uncommon “ea” ending.
I want to lean more into the miscellanea part, so I changed the spelling of the name of the newsletter. I like it more. See? Even this newsletter changes!