Begin Again

Though we live in a world that dreams of ending
that always seems about to give in
something that will not acknowledge conclusion
insists that we forever begin.  – from “Begin”, a poem by Brendan Kennelly

After my heart attack April 11^th I needed to touch everything, metaphorically speaking. As if to confirm I was in fact still here and the markers that I understood, the world I built around me still existed, still made sense.

Well it does and it doesn’t.  I had a rather cataclysmic change a couple of years ago, a heart-breaking one. I took it hard. I was broken. I have worked every day to get unbroken. To start that new life everybody talks about. In a lot of ways, I have.

But it took my heart going full stop on me to really set the past in the past and give me the sight to see not only today but a horizon worth watching the sunset for.

Touching everything included what some therapy calls t-minus 1, as in going back to the moment before the “trauma” and trying to correct emotionally what happened next. But I had already been doing that for two years. Now it seemed I needed to go back to the really before, to all the other eras in my life to establish that rumors of my existence were true.

This reset of the heart, this system reboot, included both the physical and the emotional, and the physical included both my body and my home.

I have been listening closely to what my heart is telling me: sleeping, meditating, reinventing my diet, truly putting the recent grief in perspective. By some arcane metaphysical requirement my house has demanded similar attention. Its clogged plumbing, the shaky heartbeat of my furnace, the general creakiness of it all–well I have been obsessed with addressing it.   New furnace and hot water heater. Replaced  cracked and leaky bathroom sink. Flora and fauna in my backyard properly cared for. Better blinds in my front windows.

And now, with the biblical storm a week and a half ago that sent six inches of storm sewer runoff into my basement threatening to throw the whole system into a congestive failure, I had no choice but to face every physical artifact of my entire life. Quickly and in a face mask and gloves.

Most of this is obviously too much for me. But a few things were literally getting fuzzy in the basement. My son came over this morning after a five hour nightshift unloading retail merchandise to haul sewer besotted stuff to the dumpster and perform and epic dance with mop and Clorox while I tiptoed around discovering more stuff in need of immediate attention.

Like four file drawers of a lifetime of damp to soggy letters, flyers, and assorted records of lesbian activism. These came upstairs and from noon to nearly midnight, I revisited my life from letter M through Z one damp and mildewy-smelling document at a time.

Of course the file titled “misc letters”, six inches thick and containing letters dated 1973 through the early 2000s, was in the worst shape. Why couldn’t it have been the file with programs from Creating Change conferences, programs someone else has surely archived already? But no, it was letter after astonishing letter that I painstakingly peeled apart and what I could or fervently wanted to save is now covering every surface of two rooms in the house. Which smells a little mildewy now.

These letters don’t even include those from my former significant others; that’s an entire other project.

I spent  hours today revisiting my life one forgotten letter at a time starting with the one I wrote to Rolling Stone Magazine asking for a job when I was barely 19 and wrapping up around the time I published  the anthology This Is What Lesbian Looks Like in 2000.

Talk about a system reset! I wasn’t prepared for how much I didn’t remember. I have astonishingly personal and entertaining exchanges with women I cannot place in my archive of life. And others equally surprising with women, and a couple of men, who I will never forget even if I don’t remember these particular exchanges.

By all measures, I should have quit for the day when my son took off. But I simply could not look away from the water-blurred handwriting and carbon copies of my letters in reply.

That was only the second half of the alphabet from one file cabinet made of soggy pressboard that was decomposing from the bottom up. I have bins and other file cabinets full of more.

This is a time in my life where the redundantly described “new beginning” is all the rage. Six weeks since my heart attack I am finally beginning to feel like more like a human and less like an invalid. (A strangely apt term, in-valid, for the state of limbo that is also called recovery.)

For a lot of the last two years, I would tell anyone who would listen that I didn’t know who I was anymore. With everything certain pulled out from under me, I struggled to move on. I thought my life was essentially over.

The heart attack jolted me out if the pity party. It wasn’t so much a harbinger of my life to come, although it sometimes feels that way, but the unfinished business of who I was for a couple of decades.  Like now I can really get on with this business of being Kris in all the possible ways.

Today’s epistolary archaeology awakened earlier iterations of Kris Kleindienst, activated the DNA lying dormant.  This seems pertinent to cobbling a coherent and even rewarding life going forward.