Trying in 2014—From Barf Tunnel Blindness to New Point of View

About a year after my mother’s death, Julius, Skyla, Rowena and I attended another funeral.

And it was at that memorial service, for San Francisco artist and teacher Dwayne Calizo, that I saw clearly how good our life had become.

How we’d made it through the barf tunnel.

The barf tunnel is a phrase I learned from Leslie Cooper, the mother of Rowena’s and my friend, Sean Riley. Some 15 years ago, she explained to Rowena and me that yucky stretches of life such as break-ups, personal reckonings and losses of loved ones are like crawling through a tunnel lined with vomit. Completely unpleasant paths dripping with emotional stink that seem to have no end and yet do not allow U-turns. You just have to keep moving through them blindly.

From mid-2014 to mid-2015, our path was defined by the sadness of my mother’s dying, Rowena’s cancer diagnosis and treatment, financial insecurity and other troubles. Lots of dark and dank.

But we’re through it.

That’s not to say things are perfect now. Take my mom’s death. I continue to miss her. But like Obi Wan Kenobi, my mom is in a way more powerful to me than she was before she died. Her portrait photo on my desk at home, placed there after her death, frequently reminds me of her principles of love, joy and service.

And while my father has had a rough time adjusting to life without her, little by little he has come around. A big break came around Christmas last year. My father had been despondent to the point of wishing he were dead and with my mom in the weeks and months following her death last July. But while spending time with old friends the Battaglias in his home town of Buffalo, a light flickered on. “For the first time since mom died, I actually had a feeling of happiness,” he told me at the time.

My dad now lives in St. Paul, pursues business projects and grocery shops with my brother Kirk every Saturday. He also cooks big dinners for Kirk’s family every Sunday night. He recently told me how pleased he was that his granddaughter Tigist enjoyed a Greek chicken dish he’d prepared. “And she’s my toughest critic,” he said proudly.

Rowena, meanwhile, is out of the breast cancer and treatment woods. Her early-stage tumor was removed, she completed chemotherapy in February and finished radiation treatments in April.

To be sure, cancer took something out of her. Or things. For starters, her sense of certainty around knowing her own body and her ability to heal herself. Then there was the sapping of her energy and physical wellbeing, as chemo poisons infiltrated her whole physique and radiation blasted her breast. Every tissue was touched. My famously flexible dancer wife could barely touch her toes, so tight were her hamstrings after the toxic tonic.

The loss of her hair was surprisingly tough on both of us. Rowena had a mane of wire. Rain could barely penetrate those thick strands. But chemo strafed her follicles, and clumps of hair began to fall out over Christmas. She reluctantly agreed to shave the rest off. And it didn’t come back quickly. I wondered if baldness might be her new normal. Whether she might be suffering a Samson-like fate—that with the hair went some of her power on a permanent basis.

But this summer she sprouted a new head of baby-soft hair. Grayer, maybe, but chic and a surprising new texture for her. Rowena’s physical strength also has recovered. And perhaps most importantly so has her artistic oomph. I think she has three projects in the works at the moment, including a reading soon on the “Dirty Laundry” of cancer.

It’s a similar, better story on other fronts. Last December, I got a full-time position with research and consulting firm Great Place to Work, resolving my fears about financial security. And although I’ve experienced some job uncertainty amid changes at the company this year, I’m excited about my role at Great Place to Work heading into the future.

Meanwhile, things are going swimmingly with my body. I mean that quite literally, in that I’ve made a regular practice of swimming. Front-crawling a mile or more two to three times a week not only is easing aches and increasing fitness, but marks a triumph over long-held swimming anxieties. In two weeks I will do something I once thought impossible for me: swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco.

My back is back as well. Despite some reservations, I had a nerve-burning procedure on my lower back in June. It succeeded in killing 60-80 percent of my pain, and alleviated a lot of my stiffness. I started playing soccer on a weekly basis, returned to yoga classes and am imagining triathlons. I can even see attempting a comeback in my beloved sport of basketball. For the first time in a long time I’m feeling hopeful about my body and athleticism.

And the new hope is more general. A widely applied sense of appreciation. Gratitude about the goodness all around me.

My sister-in-law Melanie Danke captured this feeling in a blog earlier this year:

“Every damn day I should be "AAAAAH! My freaking fabulous, fortunate life!!!!!" But for whatever reason, we humans don't seem to be wired that way. Probably there is a good reason. If we allowed ourselves to be overcome with the tender fragility and miraculousness of our lives we probably couldn't get on much with our days. Undoubtedly bills would not get paid. Very possibly commerce would grind to a halt. There is a chance our hearts would flat-out explode. I guess the best we can hope for are these periodic moments of lucidness, when we are filled both with an overpowering love and a profound sense of loss, reminding us, just for a second, that amidst the toast crumbs and lost mittens and bank statements, something fairly wonderful is going on.”

Melanie titled that blog item “Sentimental Horsetwaddle.” And it is hard to avoid sounding sentimental about this stuff. But the truth is the curses of the past year came with blessings tucked inside. Not just a sense of wonder but some gems of wisdom. The old saws about patience and persistence paying off. About what doesn’t kill you making you stronger. I believe those adages more than ever. And I think I’m better prepared to teach them to my kids.

I also think our family’s little story is part of a bigger, human family one. The ancient one of getting through trials and tribulations with courage, perseverance and community support. And a contemporary, hopeful tale as well. Of potentially greater enlightenment and kindness as a species. I’ve been reading a book with the claim that humanity is headed to better and better days. Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright, argues that things have been moving in a generally positive direction since life began. Although human nature contains the capacity for cruelty and selfishness along with goodness and generosity, the benefits of “non-zero-sum,” win-win exchanges keep pushing people to greater levels of cooperation and interdependence.

“More souls are crammed onto this planet than ever, and there is the real prospect of commensurately great peril,” he writes. “At the same time, there is the prospect of building the infrastructure for a planetary first: enduring global concord.”

Despite all the bad news in the world today, promising signs that Wright was basically right can be found in plenty of places. From what we at Great Place to Work see as the beginnings of a new era of better working environments, to the rapid progress America has made in recent years in terms of treating gays and lesbians with dignity, to the Iran nuclear deal that carries the seeds of greater Middle East peace.

Julius, Skyla, Rowena and I aren’t always paragons of peace these days. Our tempers flare. We can be unkind. Maybe some of the animosity is a product of the past year, when all the stress strained our ties and made us wobble at times. But overall I think we’re closer, sturdier than ever. That’s partly because we have tighter bonds with friends and family. We know we can lean on them, as well as turn to mental health pros if things get too overwhelming. And we are committed to spiritual practices that sustain us.

Like funerals. This July, we went as a family to the memorial service for Dwayne Calizo, a long-time artistic collaborator of Rowena’s. And I noticed parallels between Dwayne and my mother. That comparison is ludicrous on the surface. My mom was a conservative Catholic educator, while Dwayne was a radical, queer musician. But like my mom, Dwayne brought out the best in people. Especially when it came to their voices, and his work with them as a musical coach. Dwayne was sometimes penniless and wrestled with addiction, but hundreds of people came to the memorial service and told of the profound impact he had on them by believing they could sing.

Singing, in fact, also linked these memorials. My mother’s in St. Gertrude’s Church in Chicago included “On Eagle’s Wings”—a spiritual song deep in my bones from childhood. At Dwayne’s service, in a San Francisco theater space, Rowena and other former collaborators sang “In This Heart”—a Sinead O’Connor acapella tune that I have sung as a lullaby to Julius and Skyla for many years.

I cried like a baby as we sang the song at the memorial. Tears for the loss of Dwayne. Maybe also for the loss of my mom. But also joyful tears. I am grateful for both Dwayne and my mom. Inspired by both. Informed by their spirits.

Dwayne’s memorial service concluded the following day, with a dozen of us taking handfuls of his ashes and carrying them into the surf at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. I could feel what seemed like grains of bone between my fingertips. As a wave crashed into me, I dunked my head, let go of Dwayne and prayed my glasses would stay on.

They did. And I now see that Dwayne’s funeral was a kind of bookend to the year. An emergence from the barf tunnel, complete with an ocean cleansing of crud and bile. I hadn’t quite noticed we were out until that moment. The worry and sense of foreboding had lingered after we’d made it through the worst. In fact, the insight that we’d been in a barf tunnel and had crawled clear came to me as I saw Sean Riley at the memorial service. I hadn’t seen him for perhaps a year or more, and I summed up how we were doing with the metaphor his mother had given me. “Suddenly, it seems like we’re out,” I told him.

“That’s the thing about barf tunnels,” he responded. “You don’t see the end until you’re through.”

But once you’re through, life smells and looks so much sweeter. The view opens wide. At least it has for me.

So yes, this past year was trying. But it gave me new eyes with which to see the world. I’m not sure I can hold on to this gift as life gets easier. But I'm going to try.