International Paige Day, 2017

written 8/8/2017

Today marks the 6th anniversary of my little sister’s suicide. If you’ve been following my annual memorials since Paige’s death you’d see a pattern. First, it was about me. Then her. Then you. Then everyone. Then everything. Then nothing. I think this year it’ll be a synthesis of all of those and probably the most controversial or seemingly absurd tribute to date.

I’d like to say this year that maybe you can learn to love tragedy. Maybe loss isn’t so much a death as a birth. Maybe the burning down of your existence is actually a gift. Maybe if you stick with it, it will cut you open and everything you were meant to be will spill out.

They say that when the going gets tough, the tough get going. Many people have remarked about my strength over the years, but I don’t have anything you don’t. I choose to tell a story where I needed strength, so I found it. It seems like we’re all our own narrators. We write our own stories.

I heard a call that maybe there was more than I currently knew, so I followed it. I wrote that story. It wasn’t going to be about death. I wanted it to be about life. About living. So maybe this year, this message is a push for you to listen to that voice within you. The one that aches. The one that whispers, Hey, maybe there’s more to this. Maybe it isn’t all in vain. Or if you’re still within the throes of tragedy, this might shine as a light in the distance that says, ‘Keep going. the pain isn’t forever.’

It really doesn’t have to be. I don’t think so anyhow. If you give yourself to what’s in front of you, to life, experience, the pain, you can use it to find that “more” or you can keep it as pain. It’s up to you. It’s your story.

Anyhow, this is all to say, maybe there is more to death than sadness. Maybe what’s in death and loss is actually life and growth. Paigie’s death was a run-in with mortality that made me realize the inevitability of my own death. We often forget that we’re all dying.

Eventually, when the time was right, my thoughts transformed from “f it, I’m gonna die’ to “f it, I’m gonna live.” Not from a survival stance, but from an experience of living standpoint. If death is the only ultimate and you can’t escape it, then what do you really have to lose? I began to look for what actually could be lost, which turned out to be my life and living it, and what I’d do with it while I was here.

6 years later it’s come to my attention that what I was looking for all along was right here. Everything that spirituality, philosophy, science, and art pointed to coalesced into a bright understanding. Life is for living. Opening up and surrendering to what is right here and now, and giving it every ounce of you. While I wonder what took me so long to figure it out and feel it, I also don’t. The struggle, the process, that’s the story.

I think it’s a lot like in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. There’s Clark tediously adorning his house with every strand of Christmas lights known to man because he has this idea, this pull, this creative urge. Then when he goes to turn it on — nothing. His big vision. His call to action, unanswered. Yet he doesn’t quit. He keeps trying. Sometimes the lights go on, but he has no idea how. Nobody else can see them. Everyone thinks he’s crazy and he should just forget it.

Then finally, his heart, vision, work on the line, he tries again and with the help of a loving, unexpected hand from the outside, boom. Lights on. And everything and everyone is flooded by light that wasn’t there before. Everything and everyone is changed. So while the experience of living may feel painful or seem somewhat unnecessary and arbitrary, maybe it isn’t.

Maybe if you stick with what you envision, what calls to you and you commit to doing the work even when you can’t find the switch, maybe, right when you least expect it, the lights will turn on.

And it will be more than you ever imagined it could be.

( I read this for a video tribute.)