Ramble

Yes, the title says it all. I have no particular agenda for today except to write…something.

Life has been on hyper-speed lately and I am juggling a lot. So, I missed a post last week. And I’m late on one this week. And it bothers me, not only because I’m trying to keep to a schedule, but because this project is really my favorite thing to focus on these days. Maybe because, these days, I realize how much I have relied on the example of my brother’s strength, and how much I still need it.

I have been listening to the book Grit, lately, on audio, as a way to try and forge my way through research on resilience, which I suspected might pertain to Ted. At first, I found its conclusions kind of obvious. It starts, for instance, talking about how persistence often trumps talent, though talent and persistence are pretty much a deadly combo.

I almost didn’t continue with it. But I did. And it got better and better. I like audiobooks for this type of book because, when push comes to shove, I won’t spend precious reading time on non-fiction or self-help (or self-growth, as I prefer to call it). Listening to this book while walking, or cleaning, or folding laundry, works well for me. The downside is I feel like things go by and I’d like to focus on them more.

Among the things that I heard go by that I need to circle back on were the concept of hope…not just the vague belief that tomorrow might be a better day (but you have no control over it) but the idea that you could do something to change the course of the next day, and the next, to make it richer and more hopeful, and possibly change the outcome.

I feel like that’s a crossroads Ted must have come to, at some point, in the room, because he made such conscious use of his time to learn and connect. He didn’t wallow in his bed for eight years. He made a decision, at some point. I wish I knew why or when or how he did that.

The other thing that went by and that I need to re-visit was the idea that resilience is contagious…that one person who demonstrates it, or a culture that nurtures it, creates it and enforces it in those around you.

It made me think about all the people I’ve talked to, and who have reached out to me, who say that the memory of the way Ted lived his life still gives them strength.

I talked to Kevin James (aka Norm), Ted’s DJ friend recently. He’s recovering from a terrible case of COVID, literally learning to walk again. He said, “If Ted can do that, I can do this.”

Which is kind of how I’m feeling these days, as life pulls its punches (as it is wont to do, right?). If he can do that, I can do this.

I used to have a little metric I ran in my head as a teenager (and beyond), when life felt particularly hopeless, or I just felt bleak. As long as there was one good thing to stick around for, that I could think of, I had to stick around. My brother did not have an easy life. And yet, he wanted to stay. Would have stayed. Fought to stay, even as he died.

That image, of him fighting death, stays with me a lot. Here’s even more rambling for you…I think I may be the only person in my family who actually watched that 70’s TV movie “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.” I was maybe ten, and the ending confused me, because in it, as I recall, John Travolta walks out on the beach, without a space suit. Meaning, he could die. Would die, with that kind of exposure.

Only as an adult did I realize that the message might be that living a life of freedom, on the outside, no matter how short, was better than a life on the inside, so to speak.

My brother did not see it that way. He fought to hang around, despite the limitations of his life, and the hardships of it.

I caught, if not his resilience, the example of it. I have always known that if he could do that, I could do most anything. Or at the least, I could, with hope, try. It’s an odd legacy, given that it comes from trauma, but there it is.