Gracefulness is important to me. I love to feel graceful, be seen as graceful, move through our days together with grace. Handle the difficult things in life gracefully.
But this is where I want to be clear. I am not asking that my engagement with my own particular demons be clean. That I stay fully functional and productive while in the midst of it. I am not asking that it be without mess, that it have dignity, that it display only admirable qualities, or even that it be without ugliness or pain. I can be in pain. It is part of the game, and cannot be gotten around, true experience of felt pain, grief, loss, anger. They will only return until they’re honored.
But this is what I want said at my eulogy, and so what I ask of myself, my story, and my work — that we were real and present, vulnerable and absurd and beautiful and uniquely mad, each in its turn, time and again. That we went not around but through. And that we gave as we are all designed to do.
And as a result of this practice, I believe that my own demon wrestling will be faster than many, that it will be heavily leavened with dark humor and entwined in the support and understanding and healing of a multitude of others. And it will make good music.
And this, this is being graceful through a life.