Bittersweet Miracles

One of the nice things about writing a blog for one person is that I don't need to worry about the backstory. Although I may write a lot about Matt's death someday, you already know about it. But I've been thinking a lot about how bittersweet the miracles of life are- at least, of my life. Why is it that I only seem to grow as a person by showing up in the face of calamity? Is it like that for everyone? Someone was going to send me a bit of text about the way in which death and despair serve as the compost of our lives - that they enrich and builds us, even though they smell atrocious. I rather think Matt might like to think of himself with the worms in the compost that feeds rest of our lives. An ambivalent role, to be associated with the suffering and yet also with the redemptive growth of the people you love. I'm reminded of conversations that we used to have back in college, about the necessity for experience and suffering in the artistic process. He used to claim that some people were too coddled, that our problems were hangnails and bad hair days, and we wouldn't be able to write, or act, or paint, until we'd been more thoroughly crushed by life. I countered that we all have the same internal scale of heaven and hell- we have all had, by definition, the worst days of our own lives. But I secretly agreed with him then, and twenty years later, I am willing to say that my worst days were never as hellish as his worst days, and perhaps even that my worst days were never as hellish as his best days. On the other hand, you and I, those of us who were somewhat less enamored of our pain, are the ones actually doing the writing. And, now, the living. I find it ironic, bittersweet, that I always saw myself as experiencing a more Faulkner-esque life vicariously through Matt, and now he's doomed to find vicarious existance through me, and that I am going to be a better writer, and a better person, because of it.