HONORING

I got word the other day that a professor of mine in graduate school had died. He had made a real difference in my life and I loved him. I was an adult when I went to grad school and I went thinking I would study ethics. But when I heard this man speak during orientation, I knew he was the man for me - even though I wasn't quite sure what his "subject" was. I studied many different things in his classes - "Moby Dick", Kant and David Hume, theories of symbolization, the photographs of Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis, and, especially for me, William James. Somewhere along the line, I realized the "subject" was consciousness - how we invest the world with meanings and values and how we come to those meanings and values. In one way or another, that has been my subject ever since.

     When I heard about my professor's death, I found it wasn't enough to call a friend and tell her about it. I wanted to reach out to his family, to tell them what he had meant to me. I'd met and corresponded with his wife but I had no idea if she was still alive or had moved from the house I'd met her in. But my need to connect was strong and so I called the school. The person I spoke to thought the wife was in a nursing home and frail, but she said she'd look for an address for their son.

     When I hung up, I realized I could google the son myself. I knew he'd turn up because he'd had some high profile jobs and, sure enough, when I clicked on the first thing that came up, I easily found his current email. I immediately sent him a note expressing how grateful I was to have known and studied with his father, and the feeling that came up in me as I wrote it lingered the rest of the day. It went deep and had many layers - the emotional connection I felt for a man who had had an impact for the good on my life, the sadness I felt at his death, and an unexpected pleasure that I had followed through on my desire to reach out to the family, called the school, then actually wrote and sent the note when it would have been easy to let the facts of time and distance gradually dissipate my initial impulse. The next morning, the son's reply was waiting in my inbox. He was gracious, said how important teaching had been to his father, and thanked me for letting him and his family know how I felt. 

     His response was perfect and it completed the ritual we all want to enact whenever a person who has touched us dies - a relative, a friend, a teacher, even someone we don't know. I hoped the son had been inundated with emails and notes from other former students; that hope was part of my own desire to express gratitude, and I found myself moved that I, who has been a loner so much of the time, in this case wanted to stand with others. I recognized it as the humility that's always a part of gratitude, of the acknowledgement that something outside ourselves has helped and influenced us, that we haven't done it all ourselves.

     It was only later in the day that I realized there was something else in the deep emotion that had stayed with me. I had loved graduate school, did very well there and knew even at the time that it was the absolute right place for me. Now, I felt the truth of it, felt the emotional memory in my body, the happiness I felt at school. I realized that in honoring my professor, I was honoring a part of my past that was filled with accomplishment and recognition and gratitude, a part that was among the best times in my life. I felt the truth of that time; I was that woman and I did those things. In honoring my professor, I had given myself the gift of my own best self, not as in fantasy but as I had been in life. And can be - no will be now, in this moment, and at any moment in the future. My best self is the great possibility in my life, always there, ready to be embraced.