I’ve started, so I’ll finish. How many times has that phrase been uttered without a thought for what it actually means for any of us. I went out yesterday, made myself take a long walk, hauling my dead backside and my walking stick up hills to Lincoln park. I had a goal. I’ve started, so I’ll finish, I told myself. I was going to walk up to the Holocaust Memorial and the Legion of Honor Museum, look out over the Bay, see the moon eclipse the sun, and then walk back home with a can of zero calorie soda, past the children’s playground, past the golf course with the men yelling “Four!” before they launch golf balls at the heads of park walkers, past Andronicos, past the school, past . . .well there’s a thought. Past. Everything. Until I reached the place I am borrowing to live for now, and spend every single day fearing losing. Don’t talk to me about therapy.
I am a big fan of reality, not false platitudes which whisper safety in the ears of people who just got beaned by a golf ball launched by a man who forgot to shout out down the green, which doubles as a park. I am borrowing someone else’s life. Mine got used up, wasted and thrown away. I picked up a stone in the parking lot. A death-day memorial for someone I never met, but who looms over my life like a blessing, or a curse. There should be no flowers for A_______, no sad decaying thing to mark her never-grave that no one can visit, because she was never freed from her prison. I have the urge to go dig her up, to go free her, to bury her in a good cemetery with sensible markers and benches and shrubbery. She has been waiting a long time for someone to break her out. It is irrational, I know, but I feel a huge sense of guilt that she is piled up someone, a bag of bones, with people she probably doesn’t even like. We are not the sum of our bones nor the circumstances of our burials, I tell myself, and feel the heft and sharp edges of the stone in my pocket. It is brown and jagged and substantial. It will do.
Public golf course golfers are a strange breed. It was like running a battle ground, trying to walk along the set paths that twist about Lincoln Park. Who would come here, I wonder, when the stately Golden Gate is just a few blocks away, or the wild and weird Presidio? Me. I would. Perhaps not ever again, but with the night trying to invade the day, maybe it was ok for my self prescribed hell of exercise with a crumbled spine. I’ve started, so I’ll finish…The path I had managed to get on was headed roughly the right direction through the park, but left me walking on the side of a road, with buses and cars pushing past me. There are ends and ends….since I had a goal which did not involve being run over by a bus, I decided to risk walking along the green instead. Golfers are a self-absorbed bunch. I swear they launch balls towards walkers who do not have golf clubs just to prove a point. They have started their game and they will finish it, walkers without irons be damned. A ball bounced close to me, another flew over my head and a mole hole was throwing up dirt. There is no point throwing stones, not at any problem, not even trying to negotiate Lincoln Park on a Monday morning. The map was confusing me. I couldn’t see what was right in front of my eyes. The large gaudy building to my left with faux grecian columns didn’t leave any room for anything else, yet just beyond it was the little memorial, which instead of memorializing life, hits us with death and horror. It frees nothing. It liberates no one. It fails eternally, not showing us the beginning, but only the end-ness of the end, and the forever-ness of the trapped and oppressed.
Perhaps I belong with the statues trapped forever behind barbed wire at the most disturbing Holocaust memorial I have ever seen. There is no dignity in death in Lincoln Park; no freedom, just a pile of twisted ugly bodies, strangely painted white, and cast in iron, caught in a forever distortion of suffering and genocide and agony and imprisonment, and an approximation of a survivor forever trapped behind wire staring out into the Bay.
I had to find somewhere to leave that stone, but there was something that didn’t want to walk behind the wire, into their world, even though I could leave any time I wanted to. Still, I took a deep breath and walked up to the cast iron approximation of genocide and murder, and found a female figure with her hand outstretched, open, her nakedness and shame shown to the world, nothing hiding her pubis or her breasts. No one to cover her, no one to hold her, no one to give her dignity in death. It is immensely ugly and has nothing to redeem it.
What kind of sick joke was this? What kind of dignity lay here? What kind of memorial was this pretending to be? I lay the stone in her metal hand, and whispered A_____’s name. I let myself think of her as she was led into the gas chambers, herded like an animal. I let myself think of her final moments and hoped that somewhere in my DNA was a clue that would tell me that she went in with her head held high, and her chin jutted out and her eyes steely and fixed and accusing. I hope there was a fragment in the blood I carry that told me that she breathed in deeply and went to her end with a word on her lips that might have brought her comfort or relief or hope or even defiance, but blood can’t tell tales like that. It can’t tell me if I would have panicked and plead in vain for my life, or if I would have kicked the bastards in the balls as they dragged me to the end. At some point there is no hope. The lie we tell ourselves that there is always hope, belies that fact that…we will all finish what we started whether we want to or not. There is no way out of this life alive. We begin, we travel through a series of beginnings and little endings, and then finally we are confronted with the Big Finale.
There is no great mystery in the simple fact that life once started, at some point has to end. The question of the soul, of whether anything carries on eternally is not even particularly interesting. Belief cannot be taught or transmitted and nor should it. Some people are going to be pleasantly surprised, others perhaps a little disappointed and some will be nothing at all, and like it too, I thought, as I turned around to head back towards my apartment, leaving the stone in the metal hand. There was no resolution. Just a grotesque sculpture and a small offering and a long walk. The dead don’t want to be quiet. They don’t want to rest in peace. They want to be remembered as being as vital and alive once as we are now. The dead don’t want to be stripped of their clothes, their humanity, their dignity. They don’t want to be shot on flat-bed trucks with the life drained out of them, legs akimbo, all their suffering forever more seared into the minds of those who still can love. I don’t want to be quiet either. I want peace.
Nothing can come out of suffering, except more suffering, but there can be no peace because no one is willing to simply stop, and as soon as one side does, the other will move in, like a bully and destroy them. There is nothing left, but to run and withdraw from dispute and try and forge a life where the shadow of The End is not quite so close by. I believe in running until you are as far away from violence as possible, removed from the sphere of the misery of attack and injury and death. I believe in doing everything possible to not harm a soul. I do not believe in myself. I am a runner who has been hobbled. I turned away from violence, I did not defend myself, I simply removed myself and kept doing so until it stuck and I was free. I saved my abuser, the one who wrought horror, from throwing himself off a balcony. I took myself away, with the children, to stop him from doing something that would destroy everything and everyone, including himself. He owes me, I figure…big time….I will not put a stone on his grave if I live long enough to see his end, instead of him seeing mine, but wish him no ill. All I want is my freedom, and for the most part, I have it.
I’ve started…so I’ll finish. What kind of crazy idea is that? Not everything started is meant to be finished. Some things are doomed even before they are begun, and some lives lost before the cord has been cut. Life continues in one way or another, with a stone in its hand, and sand in its shoes, and golfers launching balls at tender heads when all you are trying to do is navigate some worldly fairway and find your way back home.