CHANGE OR DIE

          Gloria Christie-The Christie Group 

Change & Problem-Solving

Making Hard Simple

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PREVIEW OF BLOG COMING SOON!

The Mystery of What We Do For Fun

I LOVE A MYSTERY

by Gloria Christie

Bookstore Closed in 2012

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE                                                  

Maybe six months after my mother died in 1981, I was invited to a friend's wedding. So I thought I would paint the newlyweds a picture. Yet my style of painting was completely different. Before it was stilted, traditional folk art. But as I put my paintbrush to canvas, "Ortega" leaped onto it.

I don't know what caused the difference, except I had read a biography of my favorite painter, Georgia O'Keeffe. Maybe I absorbed something that translated itself onto my art. 

And there was no way I could let go of, "Ortega". So I quickly painted another like piece to gift.

"Ortega"
by Gloria Christie
1982

Of course my mother's death forced change upon my sisters and me in a most dramatic way. Any time one person changes, we must change our life around the new them. In Mom's case, the absent her.

The day after she died I was no longer a daughter of a brilliant, strong-willed woman who reared through life like a wild, black stallion. No I was set free of her constraints, her wishes, her commands. And quite frankly I wasn't exactly sure how to be without her. 

The unrestrained me burst upon the canvas. The rest of me was in freefall. I felt as if I had lost my boundaries, which was a bit alarming. But life fell into place in big pieces rather quickly. With great strides I felt my way to my new life's edges and found new boundaries - that is until my sister died.

As an adult, she was my best friend and wisest advisor. But I was six years older and raised her - making her my lost child. When we were children, I was her fierce protector by day and comforter by night when she was afraid. In life she was a tall, regal woman nursing those with Alzheimer's by loving them.

Her death left a hole the size of an inner-tube where my organs had once been. The hole isn't gone, but it is a narrow shadow now, filling with the changes in my life her death implemented. It has been a long process, each piece of modified me just a sliver slipped into the hole, one after another after another. 

Who am I without Barbara, without her presence to shape my life around? Learning that is a slow process. I resist these changes, because I didn't want her to leave me. As if that would bring her back. 

But when I let go, life presents itself. Four columns in four very different publications written in four different voices, each floating upon a raft of changing culture. The internet blogs that ride through the ether more solidly tethered than the tangible publications we hold in our hands. 

Three weeks after Mom died, I broke my leg getting out of bed. As I turned spiral breaks worked through my tibia and fibula and skin. Somehow my ankle shattered. They couldn't operate, so I spent six weeks in a wheelchair, six weeks with a walker and the rest of eight months limping with a cane.

After Barbara died, my systems faltered then sputtered back to work. Oxygen-starved red blood cells, gastric malfunction, connective tissues gone awry, my metabolic self shutting down.  I don't handle loss easily.  I doubt many of us handle death well.

I think there is much wisdom in, "It's their time." 

I could have left maybe five times due to illness. But I didn't. Instead I stay. Maybe the illness is resistance to the change that death forces upon me. Maybe.

I say there are plenty of companies that would rather die than change. I say change or die. Maybe I should listen to my own words. Maybe I should quit resisting and let the changes wash over my life.

As (almost) Always,
Gloria Christie