Betty White's Precious Parting Gift

I think that comedy and creativity are among the highest expressions of the Divine and Betty White embraced them delightfully. More than an American icon, she was a grandmother to us. Her death is a powerful gift in ways because it brings us together in collective grief. It hits us emotionally where we need it because we are so traumatized by all that has been happening to us over these last years, compounded with our existing intergenerational pain and oppressive systems that we live in. And feeling the emotions of our grief, actually grieving, is an important part of our growth. She generously gifted us a profound goodbye on the eve which celebrates the mysteries of life and death by marking an end and beginning. I am so thankful for all of the laughter she gave us, but I am even more grateful for how she’s asking us to cry right now.  

Our bodies are made of scattered water molecules that find each other so that they may form tears. Gathering salt along the way; creating a cleansing pathway for our bodies and spirit. It is beautiful how water’s magic erupts gently from our eyes as a reminder that we are valid. That while we cannot see, touch, hear, smell, or taste these things we call feelings when they can feel more tangible and burdensome than daggers, this is not some mistake or insulting irony of the human experience. That our feelings and emotions are real and powerful so much that we birth what is invisible within into the physical world of form.

Belly laughs bring us to our rewarding sacred tears, so do awestruck moments when we witness greatness in one another or feel gratitude. Yet, the catharsis of our most difficult and vulnerable feelings are challenging tasks that we are discouraged from attempting. We are instead sold numb, distraction, and the cheapest spikes of dopamine and serotonin. We did not choose to be born into a patriarchal white supremacy that makes us all suffer immensely where we shouldn’t, but we can choose to overcome its sustenance of our fear and apathy. Meaningful individual action in our catastrophic world might seem like a mere drop against all the oceans—but let’s not deny the power within every molecule of the element which has birthed, sustained, and cleansed life in cycles through our bodies, earth, and atmosphere since the beginning of this magnificent orb.

Maybe when we die, we join water in solving the great mystery of life on another journey. It connects us all and has been our witness and faithful companion since the dawn of our time. I imagine Betty White is fraught with decisions as to whether she should come back as the cow and greens that give a once-percenter food poisoning or as the murky floodwaters destined to rise in McMansions—perhaps as rain to nourish Ryan Reynold’s garden. Water understands life better than we do and keeps chuckling at us for not realizing that what we call dead is stillness except we have long discovered that movement is all there is. The densest rock is made of dancing electrons. We are much like ice cubes unaware that birth and death are just makeovers that turn us into fluid and steam. Stillness is a lovely illusion that helps compose a reality that we can perceive, and we do our best to understand it in terms of time and the physical world around us. But this tricky curiosity begs the looming question of: who or what puts everything into constant motion?

If butterfly wings can stir cyclones across continents, then tears can evaporate into waterfalls that carve mountains. It’s funny, we are more than microcosms of a universe that is aware of itself, we are microcosms of the macrocosm seriously satirizing themselves as a living art form. The more we use science in the pursuit of knowledge the more we prove over and over to ourselves that we should not be here and life has perpetually existed against incalculable odds. That, at any moment, the world could disappear into an uncertain Armageddon because the looming and impossibly large number of existential threats that exist in our ecosystem on this fragile little sphere that wobbles awkwardly on an invisible axis in a dark expanding void of destruction and chaos. Yet life here has been protected, and so have we, despite our many wrong turns.

The water cycle weaves a chaotic web that somehow always finds a way to defend its most precious microcosms of the cosmos no matter how much of an underdog they make themselves out to be. Our polluted rivers, plastic oceans and melting icecaps are synecdoche of human suffering and are solved with healing it. These crises result from the practices of life and resource exploitation and exist by systems that compromise our collective freedom. These are not problems we solve with science or government but in empathy to ourselves and each other.

Feeling is our individual healing that works to expand upon itself. All the suffering that we experience, witness, and perpetuate keeps happening because we are stagnant and numb to our emotions. Healing our anger and sorrow until it becomes gratitude; challenging our fears with trust in the triumph of love and freedom; and finding the comedy in our personal feelings of victimhood are some of the best gifts we can give ourselves, and in-turn the collective. It is effort, but a worthwhile one with unexpected rewards. Our hearts are alchemists of water that can be quick to freeze when we do not practice our magic, but when we do the potential is unimaginable.

So thank you Betty White for smacking us all over the head with a sadness that lets us appreciate how our mourning can be wept into tears of gratitude for your sharing with us all a long lifetime well-lived. For inspiring magic within our hearts when we could use it the most.