Descansos

One feature I notice in my new surroundings in Montana is the little white crosses they use to mark the places on the highway where people have died.  It's helpful, in a way. One intersection where I turn from a speedy highway onto a country road is marked with three of them.  I take extra, extra care. In the photo they look like ghosts.

Some of the crosses have become little shrines.  They are decorated with flowers and ribbons, clearly kept fresh by people who visit regularly.  I have not had the experience of living in a place where I must drive by the site of a loved one's fatal accident every day.  This seems a very sweet response to the reality of having to revisit a sad loss on a regular basis. This photo is of a shrine to Betty, born 1954, died 2011. It has a bird house overlooking a wetland and a collection of dolls nearby, graduually fading in the weather.

The person who loved Betty comes and mows the place, keeps the bird

house painted, and brings fresh mementos.  There's a rose bush by the
little angel statue.

It reminds me of having read a long time ago in Clarissa Pinkola Estes' book, Women Who Run With the Wolves.  She suggested an exercise for women - and these days I would not confine the suggestion to women --in which we make time lines of our own lives, and mark the descansos, the moments of loss and change, with little shrines that reflect our feelings.  Life sends us events that we can't run away from.  Each day we drive by the spot, so to speak.  And trying to pretend it never happened is simply not effective.

There was the divorce.  Or the job loss.  Maybe a falling out with a relative.  A bad situation with someone at work that you handled clumsily.  They don't go away.  They are bits of the stalagmites we are, maybe a little sulfurous, but only a layer here and there in the developing story of who we are.  How are these memorialized in your being?  Do you mark an anniversary?  Do you create art from it?  Is there something you cook that brings it to mind and helps you heal?  If no one has placed a white cross by the side of your road for you to decorate, you can place it yourself, so it need not be white, and need not be a cross.

I invite us all to contemplate these moments of our own lives and to mark them in our own ways.  Let us be who we are, losses and all.  Our stalagmite selves need this affirmation.

The shrine for Angela is in the front yard of a gas station next to a Wendy's just off the corner of LaSalle and Reserve in Kalispell.  In our privatized world, the attendant at the gas station had no idea who she was, even though someone obviously comes and cares for this little monument regularly. May she rest in peace.