Posts Tagged ‘death’
Freedom for Erin Go Bragh
Casey O'Brien
When my dear friend Casey took great care and enthusiasm to familiarize me with the song he wanted to hear at his death, neither one of us had any fully-conscious idea that within one week, he would be leaving. It was, in a sense, accidental, perhaps incidental, that he should have me hunting down an Irish song on Youtube as we spoke of community, change and Revolution…just as it was by an unusual play of chance – by accident – that I would encourage our friend Bryce to take video of Casey for over thirty minutes later that same night – the last time I would see him. One week later, there was a car accident with no fatalities, but all the same, it changed the course of events in the lives of friends overnight.
It would be easy for most to understand the car as an accident, and to understand the exchange the next afternoon between Casey and the bullet as not an accident at all. With what we’re told about people in locked rooms with guns, it is harder to see two accidents here, harder still to see both as meant to be, or in accordance with a young man’s Higher Self, with what he lived to do. And yet, as in any significant act, there were so many layers operating at once. The need for distinction arises because there is the idea that nothing is accidental, and also the idea that nothing is accidental, and we should be clear about which is which: whether we mean that Casey’s actions were deliberate, or that the way of all such things is deliberate when we have set ourselves on the path set out by the Higher Self.
Casey was a builder: military trained, an engineer by day, a dedicated Mason, and I knew him as a magician – the very mortar of our Temple. Not only was he the mortar that builds the foundation, but also the mortar who, alongside the pestle, was dedicated to the act of work, to the “doing.” In a sense, he was even the mortar of strength in war, the one that turns fire into flight against the air – a builder of strength itself in the way that he worked to fortify our group, or any group he was a part of.
When we got the news, Bryce recounted to me what he once heard Jim Eshelman say about death: that we have all these strings like rubber bands connecting us to the people we love, and when one of those people dies, it is as though all the rubber bands bounce back to us at once – so many springing ends showing us what we were together and giving meaning to myriad strands of moments. I say that there is always the chance of snapping latent in the rubber band itself, and this is no accident.
Three days after his death, our Temple held a Requiem for Casey at what was his second home, the Grand Masonic Lodge in New York. Looking across that room was like looking into a mirror of who Casey was, he was the image and the being and the nexus of all his closest friends: the ones tattooed from head to toe…the Masons in their tidy suits…the family of his ex-girlfriend, who reminded me of the midwest or what we mean by American family…and the magicians. You could tell that Casey was still doing the Great Work, still building a Temple where all can show up in the freedom of exactly who they are. Even in death he was in service to create this union of opposites in one hall, the same way that he had linked them together during his life simply by being himself. And his Work is not over.
If we talk about deliberate acts, we must remember that this was a young man with a code – a young man already striding towards the path of direct communication with his Higher Self, and one whose Higher Self perhaps knew that if a hidden voice was not loud enough for him to hear yet, the code he lived by might be. In the face of just how great a recklessness we ourselves are capable of, sometimes the only response is an act of valour, and perhaps this was one such act. When he showed me the song we were to play for him, he wasn’t just telling me what song to play at his death, as though he consciously saw it coming or had made plans of his own. His Higher Self was telling me what kind of work he would be going on to: bringing the possibility of Freedom into actuality. The idea that the flag of change should be drenched in red was written in his favorite song, but it is only on Earth that Freedom’s flag is ever Red. It was time to move on to the next build. O’Brien, MacDonagh, MacDiarmada, McBryde…go on in your strength.
Lisa (Letizia) Zindell
by: Ayesha Adamo
This blog is designed to represent not only the music, but also the personal thoughts, insights, and interests of the members of Loss of Eden. As such, it seems only appropriate to dedicate my first written entry to someone very important to me in my continued development as an artist and as a person.
Lisa (Letizia) Zindell and Ayesha Adamo: Rockstars
Lisa Zindell. Letizia Ann Marie Zindell. Lisa. The prom queen, the cheerleading captain, the salutatorian, the dance teacher…the DYFS worker, the girl with a Masters Degree in Criminal Justice, the Masters student in Social Work…the daughter, the girlfriend, the fiance, the ex-fiance…
The Friend.
In the summer before fourth grade, Lisa Zindell was my best friend. We spent nearly every day together – walking to the only corner deli in our tiny seashore town to get sodas and candies, playing imaginative games of dress up or pretending to be gypsies in the woods behind my house, going to late afternoon barbeques or learning to dive and do backflips into the in-ground pool at her house….On those long summer walks in our childhood, it seemed like we could talk about anything. It was one of the first times in my life that I felt I had a true friend.
And then there came a day when she stopped calling. She didn’t come over anymore, and I was no longer invited to her house either. I never knew why. We never spoke about it, but I watched her as she became…the popular girl. I was still invited to her birthday party the next year. She traced my creative drawings to put on the invites because sometimes that’s what love is.
There were times when she seemed like the Jacob to my Esau; she was the girl you always wished you were – beautiful, smart, popular, sought-after…included. Before I went away to school in tenth grade, we shared classes and cheerleading practices, but still there was a distance between us, seemingly insurmountable – a distance necessitated by her position up there in the brilliance of who she was, just a few steps ahead of me on the great ladder – a brilliance that I knew the shape of from being on the outside of it, from not being able to climb up quite as high. The last time I saw her was on the day she graduated high school and I came to watch. She was on top of it all.
On August 13, 2009, Lisa was choked and killed by her former fiance, who then killed himself.
For his repeated violations of the restraining order she had filed against him, Lisa’s killer was released on bail for a mere $1500. In this world that attaches a monetary value to absolutely everything, even the worth of a human being, wasn’t the life of a woman who dedicated her time and efforts to the protection of children and women facing dangers not unlike her own worth more than that?
To read the words of all the people whose lives she touched, whether in her work with DYFS or in teaching dance classes, as a close friend, or just as someone who lit up the high school hallways with her smile, is to know that the girl that I once played dress up with had grown into someone very special. To lose her as a friend when we were young was one of my first heartbreaks, but the deeper heartbreak still, the very adult heartbreak, is that I never got to know the great woman she was becoming. I would have loved to have known her.
When I walk back into those woods where we played as children, there is a tiny stream back there that’s almost disappeared by now and trees we used to climb in. The trees have grown too tall for climbing now, but I can nearly hear the laughter of the children that we were…somewhere…very high up in the brilliance, where the angels were ascending and descending.
