pan aspects, grief and youtube

tonight i was watching some youtube clips with the kids - an uber cute little girl and her dad singing together - totally irrelevant, i know. but, nevertheless, i ended up wiping away surreptitious tears. watching this completely gorgeous interaction between that little girl and her dad, as he strummed his guitar and they sang together. the adoration that was evident in both their eyes......i want my kids to sing with their dad as he strums his guitar.

so i'm moved to write a bit about michael. he played guitar. i'm totally unmusical, so i can't even tell you how WELL he played the guitar, but he played. and he sang songs from his childhood.  when i was pregnant with his first child, and he strummed and hummed for me, i dreamed about the future, when he would lull his child to sleep with music and the low, rich sound of his loving voice.  throughout his hectic and often bizarre life, he carried and cared for the guitar which once belonged to his big sister, who died in a car accident when he was just blooming.  he wasn't great with 'stuff' - he just couldn't keep track of it - but that guitar was a constant.

he did play for his daughters, and he sang to them too. in fact, since his death, i find it impossible to sing to my kids, because all i can think to sing is what i heard him sing, and i cannot think about michael in the presence of our kids without tears welling and spilling from my eyes.

he also knew a LOT of stuff. he had great capacity for fact recall. he loved stories, mythology, the historical context of things.  michael had a special appreciation for a greek god called pan. pan was half man, half goat. he was the god of the wild spaces, hanging out in the countryside playing the flute and cavorting with nymphs. i don't think i'd ever heard about pan before i met michael, but he really resonated with pan, drew him, sculpted him, carved him. there was a lot of pan in michael - his hair for one thing! but also his musical bent, his playful, adventurous spirit.

i find it unutterably sad that michael's energy has left us. it's ridiculous, really, because in life it was that same energy which quite regularly made my life chaotic, unpredictable, and very much NOTfun.
i guess what always kept me in his orbit was the positive potential of that energy; what always pushed me away was the negative potential.

so my mourning for my kids' loss is around them losing the playfulness, the sense of adventure, the music, the cavorting in the countryside with panmichael.

my sense of relief kicks in when i remember the tortured michael; the negative pan aspect - the god of nightmares, panic, hauntings.  i am conscious of the moments that will never be - the fear & instability of being in his orbit when the negative pan aspect sat front and centre. the one that wouldn't let michael sleep, that whispered wild and weird plans in his ear, that gave him an endless reserve of energy for destruction/deconstruction, the one that wouldn't let him sit still long enough to ever eat. i don't miss that aspect. i'm sorry beyond words that michael has gone, but i don't miss that aspect. i don't miss worrying about the kids' mental, emotional and physical safety when dark pan was out of his box. i don't miss watching michael try to reconstruct his life after the destructive dark pan phases.

as i see it, grief is an all encompassing emotion. when i mourn, i mourn for me - for the loss of that special michael energy and for all the potential that now will never be; for my daughters - who will have to find their way without the surety of father love, without the playful, magical pan touch to their lives; for his parents, for his sisters and their families; for all his friends and acquaintances, all those he touched who will never, ever again be touched in the way that michael touched them. and i cry for the pain of his journey through this life.