Today, on what would be my dad’s 70th birthday. I’m wearing my LOVE sign for him. I wept watching Parenthood last night in bed here in Seattle. (I’m almost finished with the show so please, no spoilers.) I miss my dad every day. I feel cheated every day. I will never “get over it” but yet, I am here. I am not dead. I get out of bed. (Most days.) I lost my license in security and felt frustrated and upset even though I was wearing my LOVE sign. And then I realized that it was his birthday and how the body remembers.
I wrote this piece on the anniversary of his death a few years ago but it feels fitting. The body does remember. The heart remembers. The love remembers. Happy birthday, Daddy.
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Deep inside, below the gristle and bones part of you, lies the memory of a memory. Sleeping like a lazy cat somewhere in the part of you that has forgotten its own name but remembers the sound.
July 15, 1983 was hot and muggy and humid.
I actually do not remember this at all, but I must assume that somewhere it was this way.
I was in South New Jersey, and my father was dying, and I am quite sure it was hot and muggy and humid because how else could it have been?
Every year I forget until I remember.
There is a sense of urgency in the weight of my footsteps as if they are trying to get somewhere without me. I hear my voice and realize there is something behind the words, but I am not sure what it is until I hear the date spoken aloud.
Ah! The date my father died. A voice that either belongs to me or doesn’t speaks inside my mind.
This is why I love yoga: It unburies the sounds of things you have buried in your body.
It’s the body that remembers. Always.
It’s the body that is the sleeping cat.
The mind cannot be trusted. The mind will tell you it has forgotten, while the body, the body will never lie.
The body cradles the memory within it and will show it to you in a flash as you buy milk at the store or fold forward in a yoga pose. The body will remind you that today is the day your father died all those years ago.
If the body forgot, there would be no more memories and today might just be another day on the calendar, like any other with its weather and dust and cups of coffee and love and disappointments.
July 15 is the day my father died in the middle of the night before his heart could be pumped back in time. And although I do not mark it down anywhere on any calendar, and although I sometimes I do try and forget, my body remembers, and there comes a moment on July 15, no matter what year, when I bow my head and shake my fist at the sky.
Forgive your muscles and your joints for not forgetting, for keeping that imprint alive in such a way that one day you will look back on your life and whisper to it:
Dear Life, Of all the things I have forgotten, and there have been many, I thank you for taking these snapshots and leaving them with me in stone, because without them I would be insufferable with wonder at how the events of my life slipped past me before I was able to discover who I was in time.
So go ahead and think you are forgetting.
It won’t matter. You aren’t and you can’t.
There is an imprint in you that says: This is when this happened.
The stamp has been laid.
So let your mind be open and go ahead and buy milk in the store, and every once in a while when you feel a pang in your heart or a splurge of oh my God in your bones, please understand what it is:
It is your life, trying to be remembered.
xoxo Jen Pastiloff, in the air, sans driver’s license on my way from Seattle to LA.
“Here’s the thing about Jen Pastiloff, folks. Here’s the revolutionary thing.
She listens.
She listens with an intent focus, a focus that follows your words inside you. Because she has hearing problems, she watches your lips as you speak, and she plucks the ash of your words from the air and takes it inside herself and lays it beside her heart, where before too long your words start beating as if they were strong, capable, living mammals. And then she gives them back to you.
Boiled down, this is the secret to Jen’s popularity. She can call what she does Beauty Hunting–she is for sure out there helping people find beauty. She can start a campaign called “Don’t be an asshole” and remind us all to stop a second and please, please, please be our better selves. She can use words like attention, space, time, connection, intimacy. She can ask participants to answer questions like What gets in your way? What stories are you carrying around in your body? What makes you come alive? Who would you be if nobody told you who you were? All of that is what it is. But why it works is because of her kind of listening.
And what her kind of listening does is simple:
It saves lives.” ~ Jane Eaton Hamilton.
To get into your words and stories? Join Jen Pastiloff and best-selling author Lidia Yuknavitch over Labor Day weekend 2015 for their 2nd Writing & The Body Retreat in Ojai, California following their last one, which sold out in 48 hours. You do NOT have to be a writer or a yogi.
“So I’ve finally figured out how to describe Jen Pastiloff’s Writing and the Body yoga retreat with Lidia Yuknavitch. It’s story-letting, like blood-letting but more medically accurate: Bleed out the stories that hold you down, get held in the telling by a roomful of amazing women whose stories gut you, guide you. Move them through your body with poses, music, Jen’s booming voice, Lidia’s literary I’m-not-sorry. Write renewed, truthful. Float-stumble home. Keep writing.” ~ Pema Rocker, attendee of Writing & The Body Feb 2015
Love you and our sister so much <3
This is beautiful. Thanks so much for sharing.
Ah yes. The body always knows…. even when we think we can forget. I know around every anniversary of loss I start to feel achey and weepy. Thank you for sharing.
I lost my dad when I was 6, and I swear I could’ve written so much of this myself; it resonates so deeply. Thank you for sharing. I’m sorry you’re a part of this “club” of those of us who lost our parents way too soon. My heart goes out to you.
I love your writing. I love how you act like a magnet and pull all the beautiful stories to you. I think I re-defined the beauty after I met you. It truly seems that beauty must be hunted. It wants us to leave what is comfortable and known and wants us to go deep into the dark woods to face it. I, as a father, in a difficult situation, can appreciate that you remember your dad like you do. I wish my daughter would grow up being “like” you. Not a copy of you, but someone who will remember me like I was. I loving father, who had known darkness, but kept going through it hunting beauty until the end. Love.
So beautiful…thank you for sharing this.
Somehow I got signed up to get this blog- it is my absolute favorite@ I often don’t have time to read the many I get- but I ALWAYS click on Beauty Hunting. My dad died in 1999. He was abusive so though I loved him, there was fear and it seemed I spent my whole 20’s and into my 30’s forgiving him and filling my daddy holes with forgiveness and trying to build my self worth. It didn’t take too well and now at 55 after leaving an abusive 22 yr marriage and even more abusive relationship with a man that left me a single mother now of a 7 yr old, I am finally getting healthy. Yoga has played a big part of that.
I want to know when you are coming to Denver?! I can’t afford to come to those out of state and can only afford yoga when there is a Groupon- but I do my own practice at home and hope to someday be certified and bring yoga to women my age to bring health and wholeness. I want to experience your workshop!! Please come to Denver Kathyrn
We are the same, you and me. I lost my father July of 1983, I was seven. That was 32 years ago and I can honestly say I miss him as much now as I ever have. That will never change. Thank you for writing so beautifully, the thoughts that go through my head.
Hats off to you!
These are my feelings exactly…
My memories include: the day my dad died
The day I got married!
The day we parted for good…me and my ex husband
And yes- my dad’s birthday…..
sigh….
This especially presses my heart today Jen. My father’s birthday is June 19th, which my body always associates with Father’s Day as well. A double whammy if you will. Thank you for your beautiful, poignant expression of pain