The Writing Life: one word: reconciliation

Reconciliation. In the beginning was the Word.

‘Twas in Walt Whitman’s poem by the same name that I first encountered this word many decades ago.

Most of my late adult life, I have been trying to reconcile--to re-establish a close relationship--

To myself.

To accept myself as is, to resolve the perhaps irresolvable parts of my life.

Why is this need to reconcile so strong in me?


As a child, I was fully reconciled to myself, loving and accepting and approving and cherishing and embracing myself all the live-long day.

Then something dark swooped in and stole away my essence--my confidence--my beauty.


Reconciliation tastes bittersweet. Bitter on my tongue, yet sweet in my heart.

Lately it smells rotten to me, a cloying, decaying odor--like rotting flesh--

As if it is taking me too long to puzzle out my life and to put the pieces back together.


Once I’m fully reconciled again, won’t I die and rot and be forgotten?

But isn’t that it, like Whitman writes in his short poem,

That I will “draw near;/I [will] bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.”

My own face in the coffin.


Perhaps the most horrid of wars is, after all, the war inside ourselves.

What reconciliation looks like to me, feels like to me is dying.

The only sound is of silence. Albeit a white, bright silence, which hurts my sensitive eyes.

Reconciliation is like being raked over the sharp points of my life.

It cuts into my skin. I bleed tears. It leaves the tenderest of scars.


Whitman thought reconciliation to be a word as “beautiful as the sky,” and I want to see its beauty, to know its beauty.

But sometimes that sky is dark, filled with storm clouds.

Reconciling feels scary. I have come to fear it.

Will it be another dark storm coming to take away the essence of me?


But here’s the crux:

Robert Anderson tells us that

“Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor's mind seeking some resolution it may never find.”

And still, right now, today, I am a survivor.

If I don’t reconcile myself in this life, will I struggle on in the next life to be reconciled?

Will I be incarnated again to live another unreconciled, irreconcilable life?


And what of those others whom I was at odds with?  Those who have fought against me? Some covert, some overt “enemies”?

Some of which are dead now, some not so--

What am I to do with them when they haunt me?

Perhaps it is in naming them that I am free of them.

My mother, my father, my sister, Shelley, John, Jamie, some teachers, some students and their parents, others I know not about--

But not necessarily to see these people again,

But to let go of them . . . to let go of the idea that the past could have been different.

Why did I not “get along” with people?

Was I too self-absorbed in my own pain? In my own tapestry?

My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue
An everlasting vision of the everchanging view
A wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold
A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold

I do want reconcilement to be the story of my life.

I want its connotations of healing and forgiveness to be the story of my life.

I want to reweave the tapestry in the threadbare places of my life and wrap it around me like the softest and warmest of fleece blankets.

I want to live again in the childlike, reconciliatory atmosphere of pure unadulterated love.

I want to love myself again with wild abandonment.

Even if

It means I die.

Now my tapestry’s unraveling.  He’s come to take me back.