Mustering courage to keep speaking out loud
On Sunday February 5, 2023, the world is changed with four shots. Three shots into Marya’s back, coming from her second husband Chuck, then one shot for himself. Both dead, a murder suicide. Losing Marya this way – my 54-year-old step daughter who I was close with especially in recent years – is utterly shocking and incomprehensible. That evening, she tries to leave the home, perhaps a fight. We will never know. He was a veteran. May both rest in peace.
I knew Marya for 32 years, first as a beautiful, feisty, angry, insecure and often arrogant young woman, who goes off to study at Humboldt State University in Arcata. Then getting married to Andy Jensen, and being a dedicated mother of two girls, Jennifer and Sarah, extensively volunteering at their schools. Later she becomes a grateful daughter who greatly appreciates the devotion with which I was caring for her dad Bob Blauner, my late husband, making it possible for him to die at home in October 2016. After his death she calls me often, I take her calls often at midnight, reminiscing and comforting her. And in recent years, I get to know her as a gifted craftsperson who I keep encouraging to make a new life with her arts and crafts, now that both the girls are through college.
The day Marya is murdered, I unknowingly write about the violence in America, juxtaposing it with stills of the huge white bone of a whale’s head and beach stories. Next day the violence arrives at my doorsteps as if to say: what are you going to do with this now? Three months later, I am still grief stricken, carefully navigating a fine balance between solitude and socializing. Garden work, playing the cello, writing, teaching, all that is fine, but crowds or too much time out, can spiral me down unexpected slopes, into a pit, or to the edge of a cliff. Despite feeling that I cannot mention Marya’s terrible exit from this world, I sometimes muster courage. Like yesterday, speaking about it with good old friends visiting for tea on my Kassandra deck. The sun is out. My need to keep Marya alive. Christopher met her at last year’s book party which I organized here in Karinaland with music, food and sharing. He pulls out his phone, searches and then shows to Renate and me the still below: “Is that her and him?” Yes, Marya and her husband, on my wooden bench among other guests, all of us celebrating the re-release of her late father’s book Back Lives, White Lives. Now both gone forever. Four shots.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/yhHGaVYpsqyDzzLM7
Times have been increasingly intense – especially considering the last three years – we all are forced to open our hearts. To ourselves and those close around us. In order to resist the suicidal waves and collective compulsions of killing people and nature, of bombing, shooting and strangling humans, we must practice caring for our own tribe and for “others” equally. Here is my prayer. Now we must learn to live with less conveniences, comforts, and certainties. We must think for ourselves, not just follow and regurgitate what we heard. We must find our inner compass, and practice listening. We must become fully present, alive, awake, and engage our Zivilcourage. The heart open. Everything has been drastically and speedily changing, and there will be no going back to normal anymore, for better or worse. We must dedicate ourselves to caring and community, practice honest communication and honorable interacting. This is good for us as humans. We might have forgotten what true Nobility is. (I am not talking about silly stars, antiquated kings and queens). As German-born rubble baby, I know how even in war and after war, the human heart is able to guide us, shining and operating generously. We need not worry if times will be better or worse – we will become better human beings if we live up to this evolutionary demand. Humbly dedicated. Becoming fully human. Ein Mensch.
Marya Jensen Dory
Jan 7, 1969, Berkeley – Feb 5, 2023, McKinleyville, Arcata, California
May the memory of Marya keep me engaged in rightful living, justice, and caring for those less fortunate than me, and for the younger generations coming after…
Related posts – Marya’s Blue Heart Stone, Book Party in May 2022, Whale Head Bone on beach:
https://karinalandriver.blogspot.com/2023/02/loving-to-death-blue-heart-stone-by.html
https://karinalandriver.blogspot.com/2022/06/a-week-ago-on-sunday-may-29-karinaland_5.html
https://karinalandriver.blogspot.com/2023/02/a-new-year-what-needs-to-be-learned.html
Beautiful photos of Marya. I am so surprised to read that she and I were both at the book party last May?! I do not think I spoke with her directly but somehow it makes me even more shocked to hear about her murder.
ReplyDeleteWhen you say that "we must think for ourselves," I am struck by how I have grown up around so much nostalgia for the 60s/70s - the music, AIM and the various movements for civil rights, the sexual revolution, etc. Most of the ideas I and my friends have about how to live our lives are just variations on what was popular among the baby boomers. How to live with real creativity?
I wonder if growing up in a post war zone means that there is not so much nostalgia, that people are creative out of necessity for creating a future that is better than the past. I think the great lie of America is that there is any past worth being nostalgic about. The US is a war zone – veterans who never left the wars remind me, Black and Indigenous people remind me.
Knowing for 32 years is a long time. You were a mother to her in a number of ways. I am sorry for the loss of your stepdaughter, the shock of the violence and the loss are still reverberating in you how could it be otherwise. Knowing you, as in other times of upheaval and loss you face it with an open heart and a great spirit that touches me deeply and teaches me. It is a brave thing to speak it the way you do whether through your mural or the honesty and directness of your grief. It is particularly courageous for allowing it to have its full course for it is the unfinished grief that leads to so much of the violence and destruction of life.
ReplyDeleteYour blog post is so beautifully written, it touches me so deeply. Our children are not supposed to go before us. It is life out of order. Over time, I have learned to celebrate all that my Onas' life was, still it is hard to make sense of her early death. It is easier to understand death by epilepsy than death by gunshot...but still, it is not how nature usually works. The old die. The young live. Thanks for speaking out!
ReplyDeleteThank you for bringing Ona into Karinaland River....
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