dr. maya angelou (r.i.p.)

Today was the day of Dr. Maya Angelou's funeral.  How do you do your makeup for work, the most important thing expected by your bosses when you do and sell makeup for a living, when you know there's a strong chance of heavy tears in your forecast?

When I first heard about her passing, I was so wholly unready for anything like it, I let it scroll up my  news feed with everything else I couldn't deal with.  I put it away, on that shelf in the back of my mind; the one with the dusty memories -- you know the ones you put away because you already tried running from them, long and hard, and still got nowhere, because there's no getting away?  The ones that needle you in just that way? Yea, those ones.  They sit on that shelf, sometimes for years, collecting dust, but oh, how every once in a while, they need to stand up, shake it all off and just say out loud, "I Am."

  I put the news of her passing on that shelf, content to glance at the eloquent words so many others were posting, and to enjoy the sudden flurry of photos of her that kept popping up.  But I knew full well that a Reckoning would have to come before the first coat of dust.  When I read that her funeral would be streamed live, Saturday June 7th at 10am, I knew that would be a beginning.

I knew I'd have to leave for work around 11am, but I also knew that I would watch as much of the service as I could beforehand, so I did my makeup differently (for me) this morning:  I've been playing lately with variations centered around bottom liner--an almost bare lid focused on contour/highlight, different ways to do graphic liner,super smoky lids, etc...Today it was a blue, dark, sparkly, smoky-eye (no bottom-liner) situation to match both mood and  circumstance.

  I got lucky with keeping makeup on my face.  By the time I had to leave, dabbing had been enough to keep things copacetic.  Oprah was just getting started.
 
But what was coming, did come...  I finished watching the funeral just after 4am, and my heart feels as full as it feels broken.  Words, in my hands right now, would fail the beauty of that service, the sorrow, the joy. (Did you watch?)  I don't have words.  Just a big, achy hole in that place where I used to know that she was here with us, that place where I couldn't have imagined it not being so.


So what if I go to bed with the sunrise?  The hurt in my heart is busy dancing with a feeling of complete and total inspiration. And it's not quite the same urgency we sometimes feel to live harder when someone we care about dies.  It's that this particular someone, this someone we cared so much about, lived a life that was so fully about stepping up, slaying obstacles and thriving, no matter what, she shook up the world with her Living.  In just the time it took for them to recount her story, I felt myself grow bigger, vaster than I ever thought possible.  She was a force of nature, and she made those of us whose hearts she reached want to live like that, to be our own versions of that, unabashed.  Phenomenal Woman Indeed. How dare we not shine loud and relentless, every single time we get a chance to?

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 The funeral has made it real.  She is gone from this place.  And now, it is Time to stand up, shake it off, whatever it may be, and say in whatever way I need to, with my own unique talents, "I Am."  So, for this feeling, for the way YOU've made me Feel, Dr. Maya Angelou, I say, with every cell in my being, Thank You.