Synecdoche

Do you know the feeling of having seen a word countless times but still not knowing what it means or even how to pronounce it? Recently I had this experience with the word ‘synecdoche.’ A friend was describing a film and asked if I was familiar with…and here he said something that sounded to me like schenectady. I asked, “You mean Schenectady, New York?”

“No,” he said. “Synecdoche.” (sin-eck-duh-key) “It means when you talk in shorthand, like saying ‘North Carolina lost the final NCAA game this year.’ A synecdoche is a part referring to the whole; the listener knows you’re not talking about the state of North Carolina but the university basketball team.”

Later I looked synecdoche up online. Other examples are: “The White House announced a new plan today,” and “I’ll give you a hand.” Obviously the White House can’t make announcements, and when we offer our hand in help we mean our whole body will be there too.

As I thought about the word I realized this is a painful aspect of the death of a spouse: the loss of your partner in compressed speech. Arthur and I could half-say things because we knew the other could fill in the spaces. He could say a couple of words and I would know the reference, which would set us both to laughing, or nodding our heads in thoughtful agreement. We had a secret language. I miss it.

My Life is Our Life

I have written before about the pain of ceasing to say “we” and “our,” and instead saying “I” and “my” in the year since my husband Arthur’s death. I loved being “we” with Arthur. I often signed things A&K.

The first year of my grief was a sorrowful, halting acceptance of the loss of this “we-ness,” and a slow, scary embrace of being alone. [See this earlier post.]

As I have moved into my second year of grieving I feel ready to move on with life, to explore the ways my life will unfold without Arthur as a living partner.

Contemplating what “my” life would look like, what was “authentically me,” it occurred to me that that was an absurd concept. How can there be a “me” disconnected from all that is around me? Isn’t the truth of who I am a profound interconnection with the All?

Starting from the closest point of intimacy, what I realized is that my life from this point on will still be an “our” life with Arthur. The person I am and everything I do will be influenced for the rest of my life by my thirty-four years in relationship with Arthur. I am deeply shaped by sharing Arthur’s vision of the universe as a Game of God. I am deeply shaped by sharing Arthur’s highest principle: the love of truth. I am deeply shaped by our love.

My life is an “our” life with my family. Who I am and everything I do will be influenced for the rest of my life by my fifty-eight years in relationship with the Tom and Jean Brugger family and all of that family’s branches backwards and forwards in time. I am deeply shaped not only by my parents and siblings, but by my grandparents, and great-grandparents, and uncles. I am now being shaped by my nieces, which I cherish (I don’t have any nephews, unfortunately).

My life is an “our” life with the people of the United States. Who I am and everything I do will be influenced for the rest of my life by my fifty-eight years in relationship with the culture and worldview of the U.S. in the second half of the twentieth century and the first part of the twenty-first. I am deeply shaped by the legacy of the authors of the U.S. Constitution and their vision of equality and liberty for all human beings (as imperfectly as it may have been realized in their time, it was still a shining vision); I am deeply shaped by the struggles of the 1960s to bring that vision forward into our time, the civil rights and feminist movements; I am deeply shaped by the prosperity and opportunity of the social class I was born into…

My life is an “our” life with the planet Earth. Who I am and everything I do will be influenced for the rest of my life by my fifty-eight years in relationship with this beautiful planet, the sights and sounds unique to this place and time in the universe. I am deeply shaped by living on a planet with one Sun and one Moon. How different would it be to live on a planet with no sunset because there was more than one Sun, or a planet with multiple moons? I am deeply shaped by living on a planet with trees and whales and mosquitoes and blue-green algae. I am deeply shaped by the evolutionary lineage that resulted in the intelligent bipeds we call Homo sapiens. I am deeply shaped by the other peoples and cultures that share this precious planet.

My life is an “our” life with the universe. Who I am and everything I do will be influenced for the rest of my life by my fifty-eight years in relationship with the cosmos. Who would I be without the Big Bang?

My life is our life.