Marriage, Death, Kids and Family

1. Twenty years ago today, I got married. Not to the English actor; this was to the California country boy who I met in a bar in the foothills of the Sierras. We didn't meet cute or neat or however Hollywood calls it. I was in the bar with friends; he was there for a beer after work. I can't say I was bowled over, but I kinda thought I knew him from somewhere. So we talked, and he thought so too, and I gave him my number. He called that same night. We went out the next weekend. I still wasn't bowled over. There wasn't that instant chemistry that I knew from other relationships. There was just something about him that I couldn't stay away from. It wasn't sexual. I didn't understand it then; I just went along with it. Three years later, we were married. Now, twenty years later, we're not. I am better off for not being with him now, for all sorts of reasons. But that something about him that drew me to him then? It still exists. I don't know why. I still don't know what it means. I guess I just have to live with it.

2. This summer my cousin got married. He and his wife were expecting a baby in the new year. Last Sunday, they were having a meal in a restaurant. My cousin got up to pay the bill, turned around to look at his wife and watched the life leave her eyes. They couldn't save the baby either.

3. Today I had a conversation with a young woman I love who has two children. First, much talk about the cousin and his wife. Then much talk about the young woman I love and her pregnancy. Then I sang Happy Birthday to Son #1 and listened to Son #2 babble to me. Then the young woman asked how I was, and I started to tell her. She is one of the few people in my family who hears me. But #1 and #2 were hungry and cranky and wanted their mom's attention. So before I really got into anything important to me, she had to get off the phone. The feeling I was left with was not unlike what happens when you've been making out with a guy, he comes, and then says I gotta go, finish yourself. I know the young woman I love didn't mean for me to feel that way, but I did.

4. This afternoon I went shopping for light bulbs at the hardware store. I love hardware stores, but today, today it made me miss my dad. He kept me furnished in tools and up-to-speed on how to use them. I still have the love of all the gadgetry, but without him, I'm not sure what to buy. He was another of the few people in my family who could hear me. And my mom. As I wandered around the lumber department, I thought of how my parents had spoiled me. Not with gifts or money or any of those things. They liked me and they wanted to know what I was doing and thinking and wanting and knowing. So they spoiled me for this time when there really aren't very many people around who feel that way.

Death and Dying - at Midlife

I was out of sorts yesterday. Just felt meh-ish, after a several week period in which I was up-and-at-em. Am I crashing, I thought. Oh no, oh woe. But then I did what I have learned to do at such times (at least when I can remember) and that is to just accept that I'm feeling meh-ish. And know that it too will pass. While I was working at achieving this pseudo-Zen state--and wishing, really, that I could have a Stepford button installed in my brain because who needs to feel meh-ish even if you know it will pass--I realized the source of my state of mind. The day before my friend M called to tell me that our friend Sharon was dying.

I saw Sharon when I was in LA a couple of weeks ago. It was a reunion of sorts of our book club and Sharon, who hadn't been feeling at all well, particularly wanted to come. She needed to see her friends. The group of us hung out as we have done so many times in the past, and we talked, really talked, 'checking in' with each other as only women who have history together can do. My check-in was to relate not only the ghastly year I've had, but also the much more promising one that seems now to be taking place.

Sharon checked in with her medical report. The doctor saw a spot on her lung and said it was probably sarcoidosis. Or maybe lung cancer. Sharon wasn't buying that diagnosis; she much preferred the sarcoidosis, which is an immune system disease that is rarely fatal. She would do what she has always done (sometimes with disasterous results, it must be said) and trust totally in Alternative non-Western medicine. She was refusing the steroids that would be prescribed for the sarcoidosis and she was refusing the second CAT scan that would rule out cancer. But oh, she was so tired, and so weak, and so very very depressed. The doctor wanted her to go on anti-depressants and until now, she had refused them as well. But we, her girl friends (some of whom were loaded up on Prozac and Effexor themselves) urged her to reconsider. Think of the mind-body connection, Sharon, we told her. How can you hope to get well without your full emotional strength. And she finally agreed. When I hugged her goodbye, it was with the knowledge that she too would soon be loaded up on Effexor and feeling 100% in just a matter of time.

I don't think she ever got that prescription filled. The next day I'm told she was so weak that her sister came to take her to the doctor. She had the second CAT scan. Stage IV lung cancer; metastasized already to her bones. She died yesterday, just three weeks after I last saw her. When M called to tell me, I thought, Aha--the meh-ish feeling made much more sense than I had originally thought.

I've reached the age when I'm starting to lose my friends, all of whom are midlife women. Not that cancer doesn't take young people as well, but I am suddenly aware of how vulnerable we all are to the ultimate breakdowns in the body. How vulnerable I am. And it makes me feel--well, very vulnerable.

Punk Rock Mommy has died....

I write those words through a blur of tears. Andrea Collins Smith was an incredible woman who blogged the last year of her life. You can read her final post here. She was so honest and so plain-spoken about a time that tends to get lost in a fog of sentimentality. It was as if she was taking us by the hand and saying, This is what will happen. This is the truth of it. When my mother died, as I sat with her during her last hours, I saw that there is no scary Other beyond breathing. I have said that that is the last lesson my mom taught me. And what Andrea taught me was that there is no scary Other in the process of a fatal illness. Both of these are gifts immeasurable, for freeing me of fear, they enable me to live my life more fully.

Death and Insomnia

If I only included Orgasm, I could have titled this Les Petit Morts (and forgive me if I'm off on the gender of my French...you say la, I say le...whatever).

I've been slow on the uptake and off on the posting since this weekend. First, there was Tim Russert dying on Friday. Then a local man was killed by a sheriff's deputy when he wouldn't stop beating his kid to death. The kid was a baby. The local man was his father. He took the baby out of his carseat (this was a responsible parent!) and just stomped him to death on a country road. One man who was unsuccessful in trying to stop him said that his eyes were empty and you could see all the way to the back of his head. And Monday, on my way to the gym, just around the corner from my house, I passed a blanket-covered body oozing blood. Just his paws were showing. The German shepherd from down the street. The kids in the car that was, to judge by the skid marks, going too fast when it hit him looked chastened. His owner was inconsolable. And now I have to avoid that corner.

Edited to add: New post up at MidLifeBloggers

Is it any wonder that I have a hard time falling asleep? And that I'm groggier than hell now, and probably making little sense?

Tim Russert: Some thoughts

I wasn't going to watch NBC's special "Remembering Tim Russert." It seemed like too much, another time when the news goes into entertainment mode, hyping a sad occasion into a three-ring orgy produced to wring tears and ratings.

I heard the news where I hear most news these days, on-line, from Twitter posts actually. I watched CNNs pathetically maudlin coverage this afternoon while I rode the bike at the gym and then turned to NBC, figuring they would do something more dignified, something that didn't smack of having to fill the 24 hour news cycle. But NBC was showing Tiger Woods playing golf. I tuned in later to NBC's Evening News, assuming they would give Russert the kind of dignified, two-minute send off that they have done for other collegues who have died. Instead, the entire half hour program was devoted to talking heads, one journalist or politician after another after another, each with a minute or so with some memory of Tim Russert. Nothing else happened in the world today, according the NBC News. No fires in California or floods in the MidWest. There were no demonstrations in Pakistan and although the Nightly News originated tonight in the Middle East, nothing of note happened there either. Tim Russert died today, and that was, it seemed, all the news fit to broadcast. So I wasn't going to watch another hour from NBC. What for? What more could be said? And, more important I thought, why was NBC doing this?

But I did watch it, and from it I got some, not answers so much as elaborations on my questions. I'm putting them out here because I want to know what you think. To answer the last first, I think that NBC did it because the individual journalists involved were so full of grief and shock that they were collectively taking us, the viewing public, by the collar and saying, "Look, this is who this man was. You didn't know him like we did and we cannot let him go without you seeing his full measure."


In that, for me, they succeeded. I liked Tim Russert when I thought about him, which wasn't often and rarely on Meet the Press. I hated that he was so sure--and so right--about the Democratic nomination. I was annoyed by that gleam in his eye when he was doing political analysis. I saw it as a knowing smirk. Now I think that it was simply his enthusiasm for his subject, for politics, that created that gleam. But I didn't know him, or really care about him, and mostly what shocked me was how young he was. Now, however, after watching an hours worth of clips and interviews and lots of tape of Tim himself, now his death feels personal. Now I really will miss him, and in some ways that makes me mad at NBC, because to feel little is so much easier than to actually mourn.

I don't have a clever conclusion to this post. Mostly I'm wondering--what do you think?

Today, Tomorrow, but never yesterday...

I don't really know what that means. It just came to me, and when things like that come, I write them down, and some time later, I say, Oh yeah, that's what that meant.

I had a hard day today. It didn't start out that way. For the first half of the day, I was charging through--gettin' stuff done, achieving, crossing items off the list. Then I went to this meeting I have every Wednesday. I went vowing to keep my mouth shut and my nose clean, and pretty much, I succeeded--but at what cost?

Why am I so bothered by other people's bullshit? Why can I not sit still when those around me are doing their paltry little ego dances? Why does this stuff not drive others nuts the way it does me? Why am I so intolerant? Why am I gritting my teeth--still, hours later?

I recall a dressing down I got from a boss a long time ago. He said, and I quote, "You walk around this office as if we owe you a living." And I was pretty proud of that, thought it acknowledged my obvious superiority which could not be hidden underneath that proverbial bushel. Now I think--man, how arrogant I was--and am. I really do have a sense of entitlement that is somewhat off-kilter. And if it drives other people crazy, you can't imagine what it's doing to me. I'm the one that lives inside this head, and somedays, I'll tell you, it just ain't fun.

Tonight I saw that Polly Williams died. You can read about it here: Polly Williams Of HBOs Thin Found Dead Did you see Thin, Lauren Greenfield's documentary on eating disorders? I've never had an eating disorder, so watching that doc was like visiting a foreign land to me. I sort of spoke the language--had a couple of nouns and verbs here and there--because after all, I am an American woman and I have spent my life not liking my body. But if I had a hard time understanding what motivated the other women to binge and purge and starve themselves to such drastic measures, I was completely undone by Polly Williams. She was just what I want to be: beautiful and outspoken and smart and not giving a damn and so very sure of herself and seemingly accepting of who she was. And yet--not. She died of an overdose, and intentional or not, she is gone. Jesus, I think, if someone like Polly Williams can't make it, what hope is there for the rest of us? And then I remember where I got to know her: on a TV program about eating disorders. Which are, as we know, a form of suicide. Which is, as we know, the response of a body in unbearable pain. Yet I envied her, eating disorder and all, I wanted to be her.

I can't come up with some grand summation here. Or maybe I could, but it would be trite, facile, bullshitty. Best to leave well enough alone, and say Goodnight, Polly, I will not soon forget you and I will someday make sense of what you're telling me.

There is a way of moving through life in which what happens becomes a foreground so overwhelming that nothing else is noticed. One moves from moment to moment, reading one’s life as narrative only. The background, all those elements that belong to the senses, are blotted out.

Yesterday was the funeral. I can tell about it, narrate the events. I can point to the oddities. That the setup for a traditional funeral, the folding chairs, the dais, the lectern, were all ignored, or perhaps rejected by the mourners. That her eldest son stood throughout on nearby gravestones. That the eulogy began, “she was a tough old broad,” and devolved to a retelling of old hurts and angers.

But all that is sterile, intellectual. It has neither color nor feeling. The sky is neither blue nor overcast (it was in fact blue). There are no sounds, no smells, no understanding or awareness. I don’t believe this is a case of life lived in the moment. I think it is a problem of life lived as a narrative.

This happened and then that happened. She said, he said. It is the equivalent of a genre novel, say a mystery, in which all of the elements of fiction that create a full-bodied literary experience are sacrificed to plot. It may be a darn good read, but there is no life to the thing once The End is reached.

On the other hand, there is that state of heightened awareness. It wasn’t that things suddenly had great significance, but that time stretched enough for me to see and hear and think and take note. It seems to me that this is the truth of living in the moment.

To live life as a narrative requires two things: the ability to observe, to remain intellectually alert no matter how provocative or evocative the situation. I stand in the midst of this family who have come to bury their mother, a woman with whom I have had a relationship as mother-in-law for over fifteen years, a woman who’s life has touched me in a way I cannot even articulate, but which has resulted in the only strong, organic, consistent writing I’ve done in years. Not seven months ago, I buried my own mother, the woman who was the linchpin of my life.

Yet here that day is what I observe: the oldest son has chosen, unconsciously I’m sure, to stand on the gravestones of someone else’s father. I know this because the Mason’s emblem is prominent in my mind, while I could kick myself for not registering the dead man’s name, birth and death dates. What telling details they would make for my narrative. (Here I must stop and ask myself what narrative I was creating that day: funerals of the rural non-Jew? Repressed sons? Disappointed women?) There is a solitary pot of flowers, baby calla lilies, sent to the funeral home by whom no one is sure or seems to care. One stem has been broken, and the bloom flops like a broken wing. (This detail now makes me want to cry, and I see that my narrative has much to do with the thing in my mother-in-law that has always touched me: what I read, when I create her narrative, as the supremely disappointing life of a woman at the hands of the four men she lived with, three her sons, two of whom are standing now at her graveside).
The sons are awkward in this situation. They have chosen not to have clergy (“Ma wasn’t much for ceremony”) and so it is all up to them to create whatever eulogy they intend their mother to have. “She was a tough old broad,” says the eldest.

“Yeah, she sure was,” says the youngest.

“But she had a hard life to contend with,” says the daughter-in-law.
There are few others at the graveside. Two grandchildren, out of five. A second daughter-in law who is already burnt yellow from the liver cancer that will kill her in two months. A former daughter-in-law whose attendance was not required, or even perhaps desired. She injects the single note of religion into the affair, some talk about Jesus and about the hereafter. She seems to go on forever, although it was probably only a minute or two. The eldest son scuffs his heel on the edge of the gravestone he stood on. The younger looks blank, and his left nostril flicks up ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly. The grandchildren merely look embarrassed. This was not a family of religious note, and even the short sermon was, it seems, inappropriate. When it was over, there was a palpable feeling of relief, and a chorus of muttered “amen…yes, indeed…amen.”

I wrote this seven years ago when D's mother died. I'm reprinting it now because it speaks to my sense of the importance of narration, of narratology I suppose one would say, to the way I view my life and this blog. Just as an addendum, the oldest son, the one whose best eulogy for his mother was, "she was a tough old broad" is now dead as well. I wasn't at his funeral, so I don't know who stood up to speak for him or what they said.

Dead,dead, dead!

I was just reading Mad Marriage's blog about her inlaws visiting, which made me miss my parents, and so I commented on that, writing that "my parents are gone." As soon as I wrote that word, my mother gave my knee a sharp squeeze and my father shot me his best askance-looking look (both interesting gestures considering they are dead, dead, dead).

In my family, you called death by its name. Someone died. He/she/they were dead. Not passed away. Nor did you lose them. In the first instance, we'd be likely to say "away where?" In the second, "how careless of you; have you looked carefully?"

We were definitely not a family of euphemisms. I'm not sure why this was, except that my father was such a literalist. He wanted you to name things as they were. A bathroom was not a bathroom unless there was a tub in it. And, in fact, if you said you were going to the bathroom and you were just going to use the toilet, better say so.

Words mattered. And they still matter to me. I know a lot of them and I like them and I use them--except when I can't remember them, in which case I look piteously at whoever I'm talking to and, even if it's someone I don't know, beg "what's the word I'm looking for? You know--" Sometimes they do and sometimes, I'm sure, they walk away thinking I'm nuts. It's one of the few cognitive deficits left by the aneurysm, this losing of words. It happens mostly when I'm tired, and there's a technical term the doctors and rehab people use. But I can't remember it right now.

Sadaam's Death

• I want to say murder, because I believe that is what execution is.
  
• I didn't think it would actually happen. I thought sane minds would prevail.
• I fear for the world. Something awful will come of this, of that I have no doubt.
• Some day an American leader will be captured by an enemy country and we will watch him/her be killed, because we did it first.
• If I, an American, am so horror-struck, what must those Iraqis loyal to him to feeling? Their rage must be unimaginable. And their retribution will be as well.
• I am deeply ashamed of my country's part in this. We have no excuse for what will happen to us now.
• There is nothing that the man did to us that warranted what we have done to him. The evil he did others was the evil of political aim and gain. We call it war, when we do it, and think it is noble.
  
• May God, Allah, Whoever have mercy on us--and on him.
  
• I am afraid.