Anger versus Pain

Sometimes anger is empowering. When it gets me off my butt and on the phone to set a problem right (generally a consumer type problem, like my daughter's replacement phone arriving broken), then it is a good thing. When it pulls me out of a really bad headspace, like when I was feeling very victimized and sexually harassed by a student at work, then it is a good thing.

But when I am angry at someone who died, who technically isn't around to argue with, it can be very frustrating and painful. Not such a good thing.

Last night I felt my bio-dad very strongly. Before he died, I believed that I could reach out my emotional feelings and touch base with him, even though we weren't speaking and hadn't in many years. We didn't have conversations when I put out those feelers, I just kind of touched base, checked to see if he was still there, or maybe wished him a happy birthday. I admit, I rarely if ever felt him reach back, or reach for me on his own. Although when he did, I generally rejected it, so who knows how often he may have tried.

Shortly before he and my bio-mom died (see the posting from last summer for the details), I stopped feeling either parent. They left a strange kind of empty place, and actually took some negative stuff with them (like my very strong aversion to tattoos). I felt a bit lighter, but I also knew that it meant they were either dead or dying. A few days later we got the call that my bio-mom was indeed about to succumb to lung cancer.

Once they were both dead, however, they came back into my consciousness stronger than ever before, save for maybe when I lived with them both as an infant. It felt as though they planted themselves on my chest, wishing to stay closer than ever in what I believe is an attempt to be with me in a way they couldn't when they were alive. They didn't want to leave me in death. And this made me angry. Where the hell had they been for the last $)+ years? Why, now that I can finally be free of the head trips that they could take me on with little or no effort, did they insist on hanging around? It quickly became clear that they wanted to prove something. Perhaps now that the physical restraints of this world have let them go they can finally be with me. To hell with that.

This is where feeling anger isn't terribly empowering. It feels like a constant fight, a constant attempt on my part to stand my personal moral ground, to insist that they stop wanting forgiveness and acceptance from me. I don't feel like they have given me what I need in return. They haven't taken away my pain, they haven't reversed the feelings of abandonment that have plagued me my whole life, and the resulting feelings of worthlessness and inherent badness that too often reduce me to a mess.

So when I felt my dad last night, so strongly, it hurt because I kind of miss him. He may have been a sporadic presence in my adult life, but we had our moments. We had a handful of really nice moments. If I miss anything about him, the real him, I miss those moments. And while he was asserting himself so strongly last night, it felt as though he was making a case for me to forgive. To forgive both himself and my mom. Talk about pissing me off! I am not ready to forgive her. Or him. They hurt me in ways that I can't begin to describe. I carry around these buttons and triggers that get tripped on all the time, buttons and triggers that they helped me construct, but haven't been around to help me dismantle. So I spent an evening arguing with him in my head. (yes, it may be all in my head, but that is beside the point)

I feel that if I forgive, then I am negating the value of my own feelings, that I am letting go of the right to feel pain, of the right to acknowledge that what they did was wrong. If I forgive, my pain no longer matters. I am not ready to devalue my feelings like that just yet.

This post is entitled anger versus pain. Sometimes they are mutually exclusive, sometimes they are two sides of the same issue. Sometimes anger can empower and reduce or soothe the pain.

Today, at least, they are battling it out inside me.

Consider yourself warned

I've never actually been one to journal in any kind of consistent or regular or honest manner, so blogging has been a bit of a stretch for me. While anyone who knows me will agree that if you want to know something about you me all you have to do is ask, and likely I'll hand over more information that you really wanted, I simply don't assume that the whole world wants to know my business. Nor do I assume that putting down my most personal private thoughts is a safe thing to do in any form, yet I am a memoir-ist. Go figure.

Back to my point.

In a few short weeks the anniversary of Miriam's death will be here. This has begun a sequence of grief related responses in my house. A few weeks later will be the anniversary of my mother's death, then my father's.

Last summer simply sucked.

And dealing with the losses was not easy nor simple. So I did what I could, put my head down, and moved forward. Apparently it is time to look up again, face my surroundings, my feelings, my fears and my grief.

A blog seems as good a place as any to do that.

I am a fairly inconsistent blogger. A handful of wonderful people check it fairly regularly (according to site meter), but there is rarely anything new.

The plan from today forward is: to write what I am feeling, good or bad, about the people that have been lost to me, and to my extended family, and just how much it hurts or how much I need to process, or whatever the hell I need to write.

This is cyberspace and the possibilities for reading my blog are infinite. This is cyberspace, after all, and the probability of many reading this blog is infinitesimal.

So consider yourself warned.

American Grafitti comes back to town

There is a “Salute to American Grafitti” planned in my hometown next weekend. It is three days of nostalgia. There will be Classic cars, 50s costumes, cruising, music, and more. It is a celebration of the innocence of the post World War II years, before JFK and King and Malcom X and RFK were assassinated. Theirs were deaths that would change the nation for generations. This party will be about the decade before all hell broke loose.

Yes, by all means, let us celebrate a decade of oppression, conformity, and the ever-present, underlying terror of nuclear war. Let’s root for Joe McCarthy’s Communist hysteria, black-listing, and the loss of civil liberties. We should dance with joy in celebration of our country’s first “police action” in Korea, that lovely warm-up to Vietnam and Iraq. Everyone was supposed to fit into neat little boxes. Giving birth was practically a national pastime and mom stayed at home taking good care of those babies as they popped out, and found immense satisfaction in caring for her home, washing dishes, scraping shitty diapers and waiting on her husband hand and foot. Dad was at work; the kids were at school or playing nicely in the front yard on the newly mown grass. The teen girls were readying themselves for matrimony, and hey, if they don’t find one by the time high school was over, college might be a good place to fsnag a man. There was even a box for a rebel, as proven so well by James Dean. More than one at a time meant gangs. Come to think of it, even gangs were conformists; they all wore the same cool clothes.

No one was gay or unhappy and certainly not different. It was just normal to practice bomb drills, and build fallout shelters.

An all out salute to the 1950s lifestyle depicted in the film American Graffiti is really ironic. It is a film that takes place in 1962 and was filmed in 1972, but the style is all 1950s. The need to alter our perception of history is palpable. The need to believe that we once truly lived in a simpler time is understandable. It may have been simpler then, but it certainly wasn’t safer. Not really.

But I suppose that there were good things to remember, even if we have to squint to see them, to make the frame as small a possible to keep the ugliness out of our line of sight. There is joy in most every sorrow; somewhere in there we humans have managed to survive, in part I believe, because we can find enjoyment, laughter and love. And I suppose that as much as anything, the salute to the movie and that time in history is really a salute to the good that did exist.

Isn’t that, after all, what nostalgia is?

Favorites

In the move "High Fidelity," John Cusack's character has running lists of favorites: five most memorable breakups, top ten songs in some category–you get the idea. There are so few things in my life that rank as the number one favorite of anything, that I have often felt left out or discussions or a sense of camaraderie with folks.

I remember trying to pick a favorite color, I must have been 12-years-old. Lots of girls around me chose blue as their favorite color, that choice was made especially easy because we all wore jeans most everyday, and jeans go with just about anything, especially other blue clothing items. This was long before I understood how to listen to my own heart or head about what I really wanted, but I did know that it wasn't a good idea to pick blue just because the majority did.

I chose orange, not because it looked particularly good on me, not because I had tons of stuff that I had collected in my life that were all orange, not because I truly believed it was the prettiest color around. In fact, I think the only reason I chose orange was because I owned a T-shirt with a clever saying on it that happened to be orange. This was long before I understood that some colors work better with my complexion than others. Regardless, it wasn't long before I gave up orange as my favorite. I eventually understood that greens, reds and blacks look best on me. I love the deep green hills of my hometown in the winter, most reds look great with my complexion, and while whites make me look pale, blacks accentuate my positive physical attributes.

For a time my favorite movie was the most recent Star Wars film. Then my favorite was the Rocky Horror Picture Show; the fact that I saw it twice a weekend for more than a year had some influence on that decision.

I have had crushes on famous folks, some lasting longer than others. There was the long term obsession with Bobby Sherman, the occasional actor. Who didn't like Sylvester Stallone right after Rocky, or Mark Hamill in 1977? Although and as I matured I preferred Harrison Ford. But no one person or place or movie or color or food has managed to find a way into my regular thoughts and stay there for any length of time.

This is an advantage on occasion: I gave birth to 2 children, they are both my favorite.

There is the occasional exception: I am married to my favorite husband. I live in my favorite house.

I love a good steak, and the minestrone soup at Negri's in Occidental. I thoroughly enjoy my extended family and most of my kids' friends. But no real favorites.

My daughter once asked me when I was the happiest. My reply was right now, right this moment. I am happier now than I have ever been. Each day is better than the last. I suppose that means that my life right now is my favorite. That is a distinction that I can live with.

This Guy Walks Into a Bar …

I once had a friend who called me everyday at work and began the conversation with the opening line of a joke. The joke was always the same, "This guy walks into a bar…" He never got passed the opening line, however, because I would start to giggle, which made him laugh, and we went from there. I never heard the entire joke, he had begun it once while sitting in a movie theater during the movie Re-Animator as a way of helping me cope with the disgusting and highly stressful moments at the climax of the movie.

Yes, I was younger; back in those days most things that made me laugh were some version of an inside joke, a shared experience. You know, those moments where something quite ordinary is funny as hell, and you can recreate the humor of the moment with a friend, even if you can't recreate the story for someone else, they to be there.

The laughter that is the byproduct of inside jokes, shared experiences and all things silly is what keeps us alive. If we have no other fun at all at high school reunions, we enjoy rehashing four years of the teacher who sat in the back of the classroom in the dark sipping from his flask while the history students watched yet another boring and historically accurate movie. Or the day at lunch when my best friend and I "shared" orange drink for a makeshift marriage ceremony as a response to reading Henlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. This was not the same lunch period when the above mentioned orange drink came out my nose, the direct result of a clever quip made by the boy I had a crush on. Many times a laughing jag was sparked by a burrito that I couldn't get into my mouth passed the rubber brands on my braces.

Lately the folks I share laughing experiences with include my own kids. They are making their way into young adulthood, and the hubby and myself are blessed that they are including us in their journey.

For her 17th birthday party, our darling daughter requested a dinner party–a complete sit down at the diningroom table with plates and silverware and beverages kind of dinner party. AND Mom and Dad were invited.

The guests began to arrive around 6pm, we served dinner shortly thereafter and proceeded to laugh ourselves silly for the next four hours. Solid. The one liners were zinging across the table ("That's what she said!") along with stories, banter, laughter, presents, cakes and condoms. Yes, condoms. The girls were putting them on their heads and blowing them up. Those things really do "swell" to quite a size before popping. Knowing that actually makes me feel a bit more secure about the statistics of failure. So does the fact that the kids are so comfortable with condoms before putting them to the intended use, that they can play with them without embarrassment or the need for disgusting or overly graphic jokes. Yes, I have pictures. No, I'm not posting them here. The pictures don't do the evening justice. You had to be there.

Memories, Out of the Corner of My Eye

There are some memories that creep into the psyche, that seep like water under a door and into the carpet of consciousness to become a part of who we are and insinuate themselves into the shape of our daily lives. Memories of cooking with my grandmother–putting dishes together for special occasions, for BBQs or Christmas or Thanksgiving–include not only the knowledge of the ingredients, the order they are added or mixed, the the timing for boiling, baking, but her movements as well. Cooking often takes the form of ritual in the way we chop, the way we season, the way we smell and taste our creations. I find myself searching my memories for the subtleties that aren't written down, that aren't included in the handwritten notes in Gram's old white cookbook. Each time I recreate a recipe from the holiday traditions of my childhood, I remember my grandmother's mannerisms, her voice inflections, the way she held the knife, or the point when she gave directions.

Recently I was putting together a BBQ sauce for chicken–not a tomato sauce with a special blend of seasonings–a wine and olive oil based one with a special blend of vegetables and seasonings. It calls for chopped celery and green onions, rosemary, oregano, worchestershire sauce, garlic and "italian seasonings." In the cookbook Gram wrote "slice garlic," but when I was a child and we made this sauce together, she always made me crush the garlic, clove after clove of these masses of garlic crushed to nearly a paste, plopped in with the wine and oil. When I am prepping the garlic, I search the periphal vision of my memories to watch her hands carefully put the garlic into the press and close it firmly before scraping the garlic off the outside of the press and scooping any pod leavings from the inside of the garlic press out to join the rest in the liquid.

I also strain my peripheral vision for the look on her face, the face I love and miss and see in glimpses in my mind's eye. I can see her lean on the sink as she does some sort of prep work into a container in the sink, although I can't recall what she was doing. Sometimes I can see a cigarette in her mouth, as much as I loath that visual memory, it is a visual nonetheless, so as much as I despised the ubiquitous cigarettes, it gives me another glimpse of her face.

I wonder what kinds of dishes that I have made for my family (and my very picky children) that they don't like know, but will learn to love later as I did. I used to hate the Christmas sandwich loaf, a behemoth of a project that involved no less than four different types of fillings, layered between slices of bread cut the long way unlike a traditional sandwich slice and held together with gravity and toothpicks. I hated this meal growing up. Gram made it every year for Christmas Eve dinner. It was serve along with sliced salami and cheese, sweet and dill pickles and olives, and some weird pickled vegetables like cauliflower and pepperoncini. I went for the dills, the salami and the cheese. And then waited impatiently while the grown-ups lingered over their loaf slices extending dinner out impossibly long, keeping me from opening presents.

Will my kids ever learn to like my homemade spaghetti sauce? I know they would like my chili recipe, and my son would like my lasagna recipe, both would like my enchilada recipe. Neither would likely care much about chicken or beef stroganoff and they can both make the breaded chicken that they love so much.

I suspect that even if they don't learn to love some things, if either is ever forced to make dishes they don't like, they will also find that the memories of cooking together are more important than taste of the food. And who knows, maybe they will appreciate my spaghetti sauce the way I now appreciate the sandwich loaf.

One Long Process

Anyone who has lived through the death of a loved one knows that regardless of what a company policy may be, there is really no finite time limit that grief fits neatly into. Bereavement leave at work may be three days, or three weeks, but the process is as individual and unique as the life that is lost. A few days of utter sadness and pints of ice cream may be enough to allow day-to-day functioning. A few weeks in bed, unable to attend to regular daily responsibilities or personal hygiene may be the norm. Months and months of a low steady hum in the ears might create a nearly impenetrable barrier between living and grieving. Or a heaviness might slow down every movement, every thought, every memory.

And what if there are multiple deaths, one after the other? Is it possible to separate each from the other, to compartmentalize, prioritize? In my case, there is the occasional glimpse or sense a deceased loved one, a few moments or hours of thought directed solely at one soul. Most of the time one thought leads from one to another. I don't feel that I am doing any of them justice, that I am mourning each in turn, respecting their individuality in life and death. But the timing makes it nearly impossible to separate them in my head and in my heart.

Most recently is the lost grandchild. His name was Rowan. He was inside his mother for nearly five months before his heart stopped beating. When I think of him, when I allow myself a few moments of focused thought, when I can push aside the pain and numb myself sufficiently, I envision tiny fingers and toes, a face that had begun to take on unique characteristics, a little body that was on its way to becoming plump and round in anticipation of birth. I can't stay in those moments for long, the thought of his being lost is too overwhelming. When we found out he existed, and I was facing grand parenthood, I often remarked, At least it's not another death. And now he is exactly that.

When I think of the loss of Rowan, I wonder how I can still inhale with the weight of his death on my chest. I wonder how any of us can survive another loss. I remember when I found out that my dad had died, how I felt that I couldn't cope, couldn't live through another parent's death. My mind goes back one more step to my mother, knowing she was dying so soon after Miriam, feeling angry that mom's death intruded on the great grief I was feeling for Miriam. I go back at the beginning, to the loss of Miriam, to her illness, sitting with her at the end feeling the dichotomy of the pain and the great comfort in the gifts she left us.

I had originally meant this posting to be about lost possibilities, but that would infer that I was far enough along in my grieving process that I could systematically outline exactly who left behind what potential. Instead I realize that I am still facing my grief, still processing–and it is one long process.