Last night I dreamed that I lived in a two bedroom apartment owned by my real landlord, I guess in Brooklyn, but I don't know. I had a roommate, who I think was L, a friend of mine from my mom's hometown. L threw a lot of my stuff down the stairs, including the cat's litterbox. I went down and collected it while someone was seeing another apartment in the building. It was one of those dreams where I yell a lot: that if L had an issue with my stuff, she should have brought it up with me; that you don't just throw someone's stuff down the stairs; that I was the one with a good rapport with the landlord, so he'd back me up. At one point that roommate must have become another friend of mine, P, because I thought of the (real) text that P sent me about getting together this weekend, and sending me love.
This dream in particular makes me think about the dreams in which my anger tends to come up. Often it's rooted in a real incident, which makes this one interesting, because it didn't actually happen but it draws on past emotions from bad roommate situations. It isn't a rocket science observation that I must be filtering my rage at my mother's loss through other things. I'm intrigued at the fictionality of it, though - like why would I be mad at P? She is a dear friend who knows from grief, and has been quite an ally in my part of that process. I don't think I've been mad at her at all in the years I've known her. For that matter, the only thing I have to be mad at L about is that she hasn't offered any condolences. I'm trying not to be angry at people for that, because I know it's a tough subject and a lot of people just don't know what to say.
I'm still gathering my thoughts about Mom's first memorial on Sunday, and I've got some academic thoughts to work through, as well. (I'm trying not to turn this into a blog about grieving, but since it permeates my thoughts and life, it'll be part of this no matter what I intend.)
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Friday, March 22, 2013
Refractions in the Self: or, the Toad Cave Theory
Part of the experience of grieving, for me, is knowing that there is now more than one person inside of my head. One of these people is my mother, who, to be fair, has always been there. Her voice comes out of my mouth when I talk to babies and animals. I also channel her when I teach, or when I have to be disappointed in someone, or when I am proud of someone, or when I console or congratulate a friend.
I'm also finding that I now have a divided self. There's the Normal Me, who writes every day, exercises like a maniac, laughs a lot, reads a lot, and is rarely home. The state of grief in which I now live overlaps that self with another, less familiar self. I think of this one as Toad Cave Me, because when I am most deeply sad over the loss of my loved ones, I feel like a toad at the bottom of a subterranean space, wedged in the corner of a deep, deep hole. I lie still, I cry a lot, and I sometimes lose momentary sight of the point of the things that Normal Me does. Normal Me moves a lot, and Toad Cave Me is the picture of outward inertia. (The brain can overpower the body, I guess.) Even when Toad Cave is on the move, she's lethargic and scared and often doesn't want to be where she is. You'll see both Normal Me and Toad Cave Me crying in the street, but I bet you could suss out the differences between us by our respective demeanors and the looks in our eyes.
Toad Cave Me has only appeared once or twice since my mother's death, and one of those times was immediately after my friend's death last week. The only other time she's been strongly present was a weekend when my mother was in the emergency room and a sort-of manfriend mostly best friend had just shattered my little heart to pieces. Toad Cave's presence makes sense, people tell me, because I am going through a serious trauma. My only parent is gone. Nobody misses her like I do. It takes more energy than I realize.
In the days after my mother's death, I was so motivated to be the daughter she knew that I wondered if stillness would ever come. It took about a month and a half for Toad Cave to reappear, on hiatus since my breakup and Mom's ER visit.
The ways I'm finding to pull away from Toad Cave's grasp now, or to ameliorate it when the pull is too strong, are varied. One is to imagine motion, and that at least lets me know that I'm valuing it almost as much as I normally do. Another is to stop, take a breath, run off and cry if I need to, and tell myself that feelings shift, and the courage and grit and love that my mother inculcated in me will rise to the surface soon enough, and help me power through. When it's really tough to move, another way is to ride out the stillness, to remind myself that it won't continue forever, that maybe I need the rest, and, above all, that my mother would be the first one to tell me that it's okay to take it easy, even for a mile-a-minute person like me.
Both Normal Me and Toad Cave Me are comforted by the recent words of a friend of mine: "How can you have expectations of yourself right now when you don't even know yet who you are without your mom around? Do the best you can do, for now. That's all you can do, anyway. And besides, it's enough."
I'm also finding that I now have a divided self. There's the Normal Me, who writes every day, exercises like a maniac, laughs a lot, reads a lot, and is rarely home. The state of grief in which I now live overlaps that self with another, less familiar self. I think of this one as Toad Cave Me, because when I am most deeply sad over the loss of my loved ones, I feel like a toad at the bottom of a subterranean space, wedged in the corner of a deep, deep hole. I lie still, I cry a lot, and I sometimes lose momentary sight of the point of the things that Normal Me does. Normal Me moves a lot, and Toad Cave Me is the picture of outward inertia. (The brain can overpower the body, I guess.) Even when Toad Cave is on the move, she's lethargic and scared and often doesn't want to be where she is. You'll see both Normal Me and Toad Cave Me crying in the street, but I bet you could suss out the differences between us by our respective demeanors and the looks in our eyes.
Toad Cave Me has only appeared once or twice since my mother's death, and one of those times was immediately after my friend's death last week. The only other time she's been strongly present was a weekend when my mother was in the emergency room and a sort-of manfriend mostly best friend had just shattered my little heart to pieces. Toad Cave's presence makes sense, people tell me, because I am going through a serious trauma. My only parent is gone. Nobody misses her like I do. It takes more energy than I realize.
In the days after my mother's death, I was so motivated to be the daughter she knew that I wondered if stillness would ever come. It took about a month and a half for Toad Cave to reappear, on hiatus since my breakup and Mom's ER visit.
The ways I'm finding to pull away from Toad Cave's grasp now, or to ameliorate it when the pull is too strong, are varied. One is to imagine motion, and that at least lets me know that I'm valuing it almost as much as I normally do. Another is to stop, take a breath, run off and cry if I need to, and tell myself that feelings shift, and the courage and grit and love that my mother inculcated in me will rise to the surface soon enough, and help me power through. When it's really tough to move, another way is to ride out the stillness, to remind myself that it won't continue forever, that maybe I need the rest, and, above all, that my mother would be the first one to tell me that it's okay to take it easy, even for a mile-a-minute person like me.
Both Normal Me and Toad Cave Me are comforted by the recent words of a friend of mine: "How can you have expectations of yourself right now when you don't even know yet who you are without your mom around? Do the best you can do, for now. That's all you can do, anyway. And besides, it's enough."
Monday, March 18, 2013
Piling up
A dear friend was found dead in her apartment late one night last week. I am bowled over by her sudden, unexpected death - she was a vivacious person in her early thirties who had made lots of strides in creating the life she wanted. We don't yet know why she is no longer with us. I can't stop thinking about the overseas trip I was meant to take to visit her later this year. We were both so excited. Now her family has to bury her.
J was helping me through my mom's loss, out of the generosity and caring of a heart that was lucky enough not to have been through this. Now, in this space of missing both of them, I desperately want to talk to each to process the death of the other. All I wanted this weekend was to hide in my mother's arms and cry on her shoulder and ask, like a child, why J was taken from us so early. Now I have two loves' worth of grief sitting on my shoulders. My grief is not as bad as the fact of their absence, but it feels to heavy to carry nonetheless. Nobody shares both losses with me. I am the only one deeply mourning them both.
Another friend recently told me that when her dad died, she experienced several other losses soon after. She said she believes that when that happens, karma catches up with you and sets things right eventually. What really spoke to me was her conviction that the piling up-ness will end. My family's last experience of that was in 2003 and 2004 - my mother's cousin died, my grandmother died, our cat died, and at least two other relatives died, all in about a six month period. I had always thought of that as my annus horribilis, and I expected another the year of my mother's loss, but I thought I'd be much older and much more ready, and I didn't imagine any other deaths accompanying it.
While I am the only one mourning both my mother and J, I am also the only one who knows how their different versions of magic complement each other. My mom was magic. She raised me on her own, playing the double parental role with love, trust, and humor. She was the inciting architect of lots of my childhood daydreams and imaginings and plans, and she obliquely directed me to the path that allowed me to elaborate on them and work my way into a life of no small amount of creativity and movement. (That's a pretty good metaphor for my whole life, in a lot of ways.) She led me in rain dances and I really believed it would rain. She knew which college would suit me before i knew, but she stayed quiet and watched m make my own decision. Even when she was dying, when she said that it was going to be okay, I believed her, and she was the only person who could say that and make it sound like truth.
J was magic, too. She earned three master's degrees before the age of thirty, and moved to a new country knowing nobody for the third one. She straddled the two cultures of her parents in beautiful and inspiring ways - talking to her always meant learning something about India or Ireland. As she helped me through Mom's illness and then my grief over Mom's death, she made sure I knew that because she was overseas, she was available to talk when nobody else was awake. We became friends because she reached out and told me she wanted to be, and I was so flattered, and now I am so grateful that I was able to have her in my life, even for a short time. My memories of her glow, and I will never forget her or stop missing her.
Both my mother and J were strong, brilliant women. Their intellects shone, and sometimes burned with the strength of their incandescence. They both cared so deeply about the world around them and the people inhabiting it, both in their immediate orbits and beyond. The world is a colder, sadder, duller place without them. I will spend the rest of my life missing them and trying to live up to their examples and their love.
J was helping me through my mom's loss, out of the generosity and caring of a heart that was lucky enough not to have been through this. Now, in this space of missing both of them, I desperately want to talk to each to process the death of the other. All I wanted this weekend was to hide in my mother's arms and cry on her shoulder and ask, like a child, why J was taken from us so early. Now I have two loves' worth of grief sitting on my shoulders. My grief is not as bad as the fact of their absence, but it feels to heavy to carry nonetheless. Nobody shares both losses with me. I am the only one deeply mourning them both.
Another friend recently told me that when her dad died, she experienced several other losses soon after. She said she believes that when that happens, karma catches up with you and sets things right eventually. What really spoke to me was her conviction that the piling up-ness will end. My family's last experience of that was in 2003 and 2004 - my mother's cousin died, my grandmother died, our cat died, and at least two other relatives died, all in about a six month period. I had always thought of that as my annus horribilis, and I expected another the year of my mother's loss, but I thought I'd be much older and much more ready, and I didn't imagine any other deaths accompanying it.
While I am the only one mourning both my mother and J, I am also the only one who knows how their different versions of magic complement each other. My mom was magic. She raised me on her own, playing the double parental role with love, trust, and humor. She was the inciting architect of lots of my childhood daydreams and imaginings and plans, and she obliquely directed me to the path that allowed me to elaborate on them and work my way into a life of no small amount of creativity and movement. (That's a pretty good metaphor for my whole life, in a lot of ways.) She led me in rain dances and I really believed it would rain. She knew which college would suit me before i knew, but she stayed quiet and watched m make my own decision. Even when she was dying, when she said that it was going to be okay, I believed her, and she was the only person who could say that and make it sound like truth.
J was magic, too. She earned three master's degrees before the age of thirty, and moved to a new country knowing nobody for the third one. She straddled the two cultures of her parents in beautiful and inspiring ways - talking to her always meant learning something about India or Ireland. As she helped me through Mom's illness and then my grief over Mom's death, she made sure I knew that because she was overseas, she was available to talk when nobody else was awake. We became friends because she reached out and told me she wanted to be, and I was so flattered, and now I am so grateful that I was able to have her in my life, even for a short time. My memories of her glow, and I will never forget her or stop missing her.
Both my mother and J were strong, brilliant women. Their intellects shone, and sometimes burned with the strength of their incandescence. They both cared so deeply about the world around them and the people inhabiting it, both in their immediate orbits and beyond. The world is a colder, sadder, duller place without them. I will spend the rest of my life missing them and trying to live up to their examples and their love.
Monday, March 11, 2013
Male gazes in a female sanctum
On Saturday night, I did something I've been wanting to do for a while: went to a male strip club. A dear friend, A, called and said that a friend of hers had bought a table for a girls' night out, and that I was the fist person she thought of when her friend told her to bring another person. (A and I and several other friends had a plan last summer to go to this very club after we saw Magic Mike. Cliched, yes, but we were excited about it.)
What I did not expect, and what became A's favorite moment of the night, was that I would lean over to her from our VIP couches and comment, "The male gaze is all over this place." I'm not even sure that men are allowed in, but the desire of the straight male was the backbone of the entertainment. Unlike Magic Mike, which features dancers in a Tampa strip club who do routines, the bulk of the show at this joint was what the dancers would do to women in the "hot seats." They were brought up on stage in groups of six and, one by one, lifted and grinded and ravished by the dancer on stage with them. I'm not easily shocked, and even I turned red when one of that dancers put his face through the leg hole of a woman's thong.
I know my experience with this is limited by fiction and by my experience in one particular club, but I wasn't expecting a venue that caters explicitly to straight (and often engaged) straight women to indulge so heavily in tropes that would attract straight males. I wonder, too, how many of the men performing these acts might actually be gay. The most pandering to things straight women purportedly want was when one of the dancers was billed as "the original Magic Mike."
Less surprising was the blatant pandering to American military and civic power in a segment with different dancers dressed as Marines, policemen, firefighters, and a Navy Seal. What A and I didn't expect was the introductory film strip that featured, prominently, footage from the bombing of Pearl Harbor. We were not among those who cheered.
It was interesting, invasive, and also often hilarious (not all at once). I left feeling slightly dirtied, slightly confused, and slightly intrigued by one of the dancers. I have never seen so many dollar bills on one floor.
What I did not expect, and what became A's favorite moment of the night, was that I would lean over to her from our VIP couches and comment, "The male gaze is all over this place." I'm not even sure that men are allowed in, but the desire of the straight male was the backbone of the entertainment. Unlike Magic Mike, which features dancers in a Tampa strip club who do routines, the bulk of the show at this joint was what the dancers would do to women in the "hot seats." They were brought up on stage in groups of six and, one by one, lifted and grinded and ravished by the dancer on stage with them. I'm not easily shocked, and even I turned red when one of that dancers put his face through the leg hole of a woman's thong.
I know my experience with this is limited by fiction and by my experience in one particular club, but I wasn't expecting a venue that caters explicitly to straight (and often engaged) straight women to indulge so heavily in tropes that would attract straight males. I wonder, too, how many of the men performing these acts might actually be gay. The most pandering to things straight women purportedly want was when one of the dancers was billed as "the original Magic Mike."
Less surprising was the blatant pandering to American military and civic power in a segment with different dancers dressed as Marines, policemen, firefighters, and a Navy Seal. What A and I didn't expect was the introductory film strip that featured, prominently, footage from the bombing of Pearl Harbor. We were not among those who cheered.
It was interesting, invasive, and also often hilarious (not all at once). I left feeling slightly dirtied, slightly confused, and slightly intrigued by one of the dancers. I have never seen so many dollar bills on one floor.
Friday, March 8, 2013
Grief and generality
I have been reading many loss memoirs lately, and I notice so many of my phrases in them.
Parts of Claire Bidwell Smith's The Rules of Inheritance resonate particularly. My first reaction was a
twinge of writerly betrayal, like my beautifully crafted ideas were pre-conceived before I got to them. My deeper and truer reaction, though, is that these feelings are
universal, and sometimes there is one best way to express them. Drowning in grief, for example, seems like a metaphor that rings true for a lot of people when they have lost a loved one. Sometimes it's hard to breathe. Sometimes you have chest pain. Sometimes you cry so hard you can't breathe. Sometimes you wonder when the tears will stop, as you watch them springing and trickling through the day like rain on the curves of a car window.
My grief is different from Bidwell Smith's, to be sure. It's particular to who I am and to the person I have lost. It is shaped by my age, my upbringing, my surroundings, and how I spend my time. Ultimately, though, this shared vocabulary helps to remind me that other people have been through this, and have not drowned - or have drowned and come back to shore.
My grief is different from Bidwell Smith's, to be sure. It's particular to who I am and to the person I have lost. It is shaped by my age, my upbringing, my surroundings, and how I spend my time. Ultimately, though, this shared vocabulary helps to remind me that other people have been through this, and have not drowned - or have drowned and come back to shore.
Monday, March 4, 2013
Dharma Body
Thich Nhat Hanh says that when the Buddha was dying, he told his followers not to despair, that they still would be able to encounter his dharma body. I suppose this is one way of conceptualizing the presence of my mom's spirit that I so often feel.
I want to unpack it a bit, though. Dharma is, per Wikipedia (I know, but go with me), "that which upholds, supports or maintains the regulatory order of the universe." Based on the distinction that the Buddha draws between the physical body and the dharma body, we can infer that the latter is not corporeal. It must be what many of us would think of as spiritual, or the soul itself. But in the West, we don't have this added dimension of support for the universe.
I'm thinking of the dharma body now as the universe's scaffolding - everyone's soul/true self pitching in like the turtles in the Native American legend, each playing his or her own part in holding up the universe - or repairing it, if we want to turn to my originally chosen spiritual tradition. (I'll get to shul again one of these days, I swear). I love the way different faith and belief traditions dovetail; my mom's memorial will be a testament to that, as it fit with her beliefs, too.
Though I feel so disparate, not unified, scattered in my grief, I also know that I am being held together by certain things, and one of those is my mother's dharma body and the force of her love.
I want to unpack it a bit, though. Dharma is, per Wikipedia (I know, but go with me), "that which upholds, supports or maintains the regulatory order of the universe." Based on the distinction that the Buddha draws between the physical body and the dharma body, we can infer that the latter is not corporeal. It must be what many of us would think of as spiritual, or the soul itself. But in the West, we don't have this added dimension of support for the universe.
I'm thinking of the dharma body now as the universe's scaffolding - everyone's soul/true self pitching in like the turtles in the Native American legend, each playing his or her own part in holding up the universe - or repairing it, if we want to turn to my originally chosen spiritual tradition. (I'll get to shul again one of these days, I swear). I love the way different faith and belief traditions dovetail; my mom's memorial will be a testament to that, as it fit with her beliefs, too.
Though I feel so disparate, not unified, scattered in my grief, I also know that I am being held together by certain things, and one of those is my mother's dharma body and the force of her love.
Goals
I've been thinking a lot about goals lately. I am going through the loss of the closest person in the world to me. I have bad days, but I also have very driven days, which is not at all something I expected from grieving. Today is a bit of both. I went full steam until my plans started to unravel, and now I'm not sure what my mind and body are telling me to do. I'll second guess for a few more minutes, and then commit to something.
I woke up this morning to my public radio station's annual fundraising drive. They did it last week, too, and I pledged, thinking of the annual support my mother gave our local station when I was a kid (and into my adulthood). Today, the station announced that if they met their goal, the rest of the day would be fundraiser-free. This kind of acknowledgement of the necessary evil of fundraising drives - that they know we hate them and that we would all rather listen to uninterrupted radio - is, I think, a fresh and (hopefully) useful approach for the radio station. I haven't listened to find out if it worked. They may let us know tomorrow.
The things I expect of myself every day are superhuman, I'll admit. I rarely complete all items on my too-long to do lists. I try to cram too many things into short windows of time. I say yes to all invitations and then feel incredibly guilty if I have to cancel something. In my time of grief, i still expect these things, although I'm learning to shift my expectations, and, really, to give myself a break. The things I expect of others during this time - the many different manifestations of sympathy and empathy - are sometimes too stringent, I'm realizing. People simply don't know what to say and do. My loss is too great. It reaches too far. This morning I resolved to pay less attention to their confusion, and just feel their love.
I woke up this morning to my public radio station's annual fundraising drive. They did it last week, too, and I pledged, thinking of the annual support my mother gave our local station when I was a kid (and into my adulthood). Today, the station announced that if they met their goal, the rest of the day would be fundraiser-free. This kind of acknowledgement of the necessary evil of fundraising drives - that they know we hate them and that we would all rather listen to uninterrupted radio - is, I think, a fresh and (hopefully) useful approach for the radio station. I haven't listened to find out if it worked. They may let us know tomorrow.
The things I expect of myself every day are superhuman, I'll admit. I rarely complete all items on my too-long to do lists. I try to cram too many things into short windows of time. I say yes to all invitations and then feel incredibly guilty if I have to cancel something. In my time of grief, i still expect these things, although I'm learning to shift my expectations, and, really, to give myself a break. The things I expect of others during this time - the many different manifestations of sympathy and empathy - are sometimes too stringent, I'm realizing. People simply don't know what to say and do. My loss is too great. It reaches too far. This morning I resolved to pay less attention to their confusion, and just feel their love.
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