It's So (Sur) Real
Without belaboring the point, the quick return to "normal" is a bit odd to me; the news continues to arrive as scheduled, as do the bills, the stores continue to stock their shelves, the people still smile and chat as if nothing has happened. But wait, I am now a motherless child. A friend I spoke with had it much worse, her parents perishing in their 50s from a car accident, similar to what another friend told me about her parents. So no complaints on my part, really. Everyone should be so lucky to have a parent live well into their 90s. But life ending...and continuing...and ending. Real, but mildly so even when it is right there in my face for as terrible as it might seem to me, I am not faced with the difficult and horrific images of war or famine or tragedy where the unexpected end of life does nothing but surround you. The new Philip K. Dick series Electric Dreams presented a glimpse of two such worlds, one well into the future and one confusingly based in the present, each a world of seeming virtual reality and each having their psychiatrists and counselors telling them to stop -- stop playing games, stop looking for an alternative, stop pretending that this other headset world is real. The episode was titled "Real Life."
My wife is good about telling me that, that even spending time on this blog is not real, that the dogs' eyes looking at me and the cats constantly pushing for attention are what is real. She's right of course, no matter how much I might say that writing this sort of thing proves an outlet for me, a release for all that my brain seems unwilling or unable to express vocally. I am not a good speaker; in fact I'm terrible at being an ad libber on stage or at a funeral or even toasting someone for as much as I try to probe those depths of emotion, admiring those who can cry and stutter and become so emotional that you know that it is coming from the heart, I find myself stuck in a hidden internal jail of locks and filters and whatever else is so buried that even I have forgotten why such inhibitions were put there. Perhaps something from my childhood...or my mother. As my brother would say in his pidgin, "unreal yeah?"
Friends who have also lost a parent or a set of parents have told me that there's will always be questions and sometimes guilt. Could I have done more, were there things that I should have asked? Was I sincere in my visits and did I do all that I could? Indeed, some of those things do come back to me at times, one of the memory care residents even calling one of my visits too short when I told my mom that I had to rush off to an appointment (I really did have one). An appointment huh, he asked me, almost with disdain. Bullshit, he said. It was something my dad would have likely said. In reality, that resident was probably more authentic than I was, free of filters, direct and rudely honest, a speaker of "home truths" as my wife is so fond of saying when describing things that are true but that people don't want to hear. It was the subject of a TED Talk by Elizabeth Lesser, one where she told of being open and revealing yourself: My sister and I had a long history of love, but we also had a long history of rejection and attack, from minor misunderstandings to bigger betrayals. We didn't have the kind of the relationship where we talked about the deeper stuff; but, like many siblings and like people in all kinds of relationships, we were hesitant to tell our truths, to reveal our wounds, to admit our wrongdoings. As writer and social critic James Baldwin said, "Everything now, we must assume is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise."
Drummer and songwriter Don Henley once penned: I'm learning to live without you now but I miss you sometimes; the more I know, the less I understand, all the things I thought I knew, I'm learning again. I've been tryin' to get down to the heart of the matter but my will gets weak and my thoughts seem to scatter...but I think it's about forgiveness. Even in Lesser's talk she tells of a reflection by Albert Einstein, that life is one big hamster wheel with us going round and round endlessly, an illusion fooling us and distracting us from seeing the bigger picture outside the wheel. Part of that discovery probably comes from the task of forgiveness...forgiving others and maybe with even more difficulty, forgiving ourselves. It's a soul search, a dive deep inside, a plunge into what might be a dark and scary place, unexplored and full of...what? Demons or treasures? Flaws or talents? Calm or chaos?
My brother and I left my mother pretty much in peace, her last few years perhaps not the most desirable (her mobility in decline) but warm, cared for and comfortable, at least in our minds and based on what I could see when I would visit almost daily. But nagging in the back of my mind are those short visits or days when I would take a break, those thoughts that likely haunt all caregivers when you face moments that you're told are justified ("take time for yourself") but still come like darts at a wall of balloons ready to pop one or more with a lucky throw. But I'm lucky...this wasn't a random shooting or a teen suicide, a stray bomb or a violent robbery, things I wouldn't be able to understand and yet things which happen to others in the world on a daily basis. Their heads must truly be spinning in trying to make sense of it all. And yet, Lasser makes a good point that even in such tragedy that we all need to go forward* and that we need to be more authentic: You don't have to wait for a life-or-death situation to clean up the relationships that matter to you, to offer the marrow of your soul and to seek it in another. We can all do this. We can be like a new kind of first responder, like the one to take the first courageous step toward the other, and to do something or try to do something other than rejection or attack. We can do this with our siblings and our mates and our friends and our colleagues. We can do this with the disconnection and the discord all around us. We can do this for the soul of the world.
Go forward. Henley added: There are people in your life who've come and gone; they let you down, you know they hurt your pride. You better put it all behind you...'Cause life goes on; you keep carryin' that anger it'll eat you up inside. No anger inside my brother and I, at least none that seems to be there regarding my mother. But the past is past and she's gone. Move forward. As George Orwell put it, "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." And there will always be unanswered questions, not only for the living but perhaps also for the dying; perhaps even now, within ourselves, there are questions we don't want to be brought up much less answered, questions we will take to the grave.
When my brother was here he helped me with walking my dogs; one of them is 13 and squats a lot as if constipated (in older and larger dogs, this is often an auto-immune disease that can cause tears in the colon tissue and can prove quite serious, a condition which our dog was just getting over but something that could and would continue to flare and recede). It became a joke between my brother and I as he walked that dog, the one that stopped every fifty feet or so. Real or fake, he would ask, as he gripped a poop bag, ready to pick up the dropping. Fake, he would say and we would move on; but occasionally (my other dog would usually drag me far into the lead), I would hear him call out, "Real!," as I turned to see him bending over to pick up the result. It made me think that someday, somewhere there might be people in an audience listening to me, an impromptu toast or a summary of one's life all done without notes. And just as jewelers might stare at diamonds, they just might nod their heads as they listened, their internal voices crying out, "Real." It would be yet another teaching from my mother, one which I'm still trying to learn.
*Facing tragedy with forgiveness was explored admirably and more in depth with another TED Talk, one in which a 14-year old boy had killed the speakers son...but then saw only forgiveness.
My wife is good about telling me that, that even spending time on this blog is not real, that the dogs' eyes looking at me and the cats constantly pushing for attention are what is real. She's right of course, no matter how much I might say that writing this sort of thing proves an outlet for me, a release for all that my brain seems unwilling or unable to express vocally. I am not a good speaker; in fact I'm terrible at being an ad libber on stage or at a funeral or even toasting someone for as much as I try to probe those depths of emotion, admiring those who can cry and stutter and become so emotional that you know that it is coming from the heart, I find myself stuck in a hidden internal jail of locks and filters and whatever else is so buried that even I have forgotten why such inhibitions were put there. Perhaps something from my childhood...or my mother. As my brother would say in his pidgin, "unreal yeah?"
Friends who have also lost a parent or a set of parents have told me that there's will always be questions and sometimes guilt. Could I have done more, were there things that I should have asked? Was I sincere in my visits and did I do all that I could? Indeed, some of those things do come back to me at times, one of the memory care residents even calling one of my visits too short when I told my mom that I had to rush off to an appointment (I really did have one). An appointment huh, he asked me, almost with disdain. Bullshit, he said. It was something my dad would have likely said. In reality, that resident was probably more authentic than I was, free of filters, direct and rudely honest, a speaker of "home truths" as my wife is so fond of saying when describing things that are true but that people don't want to hear. It was the subject of a TED Talk by Elizabeth Lesser, one where she told of being open and revealing yourself: My sister and I had a long history of love, but we also had a long history of rejection and attack, from minor misunderstandings to bigger betrayals. We didn't have the kind of the relationship where we talked about the deeper stuff; but, like many siblings and like people in all kinds of relationships, we were hesitant to tell our truths, to reveal our wounds, to admit our wrongdoings. As writer and social critic James Baldwin said, "Everything now, we must assume is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise."
Drummer and songwriter Don Henley once penned: I'm learning to live without you now but I miss you sometimes; the more I know, the less I understand, all the things I thought I knew, I'm learning again. I've been tryin' to get down to the heart of the matter but my will gets weak and my thoughts seem to scatter...but I think it's about forgiveness. Even in Lesser's talk she tells of a reflection by Albert Einstein, that life is one big hamster wheel with us going round and round endlessly, an illusion fooling us and distracting us from seeing the bigger picture outside the wheel. Part of that discovery probably comes from the task of forgiveness...forgiving others and maybe with even more difficulty, forgiving ourselves. It's a soul search, a dive deep inside, a plunge into what might be a dark and scary place, unexplored and full of...what? Demons or treasures? Flaws or talents? Calm or chaos?
My brother and I left my mother pretty much in peace, her last few years perhaps not the most desirable (her mobility in decline) but warm, cared for and comfortable, at least in our minds and based on what I could see when I would visit almost daily. But nagging in the back of my mind are those short visits or days when I would take a break, those thoughts that likely haunt all caregivers when you face moments that you're told are justified ("take time for yourself") but still come like darts at a wall of balloons ready to pop one or more with a lucky throw. But I'm lucky...this wasn't a random shooting or a teen suicide, a stray bomb or a violent robbery, things I wouldn't be able to understand and yet things which happen to others in the world on a daily basis. Their heads must truly be spinning in trying to make sense of it all. And yet, Lasser makes a good point that even in such tragedy that we all need to go forward* and that we need to be more authentic: You don't have to wait for a life-or-death situation to clean up the relationships that matter to you, to offer the marrow of your soul and to seek it in another. We can all do this. We can be like a new kind of first responder, like the one to take the first courageous step toward the other, and to do something or try to do something other than rejection or attack. We can do this with our siblings and our mates and our friends and our colleagues. We can do this with the disconnection and the discord all around us. We can do this for the soul of the world.
Go forward. Henley added: There are people in your life who've come and gone; they let you down, you know they hurt your pride. You better put it all behind you...'Cause life goes on; you keep carryin' that anger it'll eat you up inside. No anger inside my brother and I, at least none that seems to be there regarding my mother. But the past is past and she's gone. Move forward. As George Orwell put it, "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." And there will always be unanswered questions, not only for the living but perhaps also for the dying; perhaps even now, within ourselves, there are questions we don't want to be brought up much less answered, questions we will take to the grave.
When my brother was here he helped me with walking my dogs; one of them is 13 and squats a lot as if constipated (in older and larger dogs, this is often an auto-immune disease that can cause tears in the colon tissue and can prove quite serious, a condition which our dog was just getting over but something that could and would continue to flare and recede). It became a joke between my brother and I as he walked that dog, the one that stopped every fifty feet or so. Real or fake, he would ask, as he gripped a poop bag, ready to pick up the dropping. Fake, he would say and we would move on; but occasionally (my other dog would usually drag me far into the lead), I would hear him call out, "Real!," as I turned to see him bending over to pick up the result. It made me think that someday, somewhere there might be people in an audience listening to me, an impromptu toast or a summary of one's life all done without notes. And just as jewelers might stare at diamonds, they just might nod their heads as they listened, their internal voices crying out, "Real." It would be yet another teaching from my mother, one which I'm still trying to learn.
*Facing tragedy with forgiveness was explored admirably and more in depth with another TED Talk, one in which a 14-year old boy had killed the speakers son...but then saw only forgiveness.
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