Blogorrhea Junior

Weebles Wobble . . .

I've figured out what one of my problems is right now: I don't have enough lead in my ass, i.e., things that I would normally laugh off will now either reduce me to tears or knock all the wind out of me. I'm like a Weeble without enough ballast. This is not a happy metaphor, as I'm rather Weeble-shaped anyway and it's not a good look. It's just not taking much to push me over the edge right now, as though I were in that Almodovar movie that I never liked anyway. Lose a little sleep, run into a complication, get snubbed by someone: instant tears. I mean, I'm weepy at the best of times, but now it's just ridiculous.

On the other hand, at least I'm feeling something. Count yer blessings. Just don't push me.

Flagellation, Self and Otherwise

For some strange reason, a lot of my friends are going through some really tough times with illnesses, or personal crises, or whatever right now and seem to think they haven't been paying enough attention to me. Maybe I ought to name names, just so you know who you are and stop feeling guilty about not paying enough attention to my crisis, important as it is. Jeez, people. Take care of yourselves, too. I've got plenty of friends who aren't going through major (or minor) surgery or taking care of somebody who's battling a life-threatening illness or two, or trying to put themselves through one of the toughest nursing schools in the country on a shoestring budget to spread some love my way. In fact, I went out with a couple of pals from work Thursday night, had a major bitch-fest, and felt oh so much better (although I think the infused pear martinis played a significant role in that, as well). So quit beating yourselves up for only sending a goofy email now and then, okay? Those help too, even if I don't always have the energy to tell you so.

And if I haven't heard from you, well, that's okay too. There's this strange reaction a lot of fundamentally good people have in the face of someone else's pain: they run away. Sometimes it's just where they are in their life at the time. Sometimes it's their own delicate constitutions, their thin skin, their emotional sensitivity and lack of boundaries that drive them away. I'm speaking here of people who really do have good hearts and mean well and love us. The thing is, empathy really is a sort of pain and sometimes we just can't bear it.

One of my pals who's been having a hard time lately wrote that "when times get tough, the 'Not Actually Your REAL Friend' friends, vanish just like cocaine around Paris Hilton." They don't call, they don't come around, they're just gone, scared off by our pain. Wow, did that make me wince.  I've been in the "scared off" category more often than I like to admit, so now I'm trying hard to remember what that was like, and be grateful for whatever my friends can do, even if it's not visible to me. I'm trying to learn that just having people think good thoughts for me, or send a prayer somewhere is enough. Nobody's sure if that actually affects anything on a larger scale, but somewhere on the quantum level, I like to believe, my electrons get a little positive jolt—a quantum massage, if you will.

If I'm really honest, this is in part so I can let myself off the hook for not doing enough for my other friends who are currently waist-deep in the Big Muddy, as that Pete Seeger song goes (Richard Shindell just did a great cover of this on Mountain Stage yesterday, which is why it's on my mind.) I'm not used to cutting myself much slack when it comes to this, but I also haven't felt this emotionally beaten up in, well, I can't remember when, actually. Even when I was in therapy for depression in the early 90s, it wasn't like this. So I don't know quite where the balance of giving and getting is yet, and I hope my friends will forgive me for my inattentiveness.

It's true that certain of your friends will really rally when you're down, but I've come to believe that's when you find out who you can count in a crisis, not who your friends are. My concept of friendship has evolved over the years and I have different levels of friendship, like musuem memberships: There's the $25 Go for Drinks level; the $50 Supper Club; the $100 House Sitting Donors; the $500 Help You Move Associates; the $1,000 Bail Bonds at 4 AM; and the $5,000+ Lifetime Kidney Donors. Give generously, give often, give what you can. Or just drop me an email and say hello.

It's great (and relatively easy) to have compassion for people who are really suffering from obvious things: illness, catastrophic loss, natural disaster, war, famine, plague, unscheduled visits by the Four Horseman. It's harder to have compassion for people who don't really seem to be suffering at the moment when you are. It's not fair to compare pain, but our pain is always worse than somebody elses, just because it's ours. And frankly, nobody knows how much somebody else is suffering unless you're plugged right into their pain receptors. Granted, there are those people whose pain is always worse than yours, no matter what's happened to you. You could be on your last breath, and they've already been there and are here to tell you that your suffering could not possibly be equal to theirs. The trouble is, who's to say that to them, it's not, annoying as they may be about it?

And sometimes just seeing someone you love in pain is almost more than can be borne and so people stay away. That's not always an option. Sometimes you have to just suck it up. Another friend of mine, whom I admire very much because I actually have sort of been where he is and he's doing a much better job, is suffering enough to take antidepressants, though he doesn't like them, because he knows he has to be strong enough to take care of his partner.

One of the things that makes it damned hard being around people who are suffering is that nobody teaches us how to do this. So half the time, we fumble and botch it and do it all wrong. Our attempts are feeble, or over the top, or just wrong. Sometimes we wind up hurting the people we're trying to help just because we don't know what we're doing. So we think it's better to do nothing that to hurt them or do the wrong thing. Truthfully, sometimes, I'd rather have people do nothing than lacerate me a bit more, and there are people I'd most certainly rather see the back than the front of when I'm in pain.

But one of the other truths about suffering is that it's easier to deal with somebody else's suffering than it is to deal with our own. Not only that, it takes our mind off our own problems to deal with someone else's and often puts a new perspective on ours. And if we all spend a little time shoring somebody else up, eventually, somebody, somewhere, in the middle of their own pain, will be shoring us up. It's a beautiful reciprocating (e)motion.

Thanks!

I've gotten a couple of comments on this blog and in emails that I feel like I ought to address for the sake of my friends who are reading this. Hear ye, hear ye:  You're all doing a great job. And you're all doing a great job whatever you're doing, even if it's only thinking about me, whether I know it or not. Do what you can. Maybe it's time to reinforce this with a little thanks, too

Thanks, in no particular order, to Roz and Eva for knitting up loose ends and prodding me out of the house now and then and for flowers and plants; to Jennifer O. for trusting me to edit her book and then telling me what a great job I did when I clearly needed something to do; to Neal and Steven for trying valiantly (and finally succeeding) in sending me not one but two beautiful cards; to Anita for staying in touch and running errands in Canada for me and then putting up with craziness; to Brian and Mike for toasts and carpentry and advice and a ride; to Aunt Laura for telling me I'm her favorite niece; to Carole for just calling to yack; to Kathy B. for some beautiful letters and funny gags; to Beth for sending me one of DeeDee's books and all those wonderful letters and photos; to Peri for enjoying the roses; to Cherise and Gretl for dragging me out for infused pear martinis; to Cathy G. and Betsy for humor and cards; to Carlos for poems and kind words; to Roger for thoughts in the midst of his own crisis; to Uncle Dave and Uncle Ralph and Aunt Lucy; to Paul for being Paul and Mel for being Mel, for the last 37 years; to Sal for snarky jokes and a shared hatred of northern Michigan; to Rob for prayers and support and tales of Korea; to Jenny H. for conversation and company and memories; to Linda for chocolate and for teaching me lessons; to the Ems, to Stephen H., to George, to Greg Beresh at the funeral home, to Mrs. Hamill and all the fandom pals for their warm thoughts and stories that kept me sane, to anybody I've inadvertently forgotten who's done anything for me in the last year.

Thanks. If a person's life is only worth the sum of their friends' love, I'm solid gold.

Pay Attention

I'll be the first to admit that it's generally tough to know what to do for people who're grieving. It's a bit like watching  a train wreck without the blood. You can see what's happening as it's happening and you want to help but you've sort of got to let it run its course before you can actually get in there and be helpful. Then, you're afraid that whatever you do is just going to make it worse. You're going to remind them of their loss, make them cry, it'll all be a horrible sticky mess and nobody will feel better. Well, that's definitely a possibility. Be prepared for tears. But don't let that scare you away. If anybody gets a free pass on tears, it's somebody who's grieving. We don't even mind.if you cry along with us.

Here's my advice from inside the train wreck: just pay attention. Sometimes we know exactly what we need and all you have to do is ask. Sometimes, we're so deep in shock we can't find our butts with both hands and a map and we really need a keeper for a while. If you pay attention, you can usually tell what's what with someone grieving, if we need someone to cook for us, if we need company or need to be left alone, if something specific would bring us a moment's pleasure, or if we're just floundering and can't think where to begin to ask for help.

If the latter's the case, you've got two options, ask what we need, or offer very specific things: a ride to the store (I was really grateful for these, not having a car), an errand run, help with cleaning and sorting through belongings. The size of the offer doesn't matter. A phone call or a card means as much as driving through a blizzard. Cards are always good, in fact. If we can't bear to read them now, they're still there later, when we're feeling a little stronger. You'd think flowers would be good, too, but sometimes they're just one more chore. And food can be tricky. Sometimes we don't want to eat, and yet we don't want that gift to go to waste either, so there's another dilemma. Another reason it's best to ask before doing.

The offer of company is always good, too. Sometimes it's good just to have another warm body in the room with you, without the pressures of conversation. I think this is one of the lovely things about the customs of wakes and sitting shiva. Nobody has to say or do anything but be there, but inevitably, stories crop up and there's always company. The space where the loved one was doesn't seem so empty. It gives us time to ease into the idea that it will be now.

The trick is to keep asking for a while—a couple of weeks, at least, months is better. Grief can take a long time, depending on the loss. But take no for an answer when it's given. Whatever you're offering might not be right at that time. That doesn't mean it wasn't welcome or won't be right later. Sometimes we don't know what we want. This is when best friends really come in handy. Somebody who's known us for years will have a sense of what our emotions are like under stress to be able to tell when we're freaking out and when we just don't know what we're feeling. Check with them if you don't know what to do.

For everyone's sake, don't tell us what we need. We're the only ones who know that, no matter how irrational we are. Your experience might not be anything like ours, so don't count on that, either. Remember that while suffering is universal, the perception and experience of it is not. For example, instead of saying, "You sound depressed; you should get some psychotherapy," (an actual quote from one of my well-meaning relatives) ask if we're coping okay. Everyone has different ways of dealing with grief, and it may not be anything like yours. If we tell you we're not coping very well, then you can say something like, "The grief counselor  I went to when X died was really great. I can give you her number, if you'd like." Or if you don't live in the area, offer to find one. But the point is to give us at least some illusion of choice and control. There's already plenty of stuff we can't control, including, sometimes, our own emotions, and we know that on some level.

Don't offer unsolicited advice, but please do tell us about any mistakes you or people you know made in this situation, somehow without implying that we're going to make the same ones. Exercise some tact, and again, pay attention. Despite our grief, some of us actually function fairly well when it comes to getting things done. We know not to make any major decisions right away. We know to take things slowly. If you do see us heading for a cliff, there are kind ways to head us off. Ask questions like, "Have you thought of this particular consequence?" Offer to find us a good attorney or financial adviser. There's a first time settling an estate for everyone, and we often don't know where to look for professional advice. That can be a huge help and ward off a lot of trouble. Professionals can give us advice we need without the emotional baggage.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't offer any advice at all. Before my Dad died, I was planning on remodeling one of the bathrooms in his house that desperately needed it. When I was settling the estate, two of my cousins who are both in construction advised me not to bother before selling the house because I might never make the investment back. Better to knock some off the price and sell as-is, they said. They were full of good advice about realtors and real estate that I really needed at the time, but they waited until I brought it up to offer it. They were also indispensable in helping me do little repair jobs to bring the place up to snuff. They offered to drive me back with them to catch the train when the only airline that flies in and out of the area I grew up in went on strike. Whatever you need, just ask, they said. And then they delivered—all the way from Canada.

This is one of the most vulnerable moments of anyone's life: the last thing we need is someone barging in and taking over when we're too weak and confused to kick you in the shins and throw you out of the house. You might think you're doing a good deed, but what you're really acting like is a predator picking out the weak one in the herd. Just remember that's it's not about what you want to give, or your own sense of duty, it's about what the grieving person needs and wants. Don't ask if you're not prepared to give what's asked for. Sometimes all that's needed is, literally, attention.

A Wardrobe Malfunction of My Own

Or, Braless in Manhattan

I suddenly have a lot more empathy for Janet Jackson than I did before today. I have walked in her shoes (they pinched) before millions of New Yorkers instead of the Superbowl crowd, and endured the humiliation of my own wardrobe malfunction. Alas, it was not abetted by Justin Timberlake. It was, instead, the result of a number of perfectly ordinary circumstances:

8 days of rain + annual physical + cheap outlet lingerie = unfixably broken bra strap and a wet T-shirt

Where's the 8 days of rain come in? It's made everything and everybody damp, damp, damp. It's not so bad when you're out in it, but the moment you get inside, you realize that you are soaked, despite the raincoat and umbrella. The only thing dry on me today was my feet, thanks to a great pair of waterproof mocs. So when I disrobed for my physical, everything I folded up was wet or at least damp, including my underwear. Ack. When I started to get dressed again, everything stuck to me, including the cheap outlet bra. As I pulled the strap up over my shoulder, the little plastic ring holding it to the cup snapped (cheap outlet bra). Instant consternation and much cussing.

For some women, this is not really a problem. I'm not one of them. Even if I'd had a safety pin in my purse, I wouldn't trust it to keep the bra together without snapping open and fatally impaling me. And keeping people from noticing a pair of D-cups flapping around without a bra is impossible. In a wet, clingy T shirt, even underneath a raincoat, well, you get the picture, I'm sure. Thank goodness this happened in Chelsea, where the boys hardly noticed, and the girls are scarce. The cashier at Macy's, however, where I went to buy a new and better-constructed model, kindly pointed me to the fitting rooms once she'd cut the tags off. I guess it was pretty obvious why I wanted the tags off.

I'd been 20 years perkier (and in another part of town), I'd have gotten a date or at least a proposition out of it. If I'd been 10 years younger, I'd have been mortified. At 45, it was just funny—and a cheap thrill. I have to get my fun where I can right now.

The moral of this story is do not buy cheap, outlet lingerie. The good stuff is worth every penny, if only to be the sole support of two dependents.

Still Crazy After All These Weeks

When one of my friends lost her dad to a lingering cancer shortly after her own wedding, her newish husband later said to her something like, "okay, it's been a week, you should be over it by now."

If only.

Given that it's the height of insensitivity to tell people it's time to get over it at any time, there's a point where I'm sure others wish we would, and that's because people are, often, crazy when they're grieving. It may manifest itself in different ways, but we're not right in the head, entirely, and it can last a long time. Years, even. Some of us might never be quite right again. It might take a decade. We might be "over it" in a few months then freak out sometime down the road. No telling. Don't make the mistake of thinking we're fine though. My boss, who thinks she is family, also thinks that because I'm back to work I'm mentally there 100%. Not bleedin' likely. 75% on a good day, and I can't make myself care.

It's not that people who are grieving want to be crazy, we just are. There's not really any other way to react to having people you love disappear from your life, not matter how it happened, no matter how ready for it we think we were. It's just so wrong that your brain can't really wrap itself around the idea. One minute they're there, the next they're not. The result is that we're sometimes clinically depressed, insomniac, short tempered, or we can't stop crying, make inappropriate comments, lash out, drink too much. That's because, to state the obvious, it hurts, goddammit. Or sometimes it doesn't, and that's even weirder.

Me, I'm not entirely sure what's going on with my head right now. I'm hoping I won't do anything too incredibly stupid. I'm trying not to make any major decisions for at least a year, aside from the ones involving closing out the estate. Now that Mom and Dad are both gone, or as one person so kindly put it, now that I'm an orphan, there's the impulse to think the restraints are gone; I can be and do whoever and whatever I want. Get that tattoo. Find a guy online. Fly off to Iceland for the weekend. The big impulse I recently gave in to was to sign up for a class in letterpress at the Center for Book Arts. Woohoo. That's me, living dangerously.

When I first met the woman who's my current landlady, she'd recently lost a large chunk of her immediate family in an auto accident involving a semi tipping over. One nephew survived with numerous broken bones, another was in a coma for way longer than anybody, especially a little kid, should be before waking up not quite himself again. Both were orphaned. Even a couple of years later, when I first met her, it was obvious she was still in shock, still grieving, still trying to cope with the loss and massive changes in her life. Even without knowing what she was like before, I could see how tremendously detached and depressed she was, and no wonder. Now that I know her better and more time has passed, I'm amazed at what was underneath that. She's frighteningly smart, very funny, and deeply compassionate, and I'd have guessed none of that after that first dinner. She was a cipher, a blank wall shutting out the world. After a loss that sudden and shocking, she withdrew so far inside I wondered if she'd ever find her way back all right. That she did is a testimony to human resiliancy and her own determination.

There are days I'd like to do the same thing, if only for a little while. Sometimes I give in to it, usually when I haven't gotten any sleep. I go back to bed with a book, pull the covers up, and doze when I'm not immersed in someone else's problems. I keep telling myself I was ready for this, that it was a shock but not a surprise. Mom was 76 and in ill health, Dad was 86 and lonely as hell without her. I tell myself I'd expected her to go the way the rest of her family had: quickly, from a heart attack or a stroke, and when that happened, that I wasn't surprised. When she came out to visit me a couple of months before she died, I thought then she wouldn't last much longer. I was ready to lose her.

And I was, in the sense that I could let her go without having a the total nervous breakdown I would have had ten years ago, but that didn't make it easier, and it didn't make me miss her less, and it didn't make me any more sane than anyone else. I did my own deer-in-the-headlights act, I'm sure. I spent a lot of time staring at the tube with Dad, when we were walking zombie-like through the errands we had to do. Then I came back home to New York and started grieving in earnest.

I cried a lot, especially after talking to Dad, which I did every day. The weekends were unbearably long and lonely, though I couldn't bear to see anyone. Often it was a huge act of will to haul myself out of bed and not get back in it again. I had my long-postponed housewarming party in May, hoping that would ward it off, and if that wasn't an act of madness, I don't know what is. I invited everyone from work and all my friends, and people I wasn't actually speaking to (who came! And that was even weirder) then panicked and made way too much food. Afterwards, the world turned the grey of clinical depression around me. I first considered and then got recommendations and finally went back to therapy. I'd had one session with the new therapist when Dad died.

When Mom died, I thought Dad would do one of two things: he'd either make it through the first year somehow and then I'd have him around for another decade like his mother, who lived to be 94, gruxing around and complaining; or he'd give up some time during that first year and I'd lose both of them. Truthfully, I think I underestimated how lonely he was without Mom. He'd tell me he'd wake up talking to her all the time. But he was so damn healthy, right up to the last two weeks of his life, and then the only thing he complained about was some weakness in his legs, dizziness, and a little shortness of breath. He had a massive heart attack and never knew what hit him one night, almost eight months to day after Mom died.

Once again, I flew out to Michigan, and then something really strange happened: I quit feeling anything. Color came back to the world, but there was no emotion in it, either joy or sadness. My emotions had been amputated. I'm still waiting for them to come back, even as phantom limbs. The four weeks I was in Michigan clearing out the house and closing it up for the winter, I was fine. I slept hard, worked hard, and spent the evenings flippign through the channels to watch non-stop episodes of "CSI" and "Law and Order: SVU."

And the minute I hit New York again, I fell apart. The emotions are still on stand-by, but it's all coming out in physical ways now: I'm exhausted, short of breath, have chest pains, and have no stamina, which sounds like heart attack symptoms but is really the return of the costochondritis I thought I'd licked a year ago. My back is twisted like a pretzel and I'm carrying a lot of tension in my shoulders in a way I haven't in years. Stranger still, my hands are seizing up with what feels like arthritis. None of this was present when I was in Michigan, but it all appeared within 24 hours of coming back here. Psychosomatic symptoms anyone?

And you know, I'd rather have the emotional horror show instead. I know how to deal with that. This disconnection from myself is perplexing and scary and unfamiliar, and I don't know what to do about it. The only available emotions are anger and relief, and they're not enough. I'm in that space my landlady was in when I first met her, and I don't much care for it. It's a cold, damp, uncomfortable cave. Worse yet, there doesn't seem to be any end in sight.

A Model Communism

It's really hard to know what to do for people who're grieving. I mean, no matter what you say, no matter what you or that person believe, there's the fact of this huge hole in their life. Someone is gone and won't be coming back. Whether you believe in an afterlife (I don't), reincarnation (ditto), that the people we've lost reside always in God's memory (closer), or that it's just ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the fact of absence is unchanged. What is there to say to that?

It's hard to know what to say when everyone reacts so differently to each loss, and it's harder still for everyone to be able to offer everything everybody needs. This is why it's great to have lots of friends—and when I say "friends," I mean relatives who are friends too. In other words, family, those people who are really there when you need them.

In my mind, at least, there's a big distinction between family and relatives. Relatives you're just stuck with because you share DNA. Family is something else, the ur relationship, a subset of which is friends. I've been thinking about what constitutes family for quite a while, but especially since my boss, bless her heart, sat me down the other day to see how I was doing. "Remember, we're your family," she said, taking my hand. I thought at the time it must be true, because I didn't have any say in the matter, apparently, and it made me want to run from the room. "No, you're not," I wanted to say. "You're my boss. They're people I work with and happen to like and occasionally hang out with. That's all." It's not that I'm not grateful to them for letting me take the time I've had to to take care of business, but I would have taken it whether they liked it or not. I'm lucky enough to work at a pretty compassionate corporation, but its main business is still making money, not coddling its employees. I have no illusions about that.

Nobody can force their way into the category of family. In the sense that all human beings share something like 99.9% of DNA, we're all related, but that doesn't make us family. You can marry into the circle of relatives, or hover on the periphery of the circle of friends as an interested acquaintance, but unless you're picked for the team, you ain't family. Blood, in my experience, is not thicker than water. Instead, to fall back on another cliche, I've found that friends are God's way of compensating us for our relatives. That is, the friends who become family.

And the friends who become family, along with the relatives who really are family, are the folks who are there when you need them and do what they can. Not everybody can offer the same things, especially when it comes to getting through hard times. In a sense, real friendship is a perfect communism: From each according to their ability to each according to their needs. Everybody performs a little differently, depending on the crisis. It's not better or worse, it's just what we can do. Here's an example:

I suck at hospital visits. They are, somehow, utterly terrifying to me. If we're friends, I'll visit you at home, cook for you, change your dressing, help you bathe, wipe your butt, wash your clothes, do your housework, clean up your puke, run errands, bring you chocolate and flowers. I will even take you to the hospital and sit with your loved ones. Visit you in the hospital later? Sit with you there? A cold day in hell. I cannot do it.

When Mom had her last stroke and Dad and I drove down to the hospital for the first time to see her, there sat a woman from her congregation that I had never met, peacefully reading a book in a chair at the foot of her bed. I can't begin to say how intensely grateful I was for her presence, because, like me, Dad sucked at hospital visits too, and somebody needed to be there. In fact, most of Mom's congregation took turns staying with her when Dad and I weren't there. If you've got enough friends, they fill in those gaps of ability for each other, to get you through whatever it is you're going through. It's like a potluck of skills. Everybody brings something and soon you have a 7-course banquet of love and compassion. Dessert, obviously, is my specialty, but I can do a hearty main course if necessary. As long as it doesn't involve a hospital visit.

Sometimes, just the offer is enough, if it's sincere—and believe me, the bullshit detector is on high when you're in a position to need your friends. When my cousin David in Alaska said "I'll get on a plane and come down if you need me," I believed him. If I'd said, "please come," he'd have been there ready to do whatever. Sometimes, people want to do for you and can't because of their own circumstances, like Mel, who has enough on her plate with two households and a family business to run, a mom with Parkinson's, a husband, a dog, and multiple musical obligations. But Mel's a foundation stone in my life and sometimes that's all you need too, to know that your bedrock is still solid. When you know that, even the little things they can do for you are enough.

Idle Hands

Surprised myself today by dragging out the sewing machine (!!) and turning out four pillowcases for my bolster and body pillow from a couple of old sheets I'd been using as curtains in the old place. I bollixed up one by doing my usual sewing-two-pieces-together-that-don't-belong and then having to rip it out, and mismatched the opening on another, but two of them turned out  just fine and one actually looks like a pillowcase someone might have purchased. I don't know why cases this size are so hard to find. Why sell body pillows and bolsters if you have to get the covers and cases for them custom made? One of life's little mysteries.

It's a major accomplishment for me to get the sewing machine out, get it threaded, make a new bobbin then actually sew something. I can usually just about manage a straight seam, and that's about it. Needles and thread and I, we just don't get along. Amazingly, nothing snarled up today, though I broke the thread once and had to refill a bobbin. Usually, all I have to do is pull out a length of any kind of yarn or thread or string and it instantly turns into the most enormous Gordian knot imaginable. I've got no idea what got into me, except that I changed the bedding from summer to fall and discovered I've really got nothing for those bolsters to match the winter duvet. I can hardly believe I've done it.

It might, just might, have been a way to keep myself from going completely ballistic after having a horrible e-mail exchange this morning with my clueless cousin, who, had she been here, I would have slapped silly. I hate having to be rude with people but since she decided my answering the phone up in Michigan (where there's no caller ID; besides, her dad was there) meant that we were now back on speaking terms again, I have not been able to get through to her that I'm not emotionally tough enough right now to discuss what's wrong with our relationship, which is primarily what's wrong with it. She wants what she wants when she wants it, regardless of what anyone else wants or needs. Her pattern is to just wait a while and then pretend there was never any fracas to begin with, which would be fine if it were just stupid little things, but it's not. It's manipulation, mostly. For instance, her way of "opening the door again" with me was to kick it down with unsolicited advice about not mentioning online that I'd inherited anything from my parents and telling me that my blog seemed to indicate that I was depressed and, gee, you know, there's this stuff called psychotherapy now, and they have drugs, too, and maybe I should try that? Now, I've done my own stint of therapy for depression and found it extremely useful before and have recommended it to her for years. Now, suddenly, she knows all about it and can see that I'd benefit from it? Thank you, Doctor. What's insulting and crazy-making is her condescension and her willingness to charge in where she's not been asked under the guise of "caring" and using that excuse to try to reopen a dialogue I've told her I'm not ready to have.

So it was fall back on mindless work or get a rocket launcher today.

As a result, I now have the cleanest kitchen in Christendom (except for the floor, which just needs to be replaced, so beyond the pale is it), a tidy linen closet, clean linens on my bed, and four new pillowcases. What I really wanted to do today was sleep in, schlep my laundry over to the nice ladies at the laundromat, and spend the rest of the day not doing much of anything. Alas, none of this happened. Instead, I engaged in a little occupational therapy, which is something I usually do when I'm really freaked about something totally out of my control: death, terrorist attacks, my cousin.

You can generally tell how my life is going by how clean my house is. The relationship of cleanliness to happiness is, oddly, inversely proportional. The happier I am, the less inclined I am to do stupid, mindless housework. No, I have other fish to fry! Books to make! Museums to go to! Margaritas to suck down! Stories to write! Dinners to go to with friends! Phooey on housework. But you will never see any shit that has hit my fan, because it is instantly wiped up in a spotless and pathologically tidy house. When things get really bad, the dust mastodons under the bed tremble in fear. Extinction by vacuum cleaner cannot be far away.

My house is pretty damn clean right now. Maybe I should at least thank her for that.

Unknown Country

If you've been following this blog for a while you'll know that it's been a couple of rough years: broken friendships, several deaths, people moving away. There's been enough, finally, that the fail-safe on my emotions tripped and set the autopilot to Get By. That means, basically, that I get out of bed in the morning and I go to work and I do a fairly decent job, even if I'm not all quite there. I see my friends for dinner, I shop, I take care of personal business. It also means that I don't feel much in between. Oh, I'm quicker off the pissed-off mark than usual, and my frustration threshold is pretty low, but that's the sum total. What I am, instead, is tired and hurting physically, and cranky as hell. Emotionally, the only things I can tap into right now are relief and anger.

I'm not sure what the anger is about yet, or whether it's even part of the grief or just displacement for other things I'm not feeling, but the relief is about not having to worry about Mom and Dad anymore. The worst has happened and there's nothing else to be done except go on with my own life. I don't have to worry about worrying them, even. The most recent terrorist threat to the subways will not make them worry about their only child riding those subways. I don't have to worry about their health, about them driving at their age, about either of them falling, about whether they're eating right, about whether their doctors are paying attention. Most significantly, I don't have to worry any more about either of them dying painful, lingering deaths in a nursing home. I feel lucky and grateful that all of us were spared that.

The thing about grief—and death—is that it's not discussed, the way cancer wasn't years ago, the way AIDS wasn't for many years. Both death and grief are universal but individual experiences, simultaneously. We all grieve in our own way, we all die uniquely. And we do both alone. So there are no guidebooks, no prescriptions, though there are socially acceptable ways of grieving that vary from culture to culture, which seems stupid to me. How can you prescibe the actions for an emotion which everyone experiences differently at different times? Sometimes ceremony is a comfort; sometimes it's a burden. Sometimes we want to be alone, sometimes we want to be surrounded by friends.

When my friend Nick died of AIDS at the age of 30, I wanted to come home and smash every glass in the house. I wanted to dance myself to exhaustion (which I did a year later at the first AIDS Dance-a-thon). I cursed and cried and couldn't go to his wake because I couldn't stand the thought of sobbing so dramatically in public and because I'd cried myself into a virulent sinus infection. I didn't cry much at Mom's memorial mostly because I was too mad at the way it had gone, I think, but also because all of it was so inevitable. She was sick and old, and tired and ready to go. Nick wasn't. There was no ceremony for Dad, but Brian and Mike and I toasted him the night I flew in to Michigan, and that felt just right somehow, as will taking his ashes into the spring woods and scattering them. I still don't know what to do with Mom's. She was never happy anywhere.

As I usually do in times of crisis, I've been looking for books on the subject—on grief, not death. I've decided that nobody can tell you anything about death, even the people who experience it momentarily and come back to tell the tale. Those are only their tales and I'm not sure that if you come back from it, you were ever truly dead, medical evidence notwithstanding. Where, after all, does that line get drawn before the body starts to decay in the one sure sign of irreversible entropy? Nobody really knows. Except Lazarus. Now, he's the guy I'd like to talk to. He was actually starting to stink when they unwrapped him, decay going full bore. But there's no mention of what, if anything, he reported, or even if anyone asked.

Books on grief, I've discovered, are few and far between. Elisabeth Kubler Ross sort of cornered the market on books on dying for a while, but from that small beginning has sprung an entire genre. But grief—no. There are memoirs of loss, eulogies of the dead, but little about the experience of grief. It's too personal even in its universality, too painful when it's fresh, banal and common when it's not. I ran across one in the bookstore by Anneli Rufus called The Farewell Chronicles: How We Really Respond to Death whose table of contents reads like a bad takeout menu: Evasion, Regret, Greed, Isolation, Guilt, Apathy, Disgust, Foreboding, Relief, Horror, Irreverence, Self-Absorption, Judgment, Mordancy, Rejoicing, Uncertainty. One from column A; two from column B. $14.95 and you get an egg roll. Free delivery. I bought it because of these lines in the introduction:

You were not warned. You were not taught. No one ever sat you down and told you: Some deaths, someday, will make you sigh with bittersweet relief. Others will make you think you caused them. You will say, It's my fault. Sometimes regret will spin you in an everlasting lonely oxygenless orbit. No one ever sat you down and said: Some deaths will horrify you. Grisly things no one should see you will never be able to forget. Some deaths will make you think you hate the dead one, while others will make you think you hate yourself. Still others make you think you hate everyone alive.

Yes, I thought, standing in Barnes & Noble. Yep, damn straight. All that and more.

Then an excerpt from Joan Didion's new book, The Year of Magical Thinking, was printed in the New York Times Magazine last weekend. It chronicles the loss of both her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the concurrent life-threatening illness of her daughter. The excerpt was written by a woman who was totally unprepared for what happened, despite the inevitability of it all. There's such a tone of bewilderment in the early pages: "Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." The words could have been—were, in essence—spoken by my father describing my mother's terminal stroke at the kitchen table over dinner. I bought this book too, the day it came out.

Ultimately, I know, I'm going to have to find my own way through this dark woods. Because I'm so emotionally blocked right now, I've suspended my shrinkage. It seems useless to spend $95 a session and not be able to dig anything out. I need to shovel off a few protective layers before  the archaeological digging will be useful again. One of the ways I'll do that, I also know, is by writing, which is just a way of thinking about issues for me. Maybe some of what I write will be useful to someone else. Maybe it'll just be navel gazing. Maybe it'll be an interesting story. Maybe not.

It started like this, for me:

Can't Buy Me Love

A while ago, I saw this T-shirt in some catalog that said something to the effect of "Please God, let me prove to you that winning the lottery won't make me a bad person." Meaning, I suppose, that having money somehow makes one evil, since it's the root of all evils. Not true. What makes you evil or stupid or greedy or just plain weird about it is suddenly having it when you didn't before. Like stumbling on fame, it does change your life, and some people don't react well to the sudden rush of blood to the head, or infusion of cash to the bank account.

Not that I've won the lotto or anything. Not that my folks have left me this gigantic estate. It's pretty modest, actually; not even enough to be more than a down-payment on a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. And then I couldn't afford the maintenance and mortgage anyway, so what's the use? But I've got significantly more than I've ever had before, including real property (which, if it were miraculously transported here, probably would make me suddenly wealthy, such are the vagaries of real estate). And I just "discovered" another insurance policy that hasn't paid out yet, on top of the one that did that was three times what I expected. So there have been some quasi-pleasant surprises in the last couple of days. Once I sell the house and car and collectibles, if I invest wisely, I can have a comfortable—if not exactly extravagant—retirement, somewhere not too expensive, i.e., not here.

And in the meanwhile, I've got . . . cashflow. Whoa, as Keanu would say. And it's making me weird. Back in the day before the existence of my savings account, I didn't much think about spending money on what I wanted. I couldn't afford much, and I couldn't afford big purchases, but I pretty much got what I wanted anyway, because I didn't want much. Sadly, wants seem to outpace income, no matter what, which is just stupid. Now I'm torn between splurging a little after living so close to the bone all these years, and greedily socking it all away like bloody Gollum and his freaking Precious. Ugh. How hideous!

But I feel weird just buying a ticket to Chicago to see Paul, and ordering another bookcase, and planning another trip abroad (the first in 20 years), and carefully picking out a new cabinet for all the china and stuff Mom's left me and knowing that's not really going to make much of a dent in the money. The real danger, I've discovered, is not the big things, but frittering it away. But when you suddenly don't have to worry about every penny, it's a heady feeling to just decide, yeah, I should really buy that software now that I can afford it, and just order the stuff up without worrying about the budget.

And that's the sad part. It's not like I'm buying out Tiffany. Or suddenly getting all my clothes from Saks Fifth Ave. I'm just buying the same old stuff I used to struggle to buy, or put off buying because I couldn't justify the expense and could make do with something half-assed that was half the cost, too. Truth be told, I wouldn't buy the new tansu I'm eying if I didn't have all this damn china. And I'd think twice about the carpet, too, and probably buy a cheaper one I liked second best. But I probably would have coughed up for the new printer stand/cabinet just because the old kitchen cart is so rickety and awkward and is 15 years old and doesn't owe me anything, since it was crap to start with. And I'd buy the bookcases, just because I can't keep stacking them on the floor.

And that's pretty much all I want in the way of "stuff." But I am gleefully looking forward to traveling more, before I get old and crotchety and unable to. When that does finally happen, I'd like to be able to sit in my chair and remember all the places I've been.

One of the things that's making me weird about the influx of cash is that I didn't earn it. I've finally gotten to a point where I am earning a comfortable living now, for the first time in years, and I don't feel bad about spending that. And I suppose I shouldn't feel bad about the insurance, but I do, and a lot of it is wound up in my mother's money issues—how she'd spend it vs. how I'd spend it. Mostly what I don't like though is having to worry about the damn stuff all the time. I'll be glad when the estate is settled and I can get it all into some kind of fund where it can just multiply peacefully like an amoeba until I need it, rather than me having to chase it all over through eight, count 'em, eight accounts.

And all that said, I'd still rather have my folks than their fucking money.