The inevitable knock came one afternoon this September — the tail of Spokane summer, the season of drought and grasshoppers. My landlord stood on the stoop, placid and patient as a mountain lion, shiny black SUV idling in my — his — driveway.
How’s it going? I asked, attempting nonchalance.
He took off his sunglasses. Well, I’ve been better. Then he handed me the Notice to Vacate.
It was, truthfully, a well-earned eviction. When Elise and I had moved into our rental, a two-bedroom with a capacious back yard, a year earlier, we’d been given just one inviolable command: keep the grass looking sharp. Let the plumbing rust, the shutters slough off, the paint peel, you name it — but the lawn, our landlord instructed, was to remain sacrosanct, as verdant and groomed as the greens at Augusta.
Aesthetically, the request was reasonable: It was only natural our landlord would want his property to match the others on our leafy street. Climatically, though, it was absurd. Spokane gets around 16 inches of precipitation per year, less than half the national average. A lawn, in our semi-arid corner of the Northwest, is an extravagance. Each evening, as I watched the sprinklers vomit water over our pointless, decorative crop, I burned with environmental shame — whatever you call the hydrologic equivalent of flygskam.
And, fine, it also just came to feel like a hell of a lot of work: Who’d voluntarily spend even twenty minutes on a Saturday afternoon shoving around a deafening John Deere?
After a few months, we began to let the lawn slide. Skilled self-justifiers, we recast our laziness as civil disobedience.Burn your hoses! Scrap your mowers! We would, we vowed, create an urban jungle through benign neglect.
A young girl from an influential middle-class French family had been found in a field, stabbed to death. There was no obvious perpetrator. The police rounded up the usual suspects – which is to say, immigrants – and found a Jewish door-to-door salesman who had been in the area at the time of the crime. Trouble was, there was no actual evidence linking him to her murder.
But the police wanted him for the crime anyway, so they hit on a bold new approach. They took advantage of a hot new technology called “cinema”. Specifically, they decided to try the world’s first filmed reconstruction of a crime. They found an actress to play the victim and somehow convinced their suspect to play the part of the murderer, complete with a knife, pretending to stab her with it in front of the camera; then they showed the flickering silent film to a jury. The hapless man was convicted. “Because the jury had seen it happen,” says Burkhardt Schafer, professor of computational legal theory at the University of Edinburgh. “It was just the power of the visual.”
Back before I was an official LWONer, I was a Guest LWONer, and this is one of the pieces I wrote in that capacity. Because yoga is indeed a forever practice, it seems just as relevant now as back in 2014. Although, full disclosure, I do more Zumba these days than yoga–because getting older means one needs to jump around more to stay awake. But anyway, yoga is still my go-to when I need to wring out some rag water. Namaste.
Yesterday the People of LWON discussed our hopes for 2020. Today, we reflect on what we hope to leave behind.
Ann: Serious answer is, that’s a little complicated. After a certain point in life, you’ve got more behind you than in front and surely it would be blind-stupid graceless to not weigh carefully what you want left behind. Given that, some things I’m just glad are over with — cataract surgery, a medically-uninteresting fainting spell, the argument with my neighbor over parking, the old friend I gave up on being friends with, the office next to the guy without an indoor voice. All small stuff. Anything big to leave behind? Not that I can think of. Isn’t that nice?
Jenny: I’m with Ann…as time passes the “leave behind” and “look ahead” questions loom large. But it’s not hard to find things to brush away: For me, a painful choice for my dear old dad, a long stretch of angry gut, a favorite aunt’s memory reaching its end. Also, a really ugly screen door (replaced by a beautiful mahogany one–I can share a photo if anyone cares) and self doubt about just about everything. Not that that last one will ever be gone gone, but I hope to continue to chip away at it. Perhaps that’s one good thing about getting older: We learn to care less about what we can’t control.
Emily: Most of the things I’d like to leave behind from 2019 are not going anywhere in 2020, or if there’s a chance they might go, I don’t want to jinx it. Like Ann and Jenny, there are a lot of things I’m hoping will stick around a little longer, like my 1999 Honda Civic hatchback, which just cruised past 200,000 miles. We had a washing machine that wouldn’t spin properly, leaving all our clothes sopping wet — so I’m glad that’s gone. But aside from the political dumpster fires we’re all sick of, there aren’t many things from 2019 I’m desperate to say goodbye to. I must have had a pretty good year.
Ben: I’m looking forward to leaving behind the disorientation that comes with living in a new place — in our case, Spokane, where we moved in July 2018. Yes, the process of discovery is exciting, but it’s also discombobulating to go through life without a go-to bar, hiking trail, or fishing hole, and it’s frustrating to know little of the environmental history of the place you live. Now that we’ve had a year and a half to explore, study up, and get settled, I feel less like an interloper in someone else’s town, and more like a local in mine.
Cassandra: All of the physical discomforts of pregnancy: Skin stretched so tight it burns and itches. The near-constant ache that comes with the brutal and unwelcome expansion of my ribcage. Back pain. A huge appetite accompanied by a stomach no bigger than a teacup. Forced abstinence. I could go on (and on and on and on), but I’ll leave it there.
Happy American Thanksgiving! In the past we’ve written group posts about gratitude. This year, we thought we’d do something different: lay bare our hopes for the future. Here is what the People of LWON are most looking forward to in 2020.
Craig: The numbers, 2020, are pleasing to the eye and roll off the tongue nicely. Twenty-nineteen feels like a debacle just trying to say it, like every other letter is trying to stop you. If that’s the case, I’m looking forward to clarity. I’m thinking of 2020 like a clear pool of water, which after the burning of 2019 should be a relief.
That said, I’ve got to appreciate 2019 for the snowpack it gave to the West, one of the most heartening winters I’ve seen in a while. I figure 2020 will be dry as dust, per usual, but I wouldn’t mind being wrong.
Ann: I’m going to pre-empt everyone else wanting to say this because I’m gonna say it first: bad things end, and so the current administration and the accompanying political and civil and ethical wars will also end, and please please please, let this end be in 2020.
Jenny: A new year is a fresh, clean thing, a time to discard the crusty bits that inevitably accumulate–like those black things in the corners of my dogs’ eyes. I hope to flick those away and get a better look ahead. Maybe there’s wisdom up there.
Plus, all the things one puts off with a “maybe next year,” I hope to revisit, and actually do, in 2020. A certain trip. Some important financial decisions. An herb garden.
Emily: It’s been three years since I moved back to California. Even though I grew up here, I’ve still had to find my people again, like you do after a move. This process usually takes me about three years, and I finally feel like I’ve found the pack of friends I want to run, feast, and howl with. I’m looking forward to spending a lot more time with them. My landlord also just gave us permission to get a cat: a major 2020 news item, as far as I’m concerned. I’m looking forward to playing with my 2019 birthday present, a shiny red boat! Also: ditto what Ann said.
Ben: I’ll join Emily in pet-related anticipation. 2019 was my first-ever full year sharing a house with a warm-blooded non-human: That would be Kit, the 30-pound mutt we rescued from a shelter in Spokane. The first six months of dog companionship were bliss. I was awed by the unconditional love, the therapeutic benefits of petting, the trippy mind-meld of teaching another life-form the rudiments of your own language (even if “stay” remains something of an alien concept). Eventually, inevitably, I started to see Kit’s warts. Her ferocious desire to be cuddled can be crazy-making when it compels her into bed with us at 3 in the morning, and her street-dog past left her with some problematic aggression around other critters (just ask fellow LWONer Sarah Gilman’s own beloved, Taiga, who may still be traumatized from their single meeting). Now that the honeymoon is over, though, I’m able to love Kit more realistically and, in a way, more fully: As one wonderful bumper-sticker reads, “Proud Parent of Two Great Kids Who Are Sometimes Assholes and That’s Okay.” In 2020 I’m looking forward to the continued deepening of my interspecies relationship, my own improvement as a novice dog owner, and the establishment of boundaries — and maybe, Cesar Millan willing, another Kit-Taiga summit.
Cassandra: I am 33 weeks pregnant, so I should be full of hopes and dreams for the future. But mostly what I want is a reprieve from the special brand of all-consuming dread that has come to define 2019. The apocalypse may be nigh, but I don’t want to feel the black weight of this knowledge on my chest when I wake up each and every morning. I need a break.
Because Sarah wrote about grief on Monday and because today my son would have been 51, so then what else would I bother writing about except grief or rather grief as love’s subset or corollary or unavoidable consequence.Love → grief, love ꝏ grief. That little ꝏ sign, that side-ways 8, that’s the math/astro symbol for infinity. It looks like an infinite loop, like it comes & goes, one implying the other one, practically the same thing. Thisfirst ran June 13, 2011.
Last week Jessa wrote about psychiatric diagnoses moving from the quantum to the continuum, that is, from neat little packages to shaded subtleties and something called “a quantifiable baseline of life functioning.” The same week, Ginny published a story about the same diagnostic changes but specifically those for pathological grief – the problem being that normal grief already looks crazy.
I remember being at a meeting of a support group for bereaved parents maybe a year after my son died and listening to a sweet pretty lady tell how her golfing partner had asked her when she was going to get over her child’s death, and how the sweet lady had gunned the golf cart and run the partner over. The group thought her golf-cart reaction was reasonable and appropriate. I thought, with the amount of anger floating around in this group, we should form a roving SWAT team.
Anger, plus depression, numbness, apathy, isolation, bitterness, yearning, confusion, loss of meaning, you name it, newly bereaved people are a mess. So what grief is normal? What’s pathological? In the olden days of Freud, “pathological” was someone unable to detach themselves from the dead person and reinvest emotional energy in a living one, or maybe in a cat. The detach-and-reinvest model isn’t talked about any more but I suspect it still underlies the idea of pathological grief. Prigerson et al. — the world-class, experienced psychologists and psychiatrists who wrote the article Ginny cited — used not “pathological” but “prolonged” grief, and said that the field has had no explicit and standardized criteria for it
Prigerson et al. made an intelligent, thorough, and valiant attempt to create some criteria, and even though they’re trying to do science with the uncontrollable variables of the human mind, I don’t doubt them. Some bereaved people seem just too angry, depressed, bitter, yearning, isolated, etc. for too long; they’re in too much pain, they’re functioning too badly. When I met such people in the bereavement support group or while interviewing for a book I wrote, I felt they were unreachable, I couldn’t see where they were, they were in a dark little enclosed place — in a coffin, I thought, in their children’s company in death.
I did have a brief doubt about how long a person has to look crazy before being diagnosed as “prolonged.” The first years after my son died, I looked like a cubist-period Picasso and life looked like death, a flat back lake melting into a flat black infinite sky. By about year 4, I had cleaned up the house, was returning phone calls, meeting deadlines, and generally taking an interest again. That seems the usual time frame: after about 4 years, you’re indistinguishable from normal. Prigerson et al. interviewed people up to 2 years, well inside the 4-year window. But they weren’t finding 100 percent of their interviewees bug-nuts diagnosable, so I assume they took the worst cases and declared them “prolonged.” So, ok. After all, they’re looking for the “quantifiable baseline of life functioning” that Jessa mentioned, for a gray scale of dysfunction. So to put it all together, psych research says that after a couple years, some people just haven’t detached and reinvested enough that they can function normally; and now not-normal is quantified.
Here’s my only caveat: refine that word, “detach.” One day after I’d begun working on my book, I stepped wrong off a curb and fell, cut my knee badly, and went to my family doctor. He began stitching up the cut, and because he’s a gregarious fellow and knows I’m a writer, he asked me what I was working on. I told him. “That’s a subject no one wants to talk about,” he said. “People suppress that.”
I thought he meant people who had not lost children don’t want to talk about children’s deaths, agreed with him, and let the subject drop. He made a stitch.
“I lost a child, you know,” he said.
“I didn’t know that,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Well, it was a long time ago. It was just a few months old, bad congenital heart problems,” he said in the off-handed, seen-it-all way that old doctors have. “I never think about it.”
“How long ago?” I asked.
“Thirty years,” he said. “It doesn’t affect me. The reason I think it doesn’t is, you don’t have a chance to get close in just a few months.”
I don’t remember him referring to this baby as “he” or “she,” only as “it,” an age, and a fatal condition. I thought, Ok, maybe he didn’t get close and thirty years is a long time, and I dropped the subject again.
“Are you going to put me in your book?” he said.
“I’d love to,” I said. “I’ve had trouble finding fathers who will talk about it. The interview would take several hours.”
He said, “I’d have to be anonymous,” made a tricky knot, then reconsidered.
“No, I don’t want you to interview me,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to dredge it all up. It would hurt too much.”
I thought I’d let that pass but couldn’t. “If it didn’t bother you too much,” I said, “maybe it wouldn’t hurt to talk about it.”
He started laughing. “You really know how to hurt a guy, don’t you,” he said. “Now I have to go see a psychiatrist.”
So before I left, I made a bargain with him. I would ask him again in a month, and if he still said no, then no. A month later, he still said no. “It was so long ago,” he said. “Time is the great healer and I don’t want to open up those old wounds.”
“Thank you for considering it,” I said, and thought, thirty years and a baby he didn’t get close to, and wounds that can still be opened.
“Detach.” For a long time, I had regular dreams in which my son was pale and weak, so sick he was going to die; or he was shut up and dying in a room I couldn’t get into; or he was alive right then but he’d have to go back to being dead. These dreams were unspeakable. But now, 24 years later, I don’t have them any more. In my dreams now he’s alive and going about his business as usual. Sometimes I dream questions, can he go back to school? is he not dead? And even in the dream, I know the answers: of course he can, of course he isn’t. Here he is, he’s right here.
_____
Parts of this post have come from a Mar 4, 1997 op-ed I wrote for USA Today (behind a paywall), and from my book, linked to above.
The other night we were supposed to see a meteor shower with fireballs. That’s what they predicted, fireballs. My gal and I went out on the deck in the late fall chill, dropped a single sleeping pad, covered ourselves in a blanket, and stared up at a midnight quarter moon.
The Taurid meteor shower and its fireballs would have been visible between Aldebaran and the Pleiades, and a little to the right, except for the moon in our faces. We couldn’t see a thing around it, holding up our hands, shielding our eyes.
We live near the Colorado-Utah line, which is some of the clearest and darkest there is. The nearest town is certified as a Dark Sky Community, granting international recognition, a big deal for a high desert burg of 526 people. We live over a hill out of town and down near the rim of a canyon that looks across a horizon of nobody. Stars are numerous and crisp. Looking up, she calls the Milky Way the Galactic Chiropractor.
We’ve been watching the night sky for most of human evolution, nothing but space overhead. It’s not a habit you shake. We see supernovas and comets, the sky busy with far more than its seasonal cadence. You’ll notice Mars the night it enters retrograde. One night it’s moving ahead through the stars, and the next it’s turned around and swimming the other way.
Back before I was an official LWONer, I was a Guest LWONer, and this is one of the pieces I wrote in that capacity. Because yoga is indeed a forever practice, it seems just as relevant now as back in 2014. Although, full disclosure, I do more Zumba these days than yoga–because getting older means one needs to jump around more to stay awake. But anyway, yoga is still my go-to when I need to wring out some rag water. Namaste.
