Incapacity or Courage?

 Granadilla

I cut myself upon the thought of you

And yet I come back to it again and again,

A kind of fury makes me want to draw you out

From the dimness of the present

And set you sharply above me in a wheel of roses.

Then, going obviously to inhale their fragrance,

I touch the blade of you and cling upon it,

And only when the blood runs out across my fingers

Am I at all satisfied.

--Amy Lowell

"Courage is often confused with stoicism, the stiff upper lip, bravado that masks fear. There is another kind of courage. It is the courage to live with a broken heart, to face fear and allow vulnerability, and it is the courage to keep loving what you love “even though the world is gone.”"- Catherine Ingram

You ever listen to what other people suggest for a long time and get twisted because what other people are suggesting is just not working for you? Then you give up trying and go with your own intuition and values and your own sense of yourself and, finally, everything clears up significantly. Comparison is fatal in these moments, "Why can't I forget and be tough and let go and not care," for example, "like so and so." We usually are wrong about so and so anyway, but even if we're right, sometimes, for me, the answer is because it's not ME to do that. I don't do that. I am not tough, I don't forget, and I do care. 

What's going to happen is probably going to square with my intuition and my values. The rest is noise, frustration, distraction and false comparison. Blake said the enjoyments of genius look like torment and insanity to the angels, and it's sort of like this. Another person may observe how we live and think we are "suffering needlessly." They may, even in a well-intentioned way, try to tell us some other way. Thanks, but you thinking I have a problem is the problem, because there is no problem. Or, worse, you trying to solve my problem that I don't even have. 

And to think that we can have the most extraordinary experiences of our lives without suffering? Where does that idea come from? This reminds me of what is sometimes said to newcomers in AA- if you are going to stick around, buy a black suit, you're going to need it. Love is not possible without grief. And exactly how quickly are we supposed to be done with grief? And along exactly what linear and measured path? 

Forgetting and moving on is cheap and tawdry. Everything is forgetting, Forgetting is the most common thing there is. Forgetting and moving on abandons what was real, throws our experience and our heart under the bus, and for what? Ease and comfort. Cheap bullshit. The thin stuff of trying to stay in control of our story at all times. It's all just swept under the rug, or even deeper, swept under the floorboards anyway. You'll hear that telltale heart beating soon enough. I could run my whole life, trying to forget. What bullshit. And yet, the most common kind of advice one gets from people when something doesn't go one's way or when someone doesn't do what we want or what we hoped they would do is: "forget it." 

Miles Davis said that the key to happiness was having a bad memory. But he was fucking miserable. He was lying too, because you can hear what he can't forget in a lot of his playing. He liked to provoke. He wanted to seem tough. You can hear the searing tenderness and ache though. Sometimes Davis plays a few notes and all of his losses and all of his grief are in there. 

Remember the amazing things you've had in as much detail as you can bear, be grateful, and stay close to grief and love. Stay alive. You'll be dead soon enough, what's the goddamned hurry? I feel like I was 30, I blinked my eyes, and now 60 is one year and 19 days off. What's the rush? Humans are so fickle and unreliable by nature, guaranteed we'll forget without even trying. What's our hurry? 

If this all hits you the wrong way, just forget it. 

Complicated Grief

 Persistent complex bereavement disorder is not an official diagnosis in the DSM-5, but is in the section of "conditions deserving further study." The symptoms, which also need to be chronic or recurring for more than about a year, are:

Indefinitely yearning/longing for the deceased or ex

Preoccupation with the circumstances of the deceased’s death or the circumstances surrounding the end of a relationship

Intense sorrow and/or distress that does not improve over time.

Difficulty trusting others

Depression

Detachment and/or isolation

Difficulty pursuing interests or activities

A desire to join the deceased or the presence of suicidal or self-harming fantasies

Persistent feelings of loneliness or emptiness

Impairment in social, occupational or other areas of life 

This experience used to be called "complicated grief."

I feel like this applies to my life since about 2016. I honestly cannot say I have had a whole lot of relief and freedom from grieving, including grief that feels multigenerational and transpersonal, or even global and in regard to the whole energy of being on this planet, I feel like my version of functionality is more having learned to live with grief. I guess there have been flashes, when I am completely alone, out camping somewhere. And falling in love, but that's a whole other conversation. 

I used to feel like I could grieve, and let go, and move on, but at this later stage of life, especially as I stick to a daily meditation practice and get my ear really close to my own ground, so to speak, I am discovering more and more that I was deceiving myself, and the "letting go and moving on" was often merely distracting myself, finding a shiny new relationship, staying busy, doing a geographical cure, etc. 

I mean if "healing from grief" or "letting go and moving forward" is just denial, forgetting, the formation of emotional scars and calluses, etc., then it's not really letting go and moving forward. (We are only undeceived of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm- TS Eliot). It's still holding on and carrying forward, but just out of the way, pushed into the shadows. It all just goes under the bed, or in the trunk, or up in the attic, or whatever location metaphor you want to use. 

Maybe all grief is complicated, and the blessed for whom it's just "the grieving process" and they come out of the other side free and clear and ready to "move on" are the real anomaly, and the rest of us destroyed humans are just complicated grievers. 

Also, if there's complicated grief, maybe there should be other adjectives for grief. Mysterious grief. Annoying as fuck grief. Tiresome to everyone who has to listen to it over and over again grief. Absurd grief. Ecstatic grief. Passive aggressive grief. Living through the loss of every familiar inherited value system and paradigm grief. Total global environmental catastrophe grief. 

I have a former student, who, at age 29, was just diagnosed as autistic. We sometimes chafe against labels, but, for her, the diagnosis and the framework has offered her the first flash of possible freedom and self-understanding that she has had in years. Being diagnosed with persistent depressive disorder back in 2017 provided a certain amount of clarity for me. So now, when I go into my next counseling situation, which I hope will be soon, I'll have a label: persistent complex bereavement disorder. Nice. 

Heart's reasons

Relationship recovery and self help stuff is extremely helpful, highly recommended. There's probably no way anyone has been raised in this culture and escaped toxic and false narratives about love and relationships. 

Dog and Peach: an unlikely love affair?

I draw a fairly hard line between recovery and self help, as the goals and methods are totally different for these two areas. In self help, and therapy for that matter, the effort is to gain control of one's decisions and behaviors- the self is still at the center of the enterprise, and solutions involve behavioral change that one manages on one's own. In recovery, one surrenders, unlearns, and endeavors to form a relationship with a greater power, re-centering the business in spiritual principles (admittedly a subjective experience), diminishing the role of the self. 

Both efforts are useful, but I think self help and therapy have limits that recovery does not. The crux of self help and therapy is the assumption that I myself can help and heal myself using myself, which, if you're myself, is demonstrably iffy, and the essential core of recovery is that the self is not effective at overcoming the core wounds and brokenness of the self, just by itself. The process of behavioral change in recovery requires a power greater than the self. This is a confusing sticking point for a lot of people, and I don;t blame them, but, even though I am an atheist, I have never had trouble with it. There is something that works for me, that is a power greater than I, and on which I can rely, and that's all I have needed. 

Anyway, I have been reading Melody Beattie's pioneering syntheses about codependency, and she's fucking annoying. Here's why, thanks for asking: her advice (usually delivered in the manner of a condescending and bossy friend with a smile and an "oh honey listen" kind of brittle exterior) usually amounts to this syllogism: "Behavior x is hurting you. Think about why you do behavior x! Stop doing it!" haha. Okay sis. "Doctor, it hurts when I do this!" "Well, don't do that!" I mean, really, if I were capable of *following advice* do you really think I'd have the relationship history I have? Her essential solution, practically, is to THINK, REALIZE and then CHANGE- a sequence that almost never has worked for me. 

What's your love language?

The early relationship recovery and self help work of a great many popular helpers has an interesting, cynical, dismissive and even contemptuous attitude toward love. Essentially, it's like when someone discovers a new thing and then just runs to the extreme with it. In this case, the "new thing" was the discovery that romantic love in its inherited and unexamined forms is a hot bed (heh heh) of dysfunctional misconceptions (heh heh) and projections and harmful assumptions and behaviors. Having discovered this, the earlier helpers went to town on smashing all of this shit to bits, and were quite thorough in their dismissals and rejections. Very helpful, in the short term. The level of mockery and contempt for falling in love, being in love, romantic attachment, etc. is really amazing though. And you hear it "in the rooms" as well, especially from newcomers. 

I want to balance it all back to more tenderness and understanding, a more accepting and gentle approach. It feels to me like falling in love and being in love are core, key, very real experiences, and among the peak experiences of most lifetimes (and will *always* be a "bad decision," but more on that later) and the acidulous cynicism probably is overdone most of the time, and probably also causes real harm. There's an element also of "rational" and controlling energy in a lot of it. The pure light of reason is great to expose bullshit, but nothing worth living for stands up under scrutiny, and the sheer messy humanity and blood and guts unmanageability of love definitely does not. 

Insight and the human potential movement seem to believe that reason can out reason the heart. But wisdom knows, and knows well, and has known for thousands of years and has shown the tragic effects of trying otherwise, that the heart has its reasons that reason knows not.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

 I'm glad I took some time to do introspective, emotional work back in July. Shortly after the last post here, on July 19, I got a new teaching job in Los Angeles, traveled fairly directly from the Minnesota woods to LA to find a place, signed a lease, flew to Phoenix on a Saturday, drove back in a U-Haul the next day with all the stuff from storage, and moved in. 

Art by Amrit Brar

The teaching job has involved a ton of onboarding red tape, since the school is affiliated with UCLA, and my new faculty orientation started this week as well. The first day was in person, with tons of distancing and masks, etc., and the rest of training for the month of August are via Zoom. 

The apartment is total chaos, as I need to buy shelving, and take care of some other basics. The car needs tires, 120,000 mile service, and a new rear bumper (because I backed into a rock). The tasks and training for the new job are endless. I also foolishly agreed to do a webinar, and I'm still in major revisions of an article on its way to publication. I feel like the universe basically just pulled the plug on introspection. 

Self Portrait by Photographer Noelle S. Oszvald

Back in Los Angeles! The two years that I lived here in the early 2000's were great in some ways, nightmarish in others. The entire experience led to sobriety for me, and at the time, I knew it would be challenging to stay sober living here, so I moved back to Santa Fe. But, after 16 years sober, it's feeling good, living here again. It's a crazy ass city for sure. 

It does not currently look quite like this....

But I lucked out on a great one bedroom for a relatively affordable rent, 3 miles from work, 3 miles from the beach. The neighborhood features every imaginable service and hosts a range of food from around the world (Indian, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican (Northern and Oaxacan), Persian, Italian, American, El Salvadoran, all within walking distance). Wrangling the transition to California is almost like moving to another country, since the systems in place are so labyrinthine. But I'm managing, one day at a time. 

It's a ten minute drive to the beach in Santa Monica. A ten minute drive to work. It's oddly subdued and strange in the city right now, due to the pandemic, but I don't need to go anywhere much, since my entire job is virtual at least until the end of September. I've been maintaining contact with everything I learned in the hermit passage from December 11 until late July, and it feels like the trip through Hades is either in a completely new phase or, miracle of miracles, might be drawing to a close. 

Time will tell. 

Secret Hope of a Hidden Self

I knew that I would learn something important by going right into a sense of hiraeth, nostalgia and sense memory from a shared city. I had no idea, frankly, what the hell I was doing, or why, except that I have done this before, and it has always revealed something. This time, it took a couple of days for me to realize what I was after. 

The oddest thing about my psyche, and maybe yours, is that I am capable of keeping a secret even from myself. I think nothing speaks to Jung's central concept of "the unconscious" quite like this dynamic, where there is an independently operating self (he would have called it a "complex," but not in the Freudian sense) that is not even known to my waking mind. Or that only partially emerges at times and then gets shouted down, denied, argued with, ignored, dismissed, and denied. It's a form of self-anosognosia, like Dunning-Kruger but for the self. We assume confidently that, of all the people in the world, we know ourselves best, and this is often a serious delusion. 

In this case, the visit to the city of memories revealed that a dark, mostly hidden, sense memory, "soft animal" (only very, very human) continued to hold on to the secret hope that "we" would still be together somehow. This astonished me. I honestly had no idea, in my daylight mind, that any part of me was harboring this idea of a future partnership. If anyone had asked, I would have honestly said, oh, no, I've accepted the ending, and moved on. It's sad and all, sure, and it was lovely, but yeah, I got it, I'm done, I've moved on. 

This sorrowful, attached, dark human beast/man in me is far from that, however. And the encounter also taught me that I have not been listening, obviously. Instead, I have been treating this hidden shadow ful of hope the way an exasperated parent treats a hopeful child, who is obsessed with something they can't have. He's not swayed by reason, by dismissal, by exasperated frustration, by exhortation. He is inconsolable and not swayed by anything that my daylight self can bring. 

So I had to find some way to deal with this Other man, heart-centered, sense memory drenched, emotion, blood, dark and hidden, deeply bewildered and sorrowful. I sat on a rock looking out at Lake Kabetogama and realized I could just listen to him. I could leave space for him to be heard. I guess it's a little like that "inner child" work, but, in this case, an inner beastman. The soft human animal of my body, but much more than that as well. Deepest primal cellular self, resonant with the anima. 

He and I are beginning a relationship. He's requested I continue to keep his fondest hopes and wishes hidden from the world. He's torn to bits, forlorn, bleeding, and angry in a lot of ways, and it turns out I haven't been listening to him for a long, long time, not just since December 2018 or whenever. There's a very profound lack of trust. I still have the tendency to respond from my daylight mind, and be dismissive, or try to reason with him. He runs back into hiding if so. It's like coaxing a feral cat out for food. I have to practice simply leaving open space and only watching and listening. Essentially irrational, he believes, or even knows, a great many things I simply do not. In our estrangement, he's largely written me off. There's a lot of mistrust and resentment there that's well-earned by daylight me. 

But I am beginning to learn. He knows what he wants, he knows what he loves. Why do I keep exposing him to heartbreak, confusion, absence, abandonment, loss and longing? That's one of his aching questions. My daylight self jumps to strategy, explanation, reassurance, dismissal. Sometimes exasperation. He makes me feel like a fool. That isn't his fault. I even find myself asking him the same question: why have you led me into so much heartbreak? But in this fissure between daylight me and this dark beastman, I finally get a clearer picture of my complicated grief. The "complex" nature is actually a complex, tat is, twofold self: day and night. For years I have been able to "move on" by simply abandoning him, making a project of forgetting him, and vaguely hoping he would just go away. 

This is no longer a working option.  

Learning to live with it

For some reason, the welter of memories conjured by going back has led mostly, eventually, to gratitude. I'll take it, considering the alternatives. I was driving around a couple evenings ago and the fact settled over me that whatever risks and complications, tensions, nostalgia for what couldn't be, loss, frustrations, sorrow, confusion, or even outright bewilderment, all of it, 100% worth it. I think we need to find moments where this is the case, or something in us turns from blood to cinder. 

I am feeling worn down to the bone today. I taught a demo lesson for one school, via Zoom, and then was in four hours of Zoom interviews with another school, yesterday. I went out afterward to a place that held some sweet memories, had a huge dinner, watched the Minnesota sunset from a dozen different vantage points on the way back to the hotel. The school for which I taught the demo is recommending that I be hired, but it has to go through the university HR department, as the faculty of the school is adjunct at the university. My fingers are crossed that there won't be any hitches, but it means a complete transformation of my life over the next three weeks if so. 

I think most accurately the truth of the past many months has been that I am learning to live with all of it. I don't move on. It's not in my nature really. It makes it challenging to be getting older, since all of what I've been stays with me. But I am learning to accept it. I don't get over things, I don't move on. I learn to live with. Trying to force forgetting or getting over or moving on is futile. It's not in my nature. Letting go looks like accepting that I'm going to learn to live with whatever has happened. 

I've seen that going back and learning to live with are intimately connected. And no matter the anger, sorrow, confusion, chaos, bewilderment, since I'm going to be living with the reality, I'm charged with truth and reconciliation. It helps to use the tools I have for perspective. One day, sometimes one minute, at a time. 

Owning and taking responsibility for all of my own choices, decisions, all along the path. Letting blood stay blood. Washing the grit and cinders from the torn and slashed places. Praising whatever was possible enough to honor it with grief. Plasma is 90% salt water, so, basically the tears that platelets swim in. Learning to live with it. 

Going Back

I think I've probably written about this tendency of mine before, here on this blog, but I'm uncharacteristically too lazy to go back and look for it. I recall a visit to San Diego, during which I went back to a restaurant where the ex and I had had our fifth anniversary (and my birthday) dinner. I simply stood across the street from the restaurant, and remembered the occasion, and felt sad, felt sorrowful, felt the weight of the time that had passed between that celebration and the night I stood there again, and simply...was. In that space, with the reality. 

Last summer I had thought of going back to St. Paul and Minneapolis (I've been resisting "the Twin Cities" because my experience is distinctly different in these two cities, and they feel distinctly different, culturally, in spite of their seeming proximity). But it was clear, from the vantage point of Duluth, that I was nowhere near ready. It felt like it would be altogether too painful. 

This summer, at a remove of two years from my last extended visit, which surrounded a huge botany conference down in Rochester, I decided it was time. So, here I am. On Kellogg Street, within walking distance of 4th and Wabasha, where I stayed a few times. Last night, I had dinner at Cosetta, ice cream at Izzy's (sadly, the St. Paul location is no more, but it was only about 15 minutes to the one in Minneapolis), made a quick trip to a place on Hiawatha that held some of the best memories, and to Minnehaha Park and Falls at sunset. Then, back at the hotel, a quick walk to Wabasha, The Grey Duck, and the general area around the Wabasha Street bridge. 

Today, lunch at Key's Cafe on Robert. 

I will be here two more nights, but tomorrow is fairly full with a demo lesson for a school in LA from 1-2, and interviews with another school from 2-6:15, all via Zoom. 

I know why I am here. I lived it, and I need to honor it before, or while, moving on. I don't move on the way other people seem to, or the way I have been advised to. I tend to move on by going back. I need to feel it in my heart, and own it. I don't do well forgetting, or "detaching," or even just letting go, without some kind of cathartic encounter. I have learned this much about myself. 

Looking north up the Mississippi from Ford Parkway

One of the places

I've never missed anyone more than I miss someone through this process, but that's just one part of it. The larger part is that it is a way of memorializing a past and remembering the gifts of it, and showing up for where my heart actually is. There's a truth and reconciliation aspect to this kind of side quest through Hades. I have known, from other times that I have done this, that it may be excruciating, it may be so dark and sorrowful as to be nearly unsustainable, but the end result is a much greater integration, acceptance, peace, and serenity. 

In recovery, it's called no longer regretting the past nor wishing to shut the door on it. Being here, and grieving while celebrating, and remembering that grieving is a way of saying: "something was worth the praise of being grieved," I am especially made aware of how closed off and protective I had become. Brittle, expending a lot of energy on pushing away the reality of my life at this time and in the past. I'm reminded that it is okay to stop that. It won't kill me to be sad, to miss someone, to remember, and remember, and remember, and to grieve. 

It's not for everyone, I get that. But I know myself well enough to know that, if I want to make peace with the truth, it is one of the steps on the path. To go to the heart of the past. To bear witness to my former self and what he was able to do. To honor the truth of it. And to not be afraid. 

To hold a tender place of praise for what was possible and is no more, but what is still possible nevertheless. I think we underestimate terribly the great value of staying tender. 

Not Knowing the Half of It

My father's interment was Monday, and it's been a weird week. I drove over to see my best friend in Jersey for a little bit, and hang with his amazing DAWG, named Luna, and then went to Long Beach Island, quite intentionally to grieve the death of my father, as he was at his happiest on our vacations there. The Vivian Maier photograph featured here had reminded me of this, a couple weeks ago. The man in the photograph looks almost identical to my father—same clothing, shoes, hair, body type. 

Vivian Maier, August 22, 1956, Chicago Man on Beach

The interment, everyone masked and distanced

Lovely Luna

Several other themes coalesced around the Long Beach Island jaunt, haunt, and tumble. I stayed in the Holiday Inn in Manahawkin, that I had stayed at way back in 2011 on a really weird day where I originally started driving as if I were going to just drop in on an ex of mine in Rhode Island, but then almost the whole way there realized it was a stupid idea, and turned south, and ended up driving through New York City late at night, and all the way to Long Beach Island. This was after a brief family visit, and I just felt insane with loneliness, so I guess that's why I figured "just dropping in" on this particular (married, problematic) ex would be "fine." So I was recalling that odd chapter of my life and feeling some heavy codependent energy. 

Then I went onto Long Beach Island proper and had some incredibly good seafood and went to a little place called The Custard Hut, where we used to buy frozen custard cones when I was like 7 years old. 51 years later the place is still up and running. So a whole flood of memories of my family and my father was coming up. Down to the end of the island to photograph the sunset, which then reminded me of the night before a decisively fateful day, a little more than three years ago. 

The southern end of Long Beach Island, sunset, June 29th, 2020

In short, Monday the 29th was like a Proust novel packed into one day. It turned out, when I woke up Tuesday, that I got a dozen referrals from a private secondary school headhunter I am working with, so to make things even weirder, I did a full job interview with a school administrator on the way back to my sister's, pulled over on the side of the road. 

It's a lot to try to unpack. The switch to looking for a secondary school teaching job was not easy to make. I console myself that I can still search for postdoctoral or college level jobs as time goes on. I feel like a failure, though. It's odd, because I love teaching secondary school. I just had this secret hope that those days were gone. The job search for postdocs or college has been a total frustration, however, and secondary schools are jumping all over me, so it seems like the universe is speaking. Who knows. I'm just done trying to figure shit out. I'm just letting go of every single hope or expectation I've had. It seems like it works best. 

It is the three year mark since a life changing experience that I didn't even realize I was having, at the time, until a little bit later. It's interesting from where I am now to consider that, on July 3, 2017, I had no idea what the next 10 days were going to be about, nor that July 14 on would be so significantly different from my daily experience prior. I think this is always true anyway, but it lends an odd perception now that some surprising thing could be right around the corner. Like, who knows? I tend to think that ten days from now, I'll feel like shit, exactly like I do today, but we don't even know the half of it. Of course, the surprise could also be unpleasant. My sister, for example, who went to bed on March 3rd and woke up a widow March 4th. 

And the estimation of what occurred is always subject to revision. I wish I didn't have a mind that tells and retells and figures and reconfigures so ardently. But, well, if wishes were horses, etc. 

More wilderness and solitude, please. I will probably be on the job hunt while traveling. For this very reason, I switched to the Verizon network, so I'll have a lot more coverage in more rural areas. The tempting feeling in my heart and on my mind is to disappear. To get somewhere perfect for remote hermit life and sink into monastic silence. I had the weirdest dream the other night, where a mysterious woman lived in a shoe box, and she was saying the famous phrase: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well," and I couldn't keep from laughing. A buddy of mine reprimanded me, saying, "Dude, that's Julian of Norwich, show some respect" and I just laughed harder. 

Sunk

Having traveled back across the country, taking from May 27th to June 8th, with stops back up in the Gunnison National Forest, visiting a friend in Denver, to Lincoln Nebraska, Davenport Iowa, Toledo Ohio, and a few days exploring wild parts of Pennsylvania and New York to which I had never been, or had been many years ago, I found the general atmosphere confused, tense, inconsistent (pandemic-wise), dark and feeling heavy. Two days after I left Tempe, my father died, so the entire rest of the trip was wrapped in all of the many responses to that. 

I expected to have internet soon after arriving here, back at my sister's, but through a set of miscommunication and mistakes, it took 8 days. It just went live yesterday. The entire time in between, I was just stressing about looking for a job, feeling aimless. I went to Allentown to help take care of my mother for a few days. Otherwise, it's just been weird. Limbo. 

Meanwhile, the pandemic has hammered Arizona (and many other places that "reopened" much too soon), and I'm glad I got out of there. I was going to stay three nights and I made it two. It felt apocalyptic there. Also, meanwhile, while I was traveling. George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police and the country erupted into protests and round after round of police brutality. I saw hardly any of it on my drive east, as I was passing through areas very little affected, for the most part. But it was always in the background, always on social media. 

Now I'm feeling like I just want a job so I have something useful to do a lot of days, and a place to live from which I can venture out with comrades and get tear-gassed. The purpose of the job is not even to get paid or handle my career or whatever. Just to make some slight semblance of home possible, as a base for participating in some community or other's efforts to defund police, center marginalized narratives, and change for the better. 

Trying to remember to breathe deeply and let go

In spite of everything, emotional keywords are: bereft, lonely, angry, bewildered, sorrowful. Lots of grief in all of its forms unfolding over these days. I am no skilled judge of my own progress, so I take with a grain of salt that I am flat out stuck. Probably something is being worked out in me. 

It definitely does not feel that way. I summon protection, and long for consistent inspiration and fire. But the reality is, I feel sunk.

Death of a Salesman

My father died at about 8 a.m. on May 29th, and I was camping in a fairly remote area of the Gunnison National Forest that morning, off the grid. I got my brother's text the following day when I came down off the mountain. 

My first emotions were a feeling of relief on his behalf, since I had just seen firsthand the incredible constraints within which he lived, physically and emotionally. Also, knowing he had had a stroke a few days before, and was now not only physically imprisoned in his body but also mentally impaired, the idea of life lingering on for him in a bedridden and incapacitated condition just seemed hellish. So I was relieved. 

Of course, I'm also saddened. My father and I had reconciled, in large measure, over the past decade or so, after years of estrangement. He and I were on friendly terms when he died, for which I am grateful. He began to learn how to be supportive, kind, respectful and admiring of his children in his advanced old age, and I was able to let him know that, whatever he had been able to do for me, I was grateful for it. 

There are a great many other complex emotions. My father was a judgmental, controlling, emotionally undeveloped, toxic, bullying, abusive man for much of his life, and, in a direct sense, he did very little actual fathering. Well, honestly, he taught me almost everything I know about self-hatred, hypercritical self-awareness, hypervigilant anxiety, and shame. He also taught me, by negative example, how to be a better man. How to listen to other people, how to value my own experience, how to trust my instincts and pursue my own happiness. 

I would have gotten a lot out of a direct, frank, honest conversation with him, but he was never interested in such an exchange. Talking about experiences and emotions was simply beyond his ability. He had been severely abused by a raging alcoholic in his own childhood, and he carried with him most of the earmarks of the "adult child of an alcoholic" for his whole life. By comparison with his own father, my father was a veritable saint. Not having the opportunity to heal or recover from his own hellish childhood, my father did his level best to "do better" than his father had done. My father's way of attempting this was to be sure we were materially provided for. That was about it. 

The problem with my father's style was that it was rooted in martyrdom. His provision of a reliable material and financial context for his family came at a tremendous cost for him. He hated his job. I believe he never really wanted to do about 90% of everything he did in his whole life. 

He was performing the entire time. Not having access to authenticity and recovery from his own trauma, the best he could do was look good, keep up the look good, and look good at all costs. Imagine how bewildering and horrifying it must have been to try to do this throughout the 1970's and 1980's, as his children were (for example) 15, 17, 19, and 21 years old (in 1976), and the world was collapsing. A staunch defender of the Vietnam War, of Richard Nixon, of "law and order," watching his children be wildly progressive, etc. There was a ton of drama. The themes of chaos and collapse then coincided with the total train wreck of the American steel industry (in which my father was a white collar executive), and a great many other indignities, not the least of which was his being forced into "early retirement" at age 54, after 32 years of "service" to the steel industry. 

Everything betrayed him, because he had put all of his stock into a variety of completely unreliable and dishonest propositions. He believed the lies of the American Dream, and he wanted his children to be impressive, and America was indifferent to his loyalty, and his children did whatever the fuck they wanted. It was only in the past ten years or so that my father learned to accept me (well, about 60% of me) for who I actually am, and I feel like he reached at least some kind of marginal peace with reality before he died. 

The real arc for me was that I saw him as a hero, and then a terror, and then a profoundly pathetic figure. There's a lot of drama in there. The little boy in me, so to speak, always profoundly loved him and wanted his approval. The adolescent in me was contemptuous and resentful of him, bitterly hated and feared him. Now, I grieve the life he had more than I grieve his death. I grieved not having the father I wanted years ago, when I worked through a lot of family system recovery. I did a few thorough inventories of my own role in our conflicted relationship as part of my sobriety work. By the time he physically died, I had reached clarity and peace with the entire story, and it was as if he was already gone, 100 times over. 

His obituary, written by my brother, reads as a set of very fine lies, and I think there's nothing more honest than that, in the final analysis. I still find it shocking that I come from a family of liars and expert denialists. I find the tendencies in myself of course to be the most pernicious. 

One of the phrases in the obituary is "He was happiest surrounded by his kids, grandkids and granddogs with many happy memories of holiday gatherings at home and weeks "down the shore"." This is not how I remember him. I think obituaries should tell the truth, or at least honor a person enough not to tell lies. Our family never used the Jersey phrase "down the shore," for example. We went to the beach. These things matter to me. I guess this is why no one asked me to help write the obituary. haha. 

The idea that we honor the dead best by lying about them seems absurd to me. 

Martin Prechtel, in his somewhat annoying but useful book about grief, The Smell of Rain on Dust, makes the essential connection between grief and praise. We grieve to the extent that we are willing to praise the dead. I praise my father for finding one way out of a hellishly abusive, grindingly poor, dark and sad childhood. I praise him for his sense of humor, his basic decency as a provider, his astonishing capacity for suffering in silence, and his gradual mellowing and increased spaciousness as he headed through his late 70's into his 80's. I praise him for everything I learned from him, negative example or not.