Mom

Today is a day I traditionally wax a bit serious. It was 43 years ago on this date that my world changed forever. I had just turned 15 two weeks earlier and was at that magical age that I could be equally excited about Hot Wheels, GI Joes, and girls. In other words, before January 27, 1975, I was still a kid. After that day, my childhood vanished.


It was a Monday. My mother had been suffering from the flu for days. And she was too sick to drive me to school, so I walked the 1+ miles in the snow. Just like the cliche but shorter. When I got to my grandparents house after school (my normal routine, another almost mile), I found out mom was in the hospital. So off we went. One more mile. Worried but not scared.


At the hospital it took a bit to wake her but she finally did, just enough to greet me with a kiss, and she dropped off again. To while away the time, I sketched her picture on a mini note pad. The family stepped out of the room for a little break. After a few minutes I looked into the room and noticed that her lips were blue. I ran to get a nurse, who verified my findings, and then ran to get help. We waited for 3 hours and at long last the doctor told us she was stabilized but in a coma. By this time other family and the pastor had arrived. The next 5 days (and beyond) are a bit of a blur. I have always referred to it as hell week. Bits and pieces stand out. They had to switch her ventilator from a mask to a tracheotomy. They didn't have a brain scan machine [electroencephalogram] at the hospital and since she could not be moved, they had to wait to borrow one from a bigger hospital, which couldn't be arranged until Friday. We got that news on Wednesday. We spent our daytime hours at the hospital and our nights at home crying and bargaining with God. The pastor and the elders performed a rarely used anointing ritual for healing. Friday finally came.


I remember the exact moment when childhood left me behind. It left me, not the other way around. You were at some point supposed to leave your childhood behind. At least that's how I figured it was supposed to happen. The family and the pastor were all in the conference room waiting for the doctor. He came in and said there was no brain activity. My mother would never wake up. So the question was what did we want to do.



This was a time before all the publicity about end of life decisions. Laws now have much to say about our situation. But back then our choice was simple. My mother could be kept alive in her present state indefinitely. Or we could--knowing there was no hope of her regaining consciousness--take her off life support. What should we do? My grandparents, who had survived World War II and being refugees in a work camp afterward with my mother, were grief-stricken in way I never thought possible. Their realized dream of coming to America to start over, was now for nothing. Their only daughter had been taken from them, whether she lived or died. And while I had no legal standing being a minor at the time, I remember all eyes turning to me. What should we do? Looking back on it now, that might not be the reason why everyone looked at me, but that is the way it felt at the time. And really, what if I said, don't kill her, she's my mom, might it not have been enough to convince everyone to keep her alive, at least for a little bit longer? (The Karen Ann Quinlan case would make the national news three months later, initiating all kinds of controversy and debate about end of life decisions; she ended up living in her comatose state for another 10 years. I followed the story closely at the time and remember being sad when I heard she finally passed away. But we didn't have her case in front of us to glean any wisdom from it, and I don't know if it would have influenced our decision anyway.) I remember getting up from the table and looking out the window through the venetian blinds (because that's what they do in movies), tears welling up in my eyes. I turned back around and announced my opinion. What else could we do? She was gone to us already. I stabbed my grandmother in the heart. But she also knew I was right. Papers were signed and my great uncle asked to be present. (He later wrote about the experience which I always cherished.)


That done, my first act as a man was to go tell my great aunt the news in the lobby. She couldn't bear to come up with the rest of us. (Truth be told--or maybe reimagined--I needed to get out of the room; I was the fastest one there and it made a good excuse,)  I remember the elevator doors opening and making eye contact with her. I realized at that moment how powerful a look could be; no words were necessary and that's probably a mercy. I walked up to her and she clung to my arm and wept. (In writing this tale, this is where, 43 years later, my eyes got moist.)


My mother didn’t actually die from the flu. At least not directly. She just had the flu at the time she died. Her cause of death was “a massive brain hemorrhage”; apparently she had an aneurysm. In the days leading up to her hospitalization, she slept a lot, and when she did wake she would vomit. She was unable to eat real food, but would drink a little tea. In my head I think the constant vomiting probably raised the blood pressure in her head once too often. Just a hunch, but it makes sense to me.


I have lived a lot of years since. Who I became in life was shaped in a large part by this day. But it was also shaped during the 15 years leading up to that day by the woman who made sacrifices to give me the best childhood she could. She let me be a little kid and loved on me every day. And she gave me enough stuff to take of the business at hand when the time came. I've had plenty of hard decisions to make, and I've made many bad ones along the way. But I hope she's proud of how I turned out. I had a lot of help from a lot of people and that can't be stressed enough. But it all started with her. She was a dream mom. And I am a very lucky man to have had her as mine.



I miss you, Mom.

It's been a while

I'm tired.
I'm tired of needing to sleep.
I'm tired of not being able to sleep.
I'm tired of waking up in pain in both body and soul.
I'm tired of needing to eat.
I'm tired of needing to work.
I'm tired of being bored.
I'm tired of not wanting to do something.
I'm tired of being alone.
I'm tired of not wanting anyone around.
I'm tired of the world we live in.
I'm tired of how stupid we're all acting.
I'm tired of living, but I don't want to die.
I'm tired of being tired.

As I sit here and put these words together, I am not any more morose or melancholy than any other day. You may know me as funny--or trying to be--or happy. And I am. At least the happy part. But every single day, I feel all the rest of the things I listed above, sometimes multiple times. I have been sharing my grief life as openly as possible with you. I am not always okay, and that's okay. I may not be okay at a deep level; I don't know but I suspect that it's true. I may never be okay again; also a possibility.

Am I writing this now because I just had a birthday and feel old? I don't think so. Am I doing it because I really feel "old" now? In other words, am I tired because I feel old? Perhaps. I certainly don't feel as young as I used to. Am I just feeling the effects of long term depressive episode brought on by a traumatic incident? Probably. Again, I don't know.

I do know that I said I would share the experience with you. But I'm not doing it for the attention or sympathy or as a plea for help. Not for this entry anyway. I do not want to have any comments made on this post; I will delete them. I cannot stop you from "liking" it (without blocking you, and I don't want to do that) and so I respectfully ask that you refrain from doing so. It may be unbelievably tempting, but please, just don't. Feel free to continue to do so with any of my other posts. Seeing your responses is a highlight of my day. Everyday. But this one is different. You need to know that everyday is a process.

If you have never experienced a close personal loss, maybe this will help you when that time comes. If you have, then you know and this can be a reminder. Life is unrelenting in it's forward movement. It goes on whether we try to withdraw from it or not. I am not withdrawing. Not entirely, anyway, and I am still optimistic that "things will turn around". Part of that, of course, is up to me. And part is letting things work themselves out. It's not easy, folks, but not much about life really is, is it? What I want you to know from this--the "takeaway" as it were--is that no matter how dark it gets for me (and hopefully for you), there is always that tiny part of me that says, "the night will fade away, as it always has every morning since the beginning of the world. Wait for it, the sun will rise, the dawn will gradually break, and darkness will flee as it always has."

Get through this life as best you can. There's still a lot in this world to be happy about and to marvel at. Enjoy what moments you can, and they will give you what you need when things aren't so great.

Just had to get that off my chest. Thanks for "listening". Have a great day.

WHY??

I lost my wife of nearly 28 years just over seven months ago. I have spent the time since trying to find purpose in a suddenly meaningless existence. I do not write this to garner sympathy for myself because--boo hoo--I'm having an existential crisis. I am quite capable of feeling sorry for myself without any outside help. My issue is this: I want to live in a world that I can live with. (Don't we all?) But as I look at the world around me, I find it less and less like the world I always thought it was. Or at least as it was meant to be (more on that in a moment). Where once I held hope and optimism, I now see only ugliness in the form of pettiness, hatred and tragedy. Everywhere I look, there is an undercurrent of conflict and divisiveness. No one appears to care about Truth, Beauty, Compassion or Justice. I want to live, to continue living, even though my primary reason for doing so has been taken from me. But I find that I don't want to live in the world as it is now. The world has made it very difficult for me to want to go on living.

There are flaws in my world view. And there is more than a single source for these flaws. There are quite a few, in fact. Some come from within, others are strictly external. Let me try to break it down.

Obviously, a serious argument can be made that the reason I feel the way that I do is that I am still reeling from grief, a powerful source of emotion. I feel wronged by the cosmos in a very intimate way. I have been "wronged" before and have always come back; I have  prided myself on my resilience. I've taken a lot of hits in the past. Maybe, because I'm "old" now, I just took one too many, maybe I finally just broke. In the past, I always had the inner belief that things would get better. I'm not so sure this time around. Maybe this loss has cut me deep in ways I have never encountered before. But I should still have hope, shouldn't I?

This brings me to the second internal "flaw". Perhaps I was (as I like to call it) stupidly optimistic in times before. Maybe my world and the world around me has always sucked. History and my own experience has ample evidence that this is true. There have always been wars and disease and disasters. Murders and brutality and deceit. Read the news, read a book. Look at me. But there is beauty and intelligence and charity out there. I've seen those as well. So the "world" isn't "perfect", but it has Good to balance the Evil, Light to chase away the Darkness, Life to combat Death, Love to conquer All. Karma and Justice happen. Or at least statistically they will whether or not someone makes them happen. And statistically, Justice fails, Karma gets deferred. Balance. But someone has their thumb on the scales, don't they? Don't worry, it will all even out over time. Tell that to the wrongly convicted, the falsely accused, the mercilessly tortured and executed. Where is their Justice? How will Karma serve them? Down the road in another life? What about Now?

The here and now is all we have. And it's my Now that I'm having trouble with. I see the world now as it is presented to me through the television and the internet. And once upon a time through newspapers and history books. (History books? Yes, the present is firmly and unbreakably rooted in the past. So I gathered insight into the Now by looking at the Then.) But there is an inherent problem with acquiring knowledge in this way: the knowledge is filtered through the subtext of whomever presents it, and it is left to me to interpret the truth using my own filter of my own subtext. It is the two-edged sword of Truth. George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” Or at least it is said that he said that, or something like it. The problem is that for true communication to take place, the message that is intended must be received as it was intended. Failure for this to occur led to the creation of the word   "misunderstanding". This, of course, can lead to horrible, sometimes catastrophic consequences.

But things go deeper than that. Because the intent might be to deceive or "misrepresent". When I go to a news website, I go with the intent to learn what is new in the world. Not everyone does. Some people go to find out what other people think about what is new in the world. In this way they might be able to gather a more insight. Or they might be able to reinforce what they already believe. There is a danger in this. My news sources may themselves may have the facts wrong or be outright lying. What am I to believe? This is an instance where "democracy" fails. Just because there might more people who believe an untruth than people who don't, doesn't suddenly elevate the untruth to Truth. We now stand upon the mountain-nay, the mountain range--that has been dubbed "Ulam's Dilemma". Paraphrased by Reuben Hersh, it states: "If the number of theorems is larger than one can possibly survey, who can be trusted to judge what is 'important?'" In other words (paraphrasing a paraphrase further; am I diluting the truth?), with so much "information" out there, it is virtually impossible to know what to believe. Solomon in the book of Eccesiates wrote, "And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh." (Chapter 12, verse 12) Extend the meaning of books to include websites, et al. and that's a whole lot of reading. The information "out there" is what we have, right? What else do we have? Our own potentially flawed inner compass? Short of trusting our own judgment, we can only do what we call "best effort" at work. And hope for the best. (pesky Hope again...)

Best effort is a simple two word construct that beautifully describes "all we can do". Best effort requires two ingredients which are laid out for us in the very term. First, we must do the best we can to discern the truth. We should not simply accept at face value the first thing or anything we read. We should read about other opinions. Form our own opinions with a wide variety of sources. Get a feel for the "type" of people that hold these opinions. Are they credible? Did they do any research themselves" Or are they just spouting off things they've heard, or things they already believe and have done just enough research to support their position while ignoring those whose whose opinions support the opposite? Are they shutting off their ears and brains simply to join the crowd? Do they mock the opposition and engage in confrontation instead of welcoming rational debate and being open to other ideas? The second element is effort, some of which I have already detailed above. Do the work. Do the research. Don't let someone else "speak" for you, or worse think for you. Form your own opinions.

In my experience, most people who have negative opinions (and that is a very "diplomatic" expression with reference to some of the things I have read) about groups of people--chose and insert your favorite demographic here--have never even met, let alone talked or had any other kind of interaction with anyone associated with the group. How in the world can you form an opinion about an entire group of people based upon the words and deeds of a few of the people from that group, whose own members might be disagreeing with? It's possible that 99.999% of that group agrees with you on almost everything (except your hatred of them as a group), and you don't even know it. Why? Because you never hear anything about them. You never hear anything from them. And, most telling, you don't know any of them. They are living in their little world just like you are. They are quiet. You don't even notice them, unless something about them (their color, their speech, their funny clothes) brings them to your attention. Oh, they're one of "them". No, they're not. Not necessarily. They might be, but you don't know. How can you? You've never spoken to them.

I'm told that America is broken and divided and torn up. That things are terrible right now and we need to fix or there won't be an America. That might be true. But when has it ever been any different here? It has always been broken and divided and torn up for someone. Anytime we look back at history and say, "Yeah, things were much better then", we aren't looking at the ones from the same period who didn't have it better. And while the groups that have had it worse have changed from one period to the next, the story has not. There has always been a group--most times more than one--that has been on the outside of the alright. And even the ones who were alright have always been divided. And guess what? The whole world is in the same mess and has been from the beginning. You read and hear about it every freakin' day. Everywhere. Since the beginning. This is nothing new. It only seems worse now because we are in the middle of it. I grew up during the Cold War's greatest hits. And Viet Nam was the only reality show on the TV. At home we all lived under the constant threat of nukes blasting us out of existence, while on the other side of the world we were very accurately keeping and reporting of the body count of our Armed Forces who were battling someone because someone else higher up told them to while being protested at home. Please tell me again that things are worse now. I'm listening. Dial it back a few years and we had World War II. Was that the better time? The Great Depression? World War I? How about the Civil War? (Something, something, slavery, Lincoln) Or the American Revolution? Our country couldn't come up with a workable Constitution until 13 years after the Declaration of Independence because they couldn't agree on it. Of course the decision to separate from England was a hard-fought battle of words in the first place. Should I even mention what followed after Columbus made the trip? One of the favorite games we played was Cowboys and Indians (Cops and Robbers, and Army were the other two), and guess who had to be the losers every time? Well it had to be that way because, Movies.

I mentioned these events from history, because those are the ones I learned about in school. All horrible things in America's past. But what about the times between the wars? Surely all was good then. Um, nope. A lot of things in the history books didn't mention all. And that list is a whole longer than the one I gave above. Things I can't even believe could, let alone did, happen in the Land of the Free. And that's just American History. Pull the camera back and shit has been going on all over the world since there has been a world. We are simply continuing the cycle. Can it be stopped? Slowed down? Reversed? I don't know. I only know what I read and hear.

So where does that leave me? (And by that I mean "Us".) As I survey my own small part of the "World", one thing does become clear. I am surrounded by an enormous group of people made up of family, friends, associates, and acquaintances that have vast amounts of empathy and compassion in their being, right next to their intelligence, humor, honesty, courage and fairness. It is to the point, at least in some cases, that the lines between family and friends, friends and associates becomes more than a little blurred. What I don't see is a bunch of people screaming at each other because of some "difference", be it political, religious, economic or social. In my day to day interactions, most of the time, I am not aware of their belief system or country of origin or their preferences. I like a lot of people, many of whom might very well not like each other. I like a few people who are frankly quite unlikable. I don't have to believe the same thing they do or come from where they do or like the same things they do or look like them or act like them or even talk like them. But here's what I think is important about this. We don't shoot each other or try to burn each others houses down or throw rocks at each other. We don't even raise our voices at each other unless we were personally hurt by them. We get along. We tolerate each other's quirks. We might get annoyed with one another and we try to work it out. We don't call each other names (unless we're real close and have both decided it's okay to do so and it's all in fun). Husbands and boyfriends out there, really, be honest, how many arguments have you won with your wife or girlfriend by calling them a bitch and really meaning it? Did it help the situation any? Even a little?

So about this world as I see it. Yeah, it's messed up out there. But I don't think the problem is as big or as two-sided as everyone is being lead to believe. We're told we are "polarized". But are we? It's easy to put things in terms of Us and Them, especially when we don't actually know Them. I look around and all I see is Us. One big Us. And it's up to Us to find a way. So in spite of everything else, I still have hope and stupid optimism. Because of the people I know. I don't think most of the people in America, or even the World, are that different from one another. Sure there are extremes and extremists, but not most of us. And we are the ones who are going to have to find our voices and take action to let everyone else know the world is still worth living in. And I can live with that. And that is why.


 

A Long Time Coming

Welcome to my humble blog. It been a few years since I started this. I am finally getting around to rebooting it.

My original posts seem inane to me now. But they were apparently what I thought was "important" at the time. Musings based on current affairs with a "humorous" twist. Eh. I am no longer amused by them so I pulled 'em.

My hope with this reboot is to discuss deeper matters. Political, religious, and--yes--philosophical topics. That is not to say I won't be delving into more trivial subjects now and then; my interests run the gamut of human experience. I love cars. I love comic books. And movies of all kinds. I am into science fiction, fantasy and horror. I love all things science and history and art. Sooo, pretty much anything is fair game.

I hope people will comment on my offerings. I want you to share your point of view. I don't mind if you disagree with me, but I hope that your tone remains civil. Say what you will about me, but don't be insulting to others who may post a comment.

This may be the most boring post I have ever written, but I wanted to do something by way of an introduction that gave a sense of my intent. Every blog everywhere has an agenda, or at least a focus or sense of purpose. This is mine. To begin earnest and rational dialogues with the intent of informing and in turn being informed. To communicate what is in my head and my heart. With you. My dear reader. That together we may come to an understanding of truth.

Or not.