The Not-so-great Migration

That's me above the bowl, hoping I don't wind up flopping around
gasping for air, a totally different, unintended metaphor. 

I am migrating the site to a new platform over at Wordpress, in hopes that the added production value will push my readership into the triple digits! 

Soon I'll be monetizing my grief and I'll have a sparkling Instagram-inspired line of widowed men's lingerie. Here's the new site address:

https://wordpress.com/view/postmortempost.wordpress.com

Thanks to everyone who's read the silly stuff I write over here and thanks in advance for following me over to Wordpress. 

XOJD

The Hunt for Red Faced Self-Forgiveness

The other night the boys and I watched The Hunt for Red October. What could be better than movie night on a rainy November Friday? We took a circuitous approach to the boys’ introduction to the Jack Ryan saga. First, I fell asleep at about 6:40 pm. I ordered Chinese takeout, we ate, I cleaned up the kitchen, and barely made it to my mattress before passing out in full drool-accumulation position. This has become something of an unfortunate occasional ritual for me. I exhaust myself with lack of regular sleep and my self-imposed existential self-flagellation during the week so that staying upright until it’s dark outside becomes a major challenge by Friday. Even in November. 

Fortunately, I’d already set the boys up with dessert and a film to watch: Twilight. They missed the whole series, being too young when it came out and not the core demographic for teen vampire romances. But Freddy asked about it, so I figured why not? About twenty minutes into the movie they appeared in my doorway saying vampire romance was BORING and could they please watch something else. From the foggy depths of semi-consciousness, I suggested Hunt for Red October. “Submarines, spies, stuff blowing up, lots of action and suspense” I managed before turning over and soaking the other end of my king-sized pillow with saliva. 

I awoke in a daze 20 minutes later and stumbled into the family room. Both boys were huddled under blankets on the couch as Jack Ryan presented his defection theory to some D.C. power brokers and James Earl Jones looked younger than I ever remember him being. I joined them for the remainder of the movie. Freddy immediately started peppering me with questions about the Cold War. 

Actually they were questions about what the hell was going on in the movie, but they all pertained to the Cold War in one way or another because, I quickly realized, the film is virtually incomprehensible without that cultural backdrop – the concept of “defecting” was totally alien to kids, and they wanted to know all the significant battles of the Cold War and who won. What do you say to that? Korea? Angola? Ethiopia? Vietnam? All of Central and South America? 

I asked Freddy why he had turned on the closed captioning for a movie in English. He said it was because he was having trouble understanding the dialogue. I asked if the subtitles helped and he said “some.” What’s wrong with these kids? Haven’t they seen War Games? Red Dawn? No Way Out? Rocky IV? Turns out 1980s brink of nuclear disaster diplomacy and espionage lingo isn’t self-evident to Today’s Child. 

Kids today just don't know their oily, well-muscled geopolitical history. 

About ten minutes after I sat down, Benny got kid-tired fidgety. Changing positions, playing with the blanket, asking random questions aloud to the room pertaining to the animal kingdom rather than submarine warfare or Cold War diplomacy. I asked if he was tired and he said “I don’t think I can make it to the end of Red October, Dad,” which was adorably predictable. I reminded him that we’d already just reached early November, but Benny, who normally humors even my worst puns, was too tired to even roll his eyes. I had him lay down against me and within about five minutes I felt his body go slack and his breathing slow down. He was fast asleep, despite the depth charges exploding on the screen only a few feet away. 

It was in many ways the best of all possible Fridays. Sure, there is always an absent center in our home life and huddling on the couch as a threesome instead of a quartet highlights that to some extent. But, apart from the immutable fact of our loss, cuddling on the couch with the boys and watching a not terrible movie I’ve seen before is something even I can’t find much to complain about. In fact, I remember thinking to myself as we watched the film how fortunate it was the boys hung amicably with each other despite my somnolent absence. 

They're still cute...

Speaking of sleepiness, the movie wasn’t finished until after ten, by which time Benny had been asleep a long while and Freddy was getting a bit tired-cranky. Nothing major, but he gave Benny’s limp, overlapping leg a shove when he got up from the couch, shot a dirty look when Benny didn’t immediately wake up (he’d taken over drool duty from me). I cautioned: “don’t spoil a pleasant night; be nice; golden rule, remember?” But, sure enough, as I repaired to my bedroom, I heard the tell-tale sounds of Benny screaming in exaggerated agony and Freddy shouting through tears of anger and frustration. After letting it go for a minute or so, during which time it only escalated, I went upstairs, separated them, and read The Riot Act (abbr. late night version). They went to bed with tear stains on their faces and unspoken insults choking in their throats (or escaping my notice in the blissful decorum of my master sweeeeet). 

...when they're not screaming at each other.

As I threw myself back into my briar patch of a bed, I replayed a scene in my head from earlier in the week. It was breakfast and Benny was being uber-spacy – musing idly into the void when he had yet to get ready for school. It’s been a point of emphatic contention for us: I’m trying to get him to do his own basic tasks without being asked, to avoid me nagging and him forgetting his necessaries. It’s going haltingly at best. For no reason particular to that day’s episode, I lost my temper. 

I yelled at Benny instead of doing any number of things I know would have been more effective: ignore it altogether; gently remind or redirect; ask him if he’s got everything ready instead of scolding him for not being ready; let him express his frustrations before trying to steer him the right way. These are all good techniques and I’ve used them before with varying degrees of success. Not this time. I just lost it. It’s a thing that happens with me, particularly when I’m feeling threadbare, tired, or overwhelmed. 

The problem is: I use those adjectives to describe my mental state way too often these days. I mean, who isn’t threadbare, tired, or overwhelmed and is raising two kids? (If it’s you, well, congratulations, but I also sort of hate you? #sorrynotsorry) Not only are my struggles not valid excuses, they're just practically unhelpful. 

I don’t know how to parent, but I especially don’t know how to parent my own weaknesses. I believe the truism that kids learn a lot more by watching us than from anything we say to them directly. Heck, if my kids learned from what I tell them directly, they’d be the neatest, most respectful, responsible, highly emotionally developed children in the Western Hemisphere. They are MUCH better at adopting all of my worst leadings by example than they are internalizing any of my sententious parental sermonizing. 

How do you keep a nine year old from throwing tantrums when you sometimes have them yourself? How do you teach an eleven year old not to act out of anger or frustration when your impulse is sometimes “emotional Hulk smash feelings first, fix feelings later?” 

One of the ways I really like to make myself feel terrible is by ruminating on the fact that, of all the things that will affect the way my kids develop into adults, a huge portion of them are probably unknowable to me, at least in terms of their relative importance. It’s like piloting a submarine with no training. Sure, the ocean’s a big place, you could set off in a random direction and go for days without hitting anything, even in a massive Typhoon Class ship. But do you really want the first sign of a collision to be the walls of Reykjanes Ridge piercing the hull?

Despite his training & experience,
 Dr. Petrov's is not the face of
calm self assurance. 

I’m not the Captain Marko Ramius of parenting. I’m more like Tim Curry’s Doctor Petrov – along for the ride, seemingly in charge of something, clever enough to get a plum assignment from the Soviet Navy, yet completely oblivious to every single plot development of any significance, and utterly wrong on the conclusions I draw from my own observations (I’m not saying he should have known about the defection plan, but didn’t he at least suspect something was up when they let EVERY other officer stay for tea and asked him to go on some invented errand?! He’s a doctor! Educated! A man of science!).  

I read books and articles about parenting. I talk to my friends about it. I even Mr. Robot style talk to you about it through this blog in hopes this will serve as some sort of parenting stress release valve. I even try to think ahead, to plot a course we can follow through the lugubrious depths of child development technique. But at the end of the day – at least some days – I still screw it up. 

Scott Glenn's glasses are enough of a reason to watch the movie again.
And a good enculturation vehicle for teaching the boys about the 1980s. 

Ultimately, I guess what I’m looking for -- and hoping for everyone else I know parenting kids, especially those doing it alone -- is a good way to not just give myself a break, which is essential, but also a how-to on really believing I deserve it. You know, like Capt. Bart Mancuso when he figures out Jack Ryan played him by “knowing” Ramius always crazy Ivans to starboard in the bottom half of the hour. Or, in case you fell asleep an hour before that scene, like a nine year old whose dad yells at him sometimes but still knows how loved he is and won’t wind up at the bottom of a sea of emotional wreckage.  

Sunday Book Review: Anxiety the missing stage of grief, by Claire Bidwell-Smith

It's not the NYT, but it IS Sunday, and this IS a book review, so as Benny would say:
"it's not false advertising if I think it's true, Freddy!"

A few months ago Claire Bidwell Smith sent me a copy of her latest book -- Anxiety: the missing stage of grief. Full disclosure: I’ve never met Claire, but we have friends in common and her husband is close to Nina’s extended family. None of this was a factor in my assessment of the book. I have no stake except as a reader in the demographic the author is targeting. But still, cards on the table. 

First a spoiler: I have little criticism to offer. The book is practical, well-written, clear, and provides helpful resources beyond the text. I recommend it to anyone who has experienced the loss of a love one, regardless of whether your chief issue is anxiety. 

In fact, that’s my critical angle for this book. I never thought of myself as an anxious person. Nina battled generalized anxiety for years, she had panic attacks worrying that she had a brain tumor or that the kids had some hidden regressive, degenerative conditions. She worried herself sick until she learned to control it and still fought off anxiety despite artfully deploying all the cognitive behavioral tools at her disposal – that is until she was diagnosed with cancer. 

When Nina’s cancer happened, and particularly when it became terminal, she realized that this was the heretofore Terrible Thing she'd long dreaded. She also realized that, while it was terrible, it was just a new twist in her existing life, not some worm hole opening up to the terror dimension. She handled it much as she’d handled everything else up to that point, with a deep consideration for the impact on those around her and curiosity about the meaning to be drawn or created from this turn of events. 

By contrast, I never felt anxiety was an issue for me. Depression, sure. Anger, frustration, compulsive behavior. Hosts of other thigs. Enough to keep my psychotherapist from worrying about his golden years. But when it came to worrying, I always just figured why bother? 

When it becomes an issue, I’ll deal with it. As I read this book, though, I started to realize a lot of what I’d ascribed to “other issues” was really just a manifestation of anxiety. My “what, me, worry?” wasn’t so much a predisposition not to worry, but an unconscious decision to defer anxiety. 

There are a lot of ways to avoid dealing with anxiety, or even identifying it. 

If there’s any thing critical I can say about the book it’s that doesn’t contain any startling revelations or bold new theories. It is a clever synthesis of a lot of contemporary thinking on grief and anxiety. But that’s not exactly a criticism; to me it’s one of the book’s chief strengths. Ms. Bidwell Smith isn’t selling this book as a cutting edge discovery of profound genius. In fact, she appears to have very little ego involved in her project, which makes it both more digestible and effective.

Not only does she use her own struggle with grief-related anxiety as an example in the text, she defers to several experts in areas that run outside her own (she is a licensed therapist and sees grieving patients for a living). This not only lends credibility to her as a narrator and guide, it enriches the text with contributions from some really interesting voices speaking directly to the book’s themes – and they’re not just citations from other works, but also interviews Ms. Bidwell Smith conducted expressly for the book. 

Ms. Bidwell Smith’s organizing concept is guiding readers through the process of recognizing how integral anxiety can be to the grieving process. I found this concept annoying at first. It seemed to me at the outset that this was too forced, that perhaps the author was over-ascribing to anxiety what simply may have been part of the grief. 

But as I read the book I recognized two things: 1. I have a lot more anxiety than I am aware or ready to admit; and 2. Anxiety is fairly ubiquitous – it may not always be pathological or a diagnosable psychological condition – sometimes it may even help us succeed or keep us sharp -- but it is a fundamental part of human life. 

I picked up the book at what felt like a really optimal time for me. It has been 20 months today since Nina died. For the first few months after she died I felt intense grief, but also like I had a clear mission. It was about survival, but also the tangible things that had to get done: Social Security, death certificates, childcare arrangements, correspondence with friends and loved ones. Then there was Nina’s book, a whole other mission in itself. 

But that flurry of grief and loss related activity slowed and ended. Now I’m in the phase of grief where the immediacy of loss in way back in the rear-view mirror, yet the whole normalization of the world around me still doesn’t feel quite right. I am plagued by the loneliness of not having Nina and not even being ready to have a new relationship (though I tried, unsuccessfully, which only made my situation worse and more lonely). I worry about my parenting and the long-term viability of my plans for raising the boys by myself, both emotionally and practically. 

This book brought me back to the fundamentals and walked me through some basic, well-designed exercises that I badly needed. I already knew the material pretty well, either from my own experience with death and dying or from Nina’s anxiety trials and errors. But even the stuff I felt I knew best was presented in a helpful way – manageably, clearly – that got me to re-approach it afresh from the perspective of my current circumstances—a place I’ve never been before. 

Ms. Bidwell Smith does a great job of breaking down basic psychological concepts and techniques for the reader – guided meditation, cognitive behavioral approaches, death and dying preparedness, writing as a therapeutic tool -- but she also supplements these with firsthand accounts from her own experience or that of her patients (several of whom volunteered their case studies in interviews for the book). These concrete examples serve to punctuate the lessons in the book and tie them concretely to the author’s practice, which is a helpful reminder both of her ethos and the fact that all of these techniques and concepts are practical – they’re meant to be actively worked upon. The book is not an in-depth study, but rather a guide to accessing a set of practices, organized around the theme of grief induced anxiety. 

One of the final chapters in the book is on death planning – a subject of almost universal human avoidance. As a lawyer, I can attest firsthand to the fact that MANY of my colleagues, even some of those who do estate planning for a living, sometimes have done no advance planning for their own deaths. There is also a chapter on ultimate belief (or religion). I will simply say that, as one of the most fiercely agnostic people I know, I was engaged and not one bit put off by this chapter, which simply engages with the questions that many people have surrounding meaning and the end of life without presenting or assuming any dogmatic answers (or skidding off the road into the new-age or the occult).  

What ultimately made Anxiety: the missing stage of grief a success for me as a reader was that it resonated in the details. It’s hard to fake a good understanding of grief and loss to someone who’s been through it. I found myself nodding in agreement at several passages, including this one about narrative – telling the story of grief – and the passage of time: 

The further you are from the loss, the broader the brush strokes become, but when I see clients who are in the first year or two of loss, they are still holding on quite closely to the small details that led up to the actual death. They tell me about the date their mom first discovered a tumor, the name of the first doctor she went to and the second and the third doctors, the medications, the surgeries, and a complete blow-by-blow account of the complicated aftermath that ensued. Each of the last painful days is described in detail, often concluding with a shake of the head, expressing disbelief that any of it even happened at all. 

Every moment is important to tell in the beginning … even though we can never really change the outcome, it helps to tell these stories anyway as a way of understanding and accepting them.

When Nina died I was tasked with writing an epilogue for her memoir. Not only was I nervous about writing it (the book was such an amazing accomplishment and I am not a writer, let alone a writer of Nina’s caliber), but I was also in the immediate wake of her death. In retrospect, I was in a kind of shock. Watching her die was painful, probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and it left a profound impression on me. My first draft of the “epilogue” was between 3,000-5000 words and described Nina’s death in EXCRUTIATING detail. I hadn’t looked at it since back in 2017 when I wrote it, but it’s really something. 

When I showed it to a friend who offered to read it before I submitted to the publisher, he gently suggested removing some of the more intense material but refrained – out of delicacy, not editorial acumen -- from giving an honest assessment of what it would mean to append something like that to Nina’s gorgeous memoir. When I sent it to the publisher the response was – thank goodness – more succinct and direct. While they appreciated the hyper-naturalist Zolaesque approach (in both volume and gory detail) of my post-traumatic stress writing, we ultimately went in another direction so as not to ruin Nina’s manuscript and spare latent PTSD sufferers any harm from reading what I’d written. 

I did my best to make Zola proud by writing things that made the few forced to read them sick with horror. 

My first draft epilogue was an obvious misstep in terms of the book, but as Ms. Bidwell Smith recognizes in her new book, it was vital to me at the time to find a narrative for my grief trauma – even if it was one that mercifully few people would ultimately read. In retrospect, I’m quite sure writing all 4,000 of those words helped me enormously by giving me a channel to pour all of my overwhelming feelings into. It is this type of exercise (though not necessarily involving your dead spouse’s publisher) that the author endorses, and this type of trauma she recognizes so keenly that made the book so worthwhile for me. It was at once validating of my experience as a grieving person, a helpful reminder of some lessons and techniques I’d forgotten or got away from, and an introduction to some new material that helped me. I’d recommend it to anyone who’s lost someone they love.

Tae Kwon Do or Tae Kwon Don't, either way you'll regret it.

Last night the boys had Tae Kwon Do testing. They’re now the proud owners of a green belt with a blue stripe. Although their master during the belt ceremony reminded all the kids not to focus on the belt but on the discipline and hard work of learning their techniques, let’s be serious, the very existence of the belt ceremony suggests to the kids that the literal earning of their stripes is a big deal.

I tried to reinforce the master’s message, but I’m pretty sure I sounded like a moralistic scold and a hypocrite – the kids are astute enough to know I have always prized the destination over the journeydespite ample evidence that the contrary rule is the right one.

Immediately after TKD, we hustled down the road to TempleEmmanuel for the unity event being held to honor the victims of the recentshooting in Pittsburgh and show ecumenical unity in opposition to bigotry,violence, and hate. It was a whirlwind of a night for us.

As a family we don’t historically “do” much. I mean, we do stuff; we’ve done things - But we’re not “doers.” The kids and I have a running joke that my martial art is called Tae Kwon Don't. Even when we do a thing, we like to take a long breath afterwards and have some down time to reflect upon the doing. Not rush headlong into doing the next thing. This was always true for me and Nina as a couple and remained so when we had kids. Although the having of kids is a pretty big “doing” unto itself, our style of child-rearing was not the type-A hustle and bustle sort. We tended to keep our kids’ schedules as we did our own – with a maximum amount of blank spaces for down time and recovery.

The thirst for down time was equally shared in my marriage. It’s maybe even one of the key values that allowed Nina and I to be a good match. Bailing on a night out to stay home and order Chinese takeout was a leitmotif of our love language. Our ratio of made social plans to fully executed social plans was either dramatically uninspiring or incredibly successful, depending on which end of the I à E Myers-Briggs spectrum you fall.

I wish I could say single-parenting the boys has made me learn to savor the joys of a more socially active/committed lifestyle. I don’t think that’s quite true. If anything, I crave the ability to lie down and stare at the ceiling more than ever. Not having a second pair of hands to help with dinner, or a partner to respond to the umpteenth request from the kids for a new app sometimes feels like it’s eroding my soul. 

  

On the other hand, there’s no question losing Nina forced me to make some strides. I am now the keeper of our family calendar, which would have been laughable only a few short years ago. As our link to friends and family, I maintain ties to people I used to only communicate with at holidays (or when Nina made plans with them and we didn’t bail and order takeout). It’s more than just maintenance, too. In the past year I have made more decisions than I can count, whether it was the addition and remodeling of our house, the kids’ enrollment in schools or after-school activities, vacations, meal planning or, perhaps most importantly, where to order takeout.

Of course, I’m only doing what all single parents do, and I’m not doing it as well as many of them. But I do think when people talk about resilience this is the kind of adjustment we ought to have in mind. It’s not the “I get knocked down, but I picked myself up again” or “try, try again” mantras that matter so much as the continual acceptance that your days will be filled with small challenges you would likely avoid if circumstances were different or someone else would do it for you. 

Last weekend marked 20 months since Nina died. It's taken all of my resilience over that time to keep meeting the challenges of everyday life. But it doesn’t help any of our resiliency that we live in a time of actual, real-world chaos. My twitter feed alone in the morning makes me want to crawl back in bed, irrespective of any innate desire to do so (which was already very strong, admittedly). Events like the Tree of Life, the double homicidein Kentucky, Parkland, and the now-too-numerous-to-name state sanctionedmurders of unarmed people of color really, truly require us to go into the world armed with some serious resilience. But these are the stuff of everyday life. 

That’s part of why I decided to push through my normal instinct for added down time and attend last night’s event at the temple. I felt extra proud because the circumstances were begging me to give up and go home. The temple was mobbed with people. We had to drive several blocks into the surrounding residential neighborhood to find a parking spot. I was still on crutches from knee surgery. The kids hadn’t eaten dinner. There were so many fantastic excuses not to go.

But instead of not doing, this time we did. I hobbled my way up to a friend who helped me skip the half-mile long (no exaggeration) line and get a seat (leveraging my knee surgery for all it’s worth is the new market inefficiency). I’m not looking for a pat on the back here. I only did what thousands of other Greenborenos were doing – including many elderly and permanently disabled folks. And for the record we left early because the two diabetics in our party couldn’t wait any longer for dinner, and also I fed the kids at MacDonald’s, just to temper the self-panegyric.

I didn’t go to the temple because I fight for truth and justice. I’m pretty comfortable in my armchair liberalism, despite lacking an actual armchair (maybe when I have terminal cancer that quest can be my NYTcolumn? What I lack in talent I make up for in lack of originality.). While I believe individual attendance at these events matters, my presence or absence didn’t strike any major blows for democracy.

I’m not even sure I went to temple to work on my personal resilience. The real motivation was the same underlying my drive as a parent and a widower generally: concern for my kids, fear, and confusion. The truth is that I have NO IDEA how to parent two boys on my own, let alone how to parent through the Tree of Life massacre, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, or the President of the United States sending the military to ourSouthern border as a race baiting political stunt. 

I’m afraid I expose my kids to too many bad influences already, but I also want them to experience things and learn to discern for themselves, which makes me kind of a knee jerk censorship parent. I make poor Freddy submit the names of every band before he listens, but allow him access to heavy metal; I have clamped down on violent TV shows and video games, but I occasionally take them to a movie they're scarcely old enough to understand because I believe it's valuable or special. The truth is, like most parents, I don’t know or understand most of the content they consume. And that’s just the make-believe stuff. How much of the actual news do nine and eleven year old kids need? One artifact of our gun-crazed culture is that there are plenty of resources to help guide parents through communicating about upsetting events, but of course it depends on the kid and the context. 

When I was a kid I wanted it all uncensored and that’s what my guys want, too. But I also never lived through a time when white nationalists were running the country. There may have been just as many people of color murdered during my childhood, but the deaths weren’t captured on video and available on YouTube. I remember when Bud Dwyer shot himself during a live press conference. It was sensational and TV stations issued strong warnings about the content before airing anything about the suicide. Today I’m sure it would still be news, but it wouldn’t stand out. 

Tot Shabbat = my favorite activity I've ever done in a synagogue or temple.
Just look at that adorable cartoon challah and torah.
Now imagine tiny Jews signing silly songs about Judaica. Adorable, I'm telling you.  

The temple isn’t exactly our primary niche. We used to attend Tot Shabbat pretty regularly with the kids before Nina got sick. But Nina wasn’t Jewish and, if you need to practice to be good at it, I’m maybe the worst Jew ever. During the event the rabbi asked all the non-Jews in attendance to stand and Benny started to get up until I gave him a “yes, you are Jewish” look (we practice it during the secret world-domination cabals, held monthly in New York and Hollywood). I didn’t bother with the “you’re not quite Jewish because your mother wasn’t Jewish and the State of Israel wouldn’t immediately recognize your claim to citizenship without a proper conversion” look because I save that for the High Holidays.

The Jewish community does have a special resonance for me/us. We keep one toe in the Jew pool, as it were. And I’ve tried to explain to the kids a million times why we’re still Jewish even if we aren’t religious and I’m not even sure I understand it fully myself. But there is a cultural, ethnic, and historical weight to being Jewish. It’s as inescapable as it is hard to define. If you run from your Jewish heritage, well, that’s a pretty well-trodden and problematic path; but if you embrace it, what does that mean? Judaism must be the only religion in the world with millions of self-identifying members who are avowed atheists. 

I've grown to loathe most things about sports, especially the NFL in recent years,
but the Steelers nailed this one, even if just on a graphic design level. 

But we didn’t go to temple last night just because we’re Jewish. I felt by going to the event, by letting the kids see that people do find ways to respond, to come together, no matter how sad the circumstances, and that we can find ways as a family to join them, maybe there’s an implicit message of resilience and hope in the face of fear and despair. I don’t know. I hope that just by doing I’ll somehow be imparting something and maybe that’s wrongheaded or lazy. But I honestly have no idea how to instill the kinds of resilience my kids are going to need, whether that’s the ability to overcome losing their mom or the emotional stamina to withstand the rapaciously toxic news cycle of the Trump era.

I don’t know how to carry things myself, let alone teach two other people how to carry them. For some reason Terrance Hayes’ lines from his haunting, masterful recent collection of sonnets keeps resurfacing for me: “The names alive are like the names in graves” and "For a long time / The numbers were balanced. The number alive equal to the number in graves." Maybe it’s always awful at some level. The world never stops killing us and maybe no particular era has any claim to a more terrible spectacle of death than any other. We just have to keep saying the names out loud, together, for as long as we can.

If anyone has any other brilliant ideas, I’m so massively open to suggestions.

Jews Mourning in the Synogaugue, Sir William Rothstein, 1906

Perspective

Three dudes, three radically different perspectives on most things,
let alone ultimate questions. 

In rereading my post from yesterday on recovering from surgery, I was struck by the fact that, even in taking myself down a peg for my approach to illness and recovery – imagining what Nina would have made of it all -- I was very much stuck in my own perspective. That’s not the post I meant to write. I guess doing a blog about myself, I’m creating a pretty big inherent navel-gazing risk. But it’s also hard to stand in other peoples’ shoes to tell even a simple story. That’s one of the things that makes good writers so amazing. The ability to conjure not only the voice, but the point of view of another person requires not only language skills, but a keen observational sense that goes beyond most people’s normal social skills (in fact, if my experience with writers is any guide, it may be detrimental to them ;). 

One of the perspectives I struggle most to see, let alone adopt or try on for myself, is a kids’ point of view. I’ve always been particularly wowed by writers who can do this well: Beverly Cleary, Roald Dahl, Judy Blume, Maurice Sendak, et al. Unfortunately, this isn’t just a narrative failure. Seeing the world through a kid’s perspective is a hugely important parenting skill I lack. I don’t mean seeing the world with innocent eyes or some kind of cinematic childhood mawkishness. I’m talking about being able to summon the impact of events on my own children, anticipate their reactions to things – quotidian and profound – so that I can understand their needs and reactions. 

Not to ruminate too much in the realm of ostentatious self-deprecation, but Nina was really good at this. She had a knack for understanding what would make for good kid times that I could never summon. I think in part this stems from her love of her own childhood. 

Whenever Nina reached into her childhood memory bank, the contents were magical, wonderful. Her most powerful childhood memories were: 1. A grass fire by a California roadside that left her searching every room she entered for fire exits for the rest of her life; 2. A wolf that came to her parent’s house in San Francisco when she was 3 and asked for cranberry juice; and 3. A bear who approached her during her family’s cross-country move from California to Massachusetts – when Nina was four – and asked to share her scrambled eggs around the campfire (while, according to Nina, her parents had gone for ice cream without her). I leave it to you to decide which of these events were real and which imaginary – Nina swore they all felt equally real to her. 

Consciously or unconsciously, Nina actively cultivated some of that, I’m sure – the mind remembers through the lens we use to sift through it, to a degree. But her access to childhood memories was also just dramatically immediate – like less time had passed for her than it had for me since our respective childhoods. I think she just stayed in touch with her younger self better. This made her a ready guide for the boys and a much more effective cultivator of childhood magic for our own family. 

Even through terminal cancer, Nina's sense of childhood
magic was clearly undiminished. 

I’ve missed Nina’s depth and facility as a parent a lot since she died. I never felt very good at cultivating the magic of childhood even when she was alive. But even on a more basic level – simply anticipating the kids’ needs or how some of the twists and turns of life after Nina’s death would hit them, I feel ill-equipped. 

This week was a good example. I joked in my last piece about what a lousy patient I am and how recovering from surgery alone accentuated some of my negatives. But I totally left out how my surgery affected Benny and Freddy. When I wrote about my spider cancer dream, I failed to mention Benny’s pallid reaction at the dinner table, when he said “but they didn’t see any cancer on the MRI, right?” The look on his face was the most transparently anxious thing I’ve ever seen. 

I also left out the moment a couple days post-surgery when Freddy came into my room, scorching tears of anger streaming down his face already from a disagreement with Benny, though it was only 6:45 am, and when I asked him why he couldn’t be nicer to his brother he blurted out “what difference does it make? You’re not even going to get out of bed today!” His anger, his frustration, always churning close to the surface in that kid, were boiling over after several days of seeing me gimpy and bedridden. 

I realized that seeing me as a patient from their perspective was its own kind of trauma. Like my own experience, I’m sure it was tempered by the fact that it was just a knee surgery – no one talking about terminal disease or survival rates, no chemo, no radiation, none of the scary trigger words. But also like me, they must have been reminded, as I struggled to do everyday things, took medications that made me feel ill, and, yes, lay in my bed – babying myself probably for much longer than another otherwise able-bodied person would have done – of Nina’s two years of medical intervention that ended in her death. 

I find great joy in looking at pictures from the two years Nina was sick.
They remind me how much fun we still had, how much joy was still
in our lives. But what do the boys see, I wonder?  

This isn’t a reassurance seeking post – I think my kids are fine and, ultimately, it may be good for them to see me as a patient. For one thing, if I’m lucky, they may learn what not to do themselves (is male pattern wimpiness heritable?); also it’s normal to occasionally get sick, even need surgery, or worse. Every medical intervention doesn’t end in someone’s death. Some do. But those guys have hopefully many, many years of sickness and health to navigate, and for us at this particular juncture, it seems right that occasional, non-terminal medical bumps in the road are something they learn navigate. Although my kids’ short lives have already been filled with far too many illnesses for my taste – Freddy’s club foot and diabetes, their mother and grandmother dying of cancer – the truth is that all lives are filled with illness and dying. To the extent there’s a “normal,” it’s normal. 

I guess I want them to remember the smiles AND the
loss of hair, the love and the sadness of losing that
love. But I need to learn to see what they see better. 

Even so, kids don’t see illness and mortality the same way adults do – any more than they do cross-country camping trips. If I want to be a good parent to the boys, I can’t expect that. I have to learn to stand in their shoes a little more, peer up from the view of the Under Five Footers and conduct myself accordingly. 

Do any of you have instances that stand out where you missed the kid perspective on something major that happened to your family? Have your kids ever reminded you that they’re kids just by, well, being kids? I’d love to hear about it in the comments if you’re willing. Sometimes having only one narrative voice can be a handicap, as any good writer would know…

Stool softeners, Zofran, and other remembrances of loves past

This week was weird, even for me. On Monday I had knee surgery. It is the kind of knee surgery that’s so routine that the surgeon feels pretty blasé about telling you he does 15-20 of them a day. But there is no routine surgery when you’re the patient, and in my case, there is nothing so simple and straightforward that I cannot make a convoluted harangue out of it. 

It actually started before the surgery, when my psyche visited a cancer spider surgery dream upon me. This set the stage nicely, as it signaled to me that surgery – even a type utterly removed from cancer or Nina’s treatment – was going to be a trigger. 

Well, it turned out to be not so much a trigger as a bizarre trip down bad memory lane. The day of the surgery I took the prescribed opioids, but wound up with sudden onsets of nausea. I tried not taking the opioids. This resulted in me getting behind the pain curve and not sleeping for two nights. I went back on the opioids, this time with Zofran – the anti-nausea medication which handily enough I still have in my medicine cabinet from Nina’s last prescription. The Zofran did the trick – no more nausea – but then I remembered the downside to opioids and Zofran, which I’d also learned through Nina’s experience – massive constipation.

So back to the medicine cabinet I went for the bottle of stool softeners that have been there since Nina died. Her pain and bowel management legacy, it seems, is replete. It was an odd way to confront or revisit these issues. First, it’s just intrinsically odd to be filled with the desire to tweet “I pooped!” after your longest bout of constipation ever (because I am discreet and value privacy, rather than tweeting I texted my sister – who says decorum is dead?). But also, I ought to have remembered the lessons of pain meds and this was my first real encounter with an invasive medical procedure since Nina died. 

Fittingly, my experience was sort of the diminutive version of the kinds of things Nina went through – a friend who messaged to check in on me after surgery hit the nail precisely on the head when she asked if I were really in serious pain or just suffering from Male Pattern Wimpiness. 

But the connection to Nina’s course of disease was striking and direct. I have never been a good patient. My threshold for discomfort is startlingly low, let alone actual pain. It embarrasses me now, but I remembered when I went to have my knee examined recently that I had knee issues in 2016, too, while Nina was metastatic but not yet end-stage. I remember having great trouble getting up and down the stairs of our house. What must she have thought as she heard me groaning my way through the morning, with her metal vertebrae and Fentanyl patches? 

Here is the actual knee, with its two TINY sutures. Don't let the looks deceive you: a cushy recovery was needed. 

Actually I know exactly what she thought. Nina was pretty direct about things like that. But, though I never became even a half-decent patient, I learned to be a good caregiver to Nina. I remembered when she took her meds, reminded her about anti-nausea or anti-anxiety options, helped her track her pain levels so we knew when to ask for bigger pain patches. It was not only necessary, but that level of caregiving was my way of staying close to her, feeling necessary and vital to Nina as she got closer to dying and I faced down the idea of life without her. 

I had lots of help this week (I know Hilary Clinton meant it about childhood, but it will take a village to raise me until the day I'm lowered into the ground), but it’s weird doing the caregiver-patient dynamic alone. Not only is it an added reminder of loss, it involved so many of the instruments of Nina’s illness it was hard not to feel a kind of flashback sensation. It was so striking that at one point in my opiate induced haze I wondered if I had cooked the whole thing up subconsciously, maneuvered myself into surgery as some sort of weird grief pathology. Like I needed to go through it at some level. I am reassured by the orthopedist’s notes indicated my meniscus was in tatters, but part of me still wonders if some of this isn’t too coincidental to be purely happenstance. 

Whatever the precise etiology of my knee injury – grief neuropathology or just aging jogger syndrome -- there’s no question I did it to myself. And there’s also no question that it has already taken me longer to be ambulatory than it took Nina after they grafted a metal cage into her spine – she stood and walked the next day; I’m still using crutches. Make of that what you will. I don’t think there’s any connection, personally. 

Crash Course in Knee Surgery

I am having surgery tomorrow. It's very minor surgery. I’ve had a balky right knee for ages and it finally just gave up during a jog a couple weeks ago. The surgery is just to repair a torn meniscus. It’s the kind of surgery that’s so minor the doctor told me I could opt to have it or not depending on how much the pain in my knee was bothering me. The surgeon said the pre-op takes far longer than the actual surgery, which he estimates at about 15 minutes of actual slicing and dicing. 

But I have never found a straightforward thing I could not complicate. I have snatched the Byzantine from the clean jaws of Modernism more times than I can count. I knew it was just torn cartilage. I had a cortisone injection a couple years ago and the orthopedist told me then that was likely. When the meniscus was officially diagnosed as the culprit after the MRI, it was as expected. But I felt an elevated level of anxiety given the circumstances. 

I’ve never been hugely anxious about medical stuff, despite a lifetime of collecting weird chronic illness (juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, chronic sinus infections, diabetes, chronic urticaria). But I felt a tightness in my chest when I went to the doctor for the MRI results, and I’ve been in a sort of elevated state of uneasiness all week. As an example, I was having dinner the other night with the boys and my father in law when something Freddy said suddenly reminded me of a dream I’d had the night before: I was having my surgery and, instead of the tiny incisions they’re actually going to make, they pulled back my flesh in four directions—like open heart surgery or an autopsy—and found inside that the whole knee was rotting and filled with spiders, which came crawling out in all directions. “Cancer, clearly,” was the doctor’s diagnosis. My psyche has a very subtle way of sublimating my traumas. 

This is my first serious medical intervention since Nina died, so I guess I just have a hair trigger for this kind of stuff now? I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like I’m living my grief out of order. Not long after Nina died, I met someone and had a really intense connection right away. Probably that blunted some of the trauma of my immediate situation. It certainly delayed some of the loneliness. It was oddly normalizing, because she had also lost a spouse, so in a way the state of loss or widowhood was endemic to the new relationship. Anyhow, I didn’t feel the intensity of some of the vagabond pathologies of grief that can lie in wait for people after they lose an intimate partner as directly as I might have. 

More recently, since I’ve been on my own, the intensity of loneliness in grief is more present as are some of the neuroses. I’ve been having trouble regulating my sleep, I’m edgy and more erratic emotionally than I feel most of my situations warrant, and I’ve developed some hypochondria around things like routine knee surgery (I’m reassured by the MRI, which showed absolutely no signs of spiders, but I also remember from Nina’s course of treatment how unreliable imaging can be, so who knows? Maybe they were just imaging-resistant spiders?!). I am having more of the kinds of days my fellow widows on Hot Young Widows Club describe wherein they are just sick and tired of getting through every day without the person they planned to spend every day with for the rest of their life. I think rationally we all know we don’t literally crawl into the grave after our person, but sometimes it’s hard to convince myself. 

 

Life is a marathon, they say, not a sprint. To the extent that’s true, which seems dubious, I guess it's true for life in grief mode, too. But I have never ever wanted to run a marathon--I hate long runs and in point of fact, they’re probably really bad for my meniscus—and I’m not especially explosive out of the starting blocks either. I don’t really want to run the race at all, is the problem. The only way I ever learned how to motivate through life was in the context of my relationship with Nina. It was both my goal and my means of reaching it. Of course, there were/are other things involved—we had kids, families, friends, careers, and lots of other important goals—but those were all either a product of the relationship or in one way or another secondary to it. 

Since Nina died, I’ve been struggling to even conceptualize what the new goal structure looks like. First and most obvious is our kids. Nina’s dead, but I’m still their dad and they still need parenting (well, Freddy says he doesn’t, but Benny still wants to be parented badly as long as it involves a high cuddling to chore ratio). That’s a helpful framework, but it takes an element of my relationship with Nina—the child-having and child-raising part—and elevates it to the primary focus. And that’s fine, it’s what I’m doing. But it’s kind of like living an abstract of my previous life instead of the whole thing.

Whatever intrinsic value I derive from parenting my kids (and even for a reluctant curmudgeon of a dad like me it’s a lot), it doesn’t address a whole host of things that are important to me, and stands in direct conflict with some of them. As any single parent can tell you, it’s hard to focus on being a solid professional and also be a decent full-time parent. Anyone working full-time has the “work-life balance” issue, but I find my need to be a good father sapping my ambition to be a good lawyer more and more. 

And then there’s my personal life. When Nina died I felt sort of wide-open, like most of my normal inhibitions or hang-ups receded. I don’t know if it was just that grief seemed so much more important than any insecurities or if I was just so blasted by grief that it never occurred to me to feel insecure, but I felt an openness and connection to the people around me that I had not generally felt previously. It’s what allowed me to do interviews about Nina’s book, discuss her illness and dying, and be so public about a lot of very personal, painful stuff. 

I think it also helped me be open to the possibility of new love, along with Nina's encouragement before she died. But recently I have started to feel this emotional supernova collapse back on itself. The very force of my immediate experience of grief – the intensity of the feelings of loss, the relationship I had soon after Nina died, the publicity around her book – collapsing back in on itself a bit. It's not just intimate relationships, either. It's just a generalized sense of social anxiety and a lack of social momentum--it's more work to make a social life happen than it was. 

The potential for becoming an emotional black hole is part of the reason I started writing this blog. I figured that if putting all my crap out there on the internet was helpful before, maybe forcing myself to keep doing it could keep me from folding up my tent and stealing away into the desert now that the momentum of grief has slowed and normalized and started to feel like a long-term burden instead of an adrenalized crisis. 

I just read a book about anxiety and grief (it’s good, I highly recommend it) that reminded me of an exercise I used to do for stress relief: I'd write down whatever I was thinking -- a screed of anger, frustration, worry, fear, whatever -- and then tear up the sheet of paper, or delete the file and never look at it again. Both parts, the writing down and the throwing away, were important components of the exercise. 

The blog is different, because I’m not (yet at least) throwing out the posts after I write them. But it serves a similar purpose. It’s not just a way of staying open to the world, but also a place to make manifest and bear witness to things while I’m experiencing them, a checkpoint, framework, and vessel for the grieving process, which is weird and unpredictable and requires more interventions than I even anticipated.

So, I’m having very minor surgery tomorrow, but when I wake up I’ll probably continue to go through a whole bunch of things that have more to do with my psyche than my meniscus and I’ll need some way to process them and explain them to myself so I don’t go crazy or get too sad and so I can come here for that. And, who knows, maybe I’ll post something before the meds wear off and it’ll get REALLY interesting?

Only the lonely (need to read this post, and maybe not even them?)

 

To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died,

who neither listen nor speak;

Who do not drink their tea, though they always said

Tea was such a comfort.

From Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies, by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Loneliness isn’t actually a disease. I checked the DSM-V. But it’s got to be comorbid with a shockingly high number of mental health issues (off the top of my head: depression, anxiety, eating disorders, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, substance abuse, etc.). It’s also, not surprisingly, comorbid with mortality. This is both apodictically correct and verified with empirical research: when people I love die, I suffer from loneliness. These findings will surprise exactly no one. 

The tricky part about being lonely is that it’s not really about being alone – we all know that, but sometimes forget until we’re actually lonely. I have lots of people in my life: friends, family, colleagues, the woman who runs the coffee shop and remembers more about my kids than I do. I am not alone. But I suspect many of the loneliest people are found in crowds and most of my loneliest moments aren’t cold, long, solitary winter nights (though it WOULD be nice to have some company then – not saying I’ve never considered (and rejected) professional cuddlers). 

Of course being alone CAN make you lonely, but loneliness as I’ve come to know it isn’t so much being by myself as being without someone in particular. And the kind of loneliness caused by grief isn’t just about that person’s unavailability – as in unrequited love – but their annihilation, the total absence of a person and the relationship in all its multifaceted existence in my life. Lonely is what we feel when the one thing we want or need is a specific person who doesn’t exist anymore. 

The startling thing for me about loneliness is how many different ways there are to feel it. Pull on any thread in the ole grief sweater and you’re bound to bare your whole lonely torso completely. Picking out a new minivan is a lonely activity if you’ve only ever bought cars with your partner – even if you bring two kids and a father-in-law along. But so are smaller life events, like deciding what to have for dinner, or which pictures to hang on the living room walls. 

Fun fact: Only the Lonely = not just a song made famous by Roy Orbison, but also
a 1991 cinematic vehicle for John Candy and Ally Sheedy. You're welcome.

Raising kids is an obvious vortex for loneliness. For the widowed, even if the village it takes to raise your kids is ready, willing, and able -- as in my case -- I’m still left child-rearing without the other half of the parental unit. Nothing in my life feels quite so lonesome as holding the parental tiller for two boys who need their mother eve more than I do. That’s true whether we’re deciding on bedtime reading or discussing the birds and the bees. Which: yipes -- I’m sorry in advance to their future partners for whatever it is I’m doing to these poor guys. Hopefully you’ll be very skillful?

Every shot like this one is a game of emotional Where's Waldo
played looking for the dead. 

Everyone who’s lost a partner probably craters a little internally like me with each milestone their child hits. We memorialize the dead plenty, but we can’t sufficiently account for their absence from every living moment – we just look at past photos of the family intact, while taking new ones with an imaginary chalk line overlaid in each in the shape of the dead.

One of the times I miss Nina the most is during our annual trip to Cape Cod. It’s inescapable and obvious, a place so saturated with memories of her that it would be weird if I didn’t feel lonely for her. But some of my most intensely lonely moments have been without any obvious context cues: sitting in bed reading, looking at my iPhone calendar, grocery shopping, driving home from work. These moments are ordinary in every way except that I feel like I might peel the skin off my face, douse myself in kerosene, and run screaming into a campfire to try to relieve the crushing loneliness. Sometimes I wind up sobbing from sheer desperation at the idea that those moments might go on and on forever. 

Cumulative loneliness is the worst. Anyone can get through short bouts of being lonely, especially if there’s an end in sight. But an open-ended future with no promise of extinguishment for loneliness is daunting to me. I’ve tried to be honest with myself about how hard this is for me – I don’t like being lonely one bit and don’t feel particularly well-equipped to cope with it. Not that anyone comes naturally equipped to lose their person, but I can already identify ways in which my reactions to being lonely has influenced my behavior in problematic ways. 

Relationships are a landmine for any widowed person. Part of that is just the general emotional upheaval of loss. It’s the worst kind of roller coaster: badly constructed, unpredictable, poorly maintained, and never inspected for safety. Not the ideal conditions for relationship formation. 

There’s more to it than just damaged sustained, though. In my case, I’ve realized the potential availability of a relationship is like a narcotic – and I’m a bit of an addict. Since Nina died, I’ve had massive withdrawal symptoms and the obvious solution is to indulge my need for intimacy, attention, support, and all the other loneliness-countering properties of relationships. But I’ve also learned that I’m not emotionally equipped for a relationship right now. 

The problem isn’t that I’m lonely and seeking a relationship as a stopgap or palliative measure. I'm not trying to rebound from grief. But, even when I am confident the relationship is solid irrespective of loss, it's fraught. The feelings of desire and intimacy in a newly forming relationship make the same kind of shape as the void left by grief. There’s no way to tell where one starts and the other begins. Even if a new relationship is healthy and strong, it can mask the pain of a loneliness that it cannot cure. It’s a weird catch-22 (which is a tautology) (which is itself an abusive use of elaborate diction). 

I'm not sure how anyone knows when they’re “ready” for a relationship under any circumstance -- I wasn’t “ready” to be in a serious relationship when I met Nina by any rational criteria, and were together nearly 18 years when she died -- but whatever signals this readiness, I’m pretty sure the standard caveats don’t apply after loss. It’s not just the passage of time. I know plenty of people who dated and even remarried happily soon after losing a partner. But there is at least there is an indeterminate quotient of time + other things I need to work out whatever my stuff is that needs working out. 

It’s more of an emotional state of readiness than just waiting for pain to subside before the greenlight. I await the silent, mysterious tumblers that shift our perspectives as we pass through different stages of life clicking into place. I wake up occasionally and things that had me twisted in knots just seem less fraught. I can’t make this happen willfully, but it’s happened enough that I’d call it a pretty regularly event. Eventually, after some combination of time, effort, and experience, the wound no longer smarts quite so much, which in turn makes me stop avoiding whatever I perceived to be causing the hurt, which alters my behavior or thought process in innumerable, imperceptible ways. 

I’m hoping the loneliness will be tied to the mechanics of one of these tumblers. That, even if I’m not savvy to the inner-workings, my gears are set to the right ratios. That one day I’ll wake up and not feel it so keenly -- and not because I’m “over it” or confused by the throes of a new relationship, but because I stop feeling quite so alone. It’s not that I won’t miss Nina then – I expect that every time I think of her for the rest of my life I will have some degree of loneliness – but I hope my perspective will have shifted enough that I don’t feel armed against the possibility of new connection or blind to its potential to obfuscate my grieving. 

In the meantime, I did what any sensible widower would do: I made a playlist of songs about loneliness and listened to it while I watched lengthy slideshows of family pictures with Nina in them. When the kids weren’t around. And the housekeepers were gone. And the dogs weren’t looking at me with accusatory need. And my work was done for the day. And I was left actually, truly alone for a bit with my loneliness, which after all is an artifact of the most significant and dearly loved part of me and my life.

LINK: Only the Lonelys Playlist