Florry of Activity

I was supposed to be in Minneapolis today for a federal sentencing event. Instead I am in North Carolina awaiting Hurricane (and hopefully Tropical Storm by the time it gets to us) Florence. Apart from the usual Weather Channel hullaballoo sensationalizing the latest named storm of the season (Catastrophic Threat! Inland Exodus! -- the guy who writes their headlines used to work in Hollywood writing trailers for Michael Bay films), there has been a justifiable amount of fervid preparation on the ground.

The Governors of NC, VA, SC, and GA declared states of emergency, many friends and relatives in the impact zone at the coast were ordered to evacuate, and we've been told, even this far inland, to prepare for heavy rains, high winds, and possible flooding. Florence is a massive, powerful, serious storm (or, in the jargon of the congenitally stupid: "tremendously big & tremendously wet"), and I don't mean to denigrate emergency preparedness efforts -- everyone near the coast who can should get out of the way of this thing. And I am not immune from small scale prepping: I keep extra batteries, a weather radio, flints, long lasting candles, and a few other emergency supplies handy, and I've set aside extra fresh water and bought food earlier in the week just in case we lose power (or go to war with North Korea in a fit of Twitter pique).

But, as the parent of an anxious child,  I do resent the sensationalized tenor of the ramp up. Benny has been having a tough time managing all the nervous energy surrounding the real-life threat, given that even the adults at his school are telling him he needs to be prepared for everything from hurricane winds to flood waters. Benny has never experienced a hurricane, and to him, it sounds like the waters are going to simply fill our house and drown us all. He keeps saying he's "worried about his stuffed animals," who just happen to liven the same second floor bedroom he occupies -- so his anxieties are not heavily masked. I try to get him to center himself, focus on breathing before bedtime, do progressive relaxation exercises. But all my reassurances are met with the same litany of responsive fear: a list of things he needs to pack and series of questions about the destructive power of hurricanes (which in turn leads back to my reassurances, and so on ad infinitum). It's not his fault, the situation is uncertain and a real-life disaster cannot be ruled out -- this is to anxiety what a Big Mac topiary at a wedding would be to Donald Trump. Benny's fears are luxuriating in it.

To be fair to Benny, he's not the only one made anxious by all the fanfare and sharp graphics on Weather.com. His brother is playing it cool, but every time he poo-poo's Benny's fears, I can hear in his sharp tone a strong undercurrent of uneasiness. And even though the boys were going to stay with my father in law -- probably the handiest most resourceful person I know -- I cancelled my trip more than any other single reason due to the fact that I just didn't want to be a time zone away from the boys while a storm was slamming into our state. I live these days with a constant sense of precariousness, and I find myself tolerating a lot less when our delicate balance is threatened.

I hope everyone we know East and South of us is in a safe place or out of the way of the storm. I'm calming myself by thinking of the event as "Florry," who was one of Nina's cousins, rather than Florence, who sounds to my ears both mean and overly formal. Nina spent a summer as a teenager cooking and helping out around the house for Florry, who was the keeper of the family genealogy for many years, a project Nina helped with as well. And as one of the two most elderly guests at our wedding back in 2000 (when she was in her early eighties -- she lived until 2011 though!), Florry got to ride to the ceremony in the horse-drawn carriage that also whisked us away afterwards. Replacing the hype of Jim Cantore with a fuzzy marriage memory can't hurt, right? Plus I feel I'm simultaneously diminishing the storm and conferring on Florry the level of Category 4 hurricane. Go fam.

So this is your Duberstein-Riggs public service announcement on Hurricane Florry and managing anxiety during a natural disaster. See the images above and please take note of the actual emergency preparedness list provided by Guilford County Schools, as well as Benny's ardently felt cartoon, sketched in haste, presumably while he was supposed to be listening to the emergency hurricane preparedness lesson at school.

September 11th: the Afterthought

September 11 was my dad’s birthday and, though he died back in 2005 and I rarely remembered to send him anything on his birthday when he was alive, I’ve taken to posting something “to” him on 9/11 over the years on Facebook. It’s one of the few ways I keep in touch with my father – the two of us weren’t especially close – and also gives me a chance to steal back a teeny bit of his birthday from both the high-jackers (if I don’t post, the terrorists win!) and hyper-patriotic 9/11 memorialists. So, now I have this blog, I’m doing it here:

This is way back when my Dad was still getting his comeuppance. You're welcome, Dad. 

Dad:

Frst, per tradition, a sports update: the NFL has taken to kowtowing to our klepto-fascist former reality TV star president, who succeeded the highly competent (if somewhat painfully centrist) first black president in office because racism is apparently a very sensitive emotional faculty and the racists had the biggest electoral hissy fit ever, by punishing players for protesting the inhumane treatment of minorities by police in the United States during the playing of the national anthem at football games. And, in case they don’t do political news in the hereafter, that’s the one of the least offensive things that’s going on right now.

Anyhow, the Steelers did their typical “this whole thing is a non-event / show of team unity” thing vis-à-vis the players protesting police brutality, which is to say avoiding any semblance of protest, which, when coupled with their recidivist alleged-and-not-exonerated white frat boy rapist-boor of a quarterback, makes them one of the least interesting teams in the NFL in many ways (so of course they are one of the league’s most successful franchises).

The Pirates continue to flirt frustratingly with mediocrity. I know you weren’t a fan, gave up baseball when the Dodgers left Brooklyn, have better things to do with your death than talk Pirates, plus wouldn’t care anyhow, but I get a kick out of parading the details of their irrelevancy before you -- perhaps for that very reason. As a son/person, I can sometimes be kind of a dick. You will no doubt remember this from your experience with me from grades pre-K through 12, give or take. Because of this, I follow the Bucs zealously. I know the advanced statistics of their minor league players. I am taking my spite to new, dorky, and analytically nuanced levels.

Serena Williams was just portrayed as a mammy caricature in a cartoon for throwing a minor tennis fit that would have gone completely unnoticed if Jimmie Connors, John McEnroe, Roger Federer, or any other male player had done it. Unless maybe the hypothetical male tennis player was black, in which case the ref probably would have just shot him, then been exonerated for acting in self-defense despite the literally millions of eye-witnesses. Then the USTA would have fined players who protested this type of treatment.

The Penguins – well they still play hockey, which sort of makes them the social/moral equivalent of that uncle everyone says was “always just different” to explain his sometimes erratic, bizarre, and occasionally criminal conduct. Like, maybe the NHL keeps things in its shed that the kids shouldn’t see? But the Pens are playing about as well as anyone in hockey over the past few years. I think you’d be getting a kick out of the franchise’s rebirth and resurgence with Mario Lemiuex at the head of the operation. I’m not sure you’d love the financing of the new arena with the aid of gambling concessions and the coal industry, but dead beggars can’t be choosers? Or maybe you can? Fill me in, I’m DYING to know how it all works! (Dad joke).

Ok, enough sports talk, I want to focus on all the other things we used to communicate about … so … umm … back to sports? Haha. More dad jokes. Did I mention I have those for days? Yup.

This year on your birthday I’m struck more than anything by the fact that your family, me included, have had so many life experiences you never shared. You never lost your partner, but mom, Susan and I all have; you never had grandkids, but mom’s got two of them now. Speaking of those grandkids, man, would you enjoy seeing them. Not because you’d love having grandkids (though I think you would), but because of the MASSIVE comeuppance they’re giving to your truly. I believe you would savor that like you used to do liver and onions (which is objectively gross, thanks for exposing me to that at a tender age).

Freddy has all of my reverence for authority and a little more wit, and I am learning how little fun a parent can have with those traits. He also loves heavy metal music, a haunting from my childhood I can feel rattling both of our bones – mine literally and yours by the transitive properties of karma -- in the morning when I go to get my coffee and he’s already blaring it.

Benny can’t stay in bed at night. He pops up in my doorway like the Whack-a-Mole. I remember slinking into your bedroom doorway and being groused back to my bed, yet I still chase him away at least as often as I find the patience to go the long way round to sleep with him – meditation, breathing, visualizing calming things. And his can’t-do attitude about things around the house recapitulates my own in ways heretofore thought impossible.

But you’d like Benny a lot. It’s hard not to like Benny. You’d get a kick out of listening to Benny tell you stories. He makes them up all the time, sometimes extemporaneously—in fact those are often the best ones. He grabs fits and snatches of cartoons he’s watched, books he’s read, video games he’s played, and mammals he adores, and crafts some kind of completely off the wall narrative.

His brother composes his own songs on the electric guitar, draws animated likenesses of his family members, cooks for himself, and can make a craft out of just about anything. He’s a visionary, like his mom, a creator. It more than makes up for the bad traits he borrowed from us. He’s got natural charisma, something he didn’t get from either of us genetically and I couldn’t teach him if I tried. Sui generis. The kids aren’t my only reason for living, far from it, but they’d be enough if they had to be. They’re pretty amazing little dudes. Or, at least, they’re mine, which amounts to the same thing.

The rest of it is mostly boilerplate. Matt moved to Greensboro, which is awesome. Mom, Jennie, and Susan all visit, send treats for the kids, and keep me propped up as-needed. Everyone is damaged, everyone is surviving, mostly we’re doing ok. Except the climate and our system of democratically elected self-governance. Those are totally irrevocably fucked. But happy birthday, anyhow, Dad.

An Unpaid Internship at the Nonprofit of Life

Cartoon is from ScoopCharlotte:
https://www.scoopcharlotte.com/2015/05/08/moms-need-summer-internships/

Raising kids is hard work. The hours suck and the pay is worse. Parenting is an unpaid internship at the nonprofit of life. You get exploited, taken for granted, shat upon (sometimes literally), and all you have to show for it are some “intangible” rewards and “life experience” the baby boomers seem to think is a necessary rite of passage, but which sadly cannot be monetized or even converted into filial appreciation when you retire. Whatever parenting is, solo parenting is worse. It’s an unpaid internship at a Syrian refugee camp. It’s a total mess, you run around like your hair is on fire, and at the end of the day everyone has PTSD and dysentery despite your best efforts.

When I grieve, sometimes I miss Nina herself – the intangible experience of her, you might say -- the way she smelled, which was never just the lotions, shampoos, or perfume she used, but the combining of those things with Nina’s skin, hair, and body. I can open up a bottle of everything she ever wore, but it won’t recapture it. I miss hearing her play guitar and sing while I’m making dinner, and no matter how many times I play her favorite songs on my iPhone, it can’t recapture that.

But lots of times I’m also grieving the more prosaic loss of the second unpaid internship position we used to have here at the Duberstein-Riggs Emergency Resettlement Program (DERP). Nina was an indefatigably dedicated intern. She held executive director level responsibility, yet had no benefits or salary. Irreplaceable.

In the time since Nina died, like any dynamic non-governmental agency, our household has not stood still. Both of my formerly tiny boy children decided that right after Nina died was the absolute best time to start their sexual awareness and development. I was fully prepared to be on the front lines of this discussion. I believe Nina’s exact words were “don’t look at me; you’re handling that” to me, and the time-worn, yet remarkably effective “ask your father” to the kids themselves.

But I intended to strategize with Nina, even if I carried out the plan. And I wasn’t prepared for the discussion to also entail nascent sexual interest, which, for god’s sake why do boys even need any more?! The world is overpopulated, does not seem to need any more sexually active white men than it already has, there are so many video games, and we’ve got VR simulations that are starting to be frighteningly realistic, I mean, couldn’t they just e-onanate? Online dating is already a thing, why not online relationships?

Actually, I like to think I faced this crisis squarely, with uncharacteristic skill, though I had input from friends and a helpful review of some very good kid-level books on the subject over at Cup of Joe.

But that was only the most immediate and salacious solo parenting crisis. Kids are complicated, and they get increasingly complex as they age. My younger son, Benny, was an adorable little kid, all cheeks and grinning. His proclivity for cuddling only enhanced our notion of him as a sort of nuzzly family mascot. Nina had a special bond with Benny. Not that he and I weren’t close, but the two of them were peas in a pod. I cannot imagine a mother-son tandem with a greater shared bond for cuddling something soft and warm.

These two have always been thick as nuzzly little thieves. 

Turns out that a lot of Benny’s nuzzly, fuzzy ways are, as with most people, mechanisms he uses to cope with and mediate his reality. They are cute and delightful at times, but they are also masks. And the older he’s grown, the more he’s taken to living in his head, and the harder he gets for me to access. I am dying to hear Nina’s breakdown of Benny. I’m sure she’d be anxious for him, but I'm confident in the depth of insight she would offer.

You wouldn't know it from this picture, but these two can push each other's buttons. 

Meanwhile, his older brother Freddy has never met a maturation he didn’t crave. He started talking about getting his driver’s license not long after learning what a car was, and as soon as he could make interrogative statements, he was questioning society’s strange, inequitable distinction between children and adults. He is a wonderful and challenging kid, and a lot to take on by myself. My analytical approach to life is not so well suited to nurturing Freddy's artistic side, which Nina treasured and understood in ways I can't.

Freddy’s personality trends type-A and he struggles with obsessive-compulsive behavior. Benny’s is a strong Type B-. I call him my child Bartelby: he’d prefer not to. Not surprisingly, as the two of them have grown into more distinct, mature personas, they’ve been fighting like cats and dogs. They adore one another – just watch the two of them plead to be able to sleep in the same bed on a school night and you can see they are each other’s security blanket – but as siblings competing for what turned out to be remarkably scarce parental resources, they butt heads a lot, too.

The agony (above) and the ecstasy (below R) of brotherhood. 

This is an area where Nina was not just a contributor, but the Thought Leader of our family dynamic. Nina would be giving the TED talk on DERP’s domestic policy approach. She not only researched and implemented parenting strategies with real skill, she had really keen instincts for engendering kindness and good will in the family. Without Nina, I feel like the director of development at an agency with no executive officers. I keep the lights on, but that just reveals the total chaos in here.

Our parenting dynamic wasn’t all Nina, to be fair. Even before she got sick, I did my share, or at least tried. But our parenting was 100% about collaboration. We both thrived on constant discussion: the dynamism in our dynamic was dialectic. Now I feel like my parenting style is devolving into a really bad monologue, a frustratingly ineffective echo chamber. I can hold myself to account – I’m Jewish, after all, the guilt comes free with the life force – but I am never certain that I’m holding myself to the right standards, nor for that matter if I’m being too hard on myself or not hard enough. There used to be someone on staff for that.

The division of labor for a solo parent is stark and unbalanced. You can delegate tasks – and to be clear, I get plenty of help from many sources, the paid and the press-ganged -- but you can’t outsource the mental and emotional labor of being a parent. If there is a thing to be done, you either do it, or you make it so someone else can. There is no punting in solo parenting football: doctor visits, schools, diabetes management, dentists appointments, Tae Kwon Do, music lessons, playing with friends, and all the minutia that go with this continual barrage of events (immunization records, course fees, numbers of friends’ parents, recital dates, science projects, parent-teacher conferences, etc.) have to be stored in a readily accessible place in my skull. I really need to hire someone to build a database and find someone to manage it. I need an intern!

Then there’s the housework. Ugh. I have immense amounts of guilt for my formerly lax attitude towards housekeeping. Don’t get me wrong, I always did the stuff – washed dishes, did laundry, the normal tasks. But I never conceived of a clean house as fully my responsibility. I remember arguing with Nina about tidying up ahead of when the housekeeper came – it seemed absurd to me, but Nina understood that the tidying was just a way to get more out of the housekeeper’s visits, which we could only afford every so often.

Now the world has been turned upside down by Nina dying, I find myself hounding the kids to tidy up before the housekeeper comes. I feel guilt, both for my former recalcitrance with Nina, and for pushing responsibility on the kids with so much fervor (I have been known to play the occasional “I’m the only parent now and I need more help” card, which is a crappy thing to lay on an 11 or 9 year old with a dead mom).

I’ve also had the experience of parenting sick or, as women have been calling it for centuries, “Being a Mom.” Before everyone rolls their eyes, I want to point out the fact that I am a man, and so this is more than just the added challenge of maintaining parental equilibrium while feeling poorly. I am mourning not only the loss of my spouse, but also the loss of my former ability to lie prone on the bed moaning over my agony while my partner picks up the slack.

Seriously, though, even if Nina was vastly tougher and more functional than me when sick (she unequivocally was), she had a partner helping her. Solo parenting with a stomach bug is the pits, and that’s just a minor part. I’m also a diabetic parent, and sometimes I’m a diabetic parent sick with the flu, which, like everything to do with parenting, is much less fun solo.

I want to acknowledge the obvious fact that, although I’m parenting solo, I’m not alone: many people parent by themselves. Some, like me, do this by circumstance and others by choice. We are past the cultural age of nuclear family hegemony. But society still isn't set up for this. Every form I fill out presumes some kind of other parent and there is no adequate affordable system of childcare or parental leave in the United States, which affects solo parents even more profoundly than couples (not that it’s a picnic for them, either). So if you have one of those people in your life, give them a break. Or a day off.

Doing my best under the circumstances applies to both this attempted family portrait and my parenting since Nina died -- it works well enough, but there's always something missing. 

I wasn’t ready to lose Nina for all the reasons you can imagine not wanting to lose the person you love. But I wasn’t ready to lose her for the boring, everyday reasons, too. And it turns out our lives are made up mostly of the everyday, and one of my biggest challenges (and Nina’s greatest strengths) is turning the everyday grind into something beloved and magical.

The other night Benny came bounding into my bedroom fifteen minutes before our reading aloud time, when the boys normally join me. “I just want to cuddle and tell you about my ideas for a Halloween costume,” he said before I could stop dozing over my book. “I’m either going to be Master Chief from Halo or I’m going to be a ghost tree. Which do you like better?” Though I wasn’t yet seeing clearly and there was spittle attaching my lips to one another, I found a response right on the tip of my tongue, as if Nina had laid it there while I drifted off: “I think you should be a ghost goat tree, and we can stick Moroccan tree goats in your branches and they'll all wear sheets.” Gales of delighted laughter ensued. If you know Benny, you'll understand how nothing makes him happier than a furry animal pun. This was maybe my proudest solo parenting moment so far. Of course the next day I found out Benny hasn’t been doing his homework and Freddy got his first disciplinary write up of the school year. So: Still really missing my co-intern, but staying on top of at least some aspects of my workload of intrinsic only value and enjoying its intangible rewards.

The Fates of Alamance County

The motel immortalized in Nina's memoir sits by the side of one of the busiest highways in North Carolina. And it used to feature this hairy chested bather by the (no longer extant) pool.
  

There are a lot of things that remind me of Nina. There's the obvious: pictures, songs, books that belonged to her, movies we enjoyed together, our kids, trips to familiar places, rituals we observed -- from the Christmas stockings to the afternoon nap.

But some things are more subtly linked to Nina, or more specifically, anyhow. When Nina was being treated at Duke, we made a LOT of trips on I-40/85 en route to Durham. On these trips she started to notice that the same scooter was always outside the Embers Motor Lodge, a shabby roadside motel that’s right behind the (scenic) on-ramp from Hwy 54.

At some point she noticed a woman who seemed to belong to the scooter as well. Over months and months of drives to Duke, Nina developed a name and entire persona for the woman -- Lyla -- which was included in her memoir. Nina took the real-life person -- Lyla may or may not have been her real name, but I can verify she was a real person, I saw her -- and conjured a literary foil for herself in the throes of her wrestling match with mortality and illness.

The fact that Nina did this at a roadside motel in Graham, NC is both completely random and totally appropriate. Alamance County is, well, not much goes on in Alamance County apart from discriminatory policing and VERY minor league baseball. And even in the shallow pool of Alamance County lodging establishments, the Embers Motor Lodge is not the crown jewel. But it is absolutely unavoidable if you are traveling I-40/85, the main East-West artery in the state, with any regularity. You may not craft a whole literary narrative out of it, but just like Nina you’ll see the Embers Motor Lodge, sure as your born.

The Embers Motor Lodge that was has passed into oblivion, like so many things in Alamance County. 

As if to perfect the literary device, or maybe add an unfortunate amount of preciosity to it, depending on your view of neat endings, the universe maintained the real life Lyla storyline only as long as the narrative thread of Nina’s life held taut. I drive 40/85 constantly even without a spouse in treatment at Duke for my work. The next time I went East after Nina died there was no scooter. Soon after, there were work and utility trucks in the parking lot and someone was storing sheds in the grass obscuring the view from the road, making it hard to discern while passing what was going on at Embers.

When the sheds cleared, the motel had been redone (touched up might be more accurate, it’s still the Embers Motor Lodge) and there were no further scooter sightings, no further evidence of Lyla at all. The façade of the motel had been outfitted with pillars around the entrance, and the drab brick had even been completely whitewashed, a very literal effacement of Nina’s completely figurative use of the setting and its occupants in her book.

There aren't a lot of pictures of the Embers Motor Lodge online, surprisingly, and this one is pretty pixelated, but it shows the stately new facade nicely. 

I don’t believe in magic. I don’t see any connection stronger than the emotional and literary. So please don’t @ me, people, with your metaphysical gobbledygook. Blech. I am an impermeable rock of querulous, sciency, agnosticism. But I do sometimes wonder if Nina’s book somehow found its way to Lyla (not judging, but she didn’t look like a reader?), got fed up with being someone’s literary-device stooge, and was finally motivated to pull her life together and stop living week-to-week at the Embers Motor Lodge.

Maybe Lyla wasn’t ruled by fate, but a free-agent, acting in defiance of the Alamance County roadside lot those insufferable, patriarchal gods handed her. Something about this appeals to me beyond the storyline Nina crafted and my attachment to her work. As if somehow Lyla may have taken on the oppressiveness of fate in a way Nina was never able because of cancer, to live in defiance, even if only momentarily in the grand scheme, the finality of all things.

Whatever the reason, both the real scene and the trope that Nina summoned from it failed to outlast her. And now every time I pass the 54 exit, instead of a reminder of the thing itself, I see only its absence.

Not gonna fade away just yet (but gimme shelter).

A partnership is a kind of shelter. Giving cover is inherently part of the intimacy of intimate partners: we divide household responsibilities, comfort one another in times of need, and even make excuses for failures to attend irksome social events when necessary. We shelter one-another.

In this way, losing someone you love is way more than a window in your heart. It’s having the windows shattered, door kicked in, living room trashed, rug peed on, and roof damaged so badly the rain comes in. The place is no longer livable. But the thing is, this particular shelter is existential (unless you lost your partner in a tornado, hurricane, or other natural disaster in which case I am VERY sorry not only for your loss but also my incredibly insensitive metaphor). No matter how badly damaged it is, you gotta live there.

I keep wanting to write things like “the hardest part about being widowed is…”. But then I realize that, no matter how hard something is for me, there are millions of others who have been through harder things, and also there keep being new things that either exceed my prior sense of what was most difficult, or simply redefine it. 

When Nina died, I felt overwhelmed dealing with the raw pain I felt. I think it was actually a minor form of PTSD. Watching Nina die was painful. She and I had discussed this very thing before it became acute, and avoiding it was her overriding concern for end of life care. “Please do not let me suffer prolonged oxygen deprivation” was her seemingly modest end of life request to me, her principal caregiver. So watching her in anoxia was doubly hard -- her suffering, obviously, but also my guilt as a caregiver. And Nina was tough. She didn’t complain and she suffered a lot. So if it rose to the level of concern for her, I knew it was really a major issue. I felt I’d failed her.

My initial “hardest thing” was learning to live with what I witnessed and learning to forgive myself any mistakes I made. An obvious but problematic element of this: Nina wasn’t there to help. That may sound dumb, or at least obvious, but for a trauma of any magnitude, she’d would have been my go-to person. Instead, my lack of access to Nina was part and parcel to the need for shelter from the biggest trauma I ever knew. 

I took a variety of alternative steps to ameliorate this. I talked to friends, read books and articles, spoke to my psychologist, even got input from experts on what Nina was feeling in extremis. In the end, these things helped me limp to the point where the passage of time gave space to my rawer emotions to lose some of the tensions in their springs. It’s not that “time heals all wounds,” which I think is hogwash. Time not only doesn’t heal all wounds, it can nurse some and aggravate others.

No actual therapists were harmed in the writing of this post. 

But time is a necessary (if insufficient) condition of healing. In some cases it’s critical not only because the feelings diminish in intensity, but because it provides distance and perspective. When I was first told Nina didn’t feel everything that I perceived her body going through, I understood, but didn’t totally believe it. The look on her face, the sounds she made, her body’s graceless articulation of dying, stuck with me and prevented me from accepting that the drugs she had on board kept her brain from feeling or perceiving all of it.

As I lived with both the fallout from Nina’s death and the information I was given, the input began to sink in. The same information and reactions from folks I'd spoken to sounded differently months later, and today it has a whole different feel. I'm not at peace about her death, and if my shrink could chime in who knows what he’d say about me and PTSD – maybe I’ll have him guest post – but I have a much changed relationship to those facts than I did in the immediate aftermath.

Insight on my psychological issues courtesy of the Atlantic. 

As the initial impact of Nina’s death receded in the months (and now closing in on years) passed other, less obvious elements of losing her emerged as my new “hardest things.” This is where the contours of my missing relationship as shelter became evident.

Partly the shelter aspect is endemic to our particular relationship: Nina and I huddled regularly in our safest spaces -- usually the bed or the comfiest available couch. We both needed time and space to process our experiences, and to hatch our plans and coping mechanisms. Nina and I were pretty different, but our personalities intersected at the “I” sections of our Myers-Briggs types.

Maybe not all of us are trying to escape the world (though I definitely am and let’s be serious: any sane person would at this point, for crying out loud), but we all want a niche within it. A dugout. A place where everybody not only knows our name, but our tastes, predilections, quirks, peccadillos, timbre, rhythm, and even our scent (and not only doesn’t mind the latter, but is maybe even turned on by its raw pheremonal power…look, it’s my blog, I can write aspirationally if I want to, and Nina’s dead and can’t contradict me, so if I’m describing my scent it’s going to be “semi-frequently sensually musky” not “sometimes objectionable.”).

Without Nina, my instincts are even less helpful. Before she died, one of us could retreat and the other remain more or less socially operational; now if I recoil from the world, my whole family loses contact with it. When Nina was alive I was retreating from something, but also towards something: Nina and our Katy-bar-the-door approach to marriage. Now it’s more like I’m going to my Fortress of Solitude, which is not a crystal palace constructed of alien technology at the North Pole, but a half-decorated master bedroom that, when I’m feeling overwhelmed, is likely messy and smells like I haven’t left it in too many hours (but, hey, sensually musky!). 

Picture me here, but smaller, less modern decor, and muskier. 

This is the unrelenting long-term cost of losing your person: there is no one to turn to on those many occasions when the only one to turn to is the person you lost. Need to plan, cook, and plate dinner? You are the purchaser, chef, server, and dishwasher. Seventeenth kid crisis of the weekend? You get to be 0 for 17 instead of just 0 for 9. Parent teacher conference? Your turn. Problem with the internet provider? Get ready for muzak and frustration. In need of comfort after a rough day at the office? Hope you stopped at the liquor store on the way home. Had too much to drink last night? Hope you’re still ready to go at six thirty tomorrow morning.

I feel like I’m running a long-distance relay race and there’s no one to take the baton. Or I’m in a tag team wrestling match alone, and the other guys just keep jumping from the top rope onto my weary, bewildered, spandex-burned head.

This is grief. That's me in the sharp red onesie and boots. 

If you’re wondering how any of this is different from any single parent: it’s not. Solo parents have no shelter, either, and they all deserve childcare subsidies, a raise, and semi-regular amazing sex, just for starters. But if you’re going through the solo parent learning curve on top of the trauma of the person you love dying, well, there’s that. 

The point is, the relentlessness of the storm – not just its raw power – is the reason we need a good shelter. Your roof normally isn’t often going to get caved in by a tornado, but if you let enough sun and rain beat down on it, eventually even those everyday rays and droplets will wear it out.

So I guess I’ll just be here in my musky dugout trying not to get pelted too hard, pondering the concept of a growth mindset. And if you have a spare umbrella, slicker, or some top notch roofing skills, come on over (just call first, I'll shower and straighten up).

Grief is Hard Work (Happy Labor Day!)

Prayer

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

Galway Kinnell


There are lots of books about grief; Podcasts about grief; Whole conferences about it, too. There are any number of ways to engage with the subject of grief and most of them are readily available -- including this blog (thanks for coming! Also: sorry in advance!). So I’m left wondering why, with so many resources and potential sources of grief information around me, and considering the fact I’m trying to wrestle with grief earnestly and directly, I so frequently get jerked by the grief collar and wind up sobbing uncontrollably in the bathroom to avoid frightening the children?

I don’t cry easily and that’s likely part of the problem. It's definitely why I'm worried about frightening the children. I don’t know if it’s because of the whole guys don't cry thing (Rosie Grier song-messages aside), or maybe it’s just constitutional: some guys may cry much more readily than me and some women may cry even less? All I know is, there have been times since Nina died when I desperately felt like I needed to cry and physically couldn’t. It got to the point where I had to go looking for ways to access the tears. Because it turns out Rosie Grier was right, crying does get at least some of the mad/sad/frustrated/despondent out.

I started writing about grief, loss, and survivorship mostly so I’d have an “outlet.” Or at least that’s what I told myself and others when the question “why are you writing publicly in a very confessional mode about painful personal things?” would come up. It wasn’t really planned. Before I started the blog, I would just periodically send out effusions of thoughts about grief, or Nina, our family, etc. And I would fire off social media posts about it -- my ad hoc outlet of choice. It was a good way for me to connect when so many of my normal connections had been severed or damaged. And it did have a kind of buildup and release to it.

But now I think maybe that characterization is wrong. I don’t think this is an “outlet,” at least not in the sense that there’s just grief stuff packed inside me ready to come flowing out. I’m not a pressure-packed keg of grief IPA. Or, to the extent I am, the stuff that came out would not be drinkable or look much like a blog post. And writing isn’t cathartic, it’s not like crying. I feel good when I write about my grief and loss, but I don’t heave, spasm, and snot like a distraught toddler when I’m done writing. And writing doesn’t feel like a visceral requirement of the grieving process, the way crying sometimes does.

I’m writing because I want to grieve actively – to shape and control the flow, to the extent that’s possible, and also examine it more deliberately. Writing forces me to channel whatever psychic cud I’m masticating into something with form or shape. But even more importantly, having the prompt of writing pushes me to mine for things in places that I might otherwise not explore. A writing project is important to me not because I’m necessarily overflowing with grief or things to say about grief all the time, but because sometimes I’m not even in close touch with grief, or at least the parts that are beneath the surface.

Even when grief is really obvious – when your partner dies, for example – it can hide in plain sight. Most of the time grief doesn’t look like much of anything at all. Without context, you might miss it altogether.

Yet grief is always there. At first it’s easy to identify. As long as I get up afterwards, I can always see the truck that just ran me over or the cartoon anvil that keeps falling on my head. It gets harder to see later on, though. For me it became a kind of verdigris on the surface of my life. Maybe my normal lassitude at the sight of a sink full of dirty dishes is a little heavier than normal, my frustration at the internet provider a little more testy, or my rebuke to the kids for not closing the door is a little sharper than it would be otherwise. But it’s not clearly separable from what any of those things would be normally. Grief is life, life is grief, it all blends and mixes together.

I can’t just write myself into clarity on grief. I don’t have access to it. Maybe real writers do? Or maybe that’s why so many of my favorite writers had problems with addiction or mental illness? Regardless, it’s not enough for me to want to delve. My grief isn’t an archive. I have trouble raising the immediacy of grief to the surface. Like my grief’s tears, its truths are hard for me to access.

So what I do is, I crack myself open. I have some practiced methods to help obviate my own defenses. Sometimes I do this by reading Nina’s book – an obvious and tremendously effective solution. Nina already wrote about all the stuff up to her death and did it better than I will ever do. But she didn't write much about what happens next. And grief is like chemotherapy, you can’t tap the same vein over and over again without diminishing returns.

So other times I read old text messages. There are so many! It’s a goldmine of grief spasm inducing material. Some of it is actually Nina and I discussing death and disease and trauma. And some of it is us arguing about who should pick up groceries. As a partner, lover, and self-flagellator, I love it all.

Typical text exchange between NER and me, including the mortal and mundane. We never got to watch The Americans because Nina died a couple weeks later. But we DID make it to Turks & Caicos, portable oxygen condenser in tow.   

And then there’s pictures. Worth a thousand words? Ha. I think easily 2500 apiece, but I won’t try to prove that point here. I can't explain the role pictures of Nina have played for me since she died. They provide both much more than other sources (actual images, clarity that memory can’t retain or recall) and much less (insufficient context: a single moment frozen in time, like one cell of an organism trapped on a slide, can never tell you what that whole creature was like in life).

I haven't got enough words to describe everything this photo of Nina on the beach at Tartane in Martinique in the Spring of 2003 evokes for me.  And this one doesn't even show her face. 

But maybe my favorite and most effective way in to the parts of grief I can’t even name, let alone map out, is poetry. One of the first things I did after Nina died was buy a terrific anthology of poems about death and grief, and I still read it periodically on a regular basis. Maybe it’s because Nina was a poet, or because poetry uses meter, image, metaphor, line, and form—so many tools at its disposal to cut to the marrow, the densest, meatiest, least accessible parts of us.

Poetry not only cracks me open and leaves me invariably sobbing, it reveals grief feelings I didn’t even know I had. And I want to have all those feelings, to experience it as completely as I can.

Here are some of my recent faves. May they leave your eyes as puffy and your nose as sniffly as mine. Just don’t scare the children.

Grief, by Matthew Hickman
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/05/grief-6

It Was Like This: You Were Happy, by Jane Hirshfield
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/it-was-you-were-happy

The Comfort of Darkness, by Galway Kinnell
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/comfort-darkness

Practice, by Ellen Bryant Voigt
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/practice

The Trees, by Philip Larkin
https://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/trees

Enigma, by Leonora Speyer
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/enigma

The End, by Amy Lowell
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/end-2

The End, by D. H. Lawrence
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/end-1

Insomnolence, by Charles Rafferty
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/insomnolence

An Arundel Tomb, by Philip Larkin
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47594/an-arundel-tomb

The Mower, by Philip Larkin
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48423/the-mower-56d229a740294

The Dead, by Billy Collins
https://www.goodfuneralguide.co.uk/2011/02/the-dead-billy-collins/

The Truth the Dead Know, by Anne Sexton
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/truth-dead-know

A Song, by Joseph Brodsky
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-song-3/

Grief Stricken Kids Say the Darndest Things

They don't LOOK emotionally damaged, but don't think I'm not trying! 

I’ve done several book events for The Bright Hour like the one the Greensboro Library and GSO Hospice put on the other night (which was awesome, thank you again for making NER the community read!). I always enjoy discussing Nina’s work. It’s a welcome impetus to get in touch with Nina and my feelings about loss and grief. To talk to other people about it cogently, I need to boil down that stuff for myself, which is grief work I find helpful and productive.

And there’s the fact that I genuinely love The Bright Hour and can’t talk enough about Nina. Honestly, I go through cycles where I crave access to her so badly that I can’t imagine what I’d do without the book. Seriously, what does anyone do if they lose someone and that person hasn’t written memoir?

Still, as much as I like processing and talking about it, there are a lot of ways I’m blinded by, or at least myopic about my grief. Partly this is just due to the fact that grief is so constant and affecting. If you live with something long enough, you adjust to it without even realizing, the way the posture of someone who slouches out of insecurity or timidity seems to become their actual physical form over time (or the way people grow to resemble their pets – beware any blobfish owners!).

Beyond the sheer force and persistence of grief, I have an unconscious tendency to see Nina’s death as something that happened primarily to me, which is an obvious yet problematic distortion. Nina was a daughter, a sister, a friend, and—maybe most importantly—a mom to other people. Her death was dislocating for all those other people and causes them ongoing pain, too.

I know this intellectually. I try to remember it in practice – to ask others about their experiences of Nina’s death and not only focus on mine. I’m successful to varying degrees. But the book events make a good object lesson / reminder that I can probably never be too vigilant about not placing myself too much at the center of grief over Nina’s death. At an event I’m the literal center of attention, the person speaking, or being asked to answer things about Nina’s death and its impact, about her book, and about what life has been like without her.

The funny thing is: I am not the actual center. I didn’t write the book. I’m only doing it because Nina’s not there. I’m not the only one who can answer the questions about the impact zone left from Nina’s death. Her dad, her brother, and my kids at least are others who are all pretty directly situated to respond to those issues.

It’s not that I think it’s wrong for me to be the one speaking for her. She and I discussed me doing it before she died, it’s what her editors wanted, and I do think I’m in a better position to be Nina’s vicar here on earth (you can call me Pope Not-so-Innocent I). We spent the better part of 20 years together and I was her confidant and aide-de-camp through the book writing process (as well as the rest of our lives, which was the subject of the book, after all). There are other people grieving for Nina, but for the most part, I think it’s ok for me to take the lead on this stuff, because if Pete (Nina's dad) or Charlie (Nina's brother), or one of Nina’s friends is feeling displaced or dislocated in their grief, they can talk about it, communicate about it, problem solve their own grief (or tell me when I’m being a dufus). That’s not as much the case with my kids (though the older one is so emotionally articulate it sometimes scares me – like I may be playing catch up here soon, and he’s definitely capable to telling me when I’m a dufus).

For instance, I asked the boys what they thought after the event the other night. Almost in harmony they rejoined: “it was OK, but your jokes really weren’t funny.” D’oh. I pushed back a little and pointed out that I wasn’t really telling jokes or going for laughs, more trying to occasionally lighten what can be a very heavy subject -- the death of a young mother from breast cancer (And also, my jokes were too funny, you overly-critical, unemancipated little ingrates!).

That’s when they opened up a little more about how it feels to be Nina’s kid at one of these events: adults looking over at you, thinking you’re “cute” or “adorable,” and generally making a fuss about you. And your dad sometimes mentioning you or even getting a laugh specifically about you. In front of over 100 people. Apparently this feels bad for nine and eleven year olds, which any dad less thick than a (very readable, yet literary) memoir would have known.

It should not have come as a surprise that, while I might enjoy positioning myself to maximize exposure to all things Nina-related, the boys may not want any part of that. It turns out that kids can sometimes be self-conscious (who knew?), and also may like defining themselves instead of being characterized by their dead mom or living but unfunny and inconsiderate dad.

I didn’t even think twice about bringing them, and not because I think they make good showpieces. If anything, I’m always a little terrified that one of them will recite the lyrics to an inappropriate song I’ve played in the car and some attendee with call social services. I brought them because I view them as integral to our family, obviously, but also to our loss. Like my father in law (who was also there, and frankly, also being cooed and stared at—sorry Pete!).

But there’s the rub: of course they are integral, but they didn’t get to make the decision for themselves. It’s the whole dilemma of childhood. They also don’t see themselves in the same way I do, or the audience for Nina’s book does. It’s not that they’re not interested in Nina or her book. And they don’t generally enjoy FOMO. But the fact is, a book event on an adult memoir about death and dying in the evening at the central library doesn’t scream “kid friendly,” even if it weren’t your mom’s book.

That’s the part I think I get most wrong. These guys don’t always get to choose how they grieve or mourn. This makes some sense, they’re too young to really understand or generate solutions for the issues that come after a tremendous loss. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have input or control over whatever engagement with their mom’s death they have. And the last thing in the world I want is for the kids to wind up resenting The Bright Hour or any of the events organized around it.

Which brings me back to my sometimes problematic focus on my own grief. Parenting is hard not because it's made up of tasks no once can handle. It's because there's so much important stuff lying way down in the granular detail of childhood development. In retrospect, I saw the event mostly in terms of myself: what did I have to do to get ready, what was the format, who made up the likely audience, etc. I made arrangements for the kids – made sure there was someone to look after them, fed them dinner, etc. -- but I never took the time to look at it from their perspective. If I had, they might not have come at all. Or at least they might have helped me tell fewer (or better) jokes.