This CANNOT be true - no no no no no no NO

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What is Death Cafe?

At a Death Cafe people, often strangers, gather to eat cake, drink tea and discuss death.

Our objective is 'to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives'.

A Death Cafe is a group directed discussion of death with no agenda, objectives or themes. It is a discussion group rather than a grief support or counselling session.

Our Death Cafes are always offered:

- On a not for profit basis

- In an accessible, respectful and confidential space

- With no intention of leading people to any conclusion, product or course of action

- Alongside refreshing drinks and nourishing food – and cake!

If you're interested in holding a Death Cafe please see our how-to guide.





Death Cafe is a 'social franchise'. This means that people who sign up to our guide and principles can use the name Death Cafe, post events to this website and talk to the press as an affiliate of Death Cafe.

Death Cafes have spread quickly across Europe, North America and Australasia. As of today, we have offered 2653 Death Cafes since September 2011. If 10 people came to each one that would be 26530 participants. We've established both that there are people who are keen to talk about death and that many are passionate enough to organise their own Death Cafe.

The Death Cafe model was developed by Jon Underwood and Sue Barsky Reid, based on the ideas of Bernard Crettaz.

Death Cafe has no staff and is run on a voluntary basis by Jon Underwood in Hackney, East London. Also Lizzy Miles who ran the first Death Cafe in the U.S. and Megan Mooney who runs the Death Cafe Facebook page have played a significant role in Death Cafe's development.

We remain energised by the amazing quality of the dialogue at our events and are overwhelmed by the interest we have received.

People often ask why we doing this. Everyone has their own reasons for getting involved in Death Cafe. In the video below, Death Cafe Portland organiser Kate Brassington gives hers.

Our History

In 2010 Jon Underwood decided to develop a series of projects about death one of which was to focus on talking about death. In November Jon read about the work of Bernard Crettaz in the Independent newspaper. Inspired by Bernard's work, Jon immediately decided to use similar model for his own project, and Death Cafe was born.




Bernard Crettaz

The first Death Cafe in the UK was offered in Jon's house in Hackney, East London in September 2011. It was facilitated by pychotherapist Sue Barsky Reid, Jon's mum. It was a wonderful occasion. We went on to offer Death Cafes in a range of places including funky cafes, people's houses, cemeteries, a yurt and the Royal Festival Hall.

Jon and Sue Barsky Reid produced a guide to running your own Death Cafe, based around the methodology Sue developed. This was published in Feb. 2012 and first person to pick it up outside of the UK was Lizzy Miles in Columbus, Ohio. Subsequently hundreds of people have worked with us to provide Death Cafes across the globe.

Death Cafe has received some lovely media coverage including:

- Death Be Not Decaffeinated: Over Cup, Groups Face Taboo New York Times (front page!)

- Death Cafes Breathe Life Into Conversations About Dying NPR

- The death cafe movement: Tea and mortality Independent

- 'Death cafes' normalize a difficult, not morbid, topic USA Today

We are currently working to establish a real Death Cafe in London. Read more.

Death Cafe is also:
- On Facebook: facebook.com/deathcafe
- On Twitter: @deathcafe

Shout outs

Many thanks to:

Sean Legassick of Datamage who hosts the Death Cafe website for free

Phil Cooper of Petit Mal who designed the Death Cafe logo.

BLOGGER'S NOTE. This cannot be true! Perhaps it's an elaborate internet hoax. But here it is. My jaw literally dropped when I saw it. It's one of those, "well, hey, why not?" things, one of those "let's break the final taboo" things - I guess. But I wonder if people come covered in black skull tattoos and all-over flesh piercings, with Megadeath tshirts. Or pictures of Edgar Allan Poe. I wonder if they sit around in graveyards at night, spooking each other out or howling at the moon.

These are, of course, stereotypes. The only time we do "death trips" is at Halloween. Normally, when someone actually dies, it's pretty sanitized. We use terms like "passed away" or "passed on" or sometimes, as in grade school, "passed".

So is this bad or what? Is it "healthy" rather than "unhealthy"? I don't know, but I will admit my very first uncensored reaction to this site was to be shocked, offended, angry, a little queasy, and thinking "this is a whole new low in bad taste". 

It's not the fact that the subject is death. I believe we need to engage with the reality of it much more deeply than we do. It's the fact that this looks like a strainingly artificial attempt to be "cool" about it. I'm not sure why this is - maybe the breezy, oh-so-normal tone of the site, which made me shake my head and think it was a parody of something-or-other - but I get this strange feeling my strong personal reaction to it would be seen as uncool or even pitiable. "You obviously carry a lot of unresolved grief. Here, let me show you how to process it so that you may at last lead a healthy and productive life." 

Any group of humans contains know-it-alls, often cruel ones, and this group does not seem to have any official leadership. Thus the wounded could end up even more wounded. Then again, I am not sure emotion is encouraged in this sort of group, since the site with its skull-emblazoned china cups and black graveyard cakes seems (ironically) creepy and devoid of affect.

I find it hard to even look at this page, though I am trying to read as much of it as I can before dissing it. Maybe it's just the way the information is presented, as if they're getting together to discuss orchid species or dog breeds. This gives me the feeling that you may well have to keep grief out of it and keep the conversation on the lighter side, or at least philosophical rather than experiential. It surely does not strike me as a support group. So how do they screen out the bereaved, who may have a desperate need to talk about their feelings?

Death has swallowed some of my nearest and dearest, sucked them into the void from whence no one ever returns. Some of them have been suicides. Is this really drawing room conversation, do you think? Do these people think a combination of irony and detachment can somehow keep the horror away?

Dying is no tea party, people. It is an abyss, and no one comes back from it. It leaves a mark on one's life forever. The death of loved ones is far more brutalizing to contemplate than your own, which sometimes seems like a blessed release.

Howling with grief in a hospital ward, feeling your life has come to an end, finding no meaning in it whatsoever and hating the idiots who parrot at you "everything happens for a reason" - these grief reactions just don't fit into a tea party because they're signs that people aren't philosophical enough in their grief. They haven't processed it properly and need to get cracking. There's a right way to do this, and it doesn't involve collapsing in hysterics on a hospital floor. Doesn't fit very well with Peek Freans and china cups (even with skulls on them) balanced on your lap. 

Tea party and death, death and tea party. The best this can be is ironic, and the worst - dreadfully insensitive. It occurs to me that this emotionally neutral approach is far worse than "he is not dead, he is just away"  in dehumanizing the whole subject. At the same time, these people are dreadfully hypocritical in their claim to bring death out in the open in a "healthy" way. Healthy, I guess, so long as you aren't uncool enough to start getting all messy and emotional about it. 

Can death and grief be neatly separated? Is that what we're being asked to do here? Isn't that the whole problem in our culture - that we've forgotten how to grieve when someone dies, or are simply not allowed to? Would a grieving person ever feel welcome at one of these skull-decorated-teacup soirees? If not, what the hell is wrong with the organizers? 

Jesus! Do these guys really know what they are talking about?

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Oh death oh death

Tonight I watched a movie called Songcatcher for the third time. Saw it originally in the theatre - can't believe it was 14 years ago. Those years are as dust now. I loved it, wept through it that first time.  It's about a woman professor, circa maybe 1910, who turns her back on the ungrateful world of academe in search of authentic folk music. This compels her to go crashing through the backwoods of the Appalachians with notation paper and a gramophone.

Any story that has ancient recording devices in it automatically fascinates me. But Lily's personal evolution from prim academic to fire-breathing zealot is also crucial. The second time I watched it, I was a bit bogged down in  Hollywoodisms, the Deliverance-style backwoods "types", the two guys with the still and the shotgun, Granny on the porch, etc. And those do occur. But what also does occur is music that makes the spine freeze and the hair stand up on your arms, if not your whole body. It has that plaintive, almost howling quality, with the little uptick at the end of a phrase. Harmonies that are close and tight and somehow must go back a long way, because they're very much like the harmonies in the hymns sung by the Mennonites, Hutterites and Amish. 

The film glosses over the existence of the Child Ballads of the 1850s, a massive collection of folk songs from the British Isles which were also known to exist in remote areas of the United States. Lily's discovery is presented as not only completely original, but brazenly ignored by academics. The Child Ballads, so-named after the collector of the lyrics, cover some heavy ground:

Child Ballads are generally heavier and darker than is usual for ballads. Some of the topics and other features characteristic enough of Child Ballads to be considered Child Ballad motifs are these: romance, enchantment, devotion, determination, obsession, jealousy, forbidden love, insanity, hallucination, uncertainty of one's sanity, the ease with which the truth can be suppressed temporarily, supernatural experiences, supernatural deeds, half-human creatures, teenagers, family strife, the boldness of outlaws, abuse of authority, betting, lust, death, karma, punishment, sin, morality, vanity, folly, dignity, nobility, honor, loyalty, dishonor, riddles, historical events, omens, fate, trust, shock, deception, disguise, treachery, disappointment, revenge, violence, murder, cruelty, combat, courage, escape, exile, rescue, forgiveness, being tested, human weaknesses, and folk heroes.

That just about does it. Thank you, Wikipedia.

I looked at a number of clips before choosing this one. It takes place after a primal, almost primitive gathering of the community, and after all the jug-hoisting and boisterous stomping dies down, things go very quiet. Then a darker and more horrible story is told in song, passed from person to person, while Lily stares transfixed.

From what I gather, the makers of this film strove for as much accuracy as possible in the presentation of the songs. If they initially stuck to more familiar numbers like Barbry Allen, it was probably so the audience had something to grab hold of: "Oh, I know that song!" But as the story wears on, ballads stubbornly passed forward for centuries grab us with their macabre tales. The voices sound rough-edged and authentic, and by the sound of them, It's possible these songs are still being handed down.

I like this clip because it's technically not very good, captured right off a TV screen, and thus is surreal in quality, glowing and soft-edged. It traces the air like a flame. The scene where Lily becomes panicked by the screeching of a mountain lion in the woods, following a mountain survival strategy by tearing her clothes off to placate the beast, carries on the rawness and sense of exposure created by the songs. There is no corset that will keep you safe from the devil. If the scene smacks of "let's throw a little sex into the mix", it still works, because to this point Lily has been a simmering volcano, not so prim as she may outwardly appear.

I have a question. When DID these songs start? A song can't come out of nothing. It's not there, and then it's there. I know a bit about the "there" of the creative process, and what happens is that a tiny light comes on. A flash. A little white explosion. Then there is an idea born. From there it must be developed, of course, given its life. But as much as we may think a song like Oh Death has "always" been there, it has not. Someone had to start it, just like someone had to start the Bible. Start language. And in the same freight-train of thought, what was the first word? I know it's a nonsensical question because language developed in so many different parts of the world, in different ways and at different times. We now know there were a vast number of different proto-human creatures living on earth at the same time, borning and dying, evolving, overlapping each other before being absorbed or going extinct.

But let me go back to my  original question. What were the first things humanity felt compelled to name? Did they name themselves and each other first? Did language have to do with the hunt, as testiculo-centric anthropologists have always claimed? So how is it women evolved to sit around yakking about their kids in Starbuck's? Was it just a bunch of grunts and gestures at first, or - no, it had to be more.

I think it was Noam Chomsky, or Chumleigh the Walrus from Tennessee Tuxedo (could have been either one) who said there is really only one language. There are core rules, structure that prevents it all from becoming just strings of words, or gibberish. Underneath it all, ideas, needs are being expressed, things we all experience as humans. No one sat down and "made" language, any language, and yet we have all somehow contributed, if only with our own boring and unremarkable way of using it.

So there wasn't language, then there was. There were no songs - maybe chants around the fire with no words, but at some point there was an immense thunderclap and the two were married forever.

I love the starkness of this song about death, its terror of everlasting judgement and eternal hell. Cheers me up, in a way. I love how Lily's face shimmers and burns, how her enormous eyes stare in a kind of awful rapture. I have a horrible urge to make gifs - stop me, someone! But I can't make a silent movie out of this.

(Should I try to find a clip of what happens AFTER the wildcat-fleeing scene?)

Back alive again: the resurrection of Peter

It wasn’t much of a day. She wasn’t even sure it was a day at all, since they had really cancelled days quite a long time ago and made everything One. Or was it that they had cancelled Night?

 Which means, you walk around in a half-state, sometimes jokingly known as Twilight. Twilight was the stuff of owls and demons and things that didn’t even really exist any more. But, she thought to herself, do any of us really exist any more?

 They all made it seem as if it were “just her”, and that everyone else was normal. This was all part of the scheme, the huge heartwrenching scheme to take her life away. It was illustrated nearly every day now when she ran into the people she knew.

 They looked dissimilar, but all the same, with a strange hazy quality. Yet they laughed and were jolly in a way they never seemed to be before, as if they had discovered an amazing new Secret.

  

“Emma. Hi, Emma! Haven’t seen you in a long time!” Gretel was wearing the strangest outfit, bright paisley like she’d never worn, a sort of muumuu, with a straw tote bag.

“Hi, Gretel. I think.”

“Oh, it’s me all right. This is just my New Look.”

It’s hardly a look at all, thought Emma, wondering whatever happened to the Old Look, and what made her change it.

“You look the same,” Gretel said in a flat tone. Looking the same wasn’t quite “it”, she supposed.

“Haven’t gotten my instructions in the mail yet,” Emma said, trying to be ironic.

“Oh, that’s so funny! You’re such a funny person! Well, goodbye then!”

“Wait, Gretel. I need to ask you something.”

 “What is it now?” She was getting testy already.

“You know, Peter. . . “

“Yes, Peter.” They had both known Peter. His sudden death had been a wrench, for both of them she thought, but now she wasn’t so sure.

 “What about Peter?”

“Ever since he passed, you know. . . “

“Passed?” She began to titter. “Was he in school or something?”

“No! Don’t you remember? When he. . .”

 “What, when he went on vacation?”

The ultimate vacation, Emma thought.

“Look, I mean when he died.”

“Died?”

“Died.”

“Died?”

“For God’s sake, Gretel! You know what I’m talking about.”

“Oh, that.” She fumbled around in her straw bag for a minute. “I thought you’d heard about it.”

“Heard what?”

“He’s back alive again.”

Stunned silence. A sick feeling gathered in her stomach.

“Back alive again?”

“Of course. Haven’t you seen him? He’s walking around.”

“How, by remote control?” Her sarcasm seemed to be flying over Greta’s pointed little head.

“Sort of, but it’s better than that. He can go under his own steam by now.”

“But he’s dead!”

“Sort of. But not really. You can get renewed now, sort of like a library book. You must know that by now."

She stood there stunned, things whirling around, as Gretel just walked away without even saying goodbye.

She started to comprehend then why everything was different, why she was sort of seeing through some people, mostly really old people, but some of them children. They had a strange sort of translucent quality, but they were still walking around.

And they always seemed happy. Emma thought about Bible study a million years ago, before the Bible was universally banned, and how Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead. She had always wondered if Lazarus really wanted to be raised, his body half-rotted. Would he have a new body, somehow, or walk around  like that forever?

 

But then that meant she could find Peter!

Peter wasn’t her lover, never had been, but he had been there during the blackest, the most despairing time in her life. He would just show up at Starbucks with his baseball cap and his smile, cheerful as Bugs Bunny. He was in worse shape than she was, but they joked about it, guffawed about how awful life was.

“I heard about a woman who committed suicide. But before she committed suicide she got out the vacuum cleaner and cleaned her whole house top to bottom so it was absolutely spotless. Then she hung herself.” They had both howled with laughter.

Then they just lost touch. Like a sick cat, he had crawled under the house somewhere. She had known he was deteriorating; one conversation they had wasn’t a conversation at all, but a monologue on her part. He’d start to say something, then dry up after a couple of words and look at her in bafflement.

What bothered her was the fact that it didn’t bother him.

She kept sending him emails long after she suspected he had passed (and NOT “in school”!). She couldn’t help it. She’d think she saw him in a crowd. But it wasn’t him. Because the emails didn’t bounce back to her, she assumed they were hitting the target and he was just too busy to reply (knowing full well he had kicked the bucket long ago).

Back alive again. Strange things had been happening lately. She had mentioned her grandfather to a friend of hers, how difficult it had been for him to let go.

“Is he still dead?” the friend asked.

 h, maybe they meant in her mind, in her memory! But somehow she didn’t think so. Death was the only thing more sure than birth. Wasn’t it?

Would she see Peter again? A wild stab of hope made her heart beat faster.

She became aware of how the light went right through people, and began to count them. It was an awful lot. She wondered just what had happened to everyone. Back alive again? Is he still dead? Did you will this, wish it, or did someone impose it on you like poor Lazarus wrapped in his rotten gravecloths?

It was too much to hope for, but in her next turn of mind, when she did not pass Go but began in the middle again, she saw him. She saw a ball cap bouncing up and down the street first, then a smile.

Then they were sitting in Starbucks, but she noticed he was sitting two inches above the chair. He didn’t seem to really drink the coffee, but the eyes were the same.

 They could always be blunt and honest with each other, so Emma waded right into it.

“So, Peter. I hear you’re back alive again.”

“It would seem to be so.”

“How does that happen?”

“I don’t know that, any more than cells know how to multiply or the earth knows how to turn.”

“But is it. . . beyond your will or something?”

"This is a place beyond will."

"Her head was whirling. She hated the idea of not being able to die. Death was one of the things she looked forward to the most.

“Peter, I’m sorry, but it sounds as if you’re a fucking zombie or something. The Undead.”

“Hey, I like that! Undead, but not really alive.”

“Look, Peter, there are only TWO states: dead and alive! Which one are you?”

“No. There is the dream state. There is the hypnotic state. There is the hypnogogic state. There is the catatonic state. There is the trance state. There is the transcendent state. There is the resurrected state. I could go on and on.”

“But those are only in your mind, Peter.”

“Tell me this.” He leaned forward and looked at her with his old intensity, and for one moment she really believed this was Peter. “If I were just a body, I mean lying over there with my heart beating but no consciousness, would that be ‘me’?”

“I don’t. . . “

“So what is it that makes me me?”

“I don’t know, your brain?”

“The brain is just half a pound of juice with some wires running through it. Dissect it, and you see some curls and buds and bulges like normal internal organs. There’s nothing there.”

“So where. . . “

“Ah. You’re about to ask me where Consciousness resides.”

“I guess so. Peter, why aren’t you drinking your coffee?”

"I've evolved beyond coffee, I guess." He chuckled to himself.

“You’re not alive. Get away from me! You’re not really Peter. Are you a ghost?”


"Beyond ghost. We've been refined. We don't have to go around haunting old buildings and Civil War battle sites any more."

“But who DOES this? It has to come from somewhere!”

“Haven’t you noticed you don’t have any privacy any more?”

“Oh, Jesus, Peter.”

 “Haven’t you noticed all the electronic jims and jams that everyone seems to carry now?”

“Oh, so you’re saying your Smart Phone turned you into a ghost.”

“Everything is changed, changed utterly.”

“So what if it all just shuts down, the power grid and that?”

“Yes! Smart girl. THAT is what it is all about.”

“What?” 

"Bodies that need no sustenance when the Time comes. That time when the whole ecosystem collapses, gives way in a great Biblical flood and rips apart the rest of the world with an all-consuming fire."

“You’re scaring me.”

 “Haven’t you ever worried about it?"

“Of course. But I never knew that. . . “

“Now we can live under any conditions.”

“BUT YOU AREN’T REALLY ALIVE! You died of AIDS two years ago!”

 “But I’m not really dead.” He grinned, looking as cheerful as when he told me the suicide joke.

“You must be dead, Peter. You MUST be.”

 “No, my good friend.” He lifted his mug and pretended to drink from it. “I’m back alive again.”

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The way we die is the way we live: a case study

The way we die is the way we live

Or have lived.

I have seen it over and over. A man I knew who lived fast, sucked down alcohol and smoked like a ruin died hard. At least he died quickly, opening the door of his truck by the side of the road and collapsing. He was dead by the time he hit the ground.

Others, unable to let go, trying desperately to stay in control, waste away horribly for years, and years, and years.

I’ve seen near-miracles, like the woman I knew through my former church who was terminally ill and determined to die at home. This was not a cheery or positive woman, though her saracastic digs were often howlingly funny (so long as they weren’t aimed at you).

But something happened here, something strange and quite wonderful. This woman’s friends knew that her sarcastic quips were just a cover for a fragile and loving heart. There ws a sweetness in her that contrasted beautifully with the sour.

Without even sitting down to work it out, shifts of people  began to look after her so she could stay in her home as long as it was practical.  Towards the end, this involved bathing and feeding and taking care of her most basic needs.

At the very end, when she lay dying in hospital, her two sons, estranged from her and from each other for a dozen years, stood on either side of her bed. There’s just something so powerful about standing by someone, about being there. Attending.

It’s not a fancy and certainly not a squishy-squashy word, but at the end, it means everything.

A lot of people I know, if they are courageous enough to name their ultimate fear, will say “Dying alone.” There is something so hollow about it, indicative of an empty life with no significant attachments.

How you die almost always reflects how you have lived.

A couple of years ago I saw something in the paper and, before I could stop myself, exclaimed, “Holy.” It’s a silly expression – don’t even know where it came from - that just pops out of me when I am truly surprised.

It was an obituary in the Vancouver Sun. I won’t say the man’s name because I don’t wish to be barbecued all over again, but suffice it to say he was a local Vancouver not-quite-celebrity, a newspaper writer for the Sun who pretty much worked in one place all his life.

He was almost always described as “acerbic”, meaning he could be acid, even caustic, but his remarks caused gales of laughter among those who were NOT his target.  He was the master of schadenfreude and could summon it with a snap of his fingers. There is no way you can convince me he didn’t get pleasure out of it.

I knew him as a theatre critic at first, and I noticed right away the carbolic quality which could be quite funny in a mean Dorothy Parker-esque way. Then he was assigned the classical music beat, and was away to the races.

People pretended to be OK with his excoriating remarks, even tried to see them as an honour, though I don’t know what they thought in private.  He did like certain artists, though he was extremely picky and seemed to have supernaturally-sensitive hearing. If a violinist lost a single horsehair from his bow, he noticed, and he wasn’t charitable about it.

His weekly column on the bizarre phenomena of urban life ran for a few years and could be immensely entertaining. But that’s not the thing I want to write about today.

At some point in the early ‘90s I must have sent him something. I do remember a bizarre visitation by Liz Taylor at the local Eatons store to promote some new fragrance, Black Molluscs or something. I sent him my newspaper column about it, and he actually responded: “Ol’ Violet Eyes! I might just steal that one. I only steal from the best.”

This didn’t seem like a mean or acerbic man. Over the years I sent him sporadic bits and pieces, and to my astonishiment, one year he sent me a Christmas card. I couldn’t quite call him a friend, but he did respond to most of the bits I sent, mainly clippings from my column.

Once in typical acerbic fashion, he sent me a couple of CDs - one was of a Russian baritone whose name escapes me - with a note saying, "This is not a gift. It's just some stuff I had lying around." He never wanted anyone to see him as nice.

Then he sort of went underground: wrote a few pieces for the Georgia Straight and disappeared, apparently into retirement.

So that was that, until one day I encountered a very weird sight.

That Grand Master of the poison zinger, that excoriating critic of technology and all things progressive, had a Facebook page!

I couldn’t quite believe it, but there it was. It had all sorts of comments from people, photos, stuff he’d done, etc. It certainly looked real.

It had been, oh, five or six years since I’d heard anything from him. I knew I couldn’t “friend” him, that he'd never respond to it even if he was there, but tried to send a message anyway. It went something like:

Good to see you again! Have you interviewed the countertenor Michael Maniaci?
I have his new CD and it knocks me over.  Interested to hear your view. Hope this gets to you.”

Boy, did it.

Though I wasn’t his Facebook “friend”, he wasted no time in answering me.

“This was a mistake. I am not on Facefuck. I have no interest in joining a herd of vacuous idiots. Hope this gets to you.”

Uh. If you’re not on Facefuck, how can you answer a Facefuck message?

It was all very upsetting.

I did find a few things out. I mentioned his name to someone I knew, one of those I-know-everybody types who was as gay as the day is long (an expression he particularly favors). “Oh, THAT guy. He has a reputation, you know. They tell me he’s the most arrogant, cruel, narcissistic, heartless, ruthless bastard they have ever met.”

Oh my (again)!

So that was that, until my “Holy!” day: I saw  a full-page spread in the obituary section, which is certainly more attention than he had ever received before. You have to die to get that.

He was dead, so they ran a large full-color photo of him and remarks by (all retired) Sun employees about how “acerbic” his writing was, and how wonderful, and how he was wasted in Vancouver and should have been writing for the New Yorker. And about how he preferred to keep his private life private.

Colleagues mentioned his kindness, but there was a hedge-y quality to some of it. There were also stories of him hiding behind a post at concerts when he saw a friend or colleague coming his way.

But apparently, this was OK because he was dead now and already being elevated to sainthood in that strange, strange way the dead are always elevated. I have often wondered if this is nothing more than a superstitious fear that the bastards will come back and haunt us.

I did not react well. I was furious at all the statements about his kindness, how in spite of his poison darts he was a truly gentle soul, etc. The man was an asshole and I wanted the world to know it.

I didn’t think hard about it and I did use his real name, a bad idea. I posted my feelings on my blog, and they were not charitable (though I assumed no one would read it). But I had tagged it with his name (duh: the part of me that DID want people to see it). It wasn’t long until I received feedback, not the kind of feedback you ever want to see.

“You mean you are going to rip into this man and destroy his family before the body even hits the ground?”

“I have never in my life seen anything so merciless. You are a sick, sick woman.”

Message boards said things like “it sounds like she was totally obsessed, maybe stalking him", and "he had probably been trying to scrape her off his shoe for years.”

Someone began to swing the word "lawsuit" around like a great medieval axe blade, a particularly nasty form of verbal bullying I hadn't seen in quite some time.

It’s funny how in moments like this, dynamics are neatly reversed. It drives me completely crazy. Like a bizarre weather vane, there is a complete 180-degree turn, and ALL the nasty things a person has done are heaped on to the person who has been hurt by them.

It’s insanity, and it happens all the time. It's one of the darker, wormier, more cowardly aspects of people, a way to scrape off blame for their sins so they never have to face them or take responsibility.

But there was more going on than that. I think I hit a nerve here, because it was obvious to me that this was a lonely, bitter old man (not THAT old – only in his 60s, but the lonely die young) who died without inspiring much real grief.  A blog post I read later, written by a friend, was much more honest than the verbal Cool Whip posted in the Sun. She spoke of his kindness, but then said he frequently isolated himself and could suddenly and inexplicably cut off friends in the manner of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

Oh my, again.

Then came the truly heartbreaking part: as he lay dying in hospital, a few colleagues from his Vancouver Sun days were having trouble piecing together any facts about his life. Where was he born ? Was it Saskatchewan? Didn’t he have a brother? Where did he go to school? Nobody knew.

As far as I know, there was no one from his family there, no one to stand by him as his life ebbed away.

I will never know why he attacked me that way when I was simply trying to renew a connection, not a close one, but one that had occasionally been fun. I don’t know why there was a Facebook page set up in the first place when he said he wasn’t on “Facefuck” and probably despised such things. (Another colleague described his work habits as being out of the 1950s, along with his attitudes and TV preferences: all he watched was Turner Classic Movies.)

Somebody mentioned a wake, and even said, “Will you be there, Margaret Gunning?” I really needed more acid thrown in my face. Still later I read a post on someone else's blog which nearly peeled my skin off in a single piece. I was described as a deranged crank and even a “stinky old biddy” (a masterpiece of description!). The post was accompanied by a goofy picture of me posing with my bird on my shoulder, a clear attempt to paint me as a lunatic. It sure must have taken her a lot of time to track that one down, as I posted it back in 2008.

I guess I should’ve known better than to speak ill of the dead. I broke some sort of primal rule, but I was just pissed off at all this glowing praise of a man who had a few other traits besides kindness and gentleness. Try vitriol and nastiness.

I did take my post down and posted a brief apology on the Straight message board. My timing had been bad. Fury has abated, to be replaced mostly with pity. I wonder about that wake now, whether it ever happened with so few people.  And I wonder if any of his mysterious, even chimeric family members would have attended, because it seems to me that attending was not their strong suit. 


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Signifying. . . nothing?

Medical stuff is a poor topic, I know, but lately I’ve become  preoccupied with it. And this in spite of the fact that I hate seeing doctors and very rarely feel that I am being listened to or taken seriously.

I’m in that grinder of tests that everyone is fed into when there are any sort of symptoms at all.  So far I’ve been safely spat out the other side, given the all-clear. I WANT this to be over with and I WANT to feel entirely OK.

And I don’t.

I won’t recount what the “symptoms” are (and how I hate that word, as it implies “this person must really be sick”, when the “issue” is finding out if I am even sick at all.). They’re boring, “signifying nothing”, as Hamlet used to say on one of his bad days. But whatever they are, or aren’t, they won’t go away, not yet anyway, though I know they will be gone tomorrow morning and never be back.

I can’t go in. That’s what I told my husband today. I just can’t. The thought of “going in” stirred up an ice-storm of panic that sucked me up into some sort of whirling white vortex, and all I wanted to do was get OUT. I haven’t called and I haven’t made an appointment because I know there is nothing wrong with me, so there is no point.

Then how to ignore the swirling forces of “whatever” that I can’t seem to get away from? It’s probably nothing. I’m not bleeding to death, hey! I can walk. Sometimes I find it hard to walk fast however and don’t want to, or have to sit down.

I never get sick, and if I do they throw me out anyway. I am never listened to. This is one of these dysphoric, self-annihilating realizations that jams my face down in the mud of mortality. Have I had a good life? Have I felt wanted? And just what have I contributed, anyway?

It could have been worse, I suppose, could have ended me in my mid-30s, though I jumped clear just in time before the locomotive ran me over. But in the midst of the high of turning 50, at the very peak of my happiness and productivity, it happened again. This one was truly wicked and seemed to indicate demonic forces that I could barely grapple with. At the same time, I completely lost my faith.

I understand self-destruction, too well, but I refuse to do it. I’ve been pared down pretty far in the past few years, though you’d never know it to look at me (for I’ve gained at least blblblblt lbs.) I cling to the tattered remnants of my ambition, realizing that the playwright Clifford Odets was so so right when he said, “Success is the jinni (genie: playwrights can't spell) that kills.”

Another playwright from the same era, George S. Kaufman (whose wife Beatrice was BFF with Oscar Levant) said, “What makes you, unmakes you.” If you understand this at all, then you are already unmade.

But aren’t we ALL unmade in the end, like some great tumbled tangled psychic bed? Trees fall and rot, and so do we, though the medical profession tries very hard to beat back the flames (sorry for the mixed metaphor). I wonder why we scramble so hard to stay alive for as long as we possibly can.  Don’t we all end up in pretty much the same place?

I know that sounds bleak, and I would gladly give an arm and a leg and both kidneys to anyone in my very small, very close, very dear circle of family. I wouldn’t even have to think about it. But I just can’t see it in general. As Charlie Brown once said (speaking of great playwrights of the 1920s), “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.”

I’ve missed the comrades who’ve fallen, and there have been too many of them: wise Gerry the benevolent patriarch, quickly consumed by cancer; beloved Peter, the best friend I ever made in two seconds, who seemed to be gone in another two; Glen the journalist/poet who fled from the psych ward and committed suicide; Ken the devoted cynic and constant presence in my church choir, who literally dropped dead in his tracks. Then – weirdly – Kathleen, who never should have died at all, who cannot be dead because it just isn’t possible.

There’s another one or two in there, and I can’t remember who they were. Now this is weird. I thought there were six, at least. How could I forget a whole person?

I just recently started nosing around in the work of Dylan Thomas again, remembering that he sometimes wrote “shape poems” (concrete poems that took the actual shape of objects or whatever-the-hell. Childish, really.) All I could find in his poetic imagery was mortality, and more mortality, rot and death, mixed in with some pretty ghastly sexual images. The guy ended at 39, self-ended I mean, awash in alcohol: the innocent baby-bird look of his youth had grown puffy, slur-eyed, deathward, with a large bulb for a nose. A tragic or pathetic or even disgusting clown. Poets seem to off themselves early, one way or another, hating life, seeing through it, or hating themselves. Robert Frost was one of the few who escaped that fate, though I remember reading somewhere that his son committed suicide.

So what does all this have to do with not wanting to call the fucking doctor?

I know I will call eventually, or maybe I will not, because nothing’s wrong anyway. I’m just all caught up in this stuff and have to get away from it. I am now in my 60^th year, for fuck’s sake, and though I don’t feel old, time has whipped by in such a blur that it shocks me sometimes. I was sitting in a restaurant across from my son at my birthday dinner last night, and thought to myself: he looks almost middle-aged. His hair is thinning and he has lines around his eyes and mouth. He looks great, is very buff, bulky with muscle as he never was in his boyhood when he generally got sand kicked in his face. He’s a superb athlete who has a good chance of reaching 90 because his habits are so much better than mine. But still. A receding hairline? I remember the night I gave birth to him.

And here are these two Nordic-looking blonde grandgirls who surely must have inherited their startlingly blue eyes and cornsilk hair from my side of the family, though several generations removed: I just helped push the blonde genes along. I noticed Erica’s hands as she did a magic trick with crayons, and I was shocked to note that they look like her father’s, which look like mine.

Well, you can’t bail on THAT, can you? My time with them is timeless, a complete absorption in giggly fun and a wash of unconditional love. Do I need to stay around to be the conduit for such love (for surely I am not the “source” but only the conveyor)? Or, like everyone else, will I stay because of the same primal urge to survive that has overpopulated the earth to the point of near-catastrophe?

Post-blog: Actually, I think it was Macbeth, that "signifying nothing" bit I mean.  I've always liked the Scottish play, and the "life's but a walking shadow" speech is just about the only Shakespeare I can recite by heart. I'm the life of the party, can't you tell?