Suicide: in the jaws of the dragon

Since my readership is very slim, to say the least, I feel relatively free to talk about a subject no one seems to want to mention. It's tiptoed around, or recoiled from, both from fear it will happen to someone they know, or from the kind of entrenched stigma that buries certain topics due to intense shame.

I heard of a death not long ago, and it was not someone I knew. I read the announcement on a friend's Facebook page, and even though I am removed from the situation, I found it disturbing. It pertained to a 42-year-old man, a teacher, who died suddenly and shockingly, leaving the family "devastated". There was a very long passage about what a beloved figure he was among his students and colleagues. All through this description of the man's life, I kept thinking, suicide. I could not be sure, but it was written all over the passage, the shock and despair that seemed beyond a more natural death. Certainly no other cause of death was listed anywhere, which was unusual for one so young. Even the long passage about his achievements and his status as a much-loved figure carried a faint sense of "we don't know how this could have happened to a man like this". Not homeless, not a drug addict or an alcoholic, but the kind of person who would never think of such a thing because he was so  accomplished and well-liked.

Then, a couple of weeks later, there was a sort of updated statement, saying that the family had thought it over and decided to talk about the fact that he had committed suicide. One of the first things they said (which was also included in the first notice) was how gentle his passing had been. They insisted "he felt no pain". I was stunned. I have experienced suicidal depression, and it's like trying to pull yourself out of the mouth of a dragon before you are ripped apart or immolated. There is no peace. It is never painless. How could it be, if you've just decided to destroy yourself and deprive the world of a totally unique human presence - forever?

I assume they were referring to his lack of pain AS he committed suicide, or lack of pain AFTER he committed suicide - neither of which make sense to me at all. No, you don't feel pain when you are unconscious. Or dead.

I don't blame the family for all these tortuous twists and turns. Obviously it's important to them to think he didn't suffer, which after a suicide is as incongruous a statement as I have ever heard. I cannot be too judgemental, however, as they were reacting the way 90% of people do. But it does point up how people struggle with this raw fact, that people do, yes, DO commit suicide, even if their anguish and despair isn't obvious to others. ESPECIALLY if. This man had been, apparently, acting for most of his life, and one day he just couldn't do it any more. Or so it would seem.

More odd things struck me. The fact that his memorial is taking place in a bar shook me, because then I wondered if he was an alcoholic. Perhaps not, and I am sure the family would vehemently, even angrily deny this. But surely, somewhere in academia, someone else might be - statistically, even! - and perhaps a recovering one. Someone who can't or must not drink would have to sit around with people who are drinking, perhaps rather heavily because they are in so much pain, supposedly in their colleague's honor, and the alcoholic at the table - even if sober - must sit there smiling with a gut full of unexpressed grief. 

The expectation is that everyone will sit around sipping scotch (they even mentioned this specifically) and heartily sharing funny and fond reminiscences and anecdotes about a man who JUST KILLED HIMSELF BECAUSE HE COULDN’T STAND BEING ALIVE ANY MORE. Of course, if you cry and feel agony at such a gathering, it’s completely inappropriate to express it, and you have to leave. What are you supposed to do - sit at a table, in a bar, in a public place, and put your head down on the table and sob with raw anguish? Or is raw anguish completely inappropriate these days?

Your choices are to leave and run to the bathroom (meaning someone else at the table is in the awkward position of having to run after you while the rest of the party looks at each other uncomfortably), to stay and bring the rest of the party down and completely kill the atmosphere of heartiness and humor, or - 

The only option that is socially acceptable is to just swallow your grief and pretend you're all right, even enjoying the evening. Everyone else is, after all - aren't they? If they aren't, who is going to start talking about it and ruin the occasion? You can do your crying  at home.  

But when you get home, you find it has all turned to stone. 

Does this set of impossible choices have anything to do with the social dynamics that lead a man to take his own life? Does it have anything to do with agonizing loneliness, with a sense of being set apart from everyone else, afraid of your own feelings? Of having to "keep it up", swallowing it continually for years and years and keeping the act going until one day it fatally implodes?

Memorials are “celebrations of life” now, with no tears or grief allowed unless it’s “happy” grief (whatever that is). At very least, you are expected to run to the bathroom and do it there, along with other bodily functions. I don't know what the answer is, but when I heard about the memorial in the pub, even in the first announcement where cause of death was mysteriously not mentioned, I winced. The idea of a "wake" may still be around, and I'm not against it, but I don't think these generally take place in a public space. 

There is no suicide rule book, no etiquette, but I am alarmed at how quickly people jump to hide the scars, even to minimize what has happened or reassure everyone that it was, after all, a painless event - at least for him, a man ending his own life. But painless only in the unconsciousness that leads to death, a conundrum I will never be able to resolve.

CanLit on fire: who can win this game?

I had an immediate reaction to this meme (or whatever it is): truer words were never spoken! Of course, if you truly embrace this perspective you're seen as crass. But what is a writer to do? I've said many times that we don't expect a trained concert pianist to play in an empty hall. But that's the equivalent of what professional writers are expected to do.  That is, those who aren't at the top of what is starting to look like a literary slag heap.

I'm a little sick of being disappointed, and I do try to comfort myself with the three novels I did get published (NOT self-published, by the way - I had to wangle contracts from three different publishers). I also have three or four manuscripts stashed in my computer, and ran one in parts (Bus People - if you wanna see it, the link is here) on this blog. I think ten people looked at it. I just think if it's meant to be, it's meant to be, and in this case it wasn't. 

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2016/10/bus-people-quick-links-to-parts-1-12.html

But was there some sort of weird karma going on? If not karma, then guardian- angel-ship, which I absolutely did not believe in. But maybe something was protecting me from "success", after all: the kind of success that lifts the privileged class out of the slag heap of anonymity and onto the shoulders of the gods (while selling lots and lots of copies).

It seems the game changed before I could catch up. I was only interested in writing well, which I believed would result in having a healthy readership. I don't think that's an unreasonable goal. But it didn't happen, and now I know it won't.

But my melancholic acceptance of failure was disturbed by the current CanLit "dumpster fire" which is threatening to consume the whole industry (and yes, believe me when I say it IS an industry, though that's not such a bad thing - we all need to pay the rent). Though someone came down hard on me for posting the wrong piece on this (though there is no such thing as a RIGHT piece on this!), I will share a link (below) which gives you some idea of what's been going on in the schoolyard. If nothing else, it will give you an idea of the sheer complexity of the situation, how twisted and tangled it has become. Worst of all, it has made some writers afraid to say anything, knowing they risk having their most innocent comments mangled and distorted by the monstrous sharks of social media.

What vexes me is that NO ONE has yet said anything at all about how Twitter has poisoned the well: without even having to face your adversary, and having spent an entire nanosecond composing your thoughts, you can fire off the most hateful volleys, only to be met by a Greek chorus of approval from somewhere before your enemy fires back. Without context, and I mean ANY context at all, even relatively innocent statements can appear to be soaked in poison like a lethal dart.

I will be accused of being a crusted barnacle for saying this, but in the past, if a writer read something in a magazine that made her furious, and she wanted to write a letter to the editor in protest, she would have to take the following steps: find a piece of paper and a pen, compose it, fold it up, address it, find a stamp, walk to the nearest post box and drop it in. At any point, she might think better of it, or at least rewrite it. Then, after a long wait, perhaps weeks or months, it might be published (likely severely edited). But once a tweet is tweeted, there is no taking it back. 

Poison darts are poised everywhere, and can't even be deleted because someone will take a screenshot and use it as a weapon. Those who wish to have a future as a published author are on thin ice, and it doesn't help that the stodgy, arthritic, unmoveable CanLit establishment is sawing a hole in it.

Speaking out is risky. NOT speaking out is crippling, and plays into the hands of elitist powermongers interested only in disenfranchising marginalized groups who MIGHT bring fresh perspectives to the table, if only they were allowed to. But the reins of power, not to mention the purse strings, are in the hands of the Big Few - bestselling writers, hotshot agents, major publishers. So perhaps some unknown angel prevented me from getting what I thought I wanted.

Or not? Are the grapes sour? Who gives a shit, at this point!


CanLit-dumpster-fire-disaster



If you'd rather not wade through this long piece, here's a short excerpt which demonstrates how rancorous and confusing this has become:

Then, a new twist: B.C. author Angie Abdou wrote on Facebook that she in fact had notified Kay about Wunker's post as "part of a conversation about troubles raging in the [CanLit] community and how those issues are making their way into the classroom." But by the time Abdou went back to look for the post to send it to Kay, Wunker had unfriended her. So Abdou asked Bok to screen-cap it. In her confession, Abdou apologized for unintended consequences against Bok and Wunker; she called Wunker "a committed teacher and writer." She then left Facebook and Twitter. (On Thursday, Abdou provided The Globe with a statement. "I made a mistake, and I'm extremely sorry. I did not intend to betray anyone's confidence or to harm the reputations of anyone involved.")


Are you with me still? . . . No? Well, don't feel bad. Neither am I. The twists and turns of it are giving me vertigo. Come OFF it, people! Try to come up with some sort of armed truce, before the whole thing collapses and entire books are lost due to discouragement and pain. Creativity will be extinguished along with the flames. If people are not allowed to express themselves, if works of real literature (NOT TWEETS!) die on the vine, everyone loses. Everyone. Do you hear?

The loneliness of the long-distance drinker

ABC | PEOPLE

Elizabeth Vargas to Share Story of Alcohol Abuse and Anxiety in Book, ABC Special

By Mark Joyella on Aug. 23, 2016 - 5:40 PM

Two years after she announced she would write a memoir, 20/20 anchor Elizabeth Vargas will mark the release of her new book, Between Breaths: a Memoir of Panic and Addiction, with an hour-long ABC News special.

The special edition of 20/20 will feature ABC News Diane Sawyer interviewing Vargas about the secret she kept for years–and the difficult recovery she continues today.

Sawyer and Vargas will also report on the link between anxiety and alcohol abuse; and Vargas talks to an expert at the National Institutes of Health, visits a treatment center and speaks to alcoholics who are trying to get and stay sober.

The special airs Friday, September 9 at 10 p.m. ET, and the book will be released the following Tuesday. “When I first began to worry about my own drinking, I turned to books other women had written about their own alcoholism. I learned I was not alone, and it helped me find the courage to reach out and get help,” Vargas said when the book was announced in 2014. “I have spent my entire life telling other peoples’ stories. This one is my own, and is incredibly personal: the burden and loneliness of of the secret drinker.”

You know, even as I sit here, I wonder if I even want to do this.

I watched the 20-20 special with Diane Sawyer last night. Couldn't NOT watch it, I guess, for the same reason everyone else has: the train-wreck-in-slow-motion effect, the watching through your fingers, which is even more dramatic with a "celebrity" who has been in the limelight for some time. Not just for her journalism, but for her drinking.

Now, barely two years sober, Elizabeth Vargas announces she's releasing a memoir about her alcoholism titled, very curiously, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction. Note that "panic" (with that odd image of breathlessness) comes before "addiction". And nowhere does the title mention alcohol.

Strangely enough, last night, that's almost all she talked about: stumbling around blind-drunk, coming out of a blackout in the Emergency Room with her blood alcohol at a near-fatal level. . . fucking up at work. . . I don't know. I guess it's just that I've heard it all before. And heard it, and heard it, and heard it, particularly from celebrities.

All the way through this hard-to-watch thing, Diane Sawyer kept mentioning "red flags" (hiding booze, excuses at work, chunks of lost time, being unable to get off the sofa for her kids). But I saw some red flags of my own.

When I first saw an item on 20-20 about Vargas and her alcoholism, she said she announced it only because she was "scooped" and wanted to set the record straight. She looked very, very uncomfortable. Her smile was tight, her body language rigid, and she looked as if she couldn't wait to get out of there.

The story goes that her first stint in rehab was pretty much of a disaster. As was her second. The third time seemed to be the charm, except. . . 

Except that there were still red flags.

Sawyer: Do you think you hurt your children?

Vargas: Oh, no. I'd die for my children.

A little later on:

I will never be able to forgive myself for the way I hurt my children.

Sawyer asks her, near the end of the piece, "I know not every alcoholic wants to say how many days they have in. . . "

Vargas didn't just shut down. There was an audible slam. No, she did not want to say.

Sawyer was not quite ready to let up. "But do YOU know?"

"Oh yes. I know." But her face had closed down again, as it had done several times during the hour.

I have to tell you what I think about this. Addiction makes you lie. Otherwise, how could you hide all those bottles? And you don't necessarily stop lying because you have stopped drinking.

I don't think Vargas knows her sobriety date. She has had to start all over again so many times that she has lost track. But in the 15 years that I went to AA, I came to realize that a person's sobriety date is more important than their "belly-button birthday". If you don't know it, don't remember it, it's very likely you'll just keep re-setting the clock. 

So now, a book, a tell-all.  I wonder who told her to do this. For surely, someone did. Writing a memoir is a way to redeem yourself - quickly - by "breaking the silence" and "helping others reach out". It puts a shiny cover (literally) on the whole thing, makes you look noble for being brave enough to share it, and makes it all - what? Containable? At very least, it turns it into a commodity that can be bought and sold.

We live in a culture which claims that throwing the gates wide open and pouring out every trauma to the public is the path to "healing". "Sharing the pain" is supposed to give us lasting and/or permanent relief. Going public is therapeutic, isn't it? Well - isn't it?

I don't know how we've come to this point. It's not that I didn't identify with Vargas' blackouts, trips to the ER, high blood alcohol levels, and even screwing up at work (in her case, even on the air). It's that I DID identify. I did most of that stuff, and repeatedly. But I came to realize - the hard way - that it is very, very dangerous to expose yourself, to peel your skin off like that, when you're newly sober (meaning, the first five years or so).

Though Vargas wasn't as tight-lipped and uncomfortable as on that first night of revelation, there was still some acting going on. This woman makes her living in front of the camera, has done so for twenty years. Her face flitted from warmly confidential to deer-in-the-headlights to wretchedly guilty, to unreadable. Understandable, perhaps, but why stand under the glare of TV lights so soon? 

But the thing that I puzzled over most was the emphasis. The show I watched last night was almost all about alcoholism. Yes, there was some reference to anxiety and panic, but not as much as I thought there would be. And yet, the title of her memoir leaves out alcohol altogether! "Addiction" can mean playing too much bingo. The "between breaths" - a very strange allusion, I think - seems to be pointing to something like asthma or emphysema. It's as if she still can't quite spit it out - in writing, at least - that she's an alcoholic. Perhaps "someone" advised her not to put that in the title. Emphasize the panic and anxiety. They'll go down better. They are, after all, badges of honour in her high-pressure industry.

Why do I get this slightly vertiginous sense of spin?

It has taken me a long time to write about all this. Last November (November 30, to be exact) I celebrated 25 years of sobriety. Though I no longer attend AA, I would return to it in a heartbeat if I felt my sobriety were compromised. But I still remember, as booze-drenched as I was, what my last day of drinking was like.

You have to remember that date, or at least the date you first dragged your ass into detox or a meeting (or a meeting in detox). Otherwise, you're doomed to repeat it. It means you're "vague-ing" it off (and vague can be a verb, as far as I am concerned).

My last day of drinking was stupid, boring and depressing, but it summed up the sad joke my life had become. I was huddled in bed in the middle of the afternoon. It was deluging rain outside, had been for days, and so dark it was almost like night. The blinds were closed.  I had a bottle of cheap wine in my hand and I was taking pulls out of it. When I had sucked it dry, I threw it on the floor and said, "It's not enough." And then, for the first time in probably years, I heard myself.

In moving to Vancouver from a small town in Alberta, I had wanted so much more. I had ranted in my diary about this in a nearly-unreadable, intoxicated scrawl: "How the FUCK did this happen?? I had so many dreams and I lost them all and I want them back. In fact, I insist on it!" It was a funny thing to say during your last week of drinking.

There was another thing. I have to say this, I really do, because it's so important, a huge factor in my recovery. Before moving to Vancouver, I wondered aloud to my much-older sister what would happen if I couldn't adapt myself to life in the big city. She shrugged, made a pooh-pooh mouth, and in her best little ice-water voice, the one with the heartless little lilt in it, she said, "Oh well, I guess you'll just self-destruct."

Lying in that bed shaking my empty fist, I was GOD-DAMNED if I was going to let that poisonous prophecy come true. That toxic bitch probably has no idea how much she helped me that day.

But I digress. I think. 

I don't know about getting my dreams back, but at least I didn't die. It was extremely rough in the land of the sober, and sometimes I thought sobriety was even worse than drinking. I latched on to people very hard back then, and I think in a lot of cases I made them uncomfortable. It was extreme even by AA standards.

But I wasn't going to put my "anxiety" (or my PTSD or my bipolar disorder, then undiagnosed, or perhaps underdiagnosed) ahead of my drinking at a meeting. I had to talk about alcohol, even as I was thoroughly sick of it. Because anxiety wasn't really my problem. Panic wasn't my problem, nor was some sort of vague respiratory condition. Calling it that would have sanitized my messy, tawdry, stigmatized condition, and I couldn't afford to do that.

It's a long time later, years and years and years, and though for the most part I don't even think about alcohol, watching something like that 20-20 show last night can start things clanging. I don't think Elizabeth Vargas is out of the woods yet. She may have a couple more trips to rehab before she gets her feet on the ground (and don't get me wrong - I sincerely hope she does). Whoever advised her to do the book so early in her recovery - a recovery that seems rather fragile to me - is cockeyed. And if she decided on her own, then SHE'S cockeyed. But I think somebody should have taken her aside and set her straight. Too much "brave" too soon can be a recipe for rehab (again). And fourth times are seldom lucky.

The 20-20 Facebook page has hundreds and hundreds of comments, almost all of them rhapsodic, about Vargas' honesty and courage. But I think when sobriety is relatively new, these kinds of revelations need to be shared only with a trusted few. To throw it wide open is to open yourself to infection. It's peeling all your skin off. Why is unmitigated, unregulated, unrestrained "sharing" considered so therapeutic? Because it reduces the stigma! - doesn't it? 

Except that it doesn't. 

So what does? People going about their business, sober, once they have met the dragon face-on. Living a good life, a productive life, even a happy life - sober. It's being an example. People can pay attention to it or not, but if there are enough examples walking around like that, it can't help but make a difference.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Light comes from everywhere: the stone church

I seem to be obsessed with spring. This in spite of the fact it isn't even here yet: not for most of us. In the mild gloomy slick of Vancouver, winter never really comes, which is why croci are poking their purple Easter heads up above the soil, cherry blossom buds are ready to explode, and the roses at the Centennial Garden in Burnaby are already beginning to spear reddish-brown leaves directly out of their prickly, woody stems.

So I sit here in the a.m. with everything, or nothing, going on around me. I have become obsessed with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (which my Windows Media Player insists on listing as "Right" of Spring), and am listening to it now. What was chaotic, or at least what seemed chaotic back then, and is supposed to be chaotic, isn't at all. Now, with new ears, or a brain blasted clean by forces I don't understand, it is the most orderly piece of music I have ever heard.

As orderly as Spring:

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

As usual, Hopkins had me until the second stanza, when he went all Mary-ish on me again, as he always does. Poor little man, celibate but yearning, yearning for men, boys, all those forbidden things he put just out of his own reach. 

Even if I could write, I know I could not write this, because the art of building airy castles out of cinderblocks is given to so very few. So I plough ahead (yes! "Plough". And American readers, please don't see this emphasis on Canadian spelling as a slight: it's just that the constant, enveloping election coverage is beginning to wear me down. This is almost as exhausting as the Canadian election that caused normally-sane people to draw Hitler moustaches on Stephen Harper.) Life is a keep-on-going, it's the only thing I've found that makes any sense.

Yesterday, something sneaked into the back of my head. A memory, or a dream? A dreamlike memory. It was a memory of a wall made of slate, or something like it. A room, no, a whole building that was built like a box. Square and unadorned. And there were stone walls, impossibly, emitting light, light that seemed to come from everywhere.

I knew this had happened to me, or else it was a dream so vivid it had left a burn-mark, a scar, a brand on me somewhere. My very skin was affected. I began to search my mind, but as with so many other fragile memories, I couldn't chase it or it would flee away from me. I had to sit there and see how much of it would come back of its own accord.

I was in a room, no, a whole building, and the walls were made of some sort of rock, and the rock was emitting light. Everywhere. I had no idea where I was in the dream/memory and couldn't place it, except that it must have been in our far-ago travels.

We had been to Utah to see Bryce Canyon twice (and surely, if God exists, s/he lives there in the sacred peach-gold turning of the light). I associated Utah and our trip to the States with minerals, rocks, petrified wood, but also religion. Could this not have been some odd little church (for I believed it must be a church) situated in the middle of nowhere, and made of some thin, porous rock, like alabaster? I asked my husband if he remembered it, and I got that tolerant, no-you're-crazy look I am so used to getting. He sort of acknowledged something like that might have happened some time, probably somewhere in the Southwest on our trips out there. 

But no. It couldn't be that. For some reason it seemed much farther back.

I started my usual internet search: churches made of alabaster/rock/translucent rock. Even names of minerals that would admit light. Nothing. It HAD to be translucent rock of some kind, and I was coming up empty, as almost never happens on the internet now.

But then.

Then, something, a photo of what looked like a rock plate with striations, and light just barely showing through it, not streaming but easing, glowingly. In fact, the rock faces on this wall - and there it was, a wall - were all glowing pinkly, redly, amberly.

It was a church.

It was a church in Switzerland, in a town called Meggen on Lake Lucerne - and yes, we had stayed near the lake for a day in 1998 - 1998! It was called St. Pius Church, and was the strangest Catholic church we had ever seen, bare, austere, just a box made of marble slabs. Marble so thin it emitted light, perhaps in that way Michelangelo exploited in his statues, giving them an almost phosphorescent glow. The place was so austere that it was almost severe: hard wooden benches with no backs, an altar too minimalist to be real with a cross suspended in the mid-air, and some sort of side-sanctuary made of cement - oh, cement! But I remembered it all, every bit of it, especially the way the light seemed to come from every direction.

The other strange thing, though, was how very little I could find out about this place. There was simply nothing but a very few Google images, with text either in German or Italian, or no text at all. The English text, what little I found, was in that stilted and often hilarious form that bespeaks the literal, translated word-for-word.

What I could (finally) winkle out was that this place was built in 1964 by - Fueg? Was that his name? The plain boxy shape was typical mid-'60s ultra-modern style, something I am trying very hard to forget  

This means the outside was almost howlingly ugly, like a particularly awful industrial building with an eyesore of a 1960s alarm-clock-looking tower outside it. It reminded me of the big TV aerial we used to have, the one you could literally climb.

But then things began to fall apart. Yes, I DID remember transparent rock, light, and a very boxy, square building. But how did we find this thing in Meggen, Switzerland? We stayed in Lucerne, and I don't think we ever came across any tourist info about this awful-looking (from the outside) place. We were used to seeing overwhelmingly-ornate cathedrals with flying buttresses, glistening with garishly-coloured stained glass, Catholic ostentation in the extreme. Yet here was this bare, unlikely, almost-impossible place.

I don't remember the outside. Not at all. No one would go near such a building unless they knew about what was inside. This place would have necessitated a deliberate side-trip, and we didn't have time for that.

But I put my HAND on that rock!

It was cool-warm to the touch, not as cold as you expected, because it had soaked up sun rays even though the day was cloudy. Far from being echo-y and cold, the acoustics were beautiful, warmly concentrating sound as if embracing it.

This couldn't be the same place, though. My "memory", if that's what it is, is of a small place we happened upon while driving around in Utah. The outside looked much like the inside (I think, or at least was more inviting than this cinderblock factory in a nothing little town). Someone invited us in and told us that the place had only one natural light source. The light came through the rock walls, which were made of gypsum or alabaster (or something). There was no electrical wiring whatsoever, and at night they used candles. We didn't stay long after marvelling over the walls, because really, there was nothing else to see.

I understand how memories from different times can become conflated. I see how rare it would be for ANY cathedral to be built of marble slabs, carefully chosen to match their grain. I understand it would be extremely expensive, and that even inside, there would be aspects of it (a lot of metal to hold the slabs together, and a Cosco-like gridwork on the ceiling) that were ugly by necessity. There is no way that even a mini-version of this could be built over here. But I just don't remember the size, the scale of this thing. Though like real estate photos, the rare pictures of it (and I've used nearly all of them here) might make it look a lot bigger.

Adding to my confusion is the fact that on the internet, where I very rarely run up against stone walls, this place barely exists. There are no YouTube videos of it. People don't write about it in their travels because they don't go there. The outside is just plain hideous, plainer than plain, a dud.

I don't know what happened here. If this happened at all - and now it's up for grabs - it was eighteen years ago, our grandkids hadn't been born yet. . . and we were celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary with what we knew would be our one and only trip to Europe. Unlike all my strutting, fretting, ostentatious "friends" on Facebook, I can't post lavish photos of Algiers and Bath and Provence and wherever-the-hell, the travel destination of the month, with even more enthralling pictures of ravioli from that fabulous little Tuscan cafe (and by all means, show me your food!), because we are too old and poor and our health too dicey to go overseas, or travel anywhere at all any more. 

So that is that.

This must be it, though. It must. Where else would you find a whole church (you can't exactly call it a cathedral because it's basically a box made of stone) built so strangely? When the light kisses and splashes the stone from the outside, the walls inside glow like beaten gold. Nowhere else on earth will you find light like this. If there were an earthquake, even a small one, the whole thing would come crashing down, for those marble slabs are all of 27 centimeters thick: just over one inch.

One inch of stone between you and the sun. Think of it. But why is the memory so mixed-together with something quite different? Bill does not remember this at all, and has a hard time believing we were actually there.

Which perhaps we weren't. Perhaps we were somewhere else? But I know I could not dream stone walls emitting light. 

I'm NOT trying to make a point here, except a rather queasy one about memory. Back when I was wrestling and grappling with PTSD (which had no name then) from my father's abuse when I was a small child, there was a sudden, very high-profile "movement" called False Memory Syndrome, in which believers (whose daughters all seemed to be claiming sexual abuse from family members) tried to force on us the idea that we could create any old memory we wanted to, usually from sheer malice and a desire to hurt our parents as much as possible.

This could not have come at a worse time for me, and I was so close to suicide I was hanging on by my fingernails. Every day I signed a contract I had drawn up for myself: I will not kill myself today, dated it, and filed it with my therapist. My sister sent me whole magazine stories about "FMS" (which, who knows, may have wormed its way into the DSM by now) with long passages underlined. When I tried to explain to her what I was going through, the way my guts were being pulled out in a long ribbon by something I NEVER wanted for myself or anyone else, she ripped the letter to shreds and mailed the pieces back to me.

I had a letter from my dad, hand-written in all-caps: NO! IT DID NOT HAPPEN! He had the document countersigned by a psychiatrist who used to treat me when I was fifteen years old. This doctor was certain it didn't happen, as if he had been there. One thing you can say about my family: they sure know how to discredit a person.

The point of all this is, I don't want to believe memories can be scrambled or altered by time. They were all telling me it didn't happen. At all. My sister is a lot older than me, which (she said) guaranteed it never happened. It's a sore point with me. I DO remember the essence of something, of putting my hand on the cool-warm stone which was so very smooth. I remember Bill and I, both of us, marvelling that such a thing could even be.

But why does part of my brain say, "no, wait a minute. . . "

Not that it doesn't exist at all, but perhaps that it existed in a different form, smaller, more rudimentary, and somewhere in the United States (for Canada would never produce such a mineral oddity - we don't have marble anywhere). Knowing also that such a thing is virtually impossible, unless a North American architect decided to copy it on a smaller scale.

So what is the point here? Does this have anything to do with spring? Of course not. We didn't even travel to Switzerland in spring, it was the fall. Maybe that lovely Donovan song I posted yesterday? Maybe the crocuses, the everlasting green of Vancouver - the memory springing up or sneaking in like new life from nothing?

Probably there's no connection at all. I have never wanted to post polished essays here, but explorations that don't ever happen in a straight line. Which explains all the P.S.-es, the "oh wait!" at the end of the posts. If discoveries don't happen in a straight line, surely memories don't come back that way, or are changed in some sense - but are they invented, as my family insisted they were, just for spite or for sport?

But I DID put my hand on that stone, meaning it existed then, and must exist right now, this very minute, somewhere.

As usual, there is a small P. S. (until more seaweed trailings stream from the oozing clump I pulled out of nowhere last night). Someone here has tried to describe St. Pius in lyrical terms. After that, an amen.

Project description

The geometrical rigour and the clarity of St. Pius’s proportions help give the church its presence in the majestic – and dynamic – alpine setting and within a heterogeneous residential quarter. The white of the marble appears to enter into a dialogue with the distant glaciers. This dialectic is set forth inside the church with the contrast between the rhythm of the 74 steel columns and the cloud-like painterly structure of the stone wall panels. From the exterior, the polished walls appear to be pure white, while at night the interiors are cast in a honey-yellow glow, and their velvety surfaces radiate warmth and physical presence. St. Pius’s has not received the widespread acclaim that the expressive churches by Füeg’s contemporaries Walter Förderer and Gottfried Böhm met with. (Frank Kaltenbach)

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