The Glass Character: stages of grief

Showing posts with label stages of grief. Show all posts

Saturday, September 29, 2018

When will this strong yearning end?

Weekend in New England

Last night I waved goodbye,
Now it seems years
I'm back in the city
Where nothing is clear

But thoughts of me holding you,
Bringing us near

And tell me, when will our eyes meet?
When can I touch you?
When will this strong yearning end?
And when will I hold you again

Time in New England
Took me away
To long rocky beaches
And you by the bay
We started a story
Whose end must now wait

And tell me, when will our eyes meet?
When can I touch you?
When will this strong yearning end?
And when will I hold you again

I feel the change comin'
I feel the wind blow
I feel brave and daring
I feel my blood flow
With you I could bring out
All the love that I have
With you there's a heaven,
So earth ain't so bad

And tell me, when will our eyes meet?
When can I touch you?
When will this strong yearning end?
And when will I hold you
Again

This is the song I almost couldn't find. It needed a post of its own, not to be tacked on to a piece about garden snails! When I set out to find a good YouTube version to post here, I heard ten-year-olds sing it on those big splashy TV talent shows, and even if they could hit all the notes (always over-decorated, as all singing is now), they fell flat because they had never experienced ANY of this. They simply had no idea what they were singing about. Most were too strident, too screamy, and trying too hard to get a "wow" effect, a thumbs-up or high-five or whatever these people get when they win on those shows. They were all getting in the way of the song.

I finally found this one, presumably by an amateur, but exceptionally well sung, so I used it. A simple karaoke version, sung by someone I've never heard of, a man who has a Malaysian accent. It came closest to what I was hearing in memory. Now that I hear it again, the sweet overtones in his voice are phenomenal, not anything that can be created by a machine.

It was in the middle of all this listening that the line, "When will I hold you again?" triggered something, and I began to sob. It was like a cloudburst, just unexpected, out of nowhere, except that it was somewhere. My dear friend David, someone I loved for 27 years, died two months ago, and it has been a strange time as I've passed in and out of the revolving door of grief. And this is the first time I have cried.

I wondered why I hadn't, but I knew there was no schedule for it, no timetable for any of it, because grief is its own country and has to be traversed, travelled through. The ground is bumpy, rocky, with sheer drops. There are oases, green spaces. But these are only lavish memories, things which now must be stored away, without the presence of the one who meant so much to you.

So it's over.

When will I see you again? Never. It's not enough in the mind's eye. Memories are not enough. Right now I feel shredded, as if my heart has been through a mower.

He may have been the one person in my whole life who "got" me, quite apart from people in my family whom I know love and accept me with all my quirks. But he was what L. M. Montgomery called "of the race that knows Joseph", more than kindred, even though he wasn't kin. No one "got" me more than David, ever, and vice-versa, and it lasted for years, and years, and years, through everything.

This is pain, intense pain, and though I don't want it, I have known people who have traversed all of life and never once felt this, this heart-torn-out feeling, snapped strings dangling. I feel sorry for them, safely entombed while their hearts are still beating. They tend to die relatively young, and leave a bad trail, strewn with fragments from the casual damage of others.

I don't know what to do now, and the rest of the day will be lousy and I will feel tired and defeated, with raw eyes from crying so much, run over. But I'd rather have this. I'm not sure why, but I'd rather, perhaps because if he could see this, I know he would appreciate the fact that someone mourned him to this depth. I would not be without that certainty.

Saturday, September 26, 2015

Stages of grief: you can't handle the truth

Friday, November 7, 2014

If there are no mistakes, then why am I such a screwup?

There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth: not going all the way, and not starting.

Buddha

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
Oscar Wilde

Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out.

Benjamin Franklin

Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.

Bruce Lee

There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything. I’m positive that a doer makes mistakes.
John Wooden

Making mistakes is the privilege of the active. . . Only those who are asleep make no mistakes.

Ingvar Kamprad

OK THEN! I've been wanting to write about all this for some time now, and it seems even more relevant in light of some recent events.

I am constantly coming across quotes about how desirable it is to make mistakes. We should make lots and lots of them, or else it proves we aren't doing anything. These quotes can come from business wizards like Steve Jobs, or spiritual bigwigs like Buddha, or meatball-eating furniture magnates like Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad (whom I always thought was an actor in one of those . . . movies . . . you know the ones I mean).

The reality is somewhat different.

I think people say these things to try to alleviate the excruciating embarrassment and even humiliation that can arise from a single mistake. They're trying to make themselves feel better, not just you, and not just for past or present-day mistakes but as a sort of immunization against the humiliation of mistakes as yet unmade.

People are fired because of a single mistake, and their careers and self-esteem sometimes never recover. People lose their spouses because of a mistake (an affair? It happens, believe it or not), changing not just the course of their lives, but the lives of children and grandchildren and all their friends, who may not know on which side their loyalties should fall. (It's always one way or another, folks.)

One mistake, even one clumsy social error, can lodge itself in people's memory like one of those sticky-burr things. If you are kind and gracious 99% of the time, and fuck up 1% of the time, guess what people will remember?

I won't mention any names here, because I can't, but I once worked with an agent who ran into some problems approaching a publisher. The managing editor said, "I hate Margaret Gunning!" When asked why, he said, "Because she panned one of our authors." Something like ten years earlier, I had written a "negative" review of one of their books (I had certainly not trashed the book but felt it didn't cohere, which matched the opinion of the majority of other reviewers).

Was it a "mistake"? I was just doing my job, which is NOT to write synopses or dishwater generic non-reviews providing no critical analysis whatsoever. But even if it wasn't a mistake, it seemed to have created a rancor which would live forever. To that particular publisher, no matter what else I did to redeem myself, my name would always be mud.

So imagine what would have happened if I HAD made a mistake, even a little one!

I've misfired on emails before, sent them the wrong way. Doesn't everyone do this? I thought so, until I did it myself. Again, it was a publisher, and it was a mistake, and no one said "it's OK to make a mistake, it's the way we learn" or anything like that. Instead I got an email back saying, "Do you realize what you've just done?" You could hear their gasp of horror. According to them at least, I had done so much damage with a single click that it turned out to be irreparable. Those people will never forget. And there was nothing vindictive in my email, nothing abusive, just information they should not have received.

I goofed. I clicked. I was dead.

Is it just me? If it's just me, I might as well commit suicide right here and now. If I am to believe all these wonderful quotes and the people who insist you should make as many mistakes as you possibly can in the course of a day (and maybe they mean "mistakes" like borrowing someone's pen and forgetting to give it back), then perhaps it's true. Perhaps I'm the only one who suffers massive repercussions from a mistake, hostility, rancour, and the feeling that what I've done is totally and permanently unforgiveable.

So OK. Let's take a look at these quotes that everyone finds so comforting: Kubler-Ross for a start.

There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from.

Kubler-Ross became world-famous for her "stages of grief" theory, which automatically found near-universal acceptance with therapists and clergy and every other type of counselor until someone decided, many decades later, to do some research on the subject. They discovered that there are no stages of grief, and that everyone processes grief differently. The original premise was "stages of dying", so Kubler-Ross was not entirely responsible for this misinformation. Her theory applied to people who were terminally ill and trying to come to terms with approaching death.

I don't think she ever intended these stages to be lodged in neat compartments, to be worked through sequentially over a set period of time, but that's what happened. Therapists began to require patients to "go through the stages", and if they didn't, they were pushed to do so. Come on, it's time for the anger stage now! Why aren't you angry? And how about some bargaining? You can't go on to acceptance until you do.

So what was the mistake here? The biggie was universally embracing an untried idea just because it sounded good. Her theory was appealing because those neat stages helped to regulate and contain something that most people find overwhelming, a force of nature that seldom shows any mercy.

I'd like to believe - OK, I wouldn't like to believe, because it's too out of touch with reality - that "all events are blessings given to us to learn from". I know New Age people who believe this, but I can't. I can't because I have known people who have lost infants to disease and children to horrific accidents and had to try to pick up the pieces. I can't because I watch the news every day and see with what horrifying regularity people are casually slaughtered by crazed gunmen who one day decide they'd like to spill a little blood.

These are the extremes, but there are plenty of them. I can't believe "all events are blessings" when I watch a documentary about Auschwitz or Dachau. (Calling the Third Reich a "mistake" is the understatement of all time, but with neo-Nazism thriving and even considered "cool" by some young people, did we really learn from it?) I am still trying to figure out how an intelligent person can embrace this obvious fallacy. If your son commits suicide, is it a blessing? If you lose all your money and become homeless? I won't go on.

I can't compare events in my own life with tragedies of this magnitude. But I have experienced the alarming ways in which technology makes it even more costly to make a mistake.

I recently experienced one of those examples of the hellfire the internet can put you through. Because of something I wrote, I wasn't just roasted: I was mocked, excoriated, ridiculed, called nasty names, and made to look thoroughly stupid on someone's blog.

Obviously I had made a mistake. It was a bad one, I saw it quickly, deleted it and did what I could to make amends for it. I'd posted something that should never have been posted. Since I could not turn back the hands of time and un-write it, I could only do what I could do, and keep it brief, because over-apologizing is the biggest mistake anyone can make.

But I don't think it did one iota of good, and at best I was probably seen as covering my ass in a gesture of self-preservation. I realize now that this was a mistake that might just live forever. "Delete" doesn't do anything to erase people's memory.

It doesn't matter if I did 99 things right. That hundredth thing may spell the end of my perceived integrity and worth as a writer, and even as a human being. And now that we are in the age of blogging and internet and social media, one mistake can explode massively in a matter of seconds. It can go viral, reaching hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people in the blink of an eye.

Blessings given for us to learn from? By the time we get around to learning from them, we may be ruined. Human brains always retain the negative, we seem to have evolved that way, while positive and neutral events just sort of wash away with the tide. Combine that with the supernova-level, instantaneous communication that exists today, and you could have a recipe for disaster.

I approach Facebook and other such systems with leeriness now. If I try to "friend" someone and it turns out they are the friend of someone whose book I panned in 1998, might they diss me on Facebook, their blog or elsewhere for being an opportunist, rude or just plain stupid? Do I "friend" more than one publisher, or will that be a conflict of interest? If I ONLY friend one publisher, what sort of idiot am I who can't do business with social media, which is in large part what it is set up to do?

But if you admit that, oh boy. Embarrasment! Everyone looks away. Everybody knows Facebook is just a friendly chat over the back fence, and anyone who even thinks it might be a form of making business contacts is either gauche or completely mercenary. An elephant has suddenly appeared in the room and deposited 50 pounds of shit, and nobody knows where to look.

Maybe I was just behind the barn door when the rules were passed out. But it seems to me we'd all better watch our step. Making mistakes is a luxury which I think is the province of those alpha personalities who end up founding Ikea and changing therapeutic practice forever. The rest of us poor schlubs had better beware.

P. S. The Alex Colville painting Horse and Train remains one of my all-time favorites, speaking with no words about forces which are about to collide with catastrophic impact. It strikes me as strange that artists get to make these kinds of statements to near-universal acclaim, praised for their profound and powerful reflection of reality, but when writers do it they're being "negative" and going against the tide of a happy-face philosophy that - as far as I am concerned - collides with reality.