As I've been working on my book about loss and grief and what we make of these experiences, I thought I would periodically share that writing with you. Some of the book is about hospice and death and dying, but some is about loss and grief in a more general sense. A bit of what I have below is reflective of that:
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I fell in love with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn when I read it for the first time the year I knew my marriage was falling apart. Despite poverty, cruelty at the hands of other children and adults, and a father who died by 35 from alcoholism, Francie’s recollections of the Brooklyn of her childhood hold exotic details like free Christmas trees that are thrown at children who are strong enough to catch them on Christmas Eve, or ferry rides in the Summer sponsored by the Democratic party machine, or what it feels like to read a book all day on the balcony of your apartment as you watch the people of the neighborhood shuffle about in their Saturday routines.
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I fell in love with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn when I read it for the first time the year I knew my marriage was falling apart. Despite poverty, cruelty at the hands of other children and adults, and a father who died by 35 from alcoholism, Francie’s recollections of the Brooklyn of her childhood hold exotic details like free Christmas trees that are thrown at children who are strong enough to catch them on Christmas Eve, or ferry rides in the Summer sponsored by the Democratic party machine, or what it feels like to read a book all day on the balcony of your apartment as you watch the people of the neighborhood shuffle about in their Saturday routines.
Maybe the neighborhood, the streets, the creeks, the town of
your childhood is magical? Maybe it’s a
universal – because even if it’s terrible (like in The Glass Castle,
etc) – it’s magically terrible?
I feel that magic when I think back on my childhood, which was not terrible or wonderful
in any extreme way – but it was my childhood and my neighborhood – a suburban subdivision where kids ‘popped
wheelies’ on their bikes freely in the street, where the Sno-Cone man drove
around in a dirty old car and ‘ripped off’ kids for 50 cents a cone. Where we crossed a creek on the way to and
from school, and once – a jaguar got loose from the zoo, so none of us were
allowed to walk home that day.
Like any neighborhood – the characters were known. There was Mr. R who kept Penthouse and
Playboy in the garage and the kids would all sneak in to peek at them
(Penthouse was really bad…way worse than Playboy). Mrs. T, the sweet grandma with a cuckoo
clock in her kitchen, the Brooks boys – all three teenagers, who made out with
their girlfriends in the summer twilight as they leaned against their
cars. Even the pets were known and sort
of collective. Sinbad was a outdoor cat who
technically belonged to the family on the corner. My mom said he was mean, so I didn’t pet him
when I was out playing. I was just four years old,
but in those days, you were allowed to play outside alone for hours at a time –
you were allowed to walk back and forth to different friends houses in the
summer. My mom would step out the
front door and call my name, alerting me of dinnertime. “Katy!” she shouted, and I had better come
running or risk eating dinner cold and alone. (It happened once - beef stoganoff, cold. Gross.)
One summer evening the moms were outside talking as the kids
ran around our cul-de-sac – we lived at the very bottom of the street, centered
on the circle. I noticed Sinbad skulking
around his yard, looking different, something about his face – did he have a
beard? I wondered. I went to take a
closer look. As I approached, I saw that
Sinbad had a baby bunny draped out of his mouth – alive, I thought. I walked over and took the rabbit right out
of his mouth into my tiny open palm. The
bunny limp, panting. I petted him as I
walked to my mom – she would fix this situation, I was sure.
My mom and Mrs. Green looked at me with surprise and then
looked at one another, “what’s this?”
I explained and very certainly said that we needed to save
the bunny. “Yes. You did save the bunny,” my mom assured. “What a brave girl you are to take him from
Sinbad. He would be dead, if not for
you. We will put him in our backyard by
the irises and feed him carrots and lettuce and he will grow big and strong and
have a family there. Hurray!” And as far as I knew she put the baby bunny,
who we blessed in our nightly prayers, in the iris patch. And I believed, every bunny in our yard
from then on was either my baby bunny or one of his descendents.
This is how you begin to create an identity as a child. What my mom reflected was the beginning of something I
built on that brought havoc, wonder, beauty, and many miscalculations to my
life. I felt very powerful as a child – I
do the brave thing! I do the things that
are hard to do. Sometimes I even save someone.
The way we see and define ourselves influences many of our
decisions.
We all have these identities that are bestowed through experience and stories - I find that people who had RESPONSIBILITY as a child take on particular identities as adults…maybe your
mother was sick and she relied on you to take care of her and clean up around the
house. Maybe your family struggled financially and you took it on yourself to 'make it.' Maybe your brother was a druggie and you tried your best to be no bother to make things easier for your folks. When our story becomes that we can save or protect people (or animals), we take on something that is not ours and it will surely bring us heartache.
I wonder if thinking I am brave is one of the reasons I was drawn to hospice work. I wonder if on some level you have to have stupid balls to do such a thing. I knew it wasn’t rescuing anyone, but maybe there was something like that in it.
When I started social work school, my uncle cornered me one Christmas Eve and told me that, 'No good deed goes unpunished.' He gave me a book, Miss Lonelyhearts, that he said exemplified this, and he told me the story of an imprisoned man who wrote to him (my uncle was a lawyer), saying he was wrongly convicted. He had done research, he had a legitimate case. My uncle took the case on, pro bono, and got the conviction overturned. My uncle 'saved' the man, in some sense.
The man my uncle helped was killed in an armed robbery within two weeks of his release. The man my uncle helped had been the robber. My uncle, years later, felt deeply conflicted..."what did my good deed do?"
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I wonder if thinking I am brave is one of the reasons I was drawn to hospice work. I wonder if on some level you have to have stupid balls to do such a thing. I knew it wasn’t rescuing anyone, but maybe there was something like that in it.
When I started social work school, my uncle cornered me one Christmas Eve and told me that, 'No good deed goes unpunished.' He gave me a book, Miss Lonelyhearts, that he said exemplified this, and he told me the story of an imprisoned man who wrote to him (my uncle was a lawyer), saying he was wrongly convicted. He had done research, he had a legitimate case. My uncle took the case on, pro bono, and got the conviction overturned. My uncle 'saved' the man, in some sense.
The man my uncle helped was killed in an armed robbery within two weeks of his release. The man my uncle helped had been the robber. My uncle, years later, felt deeply conflicted..."what did my good deed do?"
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I don’t know how old I was when I realized my bunny died. Maybe in my teen years. And when I matured, I found that there was truth and there was a story. The truth was that I didn't do the good, brave thing I intended to do. The story was a kind story, though. A great story that my mom created for me: Katy is brave and strong and helps helpless things.
For me, now looking at this episode from
childhood, I wonder what my adult self would do in the same situation. Was there a greater kindness? To let Sinbad eat that bunny up with the
swiftness of a predator or to let that bunny slowly die in the patch of iris,
starving and cold? Maybe death in the
wild is always wild, so there is no ‘kind’ or ‘unkind’; there is no ‘good’ or
‘bad’ – it will be over swiftly or it will be over more slowly, but the dying
will eventually be done.
Maybe you are reading this and thinking, "Thanks, that's depressing" My daughter read that last bit and said "Ethics." But I think one thing I've learned in this life is that it is both scary and hopeful. If you think you are helping or saving your child, parent, spouse, friend, it can be so hard to know your limitations. But this is the essential thing. Don't despair. Even though it is terrifying, you must let go of running about the world thinking you have more control than you really do.
Some people we love will save themselves. Some people we love will not. But, we can never know the ripple effects of all our actions; we don't know what's best, kindest or right in every situation. I know some people reading this are saying, "Well, I kind of do." (You know who you are. )
Toward the end of my marriage, I remember getting my brain and heart in knots about what would be best for my kids. I didn't want to get divorced, in part, because I was sure that it would doom them to some dysfunctional fate. But I also remember standing in the living room and this thought hit me like a bolt of lightening: God wants me to be loved. In that moment, I felt the beginning of an idea - that my getting divorced would not hurt my kids. That seeing me not be loved would hurt my kids.
At the end of my marriage, I so wanted to save my husband, my kids, my family as I knew it and my history, but in the end, I had to rescue myself.
I think that's what belongs to us. Our own life. And that's the only thing that is truly and deeply ours to take care of.
Maybe you are reading this and thinking, "Thanks, that's depressing" My daughter read that last bit and said "Ethics." But I think one thing I've learned in this life is that it is both scary and hopeful. If you think you are helping or saving your child, parent, spouse, friend, it can be so hard to know your limitations. But this is the essential thing. Don't despair. Even though it is terrifying, you must let go of running about the world thinking you have more control than you really do.
Some people we love will save themselves. Some people we love will not. But, we can never know the ripple effects of all our actions; we don't know what's best, kindest or right in every situation. I know some people reading this are saying, "Well, I kind of do." (You know who you are. )
Toward the end of my marriage, I remember getting my brain and heart in knots about what would be best for my kids. I didn't want to get divorced, in part, because I was sure that it would doom them to some dysfunctional fate. But I also remember standing in the living room and this thought hit me like a bolt of lightening: God wants me to be loved. In that moment, I felt the beginning of an idea - that my getting divorced would not hurt my kids. That seeing me not be loved would hurt my kids.
At the end of my marriage, I so wanted to save my husband, my kids, my family as I knew it and my history, but in the end, I had to rescue myself.
I think that's what belongs to us. Our own life. And that's the only thing that is truly and deeply ours to take care of.
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