Category Archives: Ahimsa

The human need to be heard

I was doing my laundry the other night, at around 2:00 a.m. when the place is empty and I can use as many dryers as I like to get done quickly. When I walked in a guy was engaged in animated conversation with the long time night porter at the laundromat, a very friendly guy from Mexico who speaks limited English. After getting my laundry in the washing machine I went to sit outside and enjoy the central air conditioning that abused Mother Nature has graciously provided in recent nights.

The talkative guy came out to smoke a cigarette. I made a comment about the smoking section and how in the old days you could smoke a cigarette wherever you wanted to. He turned to me full of an expectation that was palpable. He said “can I talk to you, man? I really need to talk to somebody,” and I nodded, told him it was fine.

He was in turmoil, his wife was about to leave him, because after four years clean and sober, he’d fallen off the wagon, having a few drinks on the third anniversary of his father’s death. He always used to drink with the old man on his birthday.

He told me about his life, and it turned out his wife was also in recovery as he put it. I said maybe that’s why she’s so freaked out about your falling off the wagon, she sees it as a threat to her sobriety, that the same thing could easily happen to her. He was amazed by this simple idea, it seemed the thought had never occurred to him.

His sponsor had told him recently that he needed to start reaching out to people, for their opinions, for their insights, for help. I told him his sponsor sounded like a smart person, that it’s good to get perspectives from people who don’t know you because they have nothing to gain, no axe to grind. I had nothing to gain and no axe grind, and even though he never let me actually finish a thought, he was clearly very relieved that somebody was listening to him carefully and taking the trouble to respond with some thought.

When our clothes were dry and we packed everything up to leave, he thanked me and we exchanged a strong handshake. I told him he was on the right path looking for insight, understanding, that it was a good sign that he was reaching out. I wished him luck and I told him I was confident that he’d be okay, because most people don’t even bother looking for insight in their lives and he had a big leg up on everybody like that.

The experience reminded me again of how important it is to be heard. One of the most effective ways to stomp the living heart out of a person is to subject them to complete silence. They can speak, they can lay their heart bare, but by not saying anything in return you can make it very clear to them that they’re fucking dead to you.

Life or death. When Death finally comes we have nothing to say to it except to go. During our life we can choose the way of life or the way of fucking death. Me, I’ll take life every time.

It hurts to know a friend is dying

I heard from the widow of a beautiful soul I knew for many years that my old friend Les has been struggling for the last few years against a rare and relentless form of cancer called liposarcoma.  He’d always been thin, but this cancer, which attacks fat cells, found plenty of places to grow large, aggressive tumors among major organs inside his body.  Since his cancer is rare, and research dollars are scarce, they don’t have many options to treat it. They remove chunks of him and keep him on chemotherapy, while paring down their predictions for his life expectancy.

His daughter graduates high school next year.  He told the oncologists he wanted to live to see her graduate college and they told him it was possible.  Then it was trying to keep him alive until she graduates high school next year.   Now it is any day, apparently. 

I hadn’t realized it had been so long since I spoke to him, I’d known nothing about his grim situation until a few weeks ago when I found out by chance.  Last I’d heard he’d had complete remission from a scary bout with prostate cancer a few years back.  We’d kept in touch over the years, but not that closely, and apparently not for a while before the pandemic lockdown.

I called today and a woman picked up Les’s phone.  It was his older sister, who told me her little buddy was in bad shape, emaciated and grey as a prisoner in Auschwitz.  Something the doctors told him recently had finished off his will to fight, she surmised.  Her little sister, who lives near Les, had called and told her that if she wanted to see him, she’d better get down there.  She arrived the other day.  

He sleeps most of the time, they installed a hospital bed and have hospice nurses to attend him at home.  He’d been falling, so now he’s pretty much confined to bed, except when he’s helped to the bathroom.   His sister, who I met once during a shiva call after their mother died, seemed glad to talk and we chatted for a few minutes.   She’d moved to Kansas City, which was nicer than she thought, her daughter had insisted she move to where they were.  She passed a Denny’s when she got near her brother’s place in Arizona and bought a shake they used to love back when they were kids in Brooklyn.  He hasn’t been eating, nothing, for days now — never a good sign.  She offered him a sip of the milkshake and “the little stinker drank 3/4 of it”, she reported happily. but nothing since.  

We talked about things, moving between little details of our lives and her brother’s misery and soon to end life.   I told her to send my love, and Sekhnet’s, to Les, since he seemed to be sleeping.  I told her I’d try him again soon.  She told me to hang on and tried to rouse him.  She persisted for a long while, repeating my name a few times, it seemed he was deep in sleep.

Then I heard sounds coming from Les that I have never heard come from a human being.  The sounds were like a series of strangled barks overflowing with emotion.   He was trying to speak, or was in distress, or both.  His sister told me calmly that she needed to call the nurse, she thought he had to go to the bathroom and she wasn’t strong enough to help him out of bed by herself.  I told her to take care of him, and herself, and that I’d call again in a few days.  

I’m still thinking about that sound Les was making.

Morbid thoughts

We’ve gone through a recent plague, a plague on all our houses, Death dashing merrily through the land (and still reaping a good harvest of souls even now).  The NY Times silently notes in today’s Coronavirus Tracker that there were 90,428 new cases in the US yesterday, 37,770 hospitalizations and 473 Covid-19 deaths. 

473 deaths, ladies and gentlemen, that’s like 80 mass shootings, yesterday.  That’s close to a month’s worth of daily US military veteran suicides, which Obama noted are about twenty per day (thank you for your, uh, service…).

Multiply that number, 473, by 7 and you get over 3,311 dead Americans this week. From Covid-19.

With death swirling around us, and threats of death in the news, riots if F POTUS gets what would be coming to any citizen who’d done any of a dozen things he’s done, it’s natural that the mind turns to morbid thoughts.   

I limp to the other room, wince my way down a flight of stairs to get my glasses, climb back up, jaw set like I’m scaling a cliff.   Fucking hell, hyalouronic acid, WTF?  On my nose, already a cratered battlefield of minor cancers removed, the tingling of a new basal cell.   Fucking hell.  Got to find a decent dermatologist, one who won’t push me into a chair, make a generous cut around an invisible basal cell and simply cauterize the edges of the excavation because he’s not being paid enough to do the much less scarring Mohs surgery that was approved.   The new glasses seem to be working OK, though once I have the cataracts removed, and my vision is once again correctable to 20/20, all bets are off.   Blood in the urine, nothing to get excited about, simple and gross hematuria, doesn’t happen that often, but a trip to the urologist is in the cards as we’re monitoring high PSA numbers.  That literal pain in the ass?  No idea, have to find a proctologist, the one I went to for my last colonoscopy has apparently retired since then.  

Funny thing, though, the relief I got from the burning anus, in the form of some kind of medicated suppositories, seems to have turned the hematuria bracingly painful one day.   One day after my urologist emailed “sure” to my question about whether I could take phenylephrine HCl 0.025%, which had a warning about consulting your urologist if you have an enlarged prostate and difficulty urinating (I didn’t have any difficulty when I consulted my longtime doctor).  I could not urinate. Needing to pee and being unable to gets your attention, for sure.  Then, a small, bloody trickle, it felt like I was trying to pass a kidney stone, a sweaty several hours drinking copious amounts of seltzer (counterintuitive that when you can’t piss you have to flood yourself with liquid, but true)  until I was able to pass a soft clot and have an ordinary piss, without cowering.    Can’t sit here much longer, at the moment.

Just another day in the life of someone my age.   Getting older is not for the squeamish, boys and girls, but also, when you consider the alternative, it is the best thing going.   And a reminder, while we are here, to keep on doing the very best we can for ourselves and the people we care about.

Storyline # 9

Four old friends share a vacation house for a few days. For reasons none of them understand, tensions continue to escalate. Each one unwittingly plays a part in this rising stress. By the third or fourth night, one, feeling provoked by another, reacts in fury. Later, another will lash out in anger.

People under stress get mad from time to time, especially among people they love, who, being safest, are easiest to take anger out on, which sometimes just happens. Hurt feelings heal, hopefully quickly but certainly over time, given patience, kindness and communication.

Injuries to esteem can be traumatic, especially if familiar from earlier life and prolonged. Their pain can threaten, even kill, old precious relationships.

Friends in the grave are no different from friends who are alive and of whom we no longer speak, their righteous hurt become intolerable to us. Except that it’s mainly the other living ones we sometimes can’t forgive.

Story time redux

My post Story time was not meant to imply that all stories about the past are equally true, or that stories — narratives largely about what is true and what is not — are whatever we claim they are, only that they feel more or less compelling to us based on how well they satisfy what we need.  Stories make us feel a certain way about ourselves, some sit comfortably, others are very hard to sit with.  We prefer the ones that confirm that we are right to feel and act the way we do.

You can’t argue about what somebody deeply feels, the feelings themselves are as real as anything else in this hall of mirrors we homo sapiens live in.   It may surprise you to learn that an old friend believes the story that you chose to viciously torture your closest friend and sadistically refused to let up until he cried uncle by giving you something you felt he was withholding from you.   Your surprise at this unexpectedly harsh portrayal may prevent you from calmly asking a reasonable follow-up question.  

Even an open-ended expression of confusion like “have you ever known me to act that way, in our long experience as friends?” may or may not give you the answer you seek, because once strong feelings are tied up in believing a story you were convinced of, by the sincere tears of someone else you love, the issues become very clear to you and such questions are seen as yet more Devil quoting scripture to evade all responsibility, all decency.   The fact will remain, whether it can be shown or not, that you are the kind of person who tortures your closest friends and then fights to the point of exhaustion, like Trump, to deny every count against you, reasonable or not.  If you feel your name was unfairly harmed, that’s your problem for acting so despicably and still insisting you did nothing wrong.

This is one reason a Jewish scholar called Chofetz Chayim wrote a long treatise on the importance of not harming others with malicious talk.  You may be hurt, you may be angry, you may be sorely tempted to prove that you are right in your very strong feelings — but tread carefully when letting loose an arrow that can puncture somebody else’s good name.   You cannot take that arrow back.  You have done permanent harm to somebody by, in your hurt,  expressing a one-sided view of their unworthiness to be trusted or loved.    Refraining from this kind of thing can be hard to do, especially when we are under stress, hence a shelf full of volumes by this sage on the subject of holding your tongue when angry at, or hurt by, someone lest you damage their good name in the community.

On the other hand, if someone has molested children, and successfully hidden this, and you are aware of it, you have a duty to warn the other parents and members of the community.   The prohibition about speaking ill does not apply to people who do unprovoked, terrible harm to others.   We all do harm to others, but most of it is subjective and very little of the harm we do is done deliberately.   Not everything harmful is subjective or accidental, of course.  Rape is not subjective, murder is not subjective, lying under oath is not subjective, these things may be disclosed to others who may be harmed.  In those cases, we have a duty to warn others.

In the ordinary run of things, the stories we tell are harmless enough most of the time.   We recall one detail another person has no recollection of, we talk about who has a better memory, we reminisce, we tell stories about the past that may or may not have happened exactly the way we tell them, but these shared stories bind us.   They become part of us, many of these stories, the ones that make impressions on us.  At the same time, we are bombarded by stories that make no sense in light of the facts, that rely on “alternative facts” and emotional buzzwords calculated to make people want to take our side against demonic enemies.

If you break a law, and law enforcement negotiates with your lawyers for a year, and then you partially comply with the law, and then a subpoena is sent for the rest of the unlawfully taken things, and you defy the subpoena, and in a quiet follow-up visit from authorities your lawyer signs a statement that everything unlawfully taken has been returned, and then a lawful search, conducted after a detailed showing that there are probably stolen items remaining with you, yields a truck full of unreturned items, proving that you have been lying all along (or, as the Grey Lady styles it “raising questions as to whether you have been fully forthcoming”), you may tell the same story this way:

Evil partisans just want my blood, they have been howling for it for a long, long time.  If they can do this to me, illegally raid and ransack my home on bogus “charges”, they can do it to anybody (who accidentally “steals” sensitive government documents) and they will do it, and much worse, to you and everyone you love. This will not stand and we have to show strength, force and resolve and fight like hell, with our beautiful Second Amendment, if necessary, because if we don’t fight like hell we’re not going to have a White Christian Nation any more.

In personal life, as in politics, the stories we tell will hit the mark or miss based on how compellingly they play to our emotions.  What is more compelling than a dear old friend, a very tough and private person, telling you, in great pain, that her mate, a strong and well-respected man, wept every night because the torture he was forced to undergo at the hands of his merciless “best friend” was so painful, so vicious, so unfair, so inhuman?  All because this “best friend” was hell-bent on being right, and getting what he needed, no matter the cost to others, and his monstrous will was twisted to the inhuman goal of forcing the poor guy to comply with his distorted version of the story.

Hard, very hard, to be a human living, and trying to be kind, in hard times.  If you need more examples, look in any direction.  Before any of us add the personal troubles we all have, the list of urgent threats we all face — ongoing, literally fascist take-over of our experiment in democracy, continued destruction of the habitat for all living things, a deadly pandemic we have “compromised” with anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers over (almost 500 Americans died of Covid-19 yesterday, c’est la vie), the normalization of lying and political violence in public life, amid systemic injustice, an epidemic of hopelessness, self-harm, murder and suicide, to name a few, are a very heavy load, before any personal worries enter the equation. The shared threats alone are quite enough to overwhelm the strongest among us.  Plus, none of us, alone, are really that strong. Our best hope is with others.

That’s why it is so destructive to spread a poisonous story about a friend in the small community of mutual friends. Take away a person’s good name and you take away their hope for any understanding, from anybody. Not something that’s easy to defend, except, of course, with a truly compelling story.

Story time

There are many ways to describe the same situation, multiple stories are possible for every set of events. The  moral of each story is wildly different as are the heroes, villains and innocent bystanders. This is common in our smash-mouth politics, as we see everyday. 

It’s not that anything wrong was done (note the beautifully passive voice) in accidentally removing sensitive, automatically declassified national defense documents from their secure location, not by us, though those evil, partisan zealots on the other side are totally out of control, weaponizing everything, including illegally using laws and so-called legal procedures, clumsily planting fake evidence and willing to lie and do all manner of evil in an attempt to embarrass, dominate and win, because they’re sick and dangerous traitors who need to be hanging from lamp posts.   

Clearly there are other, much different, ways to lay out the facts and details and explain the cause and effect in this story. The main thing, in our litigious culture, beyond even accuracy, is that the story is emotionally compelling.

Bill Barr was found by a judge to have lacked candor in his representations to the court about a DOJ memo written in response to the Mueller Report.  He was found the other day, by a panel of appellate judges, to have been untruthful in asserting that the memo (on how to communicate to the public that Mueller had exonerated Trump for a crime Mueller said he could neither charge Trump with nor exonerate him for) was privileged because it discussed deliberations over whether to charge the former president with a crime or not.  Mueller and Barr relied on the same OLC memo that said a sitting president may not be charged with a crime, so there was no deliberation over whether to charge him in that memo.  Barr was lying, as Mueller suggested in his strongly worded letter about Barr’s misleading spin on the report, complaining that Barr had mischaracterized his findings.  Barr kept Mueller’s immediately written letter to himself for months, while claiming under oath that he had no inkling of what Bob thought of his characterization of the report.   

In another way of telling the story Barr was himself simply telling a story, it was puffery, a lawyer’s poetic license to spin the story to best suit his client’s needs. Those who share Barr’s worldview feel that Barr had every right, in the face of such, vicious, relentless enemies, to do everything that he did to help the leader he was rightfully protecting.

This is the society we are currently living in.   We don’t need to look at politics for more examples of wildly divergent, irreconcilable accounts of an occurrence people lived through together.   A blow up between old friends that nobody understood the reasons for will be described in incompatibly different stories.  In one, the four all played parts in the escalating tensions, discomfort, eruptions of anger and the sickening aftermath.  In another, three were pretty much the victims of one, a dangerous, sadistic and unforgiving person who nobody could even speak to without fear of being tortured.  In another, the blame for the accidental horrors was fairly evenly spread between three, while the fourth was largely blameless.   Another way of telling it was that once their respective traumatic childhood wounds were reopened, all bets were off, it was a zero sum war of survival, each against all.   The story then became one of alliances, who believed what and, in the end, whose story would become the final narrative in their little social circle.

One story lets the narrator completely off the hook, in fact, makes them the sympathetic victim and defender of a fellow victim, and they themselves will tell it calmly, yet passionately, to persuade friends of the truth of it.  In another story, the worst injury described will be completely absent from the first account.  Things one person remembers being said, things that shocked her, are not recalled by another person, the one who allegedly said it, though a third person does recall it, although not exactly as the first one said.

In one story the only way out is through a process of reconciliation, involving a painful but necessary conversation conducted in the safety of old friendship and extending the benefit of the doubt all around.  In another story the only solution, the only way to avoid reliving the devilishly painful details, is agreeing to forget the regrettable things ever happened and carrying on as if they didn’t, even though it means, unfortunately, tacitly tolerating the intolerable sadism of the stubbornly unforgiving one who tortured everybody and demanded they comply with a twisted version of events.

And on and on.   If the goal is peace, and restoration of what was lost, and that goal is shared, there seemingly should be a way out.   There is not always a way out, because, while we all consistently do the best we can, sometimes the best we can do is not good enough for somebody else.  If judged not good enough someone’s best can become the seed of a new story, and that failure of character is the reason we can never fix this broken, once beautiful, rare and cherished thing. 

At least we now know who to blame.

“I don’t know how to do this…”

You know what my father said to me before he died? And I mean right before he died, it might have been the last thing he said. He goes “I don’t know how to do this” and I said “it’s okay, dad, nobody knows how to do it” and a short time later he was just quiet and I saw that he wasn’t breathing. I closed his eyes with two fingers of my right hand and took the oxygen tube out of his nostrils.

I understand now that I said the right thing, what he needed to hear in that moment. “Nobody knows how” was a reassuring touch, but the words he needed to hear were “it’s okay, dad” they released him to go in peace. As he did a moment later, as gently as you can imagine.