Category Archives: musing

Doing the Impossible

The only essential ingredient for doing the impossible, outside of talent, work, dedication, perseverance, luck and strategic support, is faith that you can do it.  

Lose that spark of sometimes unreasonable hope for success and the world is right– what you are trying to do is impossible, a million reasons it was doomed from the start.  Tongues will cluck, sad looks pass behind your back.  Life will go on, just not for your dream.

Depression, it emerges, is like riding a bike.  Don’t do it for 25 years, find yourself in the right situation and, bingo:  no training wheels needed. 

Sleep Resister

One more from the last visit with Florence (and a perfect one it was).
 “Ever since I was a young girl I’ve been a sleep resister,” she told me toward the end of my visit, around 1 a.m.  I knew exactly what she was talking about and no words were necessary, she knew I knew.  The phrase is a perfect description of my variety of insomnia most of the time.  The mind resists shutting down.  It’s not worry, per se, or anxiety, as much as just a stream of thoughts and ideas that does not want to be shut off.  A clinging to consciousness.
 
“When I went off to Syracuse my father gave me a little bottle of blackberry brandy to have a few sips of before I went to bed, to help me get to sleep,” she recalled fondly, and then smiled as she reported that it didn’t really help– she remained a sleep resister right up to the end.
 
She was found dead in her computer chair, with the NY Times open in front of her, her glasses on and a bowl of M & Ms nearby, probably resisting sleep at 4 or 5 a.m. when her ticker, pronounced sound earlier that very day by some Brooklyn quack, finally gave out.

Cancer Journals

Alone, in the middle of the night, cancer victims I have known wrote long emails, sent to everyone they hoped might care.  I recall cc’s I got from two of them, one many years ago (she has survived, I saw her dancing at a wedding not long ago) and one, more recently, who was a wasted shell at my father’s funeral — held up on her son’s arm, who died not long afterwards.

 

The emails were excruciatingly detailed descriptions of cancer treatment, hopes, drug interactions, side effects, verbatim reports of talks with oncologists, nurses, spiritual advisers, descriptions of articles from medical journals.  One might call these email journals obsessively detailed.  The writers did not seem to pause for a breath, in their desire to tell the entire story, in every detail, how the drug trial, a long-shot, was nonetheless a hopeful thing, citing the literature, comparing side effects, describing how the previous chemo had made them feel, reciting many cancer terms of art with facile familiarity. They had been educated in a deadly grad school and they wrote long, scholarly emails.

 

These arrived in the night in one continuous paragraph, many screens long, or so my memory makes them appear.  I recall responding early on, and wishing them well and thereafter being at a loss, though they each thanked me profusely for writing a couple of sentences to them.  

 

One lived far away, the other I saw frequently as she grew thinner, lost her hair, grew it back, became drawn and skeletal, her beautiful smile more and more fleeting until it was just a memory.  Both wrote in the same way, writing to think out loud, writing to call out to other souls to answer them, writing not to feel so alone, awake and rattling the keys as they clung to their precariously teetering lives in otherwise silent houses.

 

I bring these up because I had an eerie feeling earlier today, thinking about some obsessively detailed emails I’d sent lately, in real time, about very specific aggravations I was going through.   The frustrations of buying mandated health insurance on the New York marketplace, by tomorrow’s deadline, for example, and having to pay $1,750 out of pocket, in addition to premium payments, before any insurance benefits kick in.  Or being dicked around by a corporation that helps nonprofits, and others, raise money on-line and does not make full payment more than a month after the campaign ends, its Customer Happiness bots cheerfully cranking out generic emails with update links that cannot be opened.  I realize the level of aggravated detail in my screeches of pain was probably similar to the emails from these two cancer patients.  Some suffer silently, others at great, sometimes unbearably detailed, length.  

 

I also had the troubling thought that diagnosed with cancer myself, I would probably find myself writing similar journals.  The odds are pretty strong both ways.  All four of my grandparents and both of my parents died of cancer, along with a young first cousin and a second cousin once removed, also quite young.  I’ve had a few small skin cancers already myself, and a few polyps snipped.  And I write by day and in the silence of night, sometimes in great detail.

 

I will now be as brief as I can as I explain to myself why I was so worked up by today.

 

On Monday a week ago I called my almost 93 year-old friend Florence, a great artist and a great soul.  She sounded befuddled on the phone, as she sometimes did.  I told her I’d call back.  When I spoke to her later she was completely clear and glad I’d be visiting her the following day.  I did.  The visit was wonderful and she looked great.  Three nights later she died.

 

I walked around the day after she died, last Sunday, feeling mostly grateful.  It was only when I told Sekhnet that Florence was gone that I found myself getting tearful.  Sekhnet is adept that way.

The following day my very promising young animation assistant was put into a terrifying position as the young man I am paying over-generously to arrive early and run the workshop showed up late and unprepared.  When I arrived the kids were one step from cannibalism, a bullied girl ran from the room.  This new group, and this promising and diligent assistant, may now be lost, the kids horses out of the barn and too late to lock the barn door. The young woman, seeing the carnage, may have been scared skittish.  I’d placed a lot of hopes on this new workshop and my new assistant.

 

Had dinner afterwards with Sekhnet, got choked up talking about a variety of things.  The next day and night I prepared a forced and muddled demo for the Wednesday workshop.  One girl correctly called the soundtrack creepy and I watched helplessly as my plans were cut to ribbons with little safety scissors.  I saw my dreams of this animation workshop flourishing and expanding littered across a classroom floor with the shredded materials that had been wasted.

 

Afterwards, after a long walk with Sekhnet, carrying heavy bags in the rain and expressing my hopelessness, she hit on an idea to help me.  Finding the 800 number for the company giving me the cold shoulder about the $450 they owed me from the fundraiser she urged me to call and straighten it out.   It was a sincere attempt to be helpful that resulted in me, on the fourth or fifth call, leaving a snarling message referring to the California attorney general’s office as Sekhnet called out the name of my nonprofit several times in the background as I tried to talk.  Wiping the foam off my lips I eventually accepted the tranquilizer she offered and found myself falling asleep twisted into a grotesque position memorialized by Sekhnet’s Blackberry.

 

A visit the following evening to an old woman dying slowly of Parkinsons, who seems to have lost the ability to communicate, didn’t feel like it brought anyone much joy.

 

Hours on hold trying to buy health insurance today, and so on.  I can add these things up and say “rough fucking week, man,” but I could not add them up in real time or distance myself in any single instance from the totality of them.  

Neither could I really get anyone to understand how unbearably painful any of it was to me, except for the sudden death of my oldest living friend.  Everyone can probably understand how much that one would hurt.

When You Have Little Time

When you have little time, are up against the loudly ticking clock, counting down– that’s the moment to slow down a little.  Breathe for a moment, gather what’s left of yourself.   Do not be distracted by the chaos that may be swirling around you, there is not time for distraction. Apply yourself to the task in what time remains, give yourself your best shot at doing the thing well.      

Death is the score keeper, waiting grim and confident at the end of every life.  Do not worry about Death, which comes when it wants to.   Life is the matter at hand, and living it as well as you can.   The timer is always counting down, but it doesn’t stop us, most of the time.   “I will always be here for you,” the loving parent reassures the child, as children must sometimes be reassured.   Not true?   A matter of opinion.

“Why such morbid thoughts, my friend?”  asks nobody in particular.  

“I lost a dear friend yesterday, and I was philosophical when her daughter called to tell me, and grateful that I’d seen her less than a week ago.  I hadn’t seen her for a while, and she was almost 93, and I was planning to see her regularly going forward.  That plan has changed, I will not see her again.   I was philosophical yesterday, grateful I’d seen her, grateful that her death seems to have been painless, after a long, wonderful life, but now the pain of that finality is breaking through.”  

As, it seems, the pain of finality always does, in the end.

Words are Tipsy Messengers Sometimes

Bandy legged, unable to pull themselves together, slightly mad, or stupid, or in a stupor, or just lazy. Capable of inspiring great passion, unleashing a flood of tears, a rushing river of life-restoring laughter, sometimes they just kick their skinny legs, eyes glassy, and don’t want to have anything to do with each other.

Like when you learn the good looking young CEO of the small company that hired your animation workshop died suddenly of a cancer she’d kept to herself.   Or the old friend you visited the other night, who looked so well and chatted so relaxedly with you long into the night, gone.

After I zipped up my dirty jacket, years worn but trusty against the cold, she said “you look like an explorer.”  I said “I am an explorer,” and she smiled.   We loved each other and told each other so.  I marveled that it was such a quick subway ride back from her home, even at 1:30 a.m.  Then she was gone, sitting in her chair by the computer, but no longer there.

Sentimentality and Friendship

Sentimentality often gets a bad rap, and thinking about it for a moment it’s not hard to see why.  The word is used disparagingly, indicating a mawkish attachment to things like the fallen out of use “mawkish”.  Sentimentality is usually thought of as wistful nostalgia for things that are no more and can usually never be again.  The sound of a ringing telephone in an old black and white movie, a sound a majority of people alive now have never heard, may raise a sentimental feeling in those of us old enough to remember this familiar old tone.   It used to mean someone (we were never sure who) was calling.  Now, it means little, except as a sentimental trigger to a smaller and smaller group of people.  

And to those who are too young to feel sentimental about the former sound of phone calls, any number of puzzles present themselves, in the odd event they notice and recognize the expressions on old people’s faces when the old tone is sounded.  Why would anyone want to go back to an era before we could know who was calling before deciding whether to pick up the phone?  To an era where we couldn’t choose the way our phone calls would announce themselves, customize the ringtones (which seldom involve a ring) to indicate certain callers.   Why would anyone be sentimental about an antiquated, boring and completely outmoded ringtone?

In extreme cases, which are not at all uncommon, sentimental attachment to things, places or people can be crippling.   Life is change, and change is often very scary, always carrying a whiff, for those with the nose for it, of the final change from life to not life.  Clinging to the familiar is easier by far than embracing the unknowable, and this clinging can take many forms.   The smart women, and men, who make the foolish choice to remain with a complete and enduring asshole who sometimes displays an endearing or redeeming trait.  I’m surprised to see how much of my own inability to move my life most productively forward is hampered by fear of change, of the sometimes irrational desire to preserve things (or at least a paralyzing reluctance to tackle winnowing), such as the perhaps 10,000 drawings that are woven into the shifting wall-to-wall mat of mostly papers covering virtually every surface in my neglected apartment.

I’m thinking of sentimentality at the moment in connection to friendship.   Some friendships are saved out of almost purely sentimental motives.  Not to say that such friendships may not also have valuable aspects, it just causes me to wonder about them.   In moments of solitary self-pity (as opposed to convivial group celebrations of self-pity) things that are basically good are viewed in a purely negative light.   What are we to make of old friends who insist we behave as we always behaved, whatever hard-won changes we may have made in the intervening years or decades?   What about friends who insist on their right to insist on their rights, no matter what the consequences of such insistence are?  Or friends who always serve themselves first, taking a slightly larger portion and making semi-humorous observations about their unflatteringly doglike behavior instead of being more mindful, less selfish?

I wonder, thinking back, about old friends I’m no longer in touch with, people it seemed I might become friends with and never did, new friends I was intrigued by, before they disappeared.  Deep friendship is rare, true enough.  Social friendships are valuable too, for one thing they take us out of our own thoughts for a while and place us in another space where brooding is not much of an option.

And I think sentimentally about a time when I did not see everyone I know or can imagine as some kind of slave, many of them in an almost constant low-grade fury.   This fury may be anger, self-hatred, terror, envy, unslakable thirst for vengeance, denial, an all-consuming sense of inferiority and competition, or what have you.  We humans swim in a sea of it, particularly in our competitive materialistic culture where the war of each against all constantly rages, or however Thomas Hobbes put it.  

Hard sometimes not to be sentimental about my formerly more humane view of the world, when this bracing fact of distracted, fleeting, compulsive life was not so much in evidence.  Look at our nonchalance toward things like torture, mass poverty, mass infant and child death, famine, genocide, out of control greed and destruction for the obscene profit of a very few, our powerlessness and the ways we console ourselves that we are still good people.  

Try not to be sentimental about a time when you may have seen this miraculous world more innocently, and mainly as a world of unlimited potential for miracles.  It is still that, however hard it may sometimes be to see it that way.

Somewhat Ironic Careers

We’ll leave my law license out of this one, I found a scrap of paper just now that had these words on it:

Human Relations Unit Sensitivity trainings led by my sensitive, brilliant father — always on guard against attack.

There were riots between ethnic groups in the NYC public high schools in the 1960s.  Jets and Sharks, they’d square off and rumble, with violent consequences.  A bloody nose or knife wound seems quaint by today’s standards, but my father’s mod squad would be called in and they’d find the leaders of these gangs and take them off to a weekend retreat.  Role playing, a chance to hear each other, guided trainings done by a multi-racial, multi-ethnic team of idealistic former teachers.

“We were pretty successful at stopping the violence at one high school after another with the kids we worked with.  The school would be peaceful for a year or two, until the kids we’d worked with graduated and their little brothers and sisters started killing each other,” my father told us, about the time he left that job for another equally stressful one.

Then, at dinner, the master of human relations and sensitivity training would go to work, reflexively doing what he could not help doing better than almost anyone else in the world. The insensitivity sessions the poor devil ran over dinner were legendary and unforgettable.

Last Thought to My Son

I am sure you noted this, but after  I was done writing that piece yesterday I realized it myself.   

I believed that people can’t change.  I also couldn’t give my children most of what kids need as they grow up.  It was just a handicap I had, something I had no control over.  When I was dying, seeing you so mild, I pretended to believe in change for your sake, to belatedly give you some little piece of what you might need.  I pretended.

It just hit me, being able to pretend for someone else’s sake … a big change.

Talking to My Son After My Death

Eight, almost nine years in, I’ve learned a few things about this death business, and though I don’t think often of life, as such, in the way that living people do, I am slowly moving forward.   I have been able to hear certain conversations and have plenty of time to muse about them, all the time in the world, literally.   Yesterday you spoke of my attitude on my death bed and it struck me as poignant, the way you believe in certain things, and I’m going to address some of those beliefs now.

We had a life long debate about whether people could really change themselves.  Your upbringing was hard, I was there, I saw it from the beginning, before the beginning.  I played a big role in making that upbringing hard, of course, and am acutely aware of the obstacles I placed in front of you and your sister, how much heavier than necessary I made the rocks you push up the hill of your lives.  

We cannot know, in some cases, what it was exactly that made our parents monstrous in the way they were.  The stories from Europe were shady, muddy, obscured by smoke, and filth, and terror, they ended in the murder of everyone left there.  I never got any details of how bad my mother’s life, may she rest in peace, was in that benighted little hamlet she left twenty or so years before it was wiped out by the Nazis.  You found out, through diligent research, that she used to whip me in the face from the time I could stand, so something that was done to her filled her with violent rage.   I appreciate the times you’ve said it’s a testament to my character that I never whipped you and your sister in the face, that it would have been understandable.  I did equally terrible things, we both know.

As for our almost forty year debate on whether people can or cannot fundamentally change their natures, I have a few things to say.  Problem one was our adversarial relationship, which largely foreclosed meaningful dialogue, and that was my fault.  I projected many things on you when you were a baby and it set things in a very bad cast.  I thought, for instance, that the way you stared at me from your crib next to the bed was accusatory.  I can see now that this was an insane point of view.  It came from my own carefully repressed terrors.  The world is full of terrors, especially if your caregiver was a violent enemy.  I have to apologize again, though I know you will say it’s not necessary.  So we have the adversarial relationship standing in the way of a real discussion, turning it into a black and white fight to the death.   The next problem is one of framing, the definitional problem.  How do we define meaningful change?  

It was your position that changing your outward behavior and reactions is a significant change for the better.  I always countered that you may change how you act, but never how you feel deep down while you are acting.  This is a clever debating tactic, perhaps, particularly if deployed with the skill I had to deploy such arguments, but beside the point, I can see now.  It also effectively ends discussion of the nature of meaningful change.  Of course how you react is significant, and changing your reactions is hard work.  Of course you will have the same feelings deep down.  Or maybe not.

I heard you say yesterday that the most recent troubled old friend you had to take your leave of (remember how you used to condemn me for casting people over the side?  I guess you understand now that it is sometimes necessary to do this) left you with different feelings than past leave takings.  You said you have no anger toward this person, just sadness.   That’s real progress, I think, on an inner feeling level, and I found it credible, too.  I salute you for this.  

The insight that you may have been left with a sixty pound boulder to push up the hill, difficult but possible, and your former friend a hundred pound one, difficult and impossible for a person to roll, is probably correct.  On many levels you continue to make progress, and on some fundamental levels she has made very little and is still very angry, critical and a bit ruthless– to herself and everyone else.

But the reason I set bone to paper today (no pen here in the grave, sad to say)– and I am conflicted about it now, is to address your feeling that I had changed on my deathbed, and so gave the final proof that people can change.  Deathbed conversions are a cliche, of course, and they are a cliche because they happen so often.  We are faced with the finality of death only once, no matter how many times we may fear it in our lives, when it actually approaches there is no mistaking it.  When the end is near nobody can predict how they might react.   Some see it as a blessing, and I have mixed feelings about that, although, to speak plainly, death has been pretty good for me.  It’s true my consciousness is a bit hard to express now, and I can’t guarantee further communications, or even the end of this one, but in some ways it’s not bad.  No worries, for one thing.

But anyway, what you saw as proof that I was capable of changing can be chalked up to the Grim Reaper grinning at me next to the bed.   Your sister was probably right– if I’d have known about the liver cancer six months earlier, as opposed to six days before I died, I probably would have still waited until that last night to tell you the things I finally told you.  Who knows?  Your construction is more generous, that I would have come to those final realizations much earlier, have lived those last months differently.  Due to the collective genius of Florida doctors we will never know.   Your manner was indeed different in that hospital room, and I have to admit, your kindness to me, the way you kept trying to let me off the hook as I was apologizing to you for the first and last time, may be seen as proof that you were right about people being able to change for the better.

I don’t bring this last point up to undermine the progress you have undoubtedly made, at least I don’t think I’m doing that.  It may be that we actually can’t change after all, though.  Maybe I will always have to undermine you, in some way.  

You told me, in the last real conversation we had, your last attempt to open a dialogue two years before I checked out, that my milder reactions to you had greatly improved our relationship, even if the inner feelings were the same.  That I respected your wish not to be constantly bad-mouthed, often in the guise of giving fatherly advice, meant a lot to you, you told me.  You offered this as proof that even I, someone who did not believe in change, could make changes.  

At the time desperation forced me to be cruel.  I actually laughed, scoffing at your naivete, telling you that my superficial change in reaction merely masked unchanged inner feelings.  I drove the nail in by adding that if I ever honestly told you what I really felt about you it would do irreparable damage to our relationship.  You could see that as just my desperation talking, and that would be fair, but I also didn’t have the insight to know any better.   Which is a deeply embarrassing thing to have to admit now, almost nine years after my death.

But the point is, what if my behavior on my deathbed, the way I expressed regret, wished I’d been able to change, see the world in all its nuance and not just as a black and white fight to the death, what if all that was just a show put on to give you a fonder last impression of me?  A manipulation orchestrated by Death, who was approaching on roller skates?  You see, this possibility would mean that I was right, our changes are only acts, and deep down we are the same as we always were.  Some things that torment you mean nothing to most people, it’s the way these things were instilled in you as a young child.  

On the other hand, my stepping out of character to seek forgiveness that last night could be seen as proof that you were right, that by changing our reactions we can change the dynamics that have trapped us unhappily in our lives.  That my relief at seeing you mild, and not angry or condemning me, as you had a right to as I went towards the grave, freed me to act differently.

This is one of those conversations that could go on, I suppose, though, in the ordinary course of things, if two people are not adversaries, certain agreements can be reached and the conversation need not be an ongoing battle over decades.  I still think about my wish, that last night, that we could have had the kind of real conversation fifteen years earlier that we finally had the last night of my life.  Fucking tragic, I know.

Sending A Bright Soul down into our world of Darkness

My friend the rabbi told a story at our friend’s funeral that explained our friend’s shortened life pretty well.   A rare and luminous soul is created in heaven and the angels stand around admiring its beauty.   As this is a rabbinic tale, there is immediately a dispute among them about the proper fate for this beautiful soul.

“This soul is too pure and perfect to be sent down into a world of darkness,” say a group of angels, “we must keep the soul here with us, where it will not be battered in the corrupt world below.”

Another group of angels petition God to send the soul down to earth, arguing that the light it will bring to the world of darkness is urgently needed.

God considers and explains that he indeed created the soul to spread light and love, and do good works, in the world below.   He decides that the soul will be born in an earthly body and live below in the world of troubles, to help refine the world through good deeds.  Reassuring the angels who want to keep the soul in heaven he adds “but his stay will not be long, since it will not take such a brilliant soul very long to complete his mission and he will be back here among us before you know it.”

The angels agree that every single day he is on earth, doing justly and spreading light, is a blessing.

As, indeed, is the case.