grief

Overly Sensitive to Violence and Death as Entertainment


Rob and I watched the film, Babel, last night. It starred a very harried and old looking Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. I am pretty sure that Pitt’s wrinkles were his own but enhanced to make him appear emotionally worn and very tired. The plot isn’t clear on many points but Pitt and Blanchett were apparently on holiday in Morrocco following the death of one of their three young children. She is then shot while on a bus tour by whom officials by is a terrorist but turns out to be a pre-teen boy playing with a rifle. Meanwhile back home, the couple’s illegal Mexican nanny/housekeeper has decided to take their surviving two children to her son’s wedding in Mexico when the parents are late returning due to the shooting and she can’t find anyone she trusts to watch her charges. Now, I had a lot of questions while watching, not the least of which was why the scenes of the couple and the nanny and the children were constantly being interupted by the life of a sullen, grief-stricken deaf/mute Japanese teenage girl in Tokoyo. First why would you choose Morrocco as a holiday retreat after your child dies? And travel on a bus tour with cranky senior aged Europeans and Brits to boot? And why wouldn’t your sister-in-law rush in and take your kids after your wife has been shot? And why would an illegal take her employer’s kids to Mexico when you would think she’d realize that she was going to have one hell of a time getting them back over the border? And finally, why were all the teens in the film fixiated on sex? The Japanese girl practicially assaulted her dentist and then a policeman (though I didn’t see that part – more later on that), and the Morroccan boy was peeping at his willing older sister. 

I didn’t finish watching the film, which I know will drive Rob crazy. He looked up the synopis on Wikipedia to satisfy himself and show me that there was nothing to be upset about in the coming scenes. I told him I couldn’t watch anymore after the nanny and children are dumped in the desert in the middle of the night by her drunken nephew after an incident with U.S. Border Patrol. I was certain that something horrible was going to happen to the children and I just couldn’t bare to watch. Things like this always remind me of my own child and anxieties about her safety. “It’s just a movie” my husband reminded me but I am too raw still when it comes to possible death, even when it is just make believe. I don’t see this as entertainment although an article in Saturday’s Globe and Mail assures me that it is now violence and not sex that is the number one entertainment draw.

So I didn’t finish the film and I am thinking that I will opt for comedy for the next while (though that isn’t always a safe bet as we watched Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang recently and it was dead people awash.) I wasn’t always this way but after watching my late husband die, and my fears about my loved ones in the wake, has made me quite squeamish. 

Rob thought the movie was dull and disjointed (disjointed passes for depth these days in cinema) but I got the point the filmmaker was trying to make – even though he did a very poor job of making it. I am okay with fake stuff. Like super hero movies. That’s not real. There are no superheroes. But movies that mimic reality, and it’s mostly the gross, horrible underside, I can no longer deal with. I don’t know if I ever will be able to again and am not sure that this is a bad thing.

Funeral After Parties


I have written and rewritten this piece several times in an attempt to clarify, for myself really, why I was so disturbed by the drinking that accompanied the funerals I have attended up in Grande Prairie since last September. A Sunday evening phone chat with my best friends pulled some of it together for me. It bothered me because its not healthy or normal. When I told Vicki about the excess of drinking that goes on at the gatherings in people’s homes after the funeral and dinner, she was as perplexed by it as I was. She’d never encountered or even heard of such a thing. And maybe it is because we are Iowans born and raised and this type of reaction to death is not typical of people from such a stoic background. Or maybe not. Sometimes I am too quick to assume that the difference lies within me and that it is others who are the true majority and I am the freak. But, even my hard-partying cousins on my mom’s side didn’t rent a keg for a funeral – a baptism or First Communion maybe but not a funeral.

 

I grew up around drinkers. Both sides of my family have alcoholics. My dad was an alcoholic up until going on three years ago. My younger brother also had a drinking problem and quit drinking last spring. Like many people my age, I did my share of paryting – the majority back in my college days though as being a grown-up with a full-time job and responsibilities, as most people find, isn’t compatible with late nights and consuming of alcohol. And too, at some point you ask yourself – what is the point of this? Today, I am practically a tee-totaler. I can’t drink more than a glass of wine over the course of an evening and I honestly never acquired a taste for it. It was always something I did to fit in. I don’t feel the need to please people in that way anymore and resent anyone who pressures me to “just have one – it won’t hurt you”.

 

In my family of mostly beer drinkers, which I have always found disgusting to the taste, I was made to feel a prude. I still resent that, but I could never fathom the incentive to get a little tipsy with one’s relatives. It seemed, and still does, a asinine idea and a good way to stir up bad feelings and smoldering resentments. Now, drinking among friends and strangers, as many do when they are out in public establishments, seems a dumber idea than drinking with one’s family even.

 

So, Tuesday night as I lay awake until close to 4AM listening to the conversations and arguments downstairs, it brought back a lot of memories for me. My father drunk and mean-spirited. My brother back in his druggie days when he was threatening to kill us all in our sleep and I would push the dresser in front of the bedroom door just a bit so it would wake me if someone came in after I had fallen asleep. It reminded me of Will who like many men with his illness turned to alcohol in the beginning to try and quell the angry he couldn’t explain but was in reality cause by his immune system attacking his nerve endings and brain. And I realized. I don’t find drunk people as amusing as I do scary. They are unpredictable in word and deed. They cannot be trusted and even though it is widely thought that alcohol lowers people’s inhibitions and allows their true selves to come out, I believe that it allows them the imagined freedom to do and say all the hateful things they truly know better than to do when they are sober. It is not their true self but their selfish self. It allows them to not give a damn. To be hurtful and then excuse themselves of it later on with “I didn’t mean it. I was drunk.”

 

In May the family is planning a big gathering on the farm. I am thinking that I would rather not go. There is going to be a huge bonfire from the out-buildings they are planning to raze and plenty of alcohol. It is my opinion that a huge pit of fire and drunken people are not a good combination, but I am not a native so perhaps I don’t know best.

 

I do know however that excessive alcohol consumption and wildly erratic personality changes that it causes in some people – is not normal. I won’t be cowed into submission on this point ever again. 

The Funeral


My third funeral since September was just this last week. People I either didn’t know at all or barely had the time to get to know. This last one was for Fraser, Rob’s father-in-law and Farron and Jordan’s grandfather. It was held at the United Church in Beaverlodge, which is not far from Grande Prairie, and as close to mile zero of the Alaskan Highway as a person can be without being there. The minister was European. Don’t ask me from where. English is his fifth language and as such his accent was fairly hard to place – even for Rob who is generally good at this type of thing. He was not your average Christian minister, bearing in mind here that my experience with Christian means Catholic and when I think “minister”, I see “priest”. He didn’t believe in the idea of being saved. He operates on the principle that we were saved by Christ’s dying on the cross, and our access to heaven was assured by the Resurrection. I found that surprising and refreshing. Surprising because I spent too long living among the Protestants in central Iowa who had this curious habit of disbelief when it comes to this idea of having been saved already, and refreshing because my own Catholic upbringing is so heavily guilt laden and filled with recriminations and doubt of worth. I could almost see myself attending worship if this guy was the minister in charge and if I didn’t suspect that organized religion was organized in the first place for reasons other than promoting the ideas they claim to represent.

 

Rob was asked to give the eulogy by Shelley’s brother, Jason and Fraser’s nephew, Brian. He did a good job. He’s a Virgo after all and spent time writing and rewriting and running his ideas by me, Jordan, Jason and Cory (Shelley’s nephew) and taking suggestions and incorporating them into revisions he wrote. It was a longer eulogy than one might expect from someone who doesn’t do that sort of thing for a living. I could hear an old man behind me doing that heavy sigh thing that Katy does when she is bored but doesn’t want to risk voicing her opinion. It went on until the man finally muttered to someone nearby, “It’s forty minutes already!” Not Rob’s eulogy, the entire service up to that point. I was a bit annoyed and if my back hadn’t been gripped in a series of agonizing spasms that afternoon, I’d have turned square around and given him the teacher stare I normally reserved for the hell spawn. As if forty minutes was too long a time to give up to remember someone, which for some of them would be the last time they bothered to at all because so many funeral attendees have put the passing behind them almost as soon as they exit the venue in search of the post-funeral chow down.

 

The church was packed to the point of over-flow with seating set up in the basement for those who couldn’t be squeezed into the main church. Despite that the interment in the very wet, muddy cemetery outside of town was sparsely attended. Just immediate family and close friends while the rest of the mourners scurried ahead to the Rio Grande Hall to snap up the best parking and be first in line for the food. I find just about everything to do with wakes, funerals and funeral dinners – disturbing or disgusting. Peering at corpses who in no way look “natural” or “better than they had in years”. Socializing as though one was attending a family reunion. Eating. As I put it to my mother once during the last of our memorable arguments concerning my refusal to willingly attend funeral dinners – “Someone’s dead. So let’s eat?” I have never attended a single one of these functions since that time that has changed my opinion one iota. Despite this I allowed myself to be coerced into a visitation/wake for Will, my late husband. I spent the evening observing others as they chatted and gave vent to their grief but didn’t feel comforted or able to grieve myself. I gave comfort and was patted on the back for my efforts. And except for the wake and funeral of my 10-year-old cousin, I don’t think I have ever really attended an event where everyone was sad – visibly and demonstratively.

 

The dinner was held at one of the many community halls that dot the farming communities around Grande Prairie. Rio (Rye-o) Grande hall was a place that Rob could remember attending dances with Shelley. Between each dance couples would stroll around the hall hand in hand waiting for the next record to begin much like I remember doing at the roller skating rink when I was in junior high. Once as he and Shelley were strolling, the widowed mother of a classmate slipped her hand in his other and strolled with them. Shelley teased him about that for the rest of the night.

 

Family ended up parking on the side of the muddy road, as the parking lot was full and then making their way inside to find the line at the food tables snaking around the outer walls. To the family’s credit, we all cut the line and I filled a plate for Katy. Cheese strips, pickles and Timbits of which she ate the latter two. We didn’t stay long. Everyone was in a hurry to get back to the farm, which was less than two minutes away. People followed and rapidly filled the kitchen to overflowing and then the drinking began.

 

I have a lot to say about alcohol, given my personal history, but for now I will say that I don’t think much of the practice of funeral “after-parties”. Grief makes a poor mixer. Especially when last will and testament readings are involved.

 

Things finally began to settle a bit in terms of numbers about 9:30 that evening and by ten it was almost quiet enough for Katy to conk out in Jason’s old bedroom above the kitchen – though how she slept through the variable noise levels that followed with regularity until 7 the next morning, I don’t know because Rob and I didn’t.

 

I was exhausted enough by 10:30 that I managed to drop off but that was just until Rob woke me at 1:30AM in a cold rage and ready to pack up and head for home. I could see us getting about two hours of the six it takes to make the Fort and then sleeping on the side of the road for some super semi to plow into in the cold dark, so I talked him down until he could sleep. Then I was awake, listening to the inebriated mourners until closing in on four. Apparently, everyone was in bed by seven that morning and though we had planned to get an early start as Rob was going to help Jordan pick up her new car before the dealership closed, he decided that we should sleep in a bit and we did, not getting on the road proper until well after 10AM.

 

There is talk of a great gathering at the farm again on the May long weekend (Victoria Day) with a bonfire of all of the old out-buildings and yes, more drinking (I should note here that there is a considerable amount of wine left courtesy of Uncle Raymond that is now part of the legacy left for the children and grandchildren and since Ray’s still is intact and fully operational somewhere – there could be even more by May). We are doubtful for this gathering at this point, but things may be different then.

 

All in all, I am hoping we will have no more sad reasons to revisit Grande Prairie anytime soon.