young widowhood

What Would Freud Say? Or Was it Jung?


Hamlet, I, 5 - Hamlet and the ghost.

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Can’t remember whose theory on dreams and the subconscious gave the most weight to the symbolic nature of the people, objects and situations that make up the scenery of our nightly home movies.

I blame Pat Robertson and the Progressive Left in any case for last night’s visitation regardless.

Normally, my dreams are populated only with people I know and the setting is most often a variation of the town where I attended university or a school building I once worked in. I don’t know why and I haven’t bothered to research what it means or doesn’t.

Dead people seldom have starring roles in my dreams. If the departed do appear, they have cameos at best. But last night, Will showed up, which shouldn’t come as a surprise thanks to the Robertson faux uproar, but I have to be honest – I was surprised because he has only deigned to grace my dreams a handful of times in the past five plus years and never as more than a walk on. Ever.

I was back in school. It was – god help me – the 80’s with  clothing and the hair styles so jarring that I actually commented on it to another character completely out of context to the situation.

I found myself back on Currier E2 in my old corner room (minus the high-strung room-mate) and Will shows up to visit me for the weekend. And you could have knocked me over with a feather when I opened the door and it was him. Normally, it’s Rob who rides shot-gun in my dreams. Very seldom do I dream that Rob doesn’t figure at some or all points.

Here’s the odd thing – as if dreams with dead husbands stopping in for visit aren’t odd enough – he was not young. His hair was longer, curled like Dee’s does at the nape, around the ears and that same cowlick that drives her to distraction and salted with gray. His face was lined a bit and his goatee salted as well.

This has happened once before where someone who’s been gone a while showing up in a dream looking his real age. My Uncle Jim popped into a dream not long before Will and I married, looking very much like the 65-year-old man he would have been and not the 39-year-old man he was when he died.

When I asked him what he was doing there, he said,

“I thought I should visit now.”

I had been on my way out to meet friends, but his arrival prompted me to suggest we stay in. He didn’t want me to change plans. He would come along after he changed into a clean shirt.

He was not the 30-year-old I remembered from before the ravages of illness. More solid. A bit thicker and hairy, but not on the order of a grizzly.

Throughout I was aware that he shouldn’t have been there but I got no further explanation from him about why other than he deemed the visit “necessary”. I sorta felt like he was less happy to see me than I was to see him and that the visit wasn’t for pleasure but one of those dutiful things a person does.

He watched me with an appraising sort of look. He seemed tired as though he’d come a long distance to spend time with me, but whatever he’d left behind him was still on his mind. He mentioned at one point that he wouldn’t be able to stay for more than the night. He had to get back. I didn’t ask where or why, and he didn’t volunteer any more information.

I’ve thought about it all day and I can’t figure out why – after all these years – he put in an actual appearance in my dreams. He has never felt the need before. It has a ghost of Hamlet’s father feel to it. Blunted purpose chiding? Perhaps.

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Lying Right and Left


Republican campaign poster from 1896 attacking...

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The reality show known as the GOP debates produced a lovely but somewhat disingenuous meme the other night. Moderator Wolf Blitzer (who has to be hoping that someday he can escape back to some semblance of his cooler “scud stud” days before he dies a tool of the main stream media) asked candidate Ron Paul one of those delightful beside the point questions that involve hypothetical scenarios from an alternate United States timeline,

Headline meme’s on Facebook and Twitter embellished the lone gunman’s “yes” response to Blitzer’s “should society let him die” to GOP Audiences Cheer as Ron Paul Proclaims that the Uninsured Should be Left to Die. Which is not what the man said at all, and to be more fair, the audience cheered him on his rather wishy-washy “personal responsibility” point and not about letting a man in a coma die because he didn’t have health insurance.

Personal responsibility is a red herring catch-all phrase in the United States that allows people to safely distance themselves from the reality that many people are responsible and are still caught by rock and hard place scenarios from which only a government  safety net can save them. It’s a word we use when we don’t want to acknowledge that we are really heartless fucks who don’t care about anyone outside our personal circles.

Regardless, the meme spoke and it came down on the side of slightly twisting the event to make Ron Paul, the Tea Party and the GOP in general fit the storyline, which is that people on the right are cold, soulless bastards who want to make over the American government in their heartless, bible thumping, Ayn Rand loving images.

The reality, which is that Blitzer’s what if missed by a country mile, is that most uninsured Americans can’t afford health insurance and that Ron Paul lives in a fantasy world where churches and other charities still take care of these people. This, however, wouldn’t have made as compelling of a soundbite. It certainly wouldn’t have fit in a Tweet.

In keeping with their newfound zeal to fight half-truth and blatant lies with more of the same, the energized Left pounced all over The 700 Club’s Pat Robertson yesterday with a similar eye for clever editing and disingenuous headlines.

Robertson does this quaint Q&A during his broadcast. Viewers send in questions, and he plums the depths of his holy man status to advise them.

The Crooks and Liars (and they couldn’t have named themselves better if they tried) website quickly and crudely edited this gem*, which sped about the social media like new gossip in a high school lunchroom.

Pat Robertson Says Divorce Terminally Ill Wife went wild to the point that the mainstream was forced to pick it up and repeat the nonsense.

Nonsense because that’s not really what Robertson said. In a rare compassionate take on his own brand of Christianity, he admitted that wanting to move on from a marriage that has been effectively ended by one spouse’s dementia is an ethically difficult one, but that he would not judge someone who did. In his opinion, a man who wanted to do so should make sure his wife is well-cared for and divorce her though he admitted that perhaps an ethicist  would be the better person to ask.

I have little patience with hypotheticals that aren’t really. People die from lack of health insurance all the time. Spouses are effectively widowed by dementia all the time. Let’s not play with this scenarios as though they aren’t thorny and real. Just because you may have avoided some tragedy or other doesn’t make it just another thought exercise.

Anymore I can’t distinguish between Left, Progressive, Right, Moderate, Conservative, Liberal. It’s all shrill. Or half-lie to “make a point”. Or making light of the very real lives of very real people to make a point like the Robertson meme in particular. It’s mostly bullshit that distracts from the work that needs to be done to solve the actual problems that are crushing the democracy right out of the country.

A Facebook/Twitter friend, who suffers from a life-threatening illness, took understandable exception to the overlaid implication that abandoning sick/terminally ill spouses is okay. She comes at the meme from the opposite side of the equation from myself. In some ways, the sick person has the upper hand because they are, rightly, awarded the lion’s share of the sympathy, but speaking as the former spouse of a man who had dementia, there are two sides to every story regardless of how tragic it is.

She was appalled by Robertson’s stance that dementia leaves essentially a “walking dead person” in its wake, but that’s exactly what it does. And just because it makes you uncomfortable to “go there” doesn’t make it less a fact.

First they become a complete stranger, Then they devolve into a stranger who doesn’t know you. Finally, they become a breathing corpse. A simplified version. There is more, and most of it is sad, lonely and soul-crushing, so I will spare you the finer points.But “walking dead” is a good, if stark, analogy.

Like Robertson, I don’t fault anyone who wants to cut and run. I’d have run a hundred times if I’d had the opportunity. I am not a better person because I didn’t.

Loyal spouses are patted on the head for their exemplary capacity for self-sacrifice just as the terminally ill who fight tooth and nail, even when they and their families would be better off if they didn’t, are given posthumous gold stars for “courage”. It’s textbook. It’s Hollywood. And it’s beside the fucking point.

Sometimes I understand perfectly why Obama always looks like a middle school teacher just after his worst class of the day. Are there any grown-ups left in the room down south anymore?

 

*You can see the clip in its entirety here.

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9/11 And the Idiocy of the Whole “where were you?” Thing


September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City: V...

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It’s t-minus two and counting until the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, which have – mostly for the worse – reshaped the United States, its people and by virtue of its over-reaching influence, the world at large.

Given the amount of fallout, it’s fitting that we stop and reflect. A lot of people died. People who had wives, partners, children, parents, siblings, friends, co-workers. The collateral damage of just the destruction of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center alone is a sorry thing to contemplate. The two wars that have mushroomed into a near economic collapse of the entire world and the paranoia that has nearly wiped up the little bit of freedom the average citizen could rightfully call their own has just compounded the tragedy exponentially.

So, I guess, it’s not out of line for even those who have never been directly in the line of the emotional blast to look back at that day and remember where they were.

We are such melodramatic creatures that the hysteria I remember from that day and the near-hysterics people are feeling at ten years out shouldn’t surprise me. Emotional drama is as contagious as any infectious disease and the number of people immune to its effects are few.

I was teaching that day. It was second period, and Becca, the teacher across the hall came up from the library and pulled me out into the hall. She was on planning period and had been chatting downstairs with the librarian, while they set up the television to record something on PBS later that day. They’d stumbled across a morning news show – I don’t remember which one – and had seen the aftermath of the first tower.

“I’ll watch your class,” she told me. “You need to go downstairs and see this.”

I left. There was just something about the look on her face that made me feel I should just do as she asked.

Downstairs the librarian was rushing about to get set up for her home room next period, but she pointed me to the television.

“You just won’t believe this,” she said. “Another plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.”

We just watched. There was nothing to say, and I saw the tower fall. The bell rang and I raced back upstairs but not before saying, “You should push the tv into your office. I don’t think the kids should see this.”

Upstairs Becca and I spoke in whispers as the kids passed between 2nd hour to home room. We filled in the other two teachers on the hall. We all agreed not to let the students know what was happening.

Within the next half hour or so, the administration in the main office had found out what was going on and discreetly instructed the staff not to let the students know what was going on. We were a neighborhood school and our kids came from working class families. Many of them had National Guardsmen in their families. It was hard not to think about what might be coming down the pipeline at them.

Throughout the day, we kept ourselves updated via the Internet and someone was always monitoring the lone television we had in the library. To my knowledge, not a single student knew about what happened until they left the building that afternoon.

I talked to my late husband at lunch. He’d heard and was worried. What if we went to war? He was young – just past draft age but that means nothing really in an emergency. The government fiddled with the draft ages during both the world wars. They can do anything they like in times of war.

I checked in with virtual friends to see if they were okay. I knew a few women living in and near Manhattan at the time. An old high school friend had in-laws in NYC. Sis’s niece lived there. Ultimately though, I knew no one who died or who knew someone who died. Aside from the run on the gas stations that evening, which I got caught up in because I was literally near empty that day and had no choice but to fill up, 9/11 didn’t affect me.

The insane aftermath did. There was so much rah-rah “we are Americans hear us roar” as the middle school where I worked collected cash and goods* for those most affected. We had assemblies up the ying-yang and ribbons and bows and flags dangled off vehicles to the point where the world seemed to be stuck in a Groundhog’s Day version of the Fourth of July.

I got tired of watching the towers fall on television. I disagreed vehemently about the invasion of Afghanistan and again about Iraq, but after a while, I stopped arguing with people about it except to say, “Someday, I will be proved right about what a bad idea these wars were.”

Mostly, I quickly got back to my life. I was still a newlywed. We were trying to have a baby. 9/11 was not my tragedy then and it still isn’t today unless one takes into account that I don’t fly anymore or that I’ve left the United States to live in Canada and feel more free here than I have at “home” for nearly a decade.

The economic crisis that stemmed in a large part from the nation’s war debts only marginally touched me when the housing bubble collapsed.** But, I would have to say that the bottom of the most bottomest lines has found me pretty much unscathed in a 9/11ish way. The decade had other tragedies in store for me. The initial shock of the event wore off quickly and I have never co-opted it as something personal because it isn’t.

There are people who have. I read a blog post last week that was written by a woman who was near hysterical about the news and media anniversary stuff. A person would have thought she was a 9/11 widow, but she’s not. She didn’t know a single person touched by the tragedy at the time and she herself was a thousand miles or more away from NYC that day. But that’s the power of melodrama and the drumbeat that was hammered into us all at the time. “This is a nation’s tragedy.” and while it’s been tragic for those who actually lost people in the Towers or the aftermath, it’s not everyone’s personal tragedy. It’s a bit nauseating when some try to glom on a bit and shake the pity tree for themselves.

Everyone has a 9/11 story but not everyone was its victim and it’s not everyone’s true tragedy. I think that might be a better way to remember it. That if it wasn’t about you, don’t make it about you in retrospect.

*So much of the money the Red Cross collected was specifically earmarked for 9/11 only that they began begging people not to specify where their donations should be spent. The Federal government covered a lot of the costs and The Red Cross really needed donations for other things more desperately. And, of course, much of the “stuff” that was collected wound up in the New York landfills. All in all so very typically American.

**I sold my house when I moved up North and lost money thanks to the housing bust.

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