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The Myth Slayer – aka “me”


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Stumbled across a book on “closure” not long ago, written by Nancy Berns, a professor at Drake University in my old home of Des Moines, Iowa. She’s a sociologist, attracted to the cherry “death and dying” course work. I have perused her blog but only read the first chapter of her book because it’s essentially a textbook for one of her courses and, therefore, ungodly expensive.*

In Chapter one, Berns basically outlines the progression of the rest of the book in syllabus fashion with brief detours into the history of the etymology, psychology,  cultural and historical evolution of a term that she compares to the equally made up idea of “self-esteem”. It is not, exactly, a grief book. Although since nearly everything in our culture is now subject to the Kübler-Rossification of processing, it is heavy on the idea that humans need to define the death throes of all experiences. Nothing can simply end. It has to be analyzed, processed and brought to “closure”.

The case can be made that because people believe in the idea that all things unsettling, hurtful and traumatic need to be kneaded like dough, punched into submission and baked until closure, it must be real. Of course, Santa Claus is real until you reach a certain age of enlightenment about magic, and God is real until it becomes apparent that he is like Santa Claus and perhaps existence can’t be explained so simplistically.

Toward the end of Chapter One, Berns describes the two types of people who don’t believe in closure – The Walking Wounded, who can’t find it and the Myth Slayers, who simply can’t fathom its existence.

I like the term Myth Slayer, don’t you? It’s fitting. I don’t believe in grief as a process (unless you are willing to admit that life itself is a series of processes of which grief is just one and in that case I will concede). I am suspicious of the idea that everything needs to be analyzed in light of how we feel about it because feelings are often irrelevant. Some things just are. Birth and death are merely the beginning and end points of mortal existence and are viewed through the accepted societal narratives of the culture and times, which vary depending on where in the world Carmen SanDiego happens to be at any given moment.

One of the reasons I rail against the grief process whose end goal is closure so that people can move on, is that I think it sets up false expectations, hopes and even inspires fear and feelings of inadequacy in those who buy in only to discover that what is promised isn’t going to materialize. It’s not okay to sell grief á la Weight Watchers or peddle it as a life-long chronic emotional illness. Grief culture is just a mythology that our death fearing, but equally obsessed with, society has created to explain the seemingly unexplainable. Just like the Greeks and the Norse invented the gods and goddesses to explain and teach, we have the five stages of grief and closure to weave through the narrative of life’s rather ordinary processes. In this way, we can avoid the fact that life is full of beginnings, middles and endings where just about everything is concerned and we can avoid the reality that nothing much happens on any front without effort on our part. There is no magic.

No magic. It’s a letdown day when we first realize this as children and it continues to bum us out until someone has to bury us and search for closure of his or her own.

One thing that resonated was Bern’s belief that people don’t need closure to heal**, which runs contrary to what the grief industry would like us to believe. Unsurprisingly, I agree with this premise. The falsehood of promoting this has led many a person to sit back, wallow and wait instead of putting one foot in front of the other and moving on. Grief lessens until it reaches a point where it is so muted as to not really be grief as it is portrayed today. There is lingering regret, longing, and sadness attached to nearly anything that ended without our permission. Death is not special in that respect. Closure promotes clinging and this leads to wallowing, sympathy seeking and inertia in terms of moving on. It gives people permission to define themselves in terms of what life has done to them instead of defining themselves by what they do in life. Bonanno would say that this is tied to resiliency, which some of us have in abundance and others of us lack or don’t have the inner resources to access or use if we did. Some social Darwinism in play here too, I suspect.

Closure is hardly a grief thing. We are encouraged to look for it when we lose jobs, lovers, friends and when bad things happen to us good people. We are a 12-step culture and I blame the Baby Boomers, but I blame them for most things about society that drip with self-absorption and keen like a child denied.

Everyone should don a cape, pick up a bludgeon and play “whack a mole” with cultural foolishness now and again.  It’s liberating to discard made up notions superimposed on normal feelings and milestones.

*At $75 for a hardback and $25 for paper, I won’t be purchasing it anytime soon. College students, it seems, are still viewed as a cash cow captive audience. In the age of e-readers and smart-phones, it astounds me that they haven’t risen up and demanded downloadable e-texts at affordable prices, but that’s a post for another day.

**However, she seems to adhere to the same idea that society pushed people through grief – as if this was actually possible – and that grief, like a fine wine, should be savored. I have to chuckle a bit because by and large people move on at a pace dictated by their personalities and needs in spite of society’s best efforts to school them.

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Gifting


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Rob asks me, “So what do you want for your birthday?”

Crickets.

He got the same deer in the headlights look that I got from Dee when I asked her what she was going to tell Santa she wanted for Christmas when she saw him at the Children’s Xmas party Rob’s company hosts every year.

The trouble is we don’t really need things. Seriously. I have written about this before but I have everything I need or even want. When backed into a corner, you’ll get the same response from me, “I really can’t think of a thing I need.”

I frame gift giving in terms of needs. I do this mostly because I loathe knickknacks and acquiring things simply because they are shiny and caught my eye. My window shopping habits of my early working girl days cling to me still. I would wander the mall, looking, trying on, thinking and leave empty-handed to ponder a bit more. If something compelled me to return for it in a week, I bought it and if not, I forgot about it. I am that way about purchases now as well. Few things need to be snapped up in the moment. Thought and sense is the best approach to buying.

The proximity of my birthday to Christmas (two weeks to the day) had always made it more difficult for me. When I was young, I was often a victim of the combo gift, which violates all sorts of love and friendship rules frankly and I don’t care how poor you are, it’s a cheap and thoughtless way to treat someone. Although that doesn’t happen anymore, I am often the victim of gifts that people think I should have or want.

My late husband, Will, was a great one for not consulting me because he wanted to surprise me and most of the things he gave me were items I would have never gotten myself. He would tell you that this was a good thing. Who wants a present that they could have gotten themselves? But yet, he hated that type of thing himself, which is why I took his birthday and Christmas as an opportunity to replenish his worn out ball cap, flannel shirts and make sure he had the most recent Pittsburgh Steelers apparel  to don when he trekked off on Sundays to watch the games.

Rob always asks, a product no doubt of having been a husband a whole lot longer than Will was. He shares a disinclination towards the idea that surprise is the best element of a good gift, thankfully, but his distaste of shopping means that I usually end up buying the gifts he and Dee give me, which sucks a bit of the celebration out of the whole thing for me.

This year though is probably the worst in terms of wracking my brain for gift ideas for myself or anyone else for that matter. Normally I have Christmas shopping done by the time the American version of Thanksgiving rolls around but not this year. I surveyed the pathetic assortment of gifts yesterday and realized I have precisely nothing for the sons-in-law and only slightly more for Rob. Dee makes out the best, but not by much with her older sisters running a close second. And there is zero for me.

Here’s the thing. My needs are simple and my wants are virtually non-existent. I don’t watch television, so I have nothing to prompt me to want nor do I read magazines, which act as a catalyst for mindless avarice in much the same fashion. I don’t have live friends, at least that I see often, so no prompting there. Rob rarely buys anything that doesn’t become a part of the house, so he is useless as a source of wish listing (and he is worse than I am about coming up with gift lists and nearly as bad as my father in assigning gifts to people so he never has to deal with unwanted items).

I prefer that people not buy me clothing. They always underestimate my size. I don’t look big but I am and so I often get mediums instead of larges and extra-larges. I am a not quite 48-year-old woman, skin-tight is not my defacto anymore. Books are another thing that I prefer to purchase myself. I used to buy and hoard books but there are few that are worth buying and ever fewer worth keeping anymore. I lean towards e-books now and would rather just use the library anyway. Music long ago became a song by song purchase. A whole cd is a waste of money. DVD’s? I check most out from the library. Compilations of shows are okay but usually disappointing and then you are stuck with them.

I have nearly every cooking/baking necessity one could use – expect one of those plastic sheets for rolling out dough. Mom had one and it was awesome, but I have never found one like it. I also have a crappy pizza cutter and as I have mentioned before I still mourn the Pampered Chef one that I foolishly allowed myself to be talked into purging when I moved up to Canada.

People who are hermits, like Rob and I, can actually have too many tea mugs.

I could use a Buddha and an ohm symbol for the yoga room door would be frivolous and yet awesome.

Rob decided to get me a smart phone for my birthday but then got one for himself too which took the “birthday” out of it a bit and I use Dee’s birthday gift of a new digital camera more than she does, which robs me of another thing for which to ask.

The Yoga Room in town is no more, so I can’t ask for my membership to be paid for this month.*

Rob is planning a dinner out for the birthday weekend and he acquiesced to my request to put the tree up on my birthday like I did when I was little. Tree trimming, pizza, cake and Christmas music. Such fun and good memories, which honestly my childhood Christmas’s possess but a few. Whatever I get or don’t get will be fine. I went online and ordered a few things from Old Navy last weekend. Wardrobe staples that Rob and Dee can pick through and designate for birthday or Christmas. I supposed I wouldn’t be disappointed if someone was to give me the first season of Game of Thrones because I enjoyed the little clips I have seen here and there, and you can’t go wrong with Sean Beane – despite the fact that his characters always die.

*I totally haven’t gotten over losing my yoga class outlet. I was talking with another woman who practiced there too and we commiserated the bankruptcy of yoga outlets now that it is gone. The city just doesn’t offer the same convenience or quality of classes and driving over to the next town is just out of the question when time is factored in. Besides, I don’t like hot yoga and the only other studio is geared towards older people during the day.

A Tragic Baking Injury


Gingerbread is a Christmas treat and there is a good reason for that. It’s time-consuming and potentially injurious to the baker due to the endless kneading of dough.

I am not blessed with a fluid ambidextrous nature. I am predominantly right-handed with a few specific left hand only functions. Dough kneading just doesn’t work with my left hand and my right wrist is prone to tendonitis due to a repetitive strain injury I acquired working salad prep back in my university kitchen wench days. So today, I am blessed with a stiff and sore wrist that is going to set back my cookie making schedule a wee bit. Or a lot bit. Depends on how much tendon and muscle kneading my dearest husband can stand performing and whether or not my massage therapist can work a slight miracle this coming Wednesday.

The right wrist is my bane. It was broken during a freak accident in grade 7 and rendered weaker by my insanely bad pencil grip and years of scribbling in spiral notebooks. Typing came along later but had I a computer before I was 25, things might not be so bad now. And it’s kind of bad. Not carpal tunnel bad but enough that it makes bearing weight on the wrist – which is somewhat to intensely important in a yoga practice – to just writing a blog post, a chore that requires ibuprofen and icing in the aftermath.

Don’t cry for me though Argentinians. There are worse things in life than a game wrist. It’s inconvenient, however, for someone whose left hand is limited in function.

I was reading recently that scientists really don’t know why most people are so handicapped by extreme right-handedness. The reason we favor our right over our left isn’t even clear. We are the only animals in the kingdom with use of both hands that limit ourselves to just one or the other. Ambidextrousness is common among other primates with “hands”.

Rob’s like “Just switch your mouse to the left for a while” in terms of making the computer easier to cope with during my convalescence. But I might as well use my left foot as my hand where mousing is concerned because they are equally awkward.

On the upside, we have tasty gingerbread despite the fact that I had to google to salvage the dough, which was very dry and crumbly. Need to tweak the recipe me thinks.

The frosting set well despite my lack of meringue powder. Is there a substitute for that? Powdered egg white maybe?

But the day is dawning, bum wrist or no, and there is Christmas shopping to attend to. Dee asked for one thing. Just one.

“Santa will know what else to bring me,” she said. “He does a good job guessing.”

Indeed. But if this one thing isn’t secured, the whole charade goes down the toilet this year.

Sure is Monday.