grief

Remembrance Day


Until 9/11 the day known as Veteran’s Day in the United States, where I was born and raised, was just a day. Nothing particularly elaborate or widespread.

You knew it was a federal holiday by the absence of mail and the dutiful coverage by the media of ceremonies here and there.

Politicians, of course, pandered.

But really, it was not a big deal.

The attack on the Twin Towers in NYC changed that a little bit but it was still hit and miss regardless of the impression given by the media down there.

When I came to Canada, I discovered the true origins of this day*, and the fact that in some countries around the world – Canada being one of them – Remembrance Day’s meaning is kinda like the Grinch’s observation about Christmas – “maybe, perhaps, means a little bit more”.

Life doesn’t come to a complete stop for Remembrance Day in Canada. In fact, it’s not even a statutory federal holiday. But it’s important.

Not because – as some people (politicians especially) would like us to believe – the fallen soldiers of our too numerous wars died defending “freedom”.

They didn’t.

Soldiers die because politicians fail.

They fail to negotiate, compromise and find equitable resolutions to vexing problems. They fail to think in terms of years and decades out as opposed to between now and the next election. They fail to understand that war’s human cost is seldom worth whatever short-term solution was gained. And finally, they fail to do what they were actually elected to do, safe-guard our freedoms themselves through their words and deeds.

Every time a soldier dies, somewhere a politician’s karma gets deservedly more muddy.

Remembrance Day is important because we remember how awful war is by recalling the bright futures that never were. The young men and women who didn’t come home to family and friends. The waste. The horror. The destruction. The fact that freedom wasn’t democratically defended and promoted but was used like a blunt instrument on the landscape, lives, hopes and dreams of people we don’t know. Whose strangeness to us made it “okay” to destroy their homes and kill their children.

And we should remember these things. It’s a painful and humbling reminder that we haven’t got it all figured out. That we are works in progress, and at times, our progress hasn’t been for the greater good but for greed, power and the right of the conqueror to force his will on the unwilling.

My father and my uncles fought in World War II and in Korea. It changed them, or so I am told. I only knew the men forged by war not the men they were prior to war. I recognize what a great loss that was to me and for them.

I wear my poppy in the weeks leading up to Remembrance Day like many, many others. I observe the day as do most of the people I know.

But I don’t think the day was ever meant to be about honouring as much as it was meant to be about remembering what was lost. Who was lost. And why we shouldn’t let war be the habit it has become.

 

*It’s amazing what you can learn about history when you leave the United States, where history is told in a way that is good for Americans and shorter on fact than a Texas social studies curriculum guide.

iMourn: How Steve Jobs Made Me Love Computers


The Macintosh 128K was the first commercially ...

Image via Wikipedia

I can’t say that my first exposure to the computer found me instantly smitten. I didn’t even know what it was and, looking back, it was amazing that my dirt poor Catholic grade school even had a computer that students were allowed to use. Not that we used it for much. The only thing I can recall doing with it was playing one of the lame original versions of The Oregon Trail. I can’t recall if we were supposed to actually learn something from the experience but, periodically, small groups of us would be sent to the small office behind the main office, where the sacred computer was housed, to “play” this game. Perhaps it was a teamwork thing?

No matter. I didn’t love computers at that point. With their dot matrix print and slower than blobs of spit drying on the pavement processing, they lacked even the basic personality of their fake television and movie counterparts. As far as I was concerned, even that most boring of video games – Pong … or Ping? was more interesting and I use the term “interesting” quite loosely, even for me.

There were computers at university. I have vivid memories of the Math Lab and playing endless rounds of games that were supposed to help me learn algebra. The tutors were so confident when they assigned them to me and so deflated when they realized that they were simply going to have to teach me math the hard way – by actually tutoring me.

I did not learn to love computers then.

My first brush with word processing was on an Apple II during my student teaching at Northwest Junior High in Iowa City. They had a computer lab with computers;  thirty-five of them. Enough to take an entire Language Arts class at once. I would never have such a thing again in twenty years of teaching, by the way, which is more sad than I can tell you.

The program was FredWriter, an open source version of AppleWorks. Already possessing competent typing skills, thanks to dear Sr. Deborah back at Wahlert High School, word processing unleashed me, freeing me from my own bad spelling and typos with the ease of backspacing.

From there it was the Apple IIe and the Macintosh’s.

Not a single teacher at Hoyt Middle School in Des Moines wanted the Mac Classic when we were finally alloted our five. Five. That’s it for a school with close to 700 kids in it and 35+ staff members. The principal had to actually beg people to take one and try it out.

Not me.

“Give my a printer,” I said, “And I’ll figure out how to put it to use.”

Between my Mac and a small writing lab with about 10 IIe’s, I taught every single kid who came through my classroom in the next three years how to use a word processing program. This was years before we had Computer teachers and well before English teachers began to stop regarding spell check as something evil and anti-dictionary.

Sadly, the first computer I owned was an IBM. Apple had a program for teachers to buy computers from them but they wanted over $1000 more than IBM was asking for a similar package. PC’s, I soon discovered, mostly suck. They don’t make sense. They assume that one cares about why they function and the programming that makes the function happen. Which is incorrect. The majority of computer users want the computer to perform. The DOS of it is beside the point

Sometime in the late 90’s, my school district threw over Apple for Dell. And Windows.

And I coped.

Learned just what I had to in order to do the things I wanted and needed to do, and missed Apple and Mac’s.

I didn’t own another Apple product until 2005 when their store arrived at the nearby mega-ish mall. I bought the cheapest computer they had – a cumbersome eMac which, in spite of its ungainly size and retro appearance, did everything a Mac should do. Work. Without my needing to know or care why.

Two iPod’s later – and really, the iPod saved my sanity – I finally had the capital to purchase my beloved MacBook. Sleek. Sure. Friendly. Wonderlicious. If ee cummings had owned one, he’d have written the perfect poem about it. If Hemingway had written on it …. well, okay, he still would have come off as whiny and effeminate, so bad example.

Shakespeare would have rocked the house with a MacBook though, that I am sure of.

When Steve Jobs announced that he was taking another medical leave not long ago, I knew he would die soon. He was lucky to have lasted as long as he did, but it was folly to think that someone with that particular type of cancer can continue to beat the odds forever. The last photos of him on the web clearly showed a man with little time left. And I am not so trite as to believe that even leaving behind the legacy that he has made leaving any easier for him or his family.

But isn’t he lucky to have touched so many lives?

I think so.

Rest in some kind of peace, Steve. And thank you.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path.

Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Address, 2005

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Review of Abel Keogh’s Dating A Widower


*Disclaimer: I follow Abel’s blog, which features a weekly series of posts on dating widowers, and I am a member of his Facebook group, Dating a Widower (DAW). I am a fairly active contributor at both venues as they center on a topic related to widowhood (which I have been) and dating/remarriage related issues surrounding widowers (my husband Rob was widowed too.) To disclaim (protest?) further, I contributed an essay to this book that Abel included, which is why I received a copy of it. End of disclosure.

I discovered Abel and his blog via a list of widowed bloggers on the web link page of yet another widowed blogger in the webosphere of all things grief and gloomy. The web is choked with widowed folks these days, sharing their stories, building platforms for support groups/organizations, launching book careers off the backs of uplifting memoir and even hosting conventions for widowed to gather and network. Yes, even in mourning, we still network. Abel’s blog and posts stuck out from the crowd for me because, while many of the bloggers/writers in the genre focus on the grief process with its irritations, perceived indignities  and sometimes actual problems/issues, he wrote about moving on, and he did it in practical, no-nonsense terms that make sense.

A blogger for over a decade, Abel’s focus via the Widower Wednesday series, a q&a column for women who are in relationships with widowed men and find themselves dealing with problems that aren’t covered by the women’s magazines and self-help literature, came about as a result of Abel responding to the specific concerns of readers who were flooding him with emails, hoping for advice and a peek into the widower’s mindset where moving on into a new relationship was concerned. Widowhood is not divorce, and many women find they have no frame of reference for issues that are bereavement driven. They also sometimes wonder if the issues they are struggling with are actually grief issues at all. In addition to the blog, Abel also began hosting a peer-to-peer group on Facebook where women who are in relationships with widowers could gather privately to exchange stories, vent, seek insight and encourage each other.

The emails, blog posts and DAW group eventually became the basis for the  Dating A Widower book.

The book itself is a nuts-and-bolts look at moving on, dating and remarriage when widowhood is at least half the equation. Each chapter deals with specific problems/issues that are common concerns and illustrated with stories of real women and how they’ve coped. Although it might appear that the point of view is primarily from the male perspective, the gender perspectives are quite evenly balanced and Abel allows his contributors to share their insight and hard won wisdom, allowing the reader to take what they want or need from each chapter.

At 114 pages, it’s a quick and comprehensive read. Abel shares his own story, culminating in his remarriage 15 months after the death of his first wife, and his now wife, Julie, contributes her perspective as well, which provides a welcome “other side” that most relationship stories don’t provide. They both write from the heart, and their story provides a good model for any “mixed” marriage couple to follow.

There is even a chapter written specifically for widowed people who are, or are thinking about, dating. Given the dreadful lack of literature dedicated to widowed folk who are past active grief and looking to move on and remarry at some point, this is a welcome – and well done – addition.

If a reader is looking for a book that validates the idea that widowers are not first men but fragile souls in need of rescue or retraining as though they were wet behind the ears pups, this is not that book. Instead, it reminds the reader that the widowed man is a man first and always and a bereaved spouse second or even farther down the list depending on his personality and responsibilities. It also emphasizes the basic bit of dating knowledge that all women should have tattooed on themselves somewhere that it’s easy to see and read, “a man who loves you will move mountains to show you how he feels and a man’s actions are worth more than a thousand of his words”. So, if a reader wants straight answers, practical and applicable advice and compelling real life stories she can relate too – this is just the book you’ve been searching for – so far probably in vain.

Dating A Widower – Starting a Relationship with a Man Who’s Starting Over by Abel Keogh is available in several formats and more information can be found here.

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