Tuesday, October 29, 2013

You Must Remember This

Introduction I

The blog before this, or, I should say, the "look" or "appearance" of  some kind of "mutilated" blog before this, is not the result of some crazed series of moments in my life; it is the result of what happens what you write a perfectly good blog and hit SAVE but forget to hit PUBLISH.  I hit "save" several times throughout the piece, as it was a longish piece; I never once managed to remember to hit "publish" at all.

Introduction II

As psychologically healthy beings, we are not finished in our development at twenty-five or thirty,  we are never finished, ever.  While it is true that what we take to be our personal identity often appears to be linked to early developmental patterns and models, it is also true that we are always in the process of trying to feel alive, safe, comfortable and in movement,  and that, through these efforts, we are endlessly altering our own capacities for growth.

Even if we are full of suffering or major impairment, most of us try to restore our connection within whatever large (or small) areas of available emotional, physical or neurological motility so that we are also moving towards connection and safety.  As Leonard Cohen writes in his song Anthem,  "There is a crack, a crack in everything/That's how the light gets in/ That's how the light gets in."

We are adapting all the time, no matter what our age. I have been thinking about this process today, most probably because today I took four of Jim's large framed photographs which had previously been lovingly lodged at Bob and Mel Dietz's home, to the local UPS store, in order to send them to my daughters, Kelly and Erin, two to each.
                                                                

                                               You Must Remember This
                                                             

"I feel as though I am sending my children off to school," said Mel, as she accompanied me to my car as I carried the photographs out of their home. I don't remember how it was that they acquired the pictures: did they acquire them all at once?  Did Jim gift them to our beloved friends, did they buy them, did they acquire them one by one or all at once? How did any of this happen?  All I remember is that Jim's photographs, the Bird on the Wire, the picture of the ship in the puddle which won a fairly large contest, as I recall, the picture of the yellow ladder leaning against a wall, the picture of the red door, which became the cover of a book published by Knopf,  had seemingly always hung there in the Dietz's stairway between their living room and their upstairs, in that order, in that way, so that if you entered Bob and Mel's home, there they were.

I nodded at her words, my own eyes welling up with tears.  Ours' had been a long friendship and Jim had been an enormous part of that friendship for forty-three years. His matter-of-factness, his intelligence, his humor, his various and sundry talents and capabilities, his many interests, his kindness, his  gentleness, his cowboy-lonesomeness, his creativity, his steadfastness, his interest and ability in food and cooking, his ability to love.....well, let me stop here,  Death doesn't end one thing, friends. I am smiling as I write these words, but tears are very near the surface.

And still, there are the pictures.  How Jim loved to take pictures!  What stories I have about Jim and his brother Neil out there in the blasted hot Eastern Washington desert, trying (and ultimately succeeding), to take one damnedly decent photograph of a rattlesnake striking at their camera.  What danger! What joy! What nonsence!

But it was not nonsense to them.  Nor was it dangerous.  It was simply, "How do we get to the truest truth of this?"
                                                                  *
Photography equals truth.  Jim equaled, for me, truth.  "Love,"  says the author Julian Barnes,"is the meeting of truth and magic.  Truth, as in photograph; magic, as in ballooning."  Well, Jim didn't "balloon," whatever Barnes meant by that, but he did nearly everything else. He wrote, he translated, he built pots, he directed plays, he photographed, he discovered a "link animal between this one and that one" and the "new" animal was named after Jim - - that is, Morganis-something-something,  he learned Latin and wrote two scholarly papers which were published in definitively scientific journals.  And, one dark night, among friends, namely, Steve, Katy, Bob and Mel, he sang, slowly and evenly, all the lyrics to The Red River Valley, while we sat, spellbound.

Why were we spellbound?  Did we not know he could sing?  Really, he couldn't.
 But, really, he could.  Fact is, he did.
 In the unfolding of memory, all this comes back to me.
                                                                  *

Since Bob and Mel returned Jim's photographs back to me I have dreamed five dreams about him.  In each one, Jim has died but is now returned to live again.  He is to die again, so the dreams
say, but not yet, not yet.

In the first dream, Jim says, "I think I should feel guilty that I'm back."

In the second dream, Jim asks, "My own death? Are you kidding me?"

In the third dream Jim is married to somebody else and won't look at me.

In the fourth dream, Jim asks me if we had any curry and chutney.

In the fifth dream Jim is being carried around by Obama.

                                                                       *
I put the photographs in my office closet and I shut the closet doors. Grief  hit me again. "Grief is a human, not a medical condition, and while there are pills to help us forget it  - - and everything else - - there are no pills to cure it.  The griefstruck are not depressed, just properly, appropriately, mathematically sad," says my friend (well, I have never met him, but so far he makes the most sense to me of all the many authors whom have written about the loss of their wives or husbands since Jim died, including Joan Didian,  Joyce Carol Oates and others - - so many others, and therefore, he IS my friend!!)

I found Jim's little old Cannon camera,  took pictures of the photographs, found somebody to help me send the pictures to the girls, and asked them which ones they wanted.  They told me.  And so.  A few days later, today in fact, just this morning, I loaded them up in my car, the way you would load up anything, and drove them to the local UPS store, where I had to ask a man if he would kindly open the door for me.  I didn't want to make two trips.  I only wanted to make one trip.       
                                                                         *

I gave the UPS lady the four large framed pictures, each signed and dated by Jim.  I addressed the labels.  How odd this feels, how odd, I thought, but I couldn't figure out what was so odd about it.  Jim has been dead now,  (Dead! What a word to use! So coarse!  Coarse!  What a word to use! So
middle-class!) --Jim has been dead now - - five years! And then I say to myself, "Five years, next to forty-three years, is nothing. Nothing! You see patients who are dealing with their first five years! Give yourself a break!"

                                                                         *

Many things have happened since Jim died, some good, some bad.  Many photographs have been taken. The photograph of me in Times Square.  The photograph of me at Lambeau Field.  The photograph of Aleister, now thirteen, and me, dancing, in my kitchen,  The photograph of Aleister and me at the Seattle Aquariam.  The photograph of me and Katy at Etta's restaurant. The photograph of me and Bob and Mel.  The photograph of me and Steve and Katy. 

"Life goes on," said Bertold Brecht in his play, The Good Woman of Setsuan. I didn't like that play overly much, but I played the lead.  Sometimes you just keep trying to get close to something you love even when you don't love the direction you're going, the vehicle you're driving in, the frame that's surrounding you.  You're doing your best.

It's hard to never hear from him. Sometimes I'll just take any reason at all just to write about him even a little bit.
                                                                           *

Well.  As I said in the beginning of this somewhat (or very) disjointed blog, no matter how isolated or lonely or withdrawn we become, we all have an impulse to keep moving towards the light. Homo sapiens are, if nothing else, persistent. I am, if nothing else, persistent. As a therapist, trained in  grief therapy,  I am amazed at how much we don't know.  I know we don't know it, because I have seen, since Jim died, at least ten people, all sane, well organized individuals, who had "lost" their partners of over thirty-some years (and, in some situations, over fifty years) to death - - and who, like me, were not at all quick to "pulling on their boots".  One does it for one's social life, for one's friends, for the decorum end of it, sure, yes, we all know how to do all that - - but, really?

And yet, there is, there is always,  "the light."   In one of Jim's photographs there is the image of the moon (among other images), having been taken in a puddle. The entire photograph is blueish.  The moon, in the photograph, while not the most important image, is not the least important. Nor is it blue. It hangs there. It cannot, as the lyricist says, be denied. It is round and sensual and there. It says, I may not be the most image here, but without me, this photo would be unbelievable. Hang on to me. Hang on.
      
                               

                                                                          *      
 Sometimes I think that's the best we have.





        
  

Tuesday, October 15, 2013