Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Reeling
Does any other 61-year-old art historian get hopped up on martinis and dance alone to Donna Summer until, a sweaty mess, he drops at 2, 3, 4, or 5 a.m.? (Donna and Duccio: a marriage made in heaven!) ... but how Arabella would have loved to be joining me! In my mind, she is. She is still my partner in every dance. I can still hear her coming into the living room at 2 or 3 a.m., finding me ecstatic over one composer or another (Faure, Medtner, Bonnie Raitt... it makes no difference), and saying, "Rob, you really are quite impossible, but I give up. Go fix me a Manhattan." ... and then we would party until all hours, and we would laugh. How we loved to laugh... and what a laugh she had. It made the angels sing! She is teaching angels to laugh now. --- What a legacy she left me. What a legacy she is to me. She still directs the beating of my heart. She insists that my heart go on beating, even when it seems too much for me to bear, as it has this past week. --- What am I doing, broadcasting these stirrings to the world? I haven't a clue, my dears. More magical thinking, I suppose... the confusion of ephemera for substance.... the gift of virtual social networking.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
I had a wonderful visit with my sister and my mother in Austin over the weekend.... although, yet again, returning to the silent emptiness of the apartment challenged my coping abilities. However, here I am, still alive the next day, with all the challenges and blessings that constitute a life. I only wish that the gaping hole in my heart would heal and that the anguish of loss would relinquish its authoritative dominance of my life's boundaries. Scar tissue and the elegies of memory: these things I expect and even want. However, they lie, I guess, in my future. For the present, I still have not moved much beyond the derailing immediacy of December, 2009. I am still waiting for the presence of absence to evolve into the absence of presence. In the latter case, I would have grief. In the former, where I am now, the grief still has me. Feeling loss differs from feeling lost. At least I hope so.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Trying to Be as Honest about God as I Can Be
Arabella and I frequently attributed the fact that we managed to find peace, and even joy, during the last two years of pain and struggle and uncertainty to the fact that we got our theodicy(the problem of evil) in order in undergraduate school. We took theology courses together at Duke with Dr. Thomas Langford. Once my next-door-neighbor, when my family lived in Durham during my seventh- and eighth-grade years, Dr. Langford taught Duke undergraduates to begin to ask questions systematically and theologically. He was a master teacher. Several years later, he would officiate at our marriage. However, in those courses, which certainly pertained neither to us as individuals nor to us as a couple nor even directly to mortality, Dr. Langford laid the foundations on which we built a marriage and on which we relied as the bedrock of hope when Arabella's illness raised the obvious questions. How could a good God allow such suffering? More specifically, how could a good God permit metastasizing cancer cells (as well as Haitian earthquakes, ethnic genocide, and tsunamis)? How could a loving God nourish a love like ours, which illness and ultimately death could then so brutally cut short? After two years of pancreatic cancer, with the continuous chemotherapy and what Arabella called its "indignities," how can one believe Jesus's words that "in my Father's house are many mansions" that he has prepared for each of us?
These questions are the stuff of anguish, as well as the fuel for philosophical and theological consternation for millenia. Dr. Langford taught Arabella and me that answers come most often in the context of the simplest stuff of life, stuff that looks like... well, merely like "stuff," not answer-material at all. (Francis of Assisi would have agreed with Dr. Langford.) So, I do not have grand conclusions and syntheses to offer, but only evidence that I glean from the realities of being a lover, a husband, a parent, and a friend.
Above all, those roles have taught me that love IS suffering... not misery, you understand, but allowing ("Suffer the little children to come unto me")... suffering or allowing the other to be who he or she is, with all the glory and all the foolishness that comes with human personhood, simply because one loves the other. Anyone who thinks that one can love without this suffering is deluding him- or herself... or has been extraordinarily lucky, like Job before his catastrophies. Some people do have extraordinary luck. It's not fair. However, as a friend of mine recently said, "fairness" does not get one very far as an ethical framework in life's big questions, at lease not after the playground years. Hence, in the United States, fifty percent of marriages end in divorce, and forty percent of children come into this world bereft of the stability of a family... because too many think that marriage will save them from suffering... or they avoid marriage, because they do not understand what suffering means, only that relationships involve it in some way they want to avoid. Well, enough of that....
When I think of God, I think of a lover, for God is love... and, like every lover, God suffers his beloved to be who they are, whether He thinks that's good for them or not. National Socialism, and cancer cells, and "hiking the Appalachian Trail"... all such things, failures of the flesh and spirit big and small, result from the freedom that God has installed at the heart of things, like a parent giving a sixteen-year-old the car keys. To do things differently would involve a curtailment of freedom, would mean love's selling out to the will-to-power-and-control. However, God does not need to protect Himself or His prerogatives, because God is love, the perfection and the end of love, full of compassion even for the metastasized abuse of freedom, even for the hubris of Goldman Sachs and of polluters-for-profit, even for me, a virtuoso in the Seven Deadly Sins.
Did God kill my wife by creating cancer? Did God create the earthquakes that killed thousands of people's spouses (and children, and parents, and brothers, and sisters, and friends) in ten minutes, in one fell swoop? Does God "take it in his stride" that I suffer now as I do? Is it simply in the nature of things that "shit happens"? No. Such things are not "natural"'; they are deeply unnatural. Ask any parent at the hospital bed of a dying child. Ask any husband or wife who, to use C. S. Lewis' metaphor, has suffered the amputation that is the death of a spouse. Ask any tortured prisoner in Tehran or Guantanemo. Ask any fisherman who has seen the waters that generations have fished suddenly bereft of any promise of a catch. Ask any unemployed auto worker whose wife with Lou Gehrig's disease cannot get health insurance... and therefore treatment. Such things are deeply, deeply unnatural. They are unnatural, because God, the source of nature, is love, not hatred and death. We suffer each other's freedom. We suffer our own freedom. God suffers our freedom, because He loves us. He loves the world... every cell of it, even if it decides cancerously to go its own way in a solipsistic myopia.
So, what should I make of these beliefs, in the midst of a hurt whose magnitude I never imagined? Am I just blowing hot air? No. No. No.
Last night I talked with my friend Sim about the rows of medications on my kitchen counter, which Arabella had so carefully organized as her assertion of life in the face of death, the last enemy. Several days earlier, I had found the capacity to empty the bathroom medicine cabinet of the mouthwash-remedies for chemo mouth sores, the oitments for the chemo dry skin, the laxatives for chemo's assault on the digestive system. "OK," I said to myself, "Now it's time to trash the medications in the kitchen." However, when I picked up the first bottle of chemo-poison, I could not bring myself to toss it. Like leaving Arabella in the hospital each night, it felt like betrayal to touch those armaments against illness. I wept at the thought.
However, Sim, a hospital chaplain, had told me that, for safety's sake, I had to get rid of those hundreds of pills. Nobody could use them. Arabella had no further need of them. After talking with him, I sat with my head in my hands for a half-hour or so. Then calmly, resolutely, I marched into the kitchen. I unscrewed each bottle cap and poured the contents into the trash can, followed by each empty amber bottle... twenty-five or so. Thousands of dollars of medication into the waste can. It hurt like crazy. "... but I wanted them to work!" I cried. "YOU wanted them to work! Our beloved Dr. Sherman wanted them to work! God wanted them to work!" ... and they did work... for two years... until cancer's freedom, Arabella, won over the freedom of our love, of your love for life, for me!
After I poured the pill bottles' contents into the trash, I heard... very clearly I heard... the "Arabella voice," which speaks constantly to me, say .... the voice said simply, "Thank you." I felt so clearly, Arabella, that you needed to be freed of those things that spoke only of illness, of suffering, of death. You don't need those things any longer. Neither do I.... neither do I.... although I wish so much that those pills had worked for a longer time... any length of time longer.... so I could have put off this anguish for a while longer. However, that's my selfishness talking again. I know. I do know. Really, I do know this.
These questions are the stuff of anguish, as well as the fuel for philosophical and theological consternation for millenia. Dr. Langford taught Arabella and me that answers come most often in the context of the simplest stuff of life, stuff that looks like... well, merely like "stuff," not answer-material at all. (Francis of Assisi would have agreed with Dr. Langford.) So, I do not have grand conclusions and syntheses to offer, but only evidence that I glean from the realities of being a lover, a husband, a parent, and a friend.
Above all, those roles have taught me that love IS suffering... not misery, you understand, but allowing ("Suffer the little children to come unto me")... suffering or allowing the other to be who he or she is, with all the glory and all the foolishness that comes with human personhood, simply because one loves the other. Anyone who thinks that one can love without this suffering is deluding him- or herself... or has been extraordinarily lucky, like Job before his catastrophies. Some people do have extraordinary luck. It's not fair. However, as a friend of mine recently said, "fairness" does not get one very far as an ethical framework in life's big questions, at lease not after the playground years. Hence, in the United States, fifty percent of marriages end in divorce, and forty percent of children come into this world bereft of the stability of a family... because too many think that marriage will save them from suffering... or they avoid marriage, because they do not understand what suffering means, only that relationships involve it in some way they want to avoid. Well, enough of that....
When I think of God, I think of a lover, for God is love... and, like every lover, God suffers his beloved to be who they are, whether He thinks that's good for them or not. National Socialism, and cancer cells, and "hiking the Appalachian Trail"... all such things, failures of the flesh and spirit big and small, result from the freedom that God has installed at the heart of things, like a parent giving a sixteen-year-old the car keys. To do things differently would involve a curtailment of freedom, would mean love's selling out to the will-to-power-and-control. However, God does not need to protect Himself or His prerogatives, because God is love, the perfection and the end of love, full of compassion even for the metastasized abuse of freedom, even for the hubris of Goldman Sachs and of polluters-for-profit, even for me, a virtuoso in the Seven Deadly Sins.
Did God kill my wife by creating cancer? Did God create the earthquakes that killed thousands of people's spouses (and children, and parents, and brothers, and sisters, and friends) in ten minutes, in one fell swoop? Does God "take it in his stride" that I suffer now as I do? Is it simply in the nature of things that "shit happens"? No. Such things are not "natural"'; they are deeply unnatural. Ask any parent at the hospital bed of a dying child. Ask any husband or wife who, to use C. S. Lewis' metaphor, has suffered the amputation that is the death of a spouse. Ask any tortured prisoner in Tehran or Guantanemo. Ask any fisherman who has seen the waters that generations have fished suddenly bereft of any promise of a catch. Ask any unemployed auto worker whose wife with Lou Gehrig's disease cannot get health insurance... and therefore treatment. Such things are deeply, deeply unnatural. They are unnatural, because God, the source of nature, is love, not hatred and death. We suffer each other's freedom. We suffer our own freedom. God suffers our freedom, because He loves us. He loves the world... every cell of it, even if it decides cancerously to go its own way in a solipsistic myopia.
So, what should I make of these beliefs, in the midst of a hurt whose magnitude I never imagined? Am I just blowing hot air? No. No. No.
Last night I talked with my friend Sim about the rows of medications on my kitchen counter, which Arabella had so carefully organized as her assertion of life in the face of death, the last enemy. Several days earlier, I had found the capacity to empty the bathroom medicine cabinet of the mouthwash-remedies for chemo mouth sores, the oitments for the chemo dry skin, the laxatives for chemo's assault on the digestive system. "OK," I said to myself, "Now it's time to trash the medications in the kitchen." However, when I picked up the first bottle of chemo-poison, I could not bring myself to toss it. Like leaving Arabella in the hospital each night, it felt like betrayal to touch those armaments against illness. I wept at the thought.
However, Sim, a hospital chaplain, had told me that, for safety's sake, I had to get rid of those hundreds of pills. Nobody could use them. Arabella had no further need of them. After talking with him, I sat with my head in my hands for a half-hour or so. Then calmly, resolutely, I marched into the kitchen. I unscrewed each bottle cap and poured the contents into the trash can, followed by each empty amber bottle... twenty-five or so. Thousands of dollars of medication into the waste can. It hurt like crazy. "... but I wanted them to work!" I cried. "YOU wanted them to work! Our beloved Dr. Sherman wanted them to work! God wanted them to work!" ... and they did work... for two years... until cancer's freedom, Arabella, won over the freedom of our love, of your love for life, for me!
After I poured the pill bottles' contents into the trash, I heard... very clearly I heard... the "Arabella voice," which speaks constantly to me, say .... the voice said simply, "Thank you." I felt so clearly, Arabella, that you needed to be freed of those things that spoke only of illness, of suffering, of death. You don't need those things any longer. Neither do I.... neither do I.... although I wish so much that those pills had worked for a longer time... any length of time longer.... so I could have put off this anguish for a while longer. However, that's my selfishness talking again. I know. I do know. Really, I do know this.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Grief Resources
Last night I visited Barnes & Noble. I wanted to find something new to read on grief and loss. I wasn't looking for information. I was looking for the companionship that all good literature provides. I asked a sales person where I might find books on these subjects. I think my question made her very uncomfortable, because she wouldn't look at me, as she brusquely told me that I should look in the "grief sub-section" of the "self-improvement" shelves. I suspected that this meant trouble. I found books with titles like The Grief Recovery Handbook: 20th Anniversary Edition: The Action Program for Moving beyond Death, Divorce, and Other Losses, Including Health, Career, and Faith. I don't think so. So, I tried the "Christian Inspiration" section, which, at least as Barnes & Noble had stocked it, didn't seem to offer me much either. Much of it looked, at least from my brief browsing, to be a little heavy on pious optimism or on a devout "management by objectives"... or both. Maybe I should have looked more carefully. Maybe something valuable lay behind the often off-putting titles, but what I saw depressed me too much. I left.
I have only read a couple of good things about grief so far. At least only a couple of things have held my attention. Among these, C. S. Lewis' A Grief Observed has resonated with my present feelings and challenges with a unique pertinence, which many others have felt as well. I first read it thirty-four years ago, when my mother-in-law died at 53, and my father-in-law bought copies of it for his children. However, I didn't really "get it" then. Although my mother-in-law's death affected me mightily, and I loved her dearly, the loss of a parent and parent-figures in my life, no matter how shattering they have felt, does not compare to the loss of Arabella with which I'm now grappling... or which is grappling with me... and Lewis writes of the loss of married love... in my case anyway, an incomparable loss. How could I have understood that at 26? I'm rather glad I didn't understand it back then. I'm glad I had to wait another thirty-four years to have a reason to understand.
Lewis writes with a lyrical honesty that transcends all the writing about the "stages of grief," which dominates so much of the literature and which I find about as helpful as a bird would find an ornithological textbook, to paraphrase Barnett Newman. I wish that I could think of this heartache as a set of "stages," which I merely have to practice and master... or simply get through, like enduring an appointment with the dentist. The "stages" rubric, however, would seem most helpful to those trying to understand what's happened to them after they've finished going through it... or, perhaps most especially, to those whose vocation lies in helping such people. However, the best counselors would never mistake diagnostic categories for the cure. In counseling, relationship cures, not diagnosis, not theory. That's why I find Lewis' book so full of solace. He does not offer therapeutic recipes for "managing grief." He offers the companionship of a wise and theologically-sensitive fellow-sufferer, who offers me his hand, not his diagnosis of my current "stage" or his prognostication of the unfinished business that still awaits me. (What? You haven't "done" anger yet???)
I will be re-reading Lewis' book frequently over the coming months. I know that I have just begun to plumb all it has to offer. At this moment, his comments about the relationship of tears to memory are sticking most in my mind. He says he feared that, if he ever stopped weeping, he would at that point lose contact with Joy, his wife... that she really would be dead to him then. However, one day, when he found himself weeping less, he realized that he remembered Joy more clearly than ever, because he was remembering her, not his loss of her. I take that to mean that, as the months and years pass, I can anticipate, not love's dissipation, but love's anchoring. That fills me with an indelible hope.
I suppose that someone will point out that Lewis is talking about moving from the stage of depression to the stage of acceptance. However, I think he's talking about something else. He's asserting a belief in the Resurrection, a reborn awareness of the eternal durability of life and love, and the Resurrection is a gift of grace, not a stage one attains through the adoption of the proper attitudes, with the proper patience. His book is not a psychological self-help book. It is a confession... Augustinian in its poetry, in its unflinching honesty, in its courageous dignity, and in its universality. His whole book on grief is like a gloss on Augustine's famous prayer on the first page of the Confessions: "You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless, until they rest in you." --- I'm afraid I'm still pretty restless, pretty disoriented... but, thank God, I have the companionable hands of Augustine and C. S. Lewis to steady me.
I have only read a couple of good things about grief so far. At least only a couple of things have held my attention. Among these, C. S. Lewis' A Grief Observed has resonated with my present feelings and challenges with a unique pertinence, which many others have felt as well. I first read it thirty-four years ago, when my mother-in-law died at 53, and my father-in-law bought copies of it for his children. However, I didn't really "get it" then. Although my mother-in-law's death affected me mightily, and I loved her dearly, the loss of a parent and parent-figures in my life, no matter how shattering they have felt, does not compare to the loss of Arabella with which I'm now grappling... or which is grappling with me... and Lewis writes of the loss of married love... in my case anyway, an incomparable loss. How could I have understood that at 26? I'm rather glad I didn't understand it back then. I'm glad I had to wait another thirty-four years to have a reason to understand.
Lewis writes with a lyrical honesty that transcends all the writing about the "stages of grief," which dominates so much of the literature and which I find about as helpful as a bird would find an ornithological textbook, to paraphrase Barnett Newman. I wish that I could think of this heartache as a set of "stages," which I merely have to practice and master... or simply get through, like enduring an appointment with the dentist. The "stages" rubric, however, would seem most helpful to those trying to understand what's happened to them after they've finished going through it... or, perhaps most especially, to those whose vocation lies in helping such people. However, the best counselors would never mistake diagnostic categories for the cure. In counseling, relationship cures, not diagnosis, not theory. That's why I find Lewis' book so full of solace. He does not offer therapeutic recipes for "managing grief." He offers the companionship of a wise and theologically-sensitive fellow-sufferer, who offers me his hand, not his diagnosis of my current "stage" or his prognostication of the unfinished business that still awaits me. (What? You haven't "done" anger yet???)
I will be re-reading Lewis' book frequently over the coming months. I know that I have just begun to plumb all it has to offer. At this moment, his comments about the relationship of tears to memory are sticking most in my mind. He says he feared that, if he ever stopped weeping, he would at that point lose contact with Joy, his wife... that she really would be dead to him then. However, one day, when he found himself weeping less, he realized that he remembered Joy more clearly than ever, because he was remembering her, not his loss of her. I take that to mean that, as the months and years pass, I can anticipate, not love's dissipation, but love's anchoring. That fills me with an indelible hope.
I suppose that someone will point out that Lewis is talking about moving from the stage of depression to the stage of acceptance. However, I think he's talking about something else. He's asserting a belief in the Resurrection, a reborn awareness of the eternal durability of life and love, and the Resurrection is a gift of grace, not a stage one attains through the adoption of the proper attitudes, with the proper patience. His book is not a psychological self-help book. It is a confession... Augustinian in its poetry, in its unflinching honesty, in its courageous dignity, and in its universality. His whole book on grief is like a gloss on Augustine's famous prayer on the first page of the Confessions: "You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless, until they rest in you." --- I'm afraid I'm still pretty restless, pretty disoriented... but, thank God, I have the companionable hands of Augustine and C. S. Lewis to steady me.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Interior Decoration
As I write this, in the wee hours of a Sunday morning, mementos of Arabella's life and of Arabella's & my life together surround me in the home that we so carefully outfitted as an expression of our individualities, our histories, our values, and our marriage. These things are more than "stuff." They are material extensions of very conscious intentionalities... precious sacramentals of the sacrament of marriage, I guess. --- Now that Arabella has died, I don't intend to make our home into a mausoleum or a shrine. Arabella would laugh herself silly at me, if I ever tried, and I'm sure her chortling would reach my ears... and box them good! However, I'm not ready to move anything... not just yet. I'll probably need help to do so, when I know the time has come. Right now, it's painful to encounter these tokens of love and, now, of loss too; it's equally painful to contemplate changing their placement, putting them in storage, or giving them away. So, I'm frozen amidst warm reminders, in a dilemma of grief.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
The Wilderness of Suffering
I wish I could report that I'm just ducky, but I'd be lying if I tried to say anything like that. I feel like I'm living in a silent, featureless, and empty wilderness, no matter how many people are walking around or even talking to me, no matter whether I'm in a concert hall, an art gallery, or a subway tunnel. When I am in fact alone, in the apartment, I often cry out in tearful anguish; I'm not sure why or to whom. I don't cry out to God with complaints or rail and rage against the "unfairness" of it all. I just want, at a deeper level of desire than I think I've ever plumbed, to have my life back and to have my wife back, which feel like pretty much the same thing right now, I'm afraid. Oftentimes, I call out for Arabella. This is all pure selfishness, I suppose, but, at this juncture, moral evaluation seems quite beside the point. Others might say that my problem stems from the fact that Arabella and I were too joined at the hip for too long and that I'm paying now for that folie à deux. I've read and heard just this kind of terminology from time to time. To that I'd reply that I would never trade the fierceness of Arabella's and my intimacy for an easier time in dealing with her death... not for a moment. What a stupid notion, which only one deprived of love and loving could ever entertain.
So for now, I go about my business; I teach; I do errands; I keep plodding through financial and domestic papers; I make telephone calls; I go to a few meetings; I attend Mass. I keep thinking that, if I continue to go about my business, at some point things will begin to change, and the wilderness will begin to be re-populated and full of sounds, and colors, and textures once more. However, I'm still waiting for that to happen. In the meantime, it's, well, just the mean-time, with all the possible connotations of that term.
Maybe I don't fully accept the final fact of Arabella's death yet. I don't think that's true, but maybe it is. From one point of view, I know that I have a strong awareness of her as a living presence in my heart and mind and soul. I even rejoice in that as much as ever. However, that doesn't really make me feel better about the present truth of my life, because that presence of which I'm so strongly aware cannot culminate in touch or conversation or laughter or plans for the future. Yes, an awareness of her presence does confirm my faith that death does not have the final word. I feel quite as convinced as ever, really, that God is love and that love, human and divine, never ends. However, that faith does not seem to mitigate the sense of loss and absence.
I suppose that one must simply suffer suffering... otherwise it would not be suffering, but something else, something more easily assimilated, articulated, and borne. I suppose that what makes suffering suffering lies in the fact that there is no mitigation. In that way, the suffering of grief is like pancreatic cancer, and the task, as Arabella taught me, is to walk through it, with my eyes focused on what is possible, not on what is impossible. I will try... but it still hurts so very much. In A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis remarked about his wife's death, "Her absence was like the sky, spread over everything." That about says it all for me too.
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