In a phone conversation with my son Matt a few weeks ago, I learned that my ex-husband had just died. I had known that he had been very ill. My daughter Kim had flown to TN to see him for what she believed was the last time. She called me from the Philly airport where she was to meet her husband, his brother and wife for a flight to Spain. She had just landed from the TN flight and was audibly stressed out. I knew something was wrong. My heart went out to her, and I forgot my decades-long anger at her father for a few minutes as I tried to reassure her and comfort her. I said, "Kim, I'm so sorry you are losing your Dad, honey." She answered, wistfully, "Mom...I lost him many years ago." That sentence has remained in my mind since our conversation.
Ever since my first husband abruptly abandoned me and his two children forty years ago, I have held a strong sense of rancor toward him. Over the years I often fantasized about the worst possible punishment I could think of for him and wished fervently that I was not a law-abiding, conscience-ridden citizen so I could carry it out.
I would imagine him stripped naked, staked out in the broiling sun of the western desert of the USA in only his cowboy boots (he was an anachronism; he ate, slept and dreamed of being a cowboy in the Wild West...1800's style), a rusty saw taken to certain parts of his body, honey poured over the wounds, and a bucket of fire ants dumped on top.
Don't worry...it never happened. But even though I later married again... to a genuine family-loving homebody of a man, hurt and anger would rise in me at the thought of my ex-husband.
He remarried almost immediately after the divorce; he had been seeing his prospective wife for some time during our marriage...without my knowledge, of course. His new wife resented our two children because their father had to pay child support for them. She treated the two kids like alienated outsiders. My son was only a toddler when his father left the family, so he never got a chance to get to know his Dad. His step-mother made things so unpleasant for both the kids that my son would be delivered back home from one of his visits to his father and as the door closed he would burst into tears and beg not to have to visit there again, but those were the court arrangements, and the kids and I had no choice.
When the two kids became teenagers and Matt went away to private school and Kim was busy caring for her horse and taking part in 4-H activities, the visits to their Dad fell off. Finally he stopped asking to see them at all. Some years went by and Kim got married. Her Dad (who was invited without his wife) attended the wedding, but did not take Kim down the aisle; instead, my second husband, Kim's step-father, was by her side.
About 20 years passed and Matt yearned to locate his Dad and "connect" with him. My ex-husband had left our area and no one knew where he could be located. Through some intricate detective and telephone work, Matt found him in Tennessee. He called and asked if his father lived there. The step-mother answered the phone and said absolutely nothing to him...merely transferred the phone to Matt's Dad.
Kim had long ago torn up any of her father's telephone numbers or addresses out of pain and disgust and a sense of abandonment by him. But she, too became curious after Matt told her of relocating him. So each of them made some visits to TN over the last five or six years, thinking they could reestablish a relationship with their father. Matt later told me that his father started drinking beer at 10:00 AM each morning, continuing at a steady pace until 3:00 PM in the afternoon when he would suggest a switch to bourbon, and that drinking binge would continue until about 3:00 AM the next day. There was never any deep, intuitive connection between them...Matt said his father would converse only about superficial things or regale visitors with his large storehouse of jokes. He chain-smoked, having been a smoker since his teen years, and continued this habit even after he had had heart attacks and quadruple by-pass surgery. He had been cautioned to stop drinking, too, but telling this man not to do something he wanted to do was like yelling at a wall...I've since done a personality profile on him and he completely fits that of a narcissist. It was no surprise to anyone when he finally found out he was in the late stages of lung cancer.
I have had an eerie reaction to thoughts of my ex-husband's death. There is now not so much anger as there is frustration and disappointment. One day I sat down and looked inward to identify why I am exhibiting such feelings. It suddenly struck me that what I was experiencing was disappointment that my ex-husband could no longer choose to come to me to apologize for the terrible emotional hurt he had caused me and his children when he left us. I was frustrated because it was too late for any explanations from him because he was........yes......he was dead.
Talk about a lack of reality on my part. This guy was the last guy on earth who ever gave out apologies of any kind for any reason. The world owed him everything and when he wanted something, he took it and was without remorse. As long as he could see himself mirrored in your eyes, you were his friend/lover/wife/child, etc. The minute your glance moved to some other interest, he tossed you aside. Only those who worshipped him steadily and unerringly were worthy of his friendship/paternal care/marriage/love.
All these years I had been waiting for some damned apology from him, or acts that simulated an apology. What a waste of time and effort and brain power. The last laugh had been on me.
So, after 40 odd years of being emotionally bound to this guy, I'm going on notice that I am now finally letting go.
It's about time.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Friday, April 27, 2007
Leaving
Yesterday my best friend of more than 50 years and I went to lunch, an occasion we have enjoyed each Thursday for a number of years.
She is slowly disappearing, slipping from my grasp. She has an illness called pre-frontal lobe dementia. It is relentlessly and irreversibly turning her into a 79-yr. old woman who speaks a foreign language that is unintelligible to all but herself, and it renders her unable to remember even her own name, the names of her friends and family, or common terminology.
Her visual acuity is still in better shape than her oral ability, so I carry along a set of index cards I call her cheat sheets. I've printed from my computer some large-fonted labels which I've glued onto the cards. When we are talking about one of her children and she has no idea who owns the name which I am repeating to her over and over again, I show her the index card with her child's name boldly printed on it, and her face lights up with recognition. But lately I've noticed that the light sometimes doesn't turn on when I hold up the card. So her visual ability is slipping away, too.
She has always loved Manhattans before our lunches, and even though I would try to steer her to a drink less potent with brain-cell-destroying alcohol in it, she would gently persist until I would relent and make sure she had her Manhattan. But for many months now she has completely forgotten that she ever drank Manhattans. I've been ordering a glass of Chardonnay for her and she has loved it, tilting the glass back to savor every last drop. Yesterday, she drank half of it and forgot it was there. After she had cleaned up her dessert, she suddenly discovered the half-glass of wine and quickly drained it, looking as though she had almost narrowly missed the best part of the afternoon. I know that after drinking the glass of wine she is much more unintelligible, so if there is important or interesting news I wish to share with her, I must do it before she downs the wine.
Sometimes she asks me if I've met her children. My children grew up with her children, and I knew her before she had two of her children. I am momentarily shocked by that kind of question, but I recover somewhat to try to explain.
She has started using a fork as a knife, her frail arthritic hands trembling as she attempts to cut through a complete sandwich with two forks. I clamp my mouth shut to keep from being bossy, hoping she'll realize what she's doing, but finally after she looks up at me with frustration and puzzlement in her eyes, I try to explain.
In the car on the way home she regaled me with a long, expressive excited paragraph on some subject that remained a complete mystery to me. I was fascinated with the strange alien words she was struggling with in her effort to communicate with me. As I drove up her driveway, she put her hand on my knee in a desperate attempt to get through to me. I stopped the car and held and patted her hand and apologized for my lack of comprehension. Tears welled up in her eyes, and with great effort she blurted out "Don't Leave!! Don't want leave!" She had been trying to explain how important our lunches were to her. She didn't want me to leave.
She'll never know how much I don't want her to leave me, either.
She is slowly disappearing, slipping from my grasp. She has an illness called pre-frontal lobe dementia. It is relentlessly and irreversibly turning her into a 79-yr. old woman who speaks a foreign language that is unintelligible to all but herself, and it renders her unable to remember even her own name, the names of her friends and family, or common terminology.
Her visual acuity is still in better shape than her oral ability, so I carry along a set of index cards I call her cheat sheets. I've printed from my computer some large-fonted labels which I've glued onto the cards. When we are talking about one of her children and she has no idea who owns the name which I am repeating to her over and over again, I show her the index card with her child's name boldly printed on it, and her face lights up with recognition. But lately I've noticed that the light sometimes doesn't turn on when I hold up the card. So her visual ability is slipping away, too.
She has always loved Manhattans before our lunches, and even though I would try to steer her to a drink less potent with brain-cell-destroying alcohol in it, she would gently persist until I would relent and make sure she had her Manhattan. But for many months now she has completely forgotten that she ever drank Manhattans. I've been ordering a glass of Chardonnay for her and she has loved it, tilting the glass back to savor every last drop. Yesterday, she drank half of it and forgot it was there. After she had cleaned up her dessert, she suddenly discovered the half-glass of wine and quickly drained it, looking as though she had almost narrowly missed the best part of the afternoon. I know that after drinking the glass of wine she is much more unintelligible, so if there is important or interesting news I wish to share with her, I must do it before she downs the wine.
Sometimes she asks me if I've met her children. My children grew up with her children, and I knew her before she had two of her children. I am momentarily shocked by that kind of question, but I recover somewhat to try to explain.
She has started using a fork as a knife, her frail arthritic hands trembling as she attempts to cut through a complete sandwich with two forks. I clamp my mouth shut to keep from being bossy, hoping she'll realize what she's doing, but finally after she looks up at me with frustration and puzzlement in her eyes, I try to explain.
In the car on the way home she regaled me with a long, expressive excited paragraph on some subject that remained a complete mystery to me. I was fascinated with the strange alien words she was struggling with in her effort to communicate with me. As I drove up her driveway, she put her hand on my knee in a desperate attempt to get through to me. I stopped the car and held and patted her hand and apologized for my lack of comprehension. Tears welled up in her eyes, and with great effort she blurted out "Don't Leave!! Don't want leave!" She had been trying to explain how important our lunches were to her. She didn't want me to leave.
She'll never know how much I don't want her to leave me, either.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Of Swastikas
I've just finished reading one of Ted Gross's blogs...this particular one a response to a hate-monger blog in which a poster thrust a graphic drawing of a Swastika into the faces of readers.
I'm still sitting here breathing hard with rage and sadness at the hate site and the poster. I couldn't bring myself to go to the awful place of the blog to read the original post, but I read with distaste the snippets that Ted quoted and I recoiled while fury rose in me.
I'm seventy-five years old. I was born in 1931 and I remember vividly the entire 2nd World War. When I would go to the movies with my friends we would get our weekly news via "The Eyes and Ears of the World", a news documentary that was shown before the main movie attraction. To this day the picture that comes into my mind when I think of "Panzer Divisions" frightens the hell out of me. Panzer Divisions were Nazi tanks plowing through the defending allied forces.
My parents were always glued to the radio to hear if the Nazi evil had been put down. One day I came home from junior high to find my mother staring into space from the window above the kitchen sink with tears running down her face. I ran to her to ask what had happened. The man who had been my Dad's best man at their wedding had been an Army Air Force pilot and was shot down over the English channel, he and his plane lost forever in the waters where the battle took place.
We were a peace-loving family who eschewed violence, but during those dark days we learned to hate Hitler and particularly the awful symbol of his realm of evil - the Swastika. My brother and i had a picture of a Swastika on our basement wall at which we threw darts and shot water pistols until my mother discovered it and tore it into shreds.
I'm still sitting here breathing hard with rage and sadness at the hate site and the poster. I couldn't bring myself to go to the awful place of the blog to read the original post, but I read with distaste the snippets that Ted quoted and I recoiled while fury rose in me.
I'm seventy-five years old. I was born in 1931 and I remember vividly the entire 2nd World War. When I would go to the movies with my friends we would get our weekly news via "The Eyes and Ears of the World", a news documentary that was shown before the main movie attraction. To this day the picture that comes into my mind when I think of "Panzer Divisions" frightens the hell out of me. Panzer Divisions were Nazi tanks plowing through the defending allied forces.
My parents were always glued to the radio to hear if the Nazi evil had been put down. One day I came home from junior high to find my mother staring into space from the window above the kitchen sink with tears running down her face. I ran to her to ask what had happened. The man who had been my Dad's best man at their wedding had been an Army Air Force pilot and was shot down over the English channel, he and his plane lost forever in the waters where the battle took place.
We were a peace-loving family who eschewed violence, but during those dark days we learned to hate Hitler and particularly the awful symbol of his realm of evil - the Swastika. My brother and i had a picture of a Swastika on our basement wall at which we threw darts and shot water pistols until my mother discovered it and tore it into shreds.
My Dad's job was as an electrical engineer and he became part of the Signal Corps because he was an expert at communication equipment. He also was drafted into a group of nationwide executives who could be ready in a national emergency to take over important tasks in Washington, DC, if our capitol ever were to be bombed. These jobs and his frequent business trips often took him away from us, but my mother always explained that he was doing his part in fighting to rid the world of Hitler.
At that time, unbeknownst to my brother and me and our parents, America was in the middle of refusing to accept Jewish refugees from Hitler's Holocaust and turning boats away from the only shore available to them at which their lives might be saved. When I learned those awful facts many many years later, I was appalled and ashamed and full of disgust and guilt for my heartless, cold country. But before I knew about America's disgraceful acts of human betrayal, the facts about the concentration camps had of course become public knowledge.
Dad was transferred to Baltimore, MD, and I started high school in a new town with new friends. My new best friend lived nearby, and we spent most of our leisure hours together. Her Dad had been a Major in the US Army. He had led one of the "liberation" teams of soldiers who, after the Nazis were on the run, had gone to the concentration camps to release and care for the dying Jewish victims. He had photographed scenes there at every stop he made, and had collected them in his personal scrapbook. But my friend told me that he had forbidden her to look at them. We wondered why.
Of course you know what happened. Just tell a teenager that he or she can't look at something, and that something is immediately in her hands. One afternoon when my friend's Mom was not at home, Kathy located the scrapbook and we opened it. Two hours later, we were crying and in deep shock over the horrors of that book. There were photos of pits where Jews had been shot and then had fallen into the pits. We searched the faces of the firing squad behind these dead and dying people. There was not a single face that had an ounce of remorse, pity or shame on it. There were photos of ovens with partially immolated bodies in it. Bones were on the filthy floor. There was a pile of shoes in one photo and a table covered with gold jewelry and watches in another. At the locked gates (yes, the Nazi animals had left, but had made sure the gates were locked behind them, knowing full well that the frail, sick Jews could never mange to escape by themselves) of the concentration camp fence, as my friend's Dad was just arriving, stood a line of the most pitifully thin people I'd ever seen. They were in torn striped sacks, and were nothing but skin and bones. The looks of sad, bewildered agony in their eyes will haunt me forever.
We sat for a long time in total silence with tears running down our faces. Kathy confessed to her Mom what we had done, and her Mom sighed and said that she and her Dad had not thought we were mature enough to see such evil incarnate, but that she hoped we'd remember the sin of it and make sure that nobody in our generation would repeat such inhumanity. Later, her Dad told us that after they had assured the poor captives that they were indeed free and would be helped, they toured the place and the major was so sickened that he had to leave briefly to vomit.
So, I"m sorry.. (I say that with considerable sarcasm; damned if I'm apologizing). I don't see a Swastika as anything but the supreme symbol of the worst genocide in the history of the world. I don't ever want to see one again...on anything. And when I see temples and homes and graves defaced by this symbol that will forever be known as the badge of evil, I want to do great harm to those who continue such hate. As a pacifist Quaker I love peace, but I don't believe in turning a blind eye or quiet hand to the virulence of unrelenting, mindless hatred. The 2nd World War is still fresh in my mind and memory, and I'll do my part to prevent those bigots who are too young to know the terrors of it from revamping its symbol into some sort of supposedly-innocent, innocuous sweet banner.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
A Contradiction in Terms
Shouldn't a criminal be not only chastised, but an attempt made by the chastisers to change him - to alter, renew, improve, or heal him, if you will - in some constructive, significant manner which becomes beneficial not only to future victims, and society, but to our commitment as charitable fellow human beings, one to another?
The Death Penalty does none of that. In fact, how can it be a "penalty" if the criminal doesn't live to recognize and ruminate on the seriousness of his crime, take responsibility for its commission, or be able to work to help compensate in some way the families of his victims, to say nothing of the possibility of improvement to himself or his community?
If you think in terms of pure vengeance, the death penalty is a waste of money, effort and bureaucratic self-control. Tremendous amounts of cash are spent while a criminal waits to be killed. They say it takes about 10 minutes to die by lethal injection, and you have satisfied no one and solved nothing when you carry the killed body out for burial after those ten minutes. From a purely pragmatic viewpoint, you've spent a mint on a criminal who isn't going to live to rue his crime. Even if he doesn't ever find remorse for his crime, at least he is made by society to think on it for the rest of his life, and to be permanently separated from the society he brutalized.
Death merely turns out to be a release from any and all punishment (other than that of a spiritual nature, if that is one's belief), but it certainly guarantees that this person will not have to "pay" for his crime in this world. I compare it to having someone conducting a murder and then being told his only payment is to take a permanent nap.
Below is a link to MSNBC's World News site, dated today, April 24, 2007, to an article on the growing concerns over the fact that a number of lethal injections that somehow failed or were administered in a faulty manner, or produced the equivalent of torture so as to cause unbearable pain and asphyxiation, and at times had to be re-administered, could be considered cruel and unusual punishment.
It has always puzzled me that 80% of Americans are comfortable with the double standard of Capital Punishment, that they see no contradiction or hypocrisy or lack of logic in our society's decision to kill someone to send a message to that person and to society that killing is wrong. Instead, it says, in effect, It's okay for SOME to kill, but not others. If it's wrong for one person to kill, it should be wrong for ALL persons to kill, no matter what the rationalization or reasons may be.
Otherwise, we remain a coarsened society that is all too willing to settle for knee-jerk revenge, rather than work hard for healing and peace and humanity.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The link:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18278575/
The Death Penalty does none of that. In fact, how can it be a "penalty" if the criminal doesn't live to recognize and ruminate on the seriousness of his crime, take responsibility for its commission, or be able to work to help compensate in some way the families of his victims, to say nothing of the possibility of improvement to himself or his community?
If you think in terms of pure vengeance, the death penalty is a waste of money, effort and bureaucratic self-control. Tremendous amounts of cash are spent while a criminal waits to be killed. They say it takes about 10 minutes to die by lethal injection, and you have satisfied no one and solved nothing when you carry the killed body out for burial after those ten minutes. From a purely pragmatic viewpoint, you've spent a mint on a criminal who isn't going to live to rue his crime. Even if he doesn't ever find remorse for his crime, at least he is made by society to think on it for the rest of his life, and to be permanently separated from the society he brutalized.
Death merely turns out to be a release from any and all punishment (other than that of a spiritual nature, if that is one's belief), but it certainly guarantees that this person will not have to "pay" for his crime in this world. I compare it to having someone conducting a murder and then being told his only payment is to take a permanent nap.
Below is a link to MSNBC's World News site, dated today, April 24, 2007, to an article on the growing concerns over the fact that a number of lethal injections that somehow failed or were administered in a faulty manner, or produced the equivalent of torture so as to cause unbearable pain and asphyxiation, and at times had to be re-administered, could be considered cruel and unusual punishment.
It has always puzzled me that 80% of Americans are comfortable with the double standard of Capital Punishment, that they see no contradiction or hypocrisy or lack of logic in our society's decision to kill someone to send a message to that person and to society that killing is wrong. Instead, it says, in effect, It's okay for SOME to kill, but not others. If it's wrong for one person to kill, it should be wrong for ALL persons to kill, no matter what the rationalization or reasons may be.
Otherwise, we remain a coarsened society that is all too willing to settle for knee-jerk revenge, rather than work hard for healing and peace and humanity.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The link:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18278575/
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