Friday
Aug032012
66 - the roller-coaster life can be
You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else."
—Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things
~~~
Okay, just want to say, W. T. F. I’ve not been here in a while, derailed over and over. So much to do, so little time. Portland. And then there’s Cheryl Strayed. Jesus Fucking Christ. Had dipped into a few things of hers online, and now I’m immersed. This woman is the bodhisattva of our time—bodhi-fucking-sattva! So far advanced and enlightened it’s off the charts humbling, it’s near scary. She gives it off: compassion, empathy and love. Full-on!
Camille and I sat in the front row of her event at Warwick’s Books where she read from her book Wild, and from her newly released Tiny Beautiful Things, collected selections of Sugar’s most powerful advice columns. Sugar/Strayed is like no other writer I’ve encountered. She’s funny, luminous, knowing and emergent. Is that not crazy, emergent?, like there’s more to come. A 40-something bodhisattva who, I expect, will be a long-time fixture on the NY Times bestseller list, and it won’t come from marketing and promotion, or author tours. It will come from reading her and it will be word of mouth. There’s something in her language, in her “literary mode of being,” in the Strayed “word.” She’s already seen as a savior and saint on Tumblr. Anyone who reads her will be blown away and unable to resist her brilliance and charm. Everything else becomes secondary when you engage her, when you begin to see how open and honest she is, how she has come to eliminate the barrier between the word and the thing, the description and the described. She’s so down to earth, so simple and clear on how to live and love that you’re shaken to the depths. She’s the goddamn deliverer; she shows the way. If you read no one else, if time is short for you, if you’ve only got time for one more book, if you don’t read Tiny Beautiful Things you will have missed your chance at glimpsing what it means to be at ease, to know, to understand. Bliss. Here and now, no more putting it off. I am upside down. For the first time in my life there’s clarity, unencumbered, unambiguous, pure unadulterated clarity. She’s the quintessential mirror.
~~~
Saturday, August 4th, will mark twelve years since I followed love to the most conservative city in California. Twelve flippin’ years. And now, a different love compels me to head back north, to Portland, to one of the most liberal cities on the West Coast. Camille found a two-bedroom flat in the Pearl, put down a deposit, near Jamison Square, a ten-minute stroll from Powell’s Books. Fortune smiled. And man-o-man it’s crazy-making time. I can’t imagine doing what she’s doing, her medical school transition schedule and academic calendar, mind-boggling. A wonder she is, fucking brilliant, and I’m starting to get all melancholy, yet marveling at it, memories, so many memories. We’re moving. Here we go. Jesus H!
We booked her for three weeks on an extended contract at the Ace Hotel. She’ll be up there beginning mid-month and her retreat starts last weekend in August, no family, no loved ones, no partners. A friggin' retreat for chrissakes, first-years bonding. For our last Friday night together in San Diego we got tickets to see Diana Krall at the Pala Casino. August 10th. Sipping, savoring, a little black jack and some loving jazz.
Moving? You figure you’ll have time, get it all right, get settled before the craziness begins, and as the months fly by you just never do, never get it done quite the way you want. Sometime in September, there’ll be this moment, we’ll realize where we are and where we’ve come. She’ll be immersed, a med-student, full-throttle, and we’ll have our love nest in the Pearl, and god damn it, another beginning, so many beginnings….
~~~
Gave notice on the 20th. It wasn’t a surprise, they knew. Six weeks. We got through the transition, our new Webmaster’s on board and taking control. All of my customer service work is going to get spread out among a few others, different departments. They won’t advertise and replace the Felicitous Factotum. That job ends with my departure, Friday, August 31st. Given the time crunch, we agreed Camille would focus on her orientation/transition preliminaries, that I’d take care of the move. Gonna try and go andante, make it a joy, make it pleasurable. Maybe make a batch of margaritas every day, sip, load a box, sip, load a box. Ha ha ha. Got the PODS working, “a smarter way to move.”
I hadn’t expected to feel so devastated, so emotionally overwrought and unstable about this ending/beginning. But there it is. So easy to be glib about adventure, about change, above moving on, and I can’t speak for Camille, she’s unique in so many ways, confronting loss and death early in life, her strength and compassion born of it. She could have grown bitter and closed off, but she found intimacy and support wherever she landed because her past grief opened her up, made her immediately appreciative and attentive and trusting. And that just gets to me, the trusting part, the willingness to engage. I’m not so trusting, more aloof and self-protective. It’s as if she thrives on being unsettled, as I’ve said so often, always leaning in, adventure intrigues, and she’s influenced me in this, but my first tendency is to hunker down, not to lean in but turn away, to resist, to cling to the comfort of habit and routine, the familiar. So much to think about and ponder.
This could be the last move I ever make, the last time I pick up and move on to a “new” situation, a new life. And Portland couldn’t be more perfect. The Cancer Center there is top-notch and the transition should be smooth. Remission and survival the hope, the desire, but I’ve got to be real, no room for self-delusion and fear, this now I see, the Strayed way.
Of course you know I googled euthanasia, Oregon the “right to die” state. And why wouldn’t we want to control and create our end? There’s an art to living and there’s an art to dying. And I happened on this, an HBO How to Die in Oregon documentary, and I got to thinking about Pops, how his end was so tortured and tragic, that those closest to him, my sister and her two sons, had to navigate the crazed system of keeping him alive at all costs. In a more enlightened era, with more humane and compassionate laws, laws that respect the liberty and freedom of the individual, he’d have chosen his end, wouldn’t have gone through those final few months. And check it, Sonja going through his things, there they were, on his bookshelves, more than one book on Dying With Dignity, books he bought after Mother died. He was on to it. And so am I.
Mother? Last Saturday, Michelle Dean in her Rumpus piece on envy, linked to D. T. Max’s New Yorker piece on David Foster Wallace, The Unfinished, and in it I learned that Wallace had undergone electroconvulsive shock therapy more than once in his life, and it made me think of Mother, she had received the “treatment” too, early on, after she and Pops were married, and she was never the same, her own words. Someone always fearful, always looking for the horizontal line, she didn’t want the ups and downs, didn’t want the roller-coaster life can be, and is, she wanted safety and security, and if you were to characterize her entire life up to the end, you’d say scared and submissive, and I’ve never shared this with anyone except Sonja, something between sister and brother, I was holed up in their retirement condo, a spare room in the back, my home for four months after I had left Claire and Los Angeles. I got a glimpse of her misery, how she was isolated and alone, that Pops true to form was not a comfort, empathetic or understanding. And months later, after I found the bookstore job and moved out, she invites me over for a Sunday morning breakfast and 49er football. And I’m convinced it was a plan of hers, to be sure I was there, she figured Pops would freak, and he did, I was in the living room fiddling with the VCR, wanting to tape the game, and Pops is in the kitchen making another pot of coffee, something he always did on Sundays, up first, then Mother would come in behind and cook breakfast, and it was nearly game time, and Mother wasn’t up, in one quiet moment at the very end, suffering from congestive heart failure, diabetes and depression, pretty much house-bound and in despair, she marshaled up the courage she had rarely found in life, Pops already asleep after his martinis, and she drank them down, a cocktail of prescriptions she had for all her ailments, and she died in her sleep…. and he never fucking noticed. They rarely touched or cuddled, and he got up not seeing that she had wet the bed, that she wasn’t breathing, never looking at her, stone-cold, dead, and when I heard him yell, “Martha! Martha!,” it’s like I knew, “Call 911!,” and I did, and they were there in a flash, and Pops couldn’t watch, into the kitchen he goes. And the paramedics did their thing, presto-pronto, and I could not avert my eyes, groaned when in their haste, moving her from the bed to the floor, her head slammed hard on the rug, and it was in that moment it became clear, she was gone, and a distance formed, I watched with fascinated disinterest as they worked to revive her, all of the procedures we’ve seen a gazillion times on the Tube, and as they carted her out, strapped onto the gurney, intubated, a quick question comes from one of the paramedics, asking about any medications she takes, and I show him where they are, and he scooped them all into a bag, and they were off. Pops was in his own world in the kitchen, avoiding the truth, hoping against hope. We followed the ambulance to the emergency room, and it’s there I realized how much she loved him, how much she understood, how he never showed weakness, never showed vulnerability, and she knew he wouldn’t take this in the way the rest of us would expect, the rock, the “man” of the house. He sat in the corner, head in hands, and then he looks at me, wants me to reassure him, says it’s a good sign it’s taking so long, and I agree with him, understanding he’s lost now, wondering how he’s going to take the news. And finally the ER Doc comes in, delivers the news, and honestly, I’ve never seen the Old Man cry, nary a tear, and tears well up, and he asks if we can see her, and the doctor says she’s still on the gurney, still intubated, it won’t be pretty is what he’s saying, and Pops goes for it anyway, I follow him, and we get in there and I don’t know, can’t explain the how and why of my aloofness, lack of emotion, as if she wasn’t my mother, not the one who raised me, hoped for the best and loved and cared for me, someone else maybe, that frail and feeble frame, in that nightgown she called frumpy, so self-deprecating and beaten down, and the clipped tube’s still taped to her mouth, and Pops doesn’t linger, he doesn’t lean down to kiss her, doesn’t hold her hand and take time, he simply touches her cheek with the back side of his hand and says, “I’m sorry,” and leaves, in his own world, as if I’m not there, and I pause, and it’s like okay, time to wail, to cry out, but I get pissed, what the fuck was that? “I’m sorry”? Sorry for all the bullshit? For all the insensitivity, the ugliness, the condemning and cruel brutishness? Right to the end, what the fuck?
I pulled up a chair and sat in silence with her. Held her hand. Lingered. A nurse came in thinking we were gone, and she excused herself. I got up, stunned, zombie-like, not wanting to leave, realizing this was it, a last moment, took pains to put the chair back exactly where it was, in the corner, out of place it seemed, a chair in ER?, making note what was in the room, my mother, alone, a tube sticking out of her mouth, dwarfed by the monitors and machinery of “preserving life,” and I went back to her, Martha Frances Kinney, stood there a while longer, then reached out, cupped her chin, cheek and jaw, leaned down, kissed her forehead, and left….
He wasn’t in the waiting room, so I headed for the parking lot, and I could see he was in the car, and as I approached I could see he was crying, and I hung back, waited, let him gather himself, then got in and drove him home. We never said a word.
~~~
Changes. Endings. Beginnings. The flux and flow. So much to work on and overcome, so much to absorb and take in, and finally I get it, I really do. It’s not any one person, any particular experience or moment, they’re all linked…. At some point you realize there’s nothing else worth doing, worth saying if it isn’t a way to bridge the gap, to eliminate the barriers, one to another, to find a way to express your love, to the one closest to you, to your paramour, partner or spouse, to those you work with and rely upon, to those you don’t know and meet for the first time, everyone who crosses your path, to take pains, to make sure they know, to give it off. ♥
Okay, just want to say, W. T. F. I’ve not been here in a while, derailed over and over. So much to do, so little time. Portland. And then there’s Cheryl Strayed. Jesus Fucking Christ. Had dipped into a few things of hers online, and now I’m immersed. This woman is the bodhisattva of our time—bodhi-fucking-sattva! So far advanced and enlightened it’s off the charts humbling, it’s near scary. She gives it off: compassion, empathy and love. Full-on!
Camille and I sat in the front row of her event at Warwick’s Books where she read from her book Wild, and from her newly released Tiny Beautiful Things, collected selections of Sugar’s most powerful advice columns. Sugar/Strayed is like no other writer I’ve encountered. She’s funny, luminous, knowing and emergent. Is that not crazy, emergent?, like there’s more to come. A 40-something bodhisattva who, I expect, will be a long-time fixture on the NY Times bestseller list, and it won’t come from marketing and promotion, or author tours. It will come from reading her and it will be word of mouth. There’s something in her language, in her “literary mode of being,” in the Strayed “word.” She’s already seen as a savior and saint on Tumblr. Anyone who reads her will be blown away and unable to resist her brilliance and charm. Everything else becomes secondary when you engage her, when you begin to see how open and honest she is, how she has come to eliminate the barrier between the word and the thing, the description and the described. She’s so down to earth, so simple and clear on how to live and love that you’re shaken to the depths. She’s the goddamn deliverer; she shows the way. If you read no one else, if time is short for you, if you’ve only got time for one more book, if you don’t read Tiny Beautiful Things you will have missed your chance at glimpsing what it means to be at ease, to know, to understand. Bliss. Here and now, no more putting it off. I am upside down. For the first time in my life there’s clarity, unencumbered, unambiguous, pure unadulterated clarity. She’s the quintessential mirror.
~~~
Saturday, August 4th, will mark twelve years since I followed love to the most conservative city in California. Twelve flippin’ years. And now, a different love compels me to head back north, to Portland, to one of the most liberal cities on the West Coast. Camille found a two-bedroom flat in the Pearl, put down a deposit, near Jamison Square, a ten-minute stroll from Powell’s Books. Fortune smiled. And man-o-man it’s crazy-making time. I can’t imagine doing what she’s doing, her medical school transition schedule and academic calendar, mind-boggling. A wonder she is, fucking brilliant, and I’m starting to get all melancholy, yet marveling at it, memories, so many memories. We’re moving. Here we go. Jesus H!
We booked her for three weeks on an extended contract at the Ace Hotel. She’ll be up there beginning mid-month and her retreat starts last weekend in August, no family, no loved ones, no partners. A friggin' retreat for chrissakes, first-years bonding. For our last Friday night together in San Diego we got tickets to see Diana Krall at the Pala Casino. August 10th. Sipping, savoring, a little black jack and some loving jazz.
Moving? You figure you’ll have time, get it all right, get settled before the craziness begins, and as the months fly by you just never do, never get it done quite the way you want. Sometime in September, there’ll be this moment, we’ll realize where we are and where we’ve come. She’ll be immersed, a med-student, full-throttle, and we’ll have our love nest in the Pearl, and god damn it, another beginning, so many beginnings….
~~~
Gave notice on the 20th. It wasn’t a surprise, they knew. Six weeks. We got through the transition, our new Webmaster’s on board and taking control. All of my customer service work is going to get spread out among a few others, different departments. They won’t advertise and replace the Felicitous Factotum. That job ends with my departure, Friday, August 31st. Given the time crunch, we agreed Camille would focus on her orientation/transition preliminaries, that I’d take care of the move. Gonna try and go andante, make it a joy, make it pleasurable. Maybe make a batch of margaritas every day, sip, load a box, sip, load a box. Ha ha ha. Got the PODS working, “a smarter way to move.”
I hadn’t expected to feel so devastated, so emotionally overwrought and unstable about this ending/beginning. But there it is. So easy to be glib about adventure, about change, above moving on, and I can’t speak for Camille, she’s unique in so many ways, confronting loss and death early in life, her strength and compassion born of it. She could have grown bitter and closed off, but she found intimacy and support wherever she landed because her past grief opened her up, made her immediately appreciative and attentive and trusting. And that just gets to me, the trusting part, the willingness to engage. I’m not so trusting, more aloof and self-protective. It’s as if she thrives on being unsettled, as I’ve said so often, always leaning in, adventure intrigues, and she’s influenced me in this, but my first tendency is to hunker down, not to lean in but turn away, to resist, to cling to the comfort of habit and routine, the familiar. So much to think about and ponder.
This could be the last move I ever make, the last time I pick up and move on to a “new” situation, a new life. And Portland couldn’t be more perfect. The Cancer Center there is top-notch and the transition should be smooth. Remission and survival the hope, the desire, but I’ve got to be real, no room for self-delusion and fear, this now I see, the Strayed way.
Of course you know I googled euthanasia, Oregon the “right to die” state. And why wouldn’t we want to control and create our end? There’s an art to living and there’s an art to dying. And I happened on this, an HBO How to Die in Oregon documentary, and I got to thinking about Pops, how his end was so tortured and tragic, that those closest to him, my sister and her two sons, had to navigate the crazed system of keeping him alive at all costs. In a more enlightened era, with more humane and compassionate laws, laws that respect the liberty and freedom of the individual, he’d have chosen his end, wouldn’t have gone through those final few months. And check it, Sonja going through his things, there they were, on his bookshelves, more than one book on Dying With Dignity, books he bought after Mother died. He was on to it. And so am I.
Mother? Last Saturday, Michelle Dean in her Rumpus piece on envy, linked to D. T. Max’s New Yorker piece on David Foster Wallace, The Unfinished, and in it I learned that Wallace had undergone electroconvulsive shock therapy more than once in his life, and it made me think of Mother, she had received the “treatment” too, early on, after she and Pops were married, and she was never the same, her own words. Someone always fearful, always looking for the horizontal line, she didn’t want the ups and downs, didn’t want the roller-coaster life can be, and is, she wanted safety and security, and if you were to characterize her entire life up to the end, you’d say scared and submissive, and I’ve never shared this with anyone except Sonja, something between sister and brother, I was holed up in their retirement condo, a spare room in the back, my home for four months after I had left Claire and Los Angeles. I got a glimpse of her misery, how she was isolated and alone, that Pops true to form was not a comfort, empathetic or understanding. And months later, after I found the bookstore job and moved out, she invites me over for a Sunday morning breakfast and 49er football. And I’m convinced it was a plan of hers, to be sure I was there, she figured Pops would freak, and he did, I was in the living room fiddling with the VCR, wanting to tape the game, and Pops is in the kitchen making another pot of coffee, something he always did on Sundays, up first, then Mother would come in behind and cook breakfast, and it was nearly game time, and Mother wasn’t up, in one quiet moment at the very end, suffering from congestive heart failure, diabetes and depression, pretty much house-bound and in despair, she marshaled up the courage she had rarely found in life, Pops already asleep after his martinis, and she drank them down, a cocktail of prescriptions she had for all her ailments, and she died in her sleep…. and he never fucking noticed. They rarely touched or cuddled, and he got up not seeing that she had wet the bed, that she wasn’t breathing, never looking at her, stone-cold, dead, and when I heard him yell, “Martha! Martha!,” it’s like I knew, “Call 911!,” and I did, and they were there in a flash, and Pops couldn’t watch, into the kitchen he goes. And the paramedics did their thing, presto-pronto, and I could not avert my eyes, groaned when in their haste, moving her from the bed to the floor, her head slammed hard on the rug, and it was in that moment it became clear, she was gone, and a distance formed, I watched with fascinated disinterest as they worked to revive her, all of the procedures we’ve seen a gazillion times on the Tube, and as they carted her out, strapped onto the gurney, intubated, a quick question comes from one of the paramedics, asking about any medications she takes, and I show him where they are, and he scooped them all into a bag, and they were off. Pops was in his own world in the kitchen, avoiding the truth, hoping against hope. We followed the ambulance to the emergency room, and it’s there I realized how much she loved him, how much she understood, how he never showed weakness, never showed vulnerability, and she knew he wouldn’t take this in the way the rest of us would expect, the rock, the “man” of the house. He sat in the corner, head in hands, and then he looks at me, wants me to reassure him, says it’s a good sign it’s taking so long, and I agree with him, understanding he’s lost now, wondering how he’s going to take the news. And finally the ER Doc comes in, delivers the news, and honestly, I’ve never seen the Old Man cry, nary a tear, and tears well up, and he asks if we can see her, and the doctor says she’s still on the gurney, still intubated, it won’t be pretty is what he’s saying, and Pops goes for it anyway, I follow him, and we get in there and I don’t know, can’t explain the how and why of my aloofness, lack of emotion, as if she wasn’t my mother, not the one who raised me, hoped for the best and loved and cared for me, someone else maybe, that frail and feeble frame, in that nightgown she called frumpy, so self-deprecating and beaten down, and the clipped tube’s still taped to her mouth, and Pops doesn’t linger, he doesn’t lean down to kiss her, doesn’t hold her hand and take time, he simply touches her cheek with the back side of his hand and says, “I’m sorry,” and leaves, in his own world, as if I’m not there, and I pause, and it’s like okay, time to wail, to cry out, but I get pissed, what the fuck was that? “I’m sorry”? Sorry for all the bullshit? For all the insensitivity, the ugliness, the condemning and cruel brutishness? Right to the end, what the fuck?
I pulled up a chair and sat in silence with her. Held her hand. Lingered. A nurse came in thinking we were gone, and she excused herself. I got up, stunned, zombie-like, not wanting to leave, realizing this was it, a last moment, took pains to put the chair back exactly where it was, in the corner, out of place it seemed, a chair in ER?, making note what was in the room, my mother, alone, a tube sticking out of her mouth, dwarfed by the monitors and machinery of “preserving life,” and I went back to her, Martha Frances Kinney, stood there a while longer, then reached out, cupped her chin, cheek and jaw, leaned down, kissed her forehead, and left….
He wasn’t in the waiting room, so I headed for the parking lot, and I could see he was in the car, and as I approached I could see he was crying, and I hung back, waited, let him gather himself, then got in and drove him home. We never said a word.
~~~
Changes. Endings. Beginnings. The flux and flow. So much to work on and overcome, so much to absorb and take in, and finally I get it, I really do. It’s not any one person, any particular experience or moment, they’re all linked…. At some point you realize there’s nothing else worth doing, worth saying if it isn’t a way to bridge the gap, to eliminate the barriers, one to another, to find a way to express your love, to the one closest to you, to your paramour, partner or spouse, to those you work with and rely upon, to those you don’t know and meet for the first time, everyone who crosses your path, to take pains, to make sure they know, to give it off. ♥
Friday, August 3, 2012 at 6:28AM 
Reader Comments (6)
Thanks for the Strayed review. I was so absorbed in Wild, I must read more of her writing. Which story first? Which to read, which to listen to...
The rest of your story is mind blowing. I can not tell what is real and what is fiction. Are you leaving for Portland or is this just part of the story?
Your recount of your mother's death was stirring, real, eye-opening but not surprising, knowing you. When you write about what is real, what is on the edge of your real world, I am amazed and impressed. I got away from reading your blog for awhile but guess if I am to stay in touch with your thinking (and maybe plans) I shall keep reading.
Me and MKB, two peas in a pod, yet, we two peas separate and distinct. I like to think I've helped him. My story's nearing an end, two more posts by all accounts, but MKB's, well, he's all up in it, endeavoring to find his own words. Much more to come from him. ♥
Your words continue to challenge and inspire, to affirm and prod to question. This description of your mother's death sent me back to walking into Sam's hospital room....almost an out of body experience even now, yet so real. Continue on, my friend...I will anxiously await your next endeavor....
ROSEMARY: ♥
Powerful and poignant. Deep and somewhat depressing but also enlightening. You've got it, Marko, you've got it.
Sometimes Marko (MKB) gets it. Thanks Rozzi.