Death in Blue

The keening in the ER waiting room came from a hunched over man in a leather seat. He was wearing a black sweatshirt with a hood over his head, and black oversized sunglasses.  He rocked his small frame back and forth over his lap, hugging himself, unable to control the spasms of lament that alternately groaned and sobbed.  I had just been removed to this room from a hallway seat inside the ER by an attendant shuttling friends and family outside the inner sanctum because a "trauma" was coming in. I had been waiting with a friend who was experiencing chest tightness and back pain and as he lay on a gurney near the ambulance entrance, I hobbled out to the waiting room on crutches. 

I was feeling much better on that night as I watched this poor man hunched over a pain I recognized as the uncontrollable loss of love and thought perhaps this was associated with the incoming "trauma" I had been shuttled away from.  It is rare to see a man roar with sadness, to lose control of his body, his hands and his heart as he was.  His clothing denied a fondness for convention and something made me wonder if he was related to a loved one, the trauma victim.  At some point, an 8 year old school girl, latina by her looks and dressed in a pleated skirt and white polo shirt, brought him a handful of tissues, for which he thanked her in an effeminate voice.  He was, however, unconsolable.

I made my way into the bathroom and when I returned, the lacrimose man was now seated with another man who was just listening to him cry, letting him hold onto his wrist as if by offering this lanyard to the man's sail of sadness he could keep him from floating away.  They were trying to call someone on a phone, but didn't know the numbers. The distraught man did not know what to do and his companion tried to make a joke at some point and was called a "bitch" lovingly by the man he was trying to comfort.  This fond nomenclature, their odd manner and dress, the location near West Hollywood all gelled into a portrait of two gay men who had lost a compadre on a late Thursday night.  The calm one didn't say much, just let his friend sob and by his mere presence provided a cleat upon which the man could wind the tormented rope of tears. At one point they were going to leave, but somehow, thought better and sat down again.

I was allowed back into the ER hallway and joined my friend as we rolled down a long hallway to get him a Catscan of his heart.  He reported that the trauma victim had been a "huge black man" with blood pouring out of his chest. An EMT had called out to the charge nurse that a bullet had hit the man's right ventricle and my friend watched as they started performing surgery on the vitcim even as they pushed his gurney into an available room.  By the time I had been allowed to re-enter, the curtains were drawn and all one could see was a bustling of clogged and sneakered feet.  A flash of blood red sheet under a long brown arm on the table illustrated a moment of life in time. A snapshot of an end. Or a new beginning.

At some point during my friend's catscan I heard a screaming roar from down the hallway. As if a megaphone had been offered the waiting room mourner, the sound was louder than I had heard when only feet away from him.  The screeching sadness did not let up for a couple of minutes and then was over.  The hall was quiet again and my friend exited the X-ray room was a look of recognition on his face.

We later learned that the victim had died and knew that the friend had taken the news at high pitch.  A gurney with a dark blue plastic rectangular cover was wheeled into the victim's room, an answer to my unspoken question: how were they going to remove the body without calling attention?  My friend and I settled down to wait for the attending to decide what his next step would be to address the chest pain. We weren't worried but realized that hospitals take any sign of heart attack seriously and would not release him until tests proved him safe for travel. His own heart was pumping well, if under a bit of high pressure, as we watched the man with the shattered ventricle get wheeled out under his blue butter dish dome.  

Death rolled down the hallway, dodging nurses, doctors, administrators, patients, friends, family, environmental attendants and aides.  He rose taller than many heads he passed and his silent wheels drew little attention.  Surely the hospital staff recognized the passing emblem, but did no one else suspect that the passing body had indeed "passed."? Of all who noted the gurney only one janitor registered a reaction as she rolled in her mop and bucket. Her face looked a bit anguished as she entered the room to do her task and behind the curtain I could see nurses gathering up the bloody sheets and pick up blue paper, gauze and instrument packaging from the floor while she took a deep breath before mopping.

The last moments of this  man's presence involved many people from the man who clearly loved and mourned him to the EMT's who tried to save his life, to the small Latina woman who would clean up after his leaky life. The hall was somber for the few moments his cadaverous carriage made its way to cold storage and then it returned to the living, the breathing and those of us who straddled health with various degrees of success. My friend's heart turned out to be sound, my hip healed and the man in mourning has taken his grief with him into his own dark night.  They say we are all dying, but I say death is not for the living. It is for those who pass without rippling the sea around us, for whom no one mourns, or notes with a grimace our blood upon the floor.

Decree

1.20.08

Searching under my desk this morning, I came across a box of pink typewriter paper my sister had sent when packing up my mother’s house shortly after her death. For some reason, she had decided it was worthy of adding to the shipment of things I had requested from our split of the inherited items. Family linens, a hand painted hutch, an upholstered chair and this box. Which I had ignored for years until yesterday when seeking some lost attachment for my phone. My daughter was with me on a sunny Sunday and I thought she would enjoy the contents for her many art projects. She delighted in the gift and then I discovered an old envelope inside marked “Divorce.” I lifted out the yellow pack so she could sort through the rosy sheets and unfolded first a legal document in Spanish and then its translation in English.

My parents had divorced when I was 6 and I had once before seen a document amongst my mother’s files. I had no memory of my parents together but had cobbled together a story based on impressions from friends and what I knew of these 2 people as I grew up. Neither had been able to speak about each other much nor could they be in the same room, so I had learned to love them on their own terms and turf. My father had married the nanny he had impregnated while my mother was traveling with my sister and me one summer and my mother supposedly had been having an affair with the nanny’s father but gone to a doctor in NJ to end her own pregnancy.

Divorce in the early 60’s was not what it is today and I had imagined that she, upon discovery of my father’s infidelity, had instigated the proceedings. She never spoke to my sister and me about what had happened so we floated back and forth between the 2 worlds of very different people. When my father died, my mother called herself a “widow” on a graduate school application I had filled out and my heart went out to her. Somewhere inside I knew she had never gotten over him, but it had been over 20 years and 2 of his marriages since their separation when he died and I was surprised at her reaction. She died 4 years later and when my sister and I put things away in her home to prepare for summer renters, we largely ignored any paperwork not directly related to her estate.

I have now been married 18 years, with 2 children, and understand the pains of marriage in a way I couldn’t have growing up with a single mother who never again lived with a man. Divorce now claims half of all marriages and my kids seem to treat it like another lifestyle choice, with their friends shuttling about between parents and their new partners and families like hockey pucks. Parents are in constant contact via phone, email, txt messaging and chats about their children’s schedules and often share vacations and family outings along with the requisite school performances, sports events, medical visits and even therapy sessions. But for me growing up, divorce looked like the pained face my mother wore whenever she had to speak to my father by phone. It looked like my father’s slight remove at the doorstep when he came to pick us up for visits. Their separate lives were as different as the décor in their two homes and the distance between them miles greater than the 20 blocks expanse from house to house. The only time I remember them in the same space for longer than a minute was at my college graduation and they could barely look at each other.

My mother had an amazing wit and a way with words that could just as easily cut like a scalpel as delight with humorous stories and intellectual parrying. I later learned that, with only a high school degree, she had always felt somewhat inferior to my PhD. bearing father, and was uncomfortable with his peer group. I could believe a friend of hers who said she would often step on his ego in order to boost her own. But I had also understood that my father had in his own passive aggressive way left photos of him and the nanny, naked in their bed, for my mother to find on her bedside table. So my understanding of her asking him to leave due to his infidelity made sense.

Finding this document was therefor no surprise. What took me in and turned me around was learning that it was not my mother filing for divorce from her philandering husband but he from her for “mental cruelty.” Further delving into the paper work revealed also the divorce decree from her first husband. Again, to my surprise, I learned that he had filed against her for the same reason: “Mental cruelty during their married life.”

As a teenager, I had learned by mistake, from my father, that she had been married before him and that there had been money troubles. I could imagine that this marriage had ended because she wanted more than her local boyfriend from Wyoming could offer in their new haunt in NYC. I could see her larger than life spirit falling in love with this new city after a life in the mid-west and how she might have wished for something more lavish. I had heard as well that my mother had fallen for my farther partly because of his wealth and social status, and then been disappointed that he didn't have as much interest in either as she had. So, twice her needs had been un-met and perhaps she had twice reacted in less than gracious ways. But "cruel?" I bristled at the word. It seemed too harsh, hopefully just a legal term from the pre "no-fault" days. Yet, a small part of this word resonated and I did not want to remember, that yes, I too had received her caustic looks and acid words. I had felt just as cut down by her as older friends had attested to. I did not want to admit that, despite their own failings, my father and her first husband may have had good reason to leave my mother.

By now, tears were streaming down my face and my daughter had looked up and matter of factly stated, “well, I guess I’ll be going now.” She left me alone in my office with 2 pieces of thin parchment paper, the carefully guarded documents of love twide gone sour nearly 50 years ago. I thought of my father, a man I held dear in my heart for his gentle spirit and his refusal to speak meanly of anyone and how I had thought he fell prey to the young nanny for the adoring look in her eyes. I wondered how my mother could not have delighted in his love, but then remembered too that he was not perfect and that I had never been married to him. I imagined too, a high school love, idyllic with dreams of the big city and how small her first husband might have felt next to her beauty and huge appetite. Yes, it made as much sense that they would have left her for their real or imagined unmet needs as she would have left them for hers.

So, what does it mean now, that my mother was left, not the leave-er? Did I learn that men leave for good reason, rather than are asked to go when they fail? My own marriage has suffered perhaps from unspoken scripts being re-enacted by unwitting players. Since year one and his extra-marital affair, I have had dreams of my own husband leaving and now it turns out I may be the one to go after my own straying 17 years later. When someone looks outside a marriage, there is usually some distress they are trying to shake off. Whether my mother’s “cruelty” caused my father’s affair or vice versa or her dissatisfaction with the small town boy she had first married had been acted out with unkindness seems less relevant. I’m not sure it matters who leaves or why. What lingers is the legacy left behind for 2 daughters, one still single at mid-life, who never found ease in their own couplings and who perhaps learned to push away the ones they have loved before ever feeling the life-long pain of being left themselves.

Fences

12.28.07

FENCES

White picket
Barbed wire
Stone hewn
Chain link
Electric

They protect our space, delineate our domain,

Keep demons out, and animals in.

We build them by hand, stake by stake,

Or unfurl wire lace carpets to lie sideways to the sky,

Dig post holes and sink tar treated beams.

They brace against the wind,

Trap papers and tossed balls,

While birds sit astride and a small cat passes through.

Fences wind around a house, a landscape, a country, a prison

Some insurmountable, others rickety and fallible,

But each one has a gate, a latch,

Inviting entry or exit.

And we pass, or not, as the full moon rises.

Last Night in San Miguel

12/8/07

Another visit to San Miguel reveals and revels in the cool "winter" air and clear sky of December as I trot up and down the hill to CASA for more workshop organizing and dream questing. This short visit wraps up with the sobering news that SM has its dark side. Political cover-ups of local women killed and American franchises taking over.

But the smell of cypress trees, the sunshine and the walking pace of life continue to appeal as church bells ring, dogs bark, firecrackers break the dawn and open land beckons.

Double Wide

11.25.07

We wend through the Kern Valley on a post Thanksgiving quest for nature, get serenaded by a caroling cuadro at Uncle Leo’s pizza parlor and end up in a double wide trailer on the shore of Lake Isabella. The full moon is incredible and shines on the water like a vanilla ribbon and promises a peaceful night. Yet inside I am surrounded by naugahyde, formica, and wood veneer paneling, a hodge podge of 50’s Bauhaus, 70’s Hippie, 80’s mafia gold flecked mirrors and some god-awful pseudo Victorian lace-y lamps. A huge wide screen TV dominates one room and the kids are thrilled. A cabinet displays over a hundred videos and we argue about which to choose, Hollywood Crap or Old fashioned Crap. I feel like a stranger in this land even as the kids pull me in to their world of Americana.

A local camping store is a Boy Scout’s dream with camo gear, regulation issue army coats and “coon skin” caps which the kids don with flair. They meld in anywhere and leave me wandering in this landscape, one foot in and one foot out.

On the drive up, the rolling hills look like borderless landscapes, the flats could be Mexico, Zaire or New Zealand. These places I have imagined moving to. I have been in LA for 15 years and yet still don’t feel at home. It’s the second longest amount of time I’ve lived in one place since growing up in New York for 18 years. I have friends, my family, community and work here in Los Angeles, yet haven’t found the soil to root in and wonder if it’s me or the city. I think I feel this sense of belonging when I’m in certain places that evoke memories of other times in life when I was young and with my father. I felt wanted and engaged with. I felt visible. Perhaps it's this feeling more than the place that I seek when traveling. Will I ever find it? They say wherever you go there you are. Is it it whoever you're with that defines your sense of belonging?

This trailer is huge. The portion sizes at the local steak house are huge (40 ounce steak, a desert the size of ½ quart of ice cream and when I ask them to split it in to they drown each half in even more whipped cream.) The TV is huge and Noah’s appetite for adventure, jet skis, ATV’s, extreme sports, just as large. I feel small in comparison to all these American appetites. And have shrunk by 10 pounds these last 2 years.

I look around the restaurant at all the happy families and couples in their flannel and pasty faces and lacquered hair. It all feels so normal and yet I know that behind every face is a story and I cannot presume to know anyone’s. The kids have taken over my social life and I delight in their growing worlds and the tales they have to tell. These are two stories I will know well, as well as my own, until they choose to separate and create their own worlds apart from me. I help shape them and in turn am re-invented by the experience of mothering them.

Hanah’s smile is huge. Noah’s hug as well. I wrap my arms around them many times a day and wonder when it will end, their need to connect physically like this. We see sailboats in the lake and I describe what a small one looks like inside, remembering my childhood summers. The cabins were tiny, cozy and just the right size for children to feel large in. Everything had its place and nothing superfluous found its way inside. We had no TV or I-pod or cell phones, just a nautical radio and books, games for entertainment. And the ocean. This floating world was small, but filled with joy and smiles and warmth and laughter and meant everything to me. Home is where the heart is and mine danced around the world, following a 56 foot ketch and the captain at its helm.

Sommeil

11.7.07

She sleeps with leopard ear muffs on and often a NY Yankees cap as well. Wrapped around a scruffy stuffed mutt, she holds on to her dreams and wakes heavily, dragging her eyelids open only after my prodding and coo-ing in her ear. This girl lives more fiercely in her moments than anyone I know. Whether telling stories at the dinner table while her food grows cold, then guzzling her milk so she can catch up with the rest of us, or reading the latest Harry Potter so intently, she can be lost on the toilet for 1/2 an hour. I love that about childhood and mourn my own lack of complete concentration as I try to balance so many demands in life. Even sleep, that surest sanctuary is divided by dreams and other worlds than my own.

We speak of dreams, places in our minds where the world is different from our reality. In sleep those places can be marvelous or treacherous, but in waking our "day" dreams are usually of the wishful sort. During the night we battle demons and re-visit old haunts. When distracted at work or on our commute, however, it is the sandy beaches or the bachelor next door that we think about, not the torments of life. Are the dark hours our battle and the light our playgrounds?

When we wake panting from the chase or aroused from a seduction, our bodily reactions are the same as if the action were real. Our heart races, we may scream or feel the after maths of an orgasm. So, how is this cerebral and corporal experience not as real as if we had been chased by our psycho neighbor or royally screwed by the pool boy? What then is real if we think and feel the same way regardless of conscious state?

What is reality when an group of people can experience an event in as many different ways as there are pairs of eyes watching? My daughter the other night asked what the word "exit" means and we got into a discussion of whether or not her bed railing really was wood when on a "subatomic level it's all just bowling balls whirring around" as she put it. On the one hand we perceive it as solid matter, but under an electron microscope it is indeed just a massing of atoms careening against each other. Is one more correct than the other?

George Bush perceived 9-11 as an assault against our sovereign soil and a Jihadist saw it as self defence against our evil empire. A wife percieves that her husband "never" puts down the toilet lid. He's convinced he does. One person thinks the word "never" means 0% of the time ("I never drink cider.") and another thinks it means %100 of the time. ("I always dont' drink cider.") Who is right?

Perception is our reality, then, at any given moment. A person who was once beloved to us and thus beautiful can look like an ugly ogre when they break our hearts. Same person, different point of view. When worldviews collide it is because we refuse to see anything from any other perspective than our own and this inflexibility is the source of all conflict from interpersonal to cross cultural.

A child sees the world in black and white, and sleeping in ear muffs makes complete sense even when it's summer. Even though Hanah dresses like a "ragamuffin," in her eyes, she has "Hanah style" and flaunts it. We think we live in teh land of freedom and Ossama Bin Laden thinks we're slaves to our corrupt corporate and god-less culture. Who's right?

Today, my 9 and 11 year old turned a corner and begain cooperating with each other without my input. Are they seeing each other's point of view? Or are they choosing paths of least resistance? Either way, they are learning to navigate their worlds, flexing their perception muscles. Whatever they are doing, it must be working, for they sleep without remorse and wake with open hearts.

Botanical Gardens

10.07.07

A gorgeous day for walking through the botanical gardens after a taxi ride up to one of the American enclaved colonias high above the city. All the homes are new and it feels like Malibu, so much cleaner and pristine than the rest of the city. They all seem to be for sale however, and thus the street lifeless.

Gorgeous plants and cactii fill this green palate of a garden and for the first time an airplane, albeit 4 passanger, breaks this silent sky. On the walk down the heal, I pass a group of young men standing around on a sunday morning. In the centro, yet another festival features cross bearing serious faced men and laughing, gyrating dancers in fur loin clothes and skeleton make up. I love the contrast of christianity and indigenous beliefs. The streets are lined with Mexicans and then us oddball gringos with our cameras and questioning faces.

As my stay draws to a close I feel torn between the beauty of this town and the rift between this ex-pat community which drives so much of the commerce and the life of the local people. The pace of life, the sense of community is lovely but until I integrate with the locals I wonder how comfortable I could truly feel. Being in the street daily, walking through town to pick up food or whatever, mingling feels like growing up in Greenwich Village and having people to hang with has made the stay easy and home like. Tomorrow I will pitch my ideas to CASA in the hopes that they will ask me back to help train their counselors in this new skill Motivating Change. And then I reverse migrate back to the land of big.