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Hot Dog Carousel

10/7/2014

It's not called the wheel, it's called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved. – Don Draper, Mad Men

Cool Dog

The other day, M asked if I was waiting / hoping / believing I'd “finish” grieving Dad. Not at all, though I have noticed changes in the intensity and quality of grieving, as well as the amount of time and energy committed to it. And I admit, I was pretty sure I was “moving forward” if not moving on, and that the greater peace I was finding meant I had a better handle on dealing with death.

And then we had to put Ramses to sleep, and the grief is familiar and scary and sad and hard, and not at all like grieving Dad, and exactly like grieving Dad. The tears are coming from the same place, and the same brain and heart struggle in tandem to find understanding, perspective, and peace.

Hot Dogs

People even make and buy me meals. My sister came over and helped with my therapeutic housecleaning, something I would never have asked for without a really good reason. And a part of me doubted I had a really good reason – after all, Ramses and I had a toxic relationship that needed to end, and ultimately, needed to end in his death.

So uncomfortable though it may be, I'm deeply sad about Ramses's death. M suggests the language of “up again,” as in, “Sounds like grief over your father's death is up again for you because of Ramses.” When she said this, I immediately saw the image in my head of a hot dog carousel. “Up again” is what happens to each hot dog as it approaches the heat lamp once again. Each hot dog takes its turn with the light, returning again and again to the top position.

Thought the image is slightly nauseating (like the carousel hot dogs themselves) it is right on the nose for me. The same hot dogs are always present. They age as they continue to cook, getting more and more wrinkled, dry, and brown, but you know the truth: they never go away. They cool down and heat up, each one in its turn, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. And yes, some get taken away and others are added, but the rack always turns up the next one in line, calling your attention.

So Ramses's death calls me back to my dad's. I will always have both these figures on the grief carousel, along with my mother-in-law, the gerbil I stepped on, Aunt Gert and Uncle Fred, Paul and Dana, Dorothy and Ben, Happy Fun Ball, my professorial career, Ellen and Leland and my grandparents (known and unknown). Each one reminds me of another, and each one gets a turn in the light.

I've always felt discouraged by my apparent inability to get “past” an emotional issue that keeps coming up even after I thought I'd figured out how to handle it, what the appropriate wisdom of the situation was, what perspective it deserved, how it fit into my overall philosophy. Then the fucker would come back again, and I'd feel like I reset to zero. “Up again” means that all aspects of my experience are incorporated – taken into my body. Nothing truer.

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A Hole in My Heart

9/22/2014

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Ramses

He had beautiful eyes. He was intelligent and warm. He could be very good company, but he was easily upset and took an excessively long time to calm down. He didn't want me to have any friends over, and he hurt me several times.

All the bruises have healed, but I'm still crying nearly every day since deciding he had to go, and I miss him terribly. I'm rebuilding my life and self-confidence after spending months accepting his reality as my own and trying to fit my needs in the spaces left by his.

The differences between my dog and the abusive men I've loved are that he didn't have a choice, and they got to live. Ramses was a barker and a biter, and we lived in fear that he'd seriously hurt a stranger, and instead of feeling shame we'd feel the sting of legal action. Threatening and biting our visitors was bad enough, but when he charged two little kids at the dog park, we knew we couldn't keep him any more.

My friend Michelle pointed out that I was going through something akin to a romantic breakup. I had already made the connection (a joke, in my thinking) that I was living in an abusive relationship. Once we made the decision that Ramses had to leave our family, I wanted desperately for someone to come forward and save him. Michelle pointed out that when you break up with someone, you don't need to find his next girlfriend. Yes, I said, but the difference is that you can't put ex-boyfriends to sleep if they don't find someone else to take them. Unfortunately.

I found comfort in the fact that the people at PAWS, where we got him, decided that putting him to sleep was the best option. When my husband contacted them to return him, he filled out an online form that asked detailed questions about what we had tried with Ramses, and they asked follow-up questions about his medication. That helped seal it: Ramses, though medicated, never really calmed down enough to respond to be receptive to training, and nobody was prepared to take a risk on him.

Living with Ramses, I got lost in a destructive version of reality. Thinking of him as an abuser brought back my life before marriage. I lived with two abusive boyfriends in my 20s. Before Ramses, I would have said only one was, yet the more I found myself saying, "Ramses won't let me have any friends over," the more I remembered the pain of living with someone who hated my happiness, my relief, my independence. I would go out with friends to get a break from oppressively long days when my boyfriend and I worked, lived, and played together, and when I got home, he'd pick a fight so I could see how impossible escape was. It seemed better at the time to simply stop going out, since others offered a perspective completely at odds with the reality I was literally inhabiting.

The other, earlier boyfriend gave me a much clearer picture of what abuse was and how even a smart, intelligent, independent feminist could allow a man to redefine her life and take away her sense of self. He hurt me and I explained it away. To myself; of course I didn't tell anyone else about him. He didn't actually STRIKE me, he just pushed me INTEND to hurt my arm, he was just stopping me from leaving the room in the middle of an argument. The pain the following day was an insistent signal that something had to give, and even so it took me a long time before I knew that I had to give myself a way out.

In all these cases, it really wasn't me, it was him. We say the opposite in breakups to reassure another person that they'll be able to find someone who can take their idiosyncrasies in a way we cannot, but the truth is that romantic love, like dog ownership, is voluntary. We can give our love to whomever we please, and if we give it to someone who doesn't accept our behaviors, our quirks, our appearance, our need to feel safe both at home and away, then we need to get away from that person. It isn't me, it's you. It's you who I need to get away from in order to be me, to reclaim my me-ness, in order to take care of myself first and the rest of world later.

I loved Ramses, and I apologized for his behavior, and I did everything I could to make it better, and I couldn't make him change. I grieve the loss of a dog so young and physically healthy, but the truth is, he was lost before he came to us. Me and my family gave him a good life as long as possible, and now, I can rededicate myself to living the best life I can.

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Sad Enough

6/3/2014

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"We are still sad, but all the food is gone now," my sister Amanda wrote in an email to a friend. "Were you open to bringing me more?"

The food had run out. The casseroles that our different households packed for lunch and compared at school, the delicious and thoughtfully and lovingly prepared meals that I could not possibly have created, much less imagined I wanted, and sometimes could barely put on a plate and heat fully. The meals your friends bring to you when your father dies and they want to do something to help but they can't keep the old man alive and they aren't prepared to clean your toilets.

Not that I resented the unclean toilets. I had no resentment, only gratitude.

The only time I felt resentment was when my daughter wanted to watch TV on the couch, and I wanted to watch a different show, and her show was boring to me, and it was my father who had died. She resented me because I had been on the couch ALL DAY ALREADY and I wasn't the only person who lived in the house.

And she was grieving too.

That was more than a year ago. It seems so distant, until I write these words, and then I'm sad again. A lot of the time, though, I'm not sad. And when I'm not sad, it's hard to get in the mood to write this blog.

Getting in the mood to blog isn't necessarily required. The posts I write that balance delicately between my personal outlook on the bitter humor around my father's hospice and death and a desire to be sensitive to others have come out of careful writing, not just tears. Simple grief is not in and of itself art, and turning grief into art for a purpose seems both sane and manipulative.

Yet "to manipulate" can mean many things, not all of them tainted: to handle, manage, or use, especially with skill, in some process of treatment or performance; to adapt of change to suit one's purpose or advantage. Amanda and I, having spent the better part of two years living with dying, were depleted in the days, weeks, and months after Dad actually, finally, irreversibly died. We weren't the only sad ones, but we were the ones carpooling each others' kids to their shared school, calling each other to ask for information or a shoulder to cry on or other support. We were the ones making each other laugh at things nobody else would find as funny, or so we thought, and there are only so many people you can make death jokes in front of.

You don't always need to have a need to ask for help. Taking advantage (again, in the positive sense of the phrase) of Dad's death to communicate really clearly about my needs taught me that sometimes you can just say, "Help." Sometimes you can call up a friend and ask if they will cook for you.

If you ever want to cook for me, I am not very sad anymore, at least not all the time, but I would enjoy it very much.

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Happy Birthday, Dad

4/3/2014

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Sunday was my father's 72nd birthday.

If he were still alive, I would probably have bought him candy: Goldberg's [sic] Peanut Chews or JuJuBes for nostalgia, dark chocolate for something that actually tastes good.

Can you say "celebrate" when mourning the departed? If so, we celebrated with lunch at Skillet Diner in New Ballard, which turned out to be one of the loudest choices possible. Had Dad been alive, he might have had trouble hearing the conversation, and he would have played the Thought-You-Saider's game; if it had been post-stroke, we would have said, "Say 'Say it again, please,'" instead of groaning.

The food was delicious. (You can add a fried chicken thigh to just about any dish – the Seattle version of "put a bird on it."). A beer was knocked over and we dashed out of the way so nimbly we all stayed dry. A good sign.

Then we walked to the Locks and found the new heron-nesting tree. (In case my sibs are reading this, my birding expert says yes, those smaller ones could have been babies). Watching herons fly makes me wonder how anyone could have ever missed the connection between them and pterodactyls.

The weather was Seattle-perfect: coolish, sweetly clean from days of sunbreaks alternating with rain that sometimes went sideways and came with a church-smashing lightning strike, lightly sunny. There's an intoxicating spring smell these days that always reminds me of falling in love with my husband.

I think Dad would have enjoyed himself. He would have been glad we came together because of him, for him, for us.

And he would have been able to eat all the Peanut Chews himself.

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The Sphinx's Riddle

3/20/2014

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1994, on our own four feet

At the end of my father's life, when I was getting to know him in new ways, he spent all day in bed. Before that, he got around in a wheelchair. And when I say got around, he really got around. He took the bus everywhere and was happy doing so, even when that meant taking 3 buses and having to choose stops based on sidewalks and curb cuts (which don't exist everywhere in Seattle).

Independence was very important to Dad. He frequently left himself voice memos, some of which were affirmations: "I travel around the city by myself on the bus. I am good at that," and "I do family bookkeeping. Also I am good at maneuvering my wheelchair." When well-meaning people would push his electric-assisted wheelchair without asking, he bristled. A wheelchair is personal, an extension of the body, and even medical personnel sometimes fail to recognize that.

Before the wheelchair there were arm crutches, the kind with cuffs that go around the forearms, and before that, a cane. He was walking with a cane at my wedding, and when we danced together, he felt steady and light on his feet.

It's hard for me to cast my mind back before concerns about his health became central to my life. Certainly, there were big chunks of time when he wasn't doing so well and I wasn't aware of it. While my attention was focused on him at the end of his life, I need to remind myself that there was a time when he was active in the outdoors, taking bike-camping trips and hiking the beautiful Pacific Northwest woods.

I liked dancing with him at my wedding. It seemed symbolic, traditional, a ritual that signified my participation in some ancient customs of transition. Like the transition from my father's home to my husband's home, which in my case was pure symbol, since I'd only lived with Dad a total of about a year from the time I was 4 and my parents divorced. My struggle between wanting to see myself as a rebel and wanting to embrace what little tradition and ritual I can goes on. Yet MY dance with MY father at MY wedding felt personal and right, and I'm glad he was able to share it with me.

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The Best Person I Ever Knew by Steve Klein

3/13/2014

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1970: Pearl, Amanda, Gert, Danny

I've been trying to write about Aunt Gert and I can't seem to get the words to come out the way I want them. So I'm falling back on the words of one who knew her and loved her: my father, who was raised by Aunt Gert and Uncle Fred after his mother died and his father flaked.

My Aunt Gert told your mother (never told me this, but) when she married Fred, he was the head of the New York State Communist Party. After my performance in "The Crucible," she told me she had been a member of the Communist Party. --Oh, an aside: One of your mother's daughters said she didn't have a very good memory. --Well, when Fred was called in to testify he quit the Post Office. And tried to start building a work record. Oh, he had a used car business for a time now, I don't remember how that goes. And then he worked for his cousin--what was his cousin's name? I don't remember--And what was the name of the business? It was a discount business, selling things at a discount, things like watches and radios. The name of the place was Tesla, T-E-S-L-A. So I think he never, he did not testify. Gert was called to testify. She had family strains, family stress, stress in family matters led her to quit the CP. Her energies, her priorities were to put family matters first, and there was a lot required to deal with family.

Did you know that--this is a well-known fact, you probably know this--Fred referred to me as Gert's son? Well, he did. He would tell her, if he has something to say to me, he would tell her. "Tell your son…" when I was in the room.

If I sat in his chair, he wouldn't speak to me, he wouldn't ask me to leave, he'd go like this [waves hand]. I asked my brother Jerry who lived with him for the summer if Fred ever shooed him out of the chair. He said, "Only once."

Oh, here's an idea. Let's have a drink of high-powered Ensure.

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The End of Boredom

3/2/2014

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One of Dad's baby friends

This is hard to say, but sometimes my father bored me.

Alone with Dad, I often struggled to keep conversation going. This became even more true when he was in the hospital, especially but not exclusively after his strokes. The iterative nature of his obsessions felt like a rejection of the “real” conversations we could be having, the ones where we shared our deepest thoughts and feelings and really connected.

I've always said boredom is frustrated desire. My daughter says “I'm bored” when the friend she wants to play with is unavailable, or when the internet connection is slow and somebody else is using the TV. I wanted Dad to play with me on my terms, to connect the way I had in mind and not the way he was connecting. I wanted to talk about our relationship – I wanted him to want to talk to me about me – instead of Clara and Robert Schumann or the Korda brothers. Not to mention Alfred Tarski.

It wasn't until the last two years of his life that I figured out how to handle the boredom. A couple days ago, I watched a crappy video I made of him during his rehab hospitalization in 2011. The camera was focused on him, making it especially clear that I was doing most of the talking. I'd just returned from my cousin Lizzie's wedding in Dallas, and I was telling Dad about all the people I met, mostly my mother's relatives by marriage.

It was a relief to have a full roster of conversation material. Once I'd exhausted tracing all the relationships and sharing my observations about the horrors of the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport (designed, presumably, by a native of that part of the world, where walking is such a foreign concept that the airport would be better converted to all go-kart traffic), Dad talked about his friends who were babies or were having them.

Thus we kept connected, sort of. Maybe not the deep, meaningful connection I craved, but started to find satisfaction with the kind of “difficult, oblique, deliberately inarticulate” conversations Joan Didion talks about in her essay “On Going Home.” The satisfaction of “talking in code about things we like best.” Babies and distant cousins are topics each of us is drawn to in our own way – though I egocentrically preferred to hear what he said about my daughter as a baby to what he said about the baby he compares her to. I was greedy for the personal because even dealing with family memories, the remove from “us” could feel like rejection.

I'd like to tell you that something broke the ice. In truth, my thinking shifted. I realized that a) what I was gonna get was a lot like what I'd already gotten, b) Dad was dying, more clearly and quickly than he had been, and if anyone was going to change the conversation, it was me, and c) the things that mattered to him mattered to me because they mattered to him.

This evolved into a practice of paying attention to his repetitions, the places his mind wanted to go, the memories and people who were important to him. Writing his memoir has been a way of solving a mystery based on clues: Why these obsessions? Why these moments? Those are much better questions than Who are these people? and How did they get into my conversations?

Boredom didn't simply end. I was bored plenty of times during the following two years. Putting aside my agenda and living within his meant more clues were coming in all the time, and when I paid attention to reality, to the topics he was actually pursuing, I could understand.

So I put aside the wish for a different conversation, and listened to the self he was presenting. Allowing myself to listen to the real Dad makes me miss him more now. That's the risk of loving. That's what takes the place of boredom.

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Claire Siegel's Crush

2/20/2014

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Here's a thought experiment: The conversations I had with Dad
in the last months of his life were chosen and designed and outlined with his legacy in mind. He set out to structure a curriculum so he could leave behind his wisdom and learning. Instead of his mind naturally cycling back through a lifetime of obsessions, he was selecting topics for the course "Father and Daughter: Creating a New Relationship at the End of Life" or, "The Stories We Tell: How to Use Your Time Left to Reveal Your Key Message."

Fantasizing that Dad had a list of the stories that he needed to tell me while he still had breath to share gives me some insight into the topics that befuddled and often annoyed me at the time. (Who cares about the names and professions of Carol's second cousins? Hint: Not Carol.) Striving for patience and careful listening, I still rolled my eyes when certain phrases were invoked: the Tarski Symposium, the Forsyte Saga, Alexander Korda, Clara Schumann, Manumit School, Lake Buel and Great Barrington, Claire Siegel.

Carol wouldn't even let him tell the Claire Siegel story in front of her. If she came into the room and he was telling me, she'd leave. As Dad said, "Carol's objection to the story is something like, or has to do with, 'What does THAT have to do with the story?' There's a lot that doesn't have to do with, is not, that's not important."

The story itself is simple ("She had a crush on me, and I thought she was a baby") yet complicated by an abundance of named characters (Doris Siegel Balder Willig, Sylvan Balder, Minkie Walbaum, two stepbrothers named Andy). The overt point here might have been something like when he was an adolescent, Dad had crushes on older girls, who thought he was cute and smart but not dating material. Claire Siegel had the same attraction to him and he lacked empathy. That fits it into the curriculum under the section "Substitution: Seeking love from older women to replace the missing mother." The lessons in this section have to do with the pain of looking in the wrong direction until you finally look in the right one; how growing up means finding the person to love who is the same emotional age as you and neither one of you is a baby (as my parents were when they married and divorced within a ten-year period); the ways people central to your memories find you parenthetical or tangential.

But Claire Siegel is not the central character of the story, despite the title. Dr. Doris Willig is the central character. Dr. Willig was Claire and Andy Siegel's mother, Andy Balder's stepmother and Sylvan Balder's ex-wife. Sylvan was a warm, friendly person. Dr. Willig was not very friendly. Sylvan often sang a song from Brigadoon: "What a day this has been / What a rare mood I'm in / Why, it's almost like being in love."

When Sylvan Balder, divorced from Doris Willig, died, Dad found out from Minkie Walbaum, his French teacher. (Repeating all the names, as Dad did, often infuriatingly, I can see how the listener might not be as in love with the repetitions as the teller is. Yet as his stand-in, I feel like part of Dad's legacy is the references and touchstones he kept returning to, so I'm caught in repeating them ad nauseum as well.)

One day in the summer of 1958, my teenaged father found himself in a conversation with Doris, who was feeling bereft at the loss of her former husband. He thought, "Ohh, is this appropriate? She's now remarried, and she's talking to me about her former marriage.... I don't think she should be telling, talking to this sixteen-year-old about how nice Sylvan Balder was and what a shame it was to lose him."

The emergent topic of this section of the course: Grief and loss and who to share them with and how. What is appropriate? What crosses boundaries more: a 13-year-old girl having a crush on a 16-year-old boy, or a woman in her forties sharing her feelings with that 16-year-old?

From the transcript of our conversation:

Me: ...what comes to mind for me is, um, the ongoing interrelationships, interrelationsh--uh relationships between you and my mother. When I think about--
Dad: We're friends!
Me: I know.
Dad: She's been such a help to me.
Me: So, Doris may have been friends with Sylvan.
Dad: He was dead, I'm not dead! I don't...
Me: Yes, okay.
Dad: I'm friends with [Uncle] Fred after he's dead. I guess, I guess they could be friends.
Me: But it makes sense to me--
Dad: Okay.
Me: --that there's an ongoing sense of connection.
Dad: Yes.
Me: And that's, that's where the mourning is.
Dad: One thing is, that that goes to show that we like marriage or something like that.

Lessons, topics, curriculum. "We Like Marriage or Something Like That." "Staying Friends with the Dead." "When Older Women Open Up to Younger Boys."

Now I wonder, what is my curriculum? My legacy? What is yours?

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Dead Man's Socks

2/13/2014

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Dad was a sock man. He like to match his sock color to his shirts. Though my stepmother Carol made him get rid of a lot of his candy-colored short sleeve shirts (benefitting me in the '80s, when I liked to dress butch), he amassed quite a collection of socks of colors far beyond black, brown, white and blue.

A couple days ago, thirteen months after his death, Carol and my sister Amanda and I met to clear out his closet. He had a couple different shoe sizes, a range of pant sizes, and very consistent shirt sizing: 16-1/2 - 33. And he had about 30 pairs of socks. There was a rainbow of single-color Polo socks, a couple pairs of mild-mannered dress socks, and a bunch of themed socks: sailboats, Mozart, a souvenir pair from Canada. Most of these were gifts from Nadine.

Nadine is one of Dad's great friends. She lives up the street on 5th Avenue and her kids grew up alongside my half-brother. On the day Dad died, Nadine was doing dishes when she suddenly felt drawn his house. She ran down the street and came in to find a ring of family holding Dad as his life wound down.

She was there to join us in grief. She also joined in washing, anointing, and dressing Dad's body. It was her idea to put the Orcas Island socks on his feet, socks she'd brought him during one of his ultimate hospitalizations.

Carol let Nadine know that Tuesday was when we were clearing out clothing, and called her when Amanda and I arrived to see if she wanted to stop by and get a sock remembrance. Once Nadine saw the pile of socks, she was unable to do much more than choose one pair and cry. Carol escorted her home.

Now everyone in my household and Amanda's has a collection of Dad socks. Some also have shoes, or shirts, or belts. These items feel much more businesslike than the wool shirts and jackets I've been wearing since we spread his ashes in the Pacific Ocean, and I like having a mundane reminder of his presence in my life.

I like wearing socks with a history.

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A Story of My Life

2/6/2014

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This was probably written in December 1980, when I was 14. Discovering it in my dad's papers today surprised me; I forgot I had shared these intimate memories with him.

Once there was a little girl whose daddy loved her, but he went away, and he could only love her on weekends. She could remember when he went away. It was summer, and hot. The little girl and her big brother came home from a camping trip to a dark house. Her mommy had turned all the lights off the keep the bugs away from the baby, who was crying anyway. It was a sad house, and the little girl's mommy had something sad to say. She said that the little girl's daddy wouldn't be living with them anymore. She said the word "divorce," but the only thing the little girl understood was that her daddy was not going to be there anymore. The only thing she understood was the loss. This made the little girl sad.

She was sad for a long time. She was sad when she sat in the dark in a car and the night demons tried to get her while she waited for her mommy. She was sad when she had to spend the night away from her mommy at the mean babysittter's house instead of with her daddy, maybe. And she was very sad when she had to move far away from her home, far from her friends, and further away from her daddy, who already lived two hours apart. She had to leave it all behind.

The little girl had to "cope with" a lot and "adapt to" a lot in her new big city, and she was frightened. She was desperate for a good home life, and her mommy did her best, but there was always something missing, even though there was something added in the form of her mommy's boyfriend. The picture was not complete, and the girl yearned.

After a while, her daddy, who had a new wife, moved to the same city she was in. In the winter the girl went to live with her daddy, in an attempt at completeness. It was nice, but too neat, and the little girl went home to where her mommy lived. She was happy with her daddy for a while, but she began to feel that although he loved her, all those years apart had separated them, and he had forgotten quite how.

The girl's daddy moved again, in the same city, but to a better house, so the girl went to visit him. She forgot the house number and the street, however, and got lost. She walked all around right near the right place, but couldn't find it, and it started to rain. After hours, and the darkness had settled in, she called her sister, who called her daddy, who came to get her. When she saw him, she wanted to give him a big hug and kiss and say "I love you, Daddy," but the car had bucket seats, so she had to settle for a small squeeze and a small "Thank you."

The little girl's desire to get close to her daddy increased to a point of sadness for her. She wanted to know him, but he seemed to hold back, so she did too, until Christmas, when she gave him a piece of paper that said

I love you, Daddy.

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Hot Dog Carousel

A Hole in My Heart

Sad Enough

Happy Birthday, Dad

The Sphinx's Riddle

The Best Person I Ever Knew by Steve Klein

The End of Boredom

Claire Siegel's Crush

Dead Man's Socks

A Story of My Life

Pearl Klein

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