Thursday, April 22, 2010
As the parent of a child with Aspergers I notice patterns that seem to be inevitable. These are the ripples from the pebble his existence tosses into life’s large pond. Included in the ripples that wash over me are the parent-teacher conferences that routinely involve phrases like, “he gets it but he never turns his work in” and “he’s okay behavior wise but there are certain kids who tease him and he reacts badly”. Also noted are the calls about how he took apart piece by piece the classroom drinking fountain.
Outside of the school milieu come the comments from Sunday school teachers and Cub Scout leaders about repetitive behaviors and fidgeting. One told me that she gave Primus a pencil each week because she knew how he would disassemble the writing implement’s eraser. This would happen every week without question each and every time. But the price of one #2 yellow was okay because his fidgeting with that one predictable item would allow him to stay engaged in the class for the full hour.
Certain moments have more dread tied to them. One somewhat repetitive pattern is after a hockey practice or game a coach approaching and stating my surname and asking if he could talk to Primus and me. My stomach drops and my pulse quickens at these moments. Mentally my thoughts fly as to what has he done now, or how bad can it be? Typically the incidents that form the basis for the “talk” have their genesis in disputes that arise after neuro-typical kids begin looking for a scapegoat in the locker room after a poor showing by the team.
Last night the assistant coach approached after a disappointing loss and queried if Primus was still there. In a calm voice replicating other voices I have heard a number of times before, Coach followed up on his request commenting he wanted to mention something to both Primus and me.
Holding my fear and my desire to flee in check I figured it would be better to eat the toad upfront as opposed to letting uncertainty fester for several days. I note that a coach’s statement about wanting to mention is usually followed up with “There was an incident…” Routinely the incidents are tied to what happens when the verbally challenged son has had enough of the blame game and erupts. These blow ups are standard fare for Aspergers kids. Not showing emotion up to the point where they can’t take anymore they suddenly blow.
Over time Primus has been really good and used only his words with only one or two minor exceptions. One was a push that followed being targeted and blamed, something that exacerbated in the locker room because he didn’t respond appropriately with an “eat shit” or “fuck off” and was thus was perceived to be showing weakness.
Given last night was an 8-1 loss for us I assumed the worst. Blame game behavior is usually pretty intense after a humiliation. When I was asked where Primus was I went outside with the coach and called the boy back, he was almost at the car.
Upon my holler Primus returned. The classic symptoms of trouble were all there. When the coach says his name he stares down and off to the side. The coach begins, “I didn’t get to talk to you in the locker room…” Routinely the next thing that happens is a question that is really a vague accusation, “What happened in there just now?” A reference to poor social skills, poor anger management, poor whatever this is what usually comes next. “…and I wanted to compliment you. You had a couple of really solid shifts on the ice tonight. Hell, the team stunk up the ice but it looked like you were steppin’ up your game.”
There were no other comments. There were no asides, no buts. There was no social lesson or veiled warning. To my amazement Primus looked the coach in the eye, it was brief mind you, but he did look him in the eye. Somewhat haltingly he then said “Thank you coach”. This is the moment after all these years of hockey I have been waiting for. Hell, this is the moment as a parent of a child with ASD I have been waiting for in any venue. I had blown off a pair of tickets to a concert I had bought not knowing it was going to conflict with the game to be at the rink for the match. My choice was the correct one.
Little victories, I must remember to savor the little victories. My life has its issues. My vision both ocular and spiritual is poor and my health is dicey. A cancer survivor I live in a place where ongoing employment seems to be harder and harder to hold onto. Still, Primus will face far greater challenges than I have. Every single day he will struggle to understand and be understood. Eventually he will have to address issues of loneliness and separation. My hope is that God or luck ride with him. Last night was a victory and it must be savored.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Talking
One of the issues with being gregarious is that you can always divert yourself away from writing. I spent three days this weekend at a hockey rink watching my son do a skills training clinic. While standing at the glass, watching the lads repeat repeat repeat the drills I met a man whose son was two years younger than man. The man however was eight years older than me and had retired from two different careers, the military and big oil. His son was the product of a second marriage, my sons are not. But with two marriages, two careers and many different places he had lived the man had a goodly number of tales to tell and opinions to share.
The man had lived in two areas where I had lived, the Midwest and the Midatlantic. We commiserated about the lack of Maryland blue crabs here in the landlocked center of the country. Heck, we both bemoaned the lack of good ocean seafood in general here where beef is king. Our talk touched on the different pace of life in both the middle and eastern parts of the country. In the Midwest it takes 20 minutes to get a consensus on whether it is time to go. On the east coast if you don’t commit immediately to go you get left behind.
Talking about places and things is often better or at least easier than struggling for ideas. We talked about the weather on the east coast and how the infrequent nature of snow throws them for a loop when it actually does show up. We talked about the SR-71. One of these aircraft is on display in Kalamazoo. As a kid this was one of the coolest planes I had ever heard about. How could it not be? It was sleek and black and it was the spy plane of choice. My buddy at the glass overlooking the rink claimed he had been an NSA analyst while working for the military. When he was posted in Alaska these kinds of planes would leave at night after the base was closed down and would come back before the base reopened.
We talked about restaurants in Grand Rapids, Salvatore’s on Leonard for pizza in particular. We talked about what could go wrong with a skating drill and darned if my son wasn’t the kid who made the error I was talking about. We talked about how cold the rink was. This is a standard topic for parents in rinks. Here in the mid-Michigan area most rinks are twinned, that is to say that have two full sheets of ice. In such a configuration one rink is always way colder than the other. I don’t know why it just is. Every parent at every rink has to bitch about it. It is, dare I say it, an icebreaker to conversation.
Yeah when you like to talk the choice of putting a pen to paper is a no-brainer second place option. Funny thing, as the years have gone on my typing has gotten better. In some ways it is far easier to type than to write. Still it is easier to flap my jaws.
The man had lived in two areas where I had lived, the Midwest and the Midatlantic. We commiserated about the lack of Maryland blue crabs here in the landlocked center of the country. Heck, we both bemoaned the lack of good ocean seafood in general here where beef is king. Our talk touched on the different pace of life in both the middle and eastern parts of the country. In the Midwest it takes 20 minutes to get a consensus on whether it is time to go. On the east coast if you don’t commit immediately to go you get left behind.
Talking about places and things is often better or at least easier than struggling for ideas. We talked about the weather on the east coast and how the infrequent nature of snow throws them for a loop when it actually does show up. We talked about the SR-71. One of these aircraft is on display in Kalamazoo. As a kid this was one of the coolest planes I had ever heard about. How could it not be? It was sleek and black and it was the spy plane of choice. My buddy at the glass overlooking the rink claimed he had been an NSA analyst while working for the military. When he was posted in Alaska these kinds of planes would leave at night after the base was closed down and would come back before the base reopened.
We talked about restaurants in Grand Rapids, Salvatore’s on Leonard for pizza in particular. We talked about what could go wrong with a skating drill and darned if my son wasn’t the kid who made the error I was talking about. We talked about how cold the rink was. This is a standard topic for parents in rinks. Here in the mid-Michigan area most rinks are twinned, that is to say that have two full sheets of ice. In such a configuration one rink is always way colder than the other. I don’t know why it just is. Every parent at every rink has to bitch about it. It is, dare I say it, an icebreaker to conversation.
Yeah when you like to talk the choice of putting a pen to paper is a no-brainer second place option. Funny thing, as the years have gone on my typing has gotten better. In some ways it is far easier to type than to write. Still it is easier to flap my jaws.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Three Things, One of Which is a Comment on the Current State of Max's Asperger Storyline on Parenthood
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Three things are on my mind this warm spring morning. I note them below.
Songbirds. Arriving downtown a little early today I walked from my bus stop to my favorite coffee shop and then on to my office. If you are ever in Lansing, MI Biggby’s on Ottawa Street is a fine place to meet, mingle and drink coffee, I highly recommend it. The conversation with the way over-educated barristas is worth the price of admission. Anyway, as I travelled my well worn route the air around my path was filled with the sounds of singing songbirds. Songbirds are coming back it seems and it is something to be happy about.
When I was a child growing up in the swamps of southern New Jersey I remember the vibrant song of the birds. I lived across from a gas station. Each day starting first thing in the morning the owner would punctuate his trips to the pump to fill up cars with his take on his favorite songs. While I would hear the owner singing his lungs out, I would also hear the birds providing graceful filigree to that earthy throaty voice. Together they were beautiful. This aural blend remains one of my fondest childhood memories.
Up until about 5-8 years ago I didn’t hear the songbirds very much around my home in my little suburban neighborhood in Michigan. The crows seemed to have driven them out. All I would hear when I headed outside each day was caw caw. The loud insistent almost dinosaur era clamoring of the crows was not very pleasant.
When West Nile virus swept through the area almost all of the crows died off. You would see them in groups of 3 or 4 lying dead on the macadam surface of the street. It was scary. But eventually the fear wore off. Nobody in my neighborhood keeled over from West Nile. But suddenly there were songbirds again, in abundance.
Some crows have returned but the songbirds are still present and still singing at the tops of their little lungs. Today is already bright with the promise of 70+ F temperature here but the voices of song birds trilling in every nook and cranny just makes the day electric.
Autism Awareness. Because I got downtown early I was able to look at the USA Today sitting on a table at my favorite coffee shop. In the Life section there was an article about Songs of the Spectrum. http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-03-31-autismsingsos31_ST_N.htm This is an effort by a parent of an Autism Spectrum child to build awareness and to provide benefit funds for autism efforts. There was a chart included in the article that indicates early autism diagnosis will reduce the cost of autism support and care for a child by 2/3rds over her/his lifetime. The chart also mentioned that screening is possible starting at roughly age two. From personal experience I can tell you there is real truth in this. If you have suspicions about whether a child you know is impacted by autism don’t delay in following up. Primus was not diagnosed until age 12. Having an earlier diagnosis would really have made a significant difference in his educational experience. April is Autism Awareness Month.
Parenthood Rocks. Sticking with the autism storyline Parenthood is showing something that my wife and I have experienced first hand, the involvement of a child with Asperger’s in team sports. Going this route is not for everyone and it does not guarantee a positive or successful result. However in our case it has had meaning and has provided growth that we really wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
In the series Max is on a softball team. He cannot hit, he cannot catch and he feels isolated (or perhaps mistreated is the better word). The father Adam Braverman finds another family member, Max’s cousin Drew that is willing to practice with him and Max. As they practice Max begins to develop some basic skills and seems to enjoy it when he gets the technique needed to make a catch. My hope is that with these skills he can make a connection with one or two of his team mates. It would also make sense to show some other parents reaction. It is amazing the win at all costs mindset that starts at the very earliest level of children’s sports. I digress.
Primus has been playing hockey for 6 or 7 years now. His skill set has through the early years was at the very lowest end of the spectrum for his team. But one thing about his variant of ASD is that he listens with precision to the details of a coach’s instruction. As he has grown he has moved slowly into the mid-pack level of skills for B hockey. More importantly he values his “team”. Maybe Max will follow that route in the storyline.
Primus’s use of the term of team is not another phrase for his friends. He mentally puts them in a box different from people at school and people he interacts with at other settings. But they have a higher value than just classmates to him. Further as the years have gone on he has learned to engage in some locker room conversation. Now mind you he punched someone out this year that criticized his playing but the same kid received similar treatment from a couple of neuro-typicals. More importantly he makes jokes and wants to be in the room with the team without adults being there. This is a major step for a kid with Aspergers.
My hope is that the story line on Parenthood will address some of this. Being on a team for an ASD kid is not easy but sometimes it can provide opportunity for interaction that would never occur otherwise. It is not a cure, a fix and it is definitely not easy. It is not easy for you as a parent watching your kid being outclassed on the field or on the ice. It is not easy for your kid to take the crap for poor play in the dugout or the locker room. But one thing about ASD kids is that they can be determined and focused. They will keep working until they improve and in the end they may find a benefit from the effort that is worth the tough parts of the experience.
Just remember when you have seen one kid with Aspergers, you have seen one kid with Aspergers. Every one of them travels a different route.
Three things are on my mind this warm spring morning. I note them below.
Songbirds. Arriving downtown a little early today I walked from my bus stop to my favorite coffee shop and then on to my office. If you are ever in Lansing, MI Biggby’s on Ottawa Street is a fine place to meet, mingle and drink coffee, I highly recommend it. The conversation with the way over-educated barristas is worth the price of admission. Anyway, as I travelled my well worn route the air around my path was filled with the sounds of singing songbirds. Songbirds are coming back it seems and it is something to be happy about.
When I was a child growing up in the swamps of southern New Jersey I remember the vibrant song of the birds. I lived across from a gas station. Each day starting first thing in the morning the owner would punctuate his trips to the pump to fill up cars with his take on his favorite songs. While I would hear the owner singing his lungs out, I would also hear the birds providing graceful filigree to that earthy throaty voice. Together they were beautiful. This aural blend remains one of my fondest childhood memories.
Up until about 5-8 years ago I didn’t hear the songbirds very much around my home in my little suburban neighborhood in Michigan. The crows seemed to have driven them out. All I would hear when I headed outside each day was caw caw. The loud insistent almost dinosaur era clamoring of the crows was not very pleasant.
When West Nile virus swept through the area almost all of the crows died off. You would see them in groups of 3 or 4 lying dead on the macadam surface of the street. It was scary. But eventually the fear wore off. Nobody in my neighborhood keeled over from West Nile. But suddenly there were songbirds again, in abundance.
Some crows have returned but the songbirds are still present and still singing at the tops of their little lungs. Today is already bright with the promise of 70+ F temperature here but the voices of song birds trilling in every nook and cranny just makes the day electric.
Autism Awareness. Because I got downtown early I was able to look at the USA Today sitting on a table at my favorite coffee shop. In the Life section there was an article about Songs of the Spectrum. http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-03-31-autismsingsos31_ST_N.htm This is an effort by a parent of an Autism Spectrum child to build awareness and to provide benefit funds for autism efforts. There was a chart included in the article that indicates early autism diagnosis will reduce the cost of autism support and care for a child by 2/3rds over her/his lifetime. The chart also mentioned that screening is possible starting at roughly age two. From personal experience I can tell you there is real truth in this. If you have suspicions about whether a child you know is impacted by autism don’t delay in following up. Primus was not diagnosed until age 12. Having an earlier diagnosis would really have made a significant difference in his educational experience. April is Autism Awareness Month.
Parenthood Rocks. Sticking with the autism storyline Parenthood is showing something that my wife and I have experienced first hand, the involvement of a child with Asperger’s in team sports. Going this route is not for everyone and it does not guarantee a positive or successful result. However in our case it has had meaning and has provided growth that we really wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
In the series Max is on a softball team. He cannot hit, he cannot catch and he feels isolated (or perhaps mistreated is the better word). The father Adam Braverman finds another family member, Max’s cousin Drew that is willing to practice with him and Max. As they practice Max begins to develop some basic skills and seems to enjoy it when he gets the technique needed to make a catch. My hope is that with these skills he can make a connection with one or two of his team mates. It would also make sense to show some other parents reaction. It is amazing the win at all costs mindset that starts at the very earliest level of children’s sports. I digress.
Primus has been playing hockey for 6 or 7 years now. His skill set has through the early years was at the very lowest end of the spectrum for his team. But one thing about his variant of ASD is that he listens with precision to the details of a coach’s instruction. As he has grown he has moved slowly into the mid-pack level of skills for B hockey. More importantly he values his “team”. Maybe Max will follow that route in the storyline.
Primus’s use of the term of team is not another phrase for his friends. He mentally puts them in a box different from people at school and people he interacts with at other settings. But they have a higher value than just classmates to him. Further as the years have gone on he has learned to engage in some locker room conversation. Now mind you he punched someone out this year that criticized his playing but the same kid received similar treatment from a couple of neuro-typicals. More importantly he makes jokes and wants to be in the room with the team without adults being there. This is a major step for a kid with Aspergers.
My hope is that the story line on Parenthood will address some of this. Being on a team for an ASD kid is not easy but sometimes it can provide opportunity for interaction that would never occur otherwise. It is not a cure, a fix and it is definitely not easy. It is not easy for you as a parent watching your kid being outclassed on the field or on the ice. It is not easy for your kid to take the crap for poor play in the dugout or the locker room. But one thing about ASD kids is that they can be determined and focused. They will keep working until they improve and in the end they may find a benefit from the effort that is worth the tough parts of the experience.
Just remember when you have seen one kid with Aspergers, you have seen one kid with Aspergers. Every one of them travels a different route.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Death on the Road
My correspondence with friends has dropped off over the past six months to a year. I hold many regrets about that. So easily I have allowed myself to lose my margin of time for jotting down the note to a dear pal or simply posting a “hey I miss you “e-mail. Surprisingly not everyone has gone this route and I still get e-mails. The other day I got a note from someone I care about greatly, someone I really love because of who they are. (You should read into this that they are a much nicer and much better person than me and I wonder why they keep me as a friend). In response to that little popcorn post I fired off a “write me a real letter and I will respond” note.
Well she did write me a real letter. The letter was a very loving capture of what she felt about the passing of her grandmother. The letter was sweet and warm and tinged with the loss that we all feel at the passing of someone who had been an important part of our lives. There was also a juxtaposition of her life to her grandmother’s. Finally and maybe rhetorically, maybe not she asked me if I had ever watched anyone die. I responded.
I may have missed the mark in my response. Right now I am feeling awkward about my reply. Still what I wrote I really meant. Over the past 36 hours I have kept thinking about what I had written. My response to her beautiful post has been so much on my mind I decided to alter my response letter and post it as this week’s blog entry. Of course I have tried to remove all identifying information pertaining to the writer. Here is the text of my response beginning just after the salutation.
Like you I have watched a person die. In actuality I have seen several people die. In my time on this earth I have seen a bit of death’s spectrum. As you know I am not an ER room nurse or an EMT. My exposure to death has thus not been so high as to make me callous to the event of life’s end. The passings I have seen I remember vividly.
On the one hand I have seen a beloved aunt die. Her family was at her side despite the hour being very late. My wife and I had driven for hours for one last visit. Within five minutes of our arrival she quit fighting and was gone. All the care and compassion a matriarch should be accorded was in full play. Her children and grandchildren nieces and nephews were about the place. Tears of love flowed. The event was filled with real love, compassion and care. While I felt sad her death came at a time appropriate in the grand scheme of things, she was suffering and she had fought the good fight long enough. But when you asked the question of whether I had seen a person die that is not the death I remember. The one I remember I will recount below.
As you know I have faith, but I am not sure my faith is as strong as yours. Despite giving in and responding to an altar call or two, I never felt the electricity of a full and complete knowledge of God as I stood in the front of a church with a pastor’s hand on my head as he prayed for me. The scales didn’t fall off my eyes after being struck blind on the road to Damascus. My journey is one that is continually tested, continually challenged. My faith is tempered by what I have experienced and while I am a Christian, that is I a believer in the Christ and in his red letter affirmations (you know the stuff Jesus is directly attributed to have said) I have real moments of doubt. There are many paths in this life and I do have trouble ascribing that only one opens the door to the fulfillment of God’s love.
I am glad you have peace but I am not sure I will ever have that, at least not in a way that resolves all the mental and philosophical conflicts I try and work through daily. My path to faith is one walked with constant fear and trembling as I set about working out my own salvation. When I read the New Testament I see that the founders of the early church understood that the search for faith is never easy, Philippians 2:12-13.
On actually seeing death I offer the following. Experiencing another’s death is an odd memory for me. The first time I watched someone die was as unexpected as it was ghastly. I was in my second year of law school. The day was a cold sunny Saturday afternoon in March. It was long enough ago that there were no VCRs and cell phones. Both of these facts played a role in the events of that day.
In the days pre-VCR if you wanted to see a “classic” film you had to watch the local film societies’ newspaper adverts to see what was showing at their weekend screenings. Living in downtown Detroit in my 17th floor tenement apartment located in officially blighted neighborhood my nearest film society was run by the Detroit Institute of Arts. In the Friday section of the Free Press there was a listing that on Saturday at 1 p.m. the Detroit Film Society would be showing Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
McCabe was an anti-western; it was maybe to only real anti-western. In the film the hero runs a brothel and dies a cowardly death. The audience finds itself rooting for him to shoot the bad guys in the back. Such actions were clearly not the cowboy way. It was a film of its era and the chance to see it on a big screen was a rarity. Having read the Free Press on Friday morning I saw it was showing. As we were having coffee before our morning classes I convinced my friend Andi (Andrea) to go. As I remember it she loved Robert Altman movies about as much as I did. We agreed to meet the next day early, which by our sense of time and calendar was a highly flexible term.
Andi and I met that Saturday morning at the University of Detroit Law School Library. As should be expected, we were running late. What else was new? The law library sits on East Jefferson Avenue near the base of I-75 South as it passes through downtown Detroit. Andi lived on the eastside and I lived downtown so it was the ideal rendezvous. The Detroit Institute of Arts is just a couple of miles north of the school through a warren of urban blight off of I-75. Trying to insure we would make the opening credits we jogged out to Andi’s little bullet shaped Civic.
Her car was the original Honda Civic; it was a two seater and had a steering wheel that was a mile across. We were running late as always and we debated whether we should smoke our joint then before we drove to the movie, in the car on the way to the movie or outside the theatre. We decided to wait. The rationale was that this was Detroit and what city cop in his right mind was going to bust a couple of people for doing a doobie in the Cass corridor? In retrospect it was a far better choice than we ever would have contemplated.
We jumped in the car and Andi drove, actually she drove like a bat out of hell. The Civic proudly wore a bumper sticker that a mutual friend had affixed as a testament to her driving skills which read, “I Break for No Apparent Reason”.
Merging onto I-75 we were headed up to Warren Avenue. From there we were going to work our way to the DIA. Hitting speed in front of the Lafayette Clinic, the Wayne State University mental health facility we were at a solid 70 m.p.h. Andi tapping the steering wheel and me the dash as we sang along to Tom Petty’s “Even the Loser’s Get Lucky Sometime”. We sang out of tune and loud, like was there any other way?
Just as we were hitting the song’s crescendo a body came off the hood of the car in front of us and flew over our Civic bouncing off the car behind us rolling brutally in the roadway. The body of that man is suspended in mind forever passing over the windshield of the Civic. No I didn’t see his face. For the life I me I can’t tell you if he was in pain at that moment. I remember his clothes were gray and he had a jacket on. But when I rewind the movie, and it does come to me late at night more frequently than I would like, it is just the shock of seeing a body there in mid-air that stands out. It is as if the cassette player went silent right then. It was if we had slipped between the light rays of the sun into a moment of unreality. All I can say for sure it is that the man was airborne and twisted in ways not meant to happen in nature.
Wrenching my head around I saw the man’s body rolling down the road. Andi was screaming and in tears. I think she was shouting something like “What was that, did you see that, what was that, what do we do?” I was not mentally there at all, shock perhaps, but my thoughts focused in a couple of seconds and I told her get off at the next exit. I didn’t care if we were in the heart of the ghetto we had to call 911. Andi was crying and I was shaking and sweating as we pulled off. I honestly can’t say what my body was doing right then.
Trying to find a pay phone in a ghetto in 1980 was not an easy task. We rode around through neighborhoods that looked like Sarajevo after the worst of the fighting. Boarded up facades and burnt buildings were everywhere. It took a couple of minutes but eventually we found a phone and put the 911 call in. I still wonder what diseases I picked up off that handset.
It was our mutual thought that we had better go back to see if anyone had helped the poor bastard. I wasn’t sure what I could do I had no first aid training. It wasn’t for voyeurism that we returned, we also thought that the cars who had hit the guy might need witness statements. Even if we were sometimes stoner law students we took our obligations under the law quite seriously. We were witnesses.
After a drive south on surface streets which seemed to take forever (time works funny in dire stress doesn’t it, things just hang there and everything seemingly takes so long), we eventually got on I-75 north again and came back to the spot by the Lafayette Clinic. The police had arrived on scene and an EMT was just getting there.
I don’t know how to refer to the man struck by the car, the victim, the man, the guy in gray so I guess I will just go with the man. When we pulled up the man was lying on the curb and a police man was over him and had a blanket covering him partially. From what I could see he was twitching and bloating up with blood that must have been pooling in the spots where he had taken the body hits from the cars that had struck him. His breathing was noisy, irregular and kind of gurgling maybe. Then the things his muscles and body were doing just stopped and the EMTs didn’t seem to be in a hurry anymore. When they put him on the stretcher there was no sense of urgency. He was gone.
Surely I must have given a statement to the police, but I don’t remember it. I know that the time for the movie came and went and we were still at the roadside. Eventually everything finished up and we left.
We drove over to the Union Street bar on Woodward. I am pretty sure we didn’t smoke the joint it just didn’t match what we had experienced. Instead we drank shots of nasty burning liquors chasing them down with beers. We drank a shitload of them. And we cried and we talked about how fucked up watching the guy twitching by the road was. I think even though we weren’t a couple we went back to my apartment and had hard nasty sex and even that didn’t feel good.
I watched the paper for days to see if there was a blurb on what happened. Detroit however is a big city and one vehicular death doesn’t merit much mention. In the end I think I found out the guy was actually a patient at the mental clinic and had been released that morning. Nobody could really come up with a reason why he was trying to cross the eight lanes of I-75 on foot trying apparently to get back to the clinic from the other side of the highway. He had not been identified as a suicide risk. No one knew the why.
Did the experience give me faith or challenge my faith? It didn’t give me faith for sure, but I don’t think it really impacted on my faith. Watching that man die did something to me that has happened only a couple of times in my life. It focused me on life and its difference from not life. It made the world seem a little more real for a couple of days. Colors were a little clearer. The air felt a little more real on my skin. I felt forced to be in the moment and to be alive. The victim’s death was not one that seemed anything but mundanely horrific, still to me it showed the world was anything but mundane. Eventually that feeling faded.
When I was almost killed in an automobile accident the feeling came back. When I went on a luge run in Norway the feeling came back. No matter how I tried to hold onto that feeling it faded. But I have the wisps of the memory from those events to remind life matters.
Watching a loved one die is very rough indeed. This is especially true when the death is slow and when bits of that person’s life are stolen incrementally. Alzheimer’s is one of the cruelest of death’s emissaries. It is not alone. I have watched friends die of AIDS and that in many ways was the worst from my perspective. No matter how your rational mind tries to process the death it is filled with pain and conflict. There are tears that should have been cried but remain locked away in all of us.
I have known people who possess the selfless nature you describe when talking about your grandmother. If such a life of love and sacrifice was her choice or a choice she came to embrace then it can serve as a point of reference for how your life might evolve. Still you really don’t gain some greater awareness or share some incredible value by living such an almost monastic life if it is not an appropriate choice for you. “No one else can give me the meaning of my life; it is something I alone can make. The meaning is not something predetermined which simply unfolds, I help both to create it and to discover it, and this is a continuing process, not a once and for all.” Milton Mayeroff, On Caring, p 62. Being other focused is fine but you have to be you for it to matter.
In one larger section of the above book Mayeroff takes time to talk about what he feels are critical components of caring; they are trust, honesty and patience. This quote seems relevant to what your were talking about.
Courage is also present in going into the unknown. By following the lead of the subject matter or the direction of the growing child, I have no guarantee where it will all end or in what unfamiliar situations I will find myself. The security of familiar landmarks is gone and I cannot anticipate fully who or what the other will become or who I will become. This is the courage of the artist who leaves the fashions of the day to go his own way and in so doing comes to find himself and be himself. Such courage is not blind: it is informed by insight from past experiences, and it is open and sensitive to the present. Trust in the other to grow and in my own ability to care gives me the courage to go into the unknown, but it is also true that without the courage to go into the unknown such trust would be impossible. And clearly, the greater the sense of going into the unknown, the more courage is called for in caring.
The total subjugation and suppression of who you are or who you have been does not benefit anyone you care about or the world. If you grandmother’s selflessness came from her courage and not from stereotyped sex roles imposed by the society and faith of the time many decades ago when she was young then following that path may make sense. If her role and her apparent selflessness were imposed on her from outside, then maybe it does not make sense for you at all.
We all change. Our musical tastes may shift radically or our interest in music may die out altogether. Our friends will come and go. The space we occupy in terms of dwelling and family will vary. But the key is to have the courage to face these things and have the focus to work toward the meaning of your own life in fear and trembling, if need be.
Well she did write me a real letter. The letter was a very loving capture of what she felt about the passing of her grandmother. The letter was sweet and warm and tinged with the loss that we all feel at the passing of someone who had been an important part of our lives. There was also a juxtaposition of her life to her grandmother’s. Finally and maybe rhetorically, maybe not she asked me if I had ever watched anyone die. I responded.
I may have missed the mark in my response. Right now I am feeling awkward about my reply. Still what I wrote I really meant. Over the past 36 hours I have kept thinking about what I had written. My response to her beautiful post has been so much on my mind I decided to alter my response letter and post it as this week’s blog entry. Of course I have tried to remove all identifying information pertaining to the writer. Here is the text of my response beginning just after the salutation.
Like you I have watched a person die. In actuality I have seen several people die. In my time on this earth I have seen a bit of death’s spectrum. As you know I am not an ER room nurse or an EMT. My exposure to death has thus not been so high as to make me callous to the event of life’s end. The passings I have seen I remember vividly.
On the one hand I have seen a beloved aunt die. Her family was at her side despite the hour being very late. My wife and I had driven for hours for one last visit. Within five minutes of our arrival she quit fighting and was gone. All the care and compassion a matriarch should be accorded was in full play. Her children and grandchildren nieces and nephews were about the place. Tears of love flowed. The event was filled with real love, compassion and care. While I felt sad her death came at a time appropriate in the grand scheme of things, she was suffering and she had fought the good fight long enough. But when you asked the question of whether I had seen a person die that is not the death I remember. The one I remember I will recount below.
As you know I have faith, but I am not sure my faith is as strong as yours. Despite giving in and responding to an altar call or two, I never felt the electricity of a full and complete knowledge of God as I stood in the front of a church with a pastor’s hand on my head as he prayed for me. The scales didn’t fall off my eyes after being struck blind on the road to Damascus. My journey is one that is continually tested, continually challenged. My faith is tempered by what I have experienced and while I am a Christian, that is I a believer in the Christ and in his red letter affirmations (you know the stuff Jesus is directly attributed to have said) I have real moments of doubt. There are many paths in this life and I do have trouble ascribing that only one opens the door to the fulfillment of God’s love.
I am glad you have peace but I am not sure I will ever have that, at least not in a way that resolves all the mental and philosophical conflicts I try and work through daily. My path to faith is one walked with constant fear and trembling as I set about working out my own salvation. When I read the New Testament I see that the founders of the early church understood that the search for faith is never easy, Philippians 2:12-13.
On actually seeing death I offer the following. Experiencing another’s death is an odd memory for me. The first time I watched someone die was as unexpected as it was ghastly. I was in my second year of law school. The day was a cold sunny Saturday afternoon in March. It was long enough ago that there were no VCRs and cell phones. Both of these facts played a role in the events of that day.
In the days pre-VCR if you wanted to see a “classic” film you had to watch the local film societies’ newspaper adverts to see what was showing at their weekend screenings. Living in downtown Detroit in my 17th floor tenement apartment located in officially blighted neighborhood my nearest film society was run by the Detroit Institute of Arts. In the Friday section of the Free Press there was a listing that on Saturday at 1 p.m. the Detroit Film Society would be showing Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
McCabe was an anti-western; it was maybe to only real anti-western. In the film the hero runs a brothel and dies a cowardly death. The audience finds itself rooting for him to shoot the bad guys in the back. Such actions were clearly not the cowboy way. It was a film of its era and the chance to see it on a big screen was a rarity. Having read the Free Press on Friday morning I saw it was showing. As we were having coffee before our morning classes I convinced my friend Andi (Andrea) to go. As I remember it she loved Robert Altman movies about as much as I did. We agreed to meet the next day early, which by our sense of time and calendar was a highly flexible term.
Andi and I met that Saturday morning at the University of Detroit Law School Library. As should be expected, we were running late. What else was new? The law library sits on East Jefferson Avenue near the base of I-75 South as it passes through downtown Detroit. Andi lived on the eastside and I lived downtown so it was the ideal rendezvous. The Detroit Institute of Arts is just a couple of miles north of the school through a warren of urban blight off of I-75. Trying to insure we would make the opening credits we jogged out to Andi’s little bullet shaped Civic.
Her car was the original Honda Civic; it was a two seater and had a steering wheel that was a mile across. We were running late as always and we debated whether we should smoke our joint then before we drove to the movie, in the car on the way to the movie or outside the theatre. We decided to wait. The rationale was that this was Detroit and what city cop in his right mind was going to bust a couple of people for doing a doobie in the Cass corridor? In retrospect it was a far better choice than we ever would have contemplated.
We jumped in the car and Andi drove, actually she drove like a bat out of hell. The Civic proudly wore a bumper sticker that a mutual friend had affixed as a testament to her driving skills which read, “I Break for No Apparent Reason”.
Merging onto I-75 we were headed up to Warren Avenue. From there we were going to work our way to the DIA. Hitting speed in front of the Lafayette Clinic, the Wayne State University mental health facility we were at a solid 70 m.p.h. Andi tapping the steering wheel and me the dash as we sang along to Tom Petty’s “Even the Loser’s Get Lucky Sometime”. We sang out of tune and loud, like was there any other way?
Just as we were hitting the song’s crescendo a body came off the hood of the car in front of us and flew over our Civic bouncing off the car behind us rolling brutally in the roadway. The body of that man is suspended in mind forever passing over the windshield of the Civic. No I didn’t see his face. For the life I me I can’t tell you if he was in pain at that moment. I remember his clothes were gray and he had a jacket on. But when I rewind the movie, and it does come to me late at night more frequently than I would like, it is just the shock of seeing a body there in mid-air that stands out. It is as if the cassette player went silent right then. It was if we had slipped between the light rays of the sun into a moment of unreality. All I can say for sure it is that the man was airborne and twisted in ways not meant to happen in nature.
Wrenching my head around I saw the man’s body rolling down the road. Andi was screaming and in tears. I think she was shouting something like “What was that, did you see that, what was that, what do we do?” I was not mentally there at all, shock perhaps, but my thoughts focused in a couple of seconds and I told her get off at the next exit. I didn’t care if we were in the heart of the ghetto we had to call 911. Andi was crying and I was shaking and sweating as we pulled off. I honestly can’t say what my body was doing right then.
Trying to find a pay phone in a ghetto in 1980 was not an easy task. We rode around through neighborhoods that looked like Sarajevo after the worst of the fighting. Boarded up facades and burnt buildings were everywhere. It took a couple of minutes but eventually we found a phone and put the 911 call in. I still wonder what diseases I picked up off that handset.
It was our mutual thought that we had better go back to see if anyone had helped the poor bastard. I wasn’t sure what I could do I had no first aid training. It wasn’t for voyeurism that we returned, we also thought that the cars who had hit the guy might need witness statements. Even if we were sometimes stoner law students we took our obligations under the law quite seriously. We were witnesses.
After a drive south on surface streets which seemed to take forever (time works funny in dire stress doesn’t it, things just hang there and everything seemingly takes so long), we eventually got on I-75 north again and came back to the spot by the Lafayette Clinic. The police had arrived on scene and an EMT was just getting there.
I don’t know how to refer to the man struck by the car, the victim, the man, the guy in gray so I guess I will just go with the man. When we pulled up the man was lying on the curb and a police man was over him and had a blanket covering him partially. From what I could see he was twitching and bloating up with blood that must have been pooling in the spots where he had taken the body hits from the cars that had struck him. His breathing was noisy, irregular and kind of gurgling maybe. Then the things his muscles and body were doing just stopped and the EMTs didn’t seem to be in a hurry anymore. When they put him on the stretcher there was no sense of urgency. He was gone.
Surely I must have given a statement to the police, but I don’t remember it. I know that the time for the movie came and went and we were still at the roadside. Eventually everything finished up and we left.
We drove over to the Union Street bar on Woodward. I am pretty sure we didn’t smoke the joint it just didn’t match what we had experienced. Instead we drank shots of nasty burning liquors chasing them down with beers. We drank a shitload of them. And we cried and we talked about how fucked up watching the guy twitching by the road was. I think even though we weren’t a couple we went back to my apartment and had hard nasty sex and even that didn’t feel good.
I watched the paper for days to see if there was a blurb on what happened. Detroit however is a big city and one vehicular death doesn’t merit much mention. In the end I think I found out the guy was actually a patient at the mental clinic and had been released that morning. Nobody could really come up with a reason why he was trying to cross the eight lanes of I-75 on foot trying apparently to get back to the clinic from the other side of the highway. He had not been identified as a suicide risk. No one knew the why.
Did the experience give me faith or challenge my faith? It didn’t give me faith for sure, but I don’t think it really impacted on my faith. Watching that man die did something to me that has happened only a couple of times in my life. It focused me on life and its difference from not life. It made the world seem a little more real for a couple of days. Colors were a little clearer. The air felt a little more real on my skin. I felt forced to be in the moment and to be alive. The victim’s death was not one that seemed anything but mundanely horrific, still to me it showed the world was anything but mundane. Eventually that feeling faded.
When I was almost killed in an automobile accident the feeling came back. When I went on a luge run in Norway the feeling came back. No matter how I tried to hold onto that feeling it faded. But I have the wisps of the memory from those events to remind life matters.
Watching a loved one die is very rough indeed. This is especially true when the death is slow and when bits of that person’s life are stolen incrementally. Alzheimer’s is one of the cruelest of death’s emissaries. It is not alone. I have watched friends die of AIDS and that in many ways was the worst from my perspective. No matter how your rational mind tries to process the death it is filled with pain and conflict. There are tears that should have been cried but remain locked away in all of us.
I have known people who possess the selfless nature you describe when talking about your grandmother. If such a life of love and sacrifice was her choice or a choice she came to embrace then it can serve as a point of reference for how your life might evolve. Still you really don’t gain some greater awareness or share some incredible value by living such an almost monastic life if it is not an appropriate choice for you. “No one else can give me the meaning of my life; it is something I alone can make. The meaning is not something predetermined which simply unfolds, I help both to create it and to discover it, and this is a continuing process, not a once and for all.” Milton Mayeroff, On Caring, p 62. Being other focused is fine but you have to be you for it to matter.
In one larger section of the above book Mayeroff takes time to talk about what he feels are critical components of caring; they are trust, honesty and patience. This quote seems relevant to what your were talking about.
Courage is also present in going into the unknown. By following the lead of the subject matter or the direction of the growing child, I have no guarantee where it will all end or in what unfamiliar situations I will find myself. The security of familiar landmarks is gone and I cannot anticipate fully who or what the other will become or who I will become. This is the courage of the artist who leaves the fashions of the day to go his own way and in so doing comes to find himself and be himself. Such courage is not blind: it is informed by insight from past experiences, and it is open and sensitive to the present. Trust in the other to grow and in my own ability to care gives me the courage to go into the unknown, but it is also true that without the courage to go into the unknown such trust would be impossible. And clearly, the greater the sense of going into the unknown, the more courage is called for in caring.
The total subjugation and suppression of who you are or who you have been does not benefit anyone you care about or the world. If you grandmother’s selflessness came from her courage and not from stereotyped sex roles imposed by the society and faith of the time many decades ago when she was young then following that path may make sense. If her role and her apparent selflessness were imposed on her from outside, then maybe it does not make sense for you at all.
We all change. Our musical tastes may shift radically or our interest in music may die out altogether. Our friends will come and go. The space we occupy in terms of dwelling and family will vary. But the key is to have the courage to face these things and have the focus to work toward the meaning of your own life in fear and trembling, if need be.
Daylight on the Morning Fields
Sometimes when I am driving about I pick up a mix disk I made a long time ago and throw it into the CD player. Today as I was on my way to breakfast before a day of errands I threw one of those disks in. Bruce Cockburn starting singing,
Don't the hours grow shorter as the days go by,
You never get to stop and open your eyes
One day you're waiting for the sky to fall
And next you're dazzled by the beauty of it all
When you're lovers in a dangerous time
Lovers in a dangerous time
Yeah sometimes a lyric will just blast beyond the mundane questions. Before I heard this I was thinking about where I had stashed my shovel at end of last fall. Suddenly I was looking out the window at the promise of spring and the living awakening things that surrounded me. A good lyric will do that for you. Enjoy. PS You don't have to listen to the post performance banter but it is interesting.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Why?
The question of suffering is one that I have not pondered much. Mostly I have taken the position that suffering just is. Children die of leukemia. Populations of people are subjected to genocide in death camps, dark jungles and other hostile environments. My feeling was that there is no why, again it just is.
Recently I have been reading a book dealing with the cabbalists of pre-inquisition Spain. Starting around the 10th or 11th century it seems they began focusing on the issue of suffering, especially the suffering of the innocent children. While comfortable by standards of the world at that time, disease was omnipresent and hope for relief or cure of the afflicted was limited. An intellectual looking at her world could easy wonder why.
As the next several hundred years evolved the discussion of immense pain and suffering moved from theoretical to personal. This followed as the inquisition first in Spain and then in Portugal inflicted an early version of the final solution on the Jewish community of which the cabbalists were a part. In the period of the Inquisition the switch from tolerance to torture came quickly, it did not take a generation to pass to become the most unholy of purportedly holy exercises.
The rapid change for these people from secure to fleeing expatriates with no destination made me start thinking. While I may be comfortable, more or less in this downward economy, it can change at a moment’s notice. Suffering on a grand scale could become real tomorrow. When you let your mind go down those threads of logic it isn’t a great leap to the big questions, the imponderables, like why is there suffering.
Recently I have been reading a book dealing with the cabbalists of pre-inquisition Spain. Starting around the 10th or 11th century it seems they began focusing on the issue of suffering, especially the suffering of the innocent children. While comfortable by standards of the world at that time, disease was omnipresent and hope for relief or cure of the afflicted was limited. An intellectual looking at her world could easy wonder why.
As the next several hundred years evolved the discussion of immense pain and suffering moved from theoretical to personal. This followed as the inquisition first in Spain and then in Portugal inflicted an early version of the final solution on the Jewish community of which the cabbalists were a part. In the period of the Inquisition the switch from tolerance to torture came quickly, it did not take a generation to pass to become the most unholy of purportedly holy exercises.
The rapid change for these people from secure to fleeing expatriates with no destination made me start thinking. While I may be comfortable, more or less in this downward economy, it can change at a moment’s notice. Suffering on a grand scale could become real tomorrow. When you let your mind go down those threads of logic it isn’t a great leap to the big questions, the imponderables, like why is there suffering.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Empty Bells
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
We are constantly formulating statements for the present. These are smothered in language and are meaningless and inconclusive parts of a debate that may or may not matter in the long run. Nobody listens to anything except when it agrees with their own prejudice.
Merton, 03-02-66 Journal (Paraphrased)
Sometimes I think I should just live detached from the political world. I dream from time to time of uncoupling the TV and the internet and just reading books for information. Books to be read must be at least 25 years and thus by their mere continued presence on the book shelf at the public library show their worth. Oh, they must be dog eared and smudged showing active reading by previous patrons. If a book is of some age and is still being read then maybe it does have worth. Nonfiction of course is preferred we are talking about ideas here. However some fiction will be considered. This would be because as is well known some ideas were so powerful their statement had to be crafted in fiction to allow their dissemination without the author being impaled for being a heretic.
We are constantly formulating statements for the present. These are smothered in language and are meaningless and inconclusive parts of a debate that may or may not matter in the long run. Nobody listens to anything except when it agrees with their own prejudice.
Merton, 03-02-66 Journal (Paraphrased)
Sometimes I think I should just live detached from the political world. I dream from time to time of uncoupling the TV and the internet and just reading books for information. Books to be read must be at least 25 years and thus by their mere continued presence on the book shelf at the public library show their worth. Oh, they must be dog eared and smudged showing active reading by previous patrons. If a book is of some age and is still being read then maybe it does have worth. Nonfiction of course is preferred we are talking about ideas here. However some fiction will be considered. This would be because as is well known some ideas were so powerful their statement had to be crafted in fiction to allow their dissemination without the author being impaled for being a heretic.
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