Day 23 Reflection: Dust

I associate dust with death. It must be my Roman Catholic upbringing and the rites of Ash Wednesday: Remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return. I prefer my father’s tongue-in-cheek version: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; if the Good Lord don’t get you, the Devil must.

The Biblical metaphor does capture a truth: Life does come from dust. Dust contains numerous forms of tiny life: mites, bacteria, mold spores, plus specks of amino acids. The primordial ooze that begat the first life on earth was dust mixed with water for life.

When I die, I want to be cremated and scattered in a peaceful garden. I want to become nutrients for the grass and flowers. I want to scatter in the wind, become one with the soil.

I cannot think of a better thing to be than dust.

Day 9 Reflection: Acceptance

“It is what it is.” This phrase has always bugged me, because I want to fix things. I want to make things happen. I want to be in charge of my destiny. All I need are some affirmations and I can —

Sometimes, it turns out, I can’t.

Sometimes I don’t have the energy to put more effort into something to influence the outcome. I give what I can, and then I accept that I’ve done the best I can, and I take my needed rest. I find this with my writing career, which thus far has not taken off. Because I have a full time job which supports my family, I cannot devote myself to full-time writing, so I write as much as I can and then accept my time and energy limitations.

Sometimes I don’t have the power to change reality, and I have to accept it. I cannot bring a loved one back to life. I can’t reverse a layoff. All I can do is accept and mourn and adapt.

Sometimes, though, it’s dangerous to accept things as they are. Injustices may be too large for me alone to solve, but that doesn’t mean I should dismiss them with “It is what it is”. I have limited power to change others’ minds or to change society, but I must address what I can rather than accept. I accept that I can’t change the world, but I try, and I listen to those who face the injustice so my energies go in a helpful direction and are not wasted.

At the end of the day, “it is what it is” … for now.

A little of what I’ve been writing today from Prodigies.

After what seemed to be a dozen iterations of the plan and all our roles — Ayana and Weissrogue as the elderly couple, Ichirou and I as the starstruck lovers, Greg infiltrating the sound system — it was time to sleep and reconvene early in the morning. I talked everyone into letting me use the hide-a-way couch in the living room, given that I didn’t think I would sleep much. This left Ayana with Greg (another of my motives) and Ichirou with Weissrogue.

As I had predicted, I didn’t sleep. Every significant event of my journey to this moment unfolded in my mind: The invitation to Poland. Finding Ichirou, looking helplessly young in the darkened room as he spun the most comforting moment I’d had in my life. The uneasy dinner with Second World Renewal; our escape down the fire escape and into the old city of Krakow. The waiter, who ended up being Greg, and our journey with Ayana from Poland to Denmark, chased by Second World’s men. After a hiatus, Ayana returning with a much more mature Ichirou, and our confrontation with someone’s — someone’s men. My death —

That was what bothered me, what kept me from sleeping. I was not afraid to die because I had died already.

I had died already, and I knew what to expect. My death was a comforting place, deep indigo and silver, and a place I yearned to go back to. I didn’t want to die again, really; I just wanted to go back there. Especially tonight, with all the times we fled going through my mind like a video montage.
I thought about the place, the silver-laced grass and the rabbit, my parents walking past me. My death.

No, I wasn’t scared.

I fell asleep and dreamed of that place, deep purple with silvery leaves that ruffled in the breeze. I lay down in the grass, and the rabbit nestled next to me. My parents did not cross the hill, nor did Ichirou come, and a touch of loneliness marred my meditative state.

Then the rabbit hopped up to my face and chided me. “Do you think you can live here forever?”
“I could, rabbit,” I breathed. “Here I would never have to deal with being rejected. Death won’t reject me.”

“Death won’t nurture you, either. If you stay for long enough here, you will never grow any more than you have now. You will never develop your talent, and you will never be loved or nurtured again.”

“I’ve never been nurtured, and I’m not sure I’ve been loved. My parents farmed me out to music schools, and I don’t know if they were in league with the Renaissance movement. And I never will know.” I sat up, not questioning that a bunny spoke to me, because this was my dream.

“What about Przymeslaw? What about your traveling companions? What about Ichirou? And Dr. DeWinter?” The rabbit washed his face with his paws.

“I don’t know who’s side DeWinter is on. For all I know, she’s part of Renaissance. I don’t trust anyone from Interlochen now.”

“Trust somebody. You need something to pull you out from this place or else you’ll be always in danger, like Ichirou. I’d point out, though, that he’s less in danger than you are, because he’s reached a hand out from his place. Have you reached a hand out from yours?” And with that, the rabbit wandered off, sniffing the silvery grass as he bounced away.

I woke up to find Ichirou standing over me grinning ruefully. “May I come in? I can’t get to sleep.”
I held my hand out to him and we cuddled until we created space for each other.

Memorials

My cousin Francis died
in the river he walked into;
he left behind a family
who had only wondered when.

My mother, on her deathbed,
demanded from a priest
that the Church apologize to her;
she gave it absolution.

When my grandfather died,
the children didn’t mourn him;
they laid one unspoken secret
with the casseroles at dinner

These stories are their testimony;
these stories are the flowers
I’ve laid upon their graves.

Eulogy of My Husband’s Mother, Whom I’ve Never Met

My mother-in-law died a week ago at 83 from complications of uterine cancer. I will go with Richard to Kansas for a memorial service in March — possibly March 17, our wedding anniversary.
This seems oddly fitting, because Dorothy Steffens died believing her only son had never married. I will meet Dorothy for the first time at the internment.

Obviously, there is a story behind this. Dorothy Steffens suffered from mental illness and dementia. She was, Richard said, alternately demanding, doting, and delusional during his childhood. Richard was the only son of a Chinese mother and her farming husband, so he got more of his share of the doting — even smothering — behavior. His sisters weren’t as favored.

Dorothy became a divisive character in any household she lived in, setting spouse against spouse with frightening accuracy. Her cognitive decline added to her emotional turbulence, complicated by Type 2 diabetes and poor self-care. Soon the sisters realized that the only way Dorothy could be cared for was to place her in a nursing home.

In the nursing home, Dorothy became fixated on a savior who would sweep her from the nursing home and take care of her forever. At one point she had targeted the doctor at the home. When Richard and I were planning our wedding, however, she had pegged her own son as her knight in shining armor.

Which is why, when Richard sent her a wedding invitation, Dorothy tried to break out of the nursing home to stop the upcoming wedding.

Richard’s sister Linda called Richard — “How could you send Mom a wedding invite?” Richard had assumed that he should give his mother another chance to be the mother he’d wanted; it hadn’t worked that time either. It was agreed that Richard would fly down to Texas and assure his mother that he had broken up with me.

Of course I had fantasies that I would meet his mother and that she would bless our marriage. On the other hand, I am pragmatic, so I sent Richard to Texas to break us up in the eyes of his mother.

I had never met Dorothy E. Steffens when she died. She never knew I had married her only son. From all accounts, she would have tried to break apart our marriage either before or after the fact, and she might well have succeeded.

Strangely, though, I think I understand her. Sometimes, a child grows up in desperation — perhaps during the Chinese-Japanese battles of WWII — and no amount of safety or security will be enough. Because there’s never enough love, never enough food, never enough reassurance, the child demands more and more. The child who struggles with mental illness loses bits and pieces of their safety to the disease and needs even more to cling onto, and it’s never there because we don’t understand the broken glass of their perception.

Plague, Pestilience, and Papulomacular Rash

In honor of having the pestilence on my face named — it’s an adenovirus, related to a cold of all things, in one of its less common manifestations — I will spend a moment talking about all sorts of pestilence a writer can infect their characters with.

I’ll start with smallpox. Smallpox is a disease you don’t want to have. If the high fever doesn’t end your life, the chance of toxemia, or toxic reaction to the viral load, could. Only 30% of people who contract smallpox die, but what if someone genetically tinkered with it so that the fatal form, malignant smallpox, resulted 100% of the time? Smallpox doesn’t exist in the wild anymore, having been eradicated recently through vaccinations. There are, however, stores of the virus in government research labs throughout the world, who endeavor to create better vaccines using smallpox in case of biological warfare. Unless they’re planning biological warfare themselves. Hmmmm…..

If the book is set in an earlier time period, dysentery might be the disease the doctor ordered. Dysentery is an intestinal disease which causes bloody diarrhea, and it can be caused by bacteria, viruses, or amoebas. Malnutrition and dehydration are the causes of death. If death by diarrhea sounds strange, remember that it’s the largest cause of death in the world. For those of you who played Oregon Trail, this is the disease that killed you many times. If the writer wants a messy, smelly death carried by contaminated water, this or cholera will fit the bill.

Tuberculosis and leprosy (related diseases, as it turns out) aren’t what they used to be. In ways, these diseases functioned opposite to each other in literature. Leprosy spared the victim’s life but disfigured them due to numbness and subsequent injury, and made them a pariah. Tuberculosis drove romantic figures to an early coughing death while making them more attractive in their frailty and pallor. Nowadays, both are easily treated; we only see the dramatic forms of these diseases these days in Edwardian/Victorian romance (tuberculosis) and in travel/adventure novels (leprosy).

Influenza doesn’t seem to get written much about. Possibly because we usually get it and get better. But the flu killed a lot of people — and still kills people. People actually die from complications from the flu, such as immune system hyperactivity, an opportunistic disease, or organ failure. The only place this disease creates much drama is in the regret that one couldn’t talk to a loved one before they died an unexpected death.

Cancer, as a slower disease, usually allows characters to interact with the victim before they die. In fact, it’s often portrayed in literature as being a “pretty” death, much like tuberculosis used to be. In actuality, cancer is often a messy death, involving stages of dying from less talkativeness to coma to death rattle to death. Characters facing death by cancer also get portrayed as beings that have already ascended into the afterlife, only their bodies haven’t caught on. Gleefully pursuing their bucket lists from a wheelchair, they dispense truisms to their unlucky earthbound brethren. There are people like this (watch Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture — he’s genuinely this enlightened by ensuing mortality), but there are also people who fight every step, there’s people who detail every pain they’re feeling, and there’s my mom — who demanded that the Catholic Church apologize for her abuse by nuns. (She only got as far as a chaplain, but he apologized).

Authors kill off characters. It’s one of the ugly realities of writing. My schtick, I guess, is that we should kill off characters as realistically as possible, to capture the humanity within humiliating, messy death.

Death, from a writing standpoint

Death and the events that surround it are dramatic, mysterious, tragic, chilling, transcendental, tumultuous, and sometimes even humorous. This presents perfect fodder for fiction and screenplays:

Death confronts our fears in a way little else does, because as a whole, we are afraid of death. Edgar Allan Poe confronted our fears of a slow, lingering death in The Cask of the Amontillado, while today’s Saw series does much the same service. Dickens’ A Christmas Carol tells as much about Scrooge’s fear of death as it is about his callous miserliness.

In fantasy, death is not always permanent. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer both use a literary device where the hero (Gandalf/Yukon Cornelius), dies while fighting the monster (the Balrog/The Abominable Snowman), and then return alive later in the action while the others mourn them. Meanwhile, in the Star Wars series, the Jedis of movies past arrive as ghosts to guide the hero. These plot twists indulge our wish that our heroes and mentors will always be there for us.

Sometimes rebirth becomes a horror. Zombies, golems, vampires, and Frankenstein’s monster remind us of what happens when we go against nature. Both golems and Frankenstein’s monsters are said to have represented fear of technology, zombies today represent tear of contagion, and the Victorian vampire represented fear of sexuality and in today’s Vampire Chronicles represent gay culture. All of these items were regarded as vectors of death, and in all but the Zombie example, they simply represented societal forces for change — which felt like death to some.

We consider constructs of Heaven and Hell in writing. From the Hell of Dante’s Inferno to the movie What Dreams May Come to the proven fictitious God is Real, we test our notions and hopes and fears about the afterlife, because even Hell is preferable to many than the eternal lack of existence. An afterlife is also easier to write about than the eternal lack of existence, I would add.

Death tests the survivors. In the book Ordinary People, a family falls apart when one son dies and the surviving son attempts suicide. At least two Agatha Christie mysteries deal with the murder of a patriarch and a contested will.

I write about death, of course. Right now I’m wearing a t-shirt that says, “You’re dangerously close to getting killed off in my next novel.” Do writers ever symbolically kill off their enemies in their novels? I don’t really know about other people, but that shady handsy folksinger from my past got obliterated by the preternatural bad guy in Gaia’s Hands.

When we talk about death, we really talk about fear, because we are the survivors. Fear of the unknown, fear of change, fear of non-existence, fear of disillusion, fear of discord in our families. It’s no accident I’m writing this the day after Christmas, which represents hope in much of the world.

Waiting

The most mundane of waits: A woman sits in the grimy, poorly-lit waiting lounge of the car repair shop, which consists of two cracked leather and chrome chairs next to a haphazard pile of hunting magazines. She glances at the coffee pot whose contents have burned to the bottom of the carafe. Finding no interest in Field and Stream, she pulls out her smartphone and gazes at it, grimacing.

A peevish wait: The teen paces, checks her watch again, scowling. Fifteen minutes late. She plops on the couch, which protests with a squeak of springs. She pulls out her phone, checks her voice mail, her e-mail, her messages. Nothing. She plays Words with Friends for a few minutes, checking her voice mail, her e-mail, and her messages in breaks. Nothing. She checks her watch again and sighs, kicking her heels off. Half an hour late, no messages — she’d been stood up.

Lovers wait: She looked out the window of the train as they passed the projects, tall and bleak with tiny windows, scorch blossoming from some, boards blocking the view of others. Past the projects, graffiti bloomed on the smoky walls of brick factories, the quick iconic scrawls interspersed with vibrant murals, all furtively sketched in the night. Then Chinatown, with its bold, ornate gate and glimpse into the ordered chaos of the outdoor market. The train stopped and moved backward, readying itself to start the maneuver to back into the station. At the station, the woman’s lover waited, lean and energetic and foolish in love with her, edgy like the city itself. She smiled.

Waiting for the end: Her mother lay dying, hooked up to monitors, scratching her bruised hand repeatedly and murmuring that something bit her, that there were bugs all over her. Her father, exasperated, reassured her mother that there were no bugs. It was not the tiny cancer in her mother’s brain that was killing her — it was the pneumonia, and her body’s inability to hold onto sodium. It was never the cancer that killed; cancer only disrupted.

Friday: The week had been rough. So close to the end of the semester, students groused about everything, gathering around her like a flock of geese pecking at her, demanding this and that. And she greeted them, calmly answering their questions instead of lashing out at veiled insults. It was not their fault, she reasoned; they were very stressed from proving themselves and falling short, and it wasn’t unusual for students to have external locus of control toward their failures, blaming outside forces. Still, Friday couldn’t come soon enough, and she would relax with a glass of wine in a totally silent living room.

Anticipation: The pristine layer of snow, the glow of her heart, whispered that something, something good, was coming. She didn’t know if it was a little or big thing, if it would make her day or change her life. She wondered if an attack of bliss, of transcendental, edgy bliss, was about to descend on her as it had in the past. She hoped not — she hoped that this time it would be good without the price to pay.

A child’s wait: Tucked in bed, the little girl keeps one eye open, waiting for a change in the air, a trickle of magic that feels like tingles and kittens, that will tell her Santa has arrived. The eye closes, and she falls asleep next to her sister.

To my Mother, after all these years.

My mother died a little less than ten years ago, six months after she got me married off. If the last sentence left you wondering, my mother always despaired of me ever marrying because, in my father’s words, “[I] … believed in unicorns”. Dad’s statement exaggerated the case, but I did (and still do to some extent) feel more comfortable in fantasy than in real life.

I believe I got my love of unicorns honestly. My mother decorated the house every Christmas until it resembled a Mary Engelbreit print. She possessed a wardrobe that she collected to wear to the perfect setting, someday, creating the perfect scenario in her mind (some of those clothes still had tags on them when she died.) She created — from sketches of pin-ups while she spoke on the phone to tantalizing dishes for dinner to embroidery projects that owed more to poster art than they did fuzzy cross-stitches of kittens.

Mom created personas — the bold, outrageous woman who hung out in the bar after work; the confident employee who got promoted past her comfort level at the Census Bureau; the slightly hassled mother who nonetheless kept up a witty conversation with my sister’s classmates. Sometimes, however, my mother would show me who she really was: a bewildered woman who never knew if people around her loved her or loved her personas — her chosen, not real, selves.

My mother couldn’t give me what I needed, because she couldn’t give it to herself. She could not give me acceptance of who I was, the student the teachers praised to the point of embarassment; the moody teen who fell in love (unrequited) again and again; the child who looked in the mirror and saw only her own obesity. I grew up with the sense of not-okayness that my mother did.

In the end, illness stripped my mother of all her personas — she grew weak and gaunt. She fell to the ground when trying to walk. She could not see well. The medication caused occasional hallucinations and uncensored commentary. But in dying, she became herself, and she was magnificent. She planned Christmas from a hospital bed (she would not make it) and picked out the jewelry she would wear. She requested (almost demanded) that a priest apologize for the emotional abuse the Church had committed. And her last words to me were: “Go out and have some fun.”

Happy Mother’s Day, Patricia Louise (Hollenbeck) Leach.

Death and the Writer Part 2: Essay to prose

I decided that, in the interest of “showing, not telling”, I would quickly take one paragraph of the previous essay and make it more storylike:

After the internment, the crowd reconvened at the local chicken joint, a meal paid for by the deceased.

*****
Just as raindrops began to fall, we parked our car outside of Chicken Mary’s, an iconic restaurant outside of Pittsburg, KS. Richard opened his car door at the same time as a frail white-haired woman who walked with two canes had; Richard pulled his door back quickly.

“I really have to go,” the woman cackled as she climbed out of the car. “With a crowd this old, all we do is go to the bathroom. Better prepare for a line.”

On the front door, a hastily scrawled note announced, “Private party only. Restaurant opens at four.” So Aunt Norma had arranged a private party for us, then.

Inside, I noticed that Chicken Mary’s hadn’t bothered much with the indoor decor. Dark paneling, occasional random items decorating the wall, wagon wheel chandeliers, a wrought iron fireplace placed in a narrow aisle where it could never be used lest it set the servers on fire.

A couple tall, rangy women with shirts with the Chicken Mary’s logo embroidered over the left breast circulated around the tables, formica and metal, to collect drink orders.

I sat down next to a plump, white haired woman who was probably Richard’s aunt, given that she looked like two others in the room. She hugged me and said, “Didn’t Norma look beautiful in her coffin?”

I recognized this as a place where the truth would not be welcome. “Yes,” I said, “she looked lovely.”