Friday, July 30, 2010

Be Ginger Rogers, or, How to Talk to Widows and Others in Grief

I am here today, dear listener, to help you better understand how to talk to a person who has had someone very close to them die.  It is not an easy task because everyone who mourns mourns differently and has different needs from their social encounters. I offer you this suggestion: be Ginger Rogers. Ginger Rogers did all that great dancing with Fred Astair, but in high heels and backwards and with a smile on her face.

This means that the person in mourning is Fred Astair to your Ginger.  And you need to follow their lead, hyper aware of every nuance of the encounter: listen closely to what the person is saying and try to discern where they want the conversation to go: are they pushing here, pulling there.  I cannot emphasize enough the need to mindful of the direction they are taking you, not the direction you want to take them.

I say this because two and a half years ago we learned that my husband had cancer and in October of 2009 he died.  And because he was well liked by many in our large circle of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, there was a tremendous outpouring of support and sympathy from the Michiana community.  But at times this outpouring became almost too much for us to bear, for every time we went to the grocery store for months afterwards, even as recently as last month, we would run into people who hadn’t seen us since he died and who were eager to express their sympathy.  This may sound cold, but we had been living with the illness and death for so long, and often we would run into two, three, four people we knew at the grocery store who would, of course, want to know how we were doing, and we just didn’t have the energy to keep condoling every time we went out.

We craved normality and a break from our sadness.  We just wanted to go to the grocery store and have it be a fun outing.  Instead, the face of almost everyone we ran into fell when they saw us.  I so appreciated the friends who followed my lead when I chirped that we were doing great and who didn’t press us with a second, more serious, “But how are you all doing.” The middle of the produce section was not the place that I want to perform my dance of grief, describing my insomnia (or worse, my children’s insomnia) or the crushing pain that feels as if it is reducing my bones and organs to the ashes that my husband’s body has become when the enormity of his absence does sometimes compute for me and I feel utterly bereft.

Going out in public became particularly difficult for my children.  To be reminded continually of their loss, to be asked constantly to condole and grieve, to have friends only be sad with them became extremely trying and they would often excuse themselves from these conversations.

We began complaining too much about this until we started reminding ourselves that this wouldn’t be happening if so many people did not truly care about us.  This became my mantra to myself and my children until one day I finally realized that these friends were also grieving Scott’s loss, that they missed him and were working through their grief as well, a grief they had in common with us.

So, what to do?  Be Ginger Rogers, beginning with my friend April’s advice: smile warmly and say “It’s good to see you,” or make some other positive acknowledgment of the person before you instead of the loss surrounding them.  Save the grief talk for a private moment. or, better yet, write a note to your friend.  My favorite notes, the ones I absolutely treasure, are those from people who described how evident Scott’s love was for me.

Sometime this past spring I read a letter in the newspaper from a woman who complained that no one in her community would talk to her about her husband’s death, not even when she would bring up the topic.  I was immediately struck by the very opposite experience this woman was having.  But then I realized that she had lost her husband twice, both in her home and in her community.  I have the solace of knowing that if I need to talk about Scott or my pain, there are so many of you out there ready and willing to dance that dance with me.  In high heels and backward.

Broadcast by Elizabeth Van Jacob on July 30, 2010 • WVPE's Audio Archive
Community • Customs & Rituals • Family & Friends • Permalink • Printer Friendly

Friday, July 16, 2010

The Staff of Life

We were looking at old snapshots, the kind where the color is already fading, and even a few that have come down to us in black and white. There were classic fishing trips at Midwestern reservoirs, with the men walking up from the dock after a brisk morning of casting lures into misty coves; there were backyard reunions with cousins flocking around picnic tables covered with potluck bounty. My wife pointed out how thin most of the relatives were. There were exceptions, of course, but most of my aunts and uncles, people who were born in the 1920s and 30s and 40s, looked average back then but they were, by today’s standards, not just fit but absolutely skinny. Most of us, myself included, don’t look that way now, and we don’t need a government-sponsored study to tell us what we can see with our own eyes: in the intervening years something dramatic happened to our diet and our way of life, and we don’t quite know what to do about it.

Sure, hard economic conditions helped keep folks slender in the old days. In I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith’s beautiful 1948 novel about love and family life in tough times, the young hero, seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain, comes to expect that a skimpy Depression-era bread-and-butter snack will stand in place of a proper evening meal, and even the hearty butter she knew growing up has been economized away in favor of pale, unsightly and unsatisfying margarine. At least the bread is still good traditional British bread. “I thank heaven,” she says, “there is no cheaper form of bread than bread.”

And yet of course we now know that there is. For there is no cultural expression, no fundamental human need, that cannot be cheapened; there is nothing so central to our life that somebody won’t try to get rich by hawking an adulterated version.  No cheaper form of bread than bread? Sure, there is. You know what aisle it’s in over at your local grocery store. Maybe a pale, insubstantial loaf of it rests on the counter now, not far from your radio and your coffee pot. There’s one at our house.

For in the years since the publication of Dodie Smith’s novel, we have come to accept and perhaps even enjoy emptier and emptier foods. We should be able to create better lives as easily as we slide into these more impoverished ones, but we don’t. Why is that? How did we debase something so central as bread, the very staff of life?

The writer Karl Kraus talked about “baking bread from bread crumbs,” and by that he meant a society gathering up its scraps and crumbs and second-rate goods and cynically assembling them into barely acceptable facsimiles of the real thing and selling them off. Just think of any mediocre situation comedy on television, recycling the same little stories and jokes until the viewers are left snoring on their couches, and you know what it means to bake bread from bread crumbs. Doesn’t that sound tasty?

But let’s not berate ourselves for having become a passive society that feeds itself badly. Instead, let’s look around at our resources. Right now, today, Michiana’s farmer’s markets are filling up with real tomatoes and sweet corn. We’ve got community gardeners all around the neighborhood, socializing and getting good exercise and eating well, and folks who buy a weekly share of organic produce from nearby farms. There are people growing vegetables in little patches even in their front yards. All the color that drained out of those old snapshots, all the taste and good taste that drained out of our lives, is still there for the harvesting.

Broadcast by Ken Smith on July 16, 2010 • WVPE's Audio Archive
Family & Friends • Food • Health • Home & Garden • Permalink • Printer Friendly

Friday, June 11, 2010

Glimpses (Courtesy of the French Secret Service)

Every once in a while we get glimpses, or that’s what I call them, anyway. Glimpses of human nature or of the hidden workings of society, glimpses of how the world actually operates. One of these glimpses came my way courtesy of the French Secret Service. In the summer of 1981 I was a college kid bumming around Europe. I ended up in Chartres on the day the president of France was coming there to enjoy a concert. It was to be the Berlioz Requiem Mass performed in the fabulous medieval cathedral. That afternoon I walked through town with an American from the youth hostel. On one long avenue a few people gathered here and there to wave to the presidential motorcade. My buddy and I paused to check it out.

Soon, in the distance, we spotted the motorcade moving at highway speeds into the center of Chartres. François Mitterand travelled in style, with six motorcycles in front, then three or four sharp black limousines, and another peppy squad of motorcycles right behind. On the cycles little flags flapped and lights flashed and the darkened windows of the cars masked the president’s location. My buddy opened his backpack and pulled out an immaculate white gym sock that sagged with the weight of something mysterious within. The motorcade was nearly upon us, and if you had asked me, I would have said we were alone on our stretch of sidewalk.

But before my acquaintance could slip his hand down into the white sock for the thing that was hiding there, from out of nowhere two sturdy men in street clothes appeared and muscled him by the arms while a third man grabbed the sock. I could see the lump more clearly now—something the size and shape of an apple, perhaps, or a hand grenade. The third secret service man reached into the sock and extracted a silvery-gray object. It was the fellow’s fancy little camera.

In those few seconds, the motorcade zipped by and disappeared down the road. The camera was back in the hands of my youth hostel buddy, too late to use, and by the time he turned to me and said “What was that?” the secret service men had vanished. In 1981, a year marred by terrorism, this was my glimpse into the workings of the world. But that night in the cathedral, I considered the little bomb that could have been lurking in the sock.  I thought, also, of two US Marines I had seen guarding the American embassy in Paris, each man as serious as the machine gun he held in his hands. There was a magical passage in the Berlioz music that night where four brass bands join the orchestra and the symphonic choir, each playing from different parts of the cathedral, different points of the compass, and all the layers of music weaving together in the air. The composer’s meditation on human frailty, the fine stonework soaring above us, the patient apprenticeship of all those musicians, the attentive hearts of the audience members, the heavy weapons and the will to use them, the secret service, the dead who bore witness beneath the cathedral floor, the kaleidoscopic glass that filtered sunlight each morning into the shapes that speak of God: No single one of these was enough to explain the thing I glimpsed that day or heard that evening. We were, all of us under the stone arches, all of us under the arc of moon and sun, we were all of us meaner and richer than any name I could have given.

Broadcast by Ken Smith on June 11, 2010 • WVPE's Audio Archive
Arts & Entertainment • Peace & War • Travel • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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A random pick from more than 400 Michiana Chronicles -- refresh the browser to see another set:

April Lidinsky -- Learning to Shut Up / Learning to Dance / In Defense of a Bad Lawn / Skirting the Issue / Mind Games / Girl Culture Shock / Where the Floods Carry Us / A Taste for History / Dancing for our Lives / The Allure of Youth Culture / Grace on the Journey / More essays by April

Jeff Nixa -- Kayaking a Great Lake / Black Ice / A Hybrid Awakening / Hunting Rhinoceros in Intensive Care / Humor in the Hospital / Walking In the Middle of the Street / Daddy Daughter Dance / Alley Dogs / Kid’s Triathlon / Chair Massage / Vision Quest / More essays by Jeff

Ken Smith -- Kids At The Pool / The Big-Spending Month of December / Turtle Lamps and Other Gifts / Pirates and Piercings / Santa’s Helicopter / The Last Morning of Summer / Veterans and Violence / Opinion Polls, Common Sense, and the Pleasures of Reading Essays / The New Old-Fashioned Mower / Putting Away Childish Things / Far Away Family / More essays by Ken

Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- Feelin’ Cranky, But Trying to Remain Civil / Heading Toward the Finish Line / One Thing A Day / Grubbing in the Dirt / Pollyanna Grows Despondent / Location, Location, Location / The Conundrum of Snow / Getting Together / Celebrating Magna Charta Day / Boomers Going Bust / Speaking Periodically / More essays by Jeanette

Heather Curlee Novak -- Feeding Willard / Humbled Handless / Running Music / Celebration / More essays by Heather

David James -- The Family Dogs / Christmas Eve, 1971 / More essays by David

Elizabeth Van Jacob -- It Was a Dark and Stormy Morning / Chronicle of a Death Told in Facebook Postings / Be Ginger Rogers, or, How to Talk to Widows and Others in Grief / Driving On / More essays by Elizabeth

Joe Chaney -- The Dogs of Europe / Swinging States / The Blackout of 2003 / Who Gets to Drive? / The Artist’s Clock / The Call of the Sandhill Cranes / The Nursing Home / My Years in the Injustice Factory / My New Year’s Ritual / Living in the Digital World / Diversity and Dialogue / More essays by Joe

Louise Collins -- Flora vs. Fauna / Of Minds and Machines / My Beef with Eating Meat / Angst and Upholstery / Holiday Lights / Checking My Change / Junk Mail and Me / Spring Makeovers / A Stroll Around The Zoo / Revisiting the Past / You Ain’t Nothin’ But A Groundhog / More essays by Louise

Jonathan Nashel -- Stray Gloves / Trick or Treat, Hoosiers! / A Death in the Family / Elvis is in the House / George W. Bush, the Movie / Women’s Football Comes to Michiana / It’s a Long, Long, Road from May to December / Talking to the Government / Taking Stock / Hitting the Road / When Students Decide to Tell You the Truth / More essays by Jonathan