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 23, 2010

Small-Scale Beauty

Our little family had the outrageous good fortune to travel to France this June.  Airline ticket prices were down, Europe’s conveniently crashing economy brought the dollar up, and we had lovely friends to stay with.  It was a starry alignment we just couldn’t ignore, and so off we flew to soak in the French landscape.

And the urban landscape was what struck me – the intimacy of it, the small spaces that people had just crammed with beauty.  New ideas about urban space and beauty—that was my traveler’s awakening, as powerful and altering as any dreamscape from the movie, Inception.

Here, in the US, we have space to spare – long horizons of cornfields and mesas, arm-stretching skies.  Anyone who has driven across country can recount the grandeur we have in excess in the U.S.—a stark beauty of its own.  Europe operates on a smaller scale, and people have had millennia to practice the art of tucking beauty into tiny corners, in cottages and cathedrals.  It’s a trick we could learn to make our intimate spaces hold more meaning.

For example: There is hardly a window-ledge in Paris that isn’t crowded with geraniums, layers of pink and red ruffles like a can-can dancer’s sassy underskirts. There’s barely a twisted iron balcony that isn’t studded with glazed pots in byzantine blues and mustard yellows, foaming over with periwinkle lobelia and a kaleidoscope of zinnias.  Any stone window ledge, any humble iron gate, is an opportunity to decorate with twisting roses or dahlias with their sooty stems like inky tattoos.  The crumbling reminder of history’s solemnity, everywhere, is softened, sweetened by the blossoms and vines of the living present.

This same approach applies to the French penchant for fashion, in which the sweet sliver of a woman’s neckline is always an invitation for a whisper of a cloudy scarf, and the breast pocket of a French gentleman’s Sunday strolling jacket, no matter how worn the tweed or wool, is punctuated with a hanky in jewel-toned silk.

And that famous French food – it’s not about all-you-can eat abundance, but about richness and delight in an elegantly restrained presentation.  Our first night in Paris, my daughter ordered for dessert a trio of lilliputian custards, which Phillipe, our waiter, taught us to taste in this order: un, deux, trios, Comme ça! – so subtle, so sublime … one a bitter citrus, one an almost peppery mint, and one a smoky flavor I mistook for black tea, but through stumbling French I learned it was a surprising “sesame” – a brow-furrowing toasted sesame.  Licked off the tip of a heavy silver dessert spoon, those palate-dazzling miniature custards made a singing trio, an arpeggio chord of flavor.  Small scale; deeply sensuous.  We Americans could learn.

Maybe because Europeans, like so many other world citizens, have suffered catastrophic destruction so often right on their own rooftops, the insistence on crowding their living spaces with beauty is a crucial, healing impulse.  In the rare instances when large-scale terror hits us right at home, Americans are not so good at figuring out how to memorialize and move on – witness the paralysis at the site of the World Trade Center, which remains a stunned concrete blank nearly ten years later. Without a “just move West” option for self-reinvention, Europeans have had to develop the survivalist’s artistry of remaking themselves in destroyed spaces.  So, they plant swaying hollyhocks in cracks along ancient stone buildings; they leave traces of the human desire for beauty, perfume, and loveliness against almost every crumbling slate or iron surface.

Locally, we all probably know people who are geniuses at this elegant work of making beauty in small but crucial ways.  In South Bend, a landscape architect named Jonathan Geels has just started a group called “Keep South Bend Beautiful” designed to gather aesthetically-minded activists who will be willing, soon, to weave more flowers and plants into our civic spaces. (You can join and follow the group on Facebook. I have!)

The epitome of this desire for small-scale beauty seemed to me to be manifested in the French custom of cheek-kissing as a greeting. Unlike the American handshake, which seems affable but literally keeps us at arm’s length, the French press cheeks --- softly, quickly, one side and then the other—the kiss actually lands in the air, a gift to the moment.  It’s like being grazed by a butterfly wing or the flesh of a July peach – utterly delicious, and to Americans, a surprisingly intimate gesture to share with a stranger.

And yet, it’s only an American fantasy that we live independently from one another; the BP oil disaster is a reminder that our spaces, like our fates, are as entwined as French rose vines. Why not make that proximity a thing of beauty?  Flowers, after all, are inexpensive. And kisses?  Beautifully, they’re both priceless and free.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on July 23, 2010 • WVPE's Audio Archive
Customs & Rituals • News & Editorial • Travel • 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
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A random pick from more than 460 Michiana Chronicles -- refresh the browser to see another set:

April Lidinsky -- Small-Scale Beauty / More essays by April

Joe Chaney -- More essays by Joe

Ken Smith -- The Staff of Life / More essays by Ken

Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- You Are Going to Die / More essays by Jeanette

Heather Curlee Novak -- More essays by Heather

David James -- Mourning Doves / More essays by David

Elizabeth Van Jacob -- Be Ginger Rogers, or, How to Talk to Widows and Others in Grief / More essays by Elizabeth

Jeff Nixa -- More essays by Jeff

Louise Collins -- More essays by Louise

Jonathan Nashel -- More essays by Jonathan