If there is a god, he sure hates people.
Kurt Vonnegut – Timequake
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That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody’s whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that being alive is a crock of shit.
Like many other times that I’ve tried to write, I’ve had a mixture of thoughts and influences stewing into what might be considered a confluence… but currently feels like a jumble. They have involved memory, grief, stories, science fiction, and this ridiculous thing we call life. Apologies in advance for being disjointed – I’ll try.
Some time last week, I listened to a podcast episode about grief and how to heal a broken heart. I’ve been listening to this podcast, Hidden Brain, for a few weeks now. It’s about a lot of different things, but especially the science of things like emotions, thinking, decision-making, gratitude, etc. etc. etc. The one on grief was both an attempt to debunk the notion of the five stages of grief, and an attempt to show how people might effectively move through the process. The guest had lost her daughter in a car accident. She was told that it would take her and her husband five years to get through it and they were prime candidates for depression, substance abuse, and divorce. The person or people telling her these things were trying to prepare her for what was to come. Of course, none of this is prescribed.
Grief is all around us – mostly because death and loss are all around us. They are necessary parts of life – even if it is a crock of shit. Every day, people lose loved ones, jobs, communities, pets, and/or their sense of place and self. I suspect every adult I know is carrying a type of grief somewhere and in some way. It may only show up at family gatherings. It may be present every day. It may make itself visible through what the podcast guest called a grief ambush – unsuspecting waves of emotion triggered by a date or sight or smell. I can remember struggling to walk through the grocery store because of a grief ambush. I have moments when I miss some aspect of my old life/lives or I miss the life I thought I would have or, or, or. Grief is often about what’s no longer present but also the disappearance of what we thought would be. Grief is pervasive enough (and we’re always getting a better understanding of it) that the most recent version of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) just added prolonged grief disorder to its list of disorders (something it doesn’t do very often).
The most grief-stricken person I’ve known was the woman to whom I had gotten engaged – she had lost her husband and mother within a month of each other. In her, I often saw the very mixed emotions grief causes… the anger, mourning, denial, and sadness. As the podcast played, the guest talked about her experiences with grief and I recognized a number of things that I’ve felt, but also witnessed. The woman in the podcast talked about how she and her husband had the chance to go to the trial of the driver who caused the car accident and they had to ask themselves, “is this going to be good or bad for our mental state?” She talked about how she would have to set her own mental boundaries – allowing herself to ask two “what if” questions, but no more. She talked about how she had to choose to be present in her current life and not her past life. This statement reminded me of the ocean-smoothed stone I was once given with those very same words – the grieving girlfriend had said she picked it up as a symbol of choosing her present life over her past life. I sometimes wonder how many times she tried to pull herself out of those what-if questions or found herself stuck in some small cyclone of memories. In that context, the fortitude, the willpower, the battle within can take on a kind of admirable beauty. Imagine a world where we could see everyone’s thought bubble that begins “today is the day I….” How many of us do this at one point or another? Tell ourselves today is the day… and maybe we succeed, and maybe we fail and maybe we give ourselves enough grace when we fail to allow for tomorrow to also be the day.
Once, while exchanging war stories of love and loss with a woman at a bar, I listened to her say, in not so many words, that maybe she’s not deserving of a good and committed relationship. She has always gotten involved with the wrong guy. As a teen, she dated a jock (which she had never done before and liked the attention) and then had gotten pregnant and had an abortion. He disappeared. She was shunned. She told me about the people who yelled at her outside of the clinic. She talked about the shame she felt from her classmates and community. She never had kids – though it sounds like she wanted them. She’s had to live with that decision every day for nearly thirty years and says not a day goes by when she doesn’t think about it. She thinks everything after, especially the failed relationships, has been a type of karmic retribution. I asked her if she could imagine a day when she won’t think about those events…. She couldn’t. I suspect she’s been living with her grief for so long that it’s become a type of familiar companion. It’s always there for her. She knows it, and it knows her.
In the novel Timequake, by Kurt Vonnegut, Monica Pepper is a secretary at the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. Her husband is a composer and a paraplegic. He was injured when Monica accidentally dove into a pool and landed on him. In the book, the space-time continuum has a hiccup and the universe briefly contacts sending everyone back ten years. Everyone has to relive ten years of their life exactly the same way as it happened the first time. Monica Pepper has to once again swan-dive onto her husband’s back. Lots of awful things will happen to lots of people a second time around… and while they have the knowledge of what will happen, they do not have the free will to change the events or the outcomes. This is, to some degree what we do when we revisit our grief. We think about what might have been done differently but are powerless to change the past. We construct worlds and scenarios in which we were kinder or more forgiving or made better (or at least different) choices. We also try to construct our future worlds as though there might be some lesson to be learned from our past mistakes….
But treating our past as a roadmap to avoid future mistakes discounts the randomness of the world. That same podcast, Hidden Brain, had also done an episode on the halo effect – which is the notion that we allow one characteristic (positive or negative) to influence our overall impression of a person, or company, or event. In this episode, the host describes a horrific accident in which a police officer was supposed to go golfing, but it was raining and he instead went to the bar. He had too many drinks, drove off, and killed a family walking across the street. He was given the maximum sentence of 15 years, and many people thought that was too light. And the challenge the host puts to the listeners is would we have sentenced him the same way had he not killed anyone. Had he done everything exactly the same, but simply been pulled over for a DUI, would we view his actions so harshly – would we still sentence him to 15 years? It’s easy to moralize about what he did wrong, but we have to acknowledge that our moralization changes because we know the outcome. While it makes us uncomfortable, it might do us well think differently about these scenarios – to not treat every success as the product of a singular effort or every failure as some function of moral deficit. In the cop’s case a whole lot of other factors played into what happened that day. And yes, he made a terrible decision and mistake, but there are other contexts to consider… if it’s not raining, he goes golfing and this doesn’t happen; if the bartender takes his keys before he gets in the car; if he gets pulled over before he hits the family; if the family leaves their house a few minutes later.
I don’t really have a way to tie these things together… and maybe that’s in keeping with the randomness of the world. Today, a man shot up a subway station in New York; a woman thinks about the abortion she had 20-30 years ago; a grieving mother allows herself two what-ifs; a widow decides today is the day I live in the present; and everyone does some sort of dance with their past in hopes of building a different future or finding their way towards something that resembles home. From the song “Four Minutes” by Roger Waters:
After a near miss on the plane
You swear you’ll never fly again
After the first kiss when you make up
You swear you’ll never break up again
And when you’ve just run a red light
Sit shaking under the street light
You swear to yourself you’ll never drink and drive again
Sometimes I feel like going home
You swear you’ll never let things go by again.
Sometimes I miss the rain and snow
And you’ll never toe the party line again
And when the east wind blows
Sometimes I feel like going home