Death's Anniversary

Seems to have been a sweep of the malach hamavet (Angel of Death) in my hood the past few weeks. We're hearing eulogies about people we never expected would fail to make it to their next birthday parties, and it is a little scary. There's something about winter, too, that makes death all the more sad, all the more gray and gloomy.

Therapy is always rich, should be at least, and when a young patient walks in and looks you in the eye and says, "They killed my father in the hospital," you know you're in for angry, pathos-driven story. People go to the hospital because they are sick, some are literally at death's door. Then the slightest error, or fate, or something somehow goes awry, and there we have it, the worst of all possible outcomes.

We could have kept him home for this, they say.

Most of the time it isn't that cut and dried, the fault, the blame. The parents of kids who overdose, for example, never let it go, the thought that they could have done something. They rarely blame anyone else. It is clear, in their heads, that they messed up somewhere along the way. There's no convincing them otherwise, not for that first decade. Time helps, hushes the self-badgering to a whisper. Death and Time, clearly in collusion, buddies.

This happens to be the 43rd anniversary of my brother's untimely death, and the third anniversary of my father's. They died on the same day of the Hebrew calendar. There's no blaming anyone for either passing. Every year, not surprisingly, like clockwork, like most others who have lost loved ones, the week or two before Death's anniversary, I begin to sink. I told someone the other day that the word is pensive, thoughtful, mindful of the meaning of the life of someone who can't answer our questions anymore.

That's what anniversaries are about, thoughts and memories.

And thoughts, we know, are intrinsically tied to emotions, so there you go.

So we light a candle on the anniversary, or two in my case, and say a few special prayers, share a few memories with people who remember.

The memory that comes to my mind is how my father reacted when he saw me dressed up for a wedding.

Last week I bought a new dress for the upcoming marriage of my youngest son. Out of nowhere, driving home from Lord and Taylor, I pictured my father looking at me in the dress with approval, with love, the sight of me a reflection of him, for sure, but warm and happy nevertheless.

My father loved nothing more than this, a celebration for something truly worth celebrating. He loved putting on his tuxedo and dancing, gracefully, at somebody's wedding.

And to be honest, I loved that tux.

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The Importance of Transgenerational

You know, it's all so fresh. I went to a conference last week, a really good one, and three-quarters into it realized my family had buried my father only two weeks past to the hour. I have no idea what happened in the third quarter of the presentation.

Later today somebody called me, left voicemail for me to call back. I totally thought it was about business, but all he wanted was to call, to see how I'm doing. That just threw me.

My dreams scare me.

I go through the usual words with people: It's hard. I find myself crying at nothing. I have a headache. I'm cold. I have a stomach ache. (Somaticizing isn't hard, but it is an art).

And it's very different, not what I would have thought it would be.
You get a break and it comes back. You're surprised every time.

Heck, I had four months to get used to the idea that my father was living on borrowed time, and we had some very intimate moments. Dying is very intimate if you share it, and it occurs to me that maybe some people have an extended dying just so they can be intimate.

Probably we can never be prepared, can never predict what it will be like, no matter the type of relationship we have had with a parent. If you take a hit, you shouldn't be surprised, and if you don't, it's okay. The books on death and dying recommend that if possible, grieve as a family. Discuss your different trajectories, mark important days, discuss memories. Let the emotions roll. And spread it out, talk to all kinds of people if you feel like it.

Meanwhile, here I am at work as if nothing has happened and it really feels this way at the moment. Gotta' love the brain.

A follow-up on eulogies:

I started out mine about my father admitting that before writing the eulogy I looked up the rules of eulogies in one of the rule books. There, in black and white and a little Hebrew, it said:

You can exaggerate. Not that much, but if there's a question, you can. You can err on the side of the positive.

Now this is incredibly important information. I don't know anyone who can't stand to be idealized a little bit in life or death, do you?

A story:

A man was dying. He had lived a full life but was clearly, undoubtedly, beleaguered with not one personality disorder, but with features of several. He hoarded, he was narcissistic, he stole on occasion, and his jealousy was completely, totally irrational, bordered on psychotic at times.

His son, let's call him Eugene, went to the funeral of a friend's father. His friend spoke glowingly of the deceased, tearfully, and as Eugene listened, he panicked.

"I'm ____ed," he moaned. "What in the world am I going to say about my father? My father was such a nothing compared to this guy. So selfish! And he's not going to make it through the year! He could die any day now!"

Eugene went home and quickly wrote a eulogy emphasizing whatever good he could find in his father's life. The focus was entirely on his father's good qualities, and he made some of the bad sound comical, not dysfunctional.

When the time came, when his father died, Eugene stood up in front of the crowd at the chapel and delivered a wonderful eulogy, had people in tears of laughter and love, and everyone said what a wonderful man his father must have been.

Eugene didn't know what to do, didn't want to correct anyone who said, Your father sounds like he was such a wonderful man. You were so lucky to have had him; what a wonderful family it must have been to grow up in. So he would disclose just a little now and then.

"My father was difficult," he might say. Or, "You couldn't correct my father, if you did he would call you stupid."

But this bothered him, made him feel guilty, besmirching the name of the dead, his father, the man who gave him life, for better or for worse. So he stopped it and let the positives of his dad's life eclipse the negatives. He could talk about the truth with his wife and his mother, for they knew this man. They grieved who he hadn't been, too, and their emotions were plenty rich. With others, however, he took one for the team.

He found that he was really angry and his anger wouldn't quit. Unable to shake it, he went to therapy. Here he learned that this is normal, being angry at someone who didn't treat you well, who could be irresponsible, difficult. Eventually he would be able to let it go, who his father really was, even forgive.

Perhaps it's not much of a story. But let me tell you how some of us would work a therapy like this, thanks, in part, to what we know about mental illness.

For sure we'd aim for acceptance while working through the full range of grieving, the sadness, the anger, the guilt, the denial, the shame-- the Kubler-Ross stages of grief. And some of us might even bring in other family members.

Family therapists will sketch out at an emotional family tree, inquire about the suicides, the mental illness, the infamous experiences in the extended family, reaching back in time. We want to know who left town and never came back, what became of the black sheep, what the norms are in the family about differentiation, and why. We inquire about how anger is expressed, and sadness, and who set these rules, and why. We want to know the meaning of success to those who are no longer living, and the meaning of failure.

To investigate, to get more of the story, patients are encouraged to interview living elderly relatives, to find photographs, letters. The job is to uncover, if possible, the good in the family, but also the mental or behavioral disorders, too, and the quirky, if not always so pleasant, personalities.

Based upon this, some of us will proffer a tentative individual diagnosis or three, defining, psychologically, members of the family who may have long since passed away, at least labeling the features. This may or may not make people feel better, but it is what it is and it's something to consider, something important to talk about, something to grieve.

"Is it genetic?" patients ask about a particular diagnosis.

We'll say yes, if we think so, or admit we don't know. Maybe, maybe not, depending upon who is fertilizing whose egg. But it's a good thing to know, isn't it, that if an ancestor has features of a disorder, that descendants might have these features as well?

For whether or not things are genetic, everything behavioral can be learned and passed down. All of us struggle with our nature, and we fight how we've been nurtured, too. Both are likely to be transgenerational, even dysfunctional in some way.

I like to think that we can fight both, that much of personality can be shaped and confronted in a nice way, and that most mental illness can be treated. We may have to change how we define success and failure.

The kicker, the part that is most difficult for many patients to buy in this psycho-educational family therapy, is that it's good to "out" our mentally ill, personality disordered, addicted relatives. Out them to the children, mainly, expose those who, dead or alive, have or had issues, or were perhaps differently-abled.

Certainly when it comes to mental illness, rather than attempt to erase a person from the family tree, own the mishigas, (rhymes with wish-ih-moss, Yiddish for craziness) and vaccinate the kids, empower them.

It's so funny. When you tell your kids about the colorful people in the family, they get it right away. And no, they don't want to be just like them. The research on self-fulfilling prophesies has always been a little light.

All that said, you don't have to roast anyone at a funeral, not unless you know your crowd.

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The Bus

That's the ski path I plowed in front of my house and the house next door.


It's snowing in Chicago. They say a picture is worth a thousand words.

I took off most of today because there's too much clutter in my life. At some point you tell yourself that your mental health deserves declutterization. My friends actually have another word that they use that we made up to describe this process of pitching things, not something I can repeat here.

And although it was great, throwing things away, I had to get to work to see my late afternoon patients. Meanwhile, the snow had been falling since eleven a.m. Driving in that stuff, parking, just the thought of snow on the windshield, makes me ill. And don't get me started about the way people drive. You can read more on that on someone else's blog.

I would have tried cross country skiing all the way here, but can't afford a fall, just can't. Sorry.

So I took the bus and am on time, but everyone else is late because of snow and traffic.

But I took the bus.

I think I've told you that I love it. Nobody likes waiting for buses, but once you're on one of these big green machines you feel instantly impenetrable. And as I'm walking to the bus I'm thinking, Hey, I could walk! But it's slippery on the sidewalks, something I learn soon after leaving the house, so why risk it.

The bus, meanwhile, is filled with happy people. Everyone is happy. Maybe it's because they're on the bus, not outside shoveling or slipping. But we're in high form here. The holidays are coming and it's so, so beautiful outside, it's not to be believed. Once I'm seated and feeling the love, I do what 90% of the world does on a bus, yank out my phone to take pictures. I think to myself, "Who will notice me taking pictures?"

I'm not aiming, just pointing my camera back, shooting random shots behind me. I see a couple of kids (above) popping up in all of them, and say to myself, "NG, no good, can't use these. What if someone recognizes them, someone they wouldn't want to recognize them. They're obviously in love."

So I raise the camera higher, and keep trying, but none of the shots are any good. And most of them have this young couple prominently, undeniably, displayed.
Then, in the last picture, I see it.

He's waving at me.

Busted.

I laugh and turn around. "I'm sorry. I just thought I'd get a couple of pics for my blog, but I keep getting you guys (I show them their pictures) and I figure that I can't expose you on a blog because someone might recognize you as a couple, and for all I know someone has forbidden your relationship, or one of you has a different, jealous partner.. . and. . .and. . "

The young woman is working on getting a word in edgewise as I struggle with words, so I finally shut up to hear her say, "It's okay, it's okay! We used to be in a relationship, but we broke up, and now. . ."

And since I'm not working, I interrupt her. "But his mother might object.. ."

This time he interrupts me, but he speaks softly and I don't hear what he says and I just roll right over him since his words aren't computing, "And your mother might object and she might get upset and you'll get into trouble.. ."

Then she interrupts, "But his mother is. . "

"What was that you had said before?" I ask him.

He smiles, his eyes are laughing, believe it or not, laughing at me. "My mother's been gone for a year now, so there's really no way she'll mind, and she wouldn't mind even if she were here. She passed away over a year ago."

Foot out of mouth, moving right along as if this is the most normal conversation I've had all day, I say,

"Uh, oh. So you've lost your mother and I'm ranting about her and how mad she will be seeing a picture of the two of you on the Internet, and now I've made you sad, and you're going to cry and I'm SO, SO, SORRY!!!!"

They both laugh at me. They think this is hysterical. Others are listening, too. Then our girl informs me with not a little authority, "And there's no way he'll cry; he doesn't cry."

He confirms. "She's right. Really. I don't cry. And you can use the picture, go ahead." And he's smiling and nodding encouragingly, and I just love him.

And she says, "Right, go ahead, it's fine. And really, don't worry. You didn't upset anyone. He never cries, he's fine, he really is"

And I love her, too, because she' maybe the nicest kid I have ever met in my life. And I say, "But he might, and he has good reason to cry, even should cry once in awhile, maybe. It's surely okay if he does and even if he doesn't, of course."

And I look into his eyes. "You're okay, really?" I ask him.

And he smiles and nods. "I'm okay really. And I won't cry if you're worried about that, about making me cry."

I shake my head in amazement. "This is amazing," I say. "This whole thing."

And they seem to agree.

Then, to be sure, I ask, "You're sure, you're a hundred percent positive that it's okay for me to post these pictures of you two on my blog, and to tell this story?"

"Sure, sure!" he smiles.

"Sure, sure!" she does, too.

Then, a lightning flash. "Where are we, anyway?" I ask.

"We're almost at _______" and she names my stop.

"Uh, oh! I have to run. I hardly ever take the bus, but I love it when I do, and I hope I see you again. Thanks so much!"

"Bye, bye," they say in unison, probably thinking I'm insane.

I walk from the bus stop back to my office thinking, What a wonderful winter we're going to have! Simply wonderful.

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