Henchal.com

Today was the birthday of a good friend of ours.  Someone whom my husband has known since his teens:  he was at our wedding, and he set up the interview that turned into my husband’s job for the past 15 years.  It is because of him that we moved here, where I finally found a place I could feel like I fit.

He and I and my husband had a tradition to take the afternoon off for the premier of every single one of the LOTR movies.  We made it to all six movies together.  No one ever made an excuse.

Despite knowing him for so long, I didn’t get past his façade for a long time.  He put on a front of sorts, being on the surface a hard-partying kind of guy, who dated strippers and lived fast.  So I didn’t really get to know him until a couple of years ago, when we went on a trip to Las Vegas for a reunion of sorts with a few of my husband’s other friends of that timeframe.  We had a couple of good conversations then, during which he “admitted” to us that he, too, is atheist (after which I high-fived him).  I asked him if he was conservative or progressive, and he said progressive.  I asked, how does a former military guy, raised Catholic, become progressive?  He said, “Thinking.”

I felt like we then became real friends, safe in the knowledge that we had shared values, but he spent a lot of the ensuing time in China for work.  During that Vegas weekend I said I didn’t have very many people with whom I get to have an enjoyable, intellectual conversation (not one that wasn’t an argument).  I didn’t have much chance to have more such conversations in person with my new friend, but we became friends on Facebook, and I found out we had a few more things in common.

He was more than just a friend.  He was starting to feel like family — like a brother.  He had the same name as one of my FOO brothers, too.

And then he died three months ago, very suddenly, in China, at the age of 48.

There are certain dates that are more or less etched in my memory.  January 13th.  January 30th.  March 26th.  July 18th.  August 7th.  Sibling’s birthdays.  I took them off my calendar but they are still in the back of my mind (although now I don’t usually notice the days when they actually happen, but maybe a couple of days later).

November 2nd.  I never had a chance to celebrate this new brother’s birthday with him.  Between the time I found out what it was, and the actual date, he was gone.  I feel like a heel for never asking before.

And I feel like shit for not being able to fully support my husband in his grief for his lifelong friend — especially since he just lost HIS mother this spring (actually, both my husband and our friend did).  Not having been especially close to my own mother, nor to his mother, I haven’t been great about supporting him in that loss either.  Which is particularly crap, because he tried very hard to support me when my parents died and we were both too young to know anything about grieving, let alone all the other shit that came with those losses.

But I’m too wrapped up in my own lousy baggage.  This loss, on top of everything else, seems to be too much, and I have a hard time putting my own grief aside for his.

I lost a good friend and co-worker fifteen years ago, in Texas, to a car accident — someone who I ate lunch with every weekday, and who immediately volunteered to take care of my cats, twice a day, for two solid weeks, when my husband had already left for his new job and I got word of my father’s cancer diagnosis.  Steve died in that accident while I was away on that visit.

I had an online friend in New Zealand, whom we got to meet in person when we visited there in 2008, at The Wirld’s Most Nawt Northerly Cheezemeet.  She and I shared a birthday.  Kim died of breast cancer in 2011.

I lost Morgan, my beloved cat of nearly 19 years, a couple of days after the anniversary of my father’s death.  Morgan had been a birthday present from my brother Joe (although I think he got my birthday and my sister’s mixed up because they are only a week apart.  Our birthdays were on Fridays that year, and we went the Saturday after her birthday, not the Saturday after mine).

I lost both my parents in 2001, when I was only 31 — well, 31 and 32, respectively, even though their deaths were only 3 months apart, because guess what?  My birthday was in between.

I lost the whole rest of my family between then and 2012.  (Well, I lost the illusion of having a family when I asked for a little too much.)

My FOO has never celebrated my birthday as a group.  There have been milestone birthday celebrations for just about everyone else, including several that I got on a plane for.  When my own 40th was approaching, at one of the reunions I tried to start a conversation abut what we could all do together to celebrate my first milestone birthday.  The only person who even joined in was my BIL.  My family (or rather, my sister) refuses to celebrate the day I was born, the day I should have become a part of the family.

And now, just when I thought I had a new log in my raft, a solid, dependable friend and brother — we’ve lost him too.  And I never got to tell him “Happy Birthday, Joe.”

One thing that strikes me, after reading this excellent essay, is that out of all the people who know about what happened in my family, no one (outside the family itself) is being a jackass about it.

“Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.”

No one else is telling me I need to “get over it”.  Mostly, the people I speak to about it say things like, “Man, that really sucks.”  (And a fair amount of “That’s fucked up.”)

Obviously I have chosen my friends well.  They are normal, healthy people who offer their empathy, not defensiveness or blame.  (To be fair, that’s partly because they don’t have any skin in the game, other than being my friend.  Objectivity and normalcy come easily from people who are not personally involved in what happened.  Defensiveness and blame come easily from people for whom empathy would require that they take their share of the responsibility.)

The things that happened can’t be fixed.  Won’t be fixed, for sure, because the people who need to fix them don’t have a need to do the work.  Why should they?  They still have a family — albeit it is short a couple people now.  Sure, their little sister got mad about “nothing”, “threw a fit”, “picked a fight”, held a grudge, went off the deep end, broke off communication with the whole family over “nothing”, shrug, what can you do?  Losing her isn’t important enough to make anyone do anything about it.  They probably miss my husband; I doubt many of them miss me.

Yes, I know what I asked for is hard.  What I asked for also happens to be normal, decent treatment of a valued family member.  And you know what?  When you care about someone, you do the hard shit for them.

If the roles were reversed, I know everyone would have come down on me like a ton of bricks for being disrespectful to Susan.  It would be the easiest thing in the world.  (In fact, Joe did exactly that:  telling me that specific words that I supposedly used when I made my request were “disrespectful to Susan’s job”. )  But they won’t do it for me, because I am somehow less important than Susan, in my own family.

So I know they are capable of the “normal, decent treatment” part.  It’s the “valued family member” part that they can’t manage.  And they don’t want to understand, because to understand would require work, would require questioning things that have never been allowed to be questioned even when they make no sense, and it would be hard.

“People tell others to take responsibility when they don’t want to understand.  Because understanding is harder than posturing. Telling someone to “take responsibility” for their loss is a form of benevolent masturbation. It’s the inverse of inspirational porn: it’s sanctimonious porn.”

I’ve been thinking of a metaphor lately:  that life’s relationships are like logs in a raft.  If you have enough good, big, logs in your raft to hold you up, you can weather the currents and the storms that come at you.  They still suck, but you can weather them, because you have your raft to depend on to keep you out of the water, to get you safely to the next port.

I used to have a really big raft.  Then, when a storm hit and I lost my biggest, sturdiest log, it turned out that some of the other logs were rotten and they fell apart.  Still other logs, that were held to the raft only by the rotten logs, drifted away.  Suddenly, in the midst of grief and loss, I was in the water, clinging to the one log I had left.

For a decade or so, I tried to gather up the pieces of those broken, rotten logs, and fit them back into a raft that I could float on — because those logs had always been a part of my raft, and I thought my raft had to have those logs in it, or it wouldn’t be a raft.

Then, over a few years of hard work and a lot of painful realizations, it became clear to me that those rotted logs were actually what caused me to end up back in the water, time and again.  And even if I could get them back in my raft, they weren’t going to hold me up.

I lost a total of 23 people when my raft fell apart.  Twenty-three people.

(I guarantee that if any of them are reading this, they have just stopped to count and see if I am correct in that or not.)

That, frankly, is a shitload of loss to deal with.  No wonder it took a few years to come to terms with it.  Fortunately, I still had a log or two to cling to, and they kept me from going under.

I’m finding other logs, and I am building a new raft.  None of the logs are quite as big as the originals — there’s not much that can make up for 40 years of shared history — but they float.  And I can depend on them to hold me up.

… if anyone tells you some form of get over it, move on, or rise above, you can let them go.

If anyone avoids you amidst loss, or pretends like it didn’t happen, or disappears from your life, you can let them go.

“…constantly flowing and as they flow they meet obstacles. Some are minor and others major but a relationship either flows around the obstacle or it is blocked, and if permanently blocked, it ends. This is not cause for stress or anger, resentment or jealously. It is what it is. Move on with appreciation and without bitterness for the relationship that is no more, and open your heart to other possibilities that life presents. The most important factor in maintaining a meaningful relationship with lovers, family or friends is simply acceptance. You need to accept them for who they are and they need to accept you for who you are. If you cannot accept another person for who they are, you need to stop inflicting stress on that person and to walk away. And if another person does not accept you for who you are, you need to walk away no matter the nature of the relationship. Stress kills and living with a person who does not accept you for who you are is like living with a person who is slowly killing you.”   ~ Captain Paul Watson

That “lack of anger or resentment” is a helluva lot easier said than done — especially when it involves all the people on earth that you’ve known your whole life — but I’m working on it.

More than I can say for anyone else.

(ETA:  Whoops, a little bitterness there.  Like I said, I’m working on it.)

I am certain that my FOO prays about all this.  They probably pray for me to come to my senses, realize how horrible I’ve been, apologize to them all, beg forgiveness, and plead to be allowed back into their tribe.

Some are probably at least praying that I take this blog down.

They can pray all they want to. I doubt it will do any more good than all my mother’s praying did any good for the marriage. (I admit that Russia does seem to have been converted, but in the grand scheme of things that doesn’t seem to have done many people any actual good, nor does it seem to have brought about world peace, as promised.)

But as they say, no prayer ever goes unanswered.

So – is this blog God’s actual answer to those misguided prayers?

After all, the inspiration for it just kind of hit me one day. Maybe God put the idea in my head, and He inspires the very words I type. Mysterious ways, and all that.  He is omniscient, after all, so I expect that He knows that in order for any healing to take place, my FOO needs to begin by listening to me, hearing and understanding, and facing up to what they are responsible for. And they need to recognize who is really responsible, rather than throwing all the blame onto one convenient scapegoat. They are too proud, and not humble enough, to admit that they, and Mom, might actually have a part in this mess.

Of course, pride is a sin, and humility its opposing virtue.

Pride (Latin, superbia), or hubris (Greek), is considered, on almost every list, the original and most serious of the seven deadly sins: the source of the others. It is identified as believing that one is essentially better than others… Dante’s definition of pride was “love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one’s neighbor“… [or, perhaps, one’s husband, father, or sister.]

Humility is defined as “Modest behavior, selflessness, and the giving of respect. Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less. It is a spirit of self-examination; a hermeneutic of suspicion toward yourself and charity toward people you disagree with. The courage of the heart necessary to undertake tasks which are difficult…”

As one of my friends said, “No one wants to have that conversation. No one wants to admit that they were shitty to a little kid.”

Another opined, “They have to accept, not only how they treated you, but how they supported their mother against you. That is a lot to have to come to terms with. Also, it’s very hard to say I’ve been wrong for 40 years.”

When you look at it that way, even God is going to have a really tough time of it with this bunch.  Makes my failure to get my point across — well, not really my failure.  Good luck with that one, Big Guy.