Fidget

I cannot seem to think straight or focus. My body aches and my mind feels rather discontent to settle on any task in particular. I feel as though I'm on pins and needles. Over the weekend my body has been screaming at me to slow down, but I find I cannot and so, get up to pace, stop the task I'm doing to pick another, or stare blankly at my to do list, not wishing to complete it.

Today I felt a desire to create, but not feeling any strong pull in any particular direction I settled on planting my pothos that had begun to root in water. Then I set about adding new music to my Ipod. This was about all the goal directed work I could manage today once I came home from running errands.

This morning I also felt the urge to travel and though I'm planning a trip with a friend in October, I feel conflicted about whether or not I should go. Mainly it's a financial question, but I think also this recent inability to alight on any one topic or idea for too long may be playing a part. After all, one of the tasks I have left is to look up train fares from Paris to Barcelona.

I think the thing that agitated me the most today was the realization that my inability to focus my creative energy was probably coming from a recent focus almost solely on my job. Now, I love my job-dont get me wrong, and likewise I have been able to take time out to spend with people and activities I enjoy, its just that lately I've let my work stress me out even when I'm nowhere near it. Ive been having the urge to quit and go elsewhere to do something different for a while, but some thing is stopping me. Whether it's a need to feel grounded, a need to feel secure in a job, or a need to continue to build connections here in NYC I can't really say. I'm not sure why I stopped listening to my inner self telling me to keep going, but I did and for a while it felt like it was because I needed to stop and deal with whatever it was I was avoiding.

I think in many ways though that need has been met and I still feel like something isn't quite right. I feel like I'm meant to do something more or something else and that I need to figure that out and move onward to doing it. I think that once I gain licensure it will be clearer and I wil lbe freer to look beyond what I do now.I've wanted for a while to work with trauma in varying places, but I"ve been held back by hesitation around the cultural relevance of westernized therapy in a non-western place. I just don't think it would work or should be done and I would very much like to be useful in other places in the world, but I seem to only have cultivated one or two things in terms of career options and I just don't know how to move forward with with them or from them.

It's not that I think what I've done with my life is useless or meaningless, no. It's just that its something thats tricky to apply to the populations I want to work with, without greater sensitivity and caution, and without knowing exactly how to manipulate what I do to best serve those people.The last thing I want is to be useless and more of a burden than a help, and how to ensure I keep doing that and doing it righteously is a thing that keeps me up at night as of late.

Being useful to others has always been important to me and I want the work I do to maintain that usefulness. On a microcosmic scale I suppose I can keep finding new ways of being useful to the people here and now in my work, but in a way I feel like I've hit a wall. Sometimes I think my students-some of them- would be better off in life if I never asked them to think about the things that are hard for them to think about, the things that touble them the most. I know that having someone to talk to can help immensely, and a fair amount of the time it does, but what good is talk if they've got all these other real life situations on their plate that they must somehow deal with? One of my favorite things about working at the shelter I worked at was when I could go down to the basement and help dish out dinner to the men. Then, at least, I knew I was meeting a direct and tangible need., I knew what I was doing was helpful.

Anyway, my point is simply that I don't have some need for thanks or instant gratification or anything like that, but I do need to see clear and tangible benefits for the person I'm looking to assist. At least more so than I witness right now. I think I just need a fresh perspective in a way, and maybe thats why I feel such a need to move on. Or maybe I'm just tired of urban work-who knows. Hope I find out soon, though.

A Little Space to Fill

I haven’t written in a couple months and I think this time its got to do with the ways in which all the themes I usually like to address are impacting me relatively directly these days. I started this blog back in 2005 after I had moved to NYC and begun gradschool. Looking back over my writings I feel as though they’ve gotten progressively worse, as though what I’m trying to say has become harder and harder and been more frequently clouded over by other extraneous things. Or maybe I just had more of a deep need to address my views and visions back then and now am seeing less of a reason to do so. Scratch that, its not less of a reason to do so, no, there is still a need to address race, class gender, and the like, its just that perhaps lately I’ve gotten wrapped up in dealing with those things in very personal ways as opposed to political ways. Perhaps I’ve been slowly going through the process of finding it more and more difficult to keep these matters at arms length. See I think an issue becomes easily discussed when have either not gotten deeply into it personally, or have already found our ways out of it and can look back on it- discussing the issues rarely seems to go well when we find ourselves in the thick of it- at least with me.

So what is it then that I’ve been trying to get at here with this whole blog? As I see it a couple of themes I’ve tried to address throughout this blog are race, gender, class, belonging, and personal connections. As a white woman who grew up middle class in a very small city I grew up with a certain amount of privilege and it wasn’t until 2005 really that I was asked to deal with what that privilege meant- not just to other people but to myself. I became aware that as a woman I was refused certain privileges but being white I was afforded others. I became aware that my ability to attend the university I did meant I had expectations placed upon me and opportunities given to me strictly based on whether I was able to afford a certain amount of tuition. I also became aware that given each of my status’s I had choices to make. Primarily choices about how I would interact with others, how I would utilize and deny my privilege, how I would approach living conscious, and how I would support the people I cared about, as well as myself, in dealing with those choices. Not that I believed that I had the answers and could help others through with such ease, but that I could be a support to them in their own struggle with this stuff, be open, understanding and honest, and hear them when/if that was what they needed from me.

So I started this blog while I was looking at those topics, and as I progressed I began addressing them first with myself , then with my professors and classmates, my clients, my staff, my family, my friends and acquaintances, and finally the people I want to have closest to me. And the thing of it is that as it’s come around to those last few levels, which all are operating simultaneously at the moment, I’m finding I’m having the hardest time. The political has become more and more personal and for me, like I said before, it’s hardest to articulate your understanding of the issues when you’re deep within them. The thing with these themes though, is that they won’t go away, and I don’t know how or when I would ever come out on the other side with enough understanding to feel distance once again- I don’t think its possible, and to be frank, I don’t know that I want so much distance from these themes that I somehow become detached from them. So I guess there in lies the complication. How do I remain actively involved in these themes and still be able to acquire some type of understanding around them and be able to articulate that, here or anywhere else.

Most recently the themes of ethnicity and personal connections have cut very close to the quick for me. Being white, and the ways in which I operate in the world around that, have been something I’ve taken up more and more strongly in my life and while it’s a good thing and an important thing, and possibly even something I’m feeling more prepared to deal with than ever, its also been a complicated thing. Now this is by no means a complaint- I feel absurdly lucky that the complication has come so late in life when I have been able to think about and discuss the themes in mature ways with mature people prior to having to deal with it on a personal level. I am aware that as a privileged white person I’ve been afforded this luxury of not having to think about it until I’m good and ready. No, in a way the problem comes for me in that I still feel completely clumsy in addressing these issues with the people who I want closest to me, the people who matter the most- particularly when those people are persons of color. Do I, and if so how do I, articulate my stumbling blocks to someone I care about or want to care about when what I have to say, or how I’m dealing with it, or the fact that I consider it difficult at all may be received, and appropriately so, with hostility, resentment, anger, confusion, annoyance, disgust, or any combination of those things if not outright rejection? In many ways I don’t think I can and I don’t think I should. In many ways to articulate them in such a way is to ask for help and guidance from someone who may have had to deal with these matters their whole life, whether they wanted to or not, and oftentimes without any guidance whatsoever. In many ways it seems self centered and privileged to even bring the topic up with people who haven’t had a choice in the matter. And so sometimes I don’t- at least not in certain senses. This is part of the reason I joined a white anti-racist group. For me to ask persons of color to sit patiently with me while I get through my own struggle with privilege and whiteness is to continue to ask to be given that privilege and to me that would be like a man asking me to feel empathic towards him and his struggle with his male privilege- it just doesn’t make any sense.

Now don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t mean that I feel that I ought to never address it. I think that to not address it with people of color in my life is taking the easy way out and I’m not really interested in any more free passes based on the color of my skin. No it’s vital to address it, but the importance comes in learning to address it not from a standpoint of privilege and expectation, but from a standpoint of empathy, understanding and a desire to learn, increase awareness, and move towards eradication of the problem.

So you see, this is just one of the ways these themes are hitting me full in the face these days, and while its been unexpected and its caused me to fall silent about certain things I guess it doesn’t mean that I’ve stopped thinking about them entirely, or that I believe these matters don’t impact me, and its not that I think that they have become irrelevant to discuss or irrelevant to me- its just that I’m kind of in the thick of it right now and in a way I’m more interested in trying to figure out what other people think on the matter, rather than spouting off about what I think I may know. I guess that’s all I’ve got to say for now.

The Colony

Someone asked me a while ago what my thoughts were on post colonialism. It’s a pretty big topic and so I briefly and poorly answered it with the promise to address it at a later date. I guess this is part of my attempt at formulating an answer.

In shock experiments with dogs looking at the psychological effects of continued stress, when the dogs had no ability to control the shock they were receiving, they eventually stopped making an effort to escape the shock. They could not function to preserve their own lives or well being and even when given the opportunity to preserve their own well being, would do nothing. Apply this phenomenon to human beings then, extending it slightly, and what you have is similar to the impact on a colonized people who have had their power and control taken away from them and eventually struggle to function and preserve their own livelihoods and well being when they have been trained to believe they cannot do it on their own or should not do it on their own. The impact of colonialism mirrors this but is, at the same time, much more than this.

Colonization deeply impacts the cultural identity of the colonized and takes from them- along with that belief in their own power- their vision of self and personal worth. They are told several things; first that they have no right to what is theirs; second that they cannot utilize their resources properly and must rely on the colonizer to “teach” them how to do it “right” ( usually the way of the 1st world country doing the colonizing); third that their way of being as a culture is inappropriate and backward; fourth that they are necessarily of that “backward” way and must be re-trained; and finally that they can never be anything but that backward way. The process of the colonizer is like the process of an abuser. Simultaneously telling the controlled that they are alternately terrible and wrong and yet capable of being trained and molded if only they submit to whatever it is the colonizer wants or views as right. They are told they are needed but that they are of no use unless they are changed in some way.

I think the best/ easiest way for me to respond is with a story. In 2002 I lived in Dakar, Senegal. Senegal was, up until 60 a French colony. The people colonized were primarily of the Wolof and Serer tribes. When Senegal was colonized by the French the British were simultaneously colonizing the Gambia. Now keep in mind that The Gambia is a tiny country that exists along the Gambi River and to the ocean, surrounded on three sides by Senegal. Because the lines chosen by the French and British were along water supplies, ports, and the like and not along any established tribal territories or lands, the tribe was effectively split and some ended up in the Gambia; some necessarily in Senegal. At the time I was in Senegal I lived in an apartment house with other students which was located behind an outpost of the French army. The French army base was this enormous pink stucco monstrosity fenced, as many domiciles were, by a high stucco wall creating the compound and guarded at the door by “security”. Against the wall of the compound was a small kola nut tree upon which rested, between the tree and the wall, a small dwelling made up of scraps of wood and tin with a fire pit outside the door which was a drapery. This to me is the most definitive picture of the impact of colonialism- a small home lived in by the rightful people of that land propped up on one side by their colonizer- both because of whom and (now) without whom they might not have a leg to stand on- and flanked on the other by the pitiful remnants of the country which they were afforded after the colonizer took all the other more valuable resources.

More than just creating a dependency on the colonizer though, post-colonial statehood has had a divisive impact on the controlled persons through a variety of venues. Firstly and perhaps most obviously was the language. In Senegal two main languages are spoken- French and Wolof. In the Gambia, although they are the same people, the languages spoken are English and Wolof. Throughout their schooling, if lucky enough to go to school, students are mandated to learn and utilize their previous colonizers languages. The children who do not go to school are relegated to only speaking Wolof (or Serer); significantly limiting their ability to go further than service jobs in homes, apprenticeships, and basic labor jobs. The dichotomy for those utilizing the language of the colonizer then is that they are made to communicate within the colonizers context if they would like to succeed but to do so they must relinquish that which binds them to their culture. This matter may also ring true to Native American’s who, through the atrocities of the boarding school system were isolated from their cultures and languages, made to take up the context of the colonizer, and alternately shunned from the colonizers community if they did reconnect to their own culture and shunned from the reservation community if they took on the whiteness too closely.

Beyond language however, the divisive impact strikes further. Going back to Senegal momentarily, while I cannot speak directly to what propelled this hostility- though one could imagine it was perpetuated by any hostility or competitiveness between the colonizers- there exists a tension between Gambian Wolof and Senegalese Wolof that ultimately pits the two sides against one another. Whether it was an effort to destabilize each others colonies, sprouted from an effort by the colonized to attain the status of “good” or “loyal”, or came from a place where being oppressed breeds oppressiveness in kind, the Senegalese maintain a feeling of distaste for the Gambians, whom they view as lower, and the Gambians speak about their feeling that the Senegalese are thieves and sanctimonious yes-men to their colonizers. People from the exact same tribe, who hold the exact same surnames- anglicized or made francophone depending on their colonial power-, are at once divided and identified by their colonizers rather than maintaining their communal history. They are made to suffer together or subsist apart.

In this example then, as in many others, the damage inflicted by the colonial system far outweighs the benefits once the colonizer has evacuated the premises. As soon as the colonizer decides they are done, have usurped all the resources they can, are willing to go, or are fought back into their place they leave the people in ruins. Not just economic ruins, but psychological ruins. Like in many abusive relationships the abused can be left feeling like they have somehow done wrong or are incapable of surviving without the abuser, they are left feeling worthless and isolated from those they once were connected to.

Anyway, I don’t know if this fully answers my feelings on post-colonialism. As a movement I think it speaks truthfully to the impact of colonialism on the once controlled people, I think that the impact of colonialism is deep and psychologically damaging, and I think that the responsibility of owning that and rebuilding the colonized at least in part lies with the colonizer.

Ties

I need to make a confession. I’ve been procrastinating on the total completion of my application for Mental Health Counseling licensure- i.e. the test, a course or two and owing them a picture of myself for my license- because I’m scared of the totality of it. I’m scared that, assuming I pass my test (which should be alright considering I passed the practice exam- though it was 1.5 years ago), and once its all in place I will be wed to staying in NYC at least for another 5 years. I’m scared that I might not succeed living in NYC even though I’ve done alright for myself thus far. I’m scared that I won’t be happy here, that I will miss home too much, that I will feel unable to go pursue other dreams I’ve got of living in other places and doing other things. I’m scared of being tied to any one place. Even sending in the money for the license didn’t stir my fear quite as much as it did to receive the letter 2 weeks ago stating that I was cleared to take my exam. And then- on top of it all- what if none of this matters because I fail the exam?

I’ve never been a person who has been happy tied to one location too solidly, but if this goes through I will be tied- at least for the duration- to New York State by the fact that I will be completely cleared to do what I am trained to do and get paid for it in this state. Licensure will mean that I am more marketable, that I have the capacity to live more comfortably if I should want to (or save like crazy if I want to do that), and that I have more fluidity and latitude in my choice of jobs. It will mean good things if I get it. But I’m absurdly scared of it.

When I first had the thought to move to NYC to continue school, I was 21 feeling confused and living in Amsterdam. I didn’t know what exactly it was I wanted to do and I was so completely scared of the possibility of failing generally and failing to get into my dream school that I didn’t apply until after I got into a bunch of other schools, none of which I felt I would be happy at. Hell I didn’t even apply then, until I spent a year out of school and my sister yelled at me about how capable I was of doing it. And I did get in. But I was scared then too.

I know that being scared has never stopped me from doing what I want to do before; it’s just that I can’t seem to shake the fear until the thing is over. So if I seem a bit on edge lately, please bear with me. Because I’m taking these ridiculous steps towards something and while it may just be licensure, and in the end even that doesn’t mean all that much, it feels like stepping out in the pitch black night and being unsure where the ground ends.

Ideal

I ran into an ex-boyfriend of mine at a wedding last weekend. He was a writer for an independent paper/ filmmaker, turned financial PR man. I can remember when I met his mother, she said to me-without knowing me or anything about me- “we thought it was time he let go of his ideals and start making a living.” Did I mention the financial PR firm he worked for belonged to his parents? At the time I didn’t think much of it beyond that she was your standard overbearing mother, until days before I was to meet his father and her for a formal dinner, when he and I suddenly ended our relationship- guess I was part of the ideals he needed to let go of.

Anyway this isn’t a story about ex-boyfriends, it’s about the ideals part, and so let me move on. A little while ago I began an email conversation with a friend of mine which moved towards a discussion about the older generation of activists and the ways in which they more clearly and firmly are able to articulate their vision of a better future, and I started to wonder- is our generation somehow different in our approach to real, positive, change? What I spoke about with that friend was how the older generation, having seen change, was able to visualize it better than the newer- those of us who have grown up primarily within republican administrations or within the Clinton years (which isn’t saying much). And while this seems like it may be a definite part of it, I also wonder about the ways we utilize technology today and the ways in which our approach to dissent differs. Take for example this blog. Anyone and everyone can write what they feel on the internet and you can just bet that someone will read it, and so- good or otherwise, articulate or otherwise, your voice seemingly gets heard. Or take for example the rising in the last 5-7 years of the internet based activist networks- moveon.org, one.org, and the like. Suddenly people don’t have to leave their comfortable apartments to take part in the protest against what is inhumane, un-patriotic, or un-democratic. With the tap of a finger against a key they can sign a petition to end the war, and where that petition inevitably ends up few people probably know, but by hitting the send button they at least feel like they’ve contributed. And while in the age of technology, online petitions were the inevitable next step- followed closely by those anthropologically fascinating youtube debates-, and while they can certainly have a positive influence, it makes me wonder if part of the problem with the newer generations protest and our articulation of a better future isn’t simply that we’ve gotten lazy.

We are a generation of people with carpal tunnel syndrome and poor eyesight thanks to all this new technology and yet none of it has seemed to make its mark in quite the way that protests in, for example, the civil rights era did. No, despite the amount of times people write, and click, and make witty political commentary online it just doesn’t seem to have the same effect. Now don’t get me wrong- there are still many people out there marching themselves to the capital, holding signs on street corners, and tramping up and down a picket line in the cold of winter, but somehow these efforts seem to have lost their teeth. Like the efforts of a select few that I run across every week in Manhattan during their protest of the working conditions at the Four Points Hotel. They scream and shout and get videotaped, and yet the giant blow-up rat that stands behind them (and incidentally follows other picketers on various other protests) seems to be mocking them. The security guards stand around them, bored and yawning, occasionally refocusing their cameras and the picketers never make an effort to move outside of their picket area, so kindly designated for them by cheap metal barricades put in place by the hotel administration. (And no I don’t expect anyone to be throwing themselves on water hoses or scuffling with the police, but it does just make me all the more aware of how protest has changed over the years.)

The thing of it is this: while the civil rights era protests may not have been perfect (and they truly weren’t), activism has somehow become a whole lot more passive, and I don’t know that those two things can go together for any significant amount of time before something gives. Maybe if we made ourselves more physically involved in the things we feel passionately about, and maybe if we didn’t leave behind our idealism for what other people tell us is a better use of our time, we wouldn’t be stuck with problems like a president who effectively voted himself into office his first term.

Anyway, that’s just my 2 cents from behind my keyboard, inside my warm apartment, on this miserably cold winter night.

Untitled

Ok so for me I’ve always been a person who felt like they knew very little and so I’ve often been obsessed with learning anything and everything I can and lately I’m hit again with the awareness that the older I get and the more I read, the more I want to know and learn. The following is, I suppose, just a story about that:

When I began to gain interest in poverty I was somewhere around 20 years old and my brother had just been released from either rehab, the psych ward, or jail- I can no longer remember which- and my parents, refusing to take him back at that time, told the people releasing him to take him to the nearest homeless shelter. They obliged. While this was the only instance I can remember of any of my family being in a shelter, it scared me just how close people I knew and loved could be to a state of utter dependence on the system. (For those of you more concerned with my parents’ moral code at this moment, take heart in the fact that he only spent 3 days there before they took him back as usual).

Anyway, it was because of this event and because of my interest in mental health that I went on a couple trips to various countries to look into what exactly people received for help when they were down and out as my brother had been. The studies I did focused on the variety of cultures I was looking at and their individual approaches to the mental health care system for those without a place to even call their own. While my research was primarily focused on the cultural differences within this matter, when I came back to the states, rather than focus on culture I began to focus more heavily on the general concept of the underprivileged within the context of mental health. I suppose all this is simply to say that I knew culture somehow made it different, but considering the fact that I was back in the states I ignorantly assumed that the way it was practiced here was indeed the way it was practiced here and that little variance would take place in terms of people served and the cultures they came from. Good lord how I was wrong.

To be honest, the thought began to occur to me when I started working with the urban poor and noticed that the men in my shelter all came from a particular neighborhood of Boston, that the majority of them were of a particular cultural heritage that was non-white, and that my shelter- of all the shelters and services our organization offered- was the most ignored and under-funded. Being young and green however, I can imagine that I said to myself “its because they’re from an urban neighborhood” rather than “ its because they’re predominantly non-white”- and as such I moved to the largest city I could find to go ahead and work with that.

As my education progressed and my experience progressed however, I saw just how little things had to do with being from an urban neighborhood. Urban neighborhood was one thing- urban black, urban Hispanic, or urban any-non-white population, was quite another. That’s not to say I didn’t find any white urban poor, they absolutely are there, it’s just to say that through whatever racists constructs, what I was seeing was that culture still played a big part in what a given community was afforded for services. Anyway, even though I was beginning to see all of the issues at play for what they were, and even though I was beginning to take on a more aware perspective of culture as it played out in other aspects of my life, a conversation with my roommate while I was still in grad school led me to look much further into the issue of rural poverty. Again this led me slightly away from culture, race, ethnicity and their roles in the system and more towards a general concept of poverty outside the cities.

Naturally though, this story didn’t and doesn’t end there. See, lately I’ve been speaking to a friend who grew up in a rural area and through my discussions with him I’ve been reading books about indigenous peoples and the difficulties experienced by those populations, and once again I am faced with the realization that culture, racial background, and skin color, play a part in what is afforded to whom in terms of services, rights, and privileges. Now maybe its been my ignorance and maybe its been the ease with which I get moved off track into other subjects, but the issues of race and culture, colonialism and whiteness as an oppressive tool, and the ways in which these issues seep into every other facet of life are becoming increasingly difficult to step away from- intentionally or otherwise. The more I realize just how much this occurs the more foolish I feel and yet I cannot sit here and pretend it doesn’t occur and that I haven’t taken part (even through simple complacency) in my own life.

Now don’t get me wrong, I realize that my condemning myself for my obtuseness and ignorance, and any self flagellation will not change the situations of the poor no matter where they are or who they are. But in the end my questions and my interest in these matters only get more complex and confusing to me. Because, what I want to know now is: how- on top of every other issue these communities are facing- I can help people deal with the fact that this system, in which we all live and breath and work and play, is still either intentionally maintaining the status quo to benefit the few, or is willfully ignoring the fact that inequality is still prevalent (and inequality is a generous term for it). How do I, as a clinician, help people deal with this more readily- and how to do I deal with it within the context of my own personal life more openly?

I mean, I know that in the last years since I’ve graduated I’ve been working on this with the children I work with and I’m glad that we’ve gotten to some of the matters and addressed them, but the more I read and listen and learn, the more difficult it seems to deal with these issues one at a time- there are just too many, and it is so very overwhelming to both my children and me. At the very least I think I’m beginning to see clearly just how pervasive an issue this is, and as late as I may be to the game at least I’m here now.

Anyway, I think for me it will become more and more important to deal with these issues within my work since I do want to work with the rural poor, and I know I need to be prepared for that. Alternately though I also realize that the best way for me to learn how to deal with something is to put it into practice and experience it, and so hopefully I will get to do that with the population I want to at some point in my life. And I will work toward that steadily.

Anyway I guess that’s just on my mind lately. I know I promised you guys more about death, but this felt more pressing tonight.

Sweet Dreams.

Death Becomes Her

Death has been on my mind quite a bit lately. Not in the reverting-back-to-my-teenage- angst sort of way, but in that lately I’ve been faced with the painful task of looking it square in the eye; from the entirely live mouse I found on my glue trap that I had to destroy, through the dead bird whose head I hadn’t noticed until some sadistic teenager was kind enough to point out that I was in fact standing on it, and straight through to today when I found myself in a cemetery surrounded by macabre adolescents decked out in skull sweatshirts and black nail polish, photographers with no sympathy for a gravestone if its in their way, and the late, great, and notorious likes of Boss Tweed, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and a woman who was found petrified and drowned at the bottom of a lake in the 19th century. Ok well, the last one was my doing, having gone on a cemetery tour for Halloween, but nonetheless I’m starting to get a sense of a creepy little pattern.

I have a co-worker who likes to tell me about superstitions his parents passed down to him from their Jamaican ancestry and most recently when I informed him of a relative of a friend who had died, he graciously put on his most superstitious voice when he informed me that apparently death comes in threes. Great.

Its not that I necessarily fear death in some enormous way, it’s simply that since I’ve been young I’ve had this anxiety about it that has manifested itself in fear of losing my parents, and losing my father in particular. Now understand, my parents are wonderful examples of how to grow old gracefully and allow nature to take its proper course- my mother never tried to dye her hair when it went gray and my dad- though holding on the last bastions of his youth by hair-spraying his nearly non-existent locks into permanence- has always laughed at himself for it and known that ultimately he will get old and lose his hair and it will be ok. But see the thing of it is that my parents are getting older and my mother as of late has expressed a fear of how many years she and my father have left given that 3 of their 4 parents died before hitting their late seventies. So two years ago when she asked me to be the one to determine when to pull the plug if either of them should be on life support I got a little nervous. I don’t like thinking about them going and while I know that death happens inevitably to everyone I can’t imagine what it would be like to have one parent without the other or have neither of them around at all. They are too much in need of one another and have maintained our family traditions throughout so much that I just don’t know who could ever take their place when their gone- if anyone really could or should.

Anyway, I’ve always been a believer that as you move through life, things come up that hit you over the head and serve as a lesson. So then: why death? Why now? I don’t know if I have an answer and maybe there is no answer that I should be looking for, but the thing of it is that I know I’m afraid of death, and I don’t like to think about it, but it happens and inevitably I have to deal with it. And I know that- I just don’t like to. Maybe that’s why it’s coming up.

It’s certainly not as if I’ve never had to deal with death. When I was younger I attended the funerals of great aunts and uncles, cousins, family friends, and friend’s family members- it’s just that death, no matter whose, always makes me feel so completely saddened and utterly lost. Not necessarily saddened at the loss of the person who has died, but sad for their loved ones who are still alive, if that makes sense. When I see the grief on someone else’s face I want to be able to tell them its going to be ok, but I feel like that’s just not going to do anything for them and beyond that it’s just a false comfort. And I guess the thing that scares me is that one day I will know that loss on a far more personal level than I ever have before and I’m just not sure what I would do about it.

Maybe reminders of death aren’t such a bad thing then. I’m not saying we should become numb to it, because I don’t want to believe that that could ever be possible and I don’t think it could truly happen anyway. But I think that it’s a necessity because it’s something that we all get faced with sooner or later in our lives.

There’s more I have to say on death. Since it’s been invading my life for the last two months I’ve done a bit of thinking on it, like I mentioned. But perhaps the rest, which relates to death penalties, war, and far more political things, can be saved for another time. After all, a person can only take so much death for one day.

So with that I’ll end here, and simply say, apropos of the subject matter and time of year: Happy Halloween.