That’s not something you really want to hear from a therapist. It’s sort of a verification that, yeah, your situation’s gotten pretty sucky.
On the other hand, it’s also an opportunity to just get yourself together.
Yes, I got bad news. About three weeks ago, I did get my test results I was worried about, and I didn’t know what to make of it, so I didn’t write about it right away. I’m still conflicted.
On the intellectual edge of my brain, I think, yeah, big whopping deal: I carry a mutated gene (the BRCA2) that makes breast cancer. Time bomb? Yes, but I knew I was at risk anyway.
And then I start analyzing and planning:So what does this test result mean?
Right now, it means that I’m twenty-three years old and should learn how to live with the knowledge that my health and my body, as they appear now, are only temporary, which is true for everyone.
But it also means that I’ll need to undergo annual mammograms starting at age 25, with MRIs scheduled at varying intervals along with some uncomfortable ultrasounds (because the BRCA2 gene mutation carries ovarian cancer risk, too). It means that I’ll have to be extra mindful about what I eat (fried foods and sugar = cancer-cell heaven), how much weight I gain (fat stores estrogen, which feeds my kind of breast cancer), and how much I expose myself to cigarette smoke (duh). It also means that I need to avoid estradiol-based birth control pills (because research currently suggests that they might feed estrogen-receptive cancer). And I know I need to be doing my cardio, and it’d be great if I could get pregnant and have my estrogen get replaced with progesterone and make my cyclical fluxes stop and hence disrupt estrogen-linked . . . yeah, you get the idea. To be utterly forthright about it, I just have to adjust and make some lifestyle changes starting now.
That all doesn’t bother me, really. Dieting, exercising, and going to the doctor a lot more than is financially feasible when you’re a recent college grad doing pud jobs without medical insurance is just part of the package of my family history. I sorta knew that, test or no test.
It’s the future that bothers me.
Now three weeks out from my results, my mind is still spinning over what I hope will never be. Because in the future, I know I might have the chance of really screwing over my kids’ childhoods if I don’t stay on top of my health and wind up needing to go through cancer treatment when my kids are still young and need me to just be “normal.” It also means I might screw over their childhoods even if I do stay on top of things, just based on current physician advisement that argues for me undergoing a prophylactic oophrectomy at age 40 combined with anti-estrogen type medication that will flip my female hormone levels upside down and turn me into a raving bitch with severe hot flashes while I force myself through an early menopause. Makes for a lovely mom, huh? Not to mention how this will change my sexual appetite. Yeah, bummer; what a wife. After just a little over a decade of marriage, this could be what the poor sap gets.
Knowing that this could be, the risk involved in just trying to live a “normal” life seems very great. That was my first thought, once I finished eking out one-syllable responses to the nurse who gave me my test results in friendly but very terse terms. Why did this thought occur to me?
Well, it seems there is still a seeping, half-scabbed-over remnant of the deep traumatic wound of watching my father die and my family life fall apart that is still in my heart, and it warns me away from even seeking to bring a family into being. It’s a part of me that is afraid of hurting someone else just by sharing myself—with all my mutant, self-detonating genetic baggage—with loved ones in such a way that would cause them grief at my changing, at my passing. I don’t even know what to call that. It’s not bad self-esteem, really; I acknowledge that I’m loveable. And that’s the problem—I don’t want them to love and be destroyed.
“But isn’t that the risk everyone takes—that the person they love now, that they marry now, will someday be someone different?” asked my therapist, who deals most often with depressed divorcees who have rudely awakened to this very knowledge. “Don’t we all risk that we ourselves, by simply living, will change and weaken and die? The difference is, you know what might change you, and you can try to take control of it now.”
It’s true, I suppose. Given what I know, I can decide ahead of time that I won’t “do” cancer the way my parents did: I won’t let it sneak up on me like it snuck up on my father, who no one would have imagined would be cancer-prone after years of clean living and an active lifestyle. And unlike my mom, I won’t let the changes cancer and cancer meds will make to my body change my mindset—I’ll fight the personality shifts like a cat fights going into the bathtub (and occasionally wins—true story, ask my Delilah).
And because I’ve seen breast cancer and breast cancer treatment in action, I’ll know more what to expect. I could plan. If I’m smart, I can out-think it like a half-finished Sudoku puzzle. I might even have the foresight to imagine and escape the awful possibilities because I’ve seen a lot of them. For example, I’d know that if I ever get a Stage 4 diagnosis, it’d be time to write my love notes and say my goodbyes because I won’t have much control over what time I have left anymore–and I won’t leave my family wondering where I left those notes and if I ever wrote them, like I wondered for a year about my father, who didn’t seem ready to die. And yes—when it comes down to it—I could be more ready for death than he was. I could do that. If I were strong enough. And maybe someday, I will be. Or I’ll have to be.
"Those glowing eyes have magic healing powers," Dad wrote in his e-mail, to which this post-procedure recovery photo was attached. That was his first surgery, in September of '06. And yes, the cat is Delilah.
I’m going to take a break from my pity-party now and put in some writing here that really matters and actually puts this whole freakishly morbid post into perspective. It’s an e-mail from my dad that I’ve saved for years, and I’m very glad I saved it. He wrote it about six months after his initial diagnosis, but he doesn’t really mention himself at all (typical Dad—and at this point, he was optimistic about his treatment. Sigh.). So it’s not a goodbye letter—not the letter I look for every time a new notebook of his turns up when we go through a new batch of his things. No, Dad wrote this for me way back when I was trying to find myself in college (Ha! If only I could go through that again!) and was having trouble just digging myself out of my own rut and struggling with feeling very afraid of my own future, academically and career-wise.
Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2007 8:00 AM
Subject: Sending our Love
Dear Sweetie,
I was troubled to hear about this trying time that you are going through, but also know that such times seem to be universal as part of our human condition. It can be troubling to know that God allows such times, but also troubling to realize that we sometimes contribute to them and bring them on ourselves. God is still with us and available to us as our guide and strength during such times. His guide is His Word, and I found what I read this morning to be such a comfort:
Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me, for my soul trusteth in thee; yea, in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge, until these calamities be overpast. Ps. 57:11
But I will sing of thy power; yea. I will sing aloud of thy mercy in the morning; for thou hast been my defense and refuge in the day of my trouble. Unto thee, O my strength, will I sing; for God is my defense, and the God of my mercy. Ps. 59:16-17
Hear my cry, O God; attend unto my prayer. From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed; lead me to the rock that is higher than I. Ps. 61: 1-2
I’m thankful this morning that Christ is that rock and that he is our guide during times of trouble. I’m also thankful that I have a daughter like you and that you have brought great joy to my life! Be strong!
Love,
Dad
Incidentally, Dad also wrote the following in an e-mail addressed to the whole family regarding his own situation during something of a turning point for him months later:
“From my experience, one can move ahead with our own agenda in a crisis, or one can ponderously back off from the situation and learn what God is trying to communicate.”
In both cases, Dad gives the same advice: Quit thinking. Quit planning. Just listen. And wait. Wait for God to cover you and lead you to the rock.
You can’t say the man wasn’t consistent.
I’ll close with this, an excerpt from one of Dad’s many Bible study notebooks, written in his own paraphrase of Isaiah 30:18.
“Therefore the Lord longs to be gracious to you, and therefore waits on high to have compassion on you. For the Lord is a God of justice. How blessed are those who long for Him.”
I’m still processing it. I loved it. I adored Ruby Jerins, the 11-year-old wonder-girl actress who plays Tyler Hawkins’ (Rob Pattinson) little sister, Caroline. I thought Emilie de Ravin, who played Aly, Tyler’s love interest, was fiesty, sportive, fun, and tender in all the ways a good woman should be. I hated how sad the ending was—but thought it was neat how all those tiny little details added up in the end to make it sensible, if not still shocking (I won’t tell you what happened, but let’s just say, I wasn’t expecting them to make a movie with the fact of this event tucked so realistically and emotionally inside the plot).
And, hell yes, I adored Rob. I’m not going to gush, though–much. So here’s me, trying to review a work by someone I obviously find attractive and respect a great deal. Don’t expect me to be impartial. Like Fox News Channel, I’m only going to make a pretense at being “fair and balanced,” since you all know what I’m actually rooting for.
Here’s a not-too-brief, and not-too-spoilery, synopsis: Tyler Hawkins (Rob Pattinson) is a nearly 22 year-old living in New York who is not, in fact, actually living —at least, not for himself. Since the suicide of his brother, Michael, Tyler’s been living for everyone else around him, even fighting their battles, and ignoring his own life (he suffers from guilt for living, we think, maybe). He’s rather aimless, lost, and “desireless,” as Rob has called him, but he has one focus that does guide his behavior: he really, really wants to fix his divorced, broken, grieving family, and to make a happier childhood possible for his adorable little sister, precocious 11 year-old Caroline (played by the amazing Ruby Jerins).
Tyler (Rob) responds to Caroline (Ruby Jerins) as she chastises him for smoking in the kids' area of Central Park. In this outtake not put into the film, Rob pouts, and Ruby laughs.
Tyler lives with his roommate, Aidan (Tate Ellington), who is your typical party-going manwhore who occassionally frets over the fact that Tyler seems depressed in spite of his ability to attract women like cats to cream (I mean, come on, Me-ow!). One night, in an attempt to get Tyler to come out of his depressive cave, Tyler and Aidan head out to the bar scene, only to find themselves witness to a nasty, unprovoked attack in the street that Tyler, in an act of righteous, self-destructive impulsivity, rushes into to put to rights. Aidan faithfully comes to help, and the bloody fistfight is broken up by one Sgt. Craig, a tough NYPD cop who throws everyone involved in jail despite the protest of several witnesses who can avow Tyler and Aidan’s innocence. Tyler and Aidan make bail with the help of Tyler’s workaholic Wallstreet-lawyer of a father, with whom Tyler has a strained and emotionally distant relationship.
Tyler and Aidan (Tate Ellington) discuss beer and women in a moment of male bonding.
Some weeks later, Aidan discovers that Sgt. Craig’s daughter is actually an NYU student in Tyler’s sociology class, and Aidan gleefully tells Tyler that he now has a chance to get back at the jackass cop: Tyler can date his daughter—then dump her. Tyler is too sensitive a soul to agree to use the girl as a pawn in a petty revenge scheme, but is intrigued by Alyssa Craig’s (Emilie de Ravin’s character’s) wit when he banters with her in a café. They wind up dating. And they wind up discovering that they’ve both been witness to the worst tragedies a child can have: for Tyler, it is the discovery of his brother’s body after his suicide six years ago; for Aly, it is watching her mother get murdered on a subway before her very eyes when she was only eleven. They form an emotional bond that, coupled with their playful natures and obvious physical chemistry, becomes romantic. Things seem to go well until Aly’s father discovers whom Aly is dating…and Aly finds out that Tyler was originally setting her up for heartbreak. Trusts, collarbones, and hearts, get broken.
Meantime, Tyler’s little sister undergoes her own social tragedies at school that put Tyler, the ever-attentive elder brother, at vicious odds with their seemingly uncaring, absentee father. It is only after Tyler stands up for the painful truth of his father’s behavior–and his own mistakes with Aly–that all the brokenness resolves and gains an overwhelmingly wonderful fullness. And then it takes only one event for that perfection to get shattered again.
The moral? Most members of the audience learned the lesson that your family, your lover, and even your capacity to love, are extremely precious, and not to be wasted. That a life that’s lived entirely for your own pleasure is not ultimately fulfilling unless that pleasure lies in helping others find contentment. It sounds corny, but the film is so sincere, and the characters so well-grounded in reality, that even grown men were crying in the theatre. Kid you not.
But what has me, a recently bereaved person, sitting here writing about it, is the bravery of this little film. The script is superb; primarily a work of Will Fetters, the script underwent many rounds of revision from Jenny Lumet and Robert Pattinson himself before it reached the stage where it felt real. At any moment, the tragedies discussed could have turned hokey, if not for the good writing and–yes–some surprisingly stellar acting. Not that I’m surprised by Rob (unlike most of the gaping-mouthed reviewers now raving about him, I’m not shocked because I’ve seen him do some really complex stuff pre-Twilight), but by the entire cast.
And why was the acting stellar? Because the actors all portrayed grief as it is: ugly, difficult, and oftentimes, paralyzingly stupefying. They didn’t try to pretty it up. But the story balanced the darkness of grief with the natural brightness from occurences of everyday humor, and even the supernaturally sublime moments of intense love.
Tyler:" . . . I love you." Aly, smiling, half asleep: "Good. I'm glad. And I love you, too." Together again at last with Aly (played by one of the luckiest women on earth, Emilie de Ravin), Tyler steals a morning moment before heading to court with his father.
I sound like I’m gushing—but I really don’t feel like I’m exaggerating. I’ll give you examples of some of the moments that had me blinking back tears of laughter, joy, and empathy…
The laughter bits: Aidan is a hoot, and Tyler’s wry responses to him are better, especially during those realistic moments when Aidan’s humor is interjected in an innappropriate moment. At one point, Aidan shows up wearing very little aside from an Irish flag and a beer bottle and interrupts a romantic moment between Tyler and Aly; Tyler is gracious, but has a good time flinging the now-drunk Aidan’s own words back at him with his witty tongue-in-cheek. When the two roomies boy-fight and rag on eachother at work in the bookstore, it’s macho-ly cute, even when Tyler gets shoved off a ladder (Rob falls twice in the film, and his colt-legged physical awkwardness lends itself to some great laughs). Other humorous notes sound between Tyler and his baby sister, Caroline, when he teases her for having a pretentious teacher who goes by “Frauline (something-Frenchie-I-can’t-pronounce)” and launches into a slew of mixed German and French in a hoity-toity tone that borders on Kermit-the-Froggishness. No wonder Caroline quits worrying about the girls in class that pick on her and giggles away with her big, lanky, gorgeous, multilingual brother.
And that right there is what really makes up a great deal of the joyful parts of the film: the wellspriing of good siblingship displayed between Tyler and his ten-years-younger baby sister, Caroline. They have some fabulous moments of the sort that my brother and I didn’t have until we, like Caroline and Tyler, no longer lived under the same roof. I’m going to talk about a few, so pardon the SPOILERAGE:
First, a comraderie. They tease each other, and Caroline nags him to quit smoking (atta girl! And Rob really should quit). They’ve also been through a lot of family grief together, and they acknowledge it and talk about it. Tyler, although he’s ten years older, recognizes that Caroline is precociously intelligent and has her own unique perspective on the situation, since she is still at home in the nest. Tyler listens to her anxieties, and even when he has no answers to her troubles, he has her back, even going so far as to openly and aggressively rebuke his father in the presence of family members–and even his father’s business associates–for being unfeeling towards Caroline,who is at a very tender age and needs attention, quality time, and her father’s ear.
Oh, and did I mention? Tyler dives in headfirst when Caroline’s in a crisis. And her crisis is heinous: Imagine being an eleven year-old girl at an all-girls private school. Now imagine that among all the matching plaid skirts and spoiled brats, you have a premature understanding of the hardness of life, a touch of Aspberger’s Syndrome, and a virtuostic gift for the arts that garners the praise and attention of your teachers–who then launch your artwork at a student exhibition at the Met. Now imagine how all those other girls at school treat you: like the plague. They detest you to the point that one of those girls invites you to a birthday party under polite-seeming pretenses, and then gets all the girls there to grab scissors and cut off your hair. For an eleven year-old, that’s the equivalent of gang rape because it steals your sense of burgeoning feminity and robs your sense of belonging to the world of females.
You come home in tears, but don’t want to listen to what your mother says about this kind of thing passing. Then your brother rushes over. And what does he do? He pulls out a book he gave you about Greek myths when you were having a bad day a few weeks back (and when he did, he told you that even the Greek gods were spiteful, jealous, and nasty to each other). But instead of lecturing you, he plops you down on your bed, curls up next to you, and reads to you in a restful tone until your sniffles give way to sleepy yawns and snores and his voice takes on a scratchy, over-used sound. That’s Tyler and Caroline.
It's not just Tyler and Caroline; It's Rob and Ruby. In a moment when the cameras weren't rolling, Ruby's shoe fell off the bench. Rob rescued it. Paps and fans tittered about how darn cute they were together. Rob later commented that, after acting with Ruby, he suddenly felt like he wanted "to be a father." Ruth controls her hormones and withholds come-hither comments.
But then, Tyler gets to perform what Rob has called “the fantasy of almost every good big brother”: he gets to get back at the prissy little birthday bitch who set his sister up. Tyler takes Caroline, now scrubbed free of her tears and given a very expensive, modern-looking bob of a haircut to hide the damage, back to school the following week. And he doesn’t drop her off at the curb. He walks with her into the classroom, sets her books down, fusses with her notebooks, and ignores the children’s stares to ask her if she’s going to “be okay?”. When he overhears the little harpy in the front row turn around and sneer, “Ooh, Caroline! Did you get a new haircut?” he snaps in the least responsible, but most instinctive way.
He strides to the harpy’s desk, whips it ’round to face the other wall, grabs the fire extinguisher on the wall next to her head, yanks it free, and throws it through the glass pane of the window, showering glass everywhere. Then he whips the girl’s desk back ’round, he gives her terrified eyes one long, hard (crazy sanpaku!) stare that says, “What you say has consequences; you won’t always be a little girl forever”, and….he winds up in jail (for the second time in the film. The audience laughs and cheers to see this happening to Tyler again). Their father, the high-powered lawyer, bails him out. And Tyler is still grinning as he leaves the gate. So. Worth. It.
It made me remember the time when my brother, after overhearing that I was getting teased on the bus-ride home by an eighth grade boy (I was a new seventh grader, and still in my fat stage), stepped up on the bus when it pulled up to our house to let me off. He didn’t throw things or come close to assaulting small children; he just greeted his old bus driver, walked back to where the little shit who was picking on me sat, and said, “Quit messing with my sister.” Or something to that effect. I’m sure all that Jared (said shithead) noticed was the fact that Caleb was a freshman in high school and obviously farther along in puberty than he. He never messed with me again–and I knew that he wouldn’t; I felt it to be true when I trailed after Caleb down the bus’s steps, floating halfway.
So that, right there, is the biggest, sweetest hunk of the joyful pie. But then there’s the romance…
The romantic relationship between Tyler and Alyssa was a teensy bit rushed. Not like Twilight rushed it (Geez, did I blink and miss the talking?), but just…rushed. I wish some of those conversations that were implied to have happened actuallly did between Tyler and Aly. The conversations that we did witness were witty, intellectual back-and-forth banter (stichomythia, if you want the literary term) that throws back to Jane Austen’s version of sitting-room foreplay. Lizzy Bennet and Mr. Darcy barely tangled wits better—and they sure as heck didn’t have the societally-endorsed physical permissiveness to make good on their parliance and tangle naked limbs the way these two lovers can.
The sex scene, even fuzzy-framed and fade-to-black enough for the PG-13 rating, was satisfying. And that’s saying something in an era where audiences demand more and more bare, fleshy eroticism. This union was tender and soulful, complete with some wondering, open-eyed sanpaku stares during kissing that spoke volumes of silent dialogue, and, of course, heralded an afterglow snugglefest to die for–but would have been even more meaningful if the build-up to the bedroom (i.e. the actual talking!) left nothing to the imagination.
And, while I’m on the negatives: dammit, Rob! Hire yourself a dialect coach, por favor. Your supposedly-Bronxian accent headed towards Chicago, Kentucky, Louisiana, and the Barristers’ brogue before it started hitting central Midwestern. I know you can’t hear the difference yet, because you haven’t actually been to Kentucky or Louisiana or the Midwest, but honey, it shows. And it takes away the veil of the character just a teensy bit. Luckily, I, and my darling friends, have a good imagination, so we all just pretended Tyler Hawkins moved around a ton as a kid and had some Barrister blood in him. That way, it kept the character solid in our heads when the accent went whhhaaa’dyousayyy? Still, it was cute to watch Rob flatten his vowels and work his head around American phraseology. It was just hard to watch him struggle. There were spots where the rhythm of accent was off in terms of where the downbeat falls in certain American pronounciations, though I can’t think of an example right now.
Pierce Brosnan, a native Irishman, was guilty of this, too, if I’m being fair. And, as happens when you’re not quite sure of yourself while acting in a different accent, Tyler’s dialogue was sometimes missing the natural musicality of Rob’s real speech (which, in his native accent, is actually musical. Listen to any interview and you’ll here him cross octaves in his pitch range as he searches up and down his soul for answers). Buuuut, even that flatness can be explained away: Tyler is still actively grieving, and often distracted. It’s easy to deliver a toneless line when you’re only mentally halfway inside a conversation. I’ve done it myself. I’m not sure if Rob did this consciously or not, but it was hard for me to decide, and sometimes distracting because it forced me to think about it. Of the non-Americans in the cast, only Emile (a native Aussie girl) could boast an American accent that was realistic enough not to draw your notice.
Other than that, the positives were numerous. Once I allowed myself to relax and adjust to being inside the story, it was easy to forget that Rob was playing Tyler, or that Emilie was playing Aly. They just became their characters in that marvelous way that happens when the actors feel themselves becoming subsumed to the point that the audience becomes connected to the soul of the plot. I think I can pinpoint the moment it happened for me: It was the scene when Tyler picks a water-fight with Aly (played by the “feisty” Emilie de Ravin–Rob’s words, not mine) at the dingy sink in his apartment with the sprayer while they’re washing dishes, and Aly saucily overturns a pot of pasta-water over his head. Rob, playing Tyler, does not physically give this away by showing signs of anticipation—no flinching, no tensing, no mental over-preparedness for the oncoming onslaught. He simply lets it happen, and then, naturally, reacts. The surprise is natural and unforced. Suddenly, the script, the stage directions, and Rob’s knowledge of what will happen next in the overarching plot and all its difficulties for him as an actor disappears, and he’s simply in the moment. As Tyler. And Tyler, in my mind, took over from there, making Rob’s own personality disappear. And then the movie seemed to live and breathe in its own skin. Below, you can see a clip from the scene. (Note: 0:37 makes me giggle like mad. What a face!)
And suddenly, I was allowed to just think and react to the story, rather than get distracted by the gratuitous amounts of Robbage. I got to thinking about my relationships to my family, and thought specifically with gratitude on the relationship that I now have with my brother and his wife, my sister-in-law, as I discussed earlier. And then I thought about how easily our anger and disappointment at the ones who we loved that left us in death (my dad) can be turned against ourselves and our surviving, struggling family (my mom), and I had a good, cleansing sob-fest.
Those brainless preteens in the front row who whined until Rob took his shirt off probably had no idea what was wrong with me. And they were missing what was so infinitely right about the whole lovely picture.
So if you want a film that’s not just a romantic drama, but a drama about life, death, family, friends, and even enemies, go see Remember Me. It’s so packed full of good stuff that, if the dialogue were written in iambic pentameter, it might get passed off as a shaky Shakespearean production. There’s that much symbolic punch to it. That’s why Film.com’s reviewer called the film “challenging in all the right ways.” But be prepared for a very, very dramatic and unexpected ending that throws it sharply into the realm of the dark Postmodern. This is not set in Elizabethan England afterall; it’s in nearly modern-day NYC.
And now, I’m off to bed, and finally ready to post this almost week-long work. If you’ve hung in there and read the whole thing, I congratulate you. 🙂
Here’s the short version of Post I: Ruth got overwhelmed the week of January 10th (the time leading into the anniversary of her father’s death) and left–left Naomi and left home. The situation is related to a previous post, https://ruthsgleanings.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/naomi-sweet-to-bitter-and-back-again/. Everyone on board? Yes? Great. Here’s the second part of the story, which is the most important:
After I left, I spent that Sunday night in a strange (well, not-so-strange–rather comfy) home belonging to extended family. They were very kind from the moment I walked in the door carrying a bag. And thankfully, my sister-in-law had prepared them for the eventuality that I would freak out, panic, get depressed, or otherwise need to escape my environs and head to their house for awhile. So when I walked in, they asked no questions. They handed me a box of tissues and let me have the still, spare room for the night.
I spent the night crying, making calls for advice to friends and grief counselors and my brother, who all told me I should come up to my brother’s apartment in another town and try to start over there.
And, as the night got cold and the strange house got quiet, I prayed.
I remember talking to God about the times when I knew I’d failed my mom and she’d failed me. I told Him about how I was scared of how angry and depressed I’d gotten. I told Him it was so hard, now that Dad wasn’t with us any longer, for me to know what to do, where to go, and how to start out on my own. I told Him I felt like I’d failed my father because I couldn’t be strong enough to help dig my mom and me out of our depression–and I told Him I felt guilty that I’d hurt my mother in the process of trying to shovel my own way out of the grief in our home.
Most of all–and it didn’t help that she called me to wish me a tearful goodnight–I felt guilty about leaving my mom as abruptly and as bitterly as I had.
My friends and counselors had told me that leaving was the right thing to do, that I needed the perspective shift of an emotionally healthier environment, and that I needed to go somewhere where people were striking out on their own and doing brave things in order for me to find the encouragement to do the same. I needed to be shocked out of my little shell; I needed to get moving again.
But a part of me wondered about home, family, and my duty to my mother. After all, hadn’t she raised me? And who was I to throw her away like she didn’t matter, even if she had dragged me down with her in grief? Shouldn’t I be helping her, not making things worse by abandoning her, like my father (symbolically) had?
And then I told God the truth–the bottom line–the simple motive under it all: that I’d decided to change my lot because I was tired of hoping that things would get better where I was. That I was exhausted with faithfully waiting for a spirit of joy to come back to the house and to my life. That I was tired of being disappointed, and that, ultimately, I didn’t trust Him.
I think you can tell, I dominated the conversation for a long while, and He listened. But when I told Him I didn’t trust Him, that’s when He made a suggestion. As is His usual manner when dealing with me, God decided to send a message through the only medium that I, in my anger and pain, would not shut my door against.
He sent me a warm, fuzzy critter.
Bell, a basset hound and the patroller of the household, nosed open the bedroom door and struggled up onto the bed, wheezing and panting from the effort of getting her stubby legs that far off the ground. Her nose was cold where she snuffled it against my leg. Her ears were floppy and moist–she’d gotten them wet in her night-time bowl of water–and she wanted to be petted, now. She smelled like wet fur, more specifically, like wet dog fur, and I struggled to put aside my cat-fancier’s disgust at her scent and slovenly ways as I patted her and assured her that I wasn’t a threat, even if I was a stranger. In a few minutes, she relaxed. Then I relaxed, and that’s when God finally spoke.
Test me in this.¹
What? I knew the scripture reference, and it seemed oddly out of context. So for the present, I ignored it, reasoning that I’d just let something random enter my mind. Also, Bell was being distracting; she groaned and rolled over on her back on top of the bed, and her floppy, dewy ears made smear marks on the coverlet as she stretched, spread-eagle, inviting a belly rub. As I scratched her tummy, all I could smell, and all I could think about, was the doggy stink of wet animal fur.
Wet. Animal. Fur. It got me thinking…
There you go.
. . . about a story . . .
. . . a story from the time of Israel’s Judges. . .
. . . about a guy named Gideon who, like Ruth, spent a lot of time threshing grain and worrying about his uncertain circumstances instead of trusting God.² In an act of theophany, the Lord appeared to Gideon in flesh and told him to do something very difficult. Gideon asked God-in-Flesh for several signs of reassurance along the way. His most famous sign involved a wet, and then conversely dry, hide of smelly sheep’s skin. The elegantly simple test became known as “Gideon’s Fleece,” and God didn’t seem to mind fulfilling it.
Here’s how it went: God listened to Gideon’s request to do impossible things to the sheep skin during the normal nocturnal pattern of condensation. One night, God drenched the fleeece and left the around it ground dusty; the next night, he soaked the ground on which the fleece rested but left the fleece itself perfectly dry. These were little signs of fulfillment, little miracles of reassurance. Baby steps toward’s Gideon’s trust, and in the end, huge leaps and bounds for the nation of Israel’s independence from the Midianites, whom Gideon rose up and destroyed.
So I thought awhile about what fleece I could put out while Bell grunted and snored. I thought about the events I already had in motion–like leaving home–and I wondered how, as emotionally drained and unsure as I was, I could ever know if I should go back. I thought about how God could communicate that to me through a supernatural reversal (wet to dry, dry to wet), and, if He was willing to kill two birds with one stone, maybe even provide for my eventual independence in the same step. I figured that would be the best thing God could do to restore trust, and to restore my sanity. So I aimed to strike a bargain; call it a truce.
“God?”
“Hmm?” grunted Bell, and maybe God.
“You know, before Christmas, that I was taking aggressive steps back home to get a new job so I could work my way to independence. If you really want me to go home, then have one of those potential jobs offered to me before I commit to anything in my brother’s town. Then, have all the counselors in my life–friends, family, therapist–who have told me that I should leave home, tell me to go back and take the job.”
Silence.
“. . . And, if it’s not too much to ask, help me to restore my relationship with my mom over the coming days. She’s hurt, I’m hurt, and we have a lot to forgive if we’re going to ever live peacefully together again.”
Bell yawned. More silence. Then, as if she’d heard her name being called, Bell pricked up an ear and rolled off the bed, trotting out the door.
I guessed her work there was done.
The next day, I went up to my brother and his wife’s apartment, some forty miles away. And I applied for every job listing I could find that seemed even remotely within my capabilities. I reconnected with some mutual friends in that town. They were all very encouraging; my sister-in-law even took me grocery shopping and asked about my favorite foods, as if to say, “See, we can live together for as long as you need to.” I slept on the couch with their cats, and started to hear a trickle of interest from potential employers. I kept applying, hoping to hook an interview or two within the week. I kept hoping to find a job quickly, so I could move into a different apartment with a roommate, and give my brother and his wife back their privacy.
I called my mom nightly, trying to gauge her emotional state, looking for signs of resentment or, miraculously, progress. I saw some of the latter—saw that she’d seen what I saw, and that she wanted change as much as I did. It seemed like we were healing the breach by building bridges on both sides of it. But that meant that only a part of my fleece was being fulfilled, but not all. I stayed where I was.
Surrounded in my newly-laid plans, my siblings, and their clean cats with their silky fur, I almost forgot about my fleece.
Until Thursday came, and I got a call out of the blue–offering me a marketing/PR internship I’d applied for during the first week of December, a position that was at the same hospital where my mom works. The HR representative told me that, at the marketing team’s sit-down departmental discussion, I was decidedly their strongest candidate.
Okay, God. There’s fulfillment number two.
I told the HR recruiter that I was thrilled, and I would make one phone call and call her right back with a definite answer. On instinct, I called my sister-in-law, who pretty much said, “What the heck are you waiting for? Call back! Call back! Take the job!”
So I did, with very little hesitation. The internship starts next week.
My brother, when he came home a little later, supported my decision, and my grief counselor was thrilled when she got my text (at only 27, she’s within her rights to be a high-tech Christian grief counselor). Fleece fulfillment number three fell into place.
So I did what I told God I’d do: I went home.
Naomi and I are patching things up and trying really, really hard not to fall into old patterns of depression, discouragement, and disparaging talk when we fail each other. And God and I? Well, we’re working on that trust thing. He’s made the biggest step. The rest, as C.S. Lewis would say, is up to me– to give up, and to try harder:
“[H]anding everything over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus, if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way . . . because He has begun to save you already.”³
Me, try not to worry? Sounds impossible without a lot of medication. But at the same time, I know we’re commanded by God not to worry (Matthew 6:25ff, Phillipians 4:6), and so I really need to work on that aspect of obedience.
The rest of the work ahead will involve learning to really and truly love my mom, in spite of our failures, and without fear of either of us getting hurt, lost, or abandoned the way we were when Dad died. And that means trying not to worry about any of the above. It also means adhering to Cassandra’s mantra at the end of the film discussed in the previous post, Capturing Castles— “I love. I have lov’d. I will love.”
“For I am the Lord, your God, who takes hold of your right hand and says to you, Do not fear; I will help you.”-Isaiah 41:13
Notes:
1. The quote is from Malachi 3:10, which is actually about tithing and trusting God with your money. See what I mean about it being kinda out of context?
2. The Book of Judges chs. 6 and 7 have Gideon’s story in full, including the bit with the fleece, as well as Gideon’s many other tests for God’s guidance.
3. Lewis, Clive Staples. Mere Christianity.The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics. New York: Harper Collins, 2002. p. 81.
First of all, thank you for remembering that the 15th was the anniversary of my father’s death. My blog stats show that a bunch of people stopped in to check on me on Friday to see how I was and to see whether or not I posted anything. I didn’t, but that’s because I was taking a hiatus of sorts from my life here at home. I’ll tell you an edited version of the story, just so you know why I up and left.
It all started with writer’s block last Friday (the 8th). And, as everyone knows, writer’s block can only be cured by one thing: watching a movie about writer’s block.
I love Netflix, especially its Instant Play feature, and most especially when it gives you access to quirky small-budget British films with a great script, like I Capture the Castle (2003).
Yes, it has Henry Cavill in it, in a small role. He’s the engineer on the Imdb.com train that I took to find this little gem. Anyway, I watched that last Friday while trying to finish making alterations to a writing project that I wasn’t happy with. I was feeling like the well of creative energy in me had run dry, and I needed ideas. Henry Cavill involved in a story about writing seemed promising. To see some of his scenes, click here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_7gK7YZUz4 and here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n08_yLF_Ok .
So, I watched the tiny plot (writer with two daughters in the 1930s purchases run-down castle in England hoping it will inspire him to write another successful novel). . .
. . . watched the plot unfold (writer becomes depressed when inspiration does not hit for many years; writer’s family falls into financial trouble; writer becomes an alcoholic and lashes out at wife with a spoon and goes briefly to jail; wife dies from cancer [obviously unrelated to spoon incident]; writer’s alcoholism worsens; his daughters, Cassandra and Rose, raise themselves with very little assistance from their artsy-crazy new stepmother; the daughters come to womanhood and become curious about men, and especially about their gorgeous, loyal, rarely-paid servant, Stephen [played by his hotness, Henry Cavill]). . .
. . . watched the plot come to climax (Cassandra and Rose come into womanhood at the same time new young scions inherit the landlordship of their castle; crazy-artsy stepmother coaches the beautiful Rose into seducing the elder of the pair of wealthy brothers into marriage; Stephen exposes Rose for her fraudulence in her engagement to the coveted Simon, which is broken; the stupid young scion Simon is heartbroken and continues to lust after Rose in spite of his less-intense feelings for Cassandra and her continued interest in him; the castle is once again in danger of being taken from the family without Rose’s advantageous marriage). . .
. . . and reach its conclusion (Cassandra decides the only way to save the whole family is for her to perform a bit of tough love: lock Daddy-writer up in the castle’s keep until he quits drinking and writes “at least fifty pages. Of anything.” He is initially angry with her, but he eventually sobers, and, with his freedom on the line, starts writing. The castle, his identity, and Cassandra’s sanity are saved).
At the very end of the film, the heroine, Cassandra, reflects on how her father’s novel went from the drivel-phrase he started with, “The cat sits on the mat,” and how it turned into being a story about a child learning to read, learning the relationship between objects and, hence, between beings, in the world, and how it became a successful novel about self-discovery. She contemplates the nature of single-syllable words (The. Cat. Sits. On. The. Mat.) and their power to simplify and direct one’s life. Thus inspired, Cassandra closes the voice-over narration with a simple line from her journal about the direction of her life: “I love. I have lov’d. I will love.” The audience hopes that she means she’ll finally get smart and go to Stephen, the boy grew up alongside her and who truly and selflessly loves her (or at least, I hoped so).
I sat back for awhile and thought of what single-syllable present-past-future tense phrasing I would use to simplify my lifeline. I came up rather empty—or came up with a lot of two-or-three syllable words that didn’t work well in terms of symmetry at all. So I gave up for the time being.
I then lay in bed that night reading my dad’s favorite counseling primer and psychobabble-sifter, M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978).And I studied his underlined passages about things like neurosis (which, Peck believes, is any kind of disordered thinking-behavior spiral in which the sufferer feels trapped in a kind of fearful paralysis exacerbated by the sufferer’s knowledge of what she “ought” to do to fix herself without having the strength to do it; hence, anxiety, depression, irrational phobias, and chemical addictions are all forms of neuroses because one knows one needs help to heal), passive-dependent personality disorder (a character-based disorder in which one becomes passively and parasitically attached to another person for validation, personal contentment, fulfillment, the enablement of a comforting habit, etc. A passive-dependent person is unaware of how damaging this relationship is to the autonomy of both parasite and host, and and he cannot see how it stunts his ability to give and receive love in a selfless fashion. Quite simply, passive-dependency is selfishness on over-drive and it stunts spiritual growth for both parties, Peck argues).
The only cure for either problem, according to Peck, is to use love–real love, the costly, effort-ful, and selfless kind– as a motivation to embrace self-discipline: to employ self-motivation, to delay gratification, to accept responsibility for one’s own actions, and to dedicate oneself to a truth larger than one’s own perception of reality. This, Peck argues, is the path to spiritual growth, to psychological health, and, ultimately, to fulfillment and meaning in life. In his argument, he draws examples from great leaders like Gandhi and Buddha and, most especially, Jesus, who took a selfless path and suffered for the sake of truth and freedom for others. All these leaders had to be strong in themselves before they could be of any real use to the world, and they had to be self-sufficient before they could offer love to others.
I thought about the concept of love–and loving–in all its tenses. I thought about how long it had been since I had exerted the kind of effort required to actually love(I found that I had done so, frequently, with my friends). Then I thought about where I’d failed to do so (usually, with my mother). Then I thought about why I failed, and got myself into a neurotic tangle of “oughts” while I pondered the possibility that my Naomi and I had developed a co-dependent relationship that enabled us to exist in a vicious cycle of pain.
Most of my readers think Naomi and I get along pretty well. We do, sometimes. But then there are the nights when I want to be left alone to my thoughts and the ghosts of the house, and Naomi, bored and lonely and wanting company, chatters at me incessantly in spite of my moody hints telling her I want to be left alone. Then I get snappish with her because I decide to put my need to think and be alone above her need to be heard and acknowledged, just like she had put her needs above mine by brushing off my requests for privacy. We get mad at each other, and, ultimately, we neither one of us get what we want: Naomi goes off alone and I am left with my thoughts full of Naomi and her sadness rather than the private pains I’d wanted to contemplate and sort out.
Then there are the nights when she escapes totally into her grief, checks out of the rational world, and leaves the responsibility and reality to me. And for a long time, I supported that; I enabled that. And that was how we existed. And I began to resent it. And it became harder and harder for me to really love her and support her in the healthy ways she needed support, with encouraging talk and by growing my own strength and independence as an example to her. It also became easier for me to enable her in the ways that were destructive, such as simply allowing her to drink and be bitter, and thus letting myself assume a position of noble-sounding martyrdom when she became emotional or incapacitated and needed a savior. This martyrdom allowed me to appear strong to others while justifying my weaknesses as the product of circumstance. This twisted roleplay became apparent to me upon reflection of the remarks made by friends and relatives who have said to me, “Oh, you’re so good to your poor mother. I can only imagine how hard that must be for you–and with you grieving yourself! [Strong girl!] No wonder you’re having trouble dating/getting out on your own/pursuing your interests in life. [Poor baby!] You just take care of her and take it easy on yourself.”
Truth is, Naomi and I were both dependent on each other to stay in our safe-but-painful stasis: Naomi needed me to stay with her so that I could be her company when she was lonely and her solid caretaker when she wanted to leave reality behind, and I needed to stay with Naomi so that I could continue to live in my safe, well-known caretaker identity as the “good daughter” instead of growing into a strange, new identity as an independent adult who could, one day, hopefully, be a caretaker of her own family and a keeper of her own responsibilities and burdens. I reflected that I had adopted my “good daughter” identity shortly after Naomi herself was diagnosed with cancer in 2002. That was years ago, when I was fifteen. It was time to grow up.
I began, in grief counseling, to plan my escape.
Once my counselor recovered from her surprise at my identifying this awful Gordian’s knot of grief and dependency, she agreed that it was time for me to break through the tangles by spreading my wings and flying–very far away. She suggested that I teach English in China, and thus, get as far away from my home situation as possible. Something radical like that. Something big–a grand gesture of independence. It seemed realistic, though: I’d just seen two of my friends off to Shanghai (http://kirstenching.wordpress.com) and Argentina (http://argenthiana.wordpress.com), respectively, and I knew I was just as smart and capable as they were. And strangely, armed with my late father’s own literary advice in the form of his notes in the margins of Dr. Peck’s book, I decided I was even strong enough to do it, and that maybe, I somehow had Dad’s blessing . . .
So I told Naomi what I’d decided. I started to look at paid teach-abroad programs. And Naomi, terrified for herself, rushed to escape her pain at the fear of abandonment. She became emotional, and altered her chemical state through a depressant (read: hard liquor)–a classic way, as I saw it, to get me to stay and take care of her.
And I got angry–really, angry. I snapped, completely snapped: yelling at her, slapping her, telling her I felt like an orphan because she just refused to act like a normal mother when I needed her to be. Told her I hated it when she didn’t fight these feelings, hated it that she just let them have her and that she made excuses to stay helpless. Dimly, I realized I was hitting some level of darkness in myself and fighting something ugly–fighting what I saw in her that I hated in myself–fighting like an animal in a corner, fighting hard on instinct. Fighting, maybe, at this point, for both our lives.
I was horrified at myself, but once the fight instinct was finished and left me shaking with adrenaline and shock, the flight instinct began. I knew I couldn’t allow us to be trapped in our snare again. And I was afraid of my own anger at my mother’s weakness. I was afraid of myself.
So I called my brother to come down from his home forty minutes away to help with my mother. Then I threw clothes in a bag and left home–and I didn’t know if I’d ever come back. That was Sunday night of last week.
I apologize for the lack of posts in recent weeks. Hopefully you’re still reading.
I also apologize for the monster length of this post. I think it’s the result of weeks of pent-up, then messily unpenned (bad writing pun) tension. I’ve barely had the stretch of two uncluttered hours to put pen to paper, let alone fingers to keyboard.
And that’s because things are changing quickly in my life. Again.
Just in time for the anniversary of my father’s slow demise, I’m once again off to start—or restart–my life.
I think the shift started with the tectonic influence of my mother, a.k.a. Mara, who has been voicing for months now her complaints about my job at the restaurant: its hours, its lack of weekends, the way that my bosses have made unrighteous overusage of my helper-caregiver nature during times of economic distress (“Abbie, can you handle serving the entire restaurant on a Sunday night by yourself? We don’t have the money to hire another server right now.” “Uh, sure, I guess.” ::Cue the anxiety attack::). It hasn’t made living at home pleasant, and going to work is even less so.
Ruth can limbo really, really well when she has a stick to knock her head on. And a white tiger-print dress helps, too.
So I made up my mind to allow myself to start looking at other jobs. That was step one, which I took around the time of my last post. Then I made myself stay up later so I could apply for other jobs online—and this step happened about two weeks ago. This week, I fell into the we’ll-call-you/interview-you-soon-so-stay-tuned stage, which is like playing limbo without any stick to tell you how far to bend while you try to continue on with your regularly scheduled days.
And on the night of the 19th, or really, the early morning of the 20th, I decided to simply quit; to allow myself to just have-it-up-to-here with the hassle of working on back-pay (still no paycheck: this is week two), having no weekends (and hence, almost no dating), working heavy shifts by myself, and being responsible for far more restaurant-running than I was ever contracted to be.
I wasn’t at work when I decided this; I was actually out with one of my old gal pals in the middle of a screaming, writhing, hysterical crowd of well over 200 people crammed into a movie theatre (out of a full 1,200 or so total in the whole building). At midnight. Awaiting the second coming–of the next installment of the Twilight Saga1, not Jesus Christ. But for all the anticipation in the air, you might have thought that we’d gathered there for that.
And I knew, while I was sitting there between groups of babbling fifteenish-year-old and forty-something women, that I was being BAD. Very bad.
I’d not only worked a full double-shift at the restaurant earlier that day, but I knew I was going to have to work the double-shift the next day, which was a Friday, and to top it off, would be a night when live musicians were coming to the restaurant. I should have been home, sleeping under the fog of sedatives, preparing myself mentally for the coming equivalent of waitressing hell—handling six or seven tables at once, managing chef s’ delays, pacifying upset customers, and making bad tips in spite of how hard I try to make everyone happy—but instead, I was out watching a teenage girl’s epic love drama unfurl itself on the big screen in the wee hours of the morning.
And I couldn’t really regret it; I couldn’t even regret going out for a drink beforehand. And I felt actually sort of mad that I was going to have to sacrifice a lot the next day in terms of sleeplessness and exhaustion to pay for one night of fun with a friend for the first time in nearly a month of working six and seven days a week—no weekends. I was seething over the loss of autonomy. I was angry—truly angry—about being caged in a lifestyle that wouldn’t suit a hamster. It was that anger, I think, that sharpened my focus and brought me to the conclusion that my vocation had to change.
Bella (Kristen Stewart) tries to connect with her reflection in a dream sequence that forces her to face facts about herself in “New Moon.” Edward (Rob) stands beside her looking pretty as a dream in a period coat.
And as I watched the film, I relearned some things about myself. Ultimately, I remembered that I had no one to be angry at for my circumstances except for myself. As Edward Cullen commented, it was Romeo who “destroyed his own happiness” in his personal tragedy; he had no one else to blame. I decided that I didn’t want to be a tragic literary cliché—so I needed to quit acting like one.
And I was grateful for the emo soundtrack, the dark, depressive facials of Kristen Stewart’s Bella, the self-deprecating sadness of Robert Pattinson’s Edward, the spunky, no-nonsense attitude and protective friendship of Ashley Greene’s Alice, and the fursplosive (furry + explosive) tempers of the werewolves. It felt like one massive cathartic experience. As an audience, we collectively sighed, cried, gasped, laughed, raged, cringed, and felt that curious relief of knowing that, in spite of the strange and unfulfilling ending of this particular book (New Moon is book two of the saga), the ultimate ending for all involved will be happy.
This seems counter-intuitive, but I love it when movies wake us up to the world of real life. I love it when they remind us of our part in the God-authored stories we inhabit, stories that are complex, difficult, and sometimes frightening, but that God promises us will at least end well. I guess the experience restored my faith a little.
So, when my gal pal and I walked out of the theatre at 2:30 AM, only to discover that her car’s battery was dead, we felt no real sense of panic. She called AAA, we returned to the bar from whence we’d started our evening to await our rescue, and we re-encountered the bartender who had flirted so assiduously with me some hours before (he’d brought me a whole bowl of cherries for my Long Island; apparently he’d been staring a me while I used a straw to chase down the lonely cherry in my glass and then decided he liked the combination of me eating cherries enough to bring me a bowl). We talked to him and discovered that, lo and behold, he was not only a neighbor of mine, but that he was competent with jumper cables. He had us safely on our way by 3 AM. Since it was a chance meeting in the first place that led to our deeper acquaintance with him, I felt like we’d experienced nothing short of a miracle in his act of chivalrous assistance.
Ah, real-world heroes. They’re better than vampire-heroes anyday (sort of). At least, they deserve a nice kiss on the cheek, if not a bite or two (okay, there was no biting, I promise). What a nice ending to our Twilight Night!
So, now I’m off on another adventure of sorts. When all of the counselors in my life back up my instincts when they tell me that it’s time to move on from somewhere, I take that as God’s voice projecting through the mind and the people he’s entrusted to care about me. My allotted stint at the restaurant is over, and in good time. I’m going back on the job market, this time looking for a position that has a little upward mobility, maybe benefits, and most of all, God’s stamp of direction. I’ll have my days free to actively pursue other job opportunities, to visit much-neglected friends, and to also have the requisite downtime required to handle the heavy emotional turmoil of the holiday season caused by my bereavement. November 13th marked the anniversary of my dad’s “death sentence”–the day when the doctors told him there was nothing left to do but wait for his body to give in to the cancer. The rest of this holiday season is going to be a landmine of emotional memory triggers from my father’s death, which means I’m going to be doing some heavy grief work in the days to come on top of my job-searching. Wish me luck.
-Ruth
Notes (Skippable unless you’re a Twihard):
“The Twilight Saga: New Moon” beat the opening-weekend records for the Harry Potter films, and it even killed the all-time opening-night record previously held by “The Dark Knight.” This just proves that women are a powerful economic group. Current stats have the audience for the films as being 80% female, 50% of whom are under the age of eighteen, with the other 50% being made up of twenty-somethings and Twimoms. http://movies.yahoo.com/news/movies.ap.org/new-moon-wolfs-down-1407m-opening-weekend-ap The movie is now the #1 filmin the world for this whole year. Yeah. I know. Crazy.
I know this post took forever for me to write, and I know I said I’d put it up a week ago. Well, it was practically ready a week ago. But I wasn’t. Reason why? It deals with my issues at home. And the readers who live there. (*cough* <Mom> *cough* <Don’t hate me> *sniffle*).
So, after some careful editing and some prayer, here it goes.
I keep coming back to the book of Ruth, not because it’s the title inspiration for this blog, but because it’s one of those precious, tiny, self-contained books in the Old Testament that tells a personal story, and tells it with as much humanity and honesty as ancient Hasidic storytelling will allow. It doesn’t just report events; it reports life-altering shifts and personal upsets that happened to its characters. Since my life is in transition right now, the realism just speaks to me. Especially as it pertains to the process of grief, and how it affects the grieving as they move into a new territory of living.
In Ruth’s tale, the big life-change for Ruth’s mother-in-law, Naomi, is described briefly, but not subtly, through a series of notations made by Naomi herself and others regarding her altered state as a new widow. I see so much of my mother here, and it helps me to understand her as we walk through this process together. I’ll show you what I mean.
Take, for example, what Naomi says to Orpah and Ruth (her daughters-in-law, who are also newly widowed), and what it reveals about Naomi’s sudden loss of self-worth, and her resignation to her fate. It’s truly sad.
“Return home, my daughters. Why would you come with me? Am I going to have any more sons, who could become your husbands? Return home, my daughters; I am too old to have another husband. Even if I thought there was still hope for me—even if I had a husband tonight and then gave birth to sons- would you wait until they grew up? Would you remain unmarried for them? No, my daughters. It is more bitter for me than for you, because the LORD’s hand has gone out against me!” (Ruth 1:11-13)
Naomi insists here that she’s essentially worthless to her daughters-in-law now, since she has nothing more to offer in terms of children, husbands, or relationships, and, therefore, in this time period, no way to provide for the young women through these connections. In my own era, my mother isn’t so much concerned about the fact that she can’t provide for me; it’s simply that she knows that, now that I’m grown, she doesn’t need to—and so she feels useless. I know this only because she says things to me like, “You don’t need me anymore,” and I know it bothers her. She’s looking for a role. It’s almost as if she’s asking, wondering, If I’m not needed as a mother, and I’m no longer a wife, what am I now?
Now, I’ve read a lot of works on widowhood, most sent to me by kindly-meaning people who wanted me to pass the book, pamphlet, or article onto my mother, who frankly has little desire to read more depressing material about other women who share her situation. But all of those works deal in a united fashion with one big issue, and it’s the hardest one a widow ever faces: the loss of identity that comes with losing one’s husband–the other half of the “item” presented to the world. My mom’s trying to figure out her identity now, and I’m trying to figure out mine in relation to hers. And it’s rough, confusing work. I feel like a teenager all over again in some ways, because I miss being mothered but I can’t stand being hovered over. And I’ve also done some mothering lately myself, and feel like I’m ready to take on the role soon (God, husband, and uterus willing). Mom doesn’t know how to manage my weird moods and standoffishness, and I don’t know how to act differently. So we’re both in a weird place, identity-wise.
In the Book of Ruth, Naomi deals with her loss of identity by adopting another one. The identity she adopts baffles today’s commentators who would wish to encourage Naomi to adopt a cheerfully desperate, youthful identity—to get her “groove back,” or re-enter the marriage market. But rather than get a Benjamite boob-job and some kosher collagen filler, Naomi does what most widows of a certain age tend to do: she takes on an identity that is actually older than her years.
How the heck do I glean this from a few short sentences in the Good Book? Easy. It’s obvious that Naomi lets herself go a little—understandably—just by the way that people respond to her. We can tell that her appearance is markedly haggard when she and Ruth finally re-enter Naomi’s home town of Bethlehem since the author of Ruth reports, “the whole town was stirred because of them, and the women exclaimed, ‘Can this be Naomi”’(Ruth 1: 19)?
Apparently, Naomi really looked awful. No one can blame her for this, though, really. I’ve seen first-hand in my own mirror the way that grieving can swiftly age your appearance (drops in weight can create prominent bone structure under the skin, or in older women, exacerbates sagging skin; lack of sleep deepens dark circles and gives a hollow look to the eyes, and constant despair carves a drawn look around the mouth, etc.). People always notice, and, in sympathy, remark on the changes. When I returned to campus after my dad died this winter, a dear friend told me sweetly, “Honey, you look like hell.” My mom’s friends have been kinder, but she’s noticed the changes in herself clearly enough without the comments.
Naomi’s response to her neighbors’ commentary is almost caustic, and it is also as dramatic as Jewish culture allows. Rather than acknowledge her previous identity, she practices name-swapping, which was a huge deal in Old Testament times:
“Don’t call me Naomi (my sweet, pleasant one),” she told them. “Call me Mara (bitter), because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. I went away full, but the LORD has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The LORD has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.” (v. 20-21)
This name-swap reflects Naomi’s altered attitude, and it’s one that I understand completely. After a great tragedy befalls you, there is almost a natural, instinctive tendency to adapt not only a bitter, hardened outlook on life, but also a terrible sense of fatalism.
There is a natural kind of logic that flows from the way that the helpless feelings that come out of the experience of loss inevitably become the habitual attitude of the mind. Fatalism becomes one’s instinct; victim-status, one’s mindset. The world seems wrong, hostile, and inevitably out-to-get-you. God seems either to be wanton in his malice or simply uncaring. Either way, a grieving person will feel helpless against powers greater than himself that seem to conspire to create misery. Simply put, when it rains, it pours, and there is nary an umbrella in sight. The griever finds ample evidence that “the LORD has afflicted [her]” and there is nothing to be done about it. Naomi represents this death-spiral of thought very well in her own words. The idea she essentially expresses is, I’ll live afflicted, and I’ll die afflicted. It’s a truly fatal way of thinking, hence the attached -ism.
In Turn Mourning into Dancing, the remarkable theologian Henri Nouwen (yes, I know I already made literary-love to him in my post on the nature of time; just deal with my new author-crush, okay?) pays close attention the way that fatalism affects the bereaved.1 In his typical spot-on realism, Nouwen explains how fatalism can bury those who are grieving inside their own coffins of pain and disappointment:
One of the most insidious aspects of fatalism has to do with how it leads us to resist healing. We become hostage to a discouragement that insists that nothing more can be done. Fatalism reinforces our tenacious grasp on the old. We become stubbornly unwilling to consider anything outside our narrow experience. Fatalism can lead to depression, despair, even suicide. (50)
I’m lucky that it’s not a normal part of my nature to be a pessimist, because fatalism is something I have to fight every day as a result of my grief. I can usually beat it, put on a brave face, and meet the world and its challenges. But for my mom, my Naomi, the task is more challenging.
“God must hate me,” I’ve heard her say, regarding our recent loss, financial burdens, or sudden need for home repairs. “I’ve never been strong,” she’ll say, by way of argument or explanation whenever I challenge her to challenge herself to get past a new stage of grief or to fight a symptom of it. I won’t lie and say it doesn’t bother me and worry me. But I know it’s ultimately an attitude that she’ll either move away from, or that God will help her alter. Either way, I have to hope—no, to be certain—that it will change. How do I know that?
Because in the Christian spirit, faith always wins. And faith is the opposite of fatalism. Or so says Nouwen, anyway. I’d like to post Nouwen’s spiel on faith versus fatalism here, just because it explains in simple terms exactly how the two attitudes work in opposite directions in the life of a grieving person:
[F]aith looks very different from fatalism. It is its radical opposite. Rather than displaying passive resignation, faith leads us to hopeful willingness. A person of faith is willing to let new things happen and shoulder responsibilities that arise from unheard of possibilities. Trust in God allows us to live with active expectation, not cynicisim. When we view life as a gift . . . given to us by a loving God, and not wrestled by us from an impersonal fate [or, I would add, an uncaring god-figure], we remember that at the heart of reality rests the love of God itself. This mean that faith creates in us a willingness to let God’s will be done. (51)
Faith therefore means that a grieving person can feel free to trust God and can therefore take on an attitude of hopefulness. And hope—the best anti-depressant in the world—restores our feeling of rightness in the world, gives us back a childlike sense of provision and protectedness, revives our youthful verve, and yes, even allows us to be vulnerable when we once were terrified of our unbearable and all-encompassing weakness. But that’s just my experience. Nouwen describes hope’s gifts more beautifully when he writes, “Hope is willing to leave unanswered questions unanswered and unknown futures unknown. Hope makes you see God’s guiding hand not only in the gentle and pleasant moments but also in the shadows of disappointment and darkness” (60).
As you can imagine, hope like this is wildly liberating. It offers honey when the world hands you vinegar. It makes you feel like you could handle anything, and it reassures you that you’re not alone. It even gives you back your old identity, with a newer, sweeter assurance, and it returns you to the land of your birth, to the roots of your faith, and to the passion you once had for your faith when it was new. Best of all, hope, the child of faith, is unstoppable once it’s been given birth.
I think the inevitability of faith’s (and hope’s) victory is the reason why the author of Ruth perspicaciously refuses to use Naomi’s self-proclaimed new name as a reference to her character in the book. Right after Naomi introduces herself as Mara in verse 21 (in the quote from Ruth 1 posted above), we read in verse 22, “So Naomireturned . . . (NIV)”
Yes. Yes, eventually, she did.
And Ruth got married, and they all lived happily ever after . . . .until the next invading tribe swept through Israel while it was half-hazardly protected by its judges (because it wouldn’t have a king until Saul came along and sucked and tried to kill Ruth’s great-grandson, David, who was a better warrior and king—until he got himself into trouble with a chick named Bathsheba, and…)
Yeah. We just gotta have faith, people. That’s all I’m saying.
Let God fix the mess.
Annddd (cue the clear forewarning of a ham-handed segue here) . . . speaking of signs of God’s faithfulness:
Oscar Wilde’s work never looked so fine. Ever.
Do you remember Wilde’s gothic novella-parable, The Picture of Dorian Gray (often mistitled The Portrait of Dorian Gray), the story about the young man whose beautiful face is captured by a mysterious painter, who from that moment on never ages, despite the dissipation and wickedness of his lifestyle? You don’t? That’s because you don’t read (quality literature, I mean. It’s clear that you read this blog). That’s why I am so excited that a film of this story is finally being introduced to this generation of moviegoers. It’s a story that can’t be told enough in our times: a dire warning of the price of the selfish consumption we indulge in within our culture.
So here comes the movie to warn us all. And, lo, behold! The beautiful face of Mr. Gray now belongs to Ben Barnes, of Prince Caspian fame, the English-major/singer-turned-freakin’gorgeous-actor whom I admire very much, and not just for his dark good looks. I cannot wait to see this movie. Bonus feature: it co-stars the unforgettable Colin Firth (That’s right, girls: it’s Mr. Darcy!!!).
Behold, ze trailer of picture perfection.
I am sad, though. The IMDB.com infopage on this movie says it’s not slotted to come to the USA theatres, but will only become available to us folks across the “Pond” when it’s released on DVD sometime next fall.
Whaaaa? That’s. So. Sad.
What can we do? Ruth’s got an idea. She’ll write a letter where it’s got its best chance of being read. This being Ruth’s only blog, here it goes:
My Dear and Darling Mr. Ben Barnes,
I’ve read that you occasionally google yourself. And so I’m hoping that, if you should ever find this blog, you might—please, please, please—campaign to bring your Dorian Gray to theatres here in the US. Pull whatever strings you have to, even if it means supplicat-texting your old neighbor, who is the simultaneous-bitch-and-master of Summit Entertainment Group.2 If he’s able to hook you up to Summit’s U.S. distributor, I will certainly do some word-of-mouth advertising, Facebooking, blogging, and book-dropping in my English major circles to raise the ticket sales for your film. And I’ll be very, very grateful to you for the gift of seeing you in period costume on a twenty-foot screen. Very, very, very grateful. So grateful that I might just . . .well . . . mmm . . . Nevermind. I wouldn’t want to sully my portrait, or yours. Much. I’m sure you know what I mean by that.
Affectionately and much affectedly yours,
Ruth
I can already see some readers rolling their eyes at me for writing that. But you should already know that I’m shameless, silly, and joking (sort of; I’m kidding in that you-know- it-could-never-happen kind of way).
But I’m also an eternal optimist. Thank God. 🙂
Notes:
Nouwen, Henri. Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001.
Weird biographical side-note of cosmos-twisting kismet proportions: Ben Barnes was apparently raised down the street from Robert Pattinson in Barnes, London, and they crossed paths pretty often when they were kids (well, when Rob was a kid, and Ben was a tweenager. Whatevah. The coincidence is awesome). Both Ben and Rob were in the “final four” in Summit’s lineup to play Edward Cullen in Twilight, but Ben was dubbed “too old” for the part (at 26, he was, sadly), so Rob (then barely 21) cradle-robbed the role. But, oh, the smallness of the world and the pool which spawned these beautiful male leads! I almost want to buy a house in that neighborhood and partake of its magical properties/property by drinking the local water from Barn Elms, breathing the air (fog? It’s western London…), walking barefoot on the grass and rolling in the dirt on the Commons, and then seeing if I have unrealistically gorgeous babies as a result. The place really must be magical, even if it’s unhealthily close to one of the bends of the polluted Thames.
The longer I’m in grief, the more frustrated I tend to become with not only myself (for being stuck in it), but with those who just don’t understand it. Being young, most of my friends haven’t really experienced a major, devastating loss. I’m referring specifically to the death of someone really close to them whose demise seems early or untimely. Some of my friends have argued that they have experienced this; they’ve lost grandparents.
I try to be respectfully sympathetic while they rattle off how much they’ll miss Mamaw’s brownies.
Don’t get me wrong. Involved grandparents can be terribly dear to us, and so it does hurt when they leave us. However, we can’t shake the strange contentment that eventually arrives with the rational inkling that tells us something at once horrible and wonderful: that maybe, since our grandparents have lived so long, it’s their natural time to go.
I think it’s easier to accept the passing of those who have already embraced a past-oriented mental state of nostalgia, who have raised their own children and seen a new generation arise; it’s the passing of the torch. If we really think about it, most grandparents seem to belong to the past even before they pass away.
The deaths of one’s close friends, siblings, or one’s parents are a different story, however. This holds especially true when you actually live with these people at the moment when death enters your home to pillage and spoil. It stalks around your childhood and recent photographs, upsetting frames showing young, glowing, healthy people who obviously—up until lately—had a lot of vigor and a lot of living yet to do. It snatches our hopes for the future and the growth we measure in the present. Death, like a gardener in a blind rage, tears out the fresh blooms and misses the brittle husks while he tramples your careful landscaping.
Death seems wasteful. Senseless. Cruel.
If the way in which your loved one died was especially drawn out or painful, and if you witnessed this demise, you wind up feeling like the helpless victim of armed robbery or rape. Only there are no fingerprints, no traceable DNA evidence, no handcuffs to snare the perpetrator, and no lineup of suspects, so there’s no possible way to assign blame and receive justice. You’re just left feeling shell shocked and abused by the world. Even God himself seems like a terrible dealer of justice, so you don’t really want to listen to anything he might have to say about your soul. (I’ll write more on that later.)
Some will say that the days leading up to, and immediately following, a loved one’s death are the worst. I won’t deny that these were terrible times for me, or that they weren’t full of all the sacred anguish and sorrow that comes when a cherished life leaves a household, leaving a burning hole.
But, as my well-read friend, Phillip, has observed, “When all the big fires are put out, the little aches continue.”
Imagine, then, what it’s like to face the world during the “aching” period, in the days and nights, weeks and months—even years—following the death of a close loved one.
You have bitter thoughts on sunny days. You have nightmares that stay up with you in the darkness. Your brain tricks you into thinking you still hear your loved one turning his key in the lock or coming up the driveway in the blue hours of the evening. In quiet moments, you might still hear him breathing. If his place of death was in your home—as it was with my father—then you might stir up the ghosts of the smells of morphine, bile, hospital astringents, and that indefinable stench known as death while you’re doing something as innocuous as vacuuming the carpet or dusting the furniture. You become conscious that all the residual sounds, scents, and traumas of his passing reverberate from the molecules of the books on his nightstand and in the non-stick skillet you used to make those simple, final meals before he started to refuse food altogether.
This is your life. It feels like an endless stretch of dying time in a small death-filled bubble that floats around your body in an encasing force field of awareness. You, the bubble-child of pains, wander about in the world and feel like it’s a stranger to you, and that the people moving happily in it look like puppets, with the same awkward, painted-on smiles and mannequin poses as the falsest effigies of souls. (Wow, I read that line and thought, Emo much?)
Emotionally, you vascillate among numbness, helplessness, and rage. Nothing seems worth starting when world has kicked you out of its living circle. You begin to feel a bit unhinged and can’t trust your own mind anymore. No one you talk to seems like they understand you. You lose confidence that you will be accepted and understood. You wait for the proverbial other shoe to drop and for things to get worse than you can imagine. Life doesn’t seem likely to get happy again, or to hold anything exciting or meaningful anymore.
That’s why C.S. Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed that
“grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling.”
Provisional—meaning to have enough just to subsist for the time being. You have little left in terms of reserves of strength. You simply exist and—helplessly, miraculously—survive.
Worst of all, it seems to take forever to get out of this land of shadow, which exists not only in your mind, but directly underneath your feet.
I’m walking out of it, though. I walk every damn day until it hurts . . . because that’s how I cover the most ground.
Thanks, dear reader, for following my footprints.
I hope this helps you when you encounter your own trials and meet others in the midst of theirs.
Sources:
Lewis, C.S. A Grief Observed. 1961. Quote recorded in my journal. I don’t have the page number.
Schwein, Phillip. From a late night phone conversation like, two weeks ago. I didn’t write down the date because I’m not anal. I just wrote down the remark because it was practically poetry. Thanks, Phil.
"Death and the Maiden," artist unlisted. I'm making an educated guess that this is a Gustave Doré, ca. 1870.
More ditties on grief, in poetry form (mine, from during this past semester at school):
On Getting My Degree This Spring
I’m proud that I didn’t
pull a Sylvia Plath
and wind up in a bell jar halfway
through my days at college,
a college which, ironically enough
in days of old, bought (or sold?)
land from (or to?) a mental institution;
so, it’s fitting that I wonder whether
the Skinnerian model
of behaviorism taught there
—do this, receive that—
will pay off in the real world
that I will soon walk into,
staring into the sun, blind,
with an uncomfortable heat building
behind my eyes
burning,
thinking, will I . . .
find my way? survive?
rise a phoenix
from the crematory
of the year you died?
The Viewing
I keep returning to this image: leaning my head back against the cupboard door
under the kitchen sink after calling the hospice, seeing myself from a distance
like an out-of-body experience while his body lay in the other room.
I am aware now, though I wasn’t then, that he still reclined in his hospital bed
on the other side of the sink, through the service window, in the den,
and I, on the other side, feeling like death, was mirroring him.
Electronic Elegy
Not quite three months after you,
the laptop that you bought me
(just days before your diagnosis)
Died;
With it, the semester’s files that I
forgot to copy on a backup disk
(because I was tending you, so ill)
and several rare family pictures.
It just burned out, poor thing;
the motherboard got tired of interfacing
(between memory and active processing).
And I could not blame it.
(That last one with the computer-talk was for you, Sheraz.)
About the Site:
Before, and happily-ever-after with, Boaz
Links
Boundless Webzine: Christianity and College A good source for thoughtful articles on the issues plaguing college-aged kids and young adults. Sometimes I disagree with the writers, though.
Kirsten's Shanghai Adventure Join tall, blonde, and single Kirsten on her adventures in China. Fascinating stories told, with pictures, too!
Oh, Dear My brother’s blog, in which you’ll find a lot of theorizing about what’s REALLY going on, and has gone on, in the world. Written from the perspective of a math geek/engineer interested in uniting God with science and history.
Ravi Zacharias International Ministries Listen, read, and learn from Christian apologist and (gasp!) true intellectual, Ravi Zacharias. He’s this generation’s C.S. Lewis–not to be missed.
StudentSoul.org A webzine geared towards college-aged Christians struggling with issues of faith and the task of finding a calling. The writers are students, rather than adult mentors like those at Boundless Webzine, and so the articles are more gritty and personal.
Thiana's Argentine Adventure Join Thiana (Tee-Anna) as she journeys to Buenos Aires for grad school–far away from her boyfriend in the States. An intense look at the courage it takes to live in a new country and the complexities of long-distance relationships.
Wendy's D.C. Musings Wendy moves to the nation’s capital–and back in with her college roommate. The Declaration of Independence has been signed–in a whole new way.
Ruth's Gleanings: Blogging from Moab 