Sobbing on the train

I haven’t written much in the past few months.  My life has spiralled so far out of control that recording it in writing seems pathetic, indulgent, or a commitment of everything to reality in the written word.  So I haven’t made that commitment.  Since January I’ve had the relationship I relocated for shortly before Alex’s death end, not by my choice, and as I was about to pick myself up in a new place, had the new job I excel at reveal itself to be hanging on a precarious thread.  So I’ve lived in a state of limbo for 3 full months now.

During those 3 months, Alex’s 30th birthday also passed.  I dreaded its arrival, then didn’t note its passing, until several weeks later finally recognized that I spent a full two weeks after it as near suicidal as I’ve ever been in a lifetime struggling with depression.  Rather than just wish I couldn’t wake up in the morning, I actually thought about how easy it would be to direct my bike off the overpass, before rejecting the notion because of all the implications, all the burdens, all the responsibilities to other people I bear that I just can’t bear that led me to think it in the first place. 

I marked the Book of Job in my ecumenical study bible, since I thought perhaps I was headed for a Jobian course of life, and I should know what happens next.  Apparently I lose my camels and develop boils.  But I’m not alone in the series of insults to maiming I’ve suffered after Alex’s death.  Many people’s marriages, jobs, mental health, physical health, collapse in the wake of a tragic loss.  Although the collapse of my relationship and job are not causally related to Alex’s death (I don’t think), they are, nevertheless, part of a package that many people find delivered to their doorsteps, as though death were not enough.

Recently I’ve become sick of feeling like a victim of a horrible turn of fate.  But it’s hard when your entire foundation has been ruined to rebuild.  As I find myself continuing to thrive in a field my brother excelled in, I want more and more to share my successes and wry observations with him, only to conclude that they mean little without him here.  And sometimes, at the end of a day on which I am on top of the world, I find myself riding the train back, looking sharp, collapsing into unstaunchable tears in front of a carload of strangers who pretend not to notice that put-together stranger unraveling in front of them.

 

In defense of Brad Paisley and LL Cool J

Brad Paisley, a pop country musician, is stirring up more press on progressive newsites and blogs than probably ever before with his and LL Cool J’s collaborative “Accidental Racist.”  As a country music fan and a student of critical race theory, I’m pretty disappointed in the reception the song is getting.

Here are the lyrics to the song: lyrics and you can listen here.  

It’s not a great song, musically.  And it is not a dissertation for a critical race theory phD.  But anyone who is judging it on those grounds completely and willfully fails to understand the climate in which this song is being introduced.  Country music has become so increasingly nativist that you could listen to an uninterrupted hour on your local station in which song after song would proclaim messages of pride for the singer’s small backwoods, the certainty that cities are inferior, that all you need to know is in your Bible, that anyone different is not wanted, that their kids aren’t like our kids, and that we will “stick a boot in your ass because it’s the American way.”  There is one Black artist in all of pop country-land (Hootie now without the Blowfish), and you can bet he does not sing about race.  Into this context comes popular singer Brad Paisley’s earlier songs like “American Saturday Night,” boldly subversive because he dared subtly state that we are a nation of immigrant influences, and even crazier his “Welcome to the Future,” which references the KKK and with awe welcomes our first Black president.  He now dares go further and start a conversation — that’s it, a starting conversation — to actually acknowledge race, racism, slavery, and racial conflict and tension, with the collaboration with respected if slightly out of date Black rapper LL Cool J. In explaining this song to Ellen DeGeneres, Paisley said “I don’t know if y’all have noticed, but there’s some racial tension,” a simple statement that our own first Black president has had to backtrack from, because acknowledging racism refutes the compromise with the right that we pretend to be a “post-racial” society.

It’s not just that people are criticizing this for not doing a great job at what it sets out to do.  It’s that the condemnation is so swift from those of us who should want these issues addressed that we are essentially chilling the conversation.  Anyone who thinks that Eric Church and Talib Kweli are now going to do a country duet about reparations lives on another planet.  Meanwhile, what’s drifting back to the (probably irate and certainly ruffled) white country base is the message that they shouldn’t even bother to try to approach the issues because we’ll just attack them, and that’s why they should just stick to what they know, which is cornbread and chicken, blonde-haired blue-eyed girls, church on Sundays.  No more trying to talk to those Black baristas, as Paisley’s song imagines; you don’t get it, so don’t try.

I get that people are interpreting LL Cool J’s line “If you forgive my gold chains I’ll forgive your iron chains” as creating a ridiculous equivalent, and if that’s what it’s meant to do I agree.  But this song doesn’t strike me as a “I’m black, you’re white, that’s history, let’s forget it, kumbaya” type of song, and I think anyone rushing to judgment on that should listen more carefully.  I hear Paisley acknowledging that he’s coming across as racist and that he’s uncomfortable with the racist legacy associated with the South.  Yankees tend to react with horror to the Confederate flag, and I’m no exception, but we also learned the victor’s version of the Civil War which, frankly, was not all about good intentioned Northerners trying to end the evils of slavery.  Southern revisionist historians do have some good points to make.  But I digress.  I also hear LL Cool J saying that his automatic reaction to the cowboy hat is fear, and I don’t then hear any indication that either singer believes that’s stupid and he should get over it.  This song is not pretending it’s all good and we should move on.  As Paisley sings, “We’re still picking up the pieces, walking on eggshells.”

The critics aren’t demanding, as some claim, that this “come from a place of honesty.”  They’re demanding that Brad Paisley not talk about race at all until he’s fully immersed in critical race theory, and maybe not even then.  And demanding silence from people beginning to learn and question and speak is not a good way to bring them along further.  We are telling Brad Paisley, “You don’t get it, so shut up.”  

So I’d ask everyone who is now skewering Brad Paisley and LL Cool J because their 5 minute pop song doesn’t fully and completely discuss the racist legacy of this country and how that affects us today, how is your condemnation moving the conversation forward?  (And also, I’d ask you to listen to a pop country station for a few hours.  Seriously.)

 

Directions to the grave

My brother’s 30th birthday was this weekend.  I was too far away to visit his grave, and everyone closer couldn’t handle going, so I gave directions to an aunt who said she’d go on our behalf and bring flowers.  Here are the directions:

If you’re going north, take the first entrance into the cemetery (it’s the only entrance from that side).  Make the first right, and drive around just west of the big building you see.  Stay on that road as it curves around to the left (pointing you due east), and stay straight on that road for about 1/8 of a mile, to a garbage can on the right side of the road.  Alex is buried to the right of that road, just beyond the garbage can, in a plot that is stuck between that road and a high fence that marks off the entrance to the ill-placed hopefully-named Resurrection Medical Center.  It is just before another road that would allow you to turn left.  You have gone too far if there are no grave stones to your right; Alex’s grave is among the newer dug ones in that area.  His grave is the second in from the road, and it’s marked by a plastic placard facing south and missing one of its two metal spokes; there should also be a plant hanger stuck in by the placard, with either a pot of dead chilies or no pot at all.

 

The disappearance of the white rabbit

I cling to strange signs.

There is a white rabbit that hangs out about a block from my house.  The first few times I saw it I did a double-take: wild bunnies, dumb though Ed Abbey proved they are, never sit so stoically, and I’ve never seen a white wild rabbit.  I finally encountered the owner and learned that the white rabbit is a pet, it lives outside, and has survived a year in this neighborhood filled with feral cats and half-trained pit bulls.  I came to expect to see the white rabbit on my way home from work every day, hanging out under the same parked car around dusk.  Jokingly, I referred to the white rabbit as an allegory for my own survival, connecting its unfathomable daily presence to my own continued existence.

I tempt my own fate.

Around the beginning of the month, I noticed that the car the white rabbit usually hid under, and indeed the white rabbit itself, were not there.  Hadn’t been there since then.  I looked around the yard to see if it were elsewhere, and under other parked cars, but there were no signs.  The food and water bowl that were normally left out on the steps were also gone.

About a week after the disappearance of the white rabbit, and before I’d really processed its absence, my partner ended our relationship.  I may have seen it coming had I been looking farther forward or back, but since my brother’s death I have only been looking at each day, so I was blindsided.  It was not, he says, related to my temper or sadness, but rather to long-term and undefined incompatibilities.  I don’t wish to press the point or blame him; I’ve ended relationships on those grounds or excuses before.  But this action did toss me back out to sea with no anchor.  I thought I was beginning to own my own life again, and now I find myself homeless, in a strange city where I have no community, nothing but a job and a cat to cling to, nowhere for solace but the mountains.  Even the mountains failed me yesterday, and I found myself flinging myself onto a snowbank and crying out that I was in pain to perfect strangers.  For days the heavy sodden woolen blanket of depression has been draped over me, shutting out light and human warmth, occasionally getting a corner stuck down my throat and choking me.  I finally went to see a therapist, who assured me that I’m doing everything correctly; my worst fear, that this is normal and there is nothing I can do to take away the pain.

I am continuing to plod through the steps, although there are more now that I am homeless and without a partner to confide my grief in or help me with my daily tasks.  I look forward to dark every day so I can sleep and be done with being conscious, and in the morning I lay in bed awake long before I need to be and wait for the light and more often my bladder to finally pull me out of my restlessness.  I have given in to self-pity, which is worse even than the pity of others, and let myself feel totally abandoned by everyone.

I pulled it together enough at work to do a great job, and then as I was leaving the office at the end of a long and horrid but productive work week I said goodbye to my brother’s picture and completely broke down again.  No matter how hard I work, no matter what I produce, no matter how amused Alex would be by it, I can’t bring him back.

A few days ago I saw the owner of the white rabbit again.  I had been staying with acquaintances around town but was coming back to my old house to stay with my cat while my ex was out of town, and happened to be biking past while the man was out for a smoke.  What happened to the white rabbit?  I asked him, terrified of the answer.  The confusion and lack of recognition on his face quickly gave way to the unworried answer: the rabbit’s fine, he assured me.  He’d built a hutch for it in his cousin’s yard across the street, to keep it safe from the dogs.  He’d also bought two more rabbits as companions for the white rabbit.

I swear when I get out of this hole I am climbing mountains and not looking down again.

The shock is over and that’s not a good thing

A while ago someone suggested that 2013 might be easier than the second half of 2012.  What could be harder than the initial months after my brother died, after all?  Even then, though, I feared that as the initial months passed, it would actually get worse.

I think 6 months marked the end of the shock period for me.  The shock is over, and this is not necessarily a good thing.  Shock, or ptsd, must have some attendant ability to wrap its victim in a cocoon.  My pain was, and remains, very real.  My disbelief remains, and was, very real.  But for 6 months after Alex died, I functioned very well in my tunnel-visioned plodding way.  I also slept well.  I am a lifelong insomniac and perpetual existential-worrier (something Alex also excelled at), and when he died I thought I would never sleep again.  Instead, I passed out hard most nights and slept solid and dreamless, in a way I would’ve bargained my soul for in anxiety-filled teen years.  I have spent my life in high stress, low pay causes, always wondering if I have chosen the place where I can be most effective.  I question, and usually destroy, all of my romantic relationships.  But for 6 months after Alex died, I was on a narrow path, hemmed in by shock, body shutting down at night and mind shutting down all peripheral visions.  

About a week ago I started not being able to sleep again.  I now worry about work at night, and toss and turn.  I wonder again what I’m doing with my life, and lose my temper to a degree I have never before, screaming for the first time in my life at someone I love.  The existential questionings and insomnia are old acquaintances and I could view this as a return to normal, but they are harder to cope with than usual and more extreme.  This return to sharper feelings on other sides does not come with a dulling of the pain of Alex’s death; it just makes it seem that much crueler that not only did I lose my brother, but I can still lose my sanity, my control, my job, and my relationship in my grief.  If I can still cry so hard I can lose my voice and get a stomach ache, it seems only fair that I should get that cocoon of dullness back so I can sleep at night.  2013 is scaring me like no year before.  

Letter to Alex, not at rest

Dear Alex,

Today I learned how to tweet, and did so copiously.  You’d be proud.  I also helped pull off a pretty phenomenal conference.  It’s the end of the day now and I’m exhausted, and I remarked to a colleague that I didn’t know whether to sleep or celebrate.  He said I should go out, because I could sleep when I’m dead.

I don’t think you sleep.  I don’t picture you as restful at all, but still angry and turbulent.  Tomorrow marks 6 months since you have been gone.  Before you died you were restless; you wanted a new path, a renewedly meaningful path, a direction.  You wanted it to coalesce before you hit 30, and you were angry when I suggested that it might be less pressing once you actually hit 30.  You were agitated then, but I think you would be furious to be dead.  You would not have wanted to miss so much — the rest of the campaign, the re-election victory, your next move to wherever.  I have never had the satisfaction of picturing you as a soul at peace.  Six months gone, earthly body buried, my own rage and the rage of your other survivors give presence to the rage I’m sure you would feel at the injustice of your death.  

Yes, there are other times when I can see you would be amused or happy or wryly analytical, but it is usually followed by anger, my own and that which I’m sure you feel.  I wish you had hit that age where saving the world immediately seems less pressing, more of a long-term path intermingled with the ability to handle disappointments, set-backs, and a general quest for happiness, but you did not.  You died in full glory of energy and quest and vigor and rage, magnificently loud and driven and tall.  In this state I am sure you do not sleep.

I am so sorry this happened to you, and this time there is nothing I can do to fix it; I can’t even be there just to listen.  All I can do is be angry for you.  

Love always, 

Your big sister

 

Occasional spite

One cannot always be pure of mind and generous of heart when grieving, and today is a day of petty spite and rage against any target that happens to catch my eye.  Today is a day when I don’t just miss my brother and resent others for living, but a day on which others’ responses to his death make me bitter and cynical.  

My brother died a very public death.  His life ended literally in front of scores of people, and also while doing very public work.  By the nature of his work and talent, he also had many friends and admirers (and a few people who I am sure resented him his popularity, attendant cockiness, and occasional girlfriend-stealing).  Many of these people truly loved him, and many more were inspired by him and stunned by his death.  Usually, this is a blessing.  It means that many people knew, almost immediately, of his death and we did not have to do the telling and re-telling. It means that many people, who I know from varying degrees of well to not at all, have reached out to me and my parents to give us their condolences and tell us what Alex meant to them.  But it also means that his public persona is writ larger than his whole, that the nuance of him is lost in the publicity, and that people can shape and mold the event of my brother’s death to their own needs.  

I recognize that my take on this is my view from the hole in which I currently make my home.  Sometimes, I am happy that Alex’s memory will live on in everyone who experienced his death.  But today, I feel like telling David Axelrod to shove his unifying event; I would rather have my brother back than an amazing Obama victory.  Sorry, David; I appreciate your attendance at the funeral and shiva, but your campaign was not as important as my brother.  And New York Times, come on; my brother was so much bigger than the Obama campaign.