The Death of Imagination

So much in the last couple weeks, where do I start? I wish I'd had the energy to update regularly. I'm sure a day-to-day account of navigating my grief would have been useful to me later. Because, you know, it's not like this will be the only time I do this and the mind forgets unpleasant details so easily.

One thing that's increasingly clear to me is not just how ill-equipped we are to deal with grief but how bad most people are at dealing with someone who's dealing with grief. And there's a copious literature on the first of these but I'm not sure there's much of anything on the latter. I sometimes feel like I'm taking notes for a manual on What Not to Do When Someone You Love Loses Someone They Love and on Monday I gave my sister an overview of the salient points.

Up until just before then, it had been an uncommonly good day. Sure, I still had my cold and there was cleanup to do from Hogmanay, but not so much that I couldn't ignore it and run to the spa to meet up with an old college friend. Getting reacquainted with her after nearly 25 years was fascinating and she was thrilled when I showed interest in "meeting her people". And her people--her tax attorney husband and actress daughter--were fascinating, too. The whole experience was very affirming.

Then I got home and found my refrigerator--still full of leftovers from Sunday--at 66°F and the prospect of having to throw everything out and replace it depressed me so much I just plopped in front of the computer to listen to moody music and play solitaire. I knew I needed to vent, so I called Nuphy, but he wasn't available. So I called my most reliable friend in the world: my sister.

As we talked, I got more and more worked up about things. It's not just the fridge--or the dead rat I found when I got back from St Louis, or the water in the lower level the day before I was supposed to leave. It's not even really the apartment as such. It's the thought of having to face everything an adult has to manage by myself. Yes, Sis can listen. But at the end of the day, I'm the one with the kitchen full of spoiling food. If I called upon one of my better friends to come over and help, they probably would. But fundamentally it's not their problem. For them, it's a charitable act. They are free to peace out at any time--and with quite legitimate reasons. Only monshu made me the promise that whatever my problems were they were his problems, too, and he would stick by my side until we solved them.

And from there we got on the raw subject of what I needed from my family when I went down for Christmas and what I didn't get. I needed to Feel the Love like I'd never felt it before. I needed to be taken care of. I needed someone attentive enough that they could sense what I needed without the burden always being on me to ask. I got some of that. There was one point, for instance, where after I'd been weeping quietly in my room for nearly an hour, e. decided to check on me, saw the state I was in, and offered to help me finish wrapping presents. But acts like that stand out against a background of relative indifference.

Like I said, I get that people don't know what to do. This is one of those live-altering experiences that you can't understand without having been through. I'm waking up to the mortifying realisation of how I've failed friends and family in the past when they were forced to endure something like this. That's why I accepted what was offered and immediately began trying to forgive them for doing so little. For not even bringing up monshu once in conversation (and eagerly changing the subject the one time I brought him up). For "giving me time" when what I needed was comfort. For, basically, not being spouses to someone they'd never agreed to marry.

Talking to other widows makes this easier--while at the same time making it only more clear how widespread the need is for advice. Before Sunday's get-together, my friend Mozhu described having almost exactly the same experience the Christmas after her husband died. My friend group is cleaving into those who Get It and those who don't--often despite their best intentions--and this isn't a new thing. Terminal illness is its own life-changing experience and even being there for Nuphy didn't prepare me for what it was like when it was my partner and not just my ex. His daughter was the responsible party then. I was the good friend with the luxury of leaving when I "needed" to because, at the end of the day, it was "not my problem".

Things have settled into a routine, which is a both good and bad. Good because it means that monshu's condition is stable and improving steadily, but bad because of the false sense of normality which will be shattered the moment we have either a major setback or a major step forward (i.e. his coming home).

I could be using this time to accomplish things which really need to get done around the house. Instead, I'm still doing the minimum there and squeezing in all the socialising I can. Before he was in the hospital, I felt like I'd seen almost nobody all year. Hospital visits are a tricky thing, since the point of them is not really to spend time with me but with the patient. (An acquaintance I saw over the weekend told me she was staying away for just that reason.) Trying to split the difference and combine them with a meal out with me wasn't too feasible back when things were more iffy, but it's better now.

I imagine I'll hit my limit before too much longer and be back to hiding in the bedroom reading again. (I try to do that, but it's tough to ignore calls and texts when any one of them could be from my husband or a health provider--and now Dad's back in the hospital, too, making it all worse.) So in the meantime I should be doing more to fit in the people I really want to see rather than simply those who are being most persistent, but that requires a change of personality I'm not yet up to effecting.

Today I once again came to the realisation that someone I thought might be a friend isn't. I posted a general announcement of monshu's upcoming surgery to Fakebook and over fifty people responded, many of them asking to be added to the e-mail list I'm maintaining for sending out updates. (Yeah, I'm old school that way.) He wasn't one of them. Now, I'm savvy enough to know what a "lossy" channel that is; there's a hundred reasons why someone might have missed one of your posts there and, thus, no reason to read too much into it. But it brought to mind the brief and unsatisfying exchange we had last December when I had tried to breach the subject with him, but once he heard that I wasn't going to be around during the holidays (when he'd be passing through), it seemed he couldn't end the conversation quickly enough.

So I did what I do when this happens and got pouty for about ten minutes. Then I mentally slapped myself and refocused on those aforementioned 50+ who *did* respond and sat down to compile the list. There were some surprises. I really can't imagine, for instance, that the former coworker I haven't seen in something like a year and was never close to is really interested in more details than I'll be making public online anyway, so I'm just going to assume she misunderstood my solicitation and leave her off.

Oh, and since I guess there are some people following me here who haven't heard through some other channel: a debulking procedure has been scheduled for next Tuesday. It will be outpatient, but I'm expecting he'll be admitted overnight for observation all the same. Are we anxious? A little, but mostly we just want the damn thing over with. We're really not going to know where things stand until they slice him open and poke around. Then maybe I'll finally be able to work with a planning horizon of more than a week for a change.

You could say I've lost a friend over the fallout from the Charlie Hebdo murders.[*] You could, but it wouldn't be accurate on either count.

You can tell the second part is false by how quickly the discussion became personal. I'm not sure we even differ that substantially, given that he's also opposed to increased dissemination of the offensive cartoons. I'd hardly begun to explain my position before he took me to task for "never EVER agreeing" with anything he's posted on his Wall. So the politics is simply the trigger; the real issue goes deeper.

How deep it goes is hinted at by the fact that his contention is demonstrably false. I know this is a sore point with him so in the past I've made a point of liking and commenting positively on his posts where possible. The fact that he's never noticed (and can't be bothered to check even after repeated urgings[**]) is evidence for the falsity of the first part of the proposition: I'm not "losing a friend", I'm finding out that I either never had one or lost him long ago.

His parting shot to me was that he's "not interested in disagreeing civilly", and I personally don't see how any friendship can survive that. I can see making certain issues off limits--there will always be some things that cut a lot closer to the bone for one person than another. But that's entirely different from holding the other person's ideas in complete contempt. From my own experience, I know that when someone's views inspire violent intolerance in me, then the chance of making or maintaining a personal connexion is nil.

In the end, it all comes down to charity. Like most geeks, I used to have a range of litmus tests for friendship. But over time, what I've come to realise is that ultimately it all comes down to goodwill. Either this is a person you're willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to even when they feel they're deeply in the wrong in a particular situation or they aren't. And if they aren't, then at most they're a friendly acquaintance.

So this guy isn't a friend. He's someone I once felt a connexion with because we both love languages and big furry men. Despite living in the same city, we only see each other rarely and then by chance, so this shouldn't bother me and it's only my tendency toward sentimentality that makes it do that. At least I can take pride in how dispassionately I handled it: no outbursts, no ultimatum, no snappy putdowns. Just a shrug before getting up from the computer to do something rewarding.


[*] Not only am I not talking about anyone here on LJ, I don't think I'm talking about someone anyone here even knows. Calm down people!
[**] Ready for irony overload? His career is "journalist".

I try to keep the Old Man on his toes. That's why first thing this morning, I asked him: "Should I make you a list of people to be notified in the event of my demise?"

It's less out-of-the-blue than it seems because I slept lightly last night and dreamt of some people I'm estranged from and may never talk to again. Which, of course, got me thinking of everyone I've regretted losing touch with over the years. Given my middle age and the general harshness of life in this world, some of those people must be dead.

Despina, for instance. I'm 99% sure that he died about four years ago. He was seriously ill and there was a desperate edge to our calls. Then silence. Unfortunately he'd reinvented himself yet again and nobody in his new circle seems to have known about me or Girlfag or any of his longstanding queer friends. So nobody knew to call us and we had no one to reach out to.

Contrast this with what happened when danbearnyc passed away. We had enough mutual friends on LJ that I heard about it here, but just in case, one of his friends went through his e-mail and sent notifications to me and other people he'd corresponded with. (It was unfortunate that the e-mail this guy ended up replying to had the subject line "Dusky Cumrag" but also, given Dan's sense of humour, rather appropriate.) He even offered a sympathetic ear (although when I eventually did decide I was ready to take him up on this, I heard nothing back).

That all seems like the least I would want to see done for people who have cared for me over the years. Many are like Despina--isolated from the groups we were once embedded in so severed from the grapevine. Facebook casts a wide net, but still not wide enough to capture everyone.