When you approach the years of 'middle age', you look back and wonder why no one told you that it would be an exercize in 'Loss-501'. I use 501 because that usually is a master's course level, and this is when we are to master the skill of coping and pressing on after losing parents, siblings,....all those from levels 101, 201, 301 and 401. It would have only been fair to say we were already through 101, 201, 301, and 401. After all, we witnessed aunts, uncles, and grandperants die....but they seemed to be in a remote neighborhood far away from what we lived with- a feeling of immortality. We have, or at least I have, very little memory of the deaths of grandparents, aunts and uncles. What I do remember much more vividly were the losses of friends in their sleep or to suicide or drowning. That would be my 401 level class. 301 would have to be going to funerals of distant relatives that caused my parents much lamenting and tears. I remember flying alone to 'represent' my mom and my brothers and sisters at my grandmother's funeral. She was 104 and I had met her three times before her death, but she and my mom were not 'close'. So I went for my mom. Sad as my mom was her only surviving child. But she couldn't do it. She did not shed a tear in front of me, but I knew she was hurting over the life she had not had with her mother. My grandma was ornry and blatant. My mom said she used to call her stupid all the time and throw things at her and favored her only brother. Yes that would be level 301. To feel the pain they are feeling because when your parents hurt, you hurt.
I remember flying alone with my Dad to New York to bury his favorite sister, a nun and the sister who literally raised my dad. He fell to his knees in tears delivering her eulogy and I was the only one in a room of many (including nuns) who rushed to lift him up and hold him. Sad and sacrilegious. Very hard for me. I was the baby of seven. Where were my older brothers? My sisters?
I suppose 201 would be watching those around you as you grow from pre-teen to 'adult', go through pain and illness. 101 would be experiencing your own illnesses (as a child and young adult) that you somehow knew you would survive. (Keep in mind, I did not exist during the Great Depression, The Plague, the flu pandemic of 1918, or WWI or II, polio, smallpox and TB). My parents witnessed in some sense of the event, WWI through their fathers. My dad was 17 when he joined the Army and was 19 when he was next to be shipped out to Normandy. I wasn't born until my Dad was 35. Instead he fought other battles and did 2 tours in Vietnam as did my one brother.
So here I am numb and confused at the master's level and master of nothing but an odd painful numbness.
I remember flying alone with my Dad to New York to bury his favorite sister, a nun and the sister who literally raised my dad. He fell to his knees in tears delivering her eulogy and I was the only one in a room of many (including nuns) who rushed to lift him up and hold him. Sad and sacrilegious. Very hard for me. I was the baby of seven. Where were my older brothers? My sisters?
I suppose 201 would be watching those around you as you grow from pre-teen to 'adult', go through pain and illness. 101 would be experiencing your own illnesses (as a child and young adult) that you somehow knew you would survive. (Keep in mind, I did not exist during the Great Depression, The Plague, the flu pandemic of 1918, or WWI or II, polio, smallpox and TB). My parents witnessed in some sense of the event, WWI through their fathers. My dad was 17 when he joined the Army and was 19 when he was next to be shipped out to Normandy. I wasn't born until my Dad was 35. Instead he fought other battles and did 2 tours in Vietnam as did my one brother.
So here I am numb and confused at the master's level and master of nothing but an odd painful numbness.
No comments:
Post a Comment