Mother always used to say, "Be patient. This will pass."
She said it back from as early as I can remember. It applied to all sorts of life situations. She'd tell it to me when my older sister would slap me for being a younger brother. She'd tell it to my sister when I "baptized" her valuable Madame Alexander dolls in a washtub in the backyard, leaving them floating face down and causing their wigs and face paint to fall off.
She'd tell it to my dad when he was laid off or fired from a construction site because he'd mouthed off at a foreman and now had to go stand in line at the Plumbers and Pipefitters Union Hall for his next work assignment.
She told it to my cousin Phyllis when her first husband was electrocuted while trying to restore a power line one Thanksgiving, so someone else could go home and have dinner with his family. She told it to her nephew Fred as he watched his three ex-wives all stand around his mother's casket and embrace each other like sisters because they loved their former mother-in-law more than they did their ex-husband.
She would tell it to young parents at church when their babies would act out badly and disrupt the service. And she said it every day to my dad when he'd get up in the middle of the night because his elderly hound dog would start barking for food. Except then, she meant it --- she prayed every day that the dog would die and sometimes tried to hurry that process along by slipping Darvon into his dog food. The dog died of old age, just the same.
When Dad died in 1999, Mother stopped eating. Sis and I were worried that she would starve herself to death before we were ready to let her go --- we had just lost one parent and were dealing with that grief. My sister had just buried her second husband. We didn't need any more deaths to deal with.
So I went down and spent a few days with Mother. I told her I wasn't leaving until she ate something. I cooked everything I could think of for her. She said the thought of eating turned her stomach. I would fix something else, and when she rejected that, I'd try another dish.I finally set all the fresh fruit I could find in the house in front of her and told her, like she had told me and Sis when we were kids, "Eat your supper. There are starving people somewhere in the world who would kill for this food."
"Let them kill me for it, then," she said, looking for all the world like the stubborn little girl her older siblings always said she was.
"Mother, this grief you're feeling. It will pass," I said.
"Who told you that shit?" she said, knowing full well who had told it to me.
Shit? Mother said "Shit." Heheh. She's going to be OK.
I grinned at her. She scowled and started peeling a banana.
Mother survived Dad by 18 months. That means she went through at least a year of doing things without him --- Valentine's Day, his birthday, Easter, their anniversary, Mother's Day, Father's Day, her birthday, all the big events. And then she started on the cycle again.
She had dropped down below 100 pounds when she started peeling that banana. By the time of her death, in October 2000, she had started making plans for the next phase of her life. She checked herself into an assisted care home for women, got her lunches at the local senior citizens center, and was even starting to play coquette with would-be suitors.
"I'll never marry any of them," she said. "Your father was the only old man I could stand living with. And besides, none of these men are strong enough to keep up with me, even though they keep sniffing round my door like your dad's old hound dog."
On the night before Mother's death, Sis took her out to a Ponderosa steakhouse, where Mother cleaned out the buffet single-handedly. She had her appetite back. The next morning, at the assisted living center, she died hungry. She raised herself out of her easy chair, took three steps toward the dining room, where they were serving breakfast, and then her body collapsed, sending her spirit off into eternity, where rumor has it, she visits hell everyday to tell Richard Nixon, "This will pass. NOT! Hahahaha!"
I miss my parents. I am grateful for their lives and the time I had with them. They loved me more than anyone has ever loved me, unconditionally, and taught me how to do the same for them and for others.
I am also angry as hell at them, an unreasonable anger filled with grief. They went off and left me with my batshit crazy older sister as my nearest relative who remembers the past. My sister hates me, tried to stab me with a garden trowel in 2006, and hates my parents --- all because they decided to give her a brother she didn't want in the first place and then left her alone in the world with him.
My anger at my parents, of course, is completely irrational. It is also a natural part of the grieving process --- something I've put off for 10 years since they both died, because it's an unpleasant emotion that is no fun to experience.
I do that a lot with grief. In 2006, I was fired from a job because I was gay. I refused to admit that such a thing could happen to me. My then-partner bit his tongue and said nothing when I would try to analyze the situation and "understand" the point of view of the supervisor who had fired me. It kept coming back to, "It doesn't make sense. I was doing everything I was supposed to do."
And then I ran into two former co-workers, also gay, who had been fired under similar circumstances. And I was hired at a new job, where I made sure everybody knew I was gay from day one and asked if they were going to have a problem with it. When it was clear that it wasn't going to be a problem, and in fact, the company had written policies of non-discrimination because of sexual orientation, it just suddenly dawned on me that I had been gay-bashed by an employer.
I said so, to my then-partner, who replied quietly, "I wondered when you would realize it. Everybody else does." I said so to my friends, straight and gay.
And I wrote an angry letter to my former supervisor, saying, "I know this is what you did, you conscienceless bitch!"
After a while my partner said, "You can stop being angry now. It's time to let this pass."
And then I realized that it's true. Men DO tend to fall in love with people who remind them of their mothers ...
My anger at the job loss was necessary for me to move on. I started allowing myself to feel anger.
I visited a cemetery and the grave of a former co-worker who committed suicide. I told her I was angry at her for shooting herself and leaving her family and friends to grieve.
I found a picture of a gay friend who was a minister. He had died of AIDS-related complications. I had delivered a eulogy for him at his funeral, full of tears and sad smiles and celebratory anecdotes and jokes. I told his picture that I was angry at him for dying and leaving me to move on.
I hate anger. I hate, hate, hate it. Feeling anger makes me sick inside. And yet, it's a normal feeling, something we have that is instilled in our biochemical system from day one. Babies express it well, when they are hungry and hurting and no one is tending to their needs.
Somewhere along the line as adults, we're taught to curb it in because it is inappropriate in daily life. Which it is --- it upsets people; interferes with the orderly way of things. But it is still a part of us, something that needs to be dealt with eventually.
Sis, my crazy sister, deals with it all the time. Her nickname in nursery school was "The Atomic Bomb." She beat the crap out of two second grade boys once (when she was in the first grade) because they touched her bicycle in an inappropriate manner. When she was working as a librarian on a Bookmobile in Baltimore, Maryland, she shoved the driver off the bus because he had slammed the door in her face. She then drove it back to the garage herself.
She went to see a psychiatrist to see why she was angry all the time. He told her to make a list of all the people she was angry at; she responded by filling up an entire stenopad with a list of names of everyone she believed had wronged her.
I was on the first page. Why? I asked her.
"You were born," she said.
She fought with her co-workers, she fought with me, she unleashed and unleashes her wrath on all four of husbands, all of whom were or are named Bill.
She is the opposite of me --- I hold it in for years and then have an outburst that keeps me from going as batshit crazy as she is.
I still have to finish grieving for the death of my best childhood friend, David. We had lost touch with each other for 30 years and then found each other on a site for gay men married to women. We spent a few years visiting and talking and exchanging e-mails and watching "American Idol" together and singing jazz karaoke together. We even made love once, just to see what it would be like.
Then his wife called me and said, "He's dead."
I don't even have a shirt of his to hang in my closet, like Ennis Del Mar did in "Brokeback Mountain."
This fall, I broke up with my former partner. He wanted it. I didn't. He was good to me at a time I needed someone to be good to me, so I didn't have much of a leg to stand on. Apparently I wasn't what he needed anymore.
And so I left. I moved into an apartment, even though I knew my job was being phased out --- more grief. And I went inside the apartment and shut the door. My kids came by and visited and did what they could for me, but ultimately they had to go back to their own lives and leave me to face it alone.
And so I have faced it. Quietly. Unhappily. And not getting angry because my partner was good to me throughout most of my relationship. He's a decent man who loved me when I needed to be loved. It's just that love did not last.
He said, "I'm in this for the long run." And he did things that made me believe he meant it.
He said, of our differing levels of income, "I'm not keeping score." And I thought he meant that, too.
But the truth is, he WASN'T in it for the long run and he WAS keeping score. Nothing wrong with that. People make statements they think they mean at the time and then find out they don't mean them or can't live up to them. I understand that. But it still hurts. And today, I'm finally admitting that I'm angry that he got my hopes up that something in my life wouldn't pass --- that it might be forever.
And the anger, I suspect, is a good thing. It's a stumbling block in the grieving process, a log fallen across my emotional path, that I need to get through. I need to dive into the waterfall of angry grief so I can get to the other side.
So that it, like everything in life, will pass.
There is a guy on LifeOut, a handsome guy with a way of cutting to the chase in all his comments, who I admire a lot for his ability to express his anger. He has a lot of it --- in fact, there are some days that I'm afraid to read what he writes because his anger is so visible and toxic. But I do, because I admire beauty of all kinds, especially the beauty of written expression.
I only know bits and pieces of his story --- I suspect that his anger comes from a well so deep that it the base of it is something so horrible that even he can't approach it. But he lets it out, as much as he can stand --- and perhaps as much as he thinks the rest of us can stand.
I know that I have to let the anger out to help myself get past the grief in my life, so I will be fit to associate with others again.
Deep in my heart, I don't want to be alone, yet I can see that right now, I'm not fit to be near anyone else, to let them close to my heart. And part of the process is dealing with the grief --- I'm handling the sadness, starting to accept the loneliness, have certainly been through the denial. But the anger, that's a tough one. It's something you just have to let out through your pores, I guess, like in a sweat lodge.
But even it will pass, I keep telling myself. I hope I haven't waited too long --- become too old --- to survive it.
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