Occam's Razor

Death – much ado about nothing?

There is nothing like a long three-week convalescence to focus your mind on the impermanence of all things. Our bodies are infinitely complex biological machines. They work with freaky regularity and excellence until one day when, of course, they do not. In my case, it stopped on January 14^th when I had tarsal tunnel surgery on my right foot and nerve release surgery on the right leg.

For the first week, I spent a lot of time hobbling from place to place either in crutches or gingerly on my right leg, wrapped in multiple layers of cotton and ace bandages. Since then, the crutches have been unnecessary. I walk where I need to go slowly but mostly stay indoors. The layers of cotton surrounding my leg and foot are gone. They were replaced with two layers of ace bandages on the foot, and now just a single layer. As I end this convalescence, my final accommodations are to keep an ace bandage on the foot and not to drive.

Thanks to the charity of friends and family, I have been fortunate enough to get to the office twice. Mostly I work from my dining room table using my employer provided laptop computer. Getting through our firewall at work remotely now means inserting my smart card into a USB smart card reader and authenticating myself using a PIN, although it hardly seems any more secure than using an ID and password. Conference calls are also more restful. I can hold the receiver in one hand while lying on the couch. Dagwood Bumstead would love working from home. Yet, despite its creature comforts, I still prefer the familiarity of the office.

As regular readers know, it is my belief that I have a soul, there likely is an afterlife of some sort and I am probably stuck in some circle of life, death and rebirth. Billions would probably agree with me. Millions would not. The latter believe that life is a highly improbable cosmic accident and the consequence of billions of years of evolution. When death arrives, all the lights go out. My friend Wendy, as well as one of my brothers, are in this group. For those of us who find life worth living, nonexistence is a depressing thought. However, because of my surgery, I am thinking maybe death (or non-existence) is not such a big deal. Maybe it means nothing at all. Instead, maybe we may choose to give it a status far larger than it deserves.

Life and death are interwoven into the universe whether we like it or not. As the Buddhists and others have long asserted, the only constant in the universe is change, so you might as well accept it. There are larger forces at work that can be lumped into one world: reality. Time is real, or is at least an aspect of living that cannot be denied. Even stars are born, age and die. Sometimes when they die, they throw their detritus out into the universe in the form of more complex matter. We are all literally the product of this star stuff. Moreover, we are destined to return to star stuff. Some part of our matter and energy was once in a star somewhere. Our matter and energy will once again be part of a star someday. In that sense, we are immortal and have been since the universe was created.

We have all already traversed the universe. Should mankind make it to another solar system someday, we will simply be retracing our inorganic roots. We are not just tied to our planet and solar system; we are tied to the universe. If some day we warp around space like they do in Star Trek, we are not exploring strange new worlds, we are returning home.

During my surgery, I was under general anesthesia for about two hours. Clearly, I did not die in those two hours. Whatever anesthesia I was given had the property of shutting down my consciousness for those two hours (or gave me the inability to recall any of it). I remember being on the surgical table and then, just as in death, the lights went out. Two hours later I was in another room, I was awake and the lights went on. During those two hours, I assume I was alive, but I might as well have been dead. Those two hours of non-existence, which might be more accurately described as an inability to remember anything or to act in any manner whatsoever, perhaps prove a point made by my atheist friends and siblings: death really does not matter.

While fear of death seems to be a human characteristic, perhaps it is all wasted energy. Not that it is easy to do, but perhaps we would all be much happier if we spent our time alive concentrating on living and forgetting all about death. After all, you cannot change the fabric of the universe or its rules. We are all caught in this incredibly complex space-time matrix. If being unconscious during my surgery is any guide, death, which for us humans seems to equate to non-consciousness, really does not matter.

Being infirmed of course matters, as I discovered. Dying matters as well as it is a progressively worse state of being infirmed. In either case, you are losing your tether to your known reality. Our species takes comfort in the known, safe and predictable. In my case, I missed the comfortable ritual of driving to and from the office, and inhabiting an office with a nice view of the Shenandoah Mountains five floors up. Working from home with one foot propped up was convenient and facilitated my recovery, but was awkward and different. Hobbling around in crutches for a week was also difficult, inconvenient and at times painful. It is understandable that I would have some petty grievances over my convalescence. However, when it ends on Friday, I should be back to better health than I was before the surgery. I hope that my life will become more comfortable and less painful.

I take some comfort in this expectation. I also take some comfort in the experience of being unconscious during my surgery, because the universe is also teaching me a lesson: neither my lack of consciousness during surgery nor death in itself are worth worrying about. Hopefully I will fully absorb these lessons and live my remaining life to its fullest in the time ahead of me.

January 31st, 2010 at 01:25pm Posted by Mark | Philosophy | no comments

On the movable walkway called life

As you may have noticed, one consequence of being born is that you eventually must die. It may seem unfair, but that’s just the way it is. We are all prisoners in our own unique time stream. We step onto our time stream (we assume) at birth, although some part of it begins at conception.

Yes, our life is undoubtedly a time stream. It is like one of those very long movable walkways that you find in large airports that carry you inside or between concourses. Its speed is constant. During the time you stand on the walkway, you stay in one place while things move around you. Eventually the walkway ends and the journey stops. We get off the walkway when we die but while we are on the walkway, we are its prisoner.

Unlike the movable walkway, we are not entirely sure how we got on it in the first place. The walkway behind us is quickly shrouded in mist and the walkway ahead, except for the first couple of feet, remains a dense fog. However, we can look to our left and our right and enjoy our limited view.

Unlike walkways in airports, this walkway is very wide. In fact, we cannot see either of its sides. Yet we know we are on the walkway because things are happening all around us. Suns rise and set. Seasons pass and return. Things that looked shiny and new last year lose their luster this year and in a dozen years are often dysfunctional or obsolete. Trying to find the edges of the walkway is as futile as trying to sail off the edge of the world. Space and time curve all around us. We cannot see the curve but we sense it is there. We feel its truth: that we are a singularity in a matrix called space-time. Ephemeral things, some alive and some not surround us. They are often beautiful. At its best life resembles a magnificent kaleidoscope. We often feel like we are sitting in a theater and our life is unfolding on the screen.

It is natural to wonder what happens when the movie that is our life ends. Are there credits? Were we really its producer and director, or just the unknowing actors? These may be impenetrable questions, but sages and common people have pondered them for time immemorial. The atheist believes that when our movie comes to and end, the lights go out and we are simply nothingness. The theist believes there is a producer. Some believe there is a producer and director. The producer is called God. The Christians call the director Jesus. The Muslims call him Muhammad. The Hindus believe there are many producers and directors and they often slip between their roles. Some of these directors coach us more than they coach others. The Buddhists think that like the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz, when you pull back the curtain you find another human like yourself (perhaps yourself) at the control directing the special effects. The agnostic doesn’t know if there are producers or directors. He does not exclude them but has a hard time trusting what he cannot see. The humanists are unconcerned about how we got on the walkway or where it will end, but is only concerned about the state of the walkway right now and how we can all live more happily in the present

In general, the longer you stay on the walkway the more you feel the past fade. You see the collection of things you have surrounded yourself with disintegrate before your eyes. You watch people, many of them loved ones, mysteriously drop off the walkway altogether, particularly as they age. The more you witness these events, the more certain you become that your walkway will end for you too at some murky time in the future. A relative handful finds the walkway very annoying. They take their own lives, figuring wherever they end up, if anywhere, is less painful than the present.

How should you spend your time while you remain on the walkway? This too is a topic of great concern for the people on the walkway. Some people are much more concerned about the next walkway. They advise that we should spend much of our time on this walkway preparing the next one. For theists there are generally two walkways that occur after death: one toward heaven, glory and salvation and the other toward hell and misery. To the Buddhist, our walkways sort of cycle backs on itself. They are confident that after death we are quickly deposited into another walkway. While our memories of our last life will be erased, we will carry our personalities and predispositions into the next life. Nirvana is the act of getting off the time stream altogether. Meditation and living simply are the keys. Enlightenment is the goal. You reach nirvana when you have achieved full enlightenment. Then they assert the carousel finally stops, you can dismount, exit and see what, if anything, is real.

Sometime in my early 20s, I remember being profoundly shaken that I was aging. Before entering adulthood, old age was so far enough away that it was abstract and hence nothing to worry about. Grabbing the reins of adulthood made me feel that life was in reality fleeting. Now in my 50s, I still feel the steady passage of the years. It feels like I am at the bow of a ship heading into the wind. The wind tears across my face but the infinite sea ahead is as mysterious and impenetrable as ever.

Strangely at age 52, while I remain leery of death, it no longer seems as fearful while at the same time it feels more tangible. I now accept that I am born to die and that’s just the way it is. It is natural to be inquisitive about dying and death, but to be obsessive about it the way I was in my twenties now seems a great waste of my life’s energies. Whatever movie I am in, it is not a bad movie and it gets more engrossing as the years pass.

Today, it feels more natural to be in the moment than to peer into an impenetrable far future. I see progress in myself and in my life. Some part of me longs for the immortal feeling of youth again, but some other part of me is also glad it is in my far past. I am more comfortable, more ordered and find more meaning now than I did thirty or forty years in my past. I feel grounded, but not rooted. My feelings will probably continue to change as I age, but right now, I accept life for what it is. I accept that it must end and feel that embracing the present is the healthiest thing for me. The movable walkway is my home, so I had better enjoy it and take care of it as best my limited skills will allow.

July 25th, 2009 at 11:16am Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Life 2009, Philosophy | no comments

A grave business

Life is about living, right? So why spend any time at all planning for death? After all, there are few things more certain in life than death and taxes. Once you are dead, unless you are Jesus Christ, you can forget about coming back to life. The best use of my corpse will be pushing up some daisies somewhere.

Alas, my passing is of interest to my financial adviser. For the two years I have had him he has been pushing my wife and I to plan for being dead. These days though, just writing a will is not good enough. You need many documents, all of which are vital for keeping lawyers in Birkenstock and driving their Mercedes Benz. Apparently, in addition to a legally enforceable will, I need Power of Attorney statements, a trust until our daughter is old enough to spend her inheritance wisely and a life support directive. Death is apparently a very complicated thing, at least for those you leave behind.

Just because I am dead, I would not want to burden my loved ones, would I? Hmm, maybe I would. I mean, I do love my loved ones. That comes with the definition. However, from my jaundiced perspective, I have given more love to them in love than I have gotten back in return. Yeah, I know, it’s good to give more than you get. But isn’t the least they can do for me when I am departed to deal with a few inheritance squabbles and tax issues? Knowing my future deceased state, does it require an extra level of love while I am alive beyond which I have already borne out in my fifty-two years of devoted service?

How do I know that this world is real anyhow? It sure feels fleeting. Maybe nonexistence is real and life is surreal. Maybe I am like Neo in The Matrix and when I die, I wake up to find my life was just a wild dream. If life is a dream, why bother with the drudgery like wills and such? Why not just live in the moment and get as much enjoyment as you can from life?

Maybe that’s why I’ve dragged my feet on updating my will. The last one is nearly fifteen years old and was done by a friend, and just so my wife and I could feel comfortable going out of town without our daughter. Because it turns out that planning for your mortality is a complex business. Naturally, this being the United States of America, there is no simple way to make your wishes known. Instead, you need either pricey software or a good attorney or two, and likely both witnesses and a notary too.

Here is my idea of how it should be done: each state and/or county would have a web site. When you want to complete your will, you they would provide you with a way to legally authenticate yourself. You would go onto the web site and be presented with a standard will complete with a number of “most popular” checkboxes and open text fields. For 95% of us, this would work fine. Since I am married, if I die first, I want my wife to get all my stuff. The same is true with her. If we both died at the same time, our daughter would get the bulk of our estate. She’s no longer a minor, but if she were I should be able to fill in that part of the web form where I indicate who would be the custodian of our child, who would oversee the estate, and enter the disposition of important heirlooms. It should take a half an hour maximum, be all done electronically and remain on file in the county clerk’s office. It would be accessible if necessary so properly credentialed officials, like the doctor in the emergency room, could also get the information.

You can write some things in your will that will have no practical effect. For example, do you want your body buried or cremated? Where should your remains go or be placed? Should your body go to medical science? Wills are read weeks or months after the deceased passes, so it is best to tell your family your wishes on what to do with your corpse. Yet, the county could easily collect this information in a central database. Every five or ten years, say whenever you renew your driver’s license, you would be required to recertify your electronic will. All this strikes me as a perfectly logical way the government could become more citizen-centric.

However, because I suspect that my survivors will otherwise engrave, “The bastard didn’t even bother to leave a will” on my gravestone, I have much belatedly decided to work on all these death documents. I quickly discovered why I dragged my feet. They are expensive to get right, particularly if you have lots of money and assets. After all, you do not want your loved ones to deal with complex things like probate taxes. No, you want to create a trust instead and screw Uncle Sam. I called one of the more prominent firms around us and found out that a modest set of these documents cost in the $3000-$5000 range. How many of us has that kind of money to throw around?

There is software you can buy, like WillMaker, but I remain a bit leery that it will not write the proper words or know precisely how to have forms properly notarized, witnessed and filed. So I did the next best thing, and shopped for a discount lawyer. It turns out that if you have to hire a lawyer, this is a good time. Many have been downsized and are scrambling for work, working from offices in their home. I found one via the user comments on Washington Consumers Checkbook. (Warning: you must subscribe to see the user comments, and they are not of much use if you live outside the Washington D.C. metropolitan area.) The lawyer even offered me a recession special: all the right documents done for a little under a grand. This still seemed like a lot of money, but it did not seem outrageous.

It turns out that what matters most is likely not the will itself, but various power of attorney statements and emergency medical directives. Do I want the plug pulled if three doctors agree that I am a goner but I cannot speak for myself? Who should speak for me when I cannot? Who can and should pay the bills or act when I cannot? Like most Americans, these obligations would fall to my spouse, but if she is not available, then who? For now, it seems safer to entrust this decision with a sibling. That may change as we age.

It will probably be money well spent, but in my deceased condition, it will mean nothing to me. We invited Carrie (the attorney) out to our house.  She told us much about the legal business of death and dying that we needed to know but about which we would have preferred to remain ignorant. We have been marking up drafts of documents she has cranked out, plodded through other verbose documents and keep trying to remember why we are doing this in the first place.

The good news is that when she is done we will have a set of PDF documents that we can easily update at any time, to name new executors and the like. We hope to have a final signing in our living room a week from Friday.

Dying is ordinarily a messy and depressing business, as is handling the estate of someone. Wills provide some comfort that the process may be less messy. As I discovered watching my mother decline, it is bound to be both messy and heartbreaking for those who go through it. Given these facts, much can and should be done to make it less onerous and expensive. With major economic crises underway, straightening out the business of death and dying is probably on no one’s radar. I hope someday someone will tackle it because the current process is unnecessarily complex and expensive, making it hard for the many who need these documents to acquire them. In the end, it is of most use to those who profit from it.

While death is inevitable, estate planning need not be the equivalent of rocket science. Instead, we could use the time and the money on worthier endeavors like enjoying the short life we were given.

March 19th, 2009 at 07:19pm Posted by Mark | Life 2009, Sociology | no comments

Consciousness as a two-way mirror

I haven’t written about metaphysics for quite a while, mainly because I did not have much to say. Principally, I was losing interest in the subject but also I have been busy engaging in life, which I suspect is its natural purpose. Yet, occasionally something comes up in the press on metaphysics that piques my curiosity. Yesterday this article on The Human Consciousness Project was published on Time Magazine’s website. The project, led by Dr. Sam Parnia of the Weill-Cornell Medical Center involves an in-depth worldwide coordinated study into out of body experiences that some claim to have while they are technically dead, but who are later successfully revived.

I have occasional disagreements with my brother on the afterlife or lack thereof. My brother is a scientist and is trained to be skeptical, which is to his credit. Unsurprisingly, he categorizes himself as an atheist. Studies underway like this one though raise reasonable doubt. Says Dr. Parnia:

There was a cardiologist that I spoke with who said he hasn’t told anyone else about it because he has no explanation for how this patient could have been able to describe in detail what he had said and done. He was so freaked out by it that he just decided not to think about it anymore.

I think it is great that what many would consider loony science is getting some clinical study again. It may be simply my natural fear of mortality, but I have come to believe that I have a soul or spirit that is external and transcends death. For the most part, it is just a feeling, but I am glad to know there have been and are continuing scientifically rigorous studies into out of body experiences.

One obvious question is whether a person who had such an experience was truly dead. Dr. Parnia points out that death is not instantaneous and that it takes a long time for our cells to actually die after being deprived of oxygen. Most of us assume though that if there are no brain waves, no reflexes and no heart is beating that you must be dead. If our brain is not working it should not be possible for those ten percent who experience out of body experiences while being clinically dead to later report in such detail actual experiences they observed while dead. Yet, unless there is a huge conspiracy taking place (something that flunks the Occam’s Razor test) that appears to be the case. Something, let us call it consciousness, can survive the clinical definition of death and is aware.

More to the point though is Dr. Parnia’s speculation on how this could be happening:

Now, if you look at the mind, consciousness, and the brain, the assumption that the mind and brain are the same thing is fine for most circumstances, because in 99% of circumstances we can’t separate the mind and brain, they work at the exactly the same time. But then there are certain extreme examples, like when the brain shuts down, that we see that that this assumption may no longer seem to hold true. So a new science is needed in the same way that we had to have a new quantum physics.

My suspicion, as is also true with Dr. Parnia, is that as we get a better understanding of quantum physics we may begin to understand that consciousness and brain activity are actually two aspects of the same thing. Indeed, I speculated as much in this post. The better our understanding of quantum physics becomes, the more our fundamental assumptions of what is reality seem undermined.

We are all subject to our own biases, and I am no exception. The renowned physicist Dr. Albert Einstein came up with the groundbreaking theories of General and Special Relativity, which opened our eyes to a reality that we could not see. It is hard for us to believe in the reality he described: that we are bound in a finite warped matrix called space-time and that it is the relationship of objects inside this continuum that warps time and space. It’s all so abstract, like algebra, to seem real. Yet, Einstein utterly rejected the then emerging science of quantum physics because he was philosophically opposed to its nondeterministic pinnings. “God does not play dice with the universe,” he once famously said. Like relativity, quantum physics seems impossible for us to grasp. It is hard to grasp that at some small level that time does not have any meaning; that everything is probable but nothing is certain; that a wave consists of both particles and energy simultaneously and that Schrodinger’s Cat could be both dead and alive at the same instant. These are all paradoxical truths of our universe at a certain level and perspective. Our instinct is to reject notions at variance with our common experience.

We do know, as Einstein articulated, that energy and mass are interchangeable. What I am beginning to understand is that everything we perceive as real is energy in some form or another, and what we perceive as mass or matter is merely a transitory property of energy made possible by the unique arrangement of certain physical conditions in the space-time continuum.

So what we experience as our life and perception appears to be a combination of both mass and energy. Yet, since mass and energy are essentially interchangeable, it is not wholly beyond possibility that at brain death consciousness survives. The difference is that since the energy that makes up our consciousness cannot be accessed through the matter that is our brain, that those of us trapped in the mass-energy concoction we call consciousness cannot perceive it.

Death may be and I think likely is nothing more than a door from one variant of experience to another. Einstein also taught us that energy could never be destroyed. It could only change in form. Perhaps death then is like a two-way mirror. When a person stands behind a two-way mirror and he is in a lighted room, another person outside the room looking at the mirror can see him because the mirror becomes semi-transparent. Turn off the light and you just see your reflection. In both cases, two people are present. In only one case can you perceive the other.

Our soul may be like that. Our soul though may be what we really are, and our body may simply be like its shadow, a part of us and inseparable from us. Well documented after death out of body experiences suggest that something like this is occurring, as crazy as it may seem in our current reality frame. Perhaps the skeptics among us simply need to widen their lens, much like Einstein did to more perfectly describe the Newtonian universe. Perhaps we need to acknowledge a universe that is far more real than our limited intellects can grasp.

September 19th, 2008 at 09:36pm Posted by Mark | Metaphysics | no comments

Suicide’s devastation and odd harvest

Through early morning fog I see
visions of the things to be
the pains that are withheld for me
I realize and I can see…
that suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please.

From the movie M*A*S*H

To me, suicide is one of these impenetrable mysteries. I think I can understand how someone who has had the bottom dropped out of their lives might want to take their own life. What is there to live for if, for example, all your living relatives were killed in a car bomb attack? Nonetheless, feeling as if you want to kill yourself and actually doing it are two different things. Our life force is incredibly strong. No matter how much pain we have in our lives, no matter how bleak our future looks, almost always something will pull us back from the ultimate act. Instead, we seem to prefer to kill ourselves slowly through the usual vices like drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, food and risky behavior.

Nonetheless, suicide happens. In 2001, approximately 30,000 of my fellow Americans killed themselves. The favorite method is to use a firearm. You are most likely to kill yourself if you are male, white and age 75 or older. You do not expect someone who is relatively young and very gifted around 6:30 one morning to plunge head first from her eighth floor dorm room. This young woman, age 18 and from a good home, was a close friend of my daughter. She, along with her many friends and her devastated family are left to grieve, wonder if there was something they should have done to prevent it and to struggle with the powerful feelings a suicide will surface.

At first, the story of her friend’s death came in muddled. We heard that she fell down a stairway. Where? At home or at college? It must have been a very long stairway to cause massive brain death. There was no hint that the death was a suicide. That came later during a gathering of friends of the young woman. At the gathering were a school counselor, friends and parents of friends and many, many suicide notes that she had written, including one to our daughter.

I met Taylor a couple times. Like most of my daughter’s friends, she was bright, goofy and artistic and she had a skewed perspective on life. She showed up most recently early last month when she attended her belated 18th birthday party. She had come home from a university out of state for the occasion. They laughed, ate pizza and a birthday cake, and watched videos. It felt somewhat quaint. Here was my daughter, a high school graduate taking a gap year between high school and college and she was still able to muster a small coterie of close friends for a birthday party.

Six weeks later Taylor was suddenly, tragically and pointlessly dead. She left few tangible memories: a long missive in our daughter’s yearbook, a few gifts received over the years, and one last unfathomable suicide note. My daughter is mostly quiet but we know that she is wracked with pain. She feels great anger at her friend, but in her final act, Taylor left no way for her to reply. Suicide closed all channels of communication. She feels survivor guilt. Should she have noticed her suicidal tendencies? She also feels a prematurely early brush with mortality. When you are 18, you should think of life as limitless and the possibilities boundless. Death is an abstraction. No more. Here is one more radioactive thing to sort out as she struggles into adulthood. Fortunately, her boss cut her some slack. She did not lose her job while she struggled to sort out her feelings. Three days later, she headed back to work, in part in the hope that it will distract her from her constant circular thoughts.

Most likely, her pain will linger. At 18, my daughter has to try to make meaning from an act that really has no meaning. She has to figure out how get beyond survivor’s guilt. In the end, she has to find a way (if it is possible at all) to move beyond her anger and her feelings that her friend was a coward, into acceptance. More likely though her feelings about Taylor’s death will forever linger, rising its angry head during moments of stress in her life. She has no choice but to come to terms with her loss. She lost a close friend, someone she thought she knew intimately but apparently not well enough.

We are keeping a close eye on our daughter. At some point, she may need grief counseling. I can imagine but not really understand the magnitude of the pain her family is going through, particularly today when family becomes the center of our lives. A million charitable acts, a thousand hugs and expressions of sympathy can never wipe away the devastation her family must feel. An amputee can learn to have a productive life again, but can never erase the memory of life before the amputation. So too a family struck by suicide will never be the same again. It can go on, but it will never be the same.

Taylor was declared brain dead, but her young organs were still alive and were harvested. I presume that many of her organs are now occupying new bodies. Likely, her organs are helping others live better and more hopeful lives. While nothing can erase the devastation of her death, some small measure of good came from it nonetheless. Perhaps her youthful heart now beats inside the chest of a woman with severe heart disease. Perhaps her kidneys will mean that two lucky people will no longer have to make twice-weekly trips for dialysis. I cannot help but honor her family for making these were painful but correct choices during a time of utter devastation.

Taylor’s mind and spirit are gone. Yet pieces of her body are still alive in others. While her family and friends remain devastated on this Thanksgiving holiday, other families are probably celebrating their perverse good fortune. I do not know if Taylor would have wanted her body used this way or not. Perhaps she chose to fall in a way to kill her brain so other parts of her body could be used to bring others happiness that she did not feel. Her tragic death is more evidence that life itself is utterly baffling. Yet even in a death this bizarre and tragic, a few are getting the chance to live again.

November 22nd, 2007 at 11:28am Posted by Mark | Sociology | no comments

Two years later

Two years later, I feel acceptance and serenity.

When a loved one dies, there is no accounting for the nature and length of the grieving process. Nor is there a way to know for certain whether you have really moved beyond their death. Yet here I am two years after my mother’s death. When I think about Mom at all, and most days I do not, those are my feelings. I accept that she is forever gone from my life. I find myself wholly at peace with her absence.

When I learned of her death, I was racked with powerful bittersweet feelings. Feeling unhappy, distraught and an emotional wreck were to be expected. I did not expect to also feel relief and happiness. I was relieved that her misery was over at last. I was glad to resume a normal life. In addition, I was happy that just maybe my mother was now in the presence of the God she had so slavishly worshipped. Perhaps she was even reunited again with her long deceased parents and many deceased siblings.

The first few months after her death felt surreal and were unnaturally quiet. It seemed like her death was just an extended absence. After all, for much of her last thirty years we lived apart. At best, I spent a couple weeks a year with her. It had become normal to be away from her. What was not normal were the last fifteen months of her life. She and my father had been living their retired years in far away Michigan. Her health had reached the stage where living at home was no longer an option. They sold their house and moved across the Potomac River from me to a retirement community called Riderwood. However, by that time she could hardly stand up and had to be carried up stairs. When she walked at all, it was with her walker. I went from seeing her once a year to once a week or more. Unfortunately, the time I did spend with her was rarely pleasant. Each visit demonstrated that her body was falling apart. Finally, there was little more of my mother than a shrunken old woman in a nursing home bed, ashen in the face, her eyes occluded and blank, her hair a surreal unnaturally white color. Near the end, her disease would not let her utter a word or even turn her head. You were never sure whether she heard you or not. I put on a brave face in her presence. I bawled in the hallways or in the privacy of my car. At some point how could anyone, including the dying, not take some relief from death? My mother’s death was ultimately merciful.

It took about six months before I really felt the aftershocks. My mother was the emotional heart of our large Catholic family. She was a loving person but she was far from perfect. She grew up impoverished, traumatized by the Great Depression and burdened with the impossible expectations from the God she loved yet that seemed to require ever more sacrifice and duty. She exuded duty and guilt, values she probably would not have wanted to transmit to me but which I absorbed anyhow.

My forebrain understood all this, knew that she loved all her children and was a product of circumstances. My neocortex had a different opinion. It still resented my perceived insufficient nurturing and the harsh punishments she meted out when we were children. I navigated through life but felt more and more detached. Inside, I was filled with turmoil. My neocortex was like a vast, dark storm cloud desperately wanting to discharge some lightning. My forebrain wanted to keep it at quite a distance.

Eventually I found myself disgorging my confused feelings to my therapist. Through therapy, I learned that to resolve my feelings that I had to do more than blab to her about them. I had to share them people who could empathize. Attempts to talk about my mixed feelings about Mom with my Dad were deflected. This left my siblings. One sister did not reply when I cautiously raised the issue in an email. Another listened patiently then gave me a different perspective of Mom, for being younger she had witnessed much less of her dark side. It was an older sister who I met for dinner one evening when she was in town who at last let me discharge my voltage. The one thing I had not anticipated was that I had a sibling who was far more upset with my mother than I was. It was clear from the endless tears flowing down her cheeks as we talked. “It’s is just hormones,” she claimed. For me, while I loved my mother some part of me also loathed her. Yet my older sister claimed that she never loved my mother at all. Her tears suggested otherwise.

At first, I had no idea I was on the road to recovery. Yet within a week, the storm clouds had disappeared. The voltage was gone. The skies were blue and the sun was shining in my life again. Since then I have felt simple acceptance at her passing and a serenity that suggests my feelings for my mother have finally been wholly reconciled.

On my first motherless Mother’s Day, I made a point to drive out to the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Silver Spring, Maryland where her cremated remains lie. This Mother’s Day, I felt no such compulsion. When I am near Silver Spring I certainly intend to pay my respects again. However, the sense of duty is gone. This suggested to me that whatever unintended apron strings were pulling at me from her grave had been cut. Instead, I concentrated on the one living mother left in my life: my mother in law. I made sure we sent her a card and called her on Mother’s Day. I wished her a Happy Mother’s Day and many more to come.

Somewhere in the space-time continuum, my mother’s spirit is still present. She is happy for me. She is glad I cut those final apron strings. At times, I imagine that she is whispering to me. She is saying, “Get on with life, Mark. Life is to be cherished and savored. Do not forget me but do not let my death hold you back either. Be free of me so you can make the most of your life. Someday we will meet again, and when we do we will meet in love, as friends and as peers.”

Thanks Mom. I love you too.

November 16th, 2007 at 10:41pm Posted by Mark | Life 2007 | one comment

Legacy Achieved

Exactly a month ago today, on Christmas Eve, my friend Frank Pierce passed away. I briefly eulogized Frank after I learned of his death. As I noted at the time, that entry hardly qualified as a proper tribute to him. Even though I knew Frank for sixteen years, no eulogy I could write would begin to do him justice. For Frank Pierce was a complex mosaic of a person. I could put together only a few of his puzzle pieces. It would probably take a couple dozen of us sitting around a bar for the better part of a day slowly sipping from some dark German beers to properly give broad perspective to this remarkable man.

Most people are content to live ordinary and comfortable lives. On the surface, Frank’s life was quite ordinary. He raised a small family and lived in modestly in the Maryland suburbs. His work for the Navy spanned many decades and involved activities that I never fully grasped. Apparently, part of it involved writing manuals so Navy pilots could land properly and using the correct protocol on foreign vessels. He was actively involved in the Washington area’s local German American society. Through it, he developed a network of friends outside of work.

Frank was the type to grasp at any opportunity offered him, no matter how small. His nature was to be incessantly curious. He was also a ruthlessly pragmatic person. He would allow no mysticism to cloud his clinical observations of the world. He knew humanity’s place in the universe, and in his view it was much lower than we thought. He saw us as lucky to be where we are and believed we would not be there for long. Humanity, he often told me, was not a naturally peaceful species. We are a warrior species and aggression is in our nature. We had to fight it by carefully teaching each new generation and by learning lessons from history. He could survey the world around him, see its terrible wars, genocides, and rampant cruelty, and realize that Americans live fortunate and almost gilded lives. Our liberty, he frequently observed, was purchased at the cost of millions of lives. Consequently, he had a deep respect for the military (perhaps in part because he spent so much time working for the Navy), its necessity, as well as the necessity at giving the Commander in Chief the benefit of the doubt. In our many discussions on the War on Terror, and the War in Iraq in particular, he was very deferential to the President. Remember, he frequently told us, he has access to intelligence you and I do not. It was with some reluctance that late last year he came to the same conclusion that I did on Iraq even before the war had started: that we were engaged in folly. The Iraq War may be the sole instance wherein I was more cognizant of reality than Frank Pierce was.

Frank was a deeply grounded man, with his eyes wide open, who was always trying to discern cause and effect. The tools that gave him such wisdom included a natural brilliance, acute curiosity, direct exposure to the real world in ways that most of us would avoid, but also consummate self-education. It could take the form of slogging through history books, newspapers and magazines or watching C-SPAN for hours on end. However, it also came from simply making connections and talking to people. Most of us are lucky to know the name of our Congressman or Senator. Frank was likely on a first named basis with many of them. He could send a thoughtful inquiry to his Congressman and he would receive a personal and thoughtful reply. He would often get a phone call from them too. Not only did he know his representatives by name, they knew him by name too. No doubt, his incisive letters to them stood out in the crowd. As a writer, he could communicate with great effectiveness and did so in a way that almost compelled the recipient to start a dialog.

In short, Frank was not just a neat older guy friend (he died at age 75), a mentor and a role model, but also an inspiration. All these wonderful aspects of Frank though pale in comparison to the ruthlessness with which he seized control of his life. He found nothing boring. Every day and every hour had potential. It seemed to me that he saw his mission was living intensely. In truth, I think he simply found life too engaging to be philosophical about how he chose to live it. His incessant itch was not just to enjoy life, but to draw in all the world’s energy, let it flow through him and use it to energize him some more. If he were a light bulb, he would have radiated 1000 watts.

I was not surprised then to find myself in Princess Anne, Maryland last Friday for his memorial service. The service occurred so belatedly because both he and his wife suffered terribly from the same terrible infection. Apparently, it contributed to his death. It took weeks for his wife Nancy to recover to the point where she could participate in a memorial service.

Frank grew up in Princess Anne and apparently was enchanted with the small town. He wrote a book about life there as a boy during the World War Two years. I have not yet read the book (although I do own another book of his, which I purchased from him), but I hope to read it some day. At the memorial service, I spoke with a number of people who mentioned the book on Princess Anne and said it was Frank’s best work.

Speaking with his daughter after the service, I learned that Frank was the last of his family to grow up in Princess Anne. About fifty people attended his memorial service. At first, I was disappointed. I expected the church to be overflowing. Then I realized that almost everyone had to come from out of town. (It was about a three-hour drive each way for me.) Princess Anne is not convenient to anything. It is about fifteen miles south of Salisbury, Maryland on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. (This area is now chicken country. It is where chicken magnate Frank Perdue made his millions.)

The service was held in Princess Anne on a cold, clear and blustery day at the Manokin Presbyterian Church, a church so old its brick walls go back to the 1700s. Even his son remarked on the oddity of his father being memorialized in a church. Frank believed in God, but he was not a Christian. Nonetheless, there was a time as a youth when he attended services regularly with his family at this historic church. The minister, who had never met Frank, did his best to eulogize him. Even so, it was hard to get many of the congregants to join him in The Lord’s Prayer. His son, Frank H. Pierce IV, eulogized him at the man we all knew, loved and admired: the ruthlessly skeptical and secular man with a boundless passionate nature for life.

I attended the service with my friend Angela. After we paid our respects to his family, we found ourselves in the cemetery behind the church. There we found the graves of the Pierce family, from the first Frank Pierce, through the Junior, then to the Senior then to our friend, Frank H. Pierce III. Frank cremains will be placed next to those of his family.

His grandson stood alone by the family graves after the service. Angela and I spoke with him. We spoke of the cynical, sectarian man we knew. “I last saw him on Thanksgiving,” he said, “and I had a feeling it might be the last time I would see him.” Angela and I expressed our utter shock at his death. We had no idea he was even sick. It was not something Frank chose to share with us. Frank kept up his regular conversations on my electronic forum, The Potomac Tavern, with his usual eloquence until the day before he died. He sent me a brief German translation I needed on that day too.

Whether grandson or friend, on one thing we could agree. As I noted in my first entry on Frank, Frank claimed he was not concerned about death. He was concerned about leaving a legacy. From his wonderful family (some of whom I met for the first time) to his many, many friends, all of us were deeply touched by Frank. We were simply blown over by his infectious spirit of life. As I spoke with his grandson, we agreed. If Frank’s mission was to leave a legacy, then he accomplished his mission in a singularly fantastic style.

I already know that when I pass out of this life that my life will be little more than a footnote to those other than my family. Frank’s seemingly ordinary life though will not be. He made quite a splash. Frank was simply unforgettable, which is why I am sure thirty years from now, if I am still alive, I will continue to treasure my time with Frank. I will think wistfully about our many conversations. Frank succeeded in getting every minute and every molecule of enjoyment out of life. I have never met anyone else who did this. I am certain he belongs to a small coterie of people who have ever lived who managed to do so.

Now that’s a legacy.

January 24th, 2007 at 10:59pm Posted by Mark | Life 2007 | no comments

Thanks Frank

My friend Frank Pierce died unexpectedly on Christmas Eve.

Frank is a friend who I initially “met” online. Meeting someone online nowadays is not a big deal, but around 1990 it was a weird thing to do or to even acknowledge. In those days, there was an Internet, but it was not accessible to the average person. I met Frank on The Back of the North Wind, an electronic bulletin board system that resided on the spare PC of a woman named Dawn Gibson who, if memory serves me right, lived in Arlington, Virginia. In those days, you used your 2400-baud modem to dial up these computers, play games, swap software and engage in electronic conversations with people in your community. I wrote more about those days a year or two back in this entry, if you are interested.

The Back of the North Wind drew an eclectic crowd. You had to know someone who knew someone to get on the board because it was not advertised on Mike Focke’s BBS list. My friend Debbie who I met on a board called Zonzr directed me there. I quickly spent almost all of my electronic social life on Dawn’s board. A good part of the reason was Frank Pierce. Frank was an older gentleman who was fifty something at the time. He was virtually unique among people in his age group for indulging in this online community thing. His passion was discussing politics and he quickly found that an online community allowed him to engage in his habit very easily. Somewhat to Dawn’s disgruntlement (for she hated politics) her board was nearly taken over by an inner ring of Washington area amateur policy wonks. Frank and I were two of the main contributors to those political discussions.

The thing about Frank though was unlike lots of amateur policy wonks, he knew about what he was talking. Frank had a depth of understanding that always amazed me. Our political discussions evolved on The Back of the North Wind and later on the message board I set up and which is still in business, The Potomac Tavern. (Frank was the co-host.) There was not much about the world that Frank had not studied in some depth. When the conversation moved from politics to other areas like religion, Frank was equally well informed.

Since I “met” Frank in 1990, I figure I have known him for sixteen years. Over those years, I figure I actually met him in person less than a dozen times. Our last meeting was about two years back when I met him at a Starbucks near his house. We spent about an hour discussing Potomac Tavern business and just chitchatting. I also had the privilege of being invited to his house a couple times. Once he hosted a Back of the North Wind get together in his backyard. We did these get togethers once or twice a year for a number of years. More recently, he invited me to stop by so I could take him for a test drive in my new hybrid.

Frank was tall, thin as a rail, bony, grey haired and both gregarious and scholarly at the same time. He and his wife Nancy had been married forever. If my memory serves me correctly, he is also survived by two sons and a daughter. He was active in the local German American community, spoke excellent German, and even wrote a newspaper column for a German newspaper called, no lie, The Potomac Tavern. It discussed current political topics happening in our nation’s capital in the context of a real tavern with a regular crew of erudite patrons. Frank recently related a story of a reader who came to Washington and was disappointed to discover that there was no Potomac Tavern in the city. Frank’s portrayal of this fictional tavern was so convincing he had some people fooled.

For among Frank’s many talents, he was an excellent writer. He wrote a number of books. None of them was a best seller, but he knew how to target the small markets. You can buy a number of them from online sources like Amazon.com. Writing alone would suffice as a creative outlet for most people. However, Frank was also a photographer. On The Potomac Tavern, if you dig for them, you will see many an amazing photograph taken by him, often carefully retouched with Adobe Photoshop. Frank’s photography occasionally dabbled on the risqué side. He spent some time doing figure photography, and a number of his models posed in the buff. I recall one trip to his house when he showed me his portfolio of nude photography. As with all his other art forms, he excelled here too.

Frank was also incredibly generous with both his time and money. While on The Back of the North Wind, he grew to know a woman named Judy. Judy lived in the backwoods of Virginia somewhere. Frank saw potential in Judy: a very smart woman who simply did not have the resources to go to college. For whatever reason, Frank decided that he would make an investment in Judy. I do not know to what extent he did it, but I know he helped pay her way through college. Frank could do these things, you see, because along with all his other talents he was a shrewd investor. This, plus his modest lifestyle, gave him the leeway to occasionally indulge in these acts of targeted charity.

I expect to blog more about Frank in the weeks ahead. I am getting details of his death second hand, but it sounds like Frank died from the complications of bronchitis. I can say that I was shocked to learn he had died, since I believe he was in the bottom half of his seventies. He always seemed in such abnormally good health. He was so skinny and his mind was always so sharp that I fully expected him to be pontificating on my forum into his nineties.

Among the many topics I explored with Frank over the years was aging. For me death was and still is a very scary thing. Frank was not scared. He was pragmatic: there is nothing you can do to stop death, so the only thing to do was to enjoy what life that is given to you to its fullest. From a man who did not seem the least bit religious, this was a both a very pragmatic and positive philosophy. He succeeded in walking his talk. He lived his final years as if he expected to live a hundred years more. He said he was not concerned about death, but he was concerned about leaving a legacy. At that, Frank clearly succeeded.

Frank taught me many life lessons I might never have grasped otherwise. I am trying to emulate his philosophy and to see every day as a gift full of boundless potential. If I can manage to do it, and I have a lot of work to do to achieve this, then perhaps Frank will have passed on to me his most treasured gift.

Frank, I am going to miss you like crazy. You have been such a positive presence in my life these last sixteen years. You are one of these people who, when you pass on, leave a large and beneficent wake. You touched and inspired many people. We in your online world were a small fraction of them. Thank you for your friendship, which has touched me in ways I still do not fully realize. I am hopeful that I will carry forward your positive spirit into the second half of my life. I hope that I can draw on your positive energy and pull some people into my wake too.

Rest in peace, dear friend.

December 27th, 2006 at 10:28pm Posted by Mark | Life 2006 | one comment

The Last of a Generation

My Uncle Dick died on Sunday. I cannot claim to have known him well. I visited his house at least once in recent years. He showed up at the occasional reunion that my mother’s side of the family put together. Uncle Dick lived to age 84, which is about average for my mother’s side of the family. For someone of his age, his body endured a lot of abuse. He smoked and drank freely. He was arrested at least once for driving intoxicated. As a result, he lost his driving license. According to my mother, he was a lot of fun to have as a younger brother. Like his older brothers, he was a big man on the high school football team. Like many Michiganders, he spent his time in the auto assembly line. He also drove the Tasty-Rite potato chip truck. To me the most amazing thing about the man was how much he looked like my grandfather. The last time I met him, I could not tell him apart from a photo of my dziadek circa 1960 or so. He spent almost his entire life in Bay City, Michigan and married a woman named Grace, who survived him. Together they raised four children and loved six grandchildren.

Perhaps you have read the book (or have seen the movie) Cheaper by the Dozen. My mother lived it: there were an even dozen in her family, including the parents. (This compares to the more modest ten in my family.) However, unlike the Gilbreths their financial situation was far dicier, and often dire. Starting with my grandparent’s first child Edith who was born in 1908 and ending with Betty in 1933, their ten children arrived over a remarkable 25-year period. Edith was born when her mother was 22. Betty arrived when my grandmother was 47.

My grandmother, who I never met, had the unfortunate experience of having three of her children die before her. The first was Don, who was shot down over occupied Europe in 1944 during the Second World War. A year later, it was Albert’s turn to meet an untimely end. Ironically, he also died in an aircraft. In his case, he was a private pilot and his plane malfunctioned. Albert was next in the queue, dying of severe stomach ulcers in 1951. The following year my grandmother died. Her husband survived her for 15 years.

The rest of the Zielinskis were blessed to live full lives and die of the complications of old age. Essie went at age 83 in 1996. Ernie followed her a few years later at age 84. Somewhere around the same time the eldest child, Edith, died. She (so far) proved to be the most long lived and died at age 93. My mother followed Edith last year. She died at age 85.

Now there are just two left. Gee is in assisted living in Jackson, Michigan. She appears to be dying of the same disease that killed my mother: Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. If she can hold on until February she will see her 80th birthday, but the odds are against her making to her 81st. When Gee passes, that will leave only Betty.

I once wished I had been the last child in the family, rather than one of many in the middle. I figured I would get the special attention from Mom and Dad I likely did not get as a middle child. (I am the fifth of eight.) Now, I am glad to be a middle child. While the timing of our deaths is unknown, the odds are that the later children in a family will help bury those siblings who were born before them. With each progressive year, ever more of the times, people and the friends they knew disappear from their lives forever.

I am just starting the process with my mother’s death last year. Fortunately my father is still alive and in good health. Logically he should be the next of us to go. Since my siblings are all in good health, after our parents are gone I expect we will have many happy decades ahead of us to enjoy each other’s company. Yet time will eventually take its toll on us too. Invariably some of us will pass before others. We too are in a death queue. We are just ignorant of where we are in the queue. Right now, it is difficult for us to see, but we felt its cold presence when our mother died last year. It is better and it is easier right now for now to put this later phase of our lives out of mind.

Within a few years, Betty (whom we call Aunt Penny) will likely be the last of her dozen alive. She will have no sisters or brothers to visit or call on the phone. Fortunately, she has three terrific sons, one daughter and hopefully a devoted husband who, I am sure, will be there for her in her last years. In addition, I am hopeful that she will have the good fortune of her sister Edith, and live into her 90s. For Aunt Penny is a spunky woman, quirky and irreverent, but warm and down to earth nonetheless. For most of my siblings, she is our favorite aunt.

How strange and odd an experience it must be to be the last sibling alive in a large family. I imagine it must feel sobering and melancholy at the same time. Particularly if your spouse precedes you, your final years are likely to be ones where the past seems to be on the tip of your tongue and yet has receded from everyone else’s views. Meanwhile, a new and different world swirls around you. This world is both familiar yet alien. My mother felt this way in her last years. She did not understand computers and this Internet thing. In some respects for people of a certain advanced age, death may be a relief. For the Earth you see is not quite the one you knew: it becomes something like living on another planet.

Being a middle child, when my time comes to meet my maker, I will likely have siblings around to help me on my dark passage. For this, I feel fortunate. As death becomes less an abstraction and more of a near term reality, I will likely feel differently.

I do make this promise though to my younger siblings who may some day be sitting around my hospital bed as life utterly drains out of me. It is this: if there is a next life, then after I die I will be there at the gate to welcome them home.

September 6th, 2006 at 08:49pm Posted by Mark | Life 2006 | no comments

JonBenet Ramsey and the tip of the iceberg

If I have one axe to grind against our modern news media, it is how it can blow one individual story way out of proportion. Last week while traveling on business, I was watching CNN from my hotel room in Augusta, Maine. The story broke that John Mark Karr had been arrested in Thailand as a suspect in the now ten-year-old murder of child model JonBenet Ramsey. I immediately groaned and looked for things to throw at the screen. I knew what was coming. For about a week, CNN along with the other major American media outlets were going to turn into the “Nearly All JonBenet Ramsey News Channel.”

It was not that I am unhappy that maybe this case would finally move toward resolution. Justice delayed is better than no justice at all. The other hard, arguably far more important news was out there, like the fragile cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah, the continued carnage in Iraq and increasing violence in Afghanistan. These stories all got short shrift, if they were mentioned at all. All our news media outlets were focused on the murder of one child ten years ago.

Yes, our media decided that the case of one six-year-old girl who had been brutally murdered more than ten years ago was worth at least 75% of its news time. Just in case we had forgotten the gory details (if that were possible, since they have been burned into our national conscience by this point), it was: let’s regurgitate the disgusting details of her murder again and again, every hour, on the hour. Let us recall the secret chamber beneath the Ramsey house. Let us relearn that the poor child had been sexually assaulted and bludgeoned. With this new development, new questions were raised. Was it possible that her parents been falsely convicted by the media for the crime? Isn’t it a shame that her mother Patsy Ramsey passed away in June of cancer under a cloud of shame and scorn? Prominent psychologists racked up big consulting fees on the airwaves. The hype was incredible; the news content was marginal at best.

Why is JonBenet Ramsey’s life still worthy of such media hype? Because she was a weird little child-model who had something terrible and bizarre happen to her. We were also fascinated because her parents had turned her into a moneymaking machine, seemingly so they could live a more opulent lifestyle. Yet there was a more obvious reason than that: because JonBenet Ramsey’s murder was one mother load for the media. Her strange case reached the demographics that our news media wanted to reach. The more they publicized the case, the more their ratings soared. The more their rating soared, the more they could charge for advertising time. Their pandering was mostly about corporate profits, not the public interest. As long as the news media could sustain interest, other more important news items got short shrift.

Focus, people. Of course, I have sympathy of JonBenet Ramsey and her family. Nevertheless, her death is simply a blip on the radar screens of child deaths, murders, molestations and abuses going on it there all the time. It is just that those other statistics do not seem to bother us. We are mostly inured to the daily child carnage swirling around us.

Approximately 30,000 children die every day from preventable causes like dysentery, malaria, fouled water and hunger. I would die of shock if CNN spent just fifteen minutes a day drawing our attention to these statistics. The closest we came to it recently was the media’s exposure the situation in Darfur. The genocide going on there among the non-Braggara tribes in western Sudan included not just many miserably dying children, but adults too. Then there was the famine, war, racism, terrorism and the half hearted international response to the crisis. Thousands of women were raped, sometimes repeatedly. Over 50,000 people have died in Darfur.

Sad as Darfur is, it is a minor problem compared to what has happened in the Congo. 3.8 million Congolese died in their latest civil war. Who among us Americans actually cares? Most Americans could not even pick Congo out on a world map. More people died in the Congo’s latest civil war than the 3.3 million Cambodians that were massacred by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. Yet we find Terri Schiavo or JonBenet Ramsey to be far more interesting, even dead, than millions of remote and desperately poor people in the heart of Africa or Asia. It is almost like 1,000,000 deaths of people we do not care about from ordinary preventable disease and civil war in foreign countries equals one death of some prominent White Caucasian American under unusual circumstances.

Okay, so we tend to have a hard time seeing beyond our own borders. So let us focus on some child abuse statistics here in our own country then. 1500 children die from child abuse in the United States every year. That is over four JonBenet Ramseys a day. Children in this country suffer 140,000 injuries as a direct result of child abuse every year. There are 1.7 million reports of child abuse every year. Add in neglect and the total rises to 2 million reports a year. Among those reports are between 150,000 and 200,000 cases of child sexual abuse a year. One in four women report being sexually abused as children, and one in seven men make a similar claim.

The living adult survivors of child abuse carry forward staggering amounts of psychological damage. Many will end up abusing their own children. With my adult perspective, I now count myself as a survivor of child abuse too. I love my mother, who passed away last year, dearly. I remember and cherish the many wonderful and truly extraordinary things she did for us. However, she also had times when she flipped out. Her emotional teakettle was frequently close to boiling. I suffered from the toxic environment of having an easily angered mother ready to lash out at her own children both emotionally and physically. My Mom was also a firm believer in “spare the rod and spoil the child”. In the 1960s, her behavior though was completely ordinary. If getting abuse at home was insufficient, there was much more to be witnessed in our parochial school. Most of my friends received the same, or worse, from their parents, so my case is hardly noteworthy. It took a couple more decades before society acknowledged that this kind of behavior was unacceptable. It was not tantamount to child abuse; it was child abuse.

So perhaps the JonBenet Ramsey case, because it happened to someone who looked more like a porcelain doll than a human being, gives us a safe way to indirectly confront the abuse we received growing up. Acknowledging our own abusive childhoods may be too painful. However, we can project our feelings and anger into a singular case and talk about it endlessly. JonBenet Ramsey’s tragic death then perhaps has the noble side effect of letting us express those feelings, yet without actually acknowledging our individual traumas.

The real conversation though should not be about JonBenet Ramsey, but about the abuse the vast majority of us suffered as children from people with power over us. Much of it was from parents. Sometimes it came from siblings. Maybe it came from the bully who beat us up at school, or a friend who through wounding words sliced our fragile psyches into cutlets. Child abuse, spousal abuse and plain old abuse goes on all around us. The best neighborhoods are no less immune to it than the roughest neighborhoods. Many of us seem to be unable not to hurt the ones we claim to love the most.

When popular news stories like the JonBenet Ramsey case are invariably raised in the media, outlets like CNN and Fox News would be doing a public service to also expose the scope of the child abuse problem. Perhaps it will bring this shame out of the closets where we can talk about it. Instead of letting these wounds fester, perhaps it is time for us to collectively take steps so they can heal.

August 20th, 2006 at 05:56pm Posted by Mark | Sociology | no comments