Occam’s Razor

Requiem for a Feline

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I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness - that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what - at last - I have found.

Preface to Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography

When I blog, I try to let words express the depth of my soul. Sometimes I come close, but words can never quite capture my feelings. Nothing that I can say in this entry can quite express how I feel right now, although the philosopher Bertrand Russell’s quote above comes close.

I used to poo-poo the notion of angels. Not anymore. Sprite, my cat of 19 ½ years of age who was put to sleep Sunday night, was an angel. He was a special angel sent by the cosmos just to me to provide me comfort, solace and love through two turbulent decades of my life. Sprite was simply love wrapped in a feline form. The depth of his love for me was focused and boundless.

Anyone who has had a pet knows how attached you can get to them. However, some pets are singularly extraordinary. That I was fortunate enough to have him as my pet means that there is either is a God or I am the fortunate recipient of a random act of the cosmos.

Mark me well. I know how people with pets can love them dearly, as I certainly loved Sprite. Nevertheless, Sprite’s love for me was extraordinary and far beyond what I even imagined was possible in my life. During the stresses of life that would have pulled apart ordinary men, Sprite was there for me. His love was like a thousand watt light bulb. He radiated his love on me in such high megadoses I was able to pull through my challenges time and time again. He did it without saying a word, except for an occasionally silent meow. He did it by looking at me intently with his devotional wide eyes and purring contentedly on my lap. He gave all he had and more for 19 ½ years. He would have stayed with me forever had his body allowed it. However, even with a cat with such a gentle constitution, death could not be postponed forever.

Sometime during the last week, Sprite’s intestine became perforated. He developed peritonitis. The twice-daily pills, the daily yogurt, the special cat food and the laxative which kept his symptoms in check lost their efficacy. By Sunday, he had no more appetite and could not even drink from his water dish. He found refuge behind the couch. I coaxed a couple spoonfuls of yogurt into his tummy, which were quickly thrown up.

It was time to visit the emergency veterinarian. I prayed of course that we were not to taking him in to be put to sleep. However, the X-rays revealed the sad truth of a cat who had given all he could give. The perforation could be seen easily, and his kidneys were enlarged and his stomach extended. It is unlikely that surgery could correct the problem. He had worn out. There was nothing to do but spare him further misery by putting him to sleep.

Sprite was quiet but attentive when we wrapped him in a towel and took him into the car. It was evening. He did not fuss in my arms at all. He looked wide-eyed and with wonder at the streetlights, the signs and the stars. He was calm. It seemed to me that they were a comfort to him. Perhaps they were a distant memory of wherever he was before he arrived in this world. While my wife drove, I gently stroked his face. Underneath the towel, somewhere there was a small but consistent purr.

Sprite left this life with dignity and unflinchingly. We held him in a blanket, looked at him intently and stroked him. I told him again for the millionth time how special a cat he was. He truly was the best cat who has ever lived. Gentleness and love expressed the character of his soul. He watched us with his wide eyes, seemingly hearing every word we were saying although we knew he was deaf. He was not afraid but was comforted that we were there for him. The narcotic he was given freed him of his pain.

“Dad, there is no more I can give you,” is what I heard him say in my head. “Sprite, we will meet again, sometime and someday, and in some other life,” I said to him quietly, tears streaming down my face. “And then once again you will be on my lap, and I will stroke you and pull back your bat-like ears and you will be purring contentedly. I love you, son.”

It was my wife and the veterinarian who actually put him to sleep. I could not find the strength for that final act. Simply seeing the euthanasia tube in his paw was hard enough. He watched my wife intently during the euthanasia, half shut his eyes and was gone. He went peacefully, which was right. In addition, he went embraced in love.

We will meet again, best friend and soulmate. There is no way I could begin to repay the love you lavished so consistently on me for so many years. I thank you for your gift nonetheless. I know we will be with each other again. For now my love, au revoir.

March 28th, 2006 at 10:30am Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Life 2006 | 6 comments

Good Night Lauren

My friend Lisa was turned on to blogging by her teenage goddaughter Lauren. It was Lisa, who in turn, got me started on my blogging adventure in December 2002. My adventure has consumed 489 entries over the last three years or so and a minimum of six hours a week of my life. Yet it may not have started at all without Lauren.

It was also Lauren who redesigned my blog to give it its present look. For the price of a $50 donation to the American Cancer Society, she invested many hours over many months designing and touching up my blog. I told her I wanted my blog to look a bit buttoned down. Yet I could not seem to do it on my own. While I have taught many classes in web page design, my attempts at giving my blog some style were utter failures. However, Lauren had that gift of making an ordinary web site look extraordinary. Do you like its look and feel? I know I do. You can thank Lauren.

You may wonder why it took months for Lauren to redesign my blog. I am a patient man but under the circumstances, I could hardly complain. It was not that the price was right, although I was happy to pay her much more. It was that Lauren had bigger fish to fry. She had Ewing’s Sarcoma, and a cancer had taken hold in her femur. An operation later, her femur was replaced. Everyone held their breath and hoped that this would mean the last of her endless hospitalizations and rounds of chemotherapy. She tried to resume a normal life and began attending college about a year late.

For a while it looked liked she had shaken the cancer. With her unflagging spirit and youth, I assumed she could put cancer behind her forever. Surely, she had more than paid her dues. Unfortunately, the cancer came back. Her pelvis acquired the cancer and then it spread to her liver. She died serenely on March 5th in her home, surrounded by many friends and family, after a heroic final battle with her disease. She was 19.

I never met Lauren in person, although I did have the good fortune of meeting her sister. Through many emails, reading her blog, and seeing her through the eyes of my friend Lisa, I did get to know her. Her radiant picture, which you can see on Lisa’s blog, shows a woman for whom love, unfailing good manners, humor and an enormous spirit of life simply shines through. It certainly came through in her emails. Despite months spent in depressing hospital rooms, and years of chemotherapy with its associated vomiting and other side effects, her spirit never wavered. She faced her own death courageously. Her faith in God never faltered either.

When I received the news of her death, I of course immediately sent Lisa my condolences. Yet it was not until Lisa posted this diary on Daily Kos that I understood the magnitude of this loss on everyone who knew her.

When my own mother died last November, I did not cry. My mother’s dying was a long and drawn out process. Her death was actually something of a blessing: an end to her suffering. However, when I read Lisa’s diary I cried right there in my office.

Most Americans never met John F. Kennedy yet millions cried the day he was assassinated. They cried, perhaps, because they saw in him someone they wanted to emulate but could not. Perhaps I cried for Lauren for similar reasons. Tragedy is a word used too frequently these days, but Lauren’s death was truly a tragedy. She was a shining and unfailing good-natured spirit who was forced to deal with horrendous adult issues while still an adolescent. Her death was nobody’s fault. Yet not even death itself could flag either her faith or her good spirits. She was at peace with herself through it all. She set something of an ultimate example to all who knew her. Everyone who knew her, including some like myself who never actually met her, feel both sorrow by her absence in our lives, and humbled that nothing nature could throw at her could change her sweetness.

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us,” Gandalf the wizard said in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. From a distance, that seems to have been Lauren’s philosophy of life: make the best of every day, no matter how challenging. I hope when my time comes to depart this earth that I can do it with just half her grace and a quarter of her courage.

March 8th, 2006 at 09:15pm Posted by Mark | Life 2006 | 2 comments

The End

Today was a cold and grey day for a burial. The temperature hovered around forty and the wind blew stiffly in our faces. At least it was neither raining nor snowing. It felt almost cold enough to be like Michigan in winter. Michigan was the state where my mother was born, and where she felt most at home.

Yet it was not to be where she would rest for eternity. Rather, it would be Crematory Garden VI, Lot 743 at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Silver Spring, Maryland. My mother died November 10th of last year. It took that long for her cremains to go to their final resting place.

Although she was cremated the day she died, neither she nor my father had picked out a cemetery plot. It took a few weeks after her death for my father to sort through these details. In the interim, my mother’s ashes rested where she longed to be in her final months: at home in their apartment. Instead, she died in a nursing home.

The cold and grey day somehow seemed appropriate for this business. Since nearly two months had passed since her death, her interment felt very much anticlimactic. My father seemed to have accepted my mother’s death long before she died. In those last years, she was a shadow of the woman he used to know. He was loving and dutiful to the end, but in some respects, it was as if he was caring for someone else.

There was no fanciful final farewell for my mother. She would have approved. She felt that her life was relatively unimportant. She knew her place in the grand scheme of things and she put herself quite a bit down the totem pole. She would not have wanted much fuss made at her interment.

My father and I were the only family witnesses. I felt someone needed to be there representing her children. My sister, who did so much to care for her during her last years, did not want to put herself through another crying jag. Perhaps this last act in my mother’s life was better left to us relatively stoic men. It would be and was a brisk and businesslike matter. “Shouldn’t take more than thirty minutes,” my father told me. It was more like ten.

It was just a short drive to the gravesite with Sam, a representative of this Catholic cemetery. Astroturf covered the pile of dirt next to my mother’s grave. I carried the box with my mother’s cremains the short distance from my father’s car to the grave. Two respectful employees waited with shovels. I handed the box to a gravedigger who gently placed it in the concrete liner. Just seconds later, the hole was being packed tight with dirt.

Feeling a bit self-conscious, I took pictures with my digital camera. Although my mother’s life was about living, I felt this last act should be recorded for those who were not present. I saw little harm in it and thought it might help bring closure.

It should not matter, but I know my mother would not have chosen suburban Maryland as her final resting place. She was a Michigander through and through. No other climate quite worked for her. When she was younger and more lucid, she expressed the desire to be buried next to her parents in Bay City. My father tried to honor her wishes. However, there was no room for her in the family plot, or indeed her parent’s cemetery. Her health drove her and my father to Maryland before she could ponder other possibilities. In the end, they pragmatically settled on Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Silver Spring. She was to be buried with his side of the family. At least in this cemetery there was still room for more deceased.

In time, my father’s ashes will be placed next to hers. Fifty-five years of marriage will be but a wink compared to the time what remains of their physical bodies will rest, side by side, together.

While my father is alive, there will be opportunities to pay respects rather frequently. I wonder after they are both gone, will I visit regularly?

I suspect I will visit more often the older I get. For as I age it is inevitable that I will lose family and friends too. Should I make it to my father’s age I suspect I will find much solace from visiting and fondly remembering two sterling parents, the joy they found in life, and their grace embracing its end.

January 6th, 2006 at 05:47pm Posted by Mark | Life 2006 | no comments

Channeling Mom

My mother died about six weeks ago. I thought in the months after her death that I would be pretty out of kilter. I expected to be a lot more grieved than I actually am. I thought I would spend hours crying over her loss, because I did love her and still feel bonded to her. That I am not is due I suspect to the opportunities we had for closure during her final months. It was certainly not fun to witness her progressive decline every week, but I found some catharsis from the experience nonetheless.

Mostly I accept her passing. I awake in the morning fully aware that she is gone but it does not interfere with my day. Yet I still find myself getting teary from time to time. Christmas found us at my Dad’s apartment. I spent some time going through his huge stack of Christmas and bereavement cards. I took special care to read the notes in the bereavement cards. So many people, many of whom I did not know, were touched by my mother. I had no idea because she rarely strayed outside her comfortable bounds of family. Yet over 85 years even someone whose life struck me as very cloistered developed friends. Tears came to my eyes as I read the heartfelt condolences.

Aside from a lifetime of memories there is not much tangible left to remind myself of her. Almost all of her clothes and jewelry have been given away. My wife got a fair amount of her jewelry. A cookbook of her favorite recipes assembled two decades earlier by two of my sisters survives. I will likely recreate her recipes from time to time. However, the food will not taste the same. For as the preface to her cookbook says, “Of course, when I make this dish, I always add a little dash of…” That in a nutshell was my mother in her favorite role as master chef. Every exquisite yet familiar meal tasted the same yet was subtly different. Perhaps we will have family contests in the years ahead to recreate some of my mother’s many scrumptious dishes. With luck, some of us will come close, but no one will quite recreate the original. We cannot cook a meal with passion. For us, cooking is mostly a means to an end, not an end itself. Since my mother expressed much of her love in her cooking, this is perhaps a truest measure of my loss. It sounds silly but the quality of the food prepared here on earth took a dramatic nosedive with her death.

We tried to create a familiar Christmas meal at my father’s apartment. We had many of the right ingredients. There was a spiral ham, purchased at the local BJs. It was very tasty. Nevertheless, it was missing the cloves that my mother would have pierced into it. My wife made au gratin potatoes that needed a wee bit more time in the oven. They were blander than my mother’s, and did not have that layer of lightly burnt cheese on the top. Salad? My mother would have made a wonderful fruit salad, slicing all the fruit by hand. The rolls came partially cooked from the store. For dessert, we ate Christmas cookies contributed by both my sister and my wife. My mother probably might have made her exquisite Snickerdoodles. For me my mother’s favorite dessert was her Goober Roles: a Leona Hamill exclusive. They were something like a cinnamon role, but made with biscuit and slathered with butter, brown sugar, karo syrup, cinnamon and nuts. The syrup invariably stuck to your teeth and the roof of your mouth, but you did not care: they were a sugar, fat and carbohydrate nirvana. You could not stop at just one. In fact, it was hard to stop after a pan-full.

Afterwards I helped clean up in the kitchen. It was quite a mess. Fortunately, my mother had trained me well. For years, she did both the cooking and cleaning up afterwards. Then one day she realized she had eight children: let us do it for a change. Therefore, we did, and to her exacting specifications. Now KP has become something I do on autopilot. I can take the messiest, greasiest pan-strewn kitchen and make it sparkle. Thanks Mom. She (and my father) taught me to stoically accept and take some modest pleasure in the many routine and unexciting chores that invariably populate a family’s life.

One thing my mother would not tolerate was dirt. This surprised me after reading her biography, because she grew up in a cleaning impaired house. She did not get the cleanliness habit until she went to nursing school. There she realized that the world was teaming with microbial life. Much of it, she was convinced, was aimed directly at her family. She got a bit obsessive with her cleaning. Not only did everything have to look clean, it actually had to be clean.

With two weeks off from the press of work, I had no more excuses. Our house is generally picked up. For example, our kitchen usually looks clean. Okay, my daughter may be thoughtless about forgetting to wipe the counter down after making her sandwiches. Occasionally even my wife or I will let a dish sit in the sink after a meal. Moreover, our kitchen table is almost always a semi permanent resting place for all the transient stuff that enters the house. It may be reasonably picked up, but is it clean? Alas, no. It would not meet my mother’s standards.

What it needed was a little Mr. Clean: me. And so yesterday I found myself at 10 AM in the kitchen. My mission: to get the kitchen clean. I could feel my mother watching down on me from the afterlife. “Your kitchen, Mark, is a not really clean.” “Yes Mom, I know. I am sorry.” “There’s no excuse for it. Cleanliness is next to godliness.” “No there isn’t, Mom. And I have two weeks off from work. I have run out of excuses.”

So out came the sponges, detergents and latex gloves. I went to work. I started by pulling out the refrigerator. Just cleaning the refrigerator turned out to be a two-hour project. I removed all the dust bunnies and wiped the wall behind the refrigerator. I threw out dubious food. I wiped down all its interior and exterior surfaces. I got rid of a decade of old photographs and magnets stuck to the door.

This was just the beginning. Abrasive cleansers went on the kitchen counters. They had been wiped numerous times but my discerning eye could still see the dirt ground into their textured surfaces. I scrubbed and scrubbed until it was as white as the model’s teeth on a tube of Pepsodent. Then, I scrubbed and bleached the sink. I wiped the windowsills. I even scrubbed the baseboard. After four hours I stopped. All this work and I was nowhere near being done!

I was exhausted. “Mom, I cannot do this anymore! I don’t have your stamina!” I had grand ideas for the kitchen. I was going to mop the floor. I was going to clean the windows. I was going to scour the oven. I was going to sweep out every cabinet, and remove all the crap in the junk drawer.

Yet I have not given up. For I still hear my Mom’s voice in my head, dreadfully concerned about my filthy kitchen. Tomorrow I will resume my clean kitchen quest. Then I will try to do the same to each room in turn. I will also shampoo the carpets. I will get all the dust bunnies in the corners of every room. I will dust then use Lemon Pledge (my Mom’s favorite) on all the wood furniture.

Then will I stop hearing my mother’s voice in my head? I am not sure. In reality even if I work at this full time, I will be lucky to get a quarter of it done. For the list of things that need cleaning and straightening is truly endless. And if I ever finish, I will have to start all over again. By that time, I am sure the kitchen will be filthy again.

Perhaps at some point I will sense my mother’s benevolent smile. Perhaps though her real thoughts from the afterlife are, “No! You got the wrong message! You are remembering as I was long ago. That’s not how I think now! Life is too short to spend it cleaning all the time. Get a life! Go for a walk! Smell some roses!”

But no, I am remembering my mother at my age: age 48. It is 1968 and that is what she was doing. She is waxing kitchen floors. She is bleaching sheets and our underwear. She is darning our socks. She is hustling us off to church. She is making sure our shoes are shined for parochial school.

Maybe this is how I grieve. Maybe, when my house is finally clean to her satisfaction, my grieving will be done. For now, I am not done channeling Mom.

December 29th, 2005 at 08:39pm Posted by Mark | Life 2005 | no comments

Yin without Yang

Clearly, it is going to take a while to process all my feelings about my mother’s death. For now, it seems surreal. Even when she and my father lived 600 miles away, even when I did not see them for a year or two, still they were always in my present. Both were an easy phone call or email away. With my Mom’s death all that has changed of course. My father is now a widower. Now he is left to pay the bills and try to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. He remains in decent health. Of course, we, his children, hope for many more years of good health and happiness for him.

At 79, he is not quite the man that he was. We see signs that he is losing some of his independence. He still drives a car, but he drives it locally and only during non rush hours. I am grateful because the drivers in the metropolitan Washington D.C. area are unforgiving to someone with aging reflexes. As a consequence in order to come visit us, someone has to drive him here (about 30 miles each way). Today being Thanksgiving, we provided the dinner. My sister Mary drove him over.

Seeing him come in the door to our house - alone - for me drove home the reality of my mother’s death. Yin was without Yang. Yes, death is a natural experience but this seemed decided unnatural. It was exactly two weeks ago today that my mother died. Even if last Thanksgiving my mother had to be helped bodily into our house, that was more natural than seeing my father come through our door without my mother.

My father remains philosophical and pragmatic. He brought with him a number of my mother’s keepsakes, principally a lot of costume jewelry. My wife got to pick through them and retain any items that she wanted. The book I gave to my mother on famous movies stars back in 1974 was returned too. I guess it was on loan. My father said my mother had enjoyed reading it many times. There are still things for him to sort through. Doubtless, many bills will need to be settled. My mother’s possessions are being farmed out to family if possible. The lesser ones are likely to end up at Goodwill. Then there is the matter of her interment. Her body was cremated but her ashes will go in a nearby cemetery. My father still has to pick out the exact plot. He is still a bit puzzled why I would want to attend this last act.

On the surface, my father seems like himself. We played a game of Scrabble (he won). We went for a Thanksgiving walk, a custom in our family so we do not feel so guilty about the feast to come. His mind is still sharp but our Thanksgiving walk came harder to him. I could hear him breathing heavily as we walked.

At our table, he was sometimes the odd man out. Had my mother been with us, there would have at least been someone his own age with whom to discuss things. We tried to keep him engaged but a lot of the conversation simply was not relevant to him. Discussions about TV shows like Buffy: The Vampire Slayer has no relevance in his life. So quite often, he was left alone in his own thoughts. Nevertheless, he seems philosophical about this time of his life. He seems to understand that his time too is nearing an end, and the world belongs to newer generations.

I am glad he has his retirement community. Too much time with my family would probably be a tedious experience for him. However, at Riderwood he has plenty of people in his own age group with whom to chat. These connections are perhaps the most meaningful experience in his life in more than twenty years. Many of the residents at Riderwood also grew up in this area. Consequently, there are endless stories to plumb with residents about the way Washington D.C. used to be sixty or seventy years or so years ago, when he was a young lad.

I hope that he has the time for a late life renaissance. Since he is unencumbered, perhaps he will take Elder Hostel vacations again. Perhaps he will visit distant relatives at times of his own choosing. On the other hand, perhaps he will simply stay at Riderwood where he is so happy, and enjoy time with family when we are in his neighborhood.

Since husbands tend to die before their wives, we are also wondering whether he might start dating again. Riderwood has many widows. A courteous gentleman like himself should be in high demand. Time will probably tell us whether he will even entertain female prospects. None of us wants to see him lonely. Fortunately, he does not appear to be the least bit lonely. He makes his own social life.

I may be projecting, but being spouseless after fifty-five years must be difficult on many levels. The void must be difficult to fully accept and work through. So we watch him with some wariness, sanguine that his last years are likely to be happy ones, but wary nonetheless. Since we live locally, my sister and I are also feeling our way through this change. How can we best support my father during his last years? Right now, we do not know the answers. We want to give him the space he deserves as a grown up in full control of his faculties, but we also want to be ready to step in when needed.

Yes, it does feel surreal. It feels surreal to play Scrabble with my father, to have his mind still so sharp, yet to have my mother irrevocably exiled from our lives. In a way, my mother still lives on. In my desk drawer are two cassettes of conversations with my mother taken some three year ago when she was of sound mind and body. I have yet to transcribe the oral history that I took. I need to. However, right now I cannot work up the courage to listen to the tapes. Her passing is still too near. I too need a little distance in order to gain perspective.

While I mostly feel fine, I sometimes wonder if I am like a soldier suffering from shell shock. Perhaps rather than being at the end of my grieving process, I am just at its beginning.

November 24th, 2005 at 08:37pm Posted by Mark | Life 2005 | no comments

Inheriting the baggage too

For those who are wondering, my mother’s funeral was quite lovely. While it would not be accurate to say everyone had a good time, it went about as good as a funeral could go. The music was lovely and touching. The priest gave a simple but heartfelt sermon that hit all the right notes. After the funeral mass, many stayed for the eulogies. Most of us children had words to say publicly; you may have read mine already. Tears were shed, but the tears were as much from laughter as of sorrow. When we remembered my mother’s little eccentricities, we could not help but laugh. Afterwards we repaired to one of the restaurants in Riderwood for a nice luncheon reception. My Mom must have been disappointed that she had not prepared the food.

My friend Courtney attended and saw my family at its full size for the first time. She remarked how much my family looks alike. She is right. You would be hard pressed to find any family where the siblings looked so much the same. Perhaps it was her remark that had me watching my own family, small though it may be. Before the service, my wife and daughter largely sat by themselves on a bench. There were plenty of people to talk to, but they preferred to stay quiet and silent rather than seek out conversation. I found myself greeting arrivals at the door to the chapel. I am learning to be gregarious, but it does not come naturally. Part of me wanted to be sitting on the bench with them.

The patter continued during the luncheon after the service. My nieces were at a table together laughing and sharing memories. And there was my wife and daughter, at a table by themselves. I joined them, but eventually mingled. This was, after all, family. Many I had not seen in years. The time I have with them is precious because we are so geographically separated. Why would I want to distance myself from them, particularly at such a turning point in our lives? Why would my wife and daughter? It is not as if they have not had plenty of time over the years with my side of the family and feel comfortable with everyone.

One thing is for sure: neither my wife nor I are extraverts. We tend to prefer the pleasure of a good book to a social gathering. If I must engage socially, I prefer small groups of people that I know. Still, there was a time when my daughter was popular. From ages 6-9, she was definitely the popular girl on the block. She was our amazing social butterfly. Girls were constantly knocking on our door, streaming into her bedroom or wanting them to come to their house. She was the nexus of a complex social, preteen network. It seemed more normal to send her to a sleepover on a weekend then not. She changed, but I do not know why. Now my daughter seems more like a cloistered nun than a social butterfly. Yes, she does have her friends, principally the “losers” (social outcasts) at school. Mostly they share her ambiguous sexual feelings and aversion to all things trendy. However, it is a small group of genuinely good teens. They meet irregularly in person. Most of their conversations are on IM, not in person.

Having twenty family members in the house for the wake was a bit much for her. She said a few polite words and then scurried out of sight into her room. The door remained closed until they were gone. Like her mother and I she likes to write. Still, it seemed more than a bit odd that she would disappear like this. She does this quite often. This girl, once so popular and the block extrovert, has morphed into the block introvert.

What happened? I am sure there were many factors. She had friends who got weird on her. They experimented tragically with drugs and sex, things that were not her scene. Yet on another level, I think she was also just modeling her parents. It is unfair to say we never host parties, but the last real party in our house was in 1999. My wife and I do attend parties once or twice a year. Yet invariably we don’t stay too long. Usually an hour or so before anyone else is even thinking of leaving my wife is tugging at my sleeve: let’s go. It usually does not take much persuading for me to leave either. Especially if it is a large group of people I do not know I find myself fumble mouthed and fumble footed. Somehow, I missed the class on successful social navigation. Few things terrify me more than having to go to a party full of strangers then have to make casual conversation. Therefore, I generally avoid it. Give me home. Give me peace and quiet.

Nevertheless, I am starting to come out. It may be a modest midlife renaissance, but it is a start. My new job has its social aspects. I have learned to swim in it. I do this a lot on business trips. I am usually with a group of 8-12 people. We spend the day in meetings and the evenings at restaurants. Most of these people I now know a bit more than casually. I do not find it too burdensome. In fact, I am finding it kind of fun. It used to be that as soon as business was over I was anxious to run to my hotel room. Now half the time I find I want the conversation to linger. Perhaps that is a good sign.

However, most likely my engrained habit toward introversion will never wholly recede. It is too comfortable. Likely one of the reasons I fell in love with my wife was that she was a shy introvert like me. There would be no need to worry about having to fend for myself in big parties if I married her! Now I am starting to understand that my daughter has modeled our behavior. I do not think that she intended to model us, but she did nonetheless. Just like Mom and Dad, her most comfortable times seem to be in her room, alone.

If it were just her introversion, perhaps this would be no more than coincidence. She is currently half way through her teenage years. What I am now seeing is more like a perfect meld of my wife and myself, rather than the free and independent spirit I had hoped to raise. I find it spooky sometimes. Neither my wife nor I were first in line in the dating business. Maybe we had self-image problems, or we carried from childhood a latent shyness. While I wanted to be dating but seemed to lack the courage, my daughter explicitly chooses to shy away from intimate relationships. Perhaps it comes from witnessing some of her friends self-destruct in these relationships. In addition, I think that she picked up that this was an area of tenderness in her parents, so she was supposed to model it.

I am beginning to perceive something that should have been blazingly obvious. While children are not intellectually sophisticated, they are excellent readers of other people. Perhaps since they learn to talk through learning to read emotions, they become very adept at understanding people’s body languages and the complex subtext to daily living. Most of this emotional intelligence I think is buried in their subconscious, so they are not explicitly aware of it. Since we parents are a constant presence in their lives, we model a version of reality that for them, after a while, seems entirely natural. It is more than religion that our children pick up from us parents. It seems to be pretty much everything. Even in areas where our children seem to be a contrast to their parents, it appears that (in my daughter’s case) it is picked to deliberately highlight the contrast.

My shyness is her shyness. My self-image problems are also hers. My feelings of toxic shame she also seems to carry forward in her life. And it goes on and on.

Perhaps all this comes from genetics. I am skeptical about this line of reasoning. Had foster parents raised her, I suspect she would have modeled them, instead of us. I do not know whether to be flattered or to be upset. Overall, I probably lean more toward the upset side. I raised her to be an independent thinker: so why is she as a liberal as I am? If she has to inherit attributes of me, why could she not pick just my good attributes and not the bad ones? Why would I want traits like my feelings of guilt to be carried over to another generation?

In retrospect, what could I have done differently to change any of it? I really do not know. Perhaps if I had been less a presence in her life, she might have turned into someone quite different. Instead, I played the dutiful and loving father role. I am sure it has many positive aspects. Somehow, my lesser aspects came along for the ride, as did my wife’s.

On the plus side, my daughter inherits our creative instincts and strong intelligence. These characteristics will serve her well in the future. She will have to work through a few issues though. I suspect my self-esteem is higher than my wife’s is. Which will she carry into adulthood? My wife is much more the bookworm than I am. Will she pick up my wife’s love of literature and always have a book in her hands? On the other hand, will she be like dear old Dad, read newspapers, and skim the media for content? Does it matter?

Time will tell. She is rapidly moving toward adulthood. Nevertheless, I do not think what my daughter went through is at all unique. I strongly suspect her friends are engaging in similar and mostly largely unconscious behavior emulation of their parents too. As I ponder my own mother’s death and try to understand the gifts she left me, I also realize some baggage came with her gifts. I hope that when my turn comes to leave this planet I will have left her with more gifts than baggage.

November 17th, 2005 at 07:38pm Posted by Mark | Sociology | no comments

Eulogy for my mother

My mother’s memorial mass is tomorrow. I prepared the following eulogy when my turn comes to say something after the mass. This is a different perspective of my mother suitable for consumption by our immediate family.

Soon hopefully I will be focusing on other things again. For those of you who are wondering I find myself at peace over her passing. I think most of my grief occurred watching her decline. Now that this is behind us I think I can move on. However, I will certainly never forget my mother, and always hold her close to my heart.

November 13th, 2005 at 09:45am Posted by Mark | Life 2005 | 6 comments

85 Years and 8 Months

My mother, Leona Marie Zielinski Hamill, died this morning at 7:42 a.m. She died at Renaissance Gardens, a nursing home at Riderwood, a retirement community in Silver Spring, Maryland. While she died peacefully, her condition (Progressive Supranuclear Palsy) made her last few months quite unpleasant. While we are of course grieved to have her gone from this life, we are also relieved that she is no longer in pain or distress.

She was born in the midst of the Great Depression in Bay City, Michigan. Her parents, poor Polish immigrants, somehow raised twelve children while eking out a living that kept the family in poverty for most of her childhood. Since she grew up in adversity, she knew adversity. It shaped her entire outlook on life. Despite being in a desperately poor family, she was able to latch on to the American Dream somehow. Partially because there was a war on, and partially because her older sister Essie and her husband found the money, she went to nursing school in Washington, D.C. There at Catholic University she met a tall, blond and skinny man six years her junior named Jim Hamill.

While she never expected to be married, Jim was persuasive. They were married on June 21st, 1950 in Bay City, Michigan. Over the course of their 55-year marriage, they raised eight children. I am one of them. An engineer’s salary greatly exceeded her father’s salary as a butcher, but my siblings and I still lived a fairly Spartan and no-frills existence. Somehow, Mom and Dad raised eight of us. We absorbed their work and education ethics. Among my eight siblings, three have PhDs and three others (including myself) have graduate degrees. My marriage of twenty years is in the middle of the pack. My sister Doris celebrated thirty years of marriage this summer. My parents can also count nine grandchildren to their credit.

My mother was a submissive mouse of a woman to her husband and was too shy to make many friends. She was only truly comfortable with her own sisters. She seemed a tyrant to us children growing up. We do not hold that against her. She was playing from the same script she learned at her mother’s knees. While my Dad was invariably calm and logical, my mother was the full of emotion. To call her a tyrant though is to paint too broad a brush. She was also a mother who gave of herself to an almost dysfunctional degree. She would take no day off. Even on vacations, she was making meals and washing clothes. Despite eight of us to care for our house was always immaculate. She changed our bed sheets weekly. There was never a trace of dust on the furniture. The dining room floor was waxed weekly, whether it needed it or not. (Much later in life, she realized that Mop-N-Glow was good enough.)

She filled our tummies with delicious and healthy foods that had most of us salivating for more. She expressed her passion mostly in her cooking. Many dishes, such as spaghetti sauce, she made from scratch. Her pressure cooker steaming away and the percolator filling the house with aromas of Maxwell House are memories none of us could possibly forget. The yellow cakes with chocolate frosting that she made for my father seemed as numerous as stars in the sky. Whether cooking, cleaning or just fussing she was always in motion. She expressed her love through action.

Yet she discounted her own abilities. Despite having earned a B.S. degree in nursing, working as a teacher for a number of years, operating as scrub and psychiatric nurses, she considered herself stupid. She idolized my father’s intellect and generally allowed him to make the important decisions. She grew up steeped in the mysticism of Catholicism. My father also felt similar devotional inclinations. Our childhood years were full of devout and some might argue dysfunctional Catholicism. Daily rosaries, weekly masses and periodic trips to the confessional were an accepted part of growing up, as were parochial schools, when they could afford it. Every morning before they started the day they prayed together at the side of their bed. We knew our mortal from our venial sins. We were always looking over our shoulders wondering if God was frowning at us for our latest minor transgressions.

After her children had flown the coup, my mother was a bit lost. She never returned to work so instead invested more energy being the good submissive wife who catered to my father. Too much togetherness between them was probably not healthy. However, they had their values and there was no changing them. Marriage meant forever because God himself had joined them. Both played their marriage script, often sniping at each other in a tired passive-aggressive fashion, to the bitter end.

As my mother declined, their roles reversed, much to my mother’s horror. All she knew how to do was to give. It was infuriating to her not to be able to give, but to have others take care of her. Every little decline added to her unhappy state. My father floundered a bit in his new caretaker role. My family stepped in to support him. Our family (principally my sister Mary) saw the obvious. When it was clear they could not manage a house together anymore, we worked through the logistics of moving them from Michigan to Maryland.

It was family in the end that I think brought home to my mother the realization that she was indeed not just loved, but cherished. For my sister Mary and me, who live locally, caring for her meant a lot of grunt work. For me it was weekly visits. Mary did the same but supplemented it with so much more. Every day was a challenge for her to make my mother’s declining life have some meaning. Others visited when they could, which was surprisingly often, considering it meant plane rides.

The end of my mother’s life is really but a footnote to a long life that spanned 85 years and 8 months exactly. My mother’s life was about service to family. To her husband and children it was about doing things to place us in a safe and stable family environment. Nevertheless, she also had something of a previous life. She was not married until the ripe age of 30. Before marriage, she was a good but unnoticed woman who won affection by being at her parent’s beck and call. Her acts were quite extraordinary. For example, she cared for her severely mentally ill mother while nursing her colicky first child, my sister Lee Ann. This meant years of constant interruption and almost no sleep. No grunt soldier slogging through the Rhineland worked harder.

Now she is at rest. We know what her life was about, but I sometimes wonder why she went to such extraordinarily lengths for us. For now we do not analyze, we simply mourn her absence. Millions of us die every year, yet each of us has powerful individual life stories. Her life story too is very powerful. Yet to me at least she remains something of an enigma.

I feel that whatever she is supposed to do, her journey is not over. I think she has other lives ahead in other bodies. This life was a lesson for her. If she is granted another one, I hope it is one where she will have some time for reflection and ease. I hope it is one where she no longer basks in someone else’s life, but is one where she becomes the person she was meant to be. That is my hope for her. It is my hope that death for her is not the end. Rather, I hope she is a chrysalis and through her death she is transformed into the beautiful butterfly so hard for any but her family to see. It is this hope that gives me comfort while, understandably, I am feeling for a while adrift without my moorings.

November 10th, 2005 at 06:19pm Posted by Mark | Life 2005 | 2 comments

Schiavo: It’s not the Right to Life, it’s the Right to Die

The Right to Lifers in the Schiavo case have it all wrong. It’s not about the right to life. It’s about the right to die.

As much as I love my wife, daughter, parents, siblings and friends they have no say in whether I live or die. They have no say because they are not me. I have autonomy. I decide what I do, what I eat and who my friends will be. I don’t need permission from anyone. Admittedly it would be pretty heartless of me to take my own life since it would likely leave my family devastated. But the bottom line is whether I live or die is my choice. It’s not something that needs to be enshrined in law. It just is a fact of life. Unless, like Terri Schiavo, I cannot speak for myself and am in a persistive vegetative state (PVS) I can choose the timing of my exit. If I have some incurable disease I can refuse treatment. If I am in a hospital or nursing home I can order that my feeding tubes be removed or my oxygen be cut off. And if I want to I can put stick a gun to my head and blow my brains out just like Hunter S. Thompson.

When we cannot speak for myself we have rules. A living will, recognized by most states, speaks for my wishes when I cannot. Terri Schiavo did not have one. This is not surprising. She was, after all, only 26 when lack of oxygen (allegedly a result of her mental illness: bulimia) caused her massive brain damage. She was however legally married to Michael Schiavo. It may be inconvenient to the Schindler family but when someone reaches eighteen they can legally make their own decisions. They decide if they want to get married. And if they decide to get married then their spouse, by default, has the legal right to speak for him or her. And Michael Schiavo asserts that Terri told him several times that she would not choose to linger in this world if she were in the state she was in.

And yet for an obscene fifteen years this soap opera has been played out, most of it in the courts. Twenty-three court rulings, all against the Schindler family, have said that Michael Schiavo has the right to act in behalf of Terri. But for some people the law and due process are insufficient. It’s gotten into the theater of the absurd. Woodside Hospital in Pinellas Park, Florida is virtually an armed camp. But Terri is just one of seventy patients there. Now we learn that the three to four minute security delay meant that Jennifer Johnson’s grandfather passed away before she could say a final goodbye to him.

No wonder our email in-boxes are filling up with references to how to create living wills. (I’ve had four emails so far myself.) The Schiavo case should encourage many of us to get off the dime and have our wishes signed, sealed and notarized. Still, while a living will ensures no ambiguity it shouldn’t be necessary. My wife knows how I feel about hanging on when there is no hope of recovery: I want to be let go. Actually, I would not prefer to die the way Terri Schiavo is dying. A week or two of starvation and dehydration is inhumane. Rather I’d like to have a nurse or physician give me a quick shot of something to put me out of my misery, just like vets do routinely to pets of all kinds. Unfortunately our so-called “culture of life” makes this impossible in our country. Even in places like Oregon where physician assisted suicide is legal, Uncle Sam is in court to ensure it doesn’t happen. So in Oregon like in the rest of the country you had best put your thoughts into a living will while you have your wits about you and resign yourself to a slow and potentially painful death. Fortunately, while I cannot know for sure, I suspect I won’t feel a thing. Any “me” in that body will have long departed this earth. I don’t know how to break it to the Schinders, but their Terri has been dead for fifteen years.

My wish for a quick end of my life in these circumstances is not just an expression of my deeply held feelings about my life, but also a kindness to those who love me. I want them to accept my death and move on. That’s the real issue with the Schindlers. The Terri they knew is gone and is never coming back. They need to let her go. They need to move on and to heal. Instead we have a great disturbance in the natural forces as artificial means keep her body alive. But her spirit is dead and long gone.

Of course a lot of the recent posturing has nothing to do with Terri and a lot to do with politics. The Republicans saw an opportunity to use the body of Terri Schiavo for their own purposes: to pump up their political base. What President Bush and the Congress did was horrifying and shameful. If you ask me it was the legislative equivalent of rape. Instead of showing respect for Terri they showed contempt. Rather than showing a love for life they demonstrated contempt for the law and for individual autonomy. No wonder the American public is overwhelmingly against what they did. No wonder Bush’s ratings are at new lows. The last thing any of us want to do is to leave our most private medical decisions to the government.

As for the Right to Life crowd, it’s now clear what is really going on. These people are not right to life. Rather, they are in denial of death. Death is a crossing we all must face someday but they deny it. In reality they have a phobia about death, and their anxiety about their own mortality is leeching out into the public sphere.

So the issue is really about law and individual autonomy. Terri Schiavo’s case will teach us we must be proactive to make sure our end of life wishes are respected. Her death will also teach us that we need to grapple with our own feelings on life and death. That is the only good I see coming out of her sad situation. Like Jesus, she was martyred for our sins. Unlike Jesus though I doubt she chose to become an example. Nonetheless she will teach us an important lesson. Let us hope that we absorb it.

Safe passage, Terri.

March 27th, 2005 at 10:38am Posted by Mark | Philosophy | no comments

Speculations on the Soul

Regular readers will know metaphysics has been on my brain the last few years. Between reading books on quantum mechanics, pondering mystics and gurus and even watching a funky metaphysical movie I can’t seem to escape it. But I haven’t gone off the deep end. Seeing What the Bleep Do We Know? for example hasn’t had me rushing off to learn more about the Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment. I prefer to make sense of fantastic things in my own murky, mysterious way rather than grab one of those prepackaged solutions off the shelf.

Today you get to go on my little roller coaster ride on the nature of soul, and why I think souls exists. Buckle up.

Ironically these thoughts come from being a programmer. To me trying to understand what software really is is very hard. There is no tangible difference between a CD ROM that is formatted or unformatted. Certainly a formatted CD-ROM with software on it can do some amazing stuff when executed by certain classes of computers and certain operating systems. But a formatted CD-ROM weighs no more nor less than an unformatted CD-ROM. The only thing that can be said about it is that its state was subtly changed. Using laser light a small portion of a track on a CD-ROM changes its properties from translucent to opaque. If an opaque value is read then a value is inferred differently than when it is translucent. A floppy disk works in a similar way, except the magnetic voltage of a spot on the disk determines the associated binary value. Neither the floppy disk nor the CD-ROM is really materially changed after encoding. Only its properties are changed so that when a spot is observed (by a recording head) a value is inferred. It remains the same “stuff”. The amount of matter before and after encoding should be identical, except for a tiny loss of matter resulting from friction imposed by the drive.

Now let’s think about our own brains. Neurologists can tell by looking at the brain of a child compared to an adult that there are fewer neural networks in the brain of a child. No surprise there. A child does not have as much experience written to his brain. A child is like a partially written disk. One might even say that upon birth a child is like a formatted disk with just the operating system on it. Over time and through experience a child’s neural network grows. Experience gets encoded. Paths are created in the brain to facilitate more and better memory recall. It’s like a computer in that it gets more software placed on it.

But software by itself is not meaningful. It is only when it interacts with external data and renders results for humans that it becomes valuable. Similarly a brain that knows the complete works of Shakespeare is not useful in itself. But when this knowledge impacts other people, perhaps through the performance of an actor, it takes on meaning.

Brain size reaches its peak around age four. Brain weight peaks out around age 5 and stays stable until you reach age 20. After age 20 the brain’s mass decreases by about a gram or so a year. Like a floppy disk the brain is clearly not indestructible. Over time neurons die, brain cells are replaced and new pathways are created. We constantly program and reprogram ourselves so that we can work more effectively in our environment. The state of our brain constantly changes, just as your computer’s hard disk constantly changes as you process work with it. Eventually though we get a permanent hard sector error that renders the media unusable and we die.

Is there a difference between your brain and your mind? I would say yes. Your brain is an organ that appears to be the center of control for your body and is the repository of your knowledge base. A computer’s brain consists of its hard disk and memory chips. What is your mind exactly? The mind is essentially the direction of will informed through the senses and through the experience encoded in our brains. The computer’s brain is its central processing unit. This is the thing that takes those binary 1s and 0s and manipulates the external environment. It allows the human to experience the work of the computer. Without the CPU the computer is nothing. The hard disk (brain) has no value by itself. But what is our mind really? There is no real answer. My answer begs the question. The mind is a gestalt: “A physical, biological, psychological, or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts.”

Which brings me at last back to metaphysics and my ponderings from the movie What the Bleep Do We Know? The mind, like software, is really virtual. And yet it seems to exists in some sort of medium. Our brain seems to be more than just a large hard disk because it seems the CPU is in there too. The brain’s CPU though is cranking away and providing a show … but where is it exactly? There is no spot in our brain that we can truly identify as our mind. We know if certain parts of the brain are removed or if it is injured enough that we will die. But there is no specific mind organ or gland unless it is the whole thing: the brain as a complete organ. And that doesn’t answer the question of where the mind is. But the evidence seems to be that the mind is not one spot in the brain. Which means it is either some larger thing, or it is not there at all.

We eat. Matter is broken down and energy is released. The energy from food is used to construct new things, like new blood and brain cells. But what is energy? It is not matter. At its root energy is the capacity to do work. And work is “physical or mental effort or activity directed toward the production or accomplishment of something.” Energy is the means to do that which matter itself cannot do. An apple sitting on a shelf cannot do anything. Something must be alive in order to do work. Matter must be transformed into energy for the accomplishment of something, for some act of work to occur and by inference for something to be alive.

We know from Einstein that E=mc². Consequently matter is converted to energy all the time. The reverse is true too: energy is converted back to matter. I would argue that from the human perspective energy is virtual but matter is real. (It’s not that energy is really unreal, it’s just that we can’t perceive it as real because it is intangible to us. And it is intangible because it doesn’t carry a steady state.) You can measure energy but you can’t really contain it separated from matter. Energy in a battery is contained because of the properties of the battery’s matter. It’s a yin and a yang thing. To possess energy we have to see it in the context of its relationship with matter. Perhaps this is because to us only matter feels real and enduring.

Odd, this is the same as my analogy of the mind to the brain. The mind seems virtual because we can’t touch it but the brain seems real because we know it is there. So to me the mind - our minds - our consciousnesses — are in reality just energy. I think it must be a complex form of energy because we are complex compared to most life.

The laws of thermodynamics tell us that neither matter nor energy can be destroyed, they can only be changed from one form to the other. A log burned in our fireplace is not destroyed; its matter is transformed into heat. E=mc² happens right in our fireplace. So if our mind is virtual and is nothing but pure energy, does it make sense to suggest that when we die our consciousness also dies? I don’t think so. It seems unreasonable and flunks my Occam’s Razor test. Yet that seems to be what a lot of us trained in the Western school of thought truly believe in our gut. If we didn’t then the anticipation of death would not be so universally traumatic. When our bodies die the energy wrapped up in keeping the body growing and maintained is released in the form of heat. And since the body can no longer sustain itself entropy asserts itself fully and our bodies decompose.

It may be that upon death that the energy that makes up our consciousness also changes form too. Or, since superstring theory suggests eleven dimensions, perhaps it just slips into one of these other higher vibrational dimensions that we can infer but not detect. It does this I suspect because it can no longer sustain the relationship with our host body that tethers it to our reality. If I am right we will all find out in time. If I am wrong no one will be able to argue with me about it after the experience of death. But there are enough psychics and mediums out there with decent track records not to be able to dismiss all of them as flakes.

That is why after so many years of pondering while I am still scientifically an agnostic I have a faith. While I do not necessarily believe in God in the classical sense I do believe in soul. I believe I have a soul. I believe that my consciousness is an aspect of my soul - my energy. It is intrinsically bound at present to the matter that contains my body. But upon my death it will be free to move elsewhere and perhaps inhabit some future body.

Time seems to be infinite. Space for all practical purposes is also infinite. I think this life is a breath in a much longer series of lives. And though it sounds corny to this agnostic I think we are all on a much larger spiritual journey. Its nature would take our breath away if we could but comprehend it.

October 22nd, 2004 at 07:58pm Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Metaphysics | no comments