Markness Visible Redux

While I don’t wish to make a prophet of Alice's friend who asked not to be bothered by “self-indulgent stream-of-consciousness musings” in her in-box, this week’s post may meet those criteria. And it’s long. Nevertheless, I hope you’ll read it; it’s even a little amusing at the end, I think.

My mother was a small woman, barely over 5 feet tall.  The top of her head came about to the middle of my chest.  During the summer of 1979, her last summer, when I was 26, every time I saw her, she would lean her head into me and say “Oh, Mark, I wish I was dead.”  These feelings were the culmination of years of depression, unhappiness, and inability to change her situation.  For a variety of reasons I won’t go into, she was unable to act on any of the suggestions I made to  try to change that feeling.  On September 6 of that year, she had a stroke.  It wasn’t a terribly bad one initially, and at the hospital, my father, sister and brother-in-law, aunt and I, along with her doctor, Dave Stewart, had already begun to discuss physical therapy regimens and what we would all do to help her recover, as we waited for the last family member to arrive at the hospital.  Mom couldn’t talk, but it was evident that she was embarrassed at her incapacitation—she was paralyzed on the left side, couldn’t talk or control her bodily functions—but she knew we were all there, and we kept encouraging her and telling her we were going to help her get back.

Within an hour or so of my sister Dorine’s arrival from Connecticut, Mom suddenly got very much worse.  Either an aftershock of the first stroke or a second, worse one unto itself, but she was basically brain dead, and at about 10 o’clock that night, when it became apparent that she could be kept alive but wasn’t going to improve, we made the decision to remove artificial supports, and she at last got her wish.  She was about a month shy of her 65th birthday.

It wasn’t until the next year that I read Katherine Ann Porter’s amazing story, “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.”   In it, Granny lies in her hospital bed, drifting in and out of consciousness,  apparently unresponsive to those around her, going over the details of her life, including the time she was left standing at the altar by her expected groom, which lent the piece its title.  Throughout the story there is a dim blue flame, her—what, soul? Life force?—flickering above her head.  At the end of her ruminations, with no sign of hope to continue holding on, "She stretched herself with a deep breath and blew out the light."  I’m as sure as I can be that that’s what my mother did.  She waited till we were gathered, had a chance to say goodbye to us all and then took the only way out of her depression that she could; she blew out the light.

My father, while only slightly larger-than-average in size, projected bigger. He had powerful muscles, a powerful drive to succeed, and powerful insecurities, although  he showed confidence in all situations (some might say overly so).  He taught Dale Carnegie ("I never had a hobby that didn't make me money," he was fond of saying.  I'm not sure I ever saw him cash any checks from all of those paint-by-number pictures he labored over on Sunday mornings, though.) classes on public speaking and preached that gospel at every opportunity.  Harold Lavalley, owner of the largest chain of independent lumberyards in the Northeast for 50 years now, was one of his earliest students.  Two of Dad’s most-repeated sayings were Dale Carnegie’s “Act enthusiastic and you’ll BE enthusiastic,"  which I can now grudgingly admit has some merit,  and  “On, on, our hero cried; I’ll find a way, or make one,” which is evidently based on a statement Hannibal made as he found his passage through the Alps blocked.  Dad started up and made quite successful a machine shop business, a construction business, became Chairman of the Board at Bellows Falls Trust Co. after his retirement.  He was the very model of up-from-the-bootstraps, can-do Americanism—confident and capable with no outward sign of self-doubt or self–questioning.

He also ate Tums by the handful and, not often but not rarely, either, spent large portions of a day in bed with, literally, a sheet pulled over his head, the world evidently “too much with him” at those times.  Attempts to engage him in conversation in his obvious times of distress would be met with a classic Yankee response:  “My troubles are my own, thank you.”  At the end of his life, in his dementia, he was the textbook embodiment of the “Sundowner,,” pleasant and cooperative during the day, violent and nearly unmanageable at night, but it seems obvious in retrospect that the shadows were never far from him during his life, even in his outwardly-sunniest moments.

And now that dark helical strand of my DNA has its hand on my shoulder, its cloak over my eyes.  It’s nothing new, as those who know me well will readily attest, although it is bigger and deeper and more consuming than anything I have ever experienced.  The world is "too much with me" (I have no desire to do anything, even read, which is unique in my life) and so are my genetic markers.  But somewhat  surprisingly I also feel, after nearly 60 years, ready to deal with it (Well, well: Wellbutrin.); as an aged mason I once fired for using a racist term to describe a type of stone he was using said, “You learn something every year.”  Maybe.

My last 3 posts, this one included, have alluded to what’s going on, by title (the play on William Styron’s account of his descent into the depths of depression and despair,  Darkness Visible: A Memoir Of Madness, the quote from Lindsey Buckingham’s “B’wana” (“We all have our demons…”) or by brevity and tone, but it feels time to address this thing head on. In the past, I didn’t want to acknowledge what I saw as a personal failing, an inability to get past an affliction that feels self-created, to overcome the blues, to "Act enthusiastic...."  But it’s no more self-created than breast cancer or MS or hundreds of other biological conditions. It is internal, not external, although that is certainly how it manifests, and it is inextricably intertwined, woven together, with all of the other strands which make me me.  I know that many people who receive these posts (and may even read them) are contending with the same issues and somehow manaage.  It's a wonder we can get out of bed in the morning.  Is this a condition of modern life?  Has it always been with us but hidden or ignored?  Dunno; it just seems that some people get some shit, other people get other shit, and some few lucky ones may be shitless—but I doubt it.

Please understand that I write this not as a solicitation for an outpouring of sympathy or concern.  I don’t want or need that, maybe can't even handle it now, but people will respond as they need to for themselves and we'll all deal.  It’s just that, again as those who know me will attest, I tend to err on the side of  too much info, too much self-revelation, and here we are.  But that too is me.

In acknowledgment of  all of this, then, appropriate music this week. But don’t be fooled into thinking it’s all gonna be lugubrious minor-key stuff although, truth in advertising, it's not gonna be real up.  “I’m Down,” for instance, contains one of Paulie’s most rock-us vocals;  “Yer Blues” and “Manic Depression” are hardly the stuff of easy-listening, either.  Now, I’ll concede “Am I Blue” and “Most of Us Are Sad,” but  Tom Waits's "Emotional Weather Report" is just finger-poppin' hipster (the good kind) jive.  Hope you can join me, Tuesday, noon til two eastern, 100.1 FM,  or wool.fm.  Sorry I wasn’t there last week.  Work got in the way.  Gotta get Popolo up and running!

Well we all need someone we can lean on….

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Saw a fella down to the dump on Saturday (And it’ll always be “the dump,” won’t it, Becky Rule (mooseofhumor.com?  “Recyclin’ centah” is for folks from away) who had a sticker in the back window of his pickup that said “Liberal: the French word for Coward.”  I said to him “Actually, you know, “Liberal” means “open minded.”  He sort of shrugged behind his mirrored aviator sunglasses and said “Either way.”  And he pronounced it as “eyether,” which surprised me; I wondered if we were going to do the whole Satchmo and Ella thing.  Instead we called the whole thing off.  But I wondered: did he mean that both “liberal” and “open-minded” are synonyms for “coward,” or did he, for one brief and shining second, become a liberal?  I didn’t ask him.