Someday my ukulele will make you weep with joy
Slate has a really cool feature, Interviews 50 Cents. The latest is a poignant talk w/ a father talking about how the sadness at the death of his son changes, but is constant, ever present. The way he describes grief is poetic and lovely.
It breaks my heart into a million pieces the way some men, older ones in particular, can talk about sorrow w/out breaking down.
A recent issue of Rue Morgue had a fascinating article on memorial photography in America and Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Though it’s creepy as all get out now, the article explained how it was a fairly common practice back then and why. From what I remember, it’s twofold.
Firstly, death was more common then. Now, death often occurs in a hospital and the funeral almost always happens out of the home, whereas death was frequent then and the ceremonies surrounding it took place at home. So, while still devastating, it wasn’t as alien or creepy. One supposes.
Secondly, while death was more common, photography was less so. People often didn’t have any pictures of their children, and when they died, they wanted to have some image to hold on to. Hence why some pictures have open eyes painted over the closed eyes of a dead child.
There are two collections of this kind of photography, Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America and Sleeping Beauty 2, which you can buy for me on eBay if you’re so inclined. They’re out of print and cost about $600 a pop. So, um, thanks in advance.
Lest you think this doesn’t happen anymore, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep offers a service to parents who’s children die before they leave the hospital. They are, for the most part, pretty sensitive shots. I can only imagine the skill required to do that kind of work.
Only the baby’s dead in this one.
*Pictures from this page.
Just finished watching The Bridge, a documentary about people who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s an elegant film.
After reading the article, Jumpers, Eric Steel decided to make a movie about the phenomenon. Steel and his crew fixed their cameras on both shores of the Golden Gate and watched the bridge for a year, hoping to film some of the suicides. They ended up filming 23 of the known 24 suicides of 2004 from the bridge.
The film has interviews with the families and friends of people who’ve jumped, as well as one with a guy who survived. The interviews depict a mix of resignation and heartbreak, with some feeling the deaths were inevitable, others torn apart with wondering why.
They got a lot of footage of people jumping and it’s creepy and sad and haunting and strangely poetic to watch. Especially when some of the footage is of the deaths of people who’s families and friends are interviewed.
There’s one section which shows a guy rescuing a girl. You see him taking pictures of Alcatraz in the distance, and her looking down at the water. She hops the first part of the bridge and stands on the second bit. His testimony is edited w/ the crews filming and the pictures he took of her before he realized what was happening right in front of him. He basically pulls her up from the edge and sits on her ’till the police he’s summoned arrive. It’s pretty cool, actually. I wasn’t sure if he was just going to watch her jump, or miss her. The girl ended up attempting to jump so often, the crew recognized her. Every time, they called the bridge authorities and she was rescued.
The Jumpers article is quite a read. Most bothersome is how, in the entire seventy year history of the bridge, a suicide-barrier is always voted against by the public and the bridge’s board. The article states the likely reason to be an aesthetic one. The bridge spokesperson when the article was written (in 2003) was still against it, even after having witnessed a suicide there. Fascinating.
Many jumpers wrap suicide notes in plastic and tuck them into their pockets. “Survival of the fittest. Adios—unfit,” one seventy-year-old man said in his valedictory; another wrote, “Absolutely no reason except I have a toothache.”
I liked this quote from Dr. Lanny Berman, the executive director of the American Association of Suicidology:
Suicidal people have transformation fantasies and are prone to magical thinking, like children and psychotics…Jumpers are drawn to the Golden Gate because they believe it’s a gateway to another place. They think that life will slow down in those final seconds, and then they’ll hit the water cleanly, like a high diver.
And of course the magical thinking extends into fantasies of the world they’ve left behind and how it’ll be tainted by their loss. One woman in the film described how she imagined her friend may’ve thought about the romantic aftermath, but he wasn’t there, so what did it matter?
It’s impossible to know whether any one suicide might have been prevented, but many suicidal people do indeed wish to be saved. As the eminent suicidologist E. S. Shneidman has said, “The paradigm is the man who cuts his throat and cries for help in the same breath.”
Kevin Hines is featured in the film - he jumped and survived. He decided if one person reached out to him and noticed his despair, he wouldn’t jump.
The bridge comes into the lives of all Bay Area residents sooner or later, and it often stays. Dr. Jerome Motto, who has been part of two failed suicidebarrier coalitions, is now retired and living in San Mateo. When I visited him there, we spent three hours talking about the bridge. Motto had a patient who committed suicide from the Golden Gate in 1963, but the jump that affected him most occurred in the seventies. “I went to this guy’s apartment afterward with the assistant medical examiner,” he told me. “The guy was in his thirties, lived alone, pretty bare apartment. He’d written a note and left it on his bureau. It said, ‘I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.’ ”
Motto sat back in his chair. “That was it,” he said. “It’s so needless, the number of people who are lost.”
After a tourist asked him to take her picture, seemingly oblivious to his crying, he heaved himself over (after taking the picture and watching her walk away). He explains in the movie how he regretted his decision as soon as he jumped.
An interesting article on the making of the film and the controversy surrounding it. Seems the film might be pushing those who make decisions closer to putting up a barrier, as the film shows how it takes no effort to hop over.
From a recent Since You Asked on Salon.com:
As to your mother’s feelings: She will have died knowing that you love her. She will have understood the terms of her going. She will have seen many die and will understand that death does not always come at a convenient time.
Of course that outrages us, but that is the way it is. Death, that most final, magisterial end, yet arrives with an insouciant randomness that outrages us. This one event, we think, of all events, ought to signal the presence of a just, even-handed God! But no, that is not how death comes at all. It comes with casual insouciance, like a child picking wildflowers, this one and that one and the other one, whatever catches its eye.
We just have to accept it, without reservation. Death picks a handful and carries them off.
So let your mother die and then go to the funeral, where the living make meaning out of death and fortify ourselves against the bleak terror of nonexistence … until the next time, when death comes again and takes a few more for its strange, invisible bouquet.
Went to the station manager’s son’s memorial service today. It was lovely, really.
Unlike some services I’ve been to, it really was about celebrating life, and the life of the person. I never met him, but I got a real sense of who he was and what he meant to people. I’ve been to some (well, one) where the preacher didn’t even know the guy, then turned the whole thing into a Jebus pitch. So wrong and so gross.
The boy’s cousin told a funny (at least I thought it was) about him. One day he offered, apropos of nothing, “I miss the Beatles”. The people there asked, what? He said they were all dead. He was told, no, only two were. He rolled his eyes, and said, “No, they all commited suicide”.
During the reception afterward, I went to the loo. There was a little girl in there, going about her little girl bathroom business, all the while singing, “La, la, la, la…”. When she flushed the toilet, she squealed with delight.
I think I’ll bring that attitude to my future bathroom visits.
Except, you know, quieter.
I feel ashamed of last week’s sorrow. Going to this today made me realize how shattered I’d be if/when someone I love dies. I need to shore up more strength.
My stomach’s still rumbly, so I’m going to have a bath, read, and hit the sack.
Sweet dreams, all.
This is an old email I sent myself. I guess I meant to write a more lengthy entry on it, but I just wanna get it out of my inbox.
Are we getting better or worse at dealing w/ death? Or will it always be the same?
While now we know more, have more things to comfort us, life in general is often easier, we (again, generally) are less superstitious, we also have less sense of family and community. We hide death, send it away to funeral homes instead of having it in our living rooms.
The world is actually less violent today than in the past, news items to the contrary notwithstanding.
But do we deal w/ the horror of death any differently? Are we better armed?
Maybe sorrow and fear of death is something that, ultimately, will frighten us to the core. Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be.
Discuss.
I overheard a conversation last week that got me thinking.
It was at work. I don’t know the widow, but it was a situation where I had to listen because I couldn’t leave. She came to visit another woman there (the one who gives me rides to the train station every day). The visitor’s husband used to work where I do, and her husband died in an accident last year. She has three (I think - two, at least) small kids.
She was talking about how they were all getting on. She broke down a little bit when she told of how her son has repeatedly run out onto the road in hopes he’ll get hit by a car so he can be w/ his daddy.
A different woman who was also part of the conversation said, “Tell him when Jesus wants you, he’ll come get you.”
Gah. I found that sentiment saccharine and trite, but also creepy as hell.
After I’d banished the thought of a child-reaping Christ from my head, I thought about what an atheist would tell a child about death. Most things said are empty, concepts are hard enough for an adult - how’s a kid supposed to understand impermanance, change, etc.?
For those of you who’ve faced death - how have you coped? It’s something I’ve always been fixated on - mourning, grief, healing. Mostly because I want to arm myself. I think if I ever write a book, it’ll be on grief and the myriad ways people deal w/ it.
In Anderson Cooper’s book, Dispatches from the Edge (full review to come), he discusses his brother’s suicide. There’s no clear message of hope in the book. He is still struggling with the pain and confusion caused by the deaths of his brother and his father. He’s young yet, and he describes starting to deal with his feelings during his coverage of hurricane Katrina, so I don’t know how more time will leave him.
It seems sometimes the death of someone you love can fuck you up forever. You’ll never get over it, never heal, never move on. I’ve heard different things about this. It depends on the person, it depends how one defines healing. Some people make peace, some never do - they just learn to navigate around the pain.
I read a really interesting blog entry about grief. The author wrote about how she felt sorrow when thinking about her grandmother’s death, but when thinking about other things, or not focusing on the death, she felt fine, even peaceful. She’s a taoist. It’s an entry I’ve been thinking about for months, ever since I first read it. It makes me feel like maybe one can have power over one’s grief.
Today I remembered something I was supposed to send Devon. It’s from Michelle’s blog, and I think it’s brilliant. But, what else would one expect from Seasame Street?
No mysticism, no lies, no cold comfort. People die, just because.
Dad came to town this weekend to bring Mel her stuff and help us schlep some new stuff (a bed she’s purchased, for example). It’s been a nice weekend.
I worked a shift at CKUA today. I used to not really enjoy my phone duties during the fund drives. But it’s really improved - the people seem more lively and funnier. We also get free meals and free massages. Today, though, I began to feel sick as I was walking home from the shift. My nausea grew as Mel, Dad, and I attempted to navigate Edmonton traffic to Ikea. I was really stressed because I’m so useless at finding anything, and because I kept envisioning us dying in a car wreck. I think about death way too much.
Anyway, we finally made it back alive and Ikealess (we gave up, just as we saw it after committing to a turn that sent us in the other direction). We decided to get chinese food. The undercooked chicken of that meal, combined w/ the questionable sandwiches I’d eaten earlier (provided by a restaurant - not CKUA’s fault!), were turning against me. Though I wanted to hang out w/ Dad and Mel, I had to go home and feel wretched.
I sat at home, reading a book of Mel’s about Marilyn Monroe’s murder. After a few hour of cocktease dry-heaves, I finally vomited.
It’s funny, when you feel sick, you almost want to believe in god again, just to beg him to take it away. Then, once you throw up, you feel like you can take on the world.
Via Nancy, some backwards masking fun. It’s funny, it’s creepy - everything I try to bring to my show.
Speaking of Monroe, one of the most interesting theories I’ve ever read about her death came via a beautifully written piece in Salon by David Thomson. He speculates that she did indeed commit suicide. That she was making progress in her life, in her thinking, in her self-regard. Then she spent a weekend w/ Frank Sinatra, Sam Giancana, and others. That she was drugged. Raped. Filmed. And that “…there is a chance that the last shred of fond, daft hope had been fucked out of her and she was weary of being just a body.”
Though it didn’t dissuade me from thinking she was murdered, it’s a haunting story.
I’ve been eating way too much bread and pasta and I’m starting to feel crappy. Stupid…poor. Also, I missed seeing the latest object of my lust in a pirate shirt. Grr.
I’m in a funk. Such a funk, I almost wonder if I should have gone to the staff Christmas party.
Nah.
I emailed my zen teacher asking about a ceremony or ritual I could do at home to commemorate someone’s death. I didn’t mention I wanted to do it for John Lennon. She emailed back, and mentioned him as an example, and wrote she may do something for him on Wednesday. It was a lovely email. And now I can just observe him when I go there. Not to sound lazy - I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately, planning my show and all. It’s just this way, I won’t have to worry about learning a new ritual when I’m already pretty busy.
Anyway, in preparation for the show, I’ve been listening to John Lennon: Anthology. It’s out-takes and rehearsal versions of songs. Oh My Love is one I’ve never heard before and it’s lovely. I think it would be a good choice to sing at a memorial thingy, especially given the lyrics. I wish I knew how to put MP3s on here. Oh well.
Oh my love
For the first time in my life
My eyes are wide open
Oh my lover
For the first time in my life
My eyes can see
I see the wind
Oh I see the trees
Everything is clearer in my heart
I see the clouds
Oh I see the sky
Everything is clearer in our world
Oh my lover
For the first time in my life
My mind is wide open
Oh my love
For the first time in my life
My mind can feel
I feel the sorrow
Oh I feel the dreams
Everything is clearer in my heart
I feel life
Oh I feel love
Everything is clearer in our world
Everybody's talkin' at me