Unfinished Bohemian Rhapsody

In the late eighties I was as traditional as they came on paper: Caucasian, from a middle class intact home in the NY suburbs, possessed of musical talent and plenty of interests, a good student, later maybe even a great student who attended a competitive college, eventually an Ivy League. On paper I was destined to follow the carboned chronology of college, job, engagement, marriage, children. On paper I would later find a life in the suburbs replete with 2.5 kids, a picket fence, and a dog. Trouble was, I didn't want to live on paper. Paper, thy name was villain.

I was never the girl who dreamed of her wedding or rehearsed elaborate wedding ceremonies. I do confess to a small dalliance during which I wrote "Mrs...." (fill in the blank) over and over and over on lined notebook paper but quickly realized that if, a big if, I would keep my name (unless the other was more musical than mine). I was also not the girl who dreamed of her future children, preferably one of each sex (because that's how binary thinking rolled then). I hated babysitting, instead taking over my brother's paper route and giving flute lessons. To this day I have a visceral repulsion to crying children and babies. Ew. So in my teens and early twenties, I flirted with the logistics of pregnancy as an intellectual exercise, not something whose byproduct I wanted any part of.

Born before the advent of sonogram selfies but just before Roe v. Wade, I had not been inducted into the guild of motherhood via stories of my own nine months in the womb with the accompanying photo documentation. Those of us spawned in the age of closed adoption received no such history. I was far more intrigued by my own origin story (am I now the superhoero in this story?) than in providing one for someone else. Unlike many of my friends, I was not haunted by the ear worm tick tock of a biological clock or Ally McBeal dancing babies. And by my early thirties when an ovarian cyst burst, followed by surgery, I knew stage 4 endometriosis had likely made pregnancy moot.

While for other women my diagnosis may have been a great tragedy, for me it was a blip on the radar. At least a decade before I had sought the nontraditional in history, literature, psychology, devouring stories of the Bloomsbury group, fascinated not just by their intellectual pursuits but by their free flowing, incandescent love affairs and pursuits of pleasure. I romanticized the hell out of the Romantic poets, conveniently disposing of their great tragedies. I researched gender bending and sexual trailblazers with gusto. I pondered, swallowed wholesale, and then posted Katharine Hepburn's ideal, "I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then," on my dorm room door and was determined to seek such real estate. I discovered it had been circling me for some time.

While I look for an accuracy memory denies me, one less rosy, too (we'll get there), what I see now is that the golden haired boy with divorced parents, who lived on a boat during high school, who didn't attend college, drank, smoked both regular and pot, and was an artist, seduced me right out of the box. He drew me literally and metaphorically, his mythic existence feeding on a hedonism I had never before witnessed up close let alone partaken of. He set his own rules and defined his own terms. There were no dreams of weddings in his future, instead those of wooden boats he would create and restore. There were dogs, not children, and certainly no picket fences. He chose freedom over self-sacrifice and I wholeheartedly believed he would not box me in. I doubt his courtship of me required much effort at all.

I ached to be someone I did not feel courageous enough to present in real life. I did not desire to be and did not fit in as wife, mother, or the elementary school teacher I had become. There were small resistances and rebellions on the scale of asymetrical haircuts and double ear piercings, unmarried overnights in the same bed (for traditional parents of the 50s this was bitter medicine to swallow), and some really questionable nineties fashion statements. Mine was a destiny not so beige yet still lacking color. I passed a few years seemingly satisfied but always, always, feeling on the inside like an outsider.

In my heart I was an impostor, an interloper in the places I frequented. Adoptees often feel like we never quite fit in, forever lurking on the periphery, excluded and othered. There was no mirror in which to gaze with instant recognition one's own features. Similarly, no genetic trail of inheritance, no explanation for the traits and quirks the typically born commonly attribute to family. While I didn't live, breathe, eat, drink adoption, it always startled when as an adult I was instantly reduced to a child's answer for a medical professional's question, forced to reply inadequately, "I don't know." It's difficult enough for those who are fully aware of their parentage to navigate self-hood, but what about when you don't know whose eye color or nose you have inherited? Or when questions of ethnicity and ethnic traditions in your family arise and you hesitate because your answer might not be honest or accurate and you want to be both? I was Schmidt, Schmidt was German, but was I really German Schmidt? I felt Jewish, but who could say?

Worse still was when the nature versus nurture debate casually bubbled up in class or conversation. For someone like me, a moment like that is no thought experiment. According to NY State law I was not entitled to my actual birth certificate, names of birth parents or even my own birth name. Existentially speaking was I even Kristie?  Or was I some facsimile of her? Or not even her at all? Like many before me nicked by the same double edged sword, I couldn't decide if I really wanted (needed?) to know, couldn't betray my parents by admitting I wanted to know, couldn't commit to trying to know which would require a few thousand dollars to hire an investigator with no guaranteed results (nevermind happy ending results), so I made do with pushing my questions down or guessing at their answers.

I fantasized about my birth mother, leaving my birth father out it, hoping she was wild, free, living the out of the box the life I wanted to live. Resorting to sick incest jokes, golden boy and I laughed at the number of people who remarked upon our bizarrely uncanny brotherly/sisterly resemblance, winking at the could be whenever we heard the oft repeated phrase, "Has anyone ever told you that you look alike?"  We joked about surprise red haired babies and other potentially inexplicable results of my mysterious gene pool even though I knew then there would likely be no babies. Into this swirl of repeated identity questions I dipped my toe, over and over. While uncertainty ruled supreme, I externally maintained a bounded facade. Internally, I longed to break free.

Golden boy provided a safe confessional and a safe harbor in Not Normal town. When we broke up, that safety net fell away. With him, I was more honest, more me. Without him, big little lies emerged and I put them to work masquerading as someone for whom everything was fine. I would not allow vulnerability, there would be no true confessions, and unwilling to make the crossover to bohemia, I found myself chained once again to the box. And then, no joke, Oprah changed my life.

Saudade

I knew Saudade (pronounce the first d but the end sounds like the end of sausage) long before I set foot on Portuguese soil, before I had read Saramago, before pasteis de nata settled in my belly and left a mustache of powdered sugar behind just above my upper lip. She was not my oldest friend, the soul on earth I had known longer than anyone except my mother, brother and three cousins. That distinction belonged to David from kindergarten and Saudade and I were fresher than that. She had left Northampton with me and stayed by my side in Cambridge. Once I moved back to Long Island I didn't see her for a number of years but by the time I stepped foot in 32 School Street, she had traveled to London, Paris, and Bali and back with me. We finished each other's sentences by the time hospice wheeled my father's body out the front door of 1552 North Street.

Saudade is the Portuguese concept of melancholic longing for those you have loved who are absent and for the places you have loved that are distant, the homesickness for a home to which you cannot remember, the lovesickness for a lover you cannot ever have again or may never have in the future. She was a total bitch in my thirties when an eleven year old relationship disintegrated before my eyes and my life, unbeknownst to many, became a living soap opera, one permanently changing its trajectory.

The breakup was ugly and messy. At a support dinner with friends about one week into it, we had managed to name at least 14 people other than me with whom my boyfriend had had sex, including two men. After the fourteenth unveiling I called an end to it. I couldn't take anymore. He had broken my heart, broken my ability to trust any other human being and what came to be the worst after effect, broken my ability to trust myself. I had missed it all. I had chosen him, I had loved him and in the adult years during which we were together, I hadn't ever seen who he really was. Had I ever really looked?

I had known him since I was 12 years old and had been in love with him since I was 14 despite his ninth grade marriage proposal, the insanity of which I laughed out loud at. Cut to standing in a parking lot as a thirty two year old woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown screaming, "Who are you?" while simultaneously screaming in my own head "Who am I?" I had unwittingly endangered my own health and life, had to have an AIDS test, courts eventually joined our breakup briefly and an actual representative from Judge Judy phoned to invite me (us? Didn't you read Judge Judy--there was no more us) onto their show in California. I told no one (would you?). Indicative of the confused state I was in, somehow Judge Judy, not the AIDS test, was rock bottom for me. Right after that I turned into a social, and certainly a sexual, hermit. To cement my new status, I gained 60 pounds of further insulation from the outside world.

Over the last eighteen years there have been a few first dates, even fewer second ones. One kind, sweet man who clearly adored me and would have been very good to me stood at my front door bewildered as I told him I was not for him. "I'm broken. I'm damaged. I can't," I said. Years of therapy have not fixed that damage. Even before the soap opera began I had been singular and reclusive by nature. As a thinker I require significant alone time in which to speculate, learn, dream. As someone thirsty for knowledge, I need time to read and absorb. As a writer, reflection, often in the form of nighttime insomnia, is and always has been part of me. In some ways spending the last eighteen years alone hasn't been that difficult. Yes, there are times I crave companionship, times I crave intimacy. I remain largely without human touch, even a hug, for weeks if not months on end, hence the brood of cats. I don't know if I have regrown the ability to be vulnerable to someone else. I don't know if I am even willing to try. But still I yearn. Saudade is with me. I see in the distance the home for which I am homesick.

Portugal calls to me nostalgically. I feel a richness waiting for me there which has nothing to do with retirement finances and everything to do with my soul. When we grapple for existential meaning over the intersection of free will and randomness, I allow that perhaps these isolated years have been preparation for this moment. During them I have distanced myself from American obsessions with things and stuff like cars (nothing like a tree killing your car to disabuse you of that one). I have summarily rejected the marriage and children paradigm. For various reasons, I find myself now distanced from the emotional tethers that typically hold one to particular places but more so, people. After my brother voted for Trump, the emotional distance between us grew cataclysmic and as my mother approaches her 80th birthday in good health I see mortality clutching at her side. Although I consider myself deeply sentimental, it is clear that even my closest friends, of which there are few, are held not by proximity but via internet connection and the occasional in person visit. More than a year ago I changed my Twitter profile to read, "witness to a dying democracy." I am now also distanced from nearly everything I held dear in America. Alienated, I feel like I have already been living in exile. And I have. Over the last twenty years, I have become substantially exiled from myself.

It's time to go home.

Where I Stand

In these past few days of helplessness and despair I have once again clung to metaphors of light penetrating the dark and love spreading faster and farther than hate. I, like many others, cling to such metaphors to provide comfort in a world seemingly gone mad, mad on every hemisphere, on every continent, in many countries, in many cities, across cultures far and wide, both near and far.

As a once English teacher now forty something suburban dwelling library media specialist at a public high school, I don't know the first thing about how to once and for all defeat evil, terrorists, fundamentalism, nor ISIS in particular. I am not an expert on historical alliances, current treaties, global economics, EU refugee policies, European constitutional laws, Islam, radical Islam, racism, sexism, or civil rights. Nor do I expect are you. But what I do know and believe deeply is that Edmund Burke had it right when he declared "the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good [people] to do nothing."

Our primary task starts with honoring the dead. It starts with the smallest acknowledgment, the simplest expressions of solidarity, the tiniest of olive branches extended to our nearest and dearest, and continues as we extend those gestures into larger actions, actions of hope. That hope dies when we criticize one another's impassioned responses to our own finite mortality and the search for a life fully lived, instead nitpicking at the approach or the attempt, instead of focusing and rallying around the intention.

So to those who have changed their Facebook profile picture to a French flag, I am sure if you had known more about Beirut's terrorist attack the day before, you now are thinking of them as well. The wave of red, white and blue I see awash on my news feed is a tangible way to express both outrage and support.

For now.

I recognize that for those who have visited France and Paris in particular, like me, the massacre speaks more directly to us but we are also not discounting other lives lost to terror in other lands, in other cultures. You and I stand with Beirut and every other location touched by the deaths of innocents.

Similarly, while the campus of UCONN is 45 miles up the road from me and I am no longer a student, I can condemn those who anonymously scrawled "Mahmoud killed Paris" on a dorm room welcome sign. I stand with those demanding UCONN students know and do better.

And even though I was never a student at Yale, nor the University of Missouri, I can empathize and feel the pain of those in your communities who feel discounted, threatened, and unsafe. I can stand with you to demand better. I can model how to be better.

Moreover, though I do not know what it feels like to be of color, I know that those who have championed #BlackLivesMatter are not simultaneously excluding any other lives. Of course, all lives matter, too. I can also stand with you.

In one week I will stand for Transgender Remembrance Day. This does not mean I also do not stand for any other lives lost or ruined in the fight for LGBTQ rights.

Honor the dead. Express your solidarity. Show compassion. Then take action. It is the only hope we have to preserve full lives of joy.

Public Grieving

Growing up in my house meant yielding to a few taboos: no discussion of bodily functions, no prioritizing individual needs over the collective, and finally, no wallowing in sadness. Tears were to be held back, sadness to be pushed aside, and routine to be reestablished as soon as possible. I learned this so well that when I was teaching second grade and my grandfather passed away the day before Halloween, I went into work the next morning dressed as Red Riding Hood and carried on as normal with all the festivities including eating cupcakes and parading around the school grounds during which I had to smile and wave a la Princess Diana to all the parents watching.

Grieving, it would seem, was something to be put on hold, to be dealt with later, certainly not in public, and only within the privacy of one's own room. This may not be an uncommon lesson internalized from my generation's parents, many of whom bore up as deprived children during the Great Depression and World War II, those whose later young marriages and parenthoods were forged by the stoic blue blood protocol-following appropriate grieving of JFK's assassination by Jackie O.

When my friend had to cancel family plans this past Sunday to retrieve my cat Buddha's body from under my deck, he called to let his mother know that after a week of disappearance, we had in fact found Buddha dead, and would need to preserve his body for the night until we could get to a proper vet. As he hung up the phone she said, "Have fun." (Which, in a  moment of great sorrow, actually made the two of us laugh out loud--a lot.) This was not unlike my own mother's response to my own phone call the next day. After a few seconds in which she allowed herself to cry, she pulled it together, rallied, and said, "So enough. You should go back to work." I had been grieving my 17 year old cat just 24 hours. He was still in my shed in a cooler.

While Buddha died in peace, he had been dead in the elements for a few days. I discovered him because of a swarm of flies hovering on my deck and because of an unmistakeable smell of death. How does one publicly grieve, especially when you have been taught to do so privately, especially when you live alone, especially when your pet has been through every major milestone in your adult life from age 30 onward with you, especially when the final details are unpleasant?

Buddha came into my life after I had lost my first cat, Tuna, tragically at six months old to a rare disease. Devastated, I swore I would never get another pet. One month later, a phone call from my brother changed everything. A cat had shown up or been dropped outside a full shelter, they had no room, he was living in a house with multiple dogs, cats, 80 chicks and ducklings just hatched (not joking), and was not doing well. He was maybe a year old. After travelling to MA and seeing him hiding in the back of a closet, I took him home to NY. One ferry and car ride later, he became my constant companion and confidant. We moved to CT shortly thereafter, from an apartment to a house six months after that.

I loved Buddha. I loved Buddha more deeply and for longer than I have loved most people. The longest we have ever been apart, until now, was for two weeks when I went to Australia in 2005. As when my father died, I have trouble imagining a world, a life without him. I see him everywhere because this was our house, our life together. I see him waiting on the front steps for me to arrive home from school. I see him standing at the sliding glass door meowing to come in. I see him looking adoringly at me, perched on my chest. I see him in the garden, curled under the elephant hosta, sleeping. He is every bit a part of me as my right arm, which he once bit when I was practicing my flute.

What I know is simply this. It will be some time, an undefined time, an elusive time, before I can fully enjoy my bed, my house, my gardens, my life once again. It will be some time before I don't feel so fragile as to expect to burst into tears when another person looks me in the eye or heaven help me, tries to hug me. It will be some time before I can even articulate what is enough, when is enough, how much is enough. But the time will come. I will continue to honor Buddha s best I can. I will try to honor myself by at long last, finally, and in a new way, publicly grieving.

Ten Birthdays Later

"There is no right way to grieve, and you have to let people grieve in the way that they can. One of the things that happens to everyone who is grief-stricken, who has lost someone, is there comes a time when everyone else just wants you to get over it, but of course you don't get over it. You get stronger; you try and live on; you endure; you change; but you don't get over it. You carry it with you."

My dad would have turned 84 today. My mom, my brother and I all agree he would hate that number. He wanted no part of senior citizenship, his behavior far more childlike in its wonder and enthusiasm. A Depression baby whose parents divorced leading to his older brother living with his father and he with his maternal grandmother, he was materially poor but spiritually rich, and forever making up for the lost opportunities of his childhood. He made sure my brother and I got to experience everything he did and much of what he didn't. Then, he did so right along with us.

He became a father in his late thirties, learned to ski at 40, began playing the organ by number and color around the same time. When I was young he awoke us on a Saturday morning to the sounds of Broadway, John Denver or marching bands blasted throughout the house as loud as could be. Sometimes he played reveille on the trumpet he used during his service in the Korean War. He entertained us with his banjo or by bursting into a spontaneous lindy or jitter bug with my mother. He was always sketching with pastels and charcoals, favoring lighthouse and sea scenes. 

He water skied with his glasses on and nicknamed me "Mouth" until I hit junior high when it changed to "Smart Ass". He even bought me a white T-shirt with a rainbowed Smart Ass emblazoned front and center. I haven't been called Smart Ass in a long time and I miss it. In every letter I received at Smith College, he enclosed one dollar. When I bought my house in Mystic, we did it and the painting together. Now I can't bear to think of moving because much of the design and many of my plants are cuttings from his. He is my living landscape.  

It's been ten years since my dad died, exactly one month before his 74th birthday. So bereft was I, I could not even phone friends to tell them. To utter the words "My dad died" aloud was a permanence I could not cement. Not for a very long time.

And since my dad died, there are times when I feel so incredibly alone. In our family unit, I feel most like him: witty, silly, artistic, and kind. It's hard to fly solo. I have eaten my way through my grief, I have worked my way through my grief, I have isolated my way through my grief. It still hits me when I least expect  it or on a day like today when I do. I still can't conceive of a world without my dad in it but here we are, ten years later, in that world. He would be angry if I wallowed, so full of life even up to the end, "I had a good life, a great life, and a far longer life than I expected. Make me proud."

I have, Dad. I have.

Happy Birthday.

Macabre

Some time ago, despite hesitation, I continued on my way through Patricia Cornwell's recently diminishing Kay Scarpetta forensic series. The emphasis on science softened the graphic crime scenes and subsequent autopsy details, effectively keeping the wounds intellectualized through the written word. I justified my repeated witnessing of such violence with my accompanied scientific gains. As my natural affinity for written mystery evolved toward thriller, so did an unanticipated interest in literary portrayals of psychopathy including the point of view of the profoundly disturbed. I joined Steig Larsson's Lisbeth Salander in her single minded quest to seek a gruesome revenge of equal depravity. Then I discovered Jo Nesbo's stolid recovering alcoholic detective Harry Hole. With Nesbo, each murder is more frighteningly described than the next and frankly, creeps me out quite effectively, enough so that I have to read Nesbo only in the daylight. (This also happens when I view The Walking Dead). I have spent an enormous amount of time reading authors who specialize in the myriad ways to kill human beings: Karin Fossum, Chelsea Cain, Lars Kepler, Linda Fairstein, Tess Gerritsen, to name just a few more.

Recently a few literary explorations of human depravity also caught my attention, including Koch's fictional family case study The Dinner, Gillian Flynn's operatic twisted relationship study Gone Girl and the dysfunctional family memoir We Are Animals. My fascination with psychology justified these choices. Enter the slow TV movement with the freakish American Horror Story: Asylum, the prequel to the movie Psycho, Bates Motel, and now Hannibal, loosely based on the novel Red Dragon. I can't seem to look away despite having been moved in the past by horror and gore to fear, nightmares, and depression. Something about the macabre draws me in. My latest foray is HBO's True Detective series, an astonishing exploration of the human psyche on the individual level which quickly expands to the universal. It asks what went wrong with a humanity capable of such indifference to one another.

After a two week binge on Criminal Minds reruns and a pretty consistent gross out from American Horror Story: Coven, I began to cut back. Feeling cranky and depressed, I also felt that as a woman I had a big target on my back screaming out "Prey" for all psychopaths to see. I wonder how much my and so many others' readings, watchings of these TV shows, and fascinations with movies of the like function as collusion with the master criminals. By consuming such dark tales with great ferocity, are we ourselves contributing to their own feeding off of the macabre, virtual or otherwise?

I still plan to watch Hannibal season 2 in a few weeks time. I am also in for the last three episodes of True Detective. I need to know what message we are supposed to be decoding. Despite given what I've just recounted. I remain endlessly fascinated by the human mind and its anticipation, sense of suspense, thrill, and yes, horror, particular emotional. Maybe the creatives count on us to be there, to witness their macabre purge of such dark desires. Maybe such witnessing holds some potential inflictors at bay. Maybe indifference to the macabre is in itself, macabre.

Regret

I don't want to be one of those people lying on her deathbed running through the litany of regrets. But to be honest, at this point in my life I already have such a list and I run through it upon occasion. Today is one such occasion.

I heard from an old friend who really should have been a better friend in the sense that over the years, we should have spent more time together and known each other better. Circumstances being what they were that didn't happen, and it makes me consider the other people who would have been worth knowing and worth knowing better who have entered and exited my life fleetingly. Conversely, there are people for whom I am that fleeting apparition. And I regret what we missed. How can I not?

I have much to offer a colleague, a student, a friend or a lover. Kind, compassionate, smart, but flawed like all of us, I can offer my time, my attention, my care, my love, as can they. Anyone worth his or her salt has figured out that it is connection to others, whether platonic or romantic, global or local, human or other, which matters most during our existence on earth. It is everything else in fact, that is fleeting. But sometimes we spend our lives focused on the wrong things and the wrong people. Our laser locks just slightly off center and we give a whole lot of energy and attention to not quite the right thing.

I blew a large bulk of my attention on a person who didn't warrant it. At first, I didn't know it but later, later there were signs and I should have redirected that care a lot earlier than I did. Because I  didn't, I missed out. Because I got hurt, I continued to miss out. Because I then closed off, I missed out even more.

Sometimes it takes an old friend to remind us of who we were before the regrets began to pile up. To remind us of what it was like to be in the moment, young and enthusiastic, unguarded and a little naïve. To remind us that we don't want to be lying on the deathbed regretting.