death

Death of friend, politics invading life, Buffy abusing Spike: Catchall

Dealing with several things all at once:

–1: The death of a dear friend of 30 years, the one in my College Memoirs whom I called “Pearl,” my confidante.  It happened two months ago.  But us college friends, the old roommies and InterVarsity people, the group who shared “Journal” e-mails until Facebook arose–we weren’t told.

One of us got re-married in mid-October.  I went to the wedding, disappointed to see that Pearl was not there.

She died later that week.

We last were on her page in September, when she posted about her child.

The Journal group found out around November 18, when somebody went to Pearl’s FB page and then posted what she discovered.

But that day, I was dealing with all sorts of headaches regarding publishing my books, and wasn’t on FB at all.  So I didn’t find out until a week ago Saturday, when I went to her FB to see what she was up to lately.

It took a moment to process the posts about her death, and once I did, I was just–stunned.  Heartbroken.

We were just coming off COVID quarantine when this happened.  (We’re all vaccinated, so COVID was just a bit of a cold that made the Hubby lose his sense of smell for a couple of weeks.)  I’d hoped to go back to church the following day, only to find this late Saturday night.  Instead, I was basically catatonic.

There was a day of deep grief.  Since then I’ve been hit with this intense midlife crisis, the sense of everyone getting older and older even though I could swear we were twenty just a couple of weeks ago, the sense of impending Death.  Same thing happened after my dad died in 2016; this and COVID have intensified it.  I’ll be fine during the day, then get hit with it in the middle of the night, or when I watch a 30-year-old TV show or look at a recent picture of someone from college.

And through it all I miss Pearl, who just isn’t there anymore.

And I wonder what happened.  The family was vague, just said she had health problems and died in her sleep.  I knew about the rheumatoid arthritis; she had that in college.  But all these years, she’d managed, she’d survived various health scares.  I wonder if it was COVID.  She was vaxxed, but there was the RA.  There are also the full ICU beds because of COVID anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers selfishly refusing to take the needs of their neighbors into account.  Did she die of COVID?  Did she die because she couldn’t get needed care because COVID is overwhelming health providers?  Did COVID take yet another friend/family member?  Or was it something else entirely?

Farewell, sweet Pearl….

 

–2: This part is a bit more lighthearted.  While I was away from church pre-vaccine, we somehow acquired a large group of converts.  They were attracted through studying the church intellectually–the same way I was.  But on Sunday I sat with them and discovered a strong sense of Convertitis and Orthodox Triumphalism.

It’s very familiar.  I suffered from it myself 15 years ago, and shared it with Richard, until I began to discover that people in my new church were human, too.

Until my priest said that River of Fire was too polemic and should focus on what’s good in Orthodoxy and not what’s bad in the other churches.

Until I heard somebody yelling at a parish General Assembly.

Until I saw that most people don’t follow the fast strictly, or care about the organ and pews, or even know a lot about their own theology that the converts find so attractive.

Until I began to see the drawbacks even in following the church that claims to be unchanged since the days of the Apostles.

We have our spats and flirting; we don’t just sit all coffee hour opining about the Filioque or hating on other churches.  You’re more likely to talk about gardening or kids or the next fundraiser.

Our new converts praised the church for being so welcoming, while I remember a time when people said the opposite.

My BFF and I are more likely to wear a Prussian uniform (him–this actually happened) or a Gothy top (me) than a prayer rope or a headscarf.

Part of staying Orthodox after the honeymoon period, is accepting that the people are not perfect.

Nowadays when I talk about problems in other churches, it focuses on harm being done by bad theology, or grifters, or abuse–things like that.  It’s about harm being done to the entire Christian body by certain attitudes.  I came to Orthodoxy not to be better than other people, but to stop worrying that nearly everyone alive was destined to end up in Hell.  I came to find a loving God.  I can recognize the good in other churches that are not Orthodox.  I can also recognize that various churches–including Orthodox–can be so obsessed with doctrinal purity that they don’t accept science or life experiences that prove some of their attitudes are wrong.

 

–3: I’m facing a writing club Christmas party today.  Normally I get into these biannual parties.  The conversation used to be interesting.  But lately, it seems like everyone who shows up is retired and I have nothing in common with them, so we sit and talk about very little of interest, if anything, before the food finally comes.  Well, there’s writing, but nobody talks about that, and half the people are spouses who don’t write.

We have liberal members, but we also have a bunch of people who are right-wing religious and/or Trumpers.  Our club party in July ended with a bunch of people getting into an argument about things like CRT, right-wing talking points being flung around, and me hearing a certain loved one’s disturbing attitudes on cultural issues.

I finally got up and walked out of the house.  I was shaken and upset for days, wondering if any of these relationships could survive.  I was finally able to put it out of my head and move on.

I don’t want a repeat of this.

Then last week, after a club meeting, somebody brought up a transgender issue and I became very uncomfortable.  Frickin’ politics ruining frickin’ EVERYTHING.  It makes you not want to leave the house, except even there it isn’t safe.

 

–4: Over the past several years, since we got Hulu, I’ve been rewatching Buffy and Angel, which I hadn’t seen since one pass of re-runs after they went off the air years ago.

Last night, I got to THAT EPISODE of Buffy.  I was so disturbed that I had to google and see if I was the only one to feel this way: Spike trying to rape Buffy was NOT AT ALL in his character.

Apparently that scene was one of the writers exorcising her own demons, because Joss wanted her to do so.  But it just wasn’t something that Spike would’ve done to Buffy.  Another thing that disturbed me was how Buffy had treated him for the past couple of seasons, especially during Season 6.  I guess the writers wanted us to hate Spike, but instead I was upset with Buffy for abusing Spike.  Spike was hardly a saint, doing his own abuse, but she’d punch him, she’d sleep with him and then say he disgusted her and she can’t love him, etc. etc.  Meanwhile, she’s letting her friends say bad things about him, too.

And yes, other people have indeed noticed this.  I found articles written by women complaining that Buffy had become an abuser.  For example: Defending Spike Part 1 and Kristen Smirnov’s Domestic Abuse and Gender Role Reversal in Season 6: My Letter to Mutant Enemy.

The writers were so intent on making us hate Spike, because he was an evil soulless thing, that they did this rape scene–

when the whole time they’d been showing us Spike on a redemption arc even without a soul.  We saw Buffy falling in love with him.  We sympathized with Spike because we saw that he was in love with Buffy and that it was turning him away from evil.

But after showing us this, the writers got mad at the viewers for seeing it clearly, and accused us of being the type to write love letters to serial killers.  It was gaslighting.  Them having Spike try to rape Buffy was like them abusing US now, along with Spike’s character.  They wanted us to think that Xander’s constant snipes at Spike were Xander seeing the situation properly.  They wanted us to agree that Buffy’s self-righteous abuse of Spike was how Good and Decent People™ behave.

While reading “Defending Spike” last night, I realized that Buffy treated Spike exactly the same as Shawn treated me back in college.  And there in black and white, I saw somebody else confirm that yes, this is extremely abusive behavior.  The writer saw it as abusive when a woman does it, and pointed out that a man doing it is clearly seen as an abuser.  And well, Shawn was male.  So hey.  That explains why I always sympathized with Spike here.

Abusers can so get into your head that for years afterward you wonder if you were the actual abuser.  Shawn and Phil (also in college) both did this to me, as did the so-called “friends” who abused me a decade ago, Richard and Tracy.  That’s part of the reason for my memoirs on both college and Richard/Tracy, to try to get into what really happened and sort it out.  It’s a lot of work and reflection.  And the conclusion is that I’m not the abuser at all.  But they can make you think you are, even 30 years later, even when intellectually you know that you were the victim.

And that’s my very-long catchall catchup post.

Struggling through waves of grief over Dad’s passing

My dad died last August.  I was at his bedside.  Then came the funeral, I went home, and it was back to my own life.

I had a lot to do: We had a cat in failing health peeing all over the basement, so every day I had to clean up after her multiple times.  The tub/surround desperately needed replacing, and that required contractors, lots of $$$, and a loan.  Hubby wanted me to deal with that, and it took some time.  I’m working on a novel that requires extensive research.  And of course, there’s typical life stuff: housework, kid’s school, church, club, etc.

In the midst of all that, a large group of obsessive trolls began stalking me on and off.

But now the tub is finally replaced, with beautiful new tiling.  The trolls lost interest.  The cat is, unfortunately, now passed, leaving me with much less work to do in a day.

And now my brain is starting to force the grief upon me.  I didn’t try to push it away before: I just had stuff to do and had to focus.  But for a long time, details of being by my dad’s bedside, and then losing my dad, were kept in a little spot in my brain, because they were too painful and disturbing.  But now the grief’s been coming out, over and over again.

At night, I sometimes dream about death.  Much of it is about my own mortality, the old fear arising yet again that death is truly the end, that the atheists are right and we go to nothingness.  The fear of the end of Me.

Just the other night (this was written March 25), I dreamed of someone whose eyes were forced open after he died (yeah, I know it’s usually the other way, but this was a dream).  Somebody said that brain waves continue after death unless your eyes are propped open: Then they stop.  This made me wonder if forcing the eyes open meant that you truly went to nothing, while before you still were alive someplace.  I wondered if forcing the eyes open meant interference, truly killing someone.  It freaked me out, and I woke up.

I dream about life slipping away, aging, faster and faster all the time, looking back and longing for youth.  I dream of my son’s life passing too fast.

Two months ago, I dreamed about my dad.  I wrote it down, and decided to use it in my novel.  I’m not sure if I want to write it here, or just let the world see the fictionalized version.  Maybe I already did write it here, but forgot.  But it was upsetting.

I constantly imagine the death of someone who has just died, whether in reality or fiction: not going to Heaven, but going to endless sleep.  I remember myself in surgery a couple of years ago, going up onto the table, then suddenly nothing until I woke up later on.  I imagine it being like that, but without waking up.

I remember details of my dad’s death.  I begin to whimper.  I remember he’s gone, that it’s all over.  I wonder if I will ever see him again, or if the afterlife is all just a fanciful dream we fool ourselves with.  (The atheists don’t seem to understand why we don’t find their version of death appealing or their message comforting.)  I could swear it was only just, say, my college years and he was driving me home for Christmas Break.  Or that I could still call him up on Father’s Day or his birthday.

I hear something or see something on TV that reminds me of my dad’s last hours, and it floods back.

Then I shake it off because I have to go on.

I recently told my husband something of this, because we just realized the cat was dying, and we were watching for the signs.  After checking the Internet to find out what they were, I realized she was probably in pain as well, but hiding it.  It reminded me of how my dad suffered, and watching for signs that he was about to leave us.  My husband said I needed a vacation.  Yet the house keeps needing to be cleaned, meals need to be cooked, bills need to be paid….While the grief and the mid-life crisis continue in the background….

 

Eulogy to my Grandma

My last surviving grandparent is no more.  She lived for 96 years.

A strong, active, productive person, a farmer’s wife for many years, who kept children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren supplied with beautiful quilts and knitted outerwear.

My favorite scarf, great for braving northern chill, is large and long and warm and knitted by Grandma.  We are all kept warm in the winter by her quilts and afghans.

My ex-friend Richard, when he stayed with us, I gave him one of Grandma’s quilts to keep him warm as he slept on the couch.  He took it with him when he and his family moved into their own place, so I finally had to get it back from him again.  He protested because it was large enough to cover him and his wife, and was very warm.

“But my grandmother made that quilt!” I said.

“Have her make another quilt,” he said.

But he finally gave it back.

We visited Grandma every holiday, or she came to visit us, bringing her little white dog.

Some of the Michigan roads near her house were still dirt; when I was little, she put me in her bike basket and pedaled me over those roads and the gravel shoulders of the paved roads.  When I got older, she put her little dog in the basket instead.

The roads to her house were full of hills that made your stomach jump up as the car dipped down.  Because of this, the road signs constantly switched from “Do Not Pass” to “Pass With Care.”

When I was a toddler, they put me on a tractor in the open barn door.  I felt high above the ground, scary and exhilarating at once.  My parents still have the picture.  This was no small tractor.

In 1984, she cut her hair like Mondale’s running mate, the first woman to run for Vice-President, Geraldine Ferraro.  She and Grandpa had always been Democrats, which annoyed my Republican dad.

She joined a Nazarene church before I was born, and went there until she moved to Texas.  She loved church, and whenever I visited, she took me there.  I had friends in the Sunday School, and one year I went to Vacation Bible School there.  A church bus picked me up along with other country kids.

She loved garage sales; many of my toys were sale finds, or she would make old doll torsos into air fresheners with knit dresses.  She knitted clothes for my dolls as well.

She put on quite a spread, such as egg nog and candy popcorn balls for Christmas and lots of candy to stuff yourself with for Easter.

I remember visiting her every summer for one or two weeks, staying in her 100-year-old house with the large red barn in back and fields which she could no longer work.

My uncle worked the fields now.  But she kept a kitchen garden, where she brought me along to pick and shuck peas for that night’s dinner.

I ate fudge bars while reading books, went to the big walk-in attic to play with old toys, a chalkboard, and books that once belonged to my father and uncles, wrote my own newspaper with comic strips such as Perdita the ant, and imagined the trees in the whispering leaves of the oak tree were people with their own stories.

I had my first experience of deja-vu there, looking up at the ceiling from a chair which she had only just moved, and realizing I had dreamed of this before knowing she moved it.

Grandpa’s Woods out back were beautiful, but I was scared to go there because the adults warned me of deer flies.

Sometimes I slept in one of the bedrooms upstairs, imagining them populated with various monsters and ghosties, whom I could identify individually.  Once, I heard caterwauling from my window.

Some of my mental stims began one summer while I slept in the big upstairs bedroom.

Sometimes I slept on the porch, with air coming through the many screened windows, while a mosquito buzzed in my ear, cars whizzed speeding by on the road (it was customary to speed down that road), and I realized that the number 8 and its various multiples were my favorite numbers.

In the dining room I would juggle the little white poodle mix’s toy balls, and realize that country silence was a deafening roar.

There were many glass shelves covered in neat knick-knacks, antiques, probably from the 30s, 40s and 50s, one a lady’s head probably from the 30s, another a tractor.

One year, she put a brand-new bathroom in the attic, since she often worked upstairs on her quilts, there was plenty of room, and the stairs were high and steep.  Finally, there were two bathrooms, and nobody had to wait for other people anymore.  But the water still tasted the same upstairs as down, that strange well-water taste.

She took me with her to visit Grandpa’s grave, where she tended flowers.  I once found an anniversary card in which she wrote to Grandpa that she hoped to reach 50 years together.  Unfortunately, he died right before they made it to 50.

There were dragonflies and damselflies; I learned to ride a bike on her large, round gravel driveway; trash was burned in a barrel out back.

The motorhome was out there, too, a small and old Winnebago, which smelled like old apples and broke down any time we traveled with it.  Grandma and my mom cooked in it, even though they had to use a stove so ancient that you had to light the gas with a long match.

The first year we took it to Texas, which I think was 1983 when I was 10 (my grandpa had died on my birthday that year), we could barely go 20mph on the Interstate.

My dad looked at the inner workings underneath the floor, and discovered that Grandpa had turned the battery over–on purpose, we believed–so the motorhome would not go faster.  (He had a thing against speed.)

Dad turned it over, and we finally stopped getting passed by every single vehicle on the Interstate.  We were still slow, but not nearly so slow.

The heating system was one big pipe coming out of the front section blowing engine heat; this totally sucked because we were traveling in winter and it took forever to get out of the northern states while going 20mph on a good day.

That motorhome was so notorious that the story was told at her funeral, along with her memoirs for the family history.  And yet she kept it all those years, traveling in it, and sleeping in it sometimes during the summer.

Unfortunately, the last memory I have of her is from 2007, the last time I saw her, because she moved to Texas and my husband and I did not have the means to go visit.  She also was too old to go back up to visit us once she had moved.

We expected she would not last much longer, because she was very old and her mind was going.  My mom says it was Alzheimer’s/dementia.

My once-strong, independent grandma, who would get up at the crack of dawn and work work work all day, could barely take care of herself.

She had lived next to one of my uncles nearly all her life, but he and his wife (always a difficult woman) were now estranged from her.  She moved to the warm near one of my other uncles until she died.

The ashes, delivered a day late, were not ready to put in an urn in time for the funeral.  The preacher read from her memoirs, but there was no body.

Later that day, I discovered the package with the ashes, waiting to be properly dealt with, at my parents’ house.

My grandmother, once a tall, strong, independent woman, full of talent and skill and opinion, was now in one small box.  My parents say it must weigh about 25 pounds, even though it’s so small.

That’s when it hit me.  Her spirit is not there; this is just her body, not “her.”  But that was once her.  And now it’s all in just a small box……

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