Category: RIP

When Is Enough?

I frequently ask that question these days. I am struck by the similarities in so many posts and blogs I read. Everyone has advice about how to create a happy life. Or how to set goals that will help you achieve your “happily ever after.” Do you ever think about how people figured out life before the advice of strangers from all over the world was available?

Well to start with, I imagine life was much simpler, say, a hundred and fifty years ago. You could look forward to a basic education – if you were lucky. You were expected to marry the most suitable match who probably lived a few houses away. Your future spouse was almost certainly from the same town.

Your parents were likely friends with the parents of your intended or they would certainly have known one another. From church or encounters at the general store or sports and hobbies. Social and geographic boundaries were much smaller and tighter.

The rules for living a good life were generally agreed upon by most of the community. You were born, got married, worked either inside (usually the wife) or outside the home (usually the husband), had kids, then grandkids, retired, got sick, and died. Dead easy.

My dear departed Dad chased the one overriding goal in life he was convinced would make him happy: becoming a millionaire. His admiration for money was a lifelong obsession. He faithfully attended Dale Carnegie courses that taught him How to Win Friends and Influence People. He learned “tricks” about how the wealthy nurtured an aura of money … like always sporting a tan. It encouraged the perception: “A man of means has time to relax in the sun.”

Dad missed one of the fundamental rules of creating wealth that follows the counter-intuitive rule: if you want more of something, you have to give it away. His miserliness always seemed like a synonym for misery. After he lost all his money in middle age, it made him cling to it even more fiercely.

He complimented his wife for saving scraps of wax paper in a kitchen drawer. He refused to buy anything “frivolous.” He balked at buying a package of better quality ham that cost only pennies more than his choice. After retiring from law, he owned and operated an ice cream store. He drove his employees crazy. When someone ordered a banana split, he would drive down to the supermarket … and buy one banana at a time.

To all outward appearances, he had a comfortable life toward its end. A house he owned outright. A luxury car. Steady passive income. Savings in the bank (if not quite a million dollars). But his emotional and financial miserliness cost him his family.

Like many kids in his generation, we were on our own after high school. I marveled with envy at peers whose parents paid for their education or paid for their fees to stay in residence or regularly sent them “care packages.” There was no support for “frivolous” pursuits like university in my Dad’s opinion. Dad once asked an old boyfriend of mine: “What is Margot doing in university? She is only going to get married and have children.”

I often wonder how Dad felt about his life and the goals he accomplished. He kept himself and his second wife safe and comfortable. But he did no community service to speak of. Had very few friends and as time went by, fewer and fewer interests. It seemed he lived his life with an anvil on his heart and soul. He never had enough.

Marketing gurus today push the glamor of high-end vodka and designer purses and shoes and all the symbols of wealth and status. Strategically, they target a younger clientele who are not yet encumbered by families and mortgage payments. This time period of “disposable income” is usually a short phase.

So I come back to my question. When we are setting goals for our lives, what is our absolute endpoint? When and why should we move the goalposts? To whose benefit? I’m convinced the answer can only be found in getting to know ourselves better. I recently read Steve Jobs’ said that a $300 watch and a $30 dollar watch tell the same time.

I learned that lesson early. There were high-end items I wanted and acquired for their quality as much as for their cachet. A Tissot wood watch I bought in Florence, Italy years ago still brings me pleasure aesthetically and sentimentally.

When we are young, we want to hurry up and get on with it. We want it all. We are hungry and eager to explore and experience everything that life can offer. We test our wings and seek out our pack. We build castles in the air then eventually settle for a three-bedroom and two-bathroom house that better suits our lifestyle, our budget, and our needs. Needs is the operative word. Life choices essentially come down to that.

The quicker we learn what makes us happy, the faster we begin to attract those things into our lives. It doesn’t matter what anyone else wants or what the world tells you will make you happy. We learn what is enough, for us. It is up to us to decide when that is.

Mother’s Day

I have written about mothers before. I have written and will continue to write about my own mother. It is a primal bond, yet the relationship can be difficult, no matter what its origin story. I wrote yesterday about idealized motherhood as a special, sacred state. The day-to-day reality can be quite different and difficult. There are common themes in the universal experience of motherhood. Yet each mother’s story is unique. This is one of those unique stories.

Lala and Her Son

“The child was tightly wrapped in the threadbare blanket his mother had taken with her as they were leaving the camp. At the immigration center, she struggled to quell her nerves and quiet her baby. The baby had a cough. The cough needed to be suppressed.

If even a slight cough was detected by an immigration official, the whole family – dad, mom, sister, and baby – might have been diverted to quarantine for suspicion of TB. Getting out of the detention center and on with their lives in Canada could have taken them many more months. The family had already spent what seemed like an eternity in a European refugee camp. Lala wasn’t sure how much more they could survive.

Homemade cough medicine liberally laced with brandy and administered in quantity had quieted her fussy boy before they disembarked at Pier 19 in Halifax. It had been effective in putting him into a deep slumber. Still, Lala worried the effects would wear off and the baby would wake and delay their plans.

The baby’s conception and birth originated in a post-World War II European refugee camp. It was there Lala met her future husband. Both parents were suffering from the brutal treatment and losses imposed by World War II Nazis. The post-War effects of displacement and relocation only compounded the traumatic effects.

At the war’s end, they jumped at the chance to come to Canada to begin life over again. They made it through the customs inspection and boarded the train for Toronto, Ontario.

Thanks to friends and relatives in the similarly displaced post-War community, they were able to buy a house. Eventually, his mother opened a dress store on the ground floor.  The family lived upstairs.

That baby had grown into a bright and mischievous little boy. He remembered spying on naked women through the cracks in the changing room doors. The ladies paid him little attention as he was but a child but he reveled in the memories. He vividly recalled the pretty ladies.

A concern in this family was the little boy’s birth origins. The baby was now a boy. He was short in stature and tended to obesity. Food was comforting for him in a way his traumatized parents could not be. On top of the traumas of war, his father harbored deep fears that his son was not his own. He took out his anxiety on the child.

The story persisted that Lala had been raped by Russian soldiers in the camps and the story muddied the waters of the boy’s origins. His father feared that the boy was the product of that violent act and not his own biological son.

One of the results was that his father measured the boy regularly. He stood him up against a door jamb with a yardstick and pencil to mark his growth. The father made careful note of how tall the boy was.  The boy recalls standing on tippy toes to appear taller to avoid his father’s rage. If the boy’s measurements “came up short,” a physical beating might ensue from deep within the wells of his father’s anger and frustration.

The boy had an older sister whose origins were equally murky. She was not the product of rape. But Lals worried her daughter was the product of another displaced Jewish refugee in the camp. When the daughter discovered her alternate origin story, she flipped out.

She stole her parents’ credit card and flew to Israel to seek out the man she believed might have been her “real father.” Israel is purportedly where he went after the war. The sister had a complete breakdown and was hospitalized in a mental hospital for a time with depression and suicidal ideation.  Her brother was enraged and disdainful.

Her parents flew to Israel to find her and bring her back to Canada. The travel costs and the psychiatrists they paid to have her seen, were a burden on her family’s limited financial resources. Her brother saw all of her “acting out” as a “choice.” In his mind, she was a stupid and selfish brat.

As an academic years later, he would publish a paper called The Myth of Mental Illness. Although he didn’t mention his sister specifically, there is no doubt she was his intellectual inspiration. It is common for those who have grown up sublimating their distress to condemn as weak those who struggle.

Her brother was angry at the financial and emotional cost to his parents. They were not wealthy people and his sister had racked up a hefty credit card bill that his parents were forced to pay off. Her rebellion stirred up troubling memories of the war.

The boy sought comfort in food and his girth expanded in proportion to his loneliness and distress. His Ph.D. thesis explored the lengths that fat people go to appear “normal” in society. Those efforts to “cover” up their fat were a study in learned manipulation that Lala’s grown son transferred to other parts of his life. He would learn to hide his rage under layers of charm and intelligence that took him up the ladder of career success in fairly short order.

He was a product of the abusive background he came from and became a volatile and violent abuser himself. Survival skills bred in post-war European refugee camps and in his family home came in handy for a sad and angry little man-child. He was intent on making up for the miseries his parents suffered that caused him to suffer in kind.

Sadly and perhaps inevitably, he inflicted that suffering on others. Lala’s boy became as twisted as the Russian soldier (allegedly) responsible for his presence on the planet.”

Traction

Traction and where to reliably find it nowadays is much on my mind. In a world awash in information, blog posts, videos, video reels, and ad infinitum, how do we make the best and most informed choices now? Everyone has an opinion. they swear is the right one to follow. Everyone presents as an expert on something.

What should we read? What to listen to? What sources can we trust? Where do we find time to do anything, above and beyond what HAS to be done daily? How do we identify our gifts and what we are passionate enough about to invest our lives in? Even worse, how do we decide what is real and reliable?

This is not an exclusive problem for us in society today. But the complexity has definitely been ramped up. Ease of access to seemingly endless options on the internet seems to create illusions and false impressions. If everyone is led to believe they can (and should) become a millionaire before they are 30, it is frustrating and could be soul-crushing if you don’t reach that target milestone. It has the potential to imbue young people with a feeling of dissatisfaction about missing the boat. Widespread FOMO.

“Fear of missing out” is a real issue for many younger people and even mid-career professionals. They are putting off marriage and house buying and baby-making in greater numbers than their parents and grandparents. There is a burgeoning revival of all things retro. There is increasing comfort in looking backward rather than looking forward. Not because life is perceived to have been so great in the past, but because it is now so difficult to imagine what can be relied on in the future.

Teenage suicide is occurring at an alarmingly high level. Teenagers! Once marked by largely carefree days under their parents’ wing, it was expected to be a time devoted to seeding dreams, testing out love and sexuality, and taking part in the normal rites of passage in the childhood to adulthood transition. That so many precious young people are opting to get off the merry-go-round of life before it even starts should be an alarming wake-up call that our values are wildly out of whack.

I often wonder how character is being built in young people today. Our great-grandparents cut their teeth on life’s harshest realities. The need to survive trumped most other considerations. Our ancestors knew that if the cows weren’t milked, the eggs collected or the fields tilled, they weren’t eating. Back-breaking work to be sure but also the satisfaction of knowing that your fate largely rested in your own hands and on your own efforts.

In smaller, rural societies, everyone knew everyone else. There was a sense of belonging and community. And not online communities. But real communities with real people who baked real apple pies and built things with their own hands and met up in a sanctuary every week, for social reasons as much as for spiritual ones. I would argue the two are inextricably connected anyway.

I would argue that our social policies need to recapture the most positive elements of those times. Humans need each other. Somehow that message is being lost in the wake of new technological promise, widespread social fragmentation, and the breakdown of social cohesion.

Young people need to be protected and nurtured until they are strong enough to grow and survive on their own. They need a base on which to build and find the traction they need to propel them forward into their lives. Mass killings and rising suicide rates are dark proof that young people are being widely failed in that regard.

The pendulum of extremes in most eras eventually swings back to a more balanced and reasonable life-enhancing way of doing life. In today’s wildly fragmented environment, it is hard to see how a newly emerging society will find time to gestate and emerge with so many options to choose from. Social cohesion has largely evaporated.

Yet time and space for self-reflection and inner exploration are badly needed on a wide scale. That need makes sense of the abundant and divergent offerings of healing retreats and therapies. We all know we need help.

The availability of healing options is more a band-aid than a cure. Our society needs to move back to putting individuals at the center of our society again. Survival instincts must kick in as people feel the essence of what makes them human being eroded.

It may be time for a resurgence of the famous line that became a war cry for humanity in the 1976 movie Network. “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” Maybe when that war cry is expressed by enough people across society again, there could be a genuine shift towards leading a more collectively saner and equanimous life.

Dad

Dad once tried to help me visualize how he’d started out in life. “Most guys start out up here,” he pointed at an invisible line high in the air. “I started down here.” His other hand was way, way down very near the table we were sitting at to have lunch.

There’s no question Dad had it rough as a child. His mother – my grandmother – was a monster from all reports. I never knew the woman. She died when I was four and a half months old. But her legacy and impact pervaded my father’s psyche until the day he died. By her emotional bequest to my Dad, she deeply affected mine. Such is the way of inter-generational trauma.

I heard no stories of motherly love and comfort about my father’s mother. Only horror stories. When Dad was about eight years old, he was playing with matches in the back shed near a kerosene barrel. The kerosene ignited. Dad’s whole face was instantly burned. His mother heard his screams and came running into the shed. When she saw what happened, she slapped his face. His skin came away in her hand.

That story was all the insight you needed into his desperately unhappy childhood. He would later explain that in the aftermath of her slap to his savaged face: “She stayed up all night and put egg whites on it.” Like many abused children, Dad remained loyal to his mother until the day he died. By loyal, I mean attached psychologically. He kept her picture by his bed. That is a space usually reserved for precious loved ones.

I have often thought of Dad’s analogy about the different altitudes at which we start out in life. In my head, I picture life’s journey as ascending a mountain. At the top of the mountain, there is a desirable destination – maybe heaven – that people work their whole lives to get to. On top of that mountain, there is a lush green and vast plateau where life is safe and easy, and enjoyable.

To get there, many people seem to take a fairly easy path on a seemingly pre-ordained trajectory. For them, this is the course of their lives. They take a meandering route up the side of the mountain, attending to necessary daily tasks and enjoying life’s pleasantries. They may struggle now and then along the way, but they get help. There is plenty to eat and drink. These pilgrims are kind to one another. Reaching that destination is their expected reward for a path well-walked and a life well-lived.

But there is another side to this mountain. There is no well-mapped path to follow. They face a rocky cliff face. The way is not marked. The route to the top is full of obstacles and danger. Provisions are scarce. Kindness even less so. Their eventual arrival at that vast plain has come at a considerable cost.

This is a route many abused children are forced to take. They climb uncertainly from one rock to the next in life praying the rock they pick will hold.

I have heard the incredulity of other people who were raised by “good enough” parents. They honestly cannot relate to abuse scenarios they cannot ever even imagine happening. They are lucky.

Dad’s difficulties were compounded by the era in which he was born. There were no psychiatrists or psychologists anywhere near him. There were few paths to healing. Self-care was a luxury that was subsumed by life’s difficult demands. In many cases, therapy was scoffed at. Or viewed with deep suspicions.

Dad tried. I remember the endless Dale Carnegie meetings he would attend. He attended men’s weekend spiritual retreats. He tried AA to beat his alcohol addiction. Made it all the way to one year of sobriety once. It didn’t stick. He was drunk as a lord on his 92nd birthday – two months before he died.

My healing journey started while Dad was still on the planet. The healing modalities that are available now were only starting to take hold in society. I told Dad of my interest in exploring the psychological consequences of childhood on our adult lives. He grew quiet on the phone for a minute, and closed the call by saying: “Maybe you can help other peopleby talking about it.” I sure hope so, Dad. RIP

Lost and Found

It happens to all of us. That sickening feeling when you lose a precious thing. A thing you loved. A thing from which you derived so much joy and happiness. A thing you convinced yourself you could never live without.

It happened to me so many times. And with it, the sinking heart, the welling tears, the panic, and feeling of pure helplessness. God, how I loathed loss. But life doles out grace one loss at a time. Don’t get me wrong. Loss can still slice me in half. But the searing pain of loss, when we were young, gives way to the grace of acceptance. And the sense of inevitability.

We learn the hard way that loss is universal. When a parent dies, so many other people can relate. Divorce is devastating. But hardly an isolated experience. What we fear losing changes as we do because what matters to us changes.

I was heading home for the holidays when I was pickpocketed at Montreal airport. My wallet had my ID and $150 cash in it. All my Christmas money. I was inconsolable. I got through Christmas somehow and returned to school. Weeks later, my cash light wallet showed up in my mailbox. The thief had been gracious enough to only lift the money and return the ID. Gotta love a crook with a heart.

The loss of friends turned out to be way harder. A group of us sat around a residence cafeteria breakfast table in stunned disbelief. Our friend Heather MacAskill had been killed the night before in a single-car crash on her way home for the holidays. My loss was minor compared to that of my friend Kathy Fisher, Heather’s very best friend.

Kathy looked like a wraith herself at that early morning requiem. By times she was silent and brooding, then wailing like a banshee. The death of another young person under tragic circumstances is very hard to process. It digs into young psyches with ferocity and can generate rage as much as sadness.

I didn’t experience many deaths after Heather. But I did lose my peers through my own stupidity. I was often the cause of the separation. Worse is that I wasn’t exactly sure what it was that I had done or said to drive me out of those people’s lives and affections. In other cases, I was profoundly aware of what triggered the loss. And I had to live with that. Being a drunken teenager with non-existent boundaries may have been all the reason that was needed.

So when a dear lost friend from childhood wandered back into my life yesterday, I was beyond joyous. It felt as if a piece of my heart had been restored in my chest. That she answered a tremulous overture with warmth and kindness filled me with the same. I was so afraid of approaching her again. I am very glad I did. Time does heal.

What I’ve learned about loss is that there are – as author Judith Viorst put it – Necessary Losses. Not only necessary but inevitable. We must shed the illusions of childhood to become adults. We may have to move and leave our comfort zone to pursue a new opportunity. We must let our children go to let them build their own lives. Our parents must leave for their well-deserved rest. That’s the deal.

Life is all about birth and death; rising and falling; coming and going; giving and taking. We are regularly reminded that it is life’s brevity that gives it meaning. When we leave this planet, as we inevitably must, there will be lots and lots of people out there to fill in the gap.

This is my time and it is precious. I didn’t always see it that way. What a sad and stupid little girl I was. I feel sorry for the me I once was and the hard lessons I had to learn to finally “get it.” To finally learn that it is life’s very uncertainties that make it so rich and unreplaceable. That was a lovely lesson I found along the way. Bring on the day.

Death Unbecoming

Yesterday I learned about the recent death of an old CBC colleague radio producer Michael Finlay in Toronto. Michael was randomly assaulted in the dead of winter on the street by a stranger. He was out grocery shopping when he was attacked. He was pushed into a concrete planter on the sidewalk, breaking several ribs and puncturing his lung. He died of his injuries five days later.

It is important to mention that he was safely installed in the hospital when they decided to send him home just two days after his injuries were sustained. Soon after he arrived home, his condition rapidly deteriorated. He stopped breathing for about twenty minutes in the ambulance on the way back to the hospital. He was declared brain-dead three days later and was removed from life support.

If you had known Michael Finlay, you would understand how incongruous his name and the words brain-dead would be in the same sentence. Michael Finlay was one of those geniuses buffered by a cynical and sarcastic and caustic exterior. But as many of his closer CBC colleagues wrote about working with him, not only did he care deeply about the words and stories that were published on-air, he also cared about them personally.

My memories of Michael Finlay were the rigor and ridiculousness he brought to CBC’s As It Happens newsroom back in the day. It was during the Falkland Islands War and for reasons still not fully understood, the newsroom inherited custody of a huge and grotesque tarantula spider. Michael named s/he/it her Malvina – as the Falkland Islands were known in Spanish. My colleague and later boss Hal Doran took charge of the care and feeding of Malvina.  Four crickets from Eaton’s department store pet section every third Saturday.” Tarantulas don’t eat much,” he recalled dryly. I only hoped the cover on the thing’s tank was secure.

I was a so-called intern at As It Happens which was code for knowing essentially jack squat about radio production. The senior producers were accommodating and tolerant towards me personally. Behind closed doors, not so much I gathered. Michael Finlay was the brooding presence in the newsroom. He followed each producer’s progress as stories from around the world either came to fruition or blew up for some reason leaving a hole in the show that quickly had to be filled. Michael – rather Finlay as he was known – was intolerant of lightweight journalism. He often shook his head and complained that the upcoming show was going to be “a dog’s breakfast” or was “going down the toilet.”

Finlay once set me on a project to track down an English-speaking Pole. They were looking for someone who could speak to the mood in Gdansk, Poland, following a major development in the ongoing power struggle between communism and the Solidarność” labor movement. We all had to learn to pronounce Lech Walesa’s name correctly: WA-when-sa. Rube that I was I called the Gdansk Solidarność” office and reached someone who spoke English. The woman claimed to have no official role so I hung up and told Finlay. “Call her back!!” he roared. “She speaks English!!” Whoever she was, she was interviewed and ran on the show that night as a color piece about the mood in Gdansk.

I was there during an odd summer in the history of CBC and As It Happens. The NABET technicians who ran the boards and production studios were on strike. Music programming filled the airwaves for weeks instead of the news. Barbara Frum had recently given up the chair as host of As It Happens to transition to television and an exciting new TV news program, The Journal. When the strike was resolved, a number of guest hosts from across the country filled the chair in a bid to land the job permanently. No one wandered away from the As It Happens newsroom that summer. In the world of Canadian broadcasting, there were no greener pastures. I eventually left As It Happens “to pursue other opportunities.”

Finlay continued for many decades on a number of other important CBC Radio shows. Finlay spearheaded a particularly strong radio program that was a digest of stories from CBC foreign correspondents called Dispatches. That it was brilliant and exceptional programming isn’t the least bit surprising knowing Finlay was involved.

Finlay was one of those guys you figured you’d meet up with again up the road one day. It upsets me tremendously that I won’t. I hope he delved more deeply after retirement into the poetry he wrote on the side when he wasn’t busy making a living. I hope he knows the place he occupied in the esteem and affection of countless colleagues who saw through his crusty exterior. We’ll never know. His death is another stark reminder of life’s cruelty and capriciousness. A random assault against an esteemed artist who deserved more time on the planet. For his own sake and for those who knew his true value.

RIP Michael Finlay. He has left an unfillable void.