Mass. Emotion

It's taken me nearly a week to write this. Largely because I've had very little chance to write anything, and have stolen what little time Michael Alexander naps during the day to bang out my personal finance column. And this week I've struggled to even answer emails after he goes to bed. We're all sick with stuffiness, sore throats and sniffles, so my energy is zapped by the time the baby falls asleep. It's nearly impossible to eke out a sentence when Michael Alexander's awake, as the keyboard is far more fascinating than any of his baby toys and he dives in as soon as I start tapping.

There's also the emotional impact of writing about emotions. I might be writing this only because I have such limited time to put anything in print. My restrictions may be freeing me to get this out without overthinking whether I'm oversharing.

Michael Alexander and I last week spent four nights in western Massachusetts, two without Mike. We were there to celebrate Rosghestvo, Christmas by the Julian calendar. That's two nights of sleeping -- alone -- in the bedroom where my father died, right next to the bedroom where my grandmother died. And just a hallway away from the room where my grandmother was waked. Every childhood home is awash in memories, good and bad. Few childhood homes in today's America are like mine. Americans love to divorce themselves from the reality of their family's disease and death, shipping them off to nursing home where strangers bathe them, change their bandages, refill their IVs and generally regard them as flesh waiting to go cold and and be replaced. I have many friends who didn't see grandparents for months at a time, as they were removed from their reality, dying a sanitary (at least by emotional standards) and soulless death in some money-making deathpit.

As my favorite undergraduate professor, Charles Kay Smith, said, Americans are as Puritanical about death as the Victorians were about sex. We changed the name parlour (or parlor) to living room (what an absurd term!) to erase any trace of dying from our homes. Up until 1918, Americans and Europeans called the front room of the house the front parlor (or parlour). The 1918 flu pandemic (or Spanish Flu), a pandemic which wiped out between 50 million and 100 million people from June 1917 to December 1920, reportedly forced people to pile bodies in the front parlor. (The first cases were reported in the continental U.S. and the rest of Europe long before creeping to Spain. But the pandemic was dubbed "Spanish flu" because as a neutral country in World War I, Spain had no censorship of news regarding the disease and its consequences. Spanish King Alfonso XIII became the high-ranking poster child for the disease after getting sick.) All this death was far too depressing for American society to bear! The desire to boost sales of its lifestyle magazine drove the editors of "The Ladies Home Journal" to rename the parlor the "living room" in honor of those who survived. God forbid Americans grow too sad to seek advice on redecorating their new room!

Though I grew up in a bucolic New England suburb, cushioned by the liberal utopia of America's higher education mecca, my life was very different, at least at home. My mother, a fashionista who shopped at Saks in New York and walked the red carpet to her various executive roles, made every effort to ensure my sister and I were clad and coiffed to fit in with the proud Protestants and fallen Catholics. We played sports. We were Brownies and Girl Scouts (my mom was a troop leader.) I was such an archetypal New England child that I won a Memorial Day poetry contest and read proudly in patriotic red, white and blue. I marched in parades dressed as a pilgrim. But beneath all the costumes and conformity, I was buffered from the uptight American denial of death. I went to wakes and funerals as a baby. And Russian Orthodox wakes and funerals involve open caskets and close contact with the corpse. I am grateful I was raised this way. I cannot imagine the detachment and denial that plagues so many of my peers. Sheltering your children from reality and the natural cycle and ritual of life is absurd and unnatural. "The Ladies Home Journal" is not an infant care handbook. It can make for good comedy, though.

As always, I digress. While I wouldn't trade my old world upbringing for the milktoast, mundane, Main Street mainstream, I do acknowledge that my early emotional intelligence makes some adult experiences more volatile. Like coming home. Home, where my father and grandmother died. My mother cared for both of them, after she helped my grandmother care for my grandfather. She was incapable of discarding them in our nation's dollar-driven deathcare system. With names like Home of the Innocents, South Mountain Restoration Center and Cokesbury Village (among the winners of U.S. News America's Best Nursing Homes rankings), America disguises these places to die and makes people think they are doing something humane in exchange for a small fortune amassed in a lifetime. Some 1.5 million people are living in the nation's 16,000-plus nursing homes, and in a typical year more than 3.2 million Americans will spend at least some time in one. That statistic saddens me far more than the purpose of a parlor.

But I struggle to sleep when I am my mother's house, where I grew up. I am startled by nightmares (often re-runs from my childhood), flooded by emotion and angry at myself for how I neglected my mother in some of her greatest moments of need. I suppose if I were raised in a home that banished the old and ill at the first sign of convalescence I wouldn't have this problem. Sorrow aside, I am comforted most by compassion and empathy which can only come with experience. I wouldn't trade my tossing, turning and night terrors for a bland background.

"Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain."
_ William Hazlitt (1778-1830) British essayist (and Irish Protestant)