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)

My Death Waits: Low Notes on the High Feast (of Consumerism)

My death waits like
a witch at night
as surely as our love is bright
let's not think about the passing time
_
I awoke, or more accurately got out of bed, with the Bowie translation of Jacques Brel's "My Death" in my head. Festive, eh? Here's to the holidays! To call this the holiday season is a politically correct way to bundle Chanukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa and the other feast days most people in this country can't name. Hey, why consider a culture outside of your own, you know, that culture called consumerism. There are few American homes where any semblance of true tradition lingers. It's become about shopping, mostly for crap that people don't want. Gift giving for children is acceptable, as we have fewer ways to show them we love them or reward them. In my home, we got some presents on Christmas, which was differentiated from the real holy day (holiday) we observed, the Feast of the Nativity on January 7, just to fit in with the "American" kids. Russians, and other Orthodox children do not get gifts on the Nativity. Grandfather Frost comes the following Sunday, and gifts are traditionally nuts and fruits and maybe some trinkets, in return for children performing Chekhov plays and other cultural feats.

When I was a young girl going to school in an affluent suburb, I envied the richer (though most of those tokens of wealth, the fancy cars and appliances and mini mansions, were plucked from creditors when the stock market crashed) kids, who'd get whatever they asked Santa for. Santa, in their case, was often the dad cheating on mom with his 22-year-old secretary, or Valium-calm mom, stuck at home with all the fancy gear that would soon be repossessed, forcing her to move to the ghetto with the kids. I saw this first hand. It helped that I was the child of two people born into harsh poverty: my mother starving as her brothers and other family were killed in war in Russia and later in a displaced persons' camp in Germany, and my father living in a single room above a Newark saloon with his first-generation immigrant parents who couldn't afford his dying brother's medical bills on their factory wages. My backstory was a little different from the other kids. At the time, that was my harsh reality. Now I realize it's what keeps me from sinking into the cesspool that is American consumerism. I can't imagine anything more loathsome than navigating an evil big box behemoth for gifts that people neither want nor need. Yet every day, people cram those soul-sucking stores in search of bargains. Bargains at what expense? At least in New York, we have enough fashion houses and boutiques that offer unique, albeit bank-busting, gifts that people can at least treasure.

Back to waking to death. The stress of this season fails to escape me. Certainly I rejoice, this season and any season, for I am blessed -- this year with the biggest gift of my life, my son. Having him makes all this the more painful, as I so want to shield him from the ills that our society brings. The real ills, like blind consumerism that is quickly breaking down any goodness in our nation. Ills like alcoholism and drug addiction are often overcome and can be won in a personal journey. But this careless crap hoarding spreads like a cancer, infecting new generations and making America the bloated butt of all jokes. I want to uphold the right traditions without compromising Mike or my individual beliefs. Like sending holiday cards. I made every effort to get my photo cards early enough so even my friends overseas would get theirs ahead of the holiday they celebrate. Every effort in vain. My order should have arrived no later than Dec. 6 via 2-day shipping. A customer service rep for the merchant apologized last week, saying there was no record for what went wrong on its end, and promised to expedite the order and reship overnight. Still, no cards. Just stress. I ordered another, more expensive set, again with expedited shipping from another merchant late last night. I've given up on the first one, and know the second isn't likely to come soon as the last-minute orders are too much for a small shop to bear.

Sending physical cards is very important to me. Ecards are not cards and I deplore them with every fiber of my being. If you can't take the time to physically address an envelope and attach a stamp, don't bother. An online image does nothing for the cockles of my heart. It reeks of corporate cheapness, laziness and a generic message to the lesser folks. Not getting my cards on time really upsets me. I couldn't sleep last night. When Michael Alexander finally fell asleep around 11:30 last night, all I could think about was those cards. I had just managed to fall asleep when he woke up at 1:50 a.m., hungry. He doesn't wake up at 1:50 a.m. anymore. He's a big boy. That's what he did at three months! I think he was trying to distract me from the stress or maybe save me from the nightmares. When I finally managed to fall back asleep around 3:30 a.m., I managed to muster maybe an hour of rest before a nightmare rattled me awake. I've had nightmares all my life, many about death or the fear of losing someone I love. As a young girl, I spent several years battling recurring dreams of my own mortality. Those became increasingly rare over the years, and it's the odd occasion now that I dream of my own death. Last night, a variation on the childhood theme returned, with a vengeance. Maybe I fear my own mortality for fear of not being able to care for my son? I've always dreaded losing people I love more than I worried about my own safety. Now I have the fear of my son losing me. I was obsessed with dream analysis as a child. Such books were among the many tomes I'd sneak and read under the covers with a flashlight. Dreams of experiencing your own death usually signals major change. It doesn't necessarily imply a negative turn of events. It usually means an end to something. I hope last night's terrors signal the end of waiting for my photo cards.

I jest, but I do take dreams seriously. It's part of my tradition, both ethnic and literary. Not that I dare compare myself with the legend, but Dostoyevsky was an even bigger believer than me that dreams can have as much substance and impact on our lives as what we call reality. "In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular activity, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality. At times monstrous images are created, but the setting and the whole picture are too truth-like and filled with details so delicate, so unexpected, but so artistically consistent, that the dreamer . . . could never have invented them in the waking state. Such sick dreams always remain long in the memory and make a powerful impression on the overwrought and deranged nervous system."

I know this sounds dramatic. We Russians (even half-breeds like me) are known for that. But my back hurts for the first time in weeks. Must go work on my overwrought and deranged nervous system.