I've moved and consolidated my two blogs here:
http://www.hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com
Friday, April 11, 2008
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Some Kind of Ay-Rab
Its been a while since I had any time (or inclination) to write one of my heart-warming memoiry essays. School, work and, more to the point, the quitting of coffee, have all conspired to keep me from pouring my heart out to absolute strangers at the rate I was accustomed. But seriously, one of the main reasons has been the fact that my son joined the Marines, and all of the ugly things that went before that, that put an end to my relationshiop with my family. I just haven't wanted to write about anything. Well, without further ado, I am getting back on the horse. Here go.
I lived in New Orleans, many, many years ago, when I was a pretty, dumb, angry, mean-spirited 140 pounds of sheer unhappiness. This was a long time before Katrina, when New Orleans was only known for the odd twin notorieties of being the South's gay mecca and the country's murder capital. An odd time to be there, indeed. I hadn't really had any urge to go there; as I often did in those days, I flipped coins and let the vagaries of destiny send me on my way. I lived in a truly horrifying neighborhood. I felt safer living in Palestine under Israeli siege; no exaggeration. In one weekend, four bodies were found in my by-water neighborhood. I worked in a grocery store there owned by a pleasantly debauched trio of muslims--an Iranian, and two Indians. Don't ask me what they were doing there, but they had been there for years, and had become quite Orleany in their outlook.
There had been a rash of murder/robberies going on for a few weeks a short time after I started there. The locus had been our outer-French quarter nexus of bars and restaurants. A week earlier a McDonald's a few blocks away had been held up. The robbers took the money and then murdered the staff. Mosen, my Iranian boss came in one night, shortly after, and walked around the counter placing a delicate looking gun on the counter next to the cash register.
"Anyone comes in to rob you," he said, "you pull this out and shoot him."
I stared back. "I'm not going to use that", I told him flatly.
"What kind of Palestinian are you," he yelled. "We have a friend, a Palestinian, he had a liquor store in the Treme [a neighborhood whose sheer lawlessness made ours seem somewhat tolerable] and some motherfuckers came in and robbed him and they shot him. And with the bullets still in his body, he got up," he said, lifting his forearm, pointing his finger at the sky as if he was resurrecting the body of his friend himself, "and walked over to the projects and found them. Even he knew these kids," he added with a scowl, "Can you believe it? And he went and he found them, and he killed everyone of them. With the bullets still in his body!"
The gun stayed there, next to the register, and a few nervous months passed but I never was forced to consider using it. I quit and left for New York a little while later.
Years later my friends from that time, Paul and Helen were the victims of a home invasion that left Helen dead. Paul and their son survived--and I have to say it seems like a miracle that they did. Paul was shot three times. I've been thinking of that gun, and I think of Paul and Helen, and I think of my own son, who recently joined the Marines. I was hoping I'd never have to use that gun because I didn't want to become a person who had killed. There is something that separates people once they've killed. Later I learned that there was something that separated people who had been subjected to horrifying acts of violence. Violence and death separate us, we become killers and we become victims and there is everyone else, just watching. I've been thinking of how to face my son, when he comes home--if he comes home--if he has killed, if he has been injured, the great divide that will separate us. On one level I despise him for doing this. I lived in a place where people with guns and artillery callously whittled away at people's lives. I hated them. I hate the soldiers in this war, too. And he's a soldier in this war.
And I guess this blog ended up going in a really different direction. Like the world. How did we get here? In a place where I can mourn the deaths of friends, where my own son signs up to be a killer, where the rest of us sit idly by and watch it all happen?
And then I started thinking about how this did happen. I was in New Orleans when my son was just three. I went on to New York from there, I was never really a part of his life, apart from some visits, a few letters and emails, presents on Christmas that I thought would give him the right outlook. We had a need, both he and I, to exist as father and son. I know it was very important to him, and though I never wanted it to be, I must admit that I've always wanted to be a part of his life. Except for the bringing him up; I was busy being an activist, changing the world. And the saddest part is not how little I changed, but that I actually added to the world's woes by not being there to guide my son, a Palestinian-Native American-Colombian who's off to invade another country.
I lived in New Orleans, many, many years ago, when I was a pretty, dumb, angry, mean-spirited 140 pounds of sheer unhappiness. This was a long time before Katrina, when New Orleans was only known for the odd twin notorieties of being the South's gay mecca and the country's murder capital. An odd time to be there, indeed. I hadn't really had any urge to go there; as I often did in those days, I flipped coins and let the vagaries of destiny send me on my way. I lived in a truly horrifying neighborhood. I felt safer living in Palestine under Israeli siege; no exaggeration. In one weekend, four bodies were found in my by-water neighborhood. I worked in a grocery store there owned by a pleasantly debauched trio of muslims--an Iranian, and two Indians. Don't ask me what they were doing there, but they had been there for years, and had become quite Orleany in their outlook.
There had been a rash of murder/robberies going on for a few weeks a short time after I started there. The locus had been our outer-French quarter nexus of bars and restaurants. A week earlier a McDonald's a few blocks away had been held up. The robbers took the money and then murdered the staff. Mosen, my Iranian boss came in one night, shortly after, and walked around the counter placing a delicate looking gun on the counter next to the cash register.
"Anyone comes in to rob you," he said, "you pull this out and shoot him."
I stared back. "I'm not going to use that", I told him flatly.
"What kind of Palestinian are you," he yelled. "We have a friend, a Palestinian, he had a liquor store in the Treme [a neighborhood whose sheer lawlessness made ours seem somewhat tolerable] and some motherfuckers came in and robbed him and they shot him. And with the bullets still in his body, he got up," he said, lifting his forearm, pointing his finger at the sky as if he was resurrecting the body of his friend himself, "and walked over to the projects and found them. Even he knew these kids," he added with a scowl, "Can you believe it? And he went and he found them, and he killed everyone of them. With the bullets still in his body!"
The gun stayed there, next to the register, and a few nervous months passed but I never was forced to consider using it. I quit and left for New York a little while later.
Years later my friends from that time, Paul and Helen were the victims of a home invasion that left Helen dead. Paul and their son survived--and I have to say it seems like a miracle that they did. Paul was shot three times. I've been thinking of that gun, and I think of Paul and Helen, and I think of my own son, who recently joined the Marines. I was hoping I'd never have to use that gun because I didn't want to become a person who had killed. There is something that separates people once they've killed. Later I learned that there was something that separated people who had been subjected to horrifying acts of violence. Violence and death separate us, we become killers and we become victims and there is everyone else, just watching. I've been thinking of how to face my son, when he comes home--if he comes home--if he has killed, if he has been injured, the great divide that will separate us. On one level I despise him for doing this. I lived in a place where people with guns and artillery callously whittled away at people's lives. I hated them. I hate the soldiers in this war, too. And he's a soldier in this war.
And I guess this blog ended up going in a really different direction. Like the world. How did we get here? In a place where I can mourn the deaths of friends, where my own son signs up to be a killer, where the rest of us sit idly by and watch it all happen?
And then I started thinking about how this did happen. I was in New Orleans when my son was just three. I went on to New York from there, I was never really a part of his life, apart from some visits, a few letters and emails, presents on Christmas that I thought would give him the right outlook. We had a need, both he and I, to exist as father and son. I know it was very important to him, and though I never wanted it to be, I must admit that I've always wanted to be a part of his life. Except for the bringing him up; I was busy being an activist, changing the world. And the saddest part is not how little I changed, but that I actually added to the world's woes by not being there to guide my son, a Palestinian-Native American-Colombian who's off to invade another country.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Remembering Celeste
My friend Celeste Victoria died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. I try every year to make to remember her life, and to use that life to keep my perspective fresh. That day was a horrifying event for New Yorkers (as I was then, just completing my sixth year of life in the city). Another friend of mine worked just down the block from the buildings. In fact, any person in my life could have been walking down the block at that particular moment. Or just happen to have their destiny bring them to be there at that moment. As Celeste did.
I also remember Celeste because it helps me to remember who I used to be. A young idealist with static concepts about justice that sprung from a leftist laundry list; something of a contrarian jerk, with enough moral high ground to allow me to look down on all creatures great and small. Part of that vision was my work at Manhattan Neighborhood Network, a community television center not too far from the west side city sanitation department. Celeste and I started work there at the same time. We had a long Saturday shift, 9 am to 8pm, where we ran the entire place together and alone and we were responsible for the crazy producers, the camera tripods, the toilet paper in the bathroom, everything. And so, though we were people who may never have met otherwise, and who often clashed--and may have even hated each other at times--we were friends and she will always have a special place in my heart because I knew her when things seemed still to make sense, when I was convinced of right and wrong, when I was a New Yorker.
When Celeste died, I was in Ramallah. I wouldn't know of her death for months still. In Ramallah, I had watched missiles destroy houses and buildings in my neighborhood, watched cities blockaded for months on end. A thousand Palestinians had been killed by then--or more, I don't look these things up anymore. When I watched those buildings fall on CNN, it seemed to be somewhere far away, somewhere I had never been. Though I had been there. A city I had never lived in, which had been my home for over half a decade. I couldn't remember being someone in that city; instead, watching the buildings collapse was like watching a movie.
Its odd that now when I see images of Palestine, of Israeli soldiers stomping through Ramallah, again I feel its as if someone else lived there and I only heard about it. Its hard to forget bad things, but only for the first year or two. And then something happens, those memories become displaced, they feel borrowed. You never forget the events, of course; you just forget who you were when they happened.
One of the cable news channels is re-broadcasting its 9-11 coverage today, instead of televising the Senate Hearings on General Petraeus (though I'm not sure there would be anything meaningful in doing the latter). After shunning those images for years, I now look at that cloud or the buildings collapsing and I force myself to remember. I force myself to know that Celeste was there and to remember her, so as to remember who I was as well.
I also remember Celeste because it helps me to remember who I used to be. A young idealist with static concepts about justice that sprung from a leftist laundry list; something of a contrarian jerk, with enough moral high ground to allow me to look down on all creatures great and small. Part of that vision was my work at Manhattan Neighborhood Network, a community television center not too far from the west side city sanitation department. Celeste and I started work there at the same time. We had a long Saturday shift, 9 am to 8pm, where we ran the entire place together and alone and we were responsible for the crazy producers, the camera tripods, the toilet paper in the bathroom, everything. And so, though we were people who may never have met otherwise, and who often clashed--and may have even hated each other at times--we were friends and she will always have a special place in my heart because I knew her when things seemed still to make sense, when I was convinced of right and wrong, when I was a New Yorker.
When Celeste died, I was in Ramallah. I wouldn't know of her death for months still. In Ramallah, I had watched missiles destroy houses and buildings in my neighborhood, watched cities blockaded for months on end. A thousand Palestinians had been killed by then--or more, I don't look these things up anymore. When I watched those buildings fall on CNN, it seemed to be somewhere far away, somewhere I had never been. Though I had been there. A city I had never lived in, which had been my home for over half a decade. I couldn't remember being someone in that city; instead, watching the buildings collapse was like watching a movie.
Its odd that now when I see images of Palestine, of Israeli soldiers stomping through Ramallah, again I feel its as if someone else lived there and I only heard about it. Its hard to forget bad things, but only for the first year or two. And then something happens, those memories become displaced, they feel borrowed. You never forget the events, of course; you just forget who you were when they happened.
One of the cable news channels is re-broadcasting its 9-11 coverage today, instead of televising the Senate Hearings on General Petraeus (though I'm not sure there would be anything meaningful in doing the latter). After shunning those images for years, I now look at that cloud or the buildings collapsing and I force myself to remember. I force myself to know that Celeste was there and to remember her, so as to remember who I was as well.
Sunday, September 2, 2007
Back to School
I'm not sure its a good idea outing myself like this--but here goes. I'm going to school. I should say back to school, although I have to admit I never think of myself as having attended college to begin with. Maybe its because it was only two semesters--three if you want to get technical, but I spent the last clocking in just long enough to scoop up my generous financial aid package so I could head off on a nihilistic world tour. Maybe its because I went to Chico State, or maybe its because I wasn't ready to sit down and learn the thing I would be doing for the rest of my life. To be honest, I was pretty lucky to get into school to begin with--I had a great SAT score, but my cumulative GPA was 2.2, and there were a lot of D's in the mix. Objectively speaking, I'd have to say I blew an amazing opportunity back then. But I've never felt that way, really; I regret alot of the things I did, and alot of the opportunities I missed, but I don't regret the man I am today. So there.
One thing in my favor this time around, is the PACE program at Berkeley City College. There is such an emphasis these days on educational programs for youth, that our society forgets there are so many of us that slip through the cracks and screw up, and that despite that--or even because of it--we have so much to contribute to society. Our experience, our knowledge of self-- everything necessary to temper education and training into wise social and economic output.
You seldom hear educators talk this way. The paradigm these days is to accelerate young people into positions they don't have the maturity to understand or to handle. Interestingly, I've been making a living lately transcribing and translating footage for video documentaries, and one of these concerns gifted teens and the career pressures they face. One thing I've found interesting in nearly all subjects, is the tremendous amount of pressure put on them by educators. The brighter they are, the more they are expected to take on, the less time they have to reflect about their lives and their place in the world. Consequenlty, they must have the whole of their lives mapped out by the time they are eighteen in order to compete for the best University that will place them on the right track for the best Law, Medical or Science school for their post-bach. I'm not sure I see the rush myself--the only shortage of doctors, lawyers or scientists is in those areas that work toward the common good, and rushing these kids into lifelong debt to pay off a career they never got a good chance to consider, hardly seems like a way to remedy that problem. People just never seem to wonder if its a good idea to give a cloistered 25 year old responsibility for defending someone's life in court or placing a tube in some guy's stomach or helping to create tomorrow's WMD or eternal environmental toxin.
I'm not trying to imply that education should be reserved for people over thirty; that's pretty preposterous. Some people do have the maturity and state of mind to assume great responsibility straight out of college at a tender age. But just as many who are highly intelligent, but didn't have those qualities when they were 18-25, have developed them to as great--or even greater--degree later in life. The world deserves to benefit not only from their intellect, but from the accumen of their lived lives. I can actually think of no more revolutionary or culture-changing process than to rend education from the parental umbilical cord and offer it to adults who have already lived and worked in the world.
PACE puts a specific emphasis on creating a cohort of working adults, who take their classes in blocks at night and on weekends. Everyone I have met associated with this program is amazing--just some really amazing stories of people who've kicked ass on their own and overcame great obstacles to do something meaningful with the remainder of their lives. I do feel a little funny here--I am not a working mother or father with a couple of kids which tends to be the median here. But what is amazing is to not feel like an outsider in academic setting just because my parents were poor and uneducated. Its still new, though, so I may get my chance to be alienated soon enough.
One thing in my favor this time around, is the PACE program at Berkeley City College. There is such an emphasis these days on educational programs for youth, that our society forgets there are so many of us that slip through the cracks and screw up, and that despite that--or even because of it--we have so much to contribute to society. Our experience, our knowledge of self-- everything necessary to temper education and training into wise social and economic output.
You seldom hear educators talk this way. The paradigm these days is to accelerate young people into positions they don't have the maturity to understand or to handle. Interestingly, I've been making a living lately transcribing and translating footage for video documentaries, and one of these concerns gifted teens and the career pressures they face. One thing I've found interesting in nearly all subjects, is the tremendous amount of pressure put on them by educators. The brighter they are, the more they are expected to take on, the less time they have to reflect about their lives and their place in the world. Consequenlty, they must have the whole of their lives mapped out by the time they are eighteen in order to compete for the best University that will place them on the right track for the best Law, Medical or Science school for their post-bach. I'm not sure I see the rush myself--the only shortage of doctors, lawyers or scientists is in those areas that work toward the common good, and rushing these kids into lifelong debt to pay off a career they never got a good chance to consider, hardly seems like a way to remedy that problem. People just never seem to wonder if its a good idea to give a cloistered 25 year old responsibility for defending someone's life in court or placing a tube in some guy's stomach or helping to create tomorrow's WMD or eternal environmental toxin.
I'm not trying to imply that education should be reserved for people over thirty; that's pretty preposterous. Some people do have the maturity and state of mind to assume great responsibility straight out of college at a tender age. But just as many who are highly intelligent, but didn't have those qualities when they were 18-25, have developed them to as great--or even greater--degree later in life. The world deserves to benefit not only from their intellect, but from the accumen of their lived lives. I can actually think of no more revolutionary or culture-changing process than to rend education from the parental umbilical cord and offer it to adults who have already lived and worked in the world.
PACE puts a specific emphasis on creating a cohort of working adults, who take their classes in blocks at night and on weekends. Everyone I have met associated with this program is amazing--just some really amazing stories of people who've kicked ass on their own and overcame great obstacles to do something meaningful with the remainder of their lives. I do feel a little funny here--I am not a working mother or father with a couple of kids which tends to be the median here. But what is amazing is to not feel like an outsider in academic setting just because my parents were poor and uneducated. Its still new, though, so I may get my chance to be alienated soon enough.
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
The Fourth in Alameda
I hate July 4th. Many people will say that and do the barbecues or watch the fireworks; not me, I boycott. I never liked the holiday much, anyway; at first because fireworks are such a letdown and then you have a whole bunch of sulpherous smelly crap to clean up and not even any presents. I usually ignore the holiday completely, but after a seeming eternity under Bush--I've just been angry from the moment I woke up.
Fortunately, I have a lot of work to do today. I'm way behind on a deadline. Unfortunately, there is no food in the house. So I had to venture out. For those of you who follow this blog religeously, you'll note that I live in Alameda now--an island hamlet just a short shot through the Posey Tube from downtown Oakland, and though it isn't really seperate from Oakland, bumping up right next to the airport, it somehow feels like living in a completely different kind of community.
Its an odd place. Not a real island, nor a real city, nor a real suburb--it reminds more of one of those enchanted, cloud obscured cities in Orientalist lore, reached through a long, arduous mountain ascent, where people live forever and are communists, but nice about it. Its pig-iron American pedigree comes from its long history of being a naval station until the post cold war downsize came. You can still see ancient merchant marines in some of the older establishments here, their forearms blurred with indigo anchors and wide-hipped ladies and unfurled banners bearing long-forgotten professions and beliefs.
The island is divided in an unlikely set of demographics--twenty something professionals settling down to raise their families, old school white trash folks from the tender time when their kind ruled the East Bay, the traditional Alameda middle-class aristocracy, a smattering of extremely wealthy people in large ivy ensconced houses. But most importanlty, I think, there is a new wave of upwardly mobile foreign-born professionals and entrepeneurs carving out an ethnic niche here. Like many of the old white enclaves of the East Bay--such as San Leandro, where I grew up--Alameda has become the incubator for what will probably be the ruling class of the next life's American polity--children of the foreign born and their children.
So this is what I'm getting at. I went out around noon to get a bite to eat. Its been a long time since I lived anywhere with anything like a parade, but there it was churning its way up my street and making a bee line for the main drag, intersecting with my only hope of finding an open eatery. I was vaguely prepared for something like this. Demographically shift all you want America, white folks with deep roots are going to be in charge for a long time to come. This was an old school, middle american, Norman-freakin-Rockwell parade, it was just getting started and the streets were lined with people. Casting bad vibes omnidirectionally, I set out with little luck, block after parading block.
Claiming, as I do, to be a writer, I couldn't help but make a few observations. First, the crowd was huge. Say what you want about the unpopularity of the Iraq occupation, no one it seemed was sharing my boycott of this hypocritical exttravaganza. People had brought their own chairs, the sidewalks were thick with bodies. But what was interesting was that many of them--maybe even most of them--weren't white, were probably not even born in this country.
I'll confess to not being smart enough to figure this one out. There's something to be said for fitting in, of course. I don't consider myself American for a lot of reasons not readily apparent, but that doesn't mean I don't respect the desire of others to assimilate. Obesity, baseball, American Idol, ambient bigotry and market-driven hard-heartedness, I understand. But 4th of July? What foreign-born person would come out to watch a parade for a holiday celebrated by a population that seems to hate every other nation on earth?
I'm not sure I can answer, but as I walked I felt a certain tug at the spirit. Looking down at the sidewalk sullenly I could not dispel the feeling. It was even stronger because so many of these faces were brown, were Pilipino, Chinese, Vietnamese, Gujarat, Bengali, Pakistani, maybe even Palestinian, or Colombian. Out on a hot day with hot dogs and cokes, and slurpees and ice creams, and toddlers dancing to the beat of a middle school marching band, and horses and the leotarded children from a local tumbling academy, and the old cars, and the old fire engines and the clowns and the conga float.
I sat in a lonely little diner, the door had to be shut because of the fumes from the horse shit. Sparsely inhabited, dark, quiet but for the muffled parade sounds. I bought a paper so I wouldn't have to watch the parade go by, but I watched it anyway and ate my tasteless meal of desecated hashbrowns and over, over-easied eggs, and oily coffee.
The parade crowd had only grown while I was inside, and I had to break past a set of bleachers on the way back. As I neared my home, the military float passed. Composed, somewhat overly ironically, of two battle-fatigued men. Their trigger-fingers were set upon their down-pointed automatic weapons and they were followed by a moldy looking humvee that looked cheap and inauthentic. I wanted to spit at them, but there was a round of applause, just slightly greater than tepid, as they passed, and I didn't dare risk it. Getting my ass beat by a bunch of flag-waiving Pilipinos on Independence Day would just be a little too much at the moment.
Fortunately, I have a lot of work to do today. I'm way behind on a deadline. Unfortunately, there is no food in the house. So I had to venture out. For those of you who follow this blog religeously, you'll note that I live in Alameda now--an island hamlet just a short shot through the Posey Tube from downtown Oakland, and though it isn't really seperate from Oakland, bumping up right next to the airport, it somehow feels like living in a completely different kind of community.
Its an odd place. Not a real island, nor a real city, nor a real suburb--it reminds more of one of those enchanted, cloud obscured cities in Orientalist lore, reached through a long, arduous mountain ascent, where people live forever and are communists, but nice about it. Its pig-iron American pedigree comes from its long history of being a naval station until the post cold war downsize came. You can still see ancient merchant marines in some of the older establishments here, their forearms blurred with indigo anchors and wide-hipped ladies and unfurled banners bearing long-forgotten professions and beliefs.
The island is divided in an unlikely set of demographics--twenty something professionals settling down to raise their families, old school white trash folks from the tender time when their kind ruled the East Bay, the traditional Alameda middle-class aristocracy, a smattering of extremely wealthy people in large ivy ensconced houses. But most importanlty, I think, there is a new wave of upwardly mobile foreign-born professionals and entrepeneurs carving out an ethnic niche here. Like many of the old white enclaves of the East Bay--such as San Leandro, where I grew up--Alameda has become the incubator for what will probably be the ruling class of the next life's American polity--children of the foreign born and their children.
So this is what I'm getting at. I went out around noon to get a bite to eat. Its been a long time since I lived anywhere with anything like a parade, but there it was churning its way up my street and making a bee line for the main drag, intersecting with my only hope of finding an open eatery. I was vaguely prepared for something like this. Demographically shift all you want America, white folks with deep roots are going to be in charge for a long time to come. This was an old school, middle american, Norman-freakin-Rockwell parade, it was just getting started and the streets were lined with people. Casting bad vibes omnidirectionally, I set out with little luck, block after parading block.
Claiming, as I do, to be a writer, I couldn't help but make a few observations. First, the crowd was huge. Say what you want about the unpopularity of the Iraq occupation, no one it seemed was sharing my boycott of this hypocritical exttravaganza. People had brought their own chairs, the sidewalks were thick with bodies. But what was interesting was that many of them--maybe even most of them--weren't white, were probably not even born in this country.
I'll confess to not being smart enough to figure this one out. There's something to be said for fitting in, of course. I don't consider myself American for a lot of reasons not readily apparent, but that doesn't mean I don't respect the desire of others to assimilate. Obesity, baseball, American Idol, ambient bigotry and market-driven hard-heartedness, I understand. But 4th of July? What foreign-born person would come out to watch a parade for a holiday celebrated by a population that seems to hate every other nation on earth?
I'm not sure I can answer, but as I walked I felt a certain tug at the spirit. Looking down at the sidewalk sullenly I could not dispel the feeling. It was even stronger because so many of these faces were brown, were Pilipino, Chinese, Vietnamese, Gujarat, Bengali, Pakistani, maybe even Palestinian, or Colombian. Out on a hot day with hot dogs and cokes, and slurpees and ice creams, and toddlers dancing to the beat of a middle school marching band, and horses and the leotarded children from a local tumbling academy, and the old cars, and the old fire engines and the clowns and the conga float.
I sat in a lonely little diner, the door had to be shut because of the fumes from the horse shit. Sparsely inhabited, dark, quiet but for the muffled parade sounds. I bought a paper so I wouldn't have to watch the parade go by, but I watched it anyway and ate my tasteless meal of desecated hashbrowns and over, over-easied eggs, and oily coffee.
The parade crowd had only grown while I was inside, and I had to break past a set of bleachers on the way back. As I neared my home, the military float passed. Composed, somewhat overly ironically, of two battle-fatigued men. Their trigger-fingers were set upon their down-pointed automatic weapons and they were followed by a moldy looking humvee that looked cheap and inauthentic. I wanted to spit at them, but there was a round of applause, just slightly greater than tepid, as they passed, and I didn't dare risk it. Getting my ass beat by a bunch of flag-waiving Pilipinos on Independence Day would just be a little too much at the moment.
Thursday, March 8, 2007
Everyone Wants to Die in Dura, Part 1
As you may have guessed, being half Palestinian and half Colombian brings with it a multitude of uncommon experiences. Unfortunately, the majority of them for me have been long and odd sagas about vengeance and loss, hopelessness and ignorance. This is one of them.
My father, Ghazi, and his brother, Taha had a long and sordid history. Taha, I must say was a beautiful man while he lived; a raw, giving, emotional firehose who stank of cigarettes and farts and cried whenever he laid eyes on his brother's children. He was my dad's opposite, guileless where my dad was consumed with greed, dirty and stinky, where my dad was mired in vanity. Perhaps it was because Taha had a harder life--and that's saying something for a guy from Palestine. There was the mess with Safia. Safia, Taha's wife for nearly half a century, was not the woman promised to him when he reached manhood; there was a tribal mishigaz, the details of which are always explained to me differently every time I ask, and the men in the family gathered along with my grandfather and beat Taha within an inch of his life. It seems obvious that they meant to kill him, and if not, that they didn't care if they did. Taha was in a coma for a week or so, according to the story, emerging from being "the handsome one" in the family, as my father told my mother, to the Uncle described above, with a lifelong list of ailments and coginitive issues. Its a brutal story, but not an isolated one. My grandfather died a few years later, and my grandmother a few days after that. She suspected that one of her daughters was hiding some of my grandfather's cash in her house after he died, my grandmother confronted my aunt about it in their home, they had an argument about it. As my grandmother left the house, her daughter threw a stone, which hit the head of its target far more accurately than she had intended it to.
With the beating, my grandfather had disowned Taha, making my dad the first born. My father never seemed to mind the method in which he had ascended. When my grandfather died, Taha assumed--perhaps because it would have been his own perspective if the roles were reversed--that things would go back to the way they should. My dad, however, had no interest in the old way. They reached a shaky truce in which they shared the title, with my father having somewhat more control and the support of his sisters and other members of the family. There was a bitter enmity between them for the remainder of Taha's life. I was never given the whole story; my mother, who had assumed the mantle of archivist for my non-communicative father, told me stories about his side of the family, giving me tantalizing tid bits here and there, but you could never fully believe what she said. She obviously liked telling stories, the spookier the better. She told me that flies could turn invisible, that cats had a secret retractable claw at the end of their tails by which they ripped the lungs out of infants and children when their parents weren't looking; and she even claimed to have witnessed the resurrection of a man from her neighborhood in Bogota. But much of what she told me about my father's family, has been independantly corroborated by my father, in one way or the other over the last few years. I've queried and compared their versions, like a chemist applying solutions to bases and looking for chemical markers, and I've come up with a mosaic of things that seem mostly true, punctuated as they are with surreal details that can't possibly have happened, but seemed to have anyway.
The enmity between my father and my uncle lasted for decades. I remember being sent as an emissary from the fiefdom of Flea Market stalls run by my father, to the small, crowded stall that my Uncle ran down the way, to break large bills for change. These were the only times that my Uncle did not seem overjoyed to see me, but he would grudgingly give me what I had been sent for, and sometimes send back some coffee for my father; not out of spite, but because he was fundamentally, and unfortunately, a man who doggedly stuck to certain principles. Things continued like this for sometime. They lived seperate lives in America, and our families experienced seperate fortunes. While we lived in an Oakland ghetto apartment for a few years, my father was a shrewd and ruthless business man, and by hook or by crook (less hook, more crook), he made enough money to move us into a decent house in San Leandro. My Uncle, by contrast, never learned English, never moved up, never stopped dressing like a Felahi. He and his family lived in a progression of small, crowded ghetto apartments and backyard Oakland ramshackles, one after the other until he died.
My father is not the live and let live kind of guy, nor, apparenlty the live and let die type either, though he has mellowed somewhat in the last few years. Taha expired in that typical tragic way that seems to only affect those involved in protracted ethnic and political turmoil; a resident alien of the US, he ironically had no intrinsic right to visit his homeland, not like my father, who as a naturalized American citizen received all the rights to travel to and from Dura al' Q'ara that a stateless Palestinian like Taha could only dream of. For years, Taha had waited for permission from the Israeli government to return. He knew he had little time left, he wanted to die in Dura. The mail came one day and there was an envelope marked with the Israeli seal and he opened it and died right there at the living room table.
As I said, my father had trouble letting things go. The wake was held in the banquet room at Dick's. I always liked Dick's, the way its lone marquis rose above the squalid, flat blocks of warehouses and factories in that part of the town, sprouting up from the railroad, to proclaim !DICK'S!, as if it was a revelation. It was one of those stand-alone deluxe diners, that you don't see anymore, with a bar and a banquet room, and my dad reserved the latter for the family post-mortum. It makes me a little sad that I missed the funeral; I had already been excommunicated from the family in a way. Because I had been away for so long, most assumed that I was uninterested, which was not exactly true at first, but became so over time. The more they left me out of family business, the more that energy was consumed in other endeavors.
As the now uncontested patriarch, it was my dad's role to speak at the assemblage. These were the adult children of Taha--Wasfia, Omar, Halima, and a few others who I no longer remember, and a bevvy of cousins, who may have only been there to see if they could get a handout from my dad. But the heart of the group was Taha's family and they hated my father each to a degree; that emotion was only tempered in some by the pragmatic realization that as a succesful relative he held the keys to certain destinies in his hand which were worth being polite for.
The story of the wake was told to me by my mother, who always gets a kick out of how crazy my father is. She knew Taha quite well, loved him dearly and counted Halima as one of her best friends for a long while, so she was invited independently of my father. They had not seen each other for ten years or so since the divorce; in the meantime, my father had ventured back to Palestine to find a wife who had bore him a new handful of children. My father took the stage in front of the assemblage and he didn't say much more than Taha's wife was a whore. From the way my mom told the story, the men there would have killed my father if it weren't for the fact that one of the waitresses heard the scuffle and called the police. My mother took the children, even her ex-husband's, to another room, and when the police came, my father was holding off Taha's sons with a folding chair.
One would think this a perfect place to end this story, but though my father's family has great stories, they lack well-placed endings. The political situation in Palestine had changed with the advent of the Oslo Accords by the time of my Uncle's death. Palestine now had a rudimentary legal structure, at least for completely internal affairs, and so Taha's family pursued Taha's old quest for justice--the replacement of his role as the first born, and their position as rightful controlling heirs to the land--in Palestinian civil court. For nearly another decade, they fought over the land. And then, just last year Safia had a stroke and went into a coma, and that is when I come back into the story again.
My father, Ghazi, and his brother, Taha had a long and sordid history. Taha, I must say was a beautiful man while he lived; a raw, giving, emotional firehose who stank of cigarettes and farts and cried whenever he laid eyes on his brother's children. He was my dad's opposite, guileless where my dad was consumed with greed, dirty and stinky, where my dad was mired in vanity. Perhaps it was because Taha had a harder life--and that's saying something for a guy from Palestine. There was the mess with Safia. Safia, Taha's wife for nearly half a century, was not the woman promised to him when he reached manhood; there was a tribal mishigaz, the details of which are always explained to me differently every time I ask, and the men in the family gathered along with my grandfather and beat Taha within an inch of his life. It seems obvious that they meant to kill him, and if not, that they didn't care if they did. Taha was in a coma for a week or so, according to the story, emerging from being "the handsome one" in the family, as my father told my mother, to the Uncle described above, with a lifelong list of ailments and coginitive issues. Its a brutal story, but not an isolated one. My grandfather died a few years later, and my grandmother a few days after that. She suspected that one of her daughters was hiding some of my grandfather's cash in her house after he died, my grandmother confronted my aunt about it in their home, they had an argument about it. As my grandmother left the house, her daughter threw a stone, which hit the head of its target far more accurately than she had intended it to.
With the beating, my grandfather had disowned Taha, making my dad the first born. My father never seemed to mind the method in which he had ascended. When my grandfather died, Taha assumed--perhaps because it would have been his own perspective if the roles were reversed--that things would go back to the way they should. My dad, however, had no interest in the old way. They reached a shaky truce in which they shared the title, with my father having somewhat more control and the support of his sisters and other members of the family. There was a bitter enmity between them for the remainder of Taha's life. I was never given the whole story; my mother, who had assumed the mantle of archivist for my non-communicative father, told me stories about his side of the family, giving me tantalizing tid bits here and there, but you could never fully believe what she said. She obviously liked telling stories, the spookier the better. She told me that flies could turn invisible, that cats had a secret retractable claw at the end of their tails by which they ripped the lungs out of infants and children when their parents weren't looking; and she even claimed to have witnessed the resurrection of a man from her neighborhood in Bogota. But much of what she told me about my father's family, has been independantly corroborated by my father, in one way or the other over the last few years. I've queried and compared their versions, like a chemist applying solutions to bases and looking for chemical markers, and I've come up with a mosaic of things that seem mostly true, punctuated as they are with surreal details that can't possibly have happened, but seemed to have anyway.
The enmity between my father and my uncle lasted for decades. I remember being sent as an emissary from the fiefdom of Flea Market stalls run by my father, to the small, crowded stall that my Uncle ran down the way, to break large bills for change. These were the only times that my Uncle did not seem overjoyed to see me, but he would grudgingly give me what I had been sent for, and sometimes send back some coffee for my father; not out of spite, but because he was fundamentally, and unfortunately, a man who doggedly stuck to certain principles. Things continued like this for sometime. They lived seperate lives in America, and our families experienced seperate fortunes. While we lived in an Oakland ghetto apartment for a few years, my father was a shrewd and ruthless business man, and by hook or by crook (less hook, more crook), he made enough money to move us into a decent house in San Leandro. My Uncle, by contrast, never learned English, never moved up, never stopped dressing like a Felahi. He and his family lived in a progression of small, crowded ghetto apartments and backyard Oakland ramshackles, one after the other until he died.
My father is not the live and let live kind of guy, nor, apparenlty the live and let die type either, though he has mellowed somewhat in the last few years. Taha expired in that typical tragic way that seems to only affect those involved in protracted ethnic and political turmoil; a resident alien of the US, he ironically had no intrinsic right to visit his homeland, not like my father, who as a naturalized American citizen received all the rights to travel to and from Dura al' Q'ara that a stateless Palestinian like Taha could only dream of. For years, Taha had waited for permission from the Israeli government to return. He knew he had little time left, he wanted to die in Dura. The mail came one day and there was an envelope marked with the Israeli seal and he opened it and died right there at the living room table.
As I said, my father had trouble letting things go. The wake was held in the banquet room at Dick's. I always liked Dick's, the way its lone marquis rose above the squalid, flat blocks of warehouses and factories in that part of the town, sprouting up from the railroad, to proclaim !DICK'S!, as if it was a revelation. It was one of those stand-alone deluxe diners, that you don't see anymore, with a bar and a banquet room, and my dad reserved the latter for the family post-mortum. It makes me a little sad that I missed the funeral; I had already been excommunicated from the family in a way. Because I had been away for so long, most assumed that I was uninterested, which was not exactly true at first, but became so over time. The more they left me out of family business, the more that energy was consumed in other endeavors.
As the now uncontested patriarch, it was my dad's role to speak at the assemblage. These were the adult children of Taha--Wasfia, Omar, Halima, and a few others who I no longer remember, and a bevvy of cousins, who may have only been there to see if they could get a handout from my dad. But the heart of the group was Taha's family and they hated my father each to a degree; that emotion was only tempered in some by the pragmatic realization that as a succesful relative he held the keys to certain destinies in his hand which were worth being polite for.
The story of the wake was told to me by my mother, who always gets a kick out of how crazy my father is. She knew Taha quite well, loved him dearly and counted Halima as one of her best friends for a long while, so she was invited independently of my father. They had not seen each other for ten years or so since the divorce; in the meantime, my father had ventured back to Palestine to find a wife who had bore him a new handful of children. My father took the stage in front of the assemblage and he didn't say much more than Taha's wife was a whore. From the way my mom told the story, the men there would have killed my father if it weren't for the fact that one of the waitresses heard the scuffle and called the police. My mother took the children, even her ex-husband's, to another room, and when the police came, my father was holding off Taha's sons with a folding chair.
One would think this a perfect place to end this story, but though my father's family has great stories, they lack well-placed endings. The political situation in Palestine had changed with the advent of the Oslo Accords by the time of my Uncle's death. Palestine now had a rudimentary legal structure, at least for completely internal affairs, and so Taha's family pursued Taha's old quest for justice--the replacement of his role as the first born, and their position as rightful controlling heirs to the land--in Palestinian civil court. For nearly another decade, they fought over the land. And then, just last year Safia had a stroke and went into a coma, and that is when I come back into the story again.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Hospice Temp
Its been an odd series of months. Those interested in the sundry can read accounts in this blog and in hyphenatedrepublic.blogspot.com, its predecessor. Others that know me probably already know the whole story. I guess at the point that I'm at in my life, I need a bounty of good experiences, but I've more or less gotten the opposite--one after the other, one on top of the other. Not the worst things in the world; just a steady stream of unapetizing episodes, which linked one to the other as they have been, have pecked away at my lust for life. I thought that I could escape my fate by riding the New Year's transition and all the hope of change that it brings, but I discovered that wanting things to change is not enough. Life gives what its going to give, whether or not you're ready to open your heart to positive experiences, and often when you want the curve of reality to prove that mostly good things happen to those willing to welcome them, you are instead shown that life is incomprensibly cruel and nonsensical.
As time passes, just as I think that my current tolerance is at its limit, I seem to be exposed to more terrible realities. There is a range of joylessness, and, at the risk of paraphrasing a character from the Matrix trilogy, levels of survival I am willing to accept. I can deal with being depressed for a long period, of reorganizing my mind to deal with previously unthinkable situations and unwanted realities, and thus becoming a different, perhaps better person. But what if it doesn't stop? And what if, in turn my ability to redirect those experiences reaches its apogee, and I become bitter and reclusive? What if this life molds me into the kind of person we all fear to be most? The old man peaking ruefully out from between the blinds, with nothing but bitterness to enjoin to the world, unable to find where it was he came from, unable to love, unable to trust happiness. We all think of those people as somehow being predestined to end up like that, but we rarely stop and wonder what pushed them to the edge. Could they have been different, joyful people if life had dealt them another hand of cards?
This is what's been on my mind and why I haven't posted for awhile. I also wanted to give some time to the memorial post out of respect for the tragic death of Helen Hill. But a few days after I heard about Helen's death, something odd happened that has changed the way I've viewed fate--or life, or reality, this moment in time--whatever you want to call it. One of the things I did at the end of the year to shake up my luck was quit my old job. I really didn't like it there, and when you spend half your life doing something you don't respect surrounded by people that leave you non-plussed, it can weaken your outlook. I was jobless for a couple of weeks, and I had a productive novel writing period, but time does not stand still and neither does the rent and the Pg&E and it was time to go back to work. The temp agency I work for called me up and offered me a relatively high paying position at a well-known health care provider, and I went without asking too many questions.
I was to replace an employee who was going on maternity leave in a few months, but it didn't become clear what the place was for a day or two. I suppose I should have noticed somewhat earlier, but I was in a bit of a fog--I had hoped to get a little more time off work to finish my book, but the California Unemployment Insurance program had other plans, and I was saddled with a previous and woefully paltry benefit. I was looking at a long term assignment--a will-numbing, what's-the-point-office-gig, that would squander the best creative hours of the day, leaving me a drained wreck with enough time for a beer, a quick meal preparation and unsatisfying wank before I slept the rest of my non-working life away. What was worse is that the job was complex, involving the mastery of medical terminology, working knowledge of medication names, dosages and administrations, and the generation of detail-oriented reports for use for care of patients by doctors and nurses.
The woman I was to replace was 7 months pregnant and had the worst case of chronic dispepsia and nausea that I have ever seen. One of the first instructions that she gave me was to leave ample space between my chair and the trash can, for at any moment she might vomit, and often there was not enough time to reach the women's bathroom. One morning she was an hour and a half late because she had vomited all over her car and herself as she drove her daughter to school. She did her best to train me, but to be honest, I generally spaced out anytime she opened her mouth; I just didn't want to learn the job or be there.
A few days after I began working there, she called in sick a few days in a row, and then announced that she would claim disability until her maternity leave kicked in; she would not be back and I had not been paying enough attention to know the first thing about the job. It was then that I became aware exactly what I was involved in. I had heard the name hospice bandied about, but hadn't given it much thought, thinking perhaps that this was an accounting or business office. But this was the adminsitrative office of a home hospice program, where the nurses, caregivers, and support staff like myself, did the paperwork to keep it running.
The first step for a patient admitted into this program is to sign a certificate stating that they have a terminal illness. This CTI is a legal declaration that no means are meant to be taken to resuscitate the individual if they are dying or dead. Then the nurse assigned to the patient fills out the forms which show the diagnosis and medications to be administered. Part of my new job is to enter this data into the patient's chart; eventually I got the hang of the process and in turn, it was this new-found facility that made me acutely aware of what I had become involved in. Only pain relieving medication, mostly opiates, are prescribed for the patients; there are no anti-biotics, no anti-cancer drugs, no treatments. The diagnosis are startling--one patient, a sort of median of illness, had as her primary diagnosis cervical cancer. Her secondary diagnosis was a list of all the other organs--literally all of them--in which it was metastisizing. Often by the time I had received and entered this data, I was already being asked to mark their file as 'expired', the ironic and trusted euphemism for the cessation of both human life and file records. The database I manage is an evershifting portrait of lives being lost, one after the other. It was a startling thing to realize. I am just a temp and the last job that I had was at a company that makes Ipod vending machines. Here the task was literally of life and death importance.
The facts of life and death, were highlighted to me just a few days ago. One of my duties is to be the main contact between the patients, or more often their family members, and the nurses-- who do not give their cell phones to the patients as a practical matter. The daughter of a patient called in. She had a thick russian accent and I knew that she must be the relative of a patient I had just entered who had a very classic Eastern Europe name. The record had been one of the first, the one on which I basically learned the job through trial and error. She needed to speak to the nurse, her father was asking how to die. I asked her to give me her phone number so that I could be sure that we had it. She was flustered, she couldn't remember it, and I said that I would find it in the database and read it back to her to make sure that we had it. She began to cry, she cried in that way that people cry about death when they can't stop, they can't think, their entire body folds into it, from the gut up. The database was frozen, of course, or it seemed to be; the whole exchange may have lasted only a few minutes, but it seemed like a lifetime. All I could say was that I understood, that if she could only give me a minute or two, we could go on about the business at hand. And finally she remembered the number, just as I found it in the database, and I told her that I would contact the nurse as soon as possible. I was told later that the time of death was a few minutes after I hung up.
I've been upset about a lot of things, as I said. Its not life isn't going my way; I've been accustomed to that since my first day of grammar school. Its more that every year has revealed a new way for the world to be hideous, and sometimes I wonder if it is just being revealed to me alone; I seem to have this weird luck for being caught at the periphery of misfortune, just close enough to witness something that's destined to change me, things my friends and family don't see and that seem to alienate me from them. The next day on the way to work, I remembered that conversation with the man's daughter, that unrelenting weeping and sadness and the reality that was being witnessed by the person on the other side of the phone and I could literally see that scene, as if I had really been there. This image led to others, the details of deaths that I had never thought about and I was suddenly living them. I saw Helen Hill, murdered and dying in the arms of her husband Paul, and I saw Celeste Victoria, paniced, dying at the Windows of the World on September 11th, and I saw my friend Hassan, slip beneath the sea and his surprise at drowning. I remembered all the people that I've known that have died and I began to cry. I hid in an abandoned portico of a storefront, with my back to Market Street and I cried, and I couldn't stop and I was half an hour late for work.
I realize that my essays tend to end in the following way, which seems to make their arcs unreal. There is a climactic event, our hero learns a valuable life lesson. I suppose I wouldn't write about anything if I didn't somehow see things that way, and perhaps, more than ever, I need to see things that way. And so this is the lesson that I have learned, or chosen to take away, at least:
sometimes life (and in this case, death) gives you what you have been asking for, but not when you've asked for it or how.
I have lived these past few years after my private war, in a state of oversensitized, rationalized grief. I haven't let one death go unthought of in my head, because my deepest fear is not feeling it, of not grieving, of being unperturbed by this cycle. And then I would have to admit what I've suspected all along--that I am a bad person, barely human. I think and think, and wonder how I'm supposed to feel, and in a way I never really let go because there is no answer, no rationalization.
At last, because of this hospice temp job, I felt unmitigated grief; I could not stop what I was seeing in my head, it was beyond reasoning with, It came from my ankles, it rose from my belly and I wanted to vomit, I wanted to pound my head against the glass. And I thus came to terms with this barest and simplest truth; that we are all going to die, its happening everywhere all the time. It is only the end of the world when it happens to us or to those around us. We are most likely going to experience tragedies before we die and they will not make any sense. But somehow, God or evolution or whatever is running things, has given us a way to make sense of life. Not with our minds, because that's impossible; either because it is beyond logic, or perhaps because it so logical that our sensibilities cannot accept it. We can't grieve rationally, because we can't accept death as a rational part of life, and if we could, there wouldn't be much to grieve about.
But with our bodies, our visceral response, we have everything we need to process the unthinkable, and thus continue to live despite the irrationality of living. And if we are so wisely equipped, then there is at least something rational about it all.
As time passes, just as I think that my current tolerance is at its limit, I seem to be exposed to more terrible realities. There is a range of joylessness, and, at the risk of paraphrasing a character from the Matrix trilogy, levels of survival I am willing to accept. I can deal with being depressed for a long period, of reorganizing my mind to deal with previously unthinkable situations and unwanted realities, and thus becoming a different, perhaps better person. But what if it doesn't stop? And what if, in turn my ability to redirect those experiences reaches its apogee, and I become bitter and reclusive? What if this life molds me into the kind of person we all fear to be most? The old man peaking ruefully out from between the blinds, with nothing but bitterness to enjoin to the world, unable to find where it was he came from, unable to love, unable to trust happiness. We all think of those people as somehow being predestined to end up like that, but we rarely stop and wonder what pushed them to the edge. Could they have been different, joyful people if life had dealt them another hand of cards?
This is what's been on my mind and why I haven't posted for awhile. I also wanted to give some time to the memorial post out of respect for the tragic death of Helen Hill. But a few days after I heard about Helen's death, something odd happened that has changed the way I've viewed fate--or life, or reality, this moment in time--whatever you want to call it. One of the things I did at the end of the year to shake up my luck was quit my old job. I really didn't like it there, and when you spend half your life doing something you don't respect surrounded by people that leave you non-plussed, it can weaken your outlook. I was jobless for a couple of weeks, and I had a productive novel writing period, but time does not stand still and neither does the rent and the Pg&E and it was time to go back to work. The temp agency I work for called me up and offered me a relatively high paying position at a well-known health care provider, and I went without asking too many questions.
I was to replace an employee who was going on maternity leave in a few months, but it didn't become clear what the place was for a day or two. I suppose I should have noticed somewhat earlier, but I was in a bit of a fog--I had hoped to get a little more time off work to finish my book, but the California Unemployment Insurance program had other plans, and I was saddled with a previous and woefully paltry benefit. I was looking at a long term assignment--a will-numbing, what's-the-point-office-gig, that would squander the best creative hours of the day, leaving me a drained wreck with enough time for a beer, a quick meal preparation and unsatisfying wank before I slept the rest of my non-working life away. What was worse is that the job was complex, involving the mastery of medical terminology, working knowledge of medication names, dosages and administrations, and the generation of detail-oriented reports for use for care of patients by doctors and nurses.
The woman I was to replace was 7 months pregnant and had the worst case of chronic dispepsia and nausea that I have ever seen. One of the first instructions that she gave me was to leave ample space between my chair and the trash can, for at any moment she might vomit, and often there was not enough time to reach the women's bathroom. One morning she was an hour and a half late because she had vomited all over her car and herself as she drove her daughter to school. She did her best to train me, but to be honest, I generally spaced out anytime she opened her mouth; I just didn't want to learn the job or be there.
A few days after I began working there, she called in sick a few days in a row, and then announced that she would claim disability until her maternity leave kicked in; she would not be back and I had not been paying enough attention to know the first thing about the job. It was then that I became aware exactly what I was involved in. I had heard the name hospice bandied about, but hadn't given it much thought, thinking perhaps that this was an accounting or business office. But this was the adminsitrative office of a home hospice program, where the nurses, caregivers, and support staff like myself, did the paperwork to keep it running.
The first step for a patient admitted into this program is to sign a certificate stating that they have a terminal illness. This CTI is a legal declaration that no means are meant to be taken to resuscitate the individual if they are dying or dead. Then the nurse assigned to the patient fills out the forms which show the diagnosis and medications to be administered. Part of my new job is to enter this data into the patient's chart; eventually I got the hang of the process and in turn, it was this new-found facility that made me acutely aware of what I had become involved in. Only pain relieving medication, mostly opiates, are prescribed for the patients; there are no anti-biotics, no anti-cancer drugs, no treatments. The diagnosis are startling--one patient, a sort of median of illness, had as her primary diagnosis cervical cancer. Her secondary diagnosis was a list of all the other organs--literally all of them--in which it was metastisizing. Often by the time I had received and entered this data, I was already being asked to mark their file as 'expired', the ironic and trusted euphemism for the cessation of both human life and file records. The database I manage is an evershifting portrait of lives being lost, one after the other. It was a startling thing to realize. I am just a temp and the last job that I had was at a company that makes Ipod vending machines. Here the task was literally of life and death importance.
The facts of life and death, were highlighted to me just a few days ago. One of my duties is to be the main contact between the patients, or more often their family members, and the nurses-- who do not give their cell phones to the patients as a practical matter. The daughter of a patient called in. She had a thick russian accent and I knew that she must be the relative of a patient I had just entered who had a very classic Eastern Europe name. The record had been one of the first, the one on which I basically learned the job through trial and error. She needed to speak to the nurse, her father was asking how to die. I asked her to give me her phone number so that I could be sure that we had it. She was flustered, she couldn't remember it, and I said that I would find it in the database and read it back to her to make sure that we had it. She began to cry, she cried in that way that people cry about death when they can't stop, they can't think, their entire body folds into it, from the gut up. The database was frozen, of course, or it seemed to be; the whole exchange may have lasted only a few minutes, but it seemed like a lifetime. All I could say was that I understood, that if she could only give me a minute or two, we could go on about the business at hand. And finally she remembered the number, just as I found it in the database, and I told her that I would contact the nurse as soon as possible. I was told later that the time of death was a few minutes after I hung up.
I've been upset about a lot of things, as I said. Its not life isn't going my way; I've been accustomed to that since my first day of grammar school. Its more that every year has revealed a new way for the world to be hideous, and sometimes I wonder if it is just being revealed to me alone; I seem to have this weird luck for being caught at the periphery of misfortune, just close enough to witness something that's destined to change me, things my friends and family don't see and that seem to alienate me from them. The next day on the way to work, I remembered that conversation with the man's daughter, that unrelenting weeping and sadness and the reality that was being witnessed by the person on the other side of the phone and I could literally see that scene, as if I had really been there. This image led to others, the details of deaths that I had never thought about and I was suddenly living them. I saw Helen Hill, murdered and dying in the arms of her husband Paul, and I saw Celeste Victoria, paniced, dying at the Windows of the World on September 11th, and I saw my friend Hassan, slip beneath the sea and his surprise at drowning. I remembered all the people that I've known that have died and I began to cry. I hid in an abandoned portico of a storefront, with my back to Market Street and I cried, and I couldn't stop and I was half an hour late for work.
I realize that my essays tend to end in the following way, which seems to make their arcs unreal. There is a climactic event, our hero learns a valuable life lesson. I suppose I wouldn't write about anything if I didn't somehow see things that way, and perhaps, more than ever, I need to see things that way. And so this is the lesson that I have learned, or chosen to take away, at least:
sometimes life (and in this case, death) gives you what you have been asking for, but not when you've asked for it or how.
I have lived these past few years after my private war, in a state of oversensitized, rationalized grief. I haven't let one death go unthought of in my head, because my deepest fear is not feeling it, of not grieving, of being unperturbed by this cycle. And then I would have to admit what I've suspected all along--that I am a bad person, barely human. I think and think, and wonder how I'm supposed to feel, and in a way I never really let go because there is no answer, no rationalization.
At last, because of this hospice temp job, I felt unmitigated grief; I could not stop what I was seeing in my head, it was beyond reasoning with, It came from my ankles, it rose from my belly and I wanted to vomit, I wanted to pound my head against the glass. And I thus came to terms with this barest and simplest truth; that we are all going to die, its happening everywhere all the time. It is only the end of the world when it happens to us or to those around us. We are most likely going to experience tragedies before we die and they will not make any sense. But somehow, God or evolution or whatever is running things, has given us a way to make sense of life. Not with our minds, because that's impossible; either because it is beyond logic, or perhaps because it so logical that our sensibilities cannot accept it. We can't grieve rationally, because we can't accept death as a rational part of life, and if we could, there wouldn't be much to grieve about.
But with our bodies, our visceral response, we have everything we need to process the unthinkable, and thus continue to live despite the irrationality of living. And if we are so wisely equipped, then there is at least something rational about it all.
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