In Sane Grief

...I wrote very early this morning at the main journal, something I forgot to mention:
    While I was waiting in line at the Post Office, yesterday (always try to avoid the post office on the Friday before Mother's Day), to requisition a U-cart for transporting (Mom's and) my food donations to the managing office, I noticed a display of the two types of Passport applications and, having nothing better to do and being in a line of people who didn't seem particularly amenable to casual chat, decided to peruse a copy of each (application in person and application by mail). Strange but true, although the geographical parameters of my life range over half the globe, including crossing U.S. political borders, I've never needed a passport so I've never had one. As I read the application an alternate mind-track teased me with travels in and out of the U.S. that I've considered since December 8, 2008: Wandering the world to research how elders are incorporated in a variety of societies; Seeking work and residence in a socially democratic country with a decent universal health care system; Learning a new language (several possibilities have arisen since Mom died and I'm continuing to investigate which to pursue first) then visiting the country in which the language is spoken in order to sharpen my skills; acknowledging and taking up the invitations of a few online journaling friends to visit them and their areas; visiting famous high rain areas like Milford Sound, New Zealand, and Mt. Wai'ale'ale, Kauai.
    Once I'd been admitted to the post office office (sorry, I couldn't resist the redundancy) I noticed a camera set-up through an open door into another area. After the impromptu Food Donation Celebration wound down, I asked the office manager about applying for a passport. Aside from reviewing the obvious technical information (hours applications are accepted, who to approach first, etc.) she offered me several helpful tips:

• Don't pay the post office for passport photos. They charge twice as much as the pharmacy across the street. Don't use a particular chain pharmacy, either: Their photos are often too dark to use. Just prior to my visit yesterday, she'd had to send away a family who had solicited photos from this pharmacy.
• If I'm planning any major change to my appearance [coloring or drastically changing my hair; plastic surgery; significant weight gain or loss; a tattoo within portrait range; having an ear amputated (she snickered at this one)], wait until my appearance has stabilized before having a passport photo taken. If I don't, I'll wish I had the first time I use the passport.
• No, I don't have to have a trip in mind in order to apply for a passport; if I don't, leave that section blank.
• Yes, Birth Certificates are returned relatively promptly and in fine shape. She's never had a complaint about this, although she's received anxious calls because "it takes awhile" to get them back. "For god sakes," make sure I copy it before sending it off.
• At this time, if you apply in person, stifle the urge to joke about terrorist activities. "You'd be surprised," she said, "how many people do this. We're obligated to note this on an application and this can slow the process," which, normally, takes four to six weeks.

    Although I'm sure the passport application display has been ubiquitous at our local post office since the USPS became an "agent of application" on behalf of the U.S Department of State, I think it is not incidental that I didn't notice it until five months, to the day, of my mother's death. I think it's also a landmark in my grief process. By chance, the Hospice Grief Counselor called me Thursday. As we chatted, I mentioned to her that between her last call and this one I'd begun to read through selected books on grief, especially pertaining to losing a spouse, since I identified more with this than with losing a mother. I also told her that, around the time I decided to do some in depth reading, I wondered if I might be a candidate for "complicated grief" and wanted to read more about that.
    "You're not," she said, and went on to clarify that people experiencing complicated grief tended toward silence. She didn't find it necessary mention that grief silence is not my problem. It's obvious.
    I told her that I was aware of this because one of the books I'd checked out was what amounted to a text on "Complicated Mourning" by Therese A. Rando, the contents of which clearly indicated that the chief hallmark of complicated mourning, blocked mourning, didn't apply to me, although I was finding the book extremely helpful in understanding my grief process. I asked her if she'd heard of the book. Only cursorily, she mentioned, but as we discussed the book I realized I hadn't absorbed as much from scanning through it as I thought I had. When our conversation ended I opened the book and reviewed its peculiar and distinctive definitions of, among other aspects of loss, mourning. Rando, in Chapter 2, which includes a section of "Definitions", Rando devotes a little over three pages to defining mourning, versus a little over a page defining grief. She distinguishes the definition included in her book from the traditional definition of mourning, "the cultural and/or public display of grief through one's behaviors", thusly: She emphasizes "the psychoanalytic tradition of focusing on intra-psychic work, expanding on it by incuding adaptive behaviors necessitated by the loss..." [all quotes from Treatment of Complicated Mourning copyright 1993 by Therese Rando].
    In addition, she devotes a majority of the chapter to a further, meticulous elucidation of mourning, including "The Six 'R' Processes of Mourning". As I reacquainted myself with these, I realized that my food donation experience, including my writing about it afterward, fell into a variety of categories:

• "Feel, identify, accept, and give some form of expression to all the psychological reactions to the loss"
• "Identify and mourn secondary losses"
• "Review and remember realistically"
• "Revive and reexperience the feelings"
• "Readjust to move adaptively into the new world without forgetting the old" [bolding SIC]
• "Develop a new relationship with the deceased"
• "Adopt new ways of being in the world"
• "Form a new identity"
• "Reinvest" [bolding SIC]

    Although I've listed these categories in order, my experience of them through this one experience was all over the map, another accepted hallmark of mourning: The processes, as observers of grief and mourning have labeled them for better understanding, don't happen in any particular order, nor do they necessarily end; they evolve, sometimes into another process, sometimes into a regurgitation and/or refinement of the same process.
    The main reason why I wrote the post to which the title above links is that, after yesterday's food donation episode was over and I was reviewing the experience, I noticed a new and distinct difference in the way I am handling my mother's death. It feels like a movement, although not necessarily along a grade like "better/worse", "higher/lower" "more/less competent". The reason I took note is that, previous to yesterday, I've experienced my grief process, for lack of a better analogy (although please assume that this one isn't exactly right, either), as centrifugally closed. Yesterday, I felt as though I'd begun to spiral...not out of anything, but to an area that, hmmm...allows me to reach for more...does that make sense?
    Specifically, yesterday was the first time since Mom's death that I "talked" to her for so long a time and with so much concentration. I didn't feel as though Mom was "there", in the same sense as I took for granted that she was "there" with me when she was alive, at home and I was out doing errands. There was none of the palpable psychic impress that her alive existence engendered in me when she was at home and I was not. She was, however, with me in a way to which the phrase "in memory" does only paltry, demeaning justice. I'm at a loss for words, here, but I suspect that other survivors will understand what I mean.
    It's the first time I can remember, too, that I've taken an "alive" and common episode in our lived together lives and adapted it successfully and joyfully into my present survivor experience. Finally, as I did so, I autonomically leapt from adapting an old experience to considering new experiences that have nothing to do with Mom's and my lived together life. It felt hopeful...not as though I was leaving anything behind but as though the world around me was widening in a way I hadn't expected.
    That's a Survivor's Mother's Day with which I can live. Gladly.

Labels: Celebrations, Complicated Grief, Grief Fantasies, Grief Literature, Grief Self-assessment, Life after Death, Mother's Day, Mourning Processes, Rando

...a "sweet thing" (family talk), banana bread. It was a re-do. I baked some banana bread a little less than a week ago and the result seemed to indicate that I didn't bake it long enough. Even though a skewer inserted near the center came out "clean", as the loaf cooled the center dropped. When I sliced the loaf down the middle it was clear the loaf hadn't baked all the way through. I dismembered the bread, froze the good ends after letting them sit for 24 hours and, since I had enough bananas for two loaves, decided to try again in a few days...that day being today.
    I added an extra 10 minutes onto the baking time, today. Again, the skewer, this time inserted into the very center of the loaf, came out "clean". And, yet, as the bread cooled the center dropped, again, although the crater in this loaf isn't as large as was last loaf's crater. So, I'm doing the same with the bread as before, dissecting out the center and freezing the rest. It's a good thing I have no bananas left, because I'd feel obligated to try again. I don't think that would be emotionally productive. This is the third time in the last month I've had crater problems with baked goods. Before the first I replaced my baking powder. After the first I replaced my baking soda. After the second I extended the baking time. I'm not sure what to do, now, without burning the bread around its perimeter.
    As I stood at the sink, after today's semi-disaster, washing the utensils I'd used, I mused about how many times I used this recipe successfully when my mother was alive. "Hmmm..." I wondered, "...can grief be so heavy that it affects not only how one does things but the product of what one does? Are my baking products responding to my grief?"
    I doubt this is true, although I consider it as worthy of pondering as just about anything else at this point in my life. While I was considering this puzzle, though, I also wondered, assuming my mother is watching my sudden lack of talent for baking, what she might be thinking about this. The solution I used, dump the gooey centers and keep the good ends, is one that I can trace to my mother's baking philosophy. It's right up there with another of her baking credos: If the turkey falls on the floor while you're taking it out to baste it, pick it up, put it back in the pan, figure that know one will know the difference and, anyway, the continued baking will kill whatever it picked up off the floor.
    Pondering this launched me into a flight of fancy about exactly how my mother might be able to participate in my experiences since she's no longer physical. I came up with an amusing supposition: Let's posit that, once a person is dead, taking my mother as an example, because what remains of her, whatever that is, existed previous to her death, since it enlivened her, and she has the ability to enter into the genetic elements of those to whom she's related, thus being able to continue to participate in physical, one step (or, perhaps more) removed. Two reasons why she might be able to do this:

1. The "substance" of which she is comprised, now, is the same as it was before her death. It just no longer has a physical home.
2. But, her descendants and other relatives (two of her cousins are still alive) share acute genetic commonalities, implicit in their cells, making it very easy for my mother's current "substance" to slip into the physical elements of those to whom she's related, just as she was slipped into her own physical elements, but, in this state, with far more individual determination.

    I know, I know, there are lots of non-fantastic problems with this fantasy, all of which assure my sane brain that this is merely a fantasy. Consider, for instance, the fate of the souls of the dead who have no living relatives. Would they be exempt from participating in this activity? What about what we are discovering about human genetics: That it's beginning to look as though we are, really and essentially, all related, in the sense of all of us all being able to be traced to a common ancestor (which isn't such a startling thing, if you think about it from an evolutionary point of view)? Would the amount of common genetic material one shares with someone else (say, a direct descendant, a daughter, for instance, versus a cousin versus someone that we would ordinarily consider "not related") have anything to do with the quality an quantity of the experience in which one was able to participate? Is it possible that the insubstantial "substance" of someone who's dead could conceivably slip into just about anyone, granting, of course, that the level of experience granted through this slipstream would be different? Could that substance also slip into the physicality of closely related animals? What about distantly related animals? I'm not talking, of course, about reincarnation...I'm talking about, hmmm....what would be a good phrase? How about "borrowed incarnation"?
    It would make a fascinating premise for a speculative fiction novel, I think. More important, though, it gives me another metaphor for guessing about where my mother could be, depending on her abilities and proclivities, and how capable she is of being aware of this system, of which she was formerly a part. This puts it into conflict, of course, with the idea that life after death, if there is such a thing, is rather like life after birth...it's so different that not only does one not hang onto the memory of being a fetus, one has no reason to remember that state. Still, it's fun to imagine. It gave me pleasure shivers when I was at the sink.
    It's also, of course, completely insane, but, you know, the longer I live the more quotidian insanity seems. If, in the extreme, insanity is considered a coping mechanism for those we choose to label "insane", it seems likely that insanity is a coping mechanism the less obviously touched among us use every day...especially when grief over loss is dumped into the mix.

Labels: Afterlife Metaphors, Death Analogies, Effects of Grief, Grief Fantasies