Doubts

My experiences ... had burned away big pieces of my soul. At the time, it had nearly destroyed me, and I had thought I might never recover. I still thought that.

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Perhaps I had become a jar in the shape of [myself], a jar that held some of the pieces of the man I had once been, but not all. Never all. If that was my new truth - and I had begun to suspect that it was - then what I had to hope for was to find and hold on to the best pieces...

- from Blade Reforged

- by Kelly McCullough

I read these words a short time ago and they resonated deep inside me. Several times lately, when examining my life, the word “shattered” has come to mind. My emotions, my personality, my ability to concentrate and to get things done were all shattered. So, I sit down to practice my guitar and within minutes my mind is elsewhere. I sit down to read and within minutes my mind is elsewhere. I start work on my research paper and within minutes…

Well, you get the picture.

In the past I rarely walked away from a challenge, yet that seems to be all that I’m doing these days. I saw myself as a “fix it” guy; when I was in my early 20’s K-mart handed me a non-functional department and I made it work. Over and over, that seemed to be what happened. I made broken things work. Before March 1, 2012, I felt like I was making a difference, that I had contributed in a positive way to the life around me, in my work and at home. Well, the universe slapped me in the face with something I can’t fix. Jonathan lost everything that might have been. Benjamin lost his brother. I lost my son. There’s simply nothing I can do, no way to make it better.

And so I’m looking back and wondering what I’ve ever actually accomplished. The fact is that the K-mart departments I took over would have still existed. You simply don’t run a K-mart store without a Health and Beauty Aids or a Toy department. Would Shepherd’s Honors Program or Psychology Department have ceased to exist? I doubt it. Even the biggest thing that I supposedly did – chair the General Studies Committee during the reform of that program – would that have not happened without me? In reality, there was any number of people who could have guided that process. I suspect that some of them could have even made it a smoother process and less of a “squeaker” victory. Even so, I might have been able to deal with all that, but I once told a group of new faculty to make sure to make time for family, because when they were old and retired, it wasn’t going to be Shepherd sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch with them. But look at me. The two women I married, both of whom I loved dearly, decided I wasn’t worth living with.

Now, I’m not looking for anyone to electronically pat me on the head and say, “There, there, it will be all right.” And I’m not expecting an It’s a Wonderful Life moment. Angels don’t have time for the likes of me (except one – you know who you are). Part of this is just venting and there’s no one here to vent to.

Part of it is just fear. In looking at the pieces in the jar, trying to find the good ones to keep, I really can’t find any.

It’s Not the Same for Men

This blog was meant to share my thoughts about how I got to where I am. One of the most significant things that has ever happened to me was becoming a father. I recently came across the following paper, written for one of my undergraduate English classes just 6 months after Jonathan was born.

Normally, for a week-long vacation, I’d buy ten to twelve books. I’d read them all, too, and sometimes more. This past summer I had two months off and I bought about a dozen books. I read five of them.

It’s not that the other books weren’t good. This summer I became a father and when my wife Diane went back to work, I took over as primary caregiver for our two-month-old son Jonathan. I figured that, while the baby napped, I could take care of the house and squeeze in some reading.

Soon I found that I had to change my expectations. Where once I read chapters in a day, I now read pages. A load of laundry was seldom finished the same day it was started and loading the dishwasher took hours.

Since housework isn’t number one on my fun-things-to-do list, I didn’t mind much. I spent my days playing with the baby, or taking him for walks. Every so often, Jonathan would take a catnap and I’d read a little or do some housework. Before long, we settled into a routine.

Gradually, my fears about my capabilities as a parent disappeared. I developed the ability to tell which cry meant “I’m hungry” and which meant “Dad, please change my diaper, I’m uncomfortable.” Also, I learned that adeptness at changing diapers can, like other skills, be acquired through practice. I also discovered what most mothers already know: it’s easier to watch TV than to read a book while feeding a baby. The TV schedules were committed to memory and He-man, the Thundercats, and Beaver Cleaver kept me entertained while Jonathan guzzled down his formula.

The best times of all were those right after Jonathan had eaten, when he was relatively alert and content. I spent hours watching him discover the world around him. I’ll never forget the look of surprise on his face when he realized that the funny thing waving in front of his eyes was his own hand, or the look of triumph the first time he swung that hand out and grabbed the afghan on the sofa.

It was in the grocery store that I first began to notice people’s reactions to us. They seemed uncomfortable with the idea of a man taking care of an infant. When my wife was with us, other women would stop us to ask about the baby, but when Jonathan and I went alone, no one ever stopped us.

At the doctor’s office, questions about the baby’s behavior were invariably addressed to my wife. Even relatives who knew that I was caring for Jonathan asked Diane how he was doing and left me out of the conversation.

In our neighborhood are several groups of mothers whose children play together. They carpool together, have coffee in the afternoons together, and provide each other with support and friendship. I met several of these mothers when Jonathan and I were out walking. They all seemed hesitant about talking with me and I was never invited to any of the “get togethers.” My offers of coffee or soda were never accepted. It seems that, while men were out creating the “old boy network” in business, women were creating the “mom network” at home and it’s just as hard for a nurturing father to break into the “mom network” as it is for a businesswoman to break into the “old boy network.”

Two months after my wife went back to work, the school year started for me. My mother watches Jonathan for me while I attend classes. Something she once said illustrates the different attitudes toward male and female parents. She asked me how Diane was handling being at work away from her baby. I answered that she was doing about as well as I was being in school away from mine. “Don’t be silly,” my mother said. “It’s not the same for a man.”

She’s not alone in that belief, and I’m not alone in refuting it. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates than in only 1% of the 25 million families in the United States is the father the primary caregiver (Trafford, 1987, p. 13). In a Washington Post article, Abigail Trafford (1987) interviewed David Frank, who detailed a series of experiences similar to mine (p. 12). Robert D. Reed (1987), who spent a year as a male nanny and is now a social worker for the Children’s Aid Society in New York, wrote in American Baby magazine, “What I find exasperating about the job is not the lack of leisure time but the stigma attached to it. My parents are having conniptions, and my peers are baffled” (p. 28).

Dr. Kyle Pruett, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale University Child Study Center, studied 17 families in which the mother and father reversed their traditional roles. When asked if the “mothering” job was really different for men than for women, he replied, “Not radically. The fathers would say, “This can be so boring. My mind is sleeping’ – the things we’ve heard from young mothers for years. This has more to do with the job than with gender” (Trafford, 1987, p. 14). Further, when Dr. Pruett was asked what surprised him most in the study, he answered, “How profoundly moved the fathers were by the experience. They changed as men – and as human beings. It surprised me to see how available they were to the complexity of the role” (Trafford, 1987, p. 14).

So it seems that there is very little real difference between men and women in the nurturing role. After all, don’t babies evoke some parental response in almost any adult? As for me, the warm playtimes I’ve shared with Jonathan and the chance to be a bigger part of his life than my traditional role calls for, these outweigh the funny looks I get in grocery stores.

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Reed, Robert D. (1987, June). My life as a male nanny. American Baby, 28.

Trafford, A. (1987, April 28). Fathers raising kids – what happens when mom goes to work and dad stays home. The Washington Post, pp. 12-16.

Music

I just got back from a walk around my neighborhood. In the last decade or so I’ve come to appreciate spring (fall used to be my favorite time of year), but tonight it felt – in a way – empty. It seems wrong somehow that the world should awaken, that there should be so much beauty, when Jonathan is gone.

The last few days have been rough. I’ve been struggling with feelings that I cannot express, some because there are simply no human words to express them, others because I think if I dared say them aloud they might cost me one of the few remaining joys in my life.

When I was younger (bear with me, all this will come together), I used to watch the Carol Burnett show. I had the biggest crush on Vicki Lawrence. I also wanted to learn to play the guitar. I had this idea that I would one day – as I believed that Woodie Guthrie had done[1] – hop a freight train to travel across country, learn to play all these wonderful folk songs that no one had ever heard, and then arrive in California where my music would earn me fame and catch the eye of Vicki Lawrence…



On stage at the Birchmere in Alexandria, VA, in
November, 1986.

In his early Doonesbury strips, Trudeau’s characters all had an internal monologue going on, each announcing their exploits to an phantom audience of adoring fans. What made that work is that a lot of people actually do that. For me, though, it was always a soundtrack. Except in moments of concentration (like delivering a lecture), there’s a song echoing around inside my head behind my thoughts. Usually a folk song. I’ve come to learn that those songs are often my way of trying to clarify to myself how I feel about the things going on in my life. Sometimes a song will get insistent, and I find that to quiet it I have to immerse myself in it, either by listening to a recording of the song over and over or by playing the song myself.

I started learning to play guitar in the summer between 8^th and 9^th grades. I had gone out for the JV football team, made second string defensive line, then broke my collarbone riding a bike down a hill that I never should have attempted to ride down (I found out much later that the “hill” had been the roadbed of a railroad back around the Civil War – I told you this would all come together). I couldn’t practice with the team, so I bought a guitar for $15 from G. C. Murphy’s, borrowed a book from a neighbor, and began teaching myself how to play. I didn’t play that first guitar long; you don’t really get a quality instrument for $15 (at least you didn’t in 1972). I traded up to a used Yamaha that I played until 1984, when I bought my Martin. That guitar has been with me ever since. We’ve gone a lot of places together, done a lot of things, and shared a lot of joy and pain. That guitar helped me get the songs out of my head and use them to communicate my feelings to other people.

So, I’ve been struggling the last few days, with feelings I can’t express. Then, this morning, I was listening to music as I entered course overrides in my office. It was an album I’ve listened to before, a David Wilcox album called Live at Eddie’s Attic ’11. Suddenly I found myself in tears. The song just washed over me and lodged itself in my head and it has been there since. I couldn’t hear it while I was in class, but as soon as I finished, it was back. So I went for a walk tonight, to listen to the song and try to figure out what it was trying to tell me. One line repeats, and maybe this is my answer:

For in this darkness love can show the way.

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[1] It was something of a disappointment when I found out that Woodie hadn’t discovered the songs but had, in fact, written them.

Aftermath Part 4: What I’ve Learned

I got no rules to recite except love each other; God, if you’d all only do that, you wouldn’t need no other rules at all, not one.
 

- from Godbody

- by Theodore Sturgeon

As 2011 drew to a close I was feeling pretty good about my life. I was coming off a sabbatical during which I’d launched a new research program, one I was excited about. I’d settled into the single life again, I had a group of good friends around me, Benjamin and I were spending some great time together, and Jonathan was spreading his wings, preparing to soar. I felt that 2012 was going to be a very good year.

All of that changed in the space of a couple of minutes on the afternoon of March 1.

I often talk about my sons in class. My first psychology prof at George Mason often talked about his girls in class, using stories from their lives to illustrate some point he was trying to make. That left a lasting impression on me and over the years I began to see why he did it. I’ve learned so much from trying to be a good parent to my kids. So, recently I found myself thinking about what I’ve learned from Jonathan’s loss, what about this last story of his life I could share with future students.

The first, most insistent thing to come to mind was this: you’re not safe. Not even at home. You can go about your day, doing your work, talking to your friends, and then go home and die simply making dinner in your own kitchen.

But I don’t think that Jonathan would want that to be the meaning I took from his death.

The next thing I thought was that life is fragile. I’ve known that intellectually for a very long time. But no amount of reflection, no amount of reading and studying can prepare you for how easily a life can be snuffed out and for everything that person knew, everything that person felt, everything he loved and longed for, to simply be gone. I could never share my feeble attempts to explain that with a group of strangers, especially those in their late teens or twenties. I’ve only tried with a small group of my friends.

And at that point several things came together in my head. I was the last person to talk to Jonathan on his cell phone. I may have been the last person who ever talked to him. I’d been trying to reach him for a couple of days to see if he could take in my mail while I was away at a conference. He called me while I was on the road to the conference with my colleague Anne and a group of students. We talked briefly, but I was driving and about to go through a tunnel, so I couldn’t stay on the phone long, even though he wanted to tell me about a new project at work. Just a few hours later I got the call from City Hospital that he was gone. On the long ride back to Shepherdstown that night I replayed that last conversation with Jonathan over and over in my head. I usually end phone calls with the kids by saying, “I love you.” But in that last call I was rushed and I couldn’t remember actually saying it. So, it meant more to me than I can say when I mentioned to Anne some time later that I might have been the last one to talk to Jonathan and she responded, “That’s so nice because the last thing you said to him was, ‘I love you.’” That brought me almost to tears.

The reality is that life is fragile. To deny that is to deny part of what makes life so precious, so worth clinging to. Life is, in a cosmic sense, difficult to create, it is impossible for us to bestow (except in that most sacred intimacy between men and women), but it is ever so easy to destroy. Every time you walk away from a loved one there is a chance that you will never see each other again.

And so this. It is hardly an original thought; others have said it before and others will no doubt say it again. But this is my lesson: don’t ever waste any opportunity to tell the people you love how you feel. It may be the last thing they ever hear.

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Benjamin, I know that I say I love you a lot, probably even in some situations when it’s a bit embarrassing (like a blog post on the World Wide Web). I hope you know that doing that isn’t just a habit and that I mean it every time I say it.

Mom, Dad, I doubt that either of you knows that I even have a blog. I’m pretty sure that neither of you will actually see this, but I love both of you, too. The same goes for my siblings: Jeff, Kim, John, Judy, Troy, and Nickie. I don’t think we say “I love you” often enough in our family. I hope we can change that.

Heidi, Anne, Joe, Chris, and Richie: I love you guys. I couldn’t ask for a better group of people to work with or a better group of friends. Your confidence in my leadership abilities is a constant source of amazement to me. Thanks for being there, thanks for listening to some things I know weren’t comfortable to hear (some of them actually having to do with work), and thanks for not treating me as if I were irreparably damaged. I really appreciate it. A special shout out to Anne; your help and support got me through the worst night of my life. I might not have made it back from Pittsburgh without you.

Stephanie. What can I say? I love you, my friend. If I have even a shred of sanity left (which is highly debatable), I owe it to you. Our lunches have meant a great deal to me, and helped me get through divorce and to begin to deal with Jonathan’s loss. You’ve listened when I needed to talk, you’ve talked when I needed to listen, and you always seem to know which one to do. That’s a rare gift. You know, you’d probably make a great psychologist. Up for a career change?

Mike, you, too, have been a great friend. Some of my favorite memories are centered on the courses we taught together, the discussions we had over lunch or in the reading group. Because of them, I think I’m a better chair, a better psychologist, and a better person. You should know that your talk on Constitution Day made me laugh. For the first time since Jonathan’s death, a deep-down, heart-felt laugh. Thank you, buddy. Love ya.

To all my other Shepherd colleagues (faculty, staff, students, and – yes – even the administration), you all are amazing. Over the years we’ve butted heads, we’ve argued, we’ve struggled with budget cuts and a changing academic environment. But, we’ve also laughed, and joked, and we’ve taught a lot of students, and we have, I hope, learned a thing or two ourselves along the way. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but the reality is that we humans are social critters. It takes a village for us to live. You all are my village. Thank you for being so amazing; I love you all.

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This is, I think, the last of the Aftermath postings. That’s not to say that I’ve recovered, or healed, or whatever. I don’t think you ever recover from the loss of a child. I’ll be dealing with the aftermath of Jonathan’s death for the rest of my life. But, as I typed this entry I could sense a door somewhere in my head closing, and I could hear a single word, “Finis.”

Aftermath 3 Post Script

Do people write post scripts to blogs? Well, I'm going to. I meant to include this in the last entry, but as commonly happens, the words took on a life of their own as I wrote and went in a different direction.

One other simile: the loss of Jonathan is – in the truest sense of the phrase – a living nightmare, a horror from which I cannot awaken. When the knowledge of Jonathan’s death – no, knowledge is not the right word. I am constantly aware of his loss. What I mean is a sense of the enormity of it, the rending of the heart, the endlessness of the desert, the eternity with a hole in my spirit where a beloved son should be, the anguish of a promising life unfulfilled – when that strikes it does so with the same visceral shock that breaks you out of a nightmare, only there’s no waking from this…

Aftermath Part 3: Metaphors

I was driving home from the Mall a couple of days ago. As I passed the place the Jonathan’s butcher used to be, tears began rolling down my face and the great emptiness welled up inside. The butcher’s place is no longer there, they went out of business before Jonathan died. But the memory was just enough to trigger the grief all over again.

I never know what’s going to do that. It can be the sight of a photograph of Jonathan, even one that’s always in sight. A song. A place we went together. Sometimes the pain just strikes out of nowhere, with no obvious trigger. Even sleep is no refuge; I woke up crying Monday morning.

Trying to explain to someone else how this feels is difficult. There are no words to describe these feelings. Even if there were, they would be horrible words, unpronounceable words. Sometimes I feel that the only thing that could give voice to these feelings would be an inarticulate howl of pain and anguish and fear and anger. So I find myself relying on similes and metaphors.

We all know about the 800-pound gorilla. The knowledge of Jonathan’s death is an 800-pound gorilla crammed into my head with me. If I just sit quietly and stare out the window I can ignore the fact that it’s pressed up against me in here, and it might choose to ignore me. If I move at all, I bump into it. That might trigger an attack. And sometimes it simply chooses to savage me.

It is like trudging through a desert. Walking through loose and shifting sand is exhausting. Walking through the heat is exhausting. The desert extends as far as the eye can see (possibly to infinity) in all directions. There are occasional oases – time with Benjamin, lunch with a good friend – but life is just trudging on through the desert…

From the closing of The Little Prince:

Now my sorrow is comforted a little. That is to say – not entirely. But I know that he did go back to his planet, because I did not find his body at daybreak. It was not such a heavy body… And at night I love to listen to the stars. It is like five hundred million little bells…

But there is one extraordinary thing… When I drew the muzzle for the little prince, I forgot to add the leather strap to it. He will never have been able to fasten it on his sheep. So now I keep wondering: what is happening on his planet? Perhaps the sheep has eaten the flower…

At one time I say to myself: “Surely not! The little prince shuts his flower under her glass globe every night, and he watches over his sheep very carefully…” Then I am happy. And there is sweetness in the laughter of all the stars.

But at another time I say to myself: “At some moment or other one is absent-minded, and that is enough! On some evening he forgot the glass globe, or the sheep got out, without making any noise, in the night…” And then the little bells are changed to tears…

Here, then, is a great mystery. For you who also love the little prince, and for me, nothing in the universe can be the same if somewhere, we do not know where, a sheep that we never saw has – yes or no? – eaten a rose…

Look up at the sky. Ask yourselves: Is it yes or no? Has the sheep eaten the flower? And you will see how everything changes…

The rose is gone, the desert has no well. For me, the stars weep…

Aftermath Part 2: Apology

Are you going away with no word of farewell
Will there be not a trace left behind
I could have loved you better, didn’t mean to be unkind
You know that was the last thing on my mind

from Last Thing on my Mind
by Tom Paxton

After the fire I went to Jonathan’s apartment three or four times to try and salvage some of his belongings. What seemed like it could be saved I brought to my house and stored in the garage. A bit over a week ago Diane and Ingrid came to my house to go through the boxes. A couple of days later I was out there trying to clean up the video games systems so they could go to Benjamin, who spent a lot of time playing games with Jonathan. I picked up one of the game controllers – something that he held in his hands and took so much joy from – and the paper towel I was using came away black as pitch, black as hell itself.

And I lost it.

I’ve been thinking a lot since then. Those thoughts led to this Aftermath series of postings. In the last one I beat up on God. This time it’s my turn.

I said last time that a big part of my self-concept is that I’m a Dad. I’m starting to think that I’m not very good at it.

One thing that has haunted me is that Jonathan died alone. When he really needed someone, there was no one there – I wasn’t there – for him. I know that’s irrational, but who expects feelings to be rational? If I had known, I would have done anything I could to prevent his death. Still, I feel like I failed him when he needed me most. And I’ve been thinking about other times…

Jonathan loved video games. From the time he was little he was just fascinated by them. When he couldn’t actually be playing video games, he was pretending to be video game characters (mostly Mario). I, however, was concerned about his socialization, so he wasn’t allowed to have them at my house. He did have them at his Mom’s and he had some games on my computer, but he couldn’t have his video games at my house. I finally relented when he was 13. And you know what? The sky didn’t fall and he ended up making some pretty good friends over the years. His socialization skills obviously weren’t deficient.

A similar thing happened with karate. He loved the Ninja Turtles and the Power Rangers. He really wanted to learn karate. Some of his “friends” (the reason for the scare quotes is a whole other story) in the neighborhood were taking lessons, but again I was concerned about socialization and I wanted him to wait until he understood that you don’t use your friends as practice targets. We made him play soccer for a few seasons, but it was clear that he really didn’t enjoy it. He started tae kwon do lessons when he was 8. The sky didn’t fall then, either. He was still studying and teaching martial arts when he died.

Last summer Benjamin moved into Jonathan’s old room in my house. I soon realized how poorly the AC system worked in his room; it was sometimes nearly 90 up there when it was around 72 on the main level. It must have been like that when Jonathan lived here, but I was so wrapped up in my marriage that I didn’t know. I really should have.

And then there was the first time Ingrid, Benjamin, and I went to Ocean City. Jonathan had to work and couldn’t go. He went to an ophthalmologist appointment the day we left (we were only going for one night) and the guy sent him to Baltimore to Johns Hopkins. Jonathan sat there for hours alone and his girlfriend called to break up with him while he was there. I really should have gone to be with him.

I could have loved you better, son. I’m sorry.