shards
I'm sort of on automatic pilot right now -- consider it blogarrhea -- as my coping mechanism of choice. Bear with me.
- One of my favorite movies of all time is Robert Altman's Short Cuts, a collection of Raymond Carver's short stories stitched together in Altman's typical overlapped-conversational style. (Visitors to our place will notice the large poster hanging in our living room.) It's a movie about the awful things that people do to one another in relationships and marriages, maybe because of boredom or deep pain long remembered, and about how things can happen even in the safest of environments. After the trauma of going to see Munich (on our date night no less), I thought about how being a parent slowly strips you of the ability to render things in abstractions: that what's happening on the screen, even if engineered for maximum versimilitude, is still only a movie and not directly involving you. In Short Cuts, Andie McDowell and Bruce Davison have a secure and loving marriage (unlike almost every other relationship in the rest of the movie), but their 8-year-old son is hit by a car and dies after fighting for his life in the hospital.
Andie McDowell made me cry every time I saw it. I don't think I can watch it again for a long time, especially as it hurts me even just typing it.
There's a bit of typical Altman dark humor after that: this happens after she buys her child's birthday cake from the local baker. The baker, angry and drunk after not getting paid for the cake for such a long time, starts leaving anonymous and threatening phone messages.
By the end of the movie, they find out who's been leaving the messages; Andie McDowell makes me cry all over again, with the fury of a grieving mother -- but what I really remember is that the baker redeems himself somewhat -- he offers them some of his muffins, saying that "eating is good at a time like this." It sounds less redemptive than it actually is, but it's the way he says it, as if he's offering up whatever he possibly can once he knows the enormity of what he's done to these people. (While it's somewhat of a weak plot device to tie all the separate story threads together, he also protects the grieving parents from the minor Los Angeles earthquake that ends the movie.)
- Another movie I'm unsure about is another one of my favorites: Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth. Although the last section, in Helsinki, almost seemed like something tacked on the first couple times I saw it, it would probably be hard for me to watch it again, if at all: it's about the Finnish taxi driver and his wife making the decision to be emotionally invested in their premature baby's health, when it had little chance to live -- and both of them end up dying inside when their baby dies. And the movie even ends with sunrise in a cold, forbidding Helsinki neighborhood. The saving grace that'll get me to watch this movie again, every time: Roberto Begnini's section in Rome. All his hilarious talk about screwing farm animals and vegetables is one of the funniest scenes ever committed to film.
Needless to say, see these movies before you become a parent, please.
- Like the characters in Night on Earth, M and I have made the conscious decision to keep the faith, to disbelieve (oh, the irony of faith in disbelief) in spite of the fact that this Stanford evaluator may be right. We don't think so, though. Watch me as I move to anger: after talking more with M tonight, I find out more extreme craptitude and flat-out incompetence -- L's first Stanford evaluator actually did things with him; she played with him, handed him toys, interacted with him, rang bells around him, and was generally a cheerful grandmotherly type who put a lot of our fears to rest, at least temporarily. This particular evaluator (from what I hear -- I couldn't be there... fucking work) had the worst bedside manner straight out of Central Casting: when presented with a sick, squalling infant who'd just been woken from a deep sleep, she didn't interact with him but tested his reflexes and gave him a couple toys. When he understandably told her to fuck off in so many infant gurgling protests, she delivered her diagnosis. Then, with my wife and the nanny both in tears and wondering about our child's future, she patted my wife on the knee and told her that "we'll see him again in 8 months".
And, just like the baker in Short Cuts, she eventually realized the enormity of what she'd done, and called my wife and tearfully apologized, over and over again. However, unlike Lyle Lovett, we suspect that she came to this realization not because she finally got a clue but because she'd been called on the carpet after conferring with the other specialists at the hospital.
- And, to tie all this back to the expected slight narcissism: the last play I was in before we had L was Wit, by Margaret Edson. Of all the things I'm thinking about tonight, this resonates the most -- it's about how an educated, confident, even imperious and arrogant person can be brought to the depths of vulnerability, dependence and humiliation by disease and illness. Needless to say, it wasn't quite the fun family farce to end one's theatrical career on. The main character is a professor and noted scholar of John Donne (my favorite poet of all time), who finds herself with terminal cancer, being treated at the university's teaching hospital, where the staff are largely indifferent, and the local hotshot researchers (my character was the lead hotshot researcher, basically the villain) are more interested in her as a scientific curiosity rather than a human being with emotional needs.
Go figure that we would be educated people, dependent on a teaching hospital to give us precisely this same treatment.
- I've mentioned this before, but I need to say it again here: it would kill me inside if I couldn't read Lord of the Rings to my own son, as my father had done for me and my sister. Or that we couldn't become a game-playing family, as my family was during my tortured teenage years.
- That said, I'm also struck by something that M's therapist had said to her: human beings are surprisingly and extraordinarily adaptable. This therapist knows of parents who have completely dependent children: they need to be carried out of bed in the morning, they need sponge baths -- these children need everything these parents can give, even when it seems these parents have nothing left. What you do in this situation becomes routine because you have no other option, and you get used to it as a result.
- I still don't know where we're going in Europe, I guess. It's definitely not Italy, so it might be either Spain or Holland. (Regular readers of M's blog will get this analogy, and I'm too lazy to explain it now.) Not knowing is killing us, but I hope I'm slowly learning to be happy with wherever we end up. As my parents said tonight, it doesn't change their love of him at all.
- There is always someone worse off than you. I'll spare you the stories that we've heard coming out of the support network, but they're heartbreaking. We were reminded of this before we even had a child: during our trip to Southeast Asia, we only had to walk around for a minute or two to be reminded of this every day. We were swarmed by child beggars at nearly every stop in Cambodia, and we could hear the odd sounds of instruments being played by victims of landmine explosions at the more popular stops. We only had to walk around this or that street in Hanoi, to find slum apartments clogged with extended generations of families, surviving off of dirty water and breathing filthy air clogged with exhaust. And of course then we'd go back to our four-star French hotel with its Christmas tree and officious staff, as if an entire nation of people was there for our convenience. More than a few of the places we visited, particularly in Thailand, were completely wiped away by the tsunami. I can barely even imagine the devastation and ruined lives of the people we'd seen, even just barely. And yet, in spite of all the human misery we saw back then, I wouldn't trade that trip for the world. It's one of the best vacations I've ever had -- it improved us as people, it strengthened our marriage, and I think I can honestly say it changed my life.
- As a coworker of mine said to me after I broke down at work, mistakenly thinking I'd gotten control: "They shouldn't have said what they said. He needs you to be his advocate, now more than ever."
- Although it may not seem like it from reading all this depressing stuff, I feel a bit better now after having written it. Really. I still need to process, but it's a bit better.
Similarly, I don't think I can read some of what Carver wrote -- and damn it all to hell, he was one of my favorite writers. And fuck it, I have to bother myself by finding the particular poem that got made into that particular Short Cuts section: Lemonade.
The man could write, and he could write about grief (or maybe the male side of grief, anyway) like no writer I've ever seen.
I choose, now, to remember the Carver poem I had done in calligraphy for M on Valentine's day one year:
“Hummingbird”
Suppose I say summer,
write the word “hummingbird,”
put it in an envelope,
take it down the hill
to the box. When you open
my letter you will recall
those days and how much,
just how much, I love you.
He wrote that when he already knew he wasn't going to survive his advancing cancer. Although some may choose to read it as a dying man's desperate clinging to life, I choose to read it as a joyous affirmation of life.