Archives: September 2011

At my ballet school, there is one spot at the ballet barre where a person cannot see the mirrors that line two of the studio walls.  In this spot of reflective respite, the mirrors in front are blocked by the audio equipment and to the side a window breaks up the vast expense of reflective glass.

I stand in this spot.

My teacher will ask from time to time, “Amy, can you see yourself?”

I confidently shake my head, ‘No.’

“Do you want to move?”

Once again, I shake my head no.  I am thankful that talking is not encouraged in the ballet studio since I would then have to explain that I can’t quite handle the truth of the mirror yet.  I am enjoying what dancing feels like right now and absorbing the truth of what my dancing looks like right now is not quite yet within my abilities. I’d like to keep what is real and what is true separate for a bit.

This interchange highlights how the way we see ourselves is not always the way that we look.  I learned early on that movement does not always look the same way that it feels.  I recall Ms. Mackie, on one knee, her hands molding my foot into a proper pointe en bas, arch turned out, heel pushed high, toes turned down.  It felt terrible, uncomfortable, and unnatural.  It looked pretty.  What was real and what was true was not the same thing.

Dancers tend to have a love hate relationship with the mirror.  Ironically, the stage has no mirror so we spend the majority of our time rehearsing in a false setting.  In theory, seeing yourself and others can help in correcting poor placement, poor technique, or poor spacing.  But when you are moving, you only catch blurry glimpses of yourself which you then quilt together in your mind with stitches of judgment, both positive and negative.  In stillness, the mirror can become a torture device, forcing you into yourself in endless obsession with the inherent faults of your existence.  A pointed and haunting example of the mirror’s power can be seen in the life and dancing of Nina Sayers in The Black Swan.  She sees reflections of herself everywhere, none of them her and all of them her.  What is real?  What is true?

At NPR.org yesterday, they featured a story on a dignity therapy which was developed by a Russian psychiatrist Henry Chochinov through his work with dying patients. Dignity therapy involves facilitating, recording, and passing on the dying person’s life story.  What he and family members of the deceased find surprising is that the perceptions of the past have changed in the light of death.  Chochinov comments:

“The stories we tell about ourselves at the end of our lives are often very different than the stories that we tell about ourselves at other points…When you are standing at death’s door and you have a chance to say something to someone, I absolutely think that that proximity to death is going to influence the words that come out of your mouth,” Chochinov says.”

They interview Kate Frego, a bereaved daughter, whose mother used dignity therapy in her last months of life and who bequeathed her life story to her.  In reading her mother’s story after her death, Frego is surprised:

“…one of the first things Frego realized was that there would be no earth-shattering headlines or dark revelations. Instead, she found the opposite: Often in the story, Frego says her mother “just dramatically underplays something that I know was actually much larger and much more meaningful or painful or upsetting to her.”

The author of the article wonders:

“Was Frego’s mother’s version a deliberate distortion of the truth, brought on because she was facing death? A whitewashing or attempt to bend the narrative of her life in a more positive direction? Frego doesn’t think so. She believes that the fact that her mother was so close to death just changed her interpretation of things.”

“It wasn’t an intentional blurring; it really was her giving us her take on things and where she was at the time,” says Frego. “She was telling us that she chose to remember the happy parts of it. And truth is the way we perceive what’s happening to us, how we interpret it.”

I tend to agree that limit experiences alter our perceptions both of the present as well as the past and open up a liminal space where we can become more ourselves in the future.  As our memories and regrets and hopes mingle and dance in our minds, our stories change.  Limit experiences hold the mirror of eternity up to our mortality and we must define anew what is real and what is true.

“When you face death, it’s like facing a wall, and it forces you to turn around and look at the life that you’ve lived,” says William Breitbart, a psychiatrist at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.”

Joan Hitchens from Storybooksforhealing comments on the NPR piece and shares this quote:

“I can only sum up all forms of end of life retrospective as just this: “The past determines the present,” according to Sigmund Freud, but, “The present redetermines the past,” responds Erik Erikson.”

I am reminded of Harry and Dumbledore’s final conversation in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Walking through Harry’s version of “heaven,” the two discuss the past, the present and the future.  As Dumbledore turns to leave Harry asks:

“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?

Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry’s ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” (723)

As we ponder our hope for legacies, genetic and otherwise, our gaze into the mirror of mortality may cause us to edit the story of our existence and hope that the legacy we leave is one of real truth.

Featured in today’s Obit.com, Julia M. Klein reviews Roger Ebert’s new memoir, Life Itself.

She traces his life journey from Urbana, IL to Chicago, highlighting the significant friendships and relationships that have made life worth living. He writes of his critic partner, Gene Siskel, and his wife, Chaz Hammelsmith Ebert.

“The two critics did not start out as friends, and their on- and off-air skirmishes were visceral and unfeigned. But over time, “linked in a Faustian television format that brought us success at the price of autonomy,” they became close, forming a fraternal bond. “No one else could possibly understand how meaningless was the hate, how deep was the love,” writes Ebert, who says he continues to miss his television partner on a daily basis.

His tribute to his other partner – his wife, Chaz Hammelsmith Ebert, a former civil rights attorney who supervises his business interests – is equally moving. During his lengthy illnesses, “her love was like a wind pushing me back from the grave…,” he writes. “She continues to make my life possible, and her presence fills me with love and a deep security. That’s what a marriage is for. Now I know.” This is forthright, emotional without being sappy, with not a wasted word.

Living in death’s shadow, Ebert maintains that he does not fear it “because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear.” He embraces no conventional religious faith. Nor does he have biological children to ensure genetic immortality. But his thoughts and ideas, he hopes, will survive, at least for a while.”

Thinking about critical distance and how understanding trauma demands attaining a level of distance without disorientation on the part of the one who has experienced suffering.  In working with those who have experienced personal loss I am often reminded of the old V8 juice commercials, where someone who has not had their V8 faces their day, walking at a 45 degree angle.  Everything is a little off.  You are still able to function, just at an odd angle.  Everything looks different because you are different.

I imagine that I am no different from many of you who have in the last week done some reading about 9/11.  My reading has felt a bit like national scrapbooking.  Bits and pieces, different perspectives, pictures and words collected and held together under one umbrella of loss.  No one photo or word or refection capable of containing the elusiveness of loss and the immensity of memory.  Many testimonies to how meaning from loss can only be culled from time and ritual.

This weekend I’ve been catching up on my reading of old magazines.  In the July 2011 issue of Vanity Fair, Eva Gabrielsson, life partner to Steig Larsson, (author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, et al.) writes of his death.  Her memories of his sudden death and the public and private rituals afterwards resonated with many of the published memories of ten years ago.  How sudden loss disorients and numbs and spins us toward focusing on basic needs, like mere survival.

She writes of the day before his death, articulating the details of a normal life.  The phone calls, the routines, the scheduled appointments.  And then the call comes.  “Get here right away.”

Larsson is in the hospital.  She only learns the course of events leading up to his hospitalization later.  At the time, she is solely focused on getting to him from Stockholm.

“At 4:22 that afternoon, he was declared dead.”

She is not with him yet, and her friends are advised by the doctors not to tell her until she arrives in person.  She feels betrayed when she arrives at the hospital, learns of the time of his death and realizes that she had conversations with her friends there en route but in each of those conversations he was already dead.

She calls his family and asks them to come.  His father, his brother.

After she learns the news of his death, countless friends and colleagues show up at the hospital. “Everyone was hugging, embracing, weeping…except for me; I still felt turned to stone.  People were in a state of collapse, dazed, at a loss, while I was simply there.  I was smoking, and I didn’t understand anything.  When I looked at the crowd in despair, though, I did tell myself that Steig had some good and wonderful friends at Expo.”(90)

The reality of death is soon followed by communal and private ritual.  She writes:

“In Sweden, funerals take place a few weeks after a death.  For Steig’s service we had to wait even longer because people were coming from all over.”

“I woke up very early that morning.  When I try to remember that day and the ones that followed, I can only finds scraps of memories lost in a fog.  I wrote nothing down in my diary; it was as if I hadn’t been there.  The burial service, in a small chapel, was only for relatives and close friends, whereas the commemoration was a more formal and public event.”

“I chose 18 speakers who would talk about Steig…”

She chooses to speak but cannot imagine what she will say so she begins a search for a letter from him that she can read.  She finds an envelope that says that it is only to be opened after his death.  One was a will, bequeathing everything to her and the other a love letter to her.

“Eva, my love,

It’s over. One way or another, everything comes to an end.  It’s all over some day.  That’s perhaps one of the most fascinating truths we know about the entire universe.  The stars die, the galaxies die, the planets die.  And people die too.  I’ve never been a believer, but the day I became interested in astronomy, I think I put aside all that was left of my fear of death.  I’d realized that in comparison to the universe, a human being, a single human being, me…is infinitely small.”

He goes on to encourage her to live and not grieve and to thank her for their life together and to say I love you.  He expresses the common human expressions that Dr. Ira Byock says we all long express before we die:  I forgive you, please forgive me, thank you, I love you, and farewell.

A few days after the public ceremony she creates her own private ritual of remembrance. She takes a black urn, places in it her favorite pictures of Larsson as well as special mementos of their relationship, and places that urn in a place of prominence and honor in her home.

“I placed the ceramic vessel full of our lives on a shelf, and behind it I slipped a few sheets of homemade paper I’d bought at Kvarnbyn in Molndal, outside Goteborg.  On a blue sheet I’d written down what I had lost, and on a yellow one what I wanted now: To survive another year.”

I imagine that tomorrow will be a day for many of both public and private remembrance of lives and stories lost in a heartbeat.  And though Larsson is right that “in comparison to the universe, a human being, a single human being…is infinitely small,” to the beloved, the life and love and memory of a single human being can be as infinite as the universe.

So, I’ve become a bit addicted to Ted Talks.  I must share this new video just posted from Joan Halifax, a Buddhist roshi who serves individuals in hospice and on death row.

Some beautiful quotes:

“The wondrous thing is that people are dying all around us and we do not realize that it can happen to us.”

“Compassion is the ability to see clearly into the nature of suffering.”

She makes this comment about her service on death row:

“I learned that any attachment to outcome would deeply distort my capacity to be truly present to the whole person.”

How attached to outcomes are you?  Yea, I’m squirming.

“The enemies of genuine compassion: pity, moral outrage, and fear.”

And I love this description of the moral life in Buddhism:

“We believe that it takes a strong back and a soft front to face the world.”

My, oh my, to have a strong back and soft front…

As a Gen-xer who will be in my mid-70′s in the year 2050, articles like the one published by Standard & Poor on the trajectory of age-related expenses for global economies over the the next 40 years cause my palms to sweat and my heart to pound.  They are wise to comment that the time for global economies, especially 1st World sovereigns, to reform their budgetary practices and prepare for the onslaught of age-related costs (pensions, social security, healthcare) that will fall on all of society is NOW.  We have a precious window in the 2010s to reform our practices and philosophies before the silver tsunami begins to erode our financial footings in the 2020s.

Considering how obtuse much of the financial research and data can appear to a layperson, the concluding remarks are straight-forward and cause me to pause:

“Since 2007, the global economic and financial crisis has by our reckoning substantially affected many sovereigns’ budgetary positions. Governments are beginning to respond with medium-term plans for fiscal consolidation. The results of our analysis highlight the potential benefits of this strategy for the long-term sustainability of public finances. At the same time, a number of governments across the globe, and particularly in Europe, have recently accelerated preparation for, and implementation of, structural reforms linked to age-related spending items–particularly pension systems–thus continuing the positive momentum built up since the start of the past decade. At the same time, however, we expect the upward risk of higher health-care costs will be an increased drag on governments’ already burdened budget positions.

The challenges ahead are daunting for the vast majority of sovereigns covered in this survey, particularly in cases where market pressures are pushing policy makers to embrace budgetary consolidation simultaneously with structural reforms of pension and health-care systems. For some sovereigns, this may put the relationship between the state and electorate under strain and severely test social cohesion. (death panels, anyone?!?!)

Nevertheless, our study suggests that unless advanced sovereigns embrace reforms at a faster pace, the fiscal pressures will become increasingly unsustainable. At the same time, the aging demographic profile of their electorates could well make the political climate for reforming pension and health-care programs even more difficult than it is currently.”

(an excerpt from Standard and Poor’s “Global Aging 2010: An Irreversible Truth:”)