sarahgoss

Shannon's Birthday

2009-10-06T03:23:03Z

Just a brief entry to remember my aunt who died in February. Today would have been her 60th birthday. One of the things I told her in the weeks before she died is that I will remember her in all the ways that remembering entails, which for me includes talking about her and writing about her, but it isn't easy. Actually, today I was remembering saying that to her-- and I know I said it to her several times, and that she said, "You're making me cry," but not in a bad way. It's kind of a funny thing to remember saying to someone, because it sounds insensitive in a way. But in the weeks leading up to her death, when it was clear that she was going to die (when the doctors had stopped treating her), it suddenly seemed utterly obvious to me that the stupid and cruel thing to do was to act like this wasn't happening and not attempt to talk to her about it--to hide from it because of my own fear. So I had some conversations with her in those weeks that now seem unbelievable to me, because I wouldn't have imagined that I could talk with someone so frankly about the fact that she is dying. I was so, so terrified of that moment, before it had really arrived. Before that, when the treatments were still happening, there was this sort of pretense, following her lead, that maybe she wouldn't die. Eventually, though, it became impossible not to face, and it felt as though to continue to act like this wasn't happening would be leaving her completely alone. She was alone, of course. But there was some small way to be with her, for a lot of the time at least, up until the very end when she was so far away.

And now, of course, this entry ended up being about me, not her after all. Today I found some mail for her lying unattended in a pile at my parents' house. There was a postcard with brightly colored balloons and "Happy birthday, Shannon!" written on the front: an offer for two complimentary tickets to fly anywhere in the continental United States. WHY HAVEN'T YOU CALLED? it demanded. WE HAVE BEEN TRYING TO GET A HOLD OF YOU. YOUR TIME IS ALMOST UP.

I know, of course, that this stuff arrives for dead people for years and years after they die, but somehow, seeing it there on the first birthday after her death was disconcerting. Getting used to this is going to take a long time.

Update

2009-02-15T23:04:11Z

My aunt Shannon is now in a nursing home where she receives round-the-clock care and she has a hospice nurse. It's not perfect-- the hospice nurse told us she was disappointed by the lack of forthcoming information she was getting from the staff-- but it's definitely better than it was. Shannon had stopped eating at the Motel 6, which made me think the end was very near, but she started eating again (a little) at the home and seemed to do a little better with the care and attention of the nurses. It's a very depressing place with a lot of dying people, but it's better than the previous situation by far.

My mother and I visited the home on Saturday and she took the liberty of barbarically chopping my former stepgrandmother out of several photographs other family members had brought for Shannon. It made Shannon laugh a little, so I guess it was worth it, but we shall see how the other family members react (given that they already are not speaking to Mom).

Tired

2009-01-21T22:39:35Z

Yesterday was beautiful, but today I needed a break from my rather demanding child. I just put her in her crib and I could hear her babbling on and on, which usually means--tragically--no nap. I decided I would put on my headphones and listen to just one song, to give myself a break, and when I took out the headphones, I would face reality.

I just took off the headphones and there is silence coming from her room. Yaaaaaaaaay.

The parent and her childless friends

2008-10-25T05:09:55Z

A good friend of mine (who happens not to be planning to have kids) sent me an interesting article, to be found here, http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/oct/18/family1, about how friendship is affected when a childless woman's friends start having kids, one after the other. I have now seen this situation from both points of view, and I do remember sharing the author's point of view, to some extent, before I had a daughter. I remember being irritated that certain women I knew with kids seemed to wear a halo that said they could do no wrong and that they assumed their lives were harder than mine (I would now have to amend that: they KNEW their lives were harder than mine). I especially recall irritation when a relative seemed to be urging me to have kids so that we could be closer. She actually told me once that if I didn't have kids, there would be no way to meaningfully measure the passage of time that was looming before me. I understood what she meant, but the idea my future life would not be meaningful unless I could mark time by the cliched rites of passage that my would-be children would experience sort of offended me. Or... made me feel secretly superior, I have to admit, since what I was really thinking was, "Wow. My life means a whole lot more to me than that." I am quite sure my life would have gone on feeling meaningful to me, as it always had before, if I had never had children.

Needless to say, the somewhat negative reaction I am now having to parts of this article probably has to do with the fact that I've crossed to the other side of things. She writes, "The joys of parenthood are hard to share and for the gap in experience that suddenly opens up, the new parents might as well have taken a trip to Mars. I have watched dear friends turn from intelligent, engaged people into gurgling, cooing aliens and they in turn regard me with a distant gaze as if from an emotional galaxy far far away. Suddenly, evenings together are cut short and yawns are stifled on both sides. How the parent responds to this can be a key factor in determining the shape the friendship will take post-baby, and I am afraid it is very much the parent that sets the tone - after all, they are the ones whose lives, interests and priorities have suddenly changed."

Okay. I guess I'm not thrilled to read the description of the new parent as a "gurgling, cooing alien," by implication no longer intelligent--but that wasn't really the part that bothered me. I do feel sometimes as though I can't hold up my end of an intelligent conversation as well anymore, because I am just so damned tired. I'll accept that. It bothered me more that she said setting the tone of the friendship (with the still childless) was the new parent's responsibility. I was the first among my primary group of girlfriends here in SF to have a child, and I REALLY, REALLY needed them to reassure me that I still mattered to them--that I was not suddenly boring or unappealing friendship material. I needed them to go out of their way a bit to make time for me now in new ways, since I could no longer join them very often in things we were used to doing together (like going out to see music late at night and drinking). I needed THEM to send ME a message and to try to find ways to see me on new turf. And they did. And I appreciated it. I remember feeling awfully vulnerable, awfully sensitive, being the only one with kids and no longer being able to enter into a lot of the subjects of conversation (like, for example, about the rigorous exercise routines everyone had going). I think they did more to set the tone--to be sure to include me and find a way for me to share what I was going through, even though it was foreign to them.

Other things she wrote:

"In my own experience, I have loved every single baby that has been born to a dear friend and have found them, by and large, fascinating. However, while I am willing to listen to the finer details of little Isabella's pooing habits or Joshua's colic, I would like the same courtesy to be extended to my concerns. The problems begin when I can see that my parent friends cannot be bothered to get their sleep-deprived head around the issues I am grappling with while I am expected to imaginatively enter a world that is alien to me."

Okay, I agree with the sentiment--people with children SHOULD be interested in what their childless friends are experiencing. I find it hard to believe that this is such a problem--although maybe this says something about me that is strange. For me, it is effortless to be interested in what is happening to people I find interesting. Just because I have a daughter emphatically does NOT mean I only find child-related subjects interesting. I am just as fascinated by my friends, and by whatever is happening to them, as I ever was. So, is this really a problem for the childless woman? (I hate that expression, "childless woman," so I'm only using it as a shorthand and because the author of the article used it; to me it sounds patronizing, like a person is to be defined by whether or not she has children and in the "childless" woman's case, it sounds like a putdown, like you're calling attention to some deficit. So I wonder why she uses that term in her article.) Maybe I am being naive to think this wouldn't be such a problem; in any case, it IS annoying if she's right that her parent-friends don't seem interested in her life anymore.

What I don't like about the passage so much is the tone. The parent-friends "cannot be bothered to get their sleep-deprived heads" around their childless friend's interests? Ummm. Do not be snide about sleep-deprivation, my friend. It is an affliction that has a life of its own. It seems cruel to be chiding one's deeply exhausted friend (if she really is suffering from sleep-deprivation) with inadequate responses to your "issues" if she is right in the middle of a very hard spot. It is like insanity, to be dealing with sleep-deprivation, as I define it (weeks and weeks and weeks of not sleeping). Your brain actually does NOT function as it used to, and you cannot respond to other people in your life as well as you would otherwise; you are not really yourself till you're through it. If the writer doesn't know what this is like--if she hasn't tried it out herself--I don't think she ought to be quite so harsh.

She also writes, "As a childless woman, I have often resented the implication from parents that my life is not somehow quite as valuable as theirs now they have discovered the Greatest Love of All and are engaged in doing The Most Important Job in the World. This is not something that is ever vocalised but is apparent in many ways, the most extreme being a friend who would not accept the possibility of my being left happily childless and promised to come after me with a turkey baster and sperm if I turn 40 in my present condition. Christobel admits that, as a parent: 'One does become rather evangelical. The whole thing about how it is absolutely possible for a woman to be happy without children suddenly seems completely unbelievable and you go through a phase of feeling it is your urgent duty to communicate this message.'"

Now there, I don't relate to the parent-friends at all. True, I'd probably say my daughter is the best thing that ever happened to me, and she brings kinds of meaning to my life that it didn't have before, but I certainly do not think it's impossible for a woman to be happy without children. Far from it. I am sure I could have been happy, in different but equally valid ways, if I hadn't had children. I am not just saying that. I mean it. And I would NEVER want to be "evangelical." That sounds completely obnoxious to me. I would never imply that a childless friend's life was less valuable or important than mine (and there again, it's bothering me even to use that expression, "childless friend," as if the person is lacking in some way).

But here, I'm not sure if I'm more annoyed at the sentiments of the "evangelical" parent friend, or with the flat, one-dimensional picture the writer is trying to paint of parents as these simple-minded beings who smarmily devalue the lives of their non-parent friends. It seems like such a stereotypical picture. I guess I know a few parents who fit this bill, but I know many more who I do not think come anywhere near to approaching this irritating image of holier-than-thou, my-life-is-more-valuable-than-yours-ness.

If anything, I think I might be extra-careful never to evangelize to my non-parent friends because I secretly suspect myself, not of wanting to make their lives as Deep and Meaningful as mine, but of wanting them to Know How It Feels-- by which I mean, know the painful love that splits you open and makes you entirely vulnerable, and the tiredness, and the sometimes frighteningly dark feelings of frustration and irritation, and the feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt and worry for the future, and the intimations of mortality, and all THAT stuff that comes along with being a parent. In painting such a stereotypical picture of these smug, holier-than-thou parents, I think she misses the point of why, probably, a lot of parents might want their non-parent friends to experience this... not because they think they're better, or that their lives are better, but because they know there's a deep empathy for how hard it can be, and the specific ways it's hard (as well as how great it can be) that you can only share with someone who's become a parent.

Not that that excuses evangelizing. I am still firmly anti-evangelical.

Thank you

2008-02-01T15:48:54Z

to the kind people who wrote me and helped me feel better before I eliminated the last post!

Sarah

LJ Etiquette

2007-02-01T04:21:42Z

I finally figured out the "Read More" LJ cut, I think. Apologies for the long rant without the LJ cut! I didn't know it would be popping up on your pages (?) and it won't happen again.

Morbid

2006-12-23T22:32:29Z

I have been having a lot of morbid thoughts lately but I have been reluctant to talk about it because, among other things, I don't want anyone to tell me I have post-partum depression. I am 100% sure that's not what this is, especially since I DID have something that felt like post-partum depression for a few weeks and I don't feel that way anymore. Yesterday I found out that someone I know--a 34-year-old woman who is not a close friend of mine but who is dear to people who are close to me--was diagnosed with breast cancer and will have a mastectomy in less than a week. It is so terrifying, and not heartening that I have been reacting to it largely in the most selfish of ways (by pondering my own death and those of people who are closer to me). I have also been grabbing up and obsessing over any piece of writing I can find that depicts death, or the approach toward death, in a realistic and compelling way. When I think about it, I guess this started at the end of the pregnancy when I read that dreadfully powerful _New Yorker_ piece about the woman who delivers a baby who has already died inside of her. I can't remember a time, at least in my adult life, that a piece of writing affected me so much. But now that I think about it, I was also obsessed with Joan Didion's memoir about the deaths of her husband and daughter, and now I can't stop thinking about a Marjorie Williams essay I just read, "Hit by Lightning: A Cancer Memoir." All three of these are excellent pieces of writing, and they have in common an unflinching, vivid, detailed account of the mundane steps that surround the act of dying (in the Didion, a lot of this pertains to the aftermath--what happens after someone suddenly dies--and in the Williams, it's a meticulous detailing of the steps that lead up to her diagnosis and her realization that she is probably going to die).

My mother gave me the collection of Williams's essays because some of them are on parenting and she thought I'd be interested. She was dismayed when I flipped past those ones to the final essays in the collection, which are about her death. I haven't quite figured out why, but having the baby definitely seems connected to this preoccupation. I've been preoccupied with death before, but somehow this feels different. This time, too, I feel like I can't chalk it up to irrational anxieties or depression, or tell myself I just need more therapy or some antidepressants. I feel more, not less, in touch with reality. And that's not a condition to medicate, is it? I have a lot of thoughts on how having the baby is connected to thoughts of death, but one way that struck me very strongly last night as I was trying to sleep (and having insomnia as usual, despite being exhausted) is that I'd better make a list of things I want to do before I die and try to make time for them in an organized way--which completely goes against my nature. But for the first time, I feel a sense of urgency, and sense that if I don't become an organized person, I am going to die feeling deep sadness that I never accomplished a lot of what I wanted to.

Well, the baby just woke up so I have to go. I guess I'll have to add more later.

Hello

2006-07-17T18:46:46Z

Hmmm... I should have done this awhile ago. It's sad to have a completely blank journal. The reason I haven't posted in Live Journal is that I already have another journal going, here:
http://sarahgossblog.blogspot.com/
I don't know if anyone even knows that I signed up for Live Journal! Maybe I will post in here occasionally, feeling all mysterious and secretive because probably no one will ever read it.