Dealing with death

On of the stories featured in The Myth of Closure was a woman whose husband was lost at sea. 

An acquaintance advised her to just call herself a widow already; it's not like anyone would know the difference.

She would know the difference.

Boss also mentioned families who lost members at the World Trade Center on 9/11. They often accepted death certificates for legal reasons and convenience. Having death legally declared, and being mostly sure that their loved one was in fact dead still left their loss complicated and ambiguous.

I have been thinking about the "convenience" part.

It is not at all unusual that even when everyone is sure of the death, we feel uncomfortable. We worry about saying the wrong thing.  

In my first round of reading about death, I mentioned that one of the books that came from from The Year of Magical Thinking was an etiquette guide by Emily Post. There used to be firmer rules about the formal handling of grief.

One reason I went to the Odditorium was for the exhibit on Victorian mourning, like maybe there would be some good ideas there. It wasn't particularly helpful.

Even when you know that someone is definitely gone, and you understand the reason why and there is nothing to fight on it, that will often not feel tidy.

One of the discussions we have had about this long goodbye with my mother is whether to have a funeral when the time comes. They had started being less common at the start of the pandemic, partly because of fears of contagion but also because of how quickly deaths were happening.

Some siblings were against having a funeral. I believe that is because at a funeral one has messy emotions and there are witnesses; they are not into that. I worried that other family members would feel cheated by that or that it was disrespectful, but everyone seems to be on board.

I also worried that maybe funerals are a community's way of coming together and telling each other, yes, this person is gone, and they were valuable to us. I have had very touching experiences at funerals and memorial services, so that can be something. Would we be missing out?

Maybe it is to get closure.

The problem with that is no matter how specific a timeline you set, it will be wrong. You will find yourself laughing when the grief is very fresh; then when it is older and appears mostly healed sharp stabs of grief will strike. 

Oh yeah, that hurt. 

One of the books in my "daughters" reading was The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards.

Dr. David Henry gives away his daughter born with Down Syndrome, pretending she died at birth. He gives her to the nurse to take to an institution, but then the nurse adopts her.

The devaluation of children with various conditions, including Down Syndrome, and institutionalization was a real thing; that's part of what inspired the story. The father making that decision unilaterally and lying to everyone is its own issue. 

I suppose to try and keep him relatable and sympathetic, it is based on his grief over his own sister's death, where he is trying to spare others. His family, poor rural people, did not know how to handle grief.

I remember thinking, Really!?! People have been dying since they have been living, generally sooner if you are poor. They had no way to process that!?! It's implied that part of it is their lack of education, but clearly the son's education didn't help.

And yet, given how we struggle sometimes with grief and mourning and supporting each other, maybe Edwards has a point.

The truth is that a funeral or a year of wearing black or covering mirrors for seven days or any other traditions may provide solace and help with reflection, but those things are outer while the healing needed is inside.

It is all very inconvenient. 

We can't always help people with that, but we can show that we care. That part is really important.

Sometimes it will involve fear of saying the wrong thing, but that makes the assumption that any specific things we could say will be wrong or right. 

I remember once getting a thank you card from someone whose mother had died, saying it was the only one that helped.

All I said that that this is going to hurt and it's okay to feel that pain.

This sucks and I am sorry. 

We can be so quick to comfort that we try and rush past the grief. That just prolongs the pain.

It is something we can't control, hence a lot of the discomfort. 

We can try to understand it better, and then adapt. 

An apparent detour: New garden update!

Yes, it SEEMS like a detour.

In September I wrote about delays in planting and germination, so transplanting some volunteer pumpkins without knowing what I would get.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/09/garden-update-now-with-vocab.html 

They turned out to be more like gourds, staying quite small. 

There was another that mostly ripened, then got eaten by critters. A couple of other buds started growing, but were too late to get very big. It could be disappointing, but it would be so easy to have nothing at all.

I am also getting some clover coming in. It is either all volunteer or maybe there are some remnants from when I planted clover a few years ago. 

There is also some grass and weeds that I am going to have to deal with eventually., but that's not why I decided to post again.

Getting only three pumpkin plants -- only one of which survived -- left a lot of empty ground. I had mentioned cover crops and green manure last time.

Fava beans are popular for this. I think this is partly because of how they spread and their size, but also because of the nitrogen-fixing abilities of legumes.

I did not have any fava beans, but I did have some seed packets for peas and beans. 

I sprouted both and they all seemed responsive. Based on where I planted what, it was really the peas that took off. 

They did fill in a lot of the bare patches, and they added some interest, but getting such a late start I did not think they would get that far.

I have blossoms in mid-December.

Okay, it has been wet and warm. Those are not the worst growing conditions, but it is still a little cooler than spring would be, I think. Plus, there shouldn't really be any pollinators left. Without a frost, who knows?

Also, we are quite near the solstice. There are plants where if you plant them too close to the summer solstice, the change from days getting longer to getting shorter inhibits their growth, signaling them to shut down. I have no idea how the wintertime switch to days getting longer will work. 

I assume a frost will come at some point and that should still be a showstopper, but seriously, what do I know?

The planet is changing so quickly and unpredictably that it's hard to plan. We still plan, and plant.

One potential reason that people struggle with ambiguity is that lack of control. 

Not liking the lack of control is very relatable, but it doesn't change anything. Denial doesn't suddenly put you back in charge.

It's best to learn to adapt. 

Dealing with ambiguity

I recently finished The Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change.

Well, I finished my first read through last month, but then I wanted to go through it more slowly and with a lot of journal writing. I have read some of the chapters three times now.

I found out that this book existed when I was reviewing books about dementia and saw that Pauline Boss had a new one that dealt specifically with the pandemic.

I have to admit that The Myth of Closure is not Boss' best work, mainly because it feels kind of hurried. 

I can't blame her for this. She was retired and caring for her ailing husband. Then between the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd and ensuing protests, plus the January 6th insurrection, suddenly she was gaining new understanding of her life's work and realizing it was something much bigger. She was also older and more aware of death, where there may have been concerns about being able to finish.

I still found a lot of food for thought, then more as I went back over it more slowly.

It is not unusual to struggle with ambiguity. Remember Fiddler on the Roof? Part of the beauty of tradition was that everyone knew what was expected of them, but what if you don't like the expectations? Sure, that means what if you can't bear to marry someone other than the poor tailor, but also, what if being properly deferential to the Russians doesn't stop them from destroying your property and injuring you?

Can the traditions even withstand being uprooted with everyone heading off to other places?

In the mid-90's I worked with someone who was studying psychology. 

At the time, "dysfunctional families" was kind of a buzz phrase, but she said that people were using it wrong. It didn't mean a "bad" family, but one where the members did not know what was expected of them and did not know how to fit into their roles.

It is possible to have roles and rules that you hate. 

Ambiguity means there is also a chance to change. 

Change is hard, especially when you are trying to change a whole structure, and when others disagree on the necessary changes and don't cooperate. 

There is still an opportunity to make things better. 

Giving meaning to ambiguous loss may mean redefining ourselves and what our relationships look like and what our acceptable results look like, but there is hope in it too.  

Books about death

Yes, my most recent posts have been inspired by a death, but that is not why I am posting this now. 

This was going to be natural follow-up to Books about dementia and Movies about death. There have been some interruptions.

Also, I am not yet ready to write on "Books about being a mess." I think that one is going to end up being broken down into even smaller parts.

Nonetheless, there were books that I read on the topic of death. 

I was deliberately reading to prepare for my mother's death, not knowing when it would happen. The books also ended up being about more than her. If they were not more about life than death, well, they are still about life too.

I have also been working on this long enough that a quote that I wanted to use already appeared on the blog in 2019. 

"It appears that people who have gone through a life of suffering, hard work, and labor, who have raised their children and been gratified in their work, have shown greater ease in accepting death with peace and dignity compared to those who have been ambitiously controlling their environment, accumulating material goods, and a great number of social relationships but few meaningful interpersonal relationships which would have been available at the end of life." 

That is from On Death and Dying by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross.

My biggest caveat on that quote is that it refers to people with young children having a harder time reconciling themselves to not finishing raising them. It could sound like the issue is whether you had children or not, but it was a matter of not being able to complete the parental role and conflicts and guilt about that.

It is also worth noting that Kübler-Ross gets quoted a lot regarding the stages of grief, as if it applies to any loss. She was specifically studying people learning that they were terminally ill. People have also tended to view it as a linear checklist, but it's not that simple or straightforward. 

First published in 1969, it is also somewhat out of date by now. One book trying to address that was Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief by David Kessler. 

Kübler-Ross and Kessler collaborated; he wasn't trying to steal her thunder. 

I agree with the premise that finding meaning is helpful, but some of his sources are questionable. I rechecked my Goodreads reviews for all of these books. The praise I have for Kessler's is that it might be accessible for some people who would struggle with deeper books. That's not a strong recommendation.

One that is also kind of faint praise is for Words at the Threshold by Lisa Smartt, yet I did gain something for it. 

When I was writing about The Gift of Alzheimer's, my issue was that a lot of her evidence seemed kind of reaching but I was glad that she was able to have positive experiences with a difficult disease.

With Smartt, I am not sure that all of the words spoken by the dying did have a deeper meaning, or at least not the perceived meaning. 

I have had times when a high fever or medication has kept me from being able to find the right words for thoughts I was trying to get out. I cannot rule out that a dying person may want very much to communicate something, but that what they are saying may not match. Getting too hung up on trying to make the words fit may not work.

That also doesn't mean that there is nothing profound or valuable. It depends on so many things. It is up to us to glean meaning and part of that is going to be from the context of the relationship that we know. 

I may be overly hung up on that because it is very hard losing someone you love. It would be easy to grasp at false comfort. Is that a problem if it is still comfort? Well, if the false part is keeping you from something that would be better, then yes.

I feel bad that I was somewhat disappointed with Gone From My Sight: The Dying Experience by Barbara Karnes.

This is the booklet that everyone providing hospice recommends. They may even give you a copy free. I have turned down two copies because I already have one.

It's not bad, though a lot of it is still assuming some awareness on the part of the person dying where it is not really helpful for dementia. That was probably part of my disappointment. 

It's value is in encouraging acceptance, which is important because the grief of the loved ones they are leaving can be an obstacle for the person who is dying and already has enough to resolve.

(I'm just going to insert a link to Ring Theory here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/promoting-hope-preventing-suicide/201705/ring-theory-helps-us-bring-comfort-in)

Remember that acceptance will be helped by finding meaning, but also may be surprisingly helped by absurdity.

I tend to find New Yorker cartoons disappointing, so I would not expect to be a fan of one of their cartoonists, but I did find some common ground in Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant by Roz Chast.

There were probably other points in common, but the one I remember most is that after having a lot of difficulty with her mother and having to hire help, being irritated to find her mother comfortably seated on the couch with the caretaker and eating a tuna fish sandwich. You should be happy, but why aren't you?

There are so many different things pulling at you. It is important to be fair and reasonable, but part of that can also be knowing that your feelings are valid and this is hard.  

Finally, I should mention A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis.

I mentioned being disappointed by the Shadowlands movie, mainly because I don't think there was that much C. S. Lewis in it. 

I don't think I have ever been disappointed by reading Lewis.

The most impressive thing about A Grief Observed may be that I could tell that he had written a lot more, so was only sharing some parts of it, but some of those parts were so raw. His criteria for sharing was not an effort to sanitize. What is left is an acknowledgment of terrible pain, but also hope and acceptance. 

I believe he found meaning in that. 

Lingering questions

Next week I plan to spend more time on death and healing. Maybe this post is a transition.

There were two things that stuck out for me from Albert's obituary. 

One was the use of "beloved" three times for his partner; that made me wonder if she wrote it and if there is a level at which it was overcompensating.

The "credit" I can give him is that for all of the women he hit on who did not know that he had a partner, including the one who was talking to him more and trying to get him to go to the reunion, I can't believe there was a lot of time spent with other women, and not only because so many weren't interested. 

I suppose his going could have made the reunion more interesting.

The other thing was a mention of friends.

Friends don't usually end up mentioned in obituaries; maybe they should be.

I know with my father's death and my mother being in end of life, that is something I have thought about more. Who needs updates? How can that best be done?

My parents were very young marrieds and they had a lot of friends who were a little bit older, which I think was nice for them as they were not near family. If I think about their influence or how my mother made friends through greyhound rescue, there might not be names mentioned but that would totally be something that it would make sense to include in an obituary. In fact, there is a reference to Albert making friends through pickleball. I get that.

There are also some people mentioned by name. One is his best friend he met at Beaver Acres. That makes me wonder if in fact he did not go to Aloha Park from the boundary change, but moved and ended up at Beaver Acres at the same time as the boundary change. (Aloha Park and Beaver Acres both fed into Five Oaks at the time.)

Regardless, in this case the person's full name is given and a reference to golfing with him, indicating the friendship lasted. I probably would not have separated the mentions, noting "best friend since elementary school" when mentioning the golf, but the inclusion does make sense.  

The other mention strikes me as weirder:

"As Albert entered high school he met his good friends Josh, Joel and Matt and he found his calling with the drama department appearing in various plays." 

All four of them definitely were in the drama department in high school and they did plays together. I specifically remember Josh and Albert having a scene together at the end of Barnum.

However, that's not how he met any of them.

Albert knew Josh from Chehalem like I did, then went to separate junior high schools.

Albert met Matt and Joel in junior high, where all of them did plays. I specifically remember Albert and Matt were both in The Curious Savage. 

There was another guy in that group, Aaron. He did hang out with the theater people, though I can't remember him acting now.

If the obituary had said Aaron instead of Josh -- even if it had said high school instead of junior high -- that would be logical to me. They did a lot of things together, and my friends and I were often there as the female component of that group.

One potential reason for not mentioning Aaron could be the criminal charges and jail time. I would get that, except that could also make a case for excluding Matt.

As far as I know, Albert never held Matt accountable for anything. Sure, things can change, but they were certainly in contact in 2008 and the mention in the obituary implies a continued connection, except for the other two.

I can't rule out continued contact, but many of us remembered clearly how completely Joel disappeared, shunning those connections. He did briefly pop up on Facebook and we exchanged some messages, but he didn't stay on long. With those group dynamics, I did not blame him, but also he was the most beloved boy in that group.

(That is specifically class of 1990, or '87 for Five Oaks. There were two other boys who spent a fair amount of time with us but one was older and one was younger. In addition, there were some people we knew who started doing more with theater at high school, but were not acting as much then. Regardless, the core group was those four boys and six of us girls.)

Then, with Josh... I don't know the details, as it was again a situation where I found out some things later. Regardless, I am pretty sure that Josh did not consider Matt a friend after one point. Given a choice, I am sure Albert would have defended Matt. He always did.

Josh was also very much beloved. 

It's weird to me that the obituary paints this image of a foursome that was really tight. It doesn't fit.

I suspect in some way it is there because maybe including two of the best and best-regarded people paints a prettier picture and makes it look like better associations.

Then I wonder if in fact he drafted his own obituary before he died, and there were things he was not going to face. 

In fact, his voice work did bring him into professional and mentoring contact with other classmates who still think fondly of him. Mentioning them could have made more sense and still sounded good. 

I can get wanting things to look better, but I want things to be real. 

Now, I have generally worked to protect identities in these posts. This one is obviously more specific, which I don't love, but seems necessary given the material.

For that reason, I am posting some references.

Related links:

https://omegaservices.com/obituaries_tributes/albert-d-hensley-jr/1763/?

https://www.wweek.com/portland/article-19583-barred.html 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Wingard 

Also, though with completely different feelings:

https://www.portlandmercury.com/artsy/2008/12/12/984914/another_death_in_the_portland 

Two stories

These stories could easily sound catty, but that's not how I feel about them.

The more recent one was around the time of our 20-year reunion.

I was talking to one of the women who took Albert's advances most to heart. She was worried because he had said he was not going to the reunion. She was trying to get him to go, but he didn't.

She was also in contact with someone else from school, Ronny Kersey. 

I mention his name because we lost him in July and I don't remember seeing any classmates post about it. I was more aware of it because one of my former coworkers had served in the Marines with him. Small world, right?

There is a level at which I think talking about people as good or bad is reductive, but yes, I considered Ron a good guy. He was not as well-known at school, where I remember him as pretty quiet. Family and friends and other service members were really hurt by the loss.

For this woman, maintaining contact was not just being friends on Facebook, but messages and I think sometimes phone calls and maybe visits when possible. Losing two of them so close together would be very sad, but she left Facebook a while ago. I don't know if she even knows.

I lost contact with her shortly after the reunion. We were talking about whom we might want to spend more time with. I named someone else from our class and she turned a bit chilly. 

Apparently she liked him too. I guess she needed to have all of the single men, or at least until she secured one.

For this third single (specifically divorced, I am not sure how recent it was then) man, we had many perfectly fine interactions, but there is one really clear memory. It bothers me more now, though I didn't love it then. That brings us to the second story. 

I have told this story before, but not since 2008.

Leaving algebra class (still in junior high), I was joined in the hall by D. (I used a different initial in the 2008 telling, so both tellings could be too incriminating... I don't know.)

In front of us, one guy grabbed the butt of the girl he was dating, surprising her. She looked mad until she saw who it was, but they walked off with his arm around her shoulders.

D told me that once that guy got what he wanted from her, he would dump her. I don't know all of the details, but I could see that she had switched to hating him about two weeks later. 

When I have these really clear snapshot memories, I have since figured out that this was a moment when my mind was processing, "Oh, this is how the world works. That sucks." That's not to say that I really had full understanding of these moments, but that was the lesson I was taking. Part of them being such vivid memories is that the lessons I was learning sucked. 

I remember not knowing what to say. Years later, I think more about how D seemed to find it amusing.

Why? Because if she gave into the guy who was essentially her boyfriend, and acting like he really liked her, that made her stupid and slutty? Was I allowed to know that because I was such a good girl? Or was I such a non-threatening girl that it didn't matter what I was told?

(If it was because I never would have gotten it on my own, he had a point.) 

Was he amused that the boyfriend in question was kind of a douche? That's actually not funny when you consider how it affects other people. 

Isn't being a teenage girl hard enough? 

In terms of how to handle it, I cannot imagine that my trying to tell her would have gone well. We weren't close and I was not known for my dating expertise.

What really would have been great is if other guys were against that, where treating girls badly would result in social exclusion of some kind. 

If I could go back, I think I would have said something to D. "Do you think that's funny? That's horrible!"

I don't know if that would have done anything other than make me seem a lot less fun. Sometimes to make things better you have to be annoying and frustrating and irritatingly right. 

Does that mean raining down on other people's grief? Probably not in this case, and I am not trying to do that. 

It will absolutely involve other times of making people uncomfortable.

The last time I engaged with Albert where he tried to make me feel bad about my blog, it ended with something like "Maybe one day I'll get a mention in your ranting blog."

Well, you have some mentions now, and this next part may sound like a rant. 

First, though, I want to point out is that if there were people whom he was more likely to defer to -- either men with not knocking them politically or women with not hitting on them -- because of perceived talent or connections or greater popularity or marital status -- there are going to be things there that fit under dominator culture and quite possibly patriarchy but possibly not misogyny.

What I see most here is misogyny, which was a huge part of #MeToo and the lack of lasting changes.

For the few predators who have done jail time, there are a lot more who are excused or shrugged off and the victim pays a higher toll... that's possible because of the misogyny.

That male classmates could choose to not talk politics with Albert so they could have enjoyable interactions, but that female classmates trying to set a boundary like, Hey, don't go through my Facebook friends and start hitting on them, then had to face his Mr. Hyde version... that's misogyny.

That he could hit on I-don't-even-know-how-many women using the exact same words like they were all interchangeable and think that was perfectly okay while also being in a long-term relationship... misogyny!

Even that he would wait to hit on some classmates until they were divorced -- so respecting the perceived rights of a different man over them but not their own autonomy -- misogyny!

That he might feel that what he needed to do to gain validation was collecting interactions with many women, that is misogyny too. I don't think it made him happy, and it is worth noting that misogyny is not great for men either but -- call it bias -- I have a bigger issue with the effects of misogyny on women. 

And that a woman twenty years out of high school with an interesting job and plenty of things going for her would feel such a need for validation from a man that she would be excited about these crummy compliments, and keep going even when she started to know that his attention to her was not unique, and also would feel the need to back off from platonic relationships if there was a perceived threat to the mere potential of a romantic relationship... that relates to internalized misogyny.

I can be sad as well as mad.  

Related posts: 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2008/12/sex-education-314.html 

Feels like old times

There is still a lot of communication going on related to the topic of last week. That's fine; I was committed to at least another week of writing about it anyway.

One of the comments was that it reminded him of #MeToo. 

I also had that reaction.

The misogyny that goes into creating this kind of a situation is a big part of that, but there was something else, and the height of #MeToo was where I first noticed that.

First of all, I need to be very clear that -- much like COVID -- #MeToo is not just one limited incident when everyone was talking about it. Tarana Burke had started using the hashtag in 2006 on MySpace, more than a decade before Alyssa Milano posted it on Twitter. Then, despite sexual harassment and assault and abuse continuing to be a problem, there was backlash against it "going too far" and the country has twice elected a serial predator (now a convicted rapist!) to the presidency.

There are ongoing problems.

Regardless, at the height I was posting about #MeToo a lot. That was some blogging but also sharing articles and updates about my own experiences on both Facebook and Twitter.

One of my Twitter mutuals blocked me. Because of some things that had happened with her daughter it was all very painful and she needed to shut it out. I did not feel good about disturbing her or losing contact with her, but it also felt important to keep posting. 

Part of that was all of the other women chiming in.

I knew many stories beyond my own. There was a level at which I was posting for them, even without mentioning their names or details. It was for me, but it was also for the others I already knew about. 

Then I kept learning about more. The circle of people I was thinking about expanded.

That was repeated during a few phases. Some reached out privately and some blared it out, but they had things to say and there was relief in saying them.

This is a much smaller scope, but yeah, there have been more people affected than I knew. 

There are always more.

Personally, the only real surprise was when the obituary confirmed he had been with his partner for 23 years. There was a part of me not sure if had had been with her all of that time, but that would put their getting together in 2002. That means definitely together in 2008 through 2010 from when I really remember it, and still together at least as late as 2017, a time period when it was still happening, that I did not know about last week. So, yeah.

The obituary calls her "beloved" three times. That's one reason I am still not using his name a lot. I don't know if she knew. Maybe it was overcompensating. There were so many people who had no idea that he had a partner.

When I wrote that first Facebook post and said I was feeling hard-hearted, what that meant is that I was seeing this outpouring of grief and essentially rolling my eyes, which did not feel right. People were legitimately sad and I should respect that, but there was also this irritation that was growing and becoming angrier.

As the responses started coming in, it was clear that I was not the only one feeling that. Giving people a place to vent could be a relief for them. There is that need to speak, but also that desire not to be giving pain to other people who are already hurting. 

Another classmate wrote a very nice Facebook post as a tribute to her friend on the same day I did my first blog post. Replying to that with what a jerk he was would not be kind to them, but keeping silent has its own problems. It's not always easy to find the right balance.

I have some more thoughts on that, but the next post will be spending some time on the misogyny. 

None of this happens without the misogyny.