Tag Archives: reflection

history, memoirs, relationships

A Ghost in you…

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There’s a song by The Psychadelic Furs that really got under my skin when I was 19 (it’s still in there).

“The Ghost in You” made me think of the important people who were not with me, most significantly, my sister Kim, and my Mother Angela.

Both of them were alive at the time, but separated from me for different reasons. My sister and I had been pals and playmates until we were about nine or ten. We were often separated as a consequence of family tragedies, misplaced loyalties (mine), or other people’s stupid, selfish decisions (our father’s). As the boy, I aligned with my father, mainly out of fear. As a girl, Kim would have been aligned with our Mother, if our Mother had been there and had been a factor in our lives.

Separation from my mother was permanent and irreversible. We had no relationship to speak of with her from about the ages of nine or ten, as she gave up on her family and escaped her life in situ, drinking herself into alcoholic abandon until her liver quit and brain damage and memory loss became her new abnormal.

She didn’t come back to us, mentally or physically. Once her memory got disrupted, her personality broke as well. She truly left us years before she ever left home and started living in various hospitals and became a ward of the province.

My sister Kim has survived, stayed alive, and made herself a life. She’s dear to me and I’m proud to be her brother. We talk regularly and we care about each other’s lives. I think that’s probably about as good as life can get: knowing someone who always wants to hear from you, and who always wants you to hear from them.

My Mum lived in the long-term care ward in Riverview from 1980 until 1995, where she died after struggling with pneumonia for a week. To me, her life was one of unrealized potential. Now all we can do is try to celebrate her beauty and recognize the traits, attributes, and abilities that she left us.

Memories are my constructs, my proxy rewards for the absence of real people. That’s where my ghosts live, preserved in my heart, freeze-dried in their best, most happiest personas. I greet them gratefully and warmly, like familiar old friends.

The Psychedelic Furs - The Ghost in You (Official Video)

 

memoirs

You can’t love them anymore

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When someone’s died, you can’t really love them anymore.

You can love your memories of them, but isn’t that just sentiment for your memories?

You can love how they used to make you feel, but isn’t that just the comfort of nostalgia?

You can admire their good values or deeds, but those values really belong to us all. Your lost beloved was doing a good job of reflecting them to you.

You can no longer love your lost person in real time, but you can always love the idea of them, the good values they held, and the inspiring examples they left behind.

history, relationships

Fatherhood

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My wife’s uncle passed away recently. He was a lovely man, surrounded by a loving family. His passing made me reflect on his reputation as a devoted father and member of his church. He left behind a family fresh in their grief, steadfast in their appreciation, and re-affirmed in their love.

My father died when I was in my twenties, leaving behind a fractured family, a dozen unresolved issues, a legacy of regrets, and no last will and testament. Over the past 35 years, I’ve become used to seeing his failures, arrogance, bombast, and violence in the foreground of my memories. It’s amazingly easy to stay inside the habit of bitterness, self-pity, and resentment. Those reactions were fairly earned at some real cost, and still valid to this day.

All the same, those particularly bitter truths obscure other less-familiar truths, like a dominant popular narrative that doesn’t tell the full story.

It’s common to focus on the negative and painful events to the exclusion of the positive ones. We learn from mistakes (our own or others) but not so much from our happiness and successes. So, I continue to mentally sift through my past, finding and polishing little moments worth celebrating that evoke pride in my father’s successes and joy in contemplating his warm moments.

I’m slowly separating the good man he could be from the toxic selfishness and anger he demonstrated. It’s really hard to separate a person from their actions, but I’ll keep trying to see both my parents as full-rounded people struggling with their demons.

Aside from my Dad, I also have to add that there have been a number of surrogate father figures in my life, who’ve provided support and positive examples of what fatherhood could look like at its best.

My maternal grandfather, Ernest Huntley Clarke (“Poppy”) was especially loved by me and my sister when we were young. He led by example every day, through his quiet, good-humoured, and dignified way of being.

I’ve prospered through the support of teachers who took the time to see and guide me, to help cultivate talents they thought were worth developing. The most impactful teachers I’ve known were when I was in art school, when I was slowly becoming mature enough to begin to appreciate them. Their attentions and challenges grew my confidence and self-worth every day.

My father-in-law, Honesto, provided a quiet kind of love and dedication, gradually accepting me as part of his family, and letting me help him when I could. His actions and sentiments to me were always uncomplicated and sincere.

stories

Feeling your worth

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Stories of fiction and fact
remind me of a painful truth.
Why treat yourself without tact?
Why be hurt without proof?

Find those old bad lessons
that have burned in afresh.
Outdated bias, old gossip,
weave a rotten old mesh.

Influential people you meet
will spread some old trash.
Scrape their bitter opinions
off your accepting flesh.

Others’ old battles
are not yours to fight.
Nothing devours old shadows
like the truth of light.

history, memoirs

Take good care of yourself. (You belong to me.)

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As a teen, I’d never have thought that in middle-age I’d be taking prescription meds each day to manage my health. (For all I knew back in my teens, middle-age was like an impossible dream. It’s easy to fear that where you are is all there is and all you’ll ever have.)

Growing up, I never saw my Dad take even an aspirin. With him, I’m convinced he would never even admit to being sick. I don’t remember him ever taking a sick day. How does that saying go? Pride goeth before a fall.

My Mum should probably have been taking Lithium or something to manage her manic-depression, but she hadn’t gone to see a Doctor since before we’d come to Vancouver in 1975. In the half-dozen years since then, the only substance either of my parents ever medicated themselves with was alcohol – way too much alcohol.

My Dad only paid attention to his Doctor when he was given the ultimatum “If you don’t stop drinking, you’re going to die!”. That dramatic advice impressed my old man. It probably made him feel like the centre of a big drama (specifically, his survival). More importantly, it gave him yet another great story to tell. I can only guess, but what a risky way that was to feel recognized.

By 1984, my Dad had a heart attack and multiple strokes, and would relapse into alcoholism and break his hip falling in a hospital shower. He had survived all his harsh physical ordeals with his mind and personality largely intact and had succeeded with the hard work of stroke rehabilitation, but was physically broken and partially paralyzed for the rest of his life.

We like to describe major events like these as “wake up calls”, but honestly, I don’t know if he ever “woke up” from his alcoholism in terms of taking responsibility for it. In his last five years of life, I think he stayed sober and relatively healthy because alcohol and cigarettes were forbidden in his private hospital. Left unsupervised, I think it’s quite likely he’d have relapsed and probably died. He did finally die in 1989 at the age of 68.

Back in 1977, my Mother was too far gone into her depression and alcoholism to even leave her bed. She’d completely withdrawn from all of us and the outside world, preferring to stay drunk or to appear to be sleeping all the time. She was unreachable, and we probably stopped trying over the course of the year. I never tried to rouse her, or go in and talk with her. The master bedroom was somewhere you just didn’t go.

One day, her liver quit and she was unresponsive. If she’d stayed home like that for another 24 hours, the Doctor told us she’d have surely died in her bed.

Medical intervention for my Mother came with a last-minute ambulance ride to Burnaby General Hospital. She detoxed after a full blood transfusion, and was not the same person afterwards. She’d survived, but alcohol poisoning had given her permanent brain damage. She’d tried to escape her life through alcohol, had almost died, and then had sort of been “remade” with a slightly different mind and personality. She’d had a painful almost-death and partial rebirth into a new life as a long-term resident in Riverview Psychiatric Hospital.

So I guess I never had good role models for taking care of myself or staying healthy. At the age of 46, my mum almost died from her alcoholism. At the age of 62, my Dad almost died from a heart attack and multiple strokes.

Now, at the age of 58, I’m kind of in-between those two ages, but am successfully managing my diabetes and high blood pressure. I’m taking Metformin and Jardiance for my Type 2 Diabetes and Ramipiril to manage my blood pressure. I do blood tests and talk with my Doctor every few months, I eat way more healthy than my folks ever did, and I walk 5000 to 10000 steps at least 5 days a week.

I guess the point of recounting all this is to show you (and myself) that I’m taking better care of myself in both physical and mental terms. In fact, I’ve learned how each of those aspects can affect the other.

By 2014, my diabetes had been largely unmanaged for about four years. I was pretty large and overweight at that time – maybe weighing 205 or more. Back then, I’d also experience some very dark feelings at least one morning each week (usually Mondays), and sometimes tears would just come to me unexpectedly. It felt like my emotions were actually working against me. In the last ten years since then, my diabetes has stayed in control through my meds and my attempts to improve my diet and daily exercise.

Today, I weight 177 pounds and am on-track to lose a few more and to get my blood pressure solidly inside the normal range. I try to get at least 5-6 hours of sleep each night and often walk more than 8000 steps each day. I feel no anxiety, and those black mornings have become very rare occurrences. I feel more calm, more confident, and more happy.

So better physical health can make it easier to improve mental health, and vice versa. My parents never experienced that while I knew them, but I can still learn from their examples.

memoirs, relationships, research, stories

Stories that aren’t mine to tell

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It’s good to be reminded of the ethics of storytelling involving other people. I’m talking specifically about family or friends who could be embarrassed or hurt by something I write.

I’ve always felt ownership over the stories from my life, but who really owns a story, and what right do I have to tell it?

Nobody’s life is lived in a vacuum. There are lines one can cross when telling tales that involve others. What can you say without asking someone for their permission or participation? It’s probably a risk that journalists deal with all the time, but being an amateur writer, I’ve tried to find the ethical boundaries on my own, and to think hard about tactics and work-arounds to keep a story on-point without risking someone else’s privacy and peace of mind. It can be a real balancing act.

Here are some filters I use to guide my personal story writing, when dealing with sensitive topics:

  • Will telling the story do more harm than good? There’s a line between telling an impactful story with a point, and telling a dramatic story to get attention. Just because there were various abuses and mental illness in my family background, that doesn’t entitle me to tell similar-themed stories of other people I know. Other people own their own stories, and unless I get their permission or participation, their story is not one I should be telling. For example, one family member straight-out asked me not to write about an incident that had personally affected me. It had affected them much more than me, and they wanted to avoid embarrassment. It was a fair request, so I’ve never written about it.

  • Did the event happen to me personally? This simple filter can help to keep me steered towards relevance while avoiding causing pain to others, just by respecting boundaries of privacy. I despise gossip and would never want to be seen as a spreader of hearsay just for the sake of spinning a colourful tale.

  • Is the person who might be hurt by your storytelling still alive? If the subject of your story has died, this may seem to cancel-out the factors listed above, but it really may not. What about other relatives who are still alive, who may take exception to your rendition of the dead subject?

  • Is your portrayal of a person or event reasonably balanced? I’ve found that an all-negative portrait of someone is never accurate in any case, so balancing negative perceptions with some positive ones helps to build a more-well-rounded portrait, and may balance the scales a bit. Still, be careful.

  • When dealing with sensitive topics, can you get permission or participation from the the main subjects, or their rights-holders? Try to do this. It’s ethical, respectful, and can save you from getting into all kinds of legal hot water. In my case, I asked my sister if it was okay for me to relay some painful stories from our shared past. They involved me directly, but the underlying pain she’d gone through and was still going through was primarily her stories to tell. Between us, we worked out a timeline of events and the people involved. I let her approve my final edit and told her that if she ever changed her mind, the story could easily be pulled off my site. There has to be responsibility and trust, and I’m grateful that she trusted me to render some extremely difficult moments. It was very brave on her part.

  • Existence is subjective, and everyone thinks they’re the hero of their own story. I may feel like the world revolves around me, but that’s just my ego and one-sided perception. Be fair-minded and balanced.

It helps to remind myself that I’m just a microscopic mote in a world which has meanings and motivations that are so much bigger than me and my little life. Underneath each series of events can be found deeper patterns that often relate us to each other. Those shared patterns are the things really worth writing about.

memoirs, stories

Old and New, Sun through and through.

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Old and New, Sun through and through.
Granville Market, Blue Parrot coffee,
A view of the harbour,
with gulls wheeling softly.

I used to come here sketching,
and dream of a future
where I’d live a good life,
dignified – even mature.

Strolling that island,
so gently today,
and holding her hand,
and hearing her say:

“I’m so grateful for you,
so glad that we met here.
Almost forty years later and
not near done yet, dear.”

The former art college,
framed our first connections.
First dating, then living
to our spirit’s directions.

That clump of pilings and rocks
dredged up out of False Creek
became Nova Terra Firma
for the bold and the meek.

We met there by chance,
my best, beautiful friend.
Let’s have another forty.
Walk with me again!

memoirs, stories

Home is what you make it

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We moved a lot when I was a kid. By the time I was eleven, we had moved that many times. Sometimes it was just a few doors up the lane and other times it was to a new town hours away.

It’s amazing how permanent or transient life can feel, and how you can adapt to changes in living conditions. As a kid, you follow your parents; you cross each new threshold in their footsteps. I’ve lived in a number of different kinds of homes, in my grandfather’s fifty year-old house in the middle of a city, in a brand new mobile home in the middle of 77 acres of brush and cow pastures, in three different motels along busy trucking routes, and in rental row housing where your neighbours are just a few inches away on the other side of a wall.

Wherever we lived, we didn’t own our home, we rented it. Each residency could last for months or years. I usually watched life unfold on the ground floor, at the lower-end of the middle-class. I had my own room for the first time at the age of eight, but a couple of years later, we were living in a motel and I had to share a bedroom. I wouldn’t have my own bedroom again till a few years later.

When you can’t have private personal space, you end up cultivating the space you need in your mind. When I was ten, I shared a bed with my Dad, and while he was sleeping, I’d listen to 14CFUN on my transistor radio with a little plastic earphone. My private late night AM radio took me into a wider world where KISS sung a ballad to Beth and Boston power-chorded their way through more than a feeling. Escapism helped to bring my kid-brain some much-needed psychological privacy and personal space. I don’t know how much I really liked my parents or my life back in those days, but I’m pretty sure I resented all chaos and uncertainty. Any chance to escape was refreshing.

I have wondered if impermanence or mobility had been kind of baked into my parents, carried over from their own upbringings. For me and my sister, our relatively transitory housing was driven by the kinds of circumstances that my parents were in. Our mother’s mental illness and father’s alcoholism must have made it difficult for them to save money or create permanence and stablility, but maybe there were older patterns at play too. Maybe ownership wasn’t even a consideration for them. Although Grandpa Love, my Dad’s dad, had built the Love family house in Prince Rupert back in 1918, my Dad never seemed followed in his father’s steps into home ownership.

I’ve wondered over the years if home ownership would have changed our family for the better. As far as I can tell, my Dad had always been a renter and none of his jobs ever laster more than a few years. Maybe he actually liked moving around every so often. Whether that was his nature or not, it wasn’t all on him. Every few years, my Mum would have a nervous breakdown or Dad would lose his job or something, and we’d have to move somewhere new and kind of start all over.

I believe that to my Mum, her real home would always be in her hometown of Victoria, where her father lived, and where she’d spent most of her life. Mum’s dad had been a Mountie and they’d moved a fair bit during her youth as the family followed him from post to post around British Columbia. Maybe in her first eleven years, she changed home as many times as I would. She and her parents settled in Victoria sometime in the mid-forties.

A Nesting Instinct

By the time I was a teen, we were renting a townhouse in East Van. I had my own room again for the first time in a few years and it was like heaven to me. We lived there through my last two years of elementary, and all through high school. By that time, I’d collected a vast collection of books, magazines, and comics, and had my own second-hand TV and a clock radio in my room, so my entertainment was self-contained and assured. I think I was trying to equip my own apartment, to define my own living space, and set up some amount of self-sufficiency. Home didn’t always feel secure or totally safe, but at least my room was mine.

When I turned 29, my wife and I were able to buy a condo in East Van, very near to the neighbourhood where she’d grown up. Ownership was a big step for us. The responsibility scared me,  but we’d gone into it together, talked it all out, and worked hard to save up our down payment.  We bought our condo pre-built, and drove by the site every week to watch the construction progress of our future home.

On move-in day, it felt so amazing to be moving into a brand new place that nobody had ever lived in before. I can still smell the new carpet and paint, and see the bright walls and shiny fixtures. There was no evidence of age anywhere: no dust, no stains, no scratches, no dented corners, no musty, mouldy aromas, no dry-rot, and no old, second-hand furniture that’d been in someone’s family for thirty years. Everything was new, and it felt like a total housing reboot.

However, our dream condo turned sour as it revealed its substandard underbelly to us so many times over the years. Starting just a few months after moving in, we discovered that we lived in a leaky condo, but we stuck it out through leak after leak, levy after levy, and more than a couple of insurance claims, hoping that each repair event would be the last. Now, twenty-eight years later, after a leak into our bedroom caused by old, degraded membrane outside, we finally decided we’d had enough of annual repairs, and should use our home’s value to find a newer condo with better-quality construction.

But even with leaks, plumbing problems, and all the other issues in our original condo, it has still been my home for almost thirty years, and of that relative permanence, I still feel very proud indeed.

memoirs

Chasing shadows, gratefully…

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For most of my life, I’ve chased after intangible things that I thought I needed. Whether it was fatherly praise or some kind of motherly love, I quietly sought reassurance that I was worthwhile, valuable, and cherished. It didn’t matter if the granters were my real parents or, later on, proxy people whom I’d adopted to take their places. It was a reflex that I didn’t even know I was playing out.

By the time I reached thirty both my parents had died, and whatever conversations we might have had would remain unfinished, capping-off relationships with each other that had been thin, confusing, and largely unhappy.

Thirty seemed to be the age when I felt the most physically and emotionally charged and capable. By that time, I’d become a part-owner and co-manager in a small software company. I was learning my craft as an artist and designer in the high-tech sector, and also learning a little about business and a lot about the human nature of the people around me.

While I built up my own abilities and forged my own life, I still needed to fill some gaping holes inside myself. They were my unsatisfied yearnings to have a supportive father figure, a nuturing, communicative mother figure, and to fill some family role without bitter feelings of resentment ruining the joy.

So, from my thirties through my fifties, I found bosses who gave me guidance, training, and praise, and a few colleagues whom I could help or counsel. Sometimes my work-teams felt like a new family.

When some career coach tells you not to treat your workmates like family, it may be prudent advice, but it’s only practical to those who don’t have gaps in their life where real family ought to have been. For me, during my first job out of college, working with people who’d become my friends, the dysfunction and misunderstandings that arose inside that group appeared to me like problems I thought I could help solve. My problems stemmed from not identifying others as the sources of dysfunction, and thinking I needed to take on some responsibility for finding solutions. Sometimes however, it really is someone else’s fault and their problems need to be dealt with by themselves, or just somebody else who isn’t you.

When I felt something resonate with a new person, I’d find myself wanting to connect, to bond, to provide support, or feel needed. With anyone in whom I’ve confided my life stories or shown some affection, those moments were always real, genuine, never contrived. The people I placed as my proxy parents or confidants, they earned my real love and gratitude. But my need to connect, the kernel that continued to influence my behaviour, came from the need to reconfirm my worth in some way.

After the age of fifty, I really tended to shy away from attention and crowds, but ironically I still wanted to be acknowledged in some way. “See me, hear me, feel me, touch me” as the song goes, but maybe don’t get too close… I think that must be a classic introvert behavior. But the pull to put myself in a familial identity or to assign that to a colleague seems less powerful now that I’m 57. It’s just a faint gravitational influence, instead of a strong magnetic pull.

But I have learned something from each friend, colleague, or mentor, directly or indirectly, and for that I’m grateful.

I like the saying “you might be done with the past, but the past ain’t done with you”. It’s a blunt way of saying that life can be circular and recurring, looping your dumb, distracted ass around and around through similar patterns until you learn what you need to change. Poets use rhyme, storytellers repeat themes, and composers replay refrains, all to show us some pattern they need us to see again and again, until we finally recognize that there’s a pattern being repeated. That’s the point at which you can finally perceive the real race you’re running, and try to jump out of the wheel ruts.

But getting to clarity and objectivity is slow, and the work takes years to clear away the fog of childhood issues. It’s like you can’t see the big picture of your own behaviour until you’re well past it, look back on it. Hindsight is 20/20.

It’s not about getting to that thing that’s always out of your reach. It’s more about getting the clarity to see it for what it is. It’s about reminding yourself to let go of that elusive thing, because it’s probably an illusion. You could just be chasing your own shadow.

You can’t catch it, but once you realize what you’re really running for, it won’t matter so much.

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