When Society Is Afraid of Grief And The Grievous, Angels

THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF LITTLE WHITE LIES CAN MAIM AND EVEN KILL - Jonathan Swift

I wrote this short story to portray the grief that isn't televised.  Americans have such a hackneyed understanding of how grief works on the human mind, heart, soul, and most importantly, body.  Experiences in grief do not entail being obliterated by the wrong color of pencil or an incorrect greeting at some soiree.  The alienation, the nihilistic sensibility (and sense), the emptiness, the worry, anxiety for the future, regret for the past, distrust of the present--not available in the movies or on Entertainment Tonite or even Real Housewives of Frogcrotch Georgia.  Hence, a short story all lit up like a Christmas tree by someone with enough experience with grief and loss it's uncanny I can even think at all.  

Enjoy!  Bon Appetit!  Or better: Bone Ape-tit!

THIS GRIEF ENSUES

So what?  Buddy's mother died.  

No biggie.  Lives come and go in the real world.  Regardless, the woman who had borne him into the world--she was now gone. Yeah.  The guy (we barely knew him), heartbroken, sat alone in his room for what to him seemed like days.  

What would anyone do if no one calls?  Who really knows what a human would do?  We could imagine, for example, such a person, lost to something now gone away, usually the past, which is always gone the instant one realizes it is the past, might sit waiting for the telephone to ring.  Or maybe even something in the daily mail--delivered around 3:30 every afternoon except Sundays--that might clue him into any help at all in assisting him, Buddy, a grieving middle-aged man suddenly so much akin to the sort-of feeling purveyed by the old Richie Havens version of a classic, "Motherless Child"--that never arrived. 

If it had, whatever, what never arrived had arrived far too late for anything. 

Buddy believed himself to be no fool.  Perhaps he never was a fool.  Remembering Richie Havens with solo guitar at Woodstock, a man on fire, gave the suddenly autonomous recluse a sort of hope.  Wasn't much.  Somehow the man knew that there is indeed hope in simply going numb.  

In reality, no one did call.  There is nothing to answer to, Buddy told himself.  Sure.  He was in pain--lots of it.  One only loses one's mother once.  New Age holistic mandarins or swamis insist the opportunity to grieve is an opportunity never to miss.  Buddy wanted to feel that way, but failing to feel holistic-anything, he also realized he'd somehow been in such a place, landed in a corner after some unmitigated disaster, unable to move away from whatever it was that had destined him to a television set, a stereo and some dimestore mysteries to solve.  

It is up to each of us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, Buddy to himself chuckled.  "But what if you don't even have any boots?"  

Funny.  Terms like "I'm shakin' in my boots", best used in seducing interested women--that one really grabbed him, for some reason, at the flash of an instant when the numbness staggered loose of him and he was able to feel, well, something.  

He'd always rather enjoyed listening to men he called "peckers" sparring over a woman.  See him? he'd overhear. He's in very bad health.  Right.  As if love of any kind is something that only entails the perfectly healthy who, Buddy, saw once, had seen a prospect of social climbing, of gaining access, of treating a woman like a means to a greater end.  

But why would a grieving man think of such a thing at the moment he had started to almost feel? Who knows?  The mind is a tricky instrument.  It is to be used carefully even in simple imagination.  The hopeful mind, even in grief, though, often floats away into something slightly more pleasant even if a reverie or a memory is all-too-similar to present experience: the loss of his own mother.  She'd fought hard for him.  Sometimes with next to nothing but Hamburger Helper and half the meat required for the simple, pan cooked recipe.  

Buddy always tried to help her.  She had her own griefs, many of them, and thus it was complicated for any son--to reach her when she backed into her own private sense of blackness.  

Now her mother with so much blackness in her life--she was no longer alive on earth.  Perished.  Sometimes, he almost fully grasped a sort of axiom:  Sometimes the dead never really die. Death, in some way or another, stands like an angel in the hallway, a lovely angel, who in a mysterious hush, announced, "You're dying!" 

Then the angel disappears.  But something seems to have changed.  Apparently, such experiences are not common.  Sometimes such mysteries are given names.  The Holy Spirit.  Enlighenment.  Nirvana.  

So much bunk. 

Buddy chuckled in his moment of enlightenment--the realization angels exist in the imagination--and thought about the old Three Stooges episodes from the 1940s when Moe, always mean, knocks Curly or Larry in the head, maybe with a barbell, and demands, "Wake up and go to sleep!"  

What else is there in this life?  The aging man sighed to himself.  Never to be heard.  He already knew what it is like to not be heard.  Grief ensues.  Grief becomes a fact of one's changed personality, but also an additional burden one will carry as if one is riding the wind to nowhere for the rest of time.  

"Wake up and go to sleep!"  The meaning of life.  One Buddhist text Buddy had read indicated that a human's life begins in brilliance and ends in brilliance--or it begins in darkness and ends within such.  Apparently, the trick is not to feel anything at all.  

We must realize that Buddy had long been a bit of a loner.  On the outside, the man, no spring chicken, definitely demonstrated extroversion.  Inside, however, while no shadow lurked other than in nightmares from past traumas and what pop psychologists call "catastrophic thinking", he clearly expressed to himself and himself completely alone a sort of security of being in the face in the crowd category.  

Why not?  It hurts to have faith.  In this world at least.  

But yes, Buddy would listen for the good, for the sublime, for that instant of clarity, the sight that all is endlessness, of a consciousness with no borders.  Then all of it would go, perhaps smashed by another very real catastrophe. 

No one called him.  You have to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps even if you have no boots to use as something that somehow supports bootstraps.  Such a silly phrase.  A little like those kiddie books that proclaim on their covers, I CAN READ ALL BY MYSELF.  Right.  And all complications are measures of one's mettle. 

Buddy, contemplating, nodded his head as if greeting an old friend, quietly snorted.  "In fantasyland," he murmured aloud. 

Help is always on the way.  Usually not.  As in never.  Buddy's mother was dead.  

Yes, the aging man felt ridiculous.  Sitting at his PC, he dialed up the YouTube version of Carole King's "So Far Away": 

Cue it up, Buddy half-grinned.  

"So far away.

Doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?

It would be so fine to see your face at my door.  

Doesn't help to know you're just time away."

Sort of.  King likely wrote about unrequited love.  We know what that is: a feeling of love left behind in the dead letter office.  Irretrievable.  

What happens when people perish?  Where do even the very best people disappear to?  Buddy snorted again: "Nothing lasts.  It's all temporary.  It's like learning once and for all that, no matter who you think you are, you're still homeless as fuck."

Buddy felt a tremor.  As if he never should have spoken the words aloud.  

As we can tell, class, Buddy's status is not one of some mystified fool out there; no, it should be clear to us all that Buddy, our ward as we watch him from far off where he may not be aware we are all watching him for purposes of research, seems sensitive to the why's and wherefore's of his own life.  

Nobody called.  Grief is to be condemned to live through not only sadness, but anger, loss, emptiness, rage, senselessness, fear, even happiness.  Buddy wasn't beyond laughing at himself.  Perhaps that is a strength.  Perhaps it's nothing but weakness.  After all, why no friends at a percarious twist in the road?  

Who knows?  Is a life something to be rigged?  As if, "Your ship will come in...' Then the ship doesn't bother to show on the horizon.   

Sometimes Buddy felt as if he'd done something terribly wrong.  To be brought low by a fact of life only to be left with no solace at all seemed almost like a mistake of karma to him.  For him.  And by him.  

What's left to do when nothing is left but to stream a few sad songs and maybe shed a tear or two.  Buddy did do that.  He played an old Jackson Browne song, "To A Dancer", a song about a loss due to a perished love.  As he ran the lyrics through his head, he felt like he was on some dumb AM radio retrospective. "Here. On 19 on our classic songs list, Jackson Browne's 'To A Dancer'!" 

"I don't know what happens when people die.

Can't seem to grasp it as hard as I try.

It's like a song I can hear playing right in my ear,

But I can't sing it.  I can't help listening."

Seemed right, Buddy dreamed. Then the old defenses come to the rescue like reinforcements: Don't feel it.  Don't feel anything at all.  Be a rock.  Get stoned after being literally stoned to death.  Go have a beer.  Whatever it needs, just get free of the bad feelings.  

Freedom, the joke.  

It's not as if Buddy did not have people he saw as friends.  He'd indeed gone to a bar the night after his mother died.  Friends?  

"Bummer dude."  

"I'm sorry.  Here.  Lemme get you a beer.  It's on me." 

Others, like some irritating woman who'd latched onto him (she always blew smoke in his face and then told him, "I'm a socialist!" as if that was halfway meaningful), saying, "Dude. It'll all be over in a sec."  

Great advice from the ever not-really-knowing knowing.  

Or one friend.  He tried cheering him up:  "Well, man, you do have Palmala, and Pinkie, and Number One, and Second Fiddle, and Thumbilina, and it's easy to hand it off to the ladies."  Great.  An allusion to masturbation. Always good for a laugh.  

"Need some cigs?  Come on.  Let's get high and stanch some anxiety."  

Does that work?  Best to just let it all fade, go numb, hit survivor mode, become heartless in the face of serious emptiness.  

Class, we've seen how little dialogue Buddy has to share.  We do see quite easily Buddy feels alone and lost.  Buddy is in grief.  I know I'm grateful as your professor, students, knowledge and observation: Let's see what Buddy does next.  

Indeed.  Buddy, beset on all sides by what felt to him to be demons, halfway noted to himself that grieving his mother had made him feel vulnerable, conspicuous, and somewhat paranoid.  Buddy laughed.  What is it like, he mused, to be one of the studies in Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire"? 

That's a black-and-white movie.  Buddy had already seen the film three times.  After that, no connection to real life at all.  Or Fellini's "Orchestra Rehearsal": an entire symphony spends nearly half the film, he seemed to remember, warming up.  Then the orchestra hall begins coming apart.  It's like the Picasso painting "Guernica."  

Life is like that.  Plenty and then some.  Then a middle-aged man who feels like he's got limited time left feels like both waiting and not waiting for some sort of answer or a reason or an actual validation of any dream at all are pointless exercises.  

Buddy, momentary expert on grief.  It takes grief to know it.  Just as it takes grief to turn one into a survior or a soldier.  Some lives do float like angels; others are not fated for much of anything. As we taught our research team, class, some lives are meant for the subject to do nothing at all.  

Buddy's mother: She'd cry out in both rage and grief over trauma that could not go away: "I can't do anything at all!"  

Um, torture.  Buddy's darker lights betrayed him.  It takes desperation to know desperation, and all the flowery platitudes and memes on Facebook or elsewhere, including churches, are essentially meaningless when the rubbery road meets the supposition of body-as-experiment, body-as-machine, body-as-toy.  

Buddy, no dull excuse for an intellectual; he'd heard that Joyce's Finnegan's Wake is almost unreadable unless one has knowledge of a seeming multitude of various Irish dialects.  Accidentally on purpose?  Joyce had sworn he was going to destroy literature.  In his case, while it's debatable, he did succeed in making his modernism illegible.  And great.  

Some lives fly.  Others go nowhere.  As if by design.  Lost girlfriends?  Dime a dozen.  Grief over such losses?  Unavoidable.  Buddy had longed long enough, and many times, enough to never let it show, to bottle it all in, and then move on to the next act.  

Ah, yes.  Life as an opera scene or something out of a cheap vaudeville wannabe thing set loose on people as some sort of arty demonstration.  That's like the sum-total burlesque of "Go.  Do new things" with no walk-around money after the landlord gets his usual lion's share.  

Beautiful.  Isn't life lovely?  There it is again: negativity.  More like a sort of law set up as a way to protect people with soft or even Pollyannaish understandings of the real world: Don't understand what Buddy would have likened to Conrad's concept of "The Dark Force" inside even the brightest of lives. And there he is, way back in a past unlike Buddy's present, standing accused of "imperialism enablement".  Crap. 

Some express a grocery list of nearly endless griefs many of us, class, cannot comprehend.  Buddy: a sensitive man, albeit a true empath, not one of those fusty people who present themselves as empathetic without knowing, class, what hells true empaths are forced to live through.  Write that down.  It'll be on the exam on Monday morning. 

Then there is the sense, Buddy pondered, of "Let's see how much that dude can take!"  Greatness, that one. Then bitterness, a bitch's brew that seems like the Philosopher's Stone to the naive and those in thrall of magical thinking.  

"Oh.  Your mom died? It's inevitable, man.  You'll get over it." 

In Buddy's grievous ideation, all ships never come in.  Rather they hang way out to sea simply to be seen.  Bitter?  Yes.  Be positive, he thought.  Always say yes.   

Buddy sat there, remembering Camus' "The Stranger".  A Frenchman shoots an Arab for no reason at all after his mother died.  Hilarious.  How does one meet absurdity without offering absurdity a taste of absurdity?  

Buddy stopped to drink a little orange juice. He didn't bother to shower.  His socks were dirty.  His jeans--a mess of dirt and daily living.  Then he stood up, opened his back door, and left.  

Aging and grievous, our subject, Buddy, will never again be seen.

Note:  A PRIZE WINNER!  A TOTALLY WINNING STORY SOON TO BE A HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTER!!!