On writing The Daily Lioness for Karen

Nearly every day since September 4th, I have posted a photograph of lionesses found on the Internet together with a small commentary to try to inspire my dear sister-in-law Karen to keep putting one foot in front of the other after the death of her husband, my brother Richard. I feel that the run of thoughts on this idea is near its end, but the doing of it has been unexpectedly inspirational to me as well as, I dearly hope, helpful for her.

To post anything every day on her Facebook page is a significant commitment of time and energy. The death of my brother Richard was my first experience of such a public, immediate, and intimate event in digital media, so that by itself has been a learning experience. In this initiation with Richard I found Facebook to be a friend, though I can easily see that it could not be too.

On the first day, September 4th, knowing her love of animals and cats in particular, I found an image of a lioness in the ether and put it on her page, with a message:

          Here is a Lioness to give you strength and courage today.

That day I thought about the idea of a lioness in Africa, and the hardships of that life, and began to see correlations between a lion’s hard life, and the reality of grief, and to the necessity to continue to live in spite of terrible things happening. Karen and I share the conviction that animals feel what we do, even if differently to the human experience, so this was a means to connect on many levels.

As the series continued and became The Daily Lioness for Karen, I thought about the horror and challenge of extreme grief – draining, filled with horrifying recollections, lonely, and ultimately tedious in the endless loop of sadness. This seemed so real for a lioness too, based on the many nature films I watched (and ones I sought out during this process as I continued to evolve my thoughts about this matter). A lioness has many burdens; she is the breadwinner of the family, she must work collaboratively with her fellow females. Despite all the events of a day, she must still get up and move effectively the next day.

The analogy to Karen’s life was striking. Karen has several very close female friends, and so I began to imagine them as the fellow lionesses of the pride. Lionesses in the wild are very affectionate with their fellow females, and they are well-photographed and represented on the Web. I found that I could pull down photos of these beautiful animals to illustrate my thoughts for her, which allowed me to delve into this important relationship and love between females that is so obviously critical to lion kind, as well as to Karen as she wended her way through the terrible months after Richard died.

Themes emerged. “Life on the plains” for me began to have very deep and significant meaning – the ongoing, huge, inevitability of events that shape our days and our lives. I used this phrase often. The notion that deep sorrow was not knowable to anyone else, captured inside a being and experienced personally and alone, pervades many of the entries.

          The heart knoweth his own bitterness; and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy.
                                                                                      Proverbs 14:10 (King James)

During this period I watched a documentary where a lioness had two lovely little cubs, which were her firstborn, so she was inexperienced. She moved their nest as instinct dictated, but in a move when the cubs were at their sweetest and most innocent they stopped and accidentally made their home near the nest of a cobra snake. The snake was very aggressive and bit all three of them, killing the cubs and desperately wounding the mother lion. She was not able to do anything for days, delirious with poison and pain and dehydration. Somehow she survived, and the moment she could, she came back to where her cubs had been. Of course the hyenas had long since taken away their little bodies as Nature designs, and the mother lion looked and looked, but they were not there. Lions do not cry; they have a different experience to humans in these matters. But there is no doubt that she was desperately disturbed and upset. But every day on the plains, the sun comes up, the heat begins, and the belly roars for food. There is no time for standing still to mourn . . . the lioness had to get up and move on, with only a moment to look back to the babies that she loved, and from that point on, her sorrow only lived within her.

This became profoundly significant for me in considering Karen’s grief.

I found inspiration in many things during this time. The photographs of the lionesses themselves gave inspiration – admittedly not always channeling what the lioness might be actually experiencing: inevitably anthropomorphized to meet the imperative of the Daily Lioness. So a photo of two lionesses in a wild leap (heaven only knows why!) was attached to this entry:

Each day life on the plains presents the highly unexpected, which must be met with balance and equanimity. Or something relatively close. If possible.

I tried to have a humorous touch when I could – but thematically I returned over and over to these core ideas:

·        Life on the plains > our (and Karen’s) everyday life, which is has random terrible events, is relentless and unsympathetic, but Karen must still get up every day and go to work

·        The other Lionesses > Karen’s female friends who have been so good for her (many blessings on you Lionesses)

·        The complete isolation of the Lioness > Karen’s unknowable grief

·        The tedium of the Lioness’ life > I sense that endless grief is tedious, is boring, is exhausting, and is inescapable; robbing Karen of the will to do or try anything but still astonishing her by the tedious boredom of the pain

·        The paradox of finding moments of joy in long periods of grief > I know Karen experienced this, even when we were there with her, and it is probably hard to reconcile spiritually but this is what leads the way out of the tunnel of grief

·        The emergence from grief into a new and deeper consciousness > a process I know she is experiencing now

·        The bravery of living on in the face of the death of those closest to us – as well as the inevitability of it > Karen’s daily challenge

·        The acceptance of sorrow as a way of life > not a happy thing, but Karen’s way of life now

·        The loneliness of grief > as noted in the Proverb above, simply the way it is for Karen and anyone who is afflicted with terrible loss

And ultimately, that salvation and relief comes from the normal and everyday things; standing up each day, doing what must be done; facing life on the plains is the way out of the terrible state of grief, if only by the reality that day by day, it becomes further behind and a new life evolves.

Karen has been wonderfully thoughtful and philosophical during the process of Richard’s dying, death and aftermath, and as she herself has said, has sought understanding in reading the experiences and wisdom of others. She puts excerpts on her Facebook page from time to time and these have given me ideas as well, and have informed the Daily Lioness to be directly relevant to her, and to the fine thoughts of others.

I did not shy away from facing the reality that Richard is gone, and that this is the root of the problem. I intuit that Karen does not want this forgotten, and I wrote about it several times. He is gone. We grieve. We try to manage our lives in the face of his loss. It is not fair, but it cannot be changed.

In the end, the simplicity of the statements in this series of thoughts has actually been filled with tremendous deeper meeting, certainly for me and I hope for Karen. I hope that having thought this all through now for her, it will help me should I ever need it. I don’t know; La Calavera has thought for years about death, but thinking about it is not the same as living it.

I love you Karen, and Pancho.

A message to my dying brother

I wrote this essay on the plane, on July 20, 2012 on the way to Los Angeles to see my brother Pancho and his wife Karen. Karen had told us that we had to get there soon, as Pancho was fading fast from his violent cancer which had spread wildly and for which there was no treatment. I have never had to speak to a person in this state; what could I say, that would be acceptable, and not maudlin, and encouraging, but acknowledging the reality of the situation? These were my thoughts on that day, before I arrived.

I am on my way to Los Angeles to see my brother Richard, Pancho to his four siblings, summoned urgently by his wife Karen to see him as he lies in the hospital being consumed by a virulent systemic cancer. He has not been in this state for long, for better or worse, but things have declined rapidly and it is likely that he will not be with us for much longer.  

Pancho has never had an easy time of it, in my perception. He was the youngest of our five brothers and sisters, and when our parents divorced he was still young enough to be folded into my mother’s new relationship with Clark, where they formed a family unit (truth be told, to the envy of the rest of us who were sentenced to either live with my father and his second wife Blanca or else as I was, cast into the universe to try to find my own way. The only good thing that came out of that situation was our brother Neil, whom our father adopted, and we have too, as our sixth sibling and we love him dearly.)

Being in the “new” family must have been to some extent disorienting, after emerging from the painful household of our parents. I know Clark loved Pancho and considers him his son in a very special way. They were really a family, if separate from the rest of us.

Pancho went to college, and got a degree and certification to be an accountant. He married Karen, his college sweetheart (who, ironically, he would never have met had our parents not divorced) and I was privileged to read 1st Corinthians 13 at their wedding – nervous and not my best performance, but so pleased to be asked to play a role for them. They just celebrated their 25th anniversary a few days ago with a renewal of vows in Pancho’s hospital room. Theirs is the longest relationship of all of us siblings. I wish I had been there for that. 

He was never happy, it seemed, working in corporate life. At one point he thought what he really wanted to do was to be a policeman, a job for which he was over-qualified. Pancho has a keen sense of what is right and he’s not afraid to say it, for which he has suffered from time to time. He’s also not keen on dishonesty, which probably cost him that career change; he passed all the written tests with flying colors but didn’t lie about past (and minor) adolescent use of marijuana . . . so he was rejected.

Life moved on, and he found he had a growing interest in the culinary arts. Our mother did too, and she helped him to take time off in his 40s to go back to school for a degree in this field, which incidentally I think she enjoyed enormously and helped to build bonds between them. He enjoyed this mightily and seemed really to find his true calling. Pancho loved cooking, and he was a good cook. But after he got his degree, he found working in restaurant kitchens incompatible with his view of life – so he did catering jobs which he found fulfilling and at which he excelled. And he went back into finance as his day job.

In the last few years somehow he got hooked up with a company that imported exotic fish for eating – Lee Fish. They hired him to be their controller, and he loved working there, loved their fishes, cooked and ate them, and extolled their fishes to all of us. I regret that he was not able to arrange my special shipment of fishes in the last few months, for we were not in our home to receive and cook them. Though I did keep one of the photos he sent me of an exotic and amazing fish on my desktop for many months, as it was so beautiful and strange.

In his adversity now it seems that Lee Fish is taking the high road for him and keeping him on payroll even though he is so ill. I am awed with respect; they are a relatively small company and this commitment is noteworthy and noble.

In recent times, I have seen my brother emerge from decades of various sorts of dissatisfaction with his life to a place where he seems to me to be satisfied, happy, reconciled, and has found ways to delight himself, Karen, and his family and friends with his cooking knowledge and skills. I have often called him when I was making something to get pointers – most recently with caramel which we both botched as well as made successfully! We both loved Barbara Kafka’s Roasting cookbook and would discuss results of various recipes we had tried. Pancho loved to cook.

So – back to the matter at hand. Here’s what I hope to be able to tell him:

I’m proud of you my Brother, for finding a way through everything to be happy and to enjoy your life, and to bring joy to others.

I love you, and I will miss you terribly

 

Richard died on August 10th, 2012, at home in his house with his wife Karen by his side, and with his cats and his dart trophies, and his cooking things around him. We spent days at the hospital in July with him, overnight as we thought he would die at any moment, but he continued to live on. Having prepared my message, I found a moment, and I told him, that I was proud of him. His eyes filled with tears, and so did mine. We didn't speak of the facts before us, but I am so glad I told him. From the Memory Book we prepared for him I came to learn that he had a deep and wide life of love, charity, fellowship and contribution. I wish I had known more before he was taken away from us. 

 

Richard Monroe Lawrence

December 12, 1960 - August 10, 2012

 

The Human Experiment: The Eastern State Penitentiary

In recent months I have begun to think about the last 200 years as “The Human Experiment” – a time when people with often the best intentions get into a position of power and do things that affect a large portion of humanity in a very negative way – and nobody can change it. The experience which started me down this path of thinking was a visit we made last winter to the Eastern StatePenitentiary outside Philadelphia. The Bear’s son was in town for a conference so we went down for a few days to hang out, and needed a place to go that was *not* an art museum. We saw the promotions for this place and decided to go together – Bear’s son was very enthusiastic.

You could only get in on a tour, and we arrived in time to catch one in the early afternoon of a desperately cold winter day with a very well-informed tour guide. The Bear and I were interested because we’d seen a similar penitentiary in Paris the year before, out the window of our hotel – it was one of the earliest radial-designed jails from the 1800s. We were not able to go inside that one, so this was the next best. We discovered on this visit that the one in Philadelphia was the first of its type.

Prior to the creation of this facility in 1829, jails had been places where large numbers of people were locked up in common rooms, without any thought to rehabilitation, but rather to punishment. The jails were not sanitary, there were illicit businesses running inside to provision the prisoners and keep them in vices (and doubtless, the wardens in sherry). Dirty, sinful, unrepentant warehouses for people who would just get out and do the same things again.

So thoughtful people began to consider this problem; the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons was formed as the first such organized group to consider the state of prisons and how they might be made better. In the case of the Eastern State Penitentiary, they actually invented a new word which we hardly contemplate today – the Penitentiary – a place to be penitent, to grow spiritually, to gain a new outlook on life and to come out rejuvenated and better equipped to deal with the difficult pressures of modern life. The Quaker influence was significant in their thinking.

This group promoted their idea of the penitentiary to the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania government, to whom it was truly an appealing idea, and in 1821 it was approved and funded by the Pennsylvania legislature – it would be the largest and most expensive building to that point in the new country. As it evolved, every aspect of the building was considered to help create this environment of penitence. Each prisoner was given a “cell” all his or her own. They had a skylight and a tiny patch of grass at the back of the cell so they could see “nature”. The building had to have a large-scale plumbing installation – the first of its kind in the United States – so that the prisoners could have a toilet in their cell and would not have to be taken out to do their business. Simple furniture was put in the room, and of course, a Bible to support their contemplation.

To ensure that this contemplative isolation was complete, prisoners were not allowed to see anyone else. Food was slid through the door and guards were unseen. If a prisoner had to be moved in the facility, they would be blindfolded and led to the new place. All of this was seen as a requirement to create the appropriate conditions for contemplation and repentance – and was called “The Silent System.”

More money was spent on the construction of the Eastern State Penitentiary in the 1880s than was spent on the White House in Washington – and it had indoor plumbing, central heating, and shower baths en suite before that august building. The building was designed to have a center tower, and five spokes off the center, each one housing a “penitent” in unique cells – a design copied in more than 500 penitentiaries around the world in the years that followed. They managed to get two spokes built in the Eastern State building in the beginning.

There were a few small problems. Because the plumbing was still very new technology, it didn’t work very well, so the toilets in each cell allowed a lot of sewer gas to come into the cells which was a bit unpleasant. It was very cold in the winter, and it was difficult to heat the cells, so it was a rather uncomfortable environment in winter (which we experienced when we were there – desperately cold and damp).

But there was something else – an unintended consequence. Within a few months of being placed into these cells alone, the inmates went completely insane. It turns out that if human beings are isolated into low-sensation and zero contact environments, they lose their minds completely in short order. All the well-meaning (but unknowledgeable) people who had created this place did not anticipate this result.

Nobody did anything to address it, however. Rather, life got in the way, and within a couple of years there were vastly more prisoners being produced by the judicial system than the founders of the penitentiary had anticipated. Within about two years, they had to double up prisoners in cells, because they simply did not have the room to house them anywhere.

Eastern State Penitentiary - January 2012

Not long after, they had to construct a second story on several of the spokes to accommodate the volume of influx. This invalidated the idea of the patch of grass and skylight – now many cells lacked both. Curiously, though prisoners were still blindfolded when they were transported, at least one cell block was designed by a leading Gothic architect – a bizarre design element for a 21^st century visitor and one from which inmates would have derived no inspiration.

The prison had its famous inmates – Al Capone had a sojourn there in which he had a very nicely-equipped cell with furniture, a record player, and Oriental carpets on the floor. Thus we see that even in that awful place, some were more equal than others. Most inmates continued to freeze or boil in their stinking cells, as the remediation of the sewage system was expensive and put off for decades.

In all of this, there was never an official re-thinking of the philosophy – indeed, inmates are still put into cells today with a toilet and sink. Often in pairs, today they are allowed communal time in the yard with other inmates, and various social activities like eating together and work details which doubtless have put madness at bay for at least some. Whether these changes came about because someone realized that isolation was not a good answer, or rather because it was less expensive to do it this way, is not known to me as of this writing. However, at some point, someone realized that isolation was not good for humans and produced undesirable effects. Fortunately!

I think of this as part of the Human Experiment – a less than sunny set of events in the view of La Calavera, where assumptions by ignorant people are allowed to dominate large portions of society to the detriment of everyone – and not changed for decades or a century. Because, well, it wouldn’t do to admit they were wrong.

I am starting to collect these, and will report in due course on the Pruitt Igoe Housing Projects in St. Louis, Missouri, built in the 1950s. Such a great idea – drowned in narrow-minded and wrong-headed social ideas together with lack of planning that created ruins in a situation that should have created wonderful new communities and a new world. There are so many other examples too. It’s worth thinking about.

More anon.

Lenny

Our neighbor and friend Lenny Bagarozzo died on Tuesday, after (as they might say) a long illness. Of course the end seemed very fast to us, but in retrospect he must have been very ill for a long time, and we’d chalked it up to his weight and odd lifestyle.

When people heard that Lenny had died, they said things like, “Wasn’t that the guy who wore the all purple outfits?” or “Is he the one who wore the mumus?” – and indeed, yes, that was Lenny. Covered with bling – often in pink bling, mixing cheap and expensive, taking child-like joy in the colors and sparkles. Lenny seemed to completely lack self-consciousness; rather like a force of nature, he steamed through the part of his life during which we knew him, craving and devouring experience but as Mr. Bear remarked in his last days, probably very lonely at the core.

Lenny and Mr. Bear - that's Lenny on the left,
with the white silk outfit, sparkly silver sandals,
and white silk baseball hat.

We knew him somewhat – we couldn’t honestly say he was a close friend, but he was a fixture, more like family, if oddball family. He came to the Tower West breakfasts every Saturday and held down a chair (on one occasion breaking one, as he was a large man). He was funny, and silly, and occasionally lewd, in a History Boys sort of way, petting any man around like he’d pet his many cats, gently but urgently, whether there was any chance of interest or not. He petted Mr. Bear from time to time, and the Bear didn’t seem to mind it.

He was retired from the post office, and had lost his mother some years before. He lived with her most of his life, and though we never met her, we sensed that she had provided a lot of order and structure for him, which went away with her demise. During the period we knew him, his main attention was for sports and to take cruises, generally with gay themes, and he went on them many times a year, bringing back momentos of the trips in the form of Peter Max paintings and oversized blingy jewelry that he’d buy on the islands or on board the ships. He also brought back funny posed portraits of himself, occasionally with a “friend” – serious but crazy and bizarre at the same time. He was entirely unselfconscious about all of this, which we found endearing and made it forgivable.

He might be dismissed as an odd eccentric, but there was the voice. He was a trained opera singer – amateur perhaps, but a powerful and beautiful voice that he would deploy with or without coaxing, bursting into bits from Carmen, or a Christmas song, or any other tune that passed through his head. His huge voice would boom through the lobby at Saturday breakfast from time to time. It was a remarkable talent.

Lenny loved a party, though he often would sit on a chair on the side and snooze. Many times he provided funds for Tower West parties, and I don’t think many people knew of his generosity. He liked to be there with everyone, and never missed a chance to come down and be with us all.

As the end became near, he made it pretty clear that he did not have a burning desire to live longer – none of the Kubler-Ross stages at all. He was matter-of-fact about the state of things, even in the hospital when we visited him last week he was as interested in the tabloids as he was in his own health. We suspected the doctors had not told him how near to the end he was, though he had symptoms that we knew were indicative of a close end. His eyes were so tired, and his body so bloated, it was heartbreaking. But he didn’t complain about these things. I’m glad we made the effort to see him while he was still alive.

He asked me to make him a pink sparkly necklace recently, and I had every intention of doing it. But I don’t normally make pink things, and didn’t have any stock to make one up immediately. I planned to buy some pink beads and make him a pretty one. But alas, now I will not be able to do that. Instead, I’ve put a pink border on the little cards we made him for the funeral tomorrow.

We’ve discussed since his death his curious absence of will to fight for his life. Mr. Bear, who is much more perceptive about these things than I, feels that he had grown bored of life and terminally lonely, and so to die was viable option in his mind. Lenny grew up in a time when a gay man had to struggle – to “come out” – to find a world that was safe and non-critical, and to live in a gay world where physical beauty mattered so much. Lenny was not beautiful on the outside, but he was on the inside. He was truly a rainbow crusader, proud to be what he was but apparently ambivalent about where that brought him. True to who he was in life, he will be buried in a New Jersey Devils jersey and a New York Mets baseball cap. We will miss him, in all his complexity.