The Upsides of Death

My family and I are currently working through a sudden death of someone central to all of us.  Anne Octavia Jay, my ex-wife, suddenly died.  For months, she was working through some medical issues that seemed surmountable, but then there was some extra-bad news. Then, about two weeks ago it started pouring bad news. This deluge included a sudden diagnosis of stage four cancer.  On Christmas Eve, she suffered cardiac arrest, which led to forty minutes of CPR. In the ICU we learned what kind of damage can happen to a person's brain after forty minutes of CPR.

On the day after Christmas, my two young adult daughters and I gathered around Anne in the ICU to say our goodbyes. I learned that for a patient who has suffered this sort of damage, the fact that she occasionally opened her eyes means nothing at all.   I learned what "comfort care" means. I am learning what it means to be the only surviving parent.  I am learning how hard it can be to lose a parent.  I am learning the awkwardness of being an ex-spouse who loses one's ex-spouse. What am I to be called?  An "ex-widower"? What is the proper name for a person in my position, someone who still cared deeply for my deceased ex but who feels awkward because our marriage fell apart and we divorced each other?

I don't really have an end in mind for this post. Mostly, I'm emoting, but I wanted to share that I was particularly right about one thing. I've always assumed that one can use most "bad" events as good experiences, not just as good learning experiences. We the survivors have learned a lot together.  I now know how to be a better friend to other people who have lost their loved ones.  I now know better how to appreciate the complexity of the human body.  We shouldn't be surprised when our bodies don't work; rather, we should be more more surprised that they ever actually work, given their mind-boggling complexity.  I've learned to appreciate the human heart.  Anne's heart faithfully beat for 59 years, which is a stunning achievement regularly exceeded by the heart-beating streaks of countless other people such as me (I'm in my 60's).

Mostly, I've learned to appreciate the importance of community.  I've seen many dozens of people come out of the woodwork to offer comfort and assistance for my daughters and me in many major and minor ways.  I now have increased respect for the way healthcare workers treat the family of dying patients. I've learned to appreciate straight talk from these professionals.  I've learned to appreciate the patience and kindness of all the people at the cremation service we are using.  We are surrounded by good-hearted people, including countless friends and relatives.  They are everywhere.  They are constantly bringing us flowers and soup and snacks and offers of ever-more help. It has been humbling.

We are in our George Bailey moment and people are running to our rescue in droves to tell us that we are not alone. It feels wonderful.  I know that the hard part will be when all of the adrenaline is gone and when my daughters and I will experience unrelenting emptiness.  That leads me to also appreciate the many friends and professionals who offer grief counseling individually and in groups.

Death in one's family can be one of the better ways to learn what it means to live a good life.  And to paraphrase Tim McGraw, I have better learned to live like I am dying.

I'll end with a Facebook tribute I created for Anne. More than anything else, she wanted to make sure her children were OK. This was her prime directive.  My daughters are working through this with me and I am strongly convinced that we will be ultimately be OK as we continue our life journeys stronger and wiser. Thanks for reading through to the end.

Continue ReadingThe Upsides of Death

Rediscovering Connection at your Local Park

The Internet is an amazing tool that offers us easy ways to connect with each other with very little effort. This magic technology also allows social media sites to pummel us with videos of people bullying each other and physically fighting each other in public places. The triggering "excuses" for these flare-ups are countless. It's often about masks, but many of these videos focus on the bizarre propensity of many people have to divide others into political and “racial” tribes.

In some of these videos people violently assault each other. I recently viewed a video of two families arguing on a store parking lot. Somebody apparently accidentally bumped somebody else, then the situation quickly and needlessly escalated to the point where guns were drawn. I cringe when I see this insanity. A couple of these disheartening videos show up on my feeds every week, posted by people whose motives are often unclear. Some of these videos involve police officers but the great majority do not. Often, every one of the people featured in the video is ill-behaved. Other videos involve unprovoked violence, however, and many of those incidents culminate in physical injuries to an innocent person. Watching too many of these videos plants a false intuition that we are watching typical human beings doing typical things.

Is there a silver lining to these displays of anger and violence? Is it important to sometimes document our human frailties and cruelties? Should we occasionally hold some of these videos up like mirrors to force ourselves to acknowledge the risk that our anger can dangerously escalate into brutality? Can we use some of these videos as teachable moments, showing what can happen when we fail to show restraint and kindness?

Even if there is such a silver lining, it can’t be healthy to watch a steady stream of these videos showing so many people being so shitty to each other. It seems to me that too much exposure to these videos numbs us to the pain and suffering of others. At some point, our in-group tendencies can completely anesthetize our empathy for "the other." Once we cross that line where we no longer care about the pain of others, these videos serve mostly as conflict pornography. For years, Hollywood has been peddling gratuitous violence as entertainment. Movie and TV studios too often stoop to the lowest level of profitable "entertainment." The proliferation of smartphone camera social media videos suggests that there’s no longer any need for Hollywood to continue paying highly trained writers substantial money to concoct their stylized ballets of violence.

In this age of COVID-19, many people are feeling trapped in their homes. Many of us are also transfixed to our screens on which we exposed to far too many videos of people acting badly. Slouching on the couch to watch strangers being mean to each other can’t be harmless. Aren’t these videos causing permanent social damage? And aren’t there better things to do with one's time?

Almost every day, I walk through glorious Tower Grove Park, near my home in St. Louis. On almost every walk I see people from many different demographic and ethnic groups. They show up in the park with their own styles of clothing, music, food, games and language, even now as the weather is turning colder. It is an especially beautiful thing to behold the families at play, parents and their little children. [More . . .]

Continue ReadingRediscovering Connection at your Local Park

Making Farming a Reality in Rose Bud, Arkansas

I met Steve Grappe ten years ago in St. Louis when I was attending a Lightroom course he was teaching. Back then, Steve was an excellent photographer who eventually became my photography mentor. He taught many other people too. He was the center of vibrant photography community. I quickly learned that Steve was an indefatigable man with an expansive skillset and nonstop creativity. A few years ago Steve left St. Louis to reconnect with Kelly, his prom date from many years earlier when they attended high school together in Arkansas. They were married in May 2018. He took a day gig as a car mechanic and she continued her job as a telecom executive. They settled down and lived happily ever after. The End.

Actually, that's not quite the end of the story. A few months later, they bought a dilapidated old farm in Rose Bud, Arkansas. It was actually much worse than dilapidated. I think Steve said he bought it for a bag of acorns. They worked around the clock to fix up the place and this took an enormous amount of sweat equity. Steve and Kelly were helped considerably in this project by Kelly's teenage daughter, Grace.

Steve and Kelly were still most definitely not farmers, but at about this same time they decided they needed to learn how to run a farm, so they attended one of the best farm schools available: Youtube. They also asked lots of questions and listened to others in the business. They jumped right in and brought in some livestock, including chickens, pigs, turkeys, rabbits and pigs. They named their special place "Forevermost Farms," a name based upon a syrupy romantic encounter that I don't have time for right now. All of that was such long time ago . . . To recap, Steve and Kelly got married all the way back in May of 2018. They then bought a run-down farm, turned it into a really cool place where some of the animals wear clothes and sometimes sing in little animal quartets. Steve and Kelly went to YouTube University in order to learn how to humanely and organically raise these eccentric critters. Their work has become their passion and I now realize that they were just getting started.

Fast forword: In the past couple weeks, Steve and Kelly said goodbye to their latest batch of 3,000 chickens that they raised over the past few months. They also recently said goodbye to 300 turkeys, 60 pigs and, if I'm remembering correctly, a partridge in a pear tree. Most recently, they announced that one of their dogs is pregnant, which will provide them with more dogs to help them raise their livestock. Things are always happening at Forevermost.

The above numbers boggle my mind, but I've visited Steve and Kelly and I've seen their beautiful place. I've seen many of their animals and I know that many of those animals have both personalities and names. Steve has also become an expert in the mating habits of their animals. He carefully (some would say voyeuristically) observes the animals to see who is doing what to whom. Beware. If you ask Steve a question about animal sex, he will speak to you much more directly than your parents ever did when they gave you the "sex talk."

As Forevermost Farms has become a reality, I've seen a special glow in the eyes of Steve and Kelly. They have accomplished something I would have thought impossible until I saw it with my own eyes, especially in that short time frame, and it was all done on a limited budget. But guess what? My two wonderful upbeat hard-working friends have now most definitely become farmers.

If you'd like to know more about the story of Forevermost Farms, you are invited to follow Steve and Kelly on Facebook or at the Forevermost Farms Website. Please do visit their website so that you can take in some of this celebration that has become their lives.

Continue ReadingMaking Farming a Reality in Rose Bud, Arkansas

About Mozart’s Symphony No. 1 in Eb Major

I just finished listening to Mozart's Symphony No. 1 in Eb Major for the first time. It's a very nice piece of music with some notable flourishes. Oh . . . and perhaps you don't know this (I didn't): Mozart was 8 years old when he wrote this symphony. This leads me to ask myself: "How is this possible?"  I have no answers.  It seems impossible. Here's the first page of the handwritten manuscript written by 8-year old Mozart:

Continue ReadingAbout Mozart’s Symphony No. 1 in Eb Major

RIP James “The Amazing” Randi

James Randi was an inspiration to me. He was one of the many magicians (including Penn Jillette) who also turned their attention toward exposing many paranormal claims. He was a first-rate debunker of those who prey on fear, ignorance and superstition, as well as an entertaining communicator. I was fortunate to be able to see "The Amazing Randi" make a presentation in person at the CSICOP Conference in Buffalo, NY in 1983. It is awesome to see these charlatans fails so dramatically and so publicly

Continue ReadingRIP James “The Amazing” Randi