If I were God, the world would be in a much worse situation than it already is.

I used to think if I were God, I wouldn’t let anyone or anything die. I used to think that what I’d do – if I were God – is have people and animals and, in some cases, plants, get nourishment simply from the air they breathed. I would have no slaughter houses, no killer whales eating seals. And above all, I’d have no people die. Not ever. Not ever ever ever.

That’s what I used to think.

And my sister Anne and I talked about that once, in the way that sisters do – sisters who were raised Catholic and still had at some deep, fundamental level, a faith in something bigger than we are, maybe not a sentient God like most religions teach but most definitely a belief in something greater than ourselves.

Anne’s faith in a hands-on God seems not to have wavered throughout the years. Anne’s God answers prayers, hears the pleas of all His people (at least, I think that’s how Anne’s faith goes. I could be wrong).

However, I’m not wrong about the discussion she and I had about being God. It was over a year ago, and I told her I’d do away with death. For everyone. Including the baby birds, the seals, the deer, the manatee. (I wasn’t completely sure about some of the spiders down in Australia. Honestly, they just seem like a mistake and should never been around in the first place.)

Anne and I were on the phone talking about what we’d do – if we were God – and even as we were coming up with these grandiose plans, we were laughing. Because 1) we aren’t God, and no one in their right mind would want either of us in that role. Hell, I don’t think anyone in their right mind would even want us to be saints. (Maybe highly placed religious leaders. Maybe.), and 2) If we somehow managed to be God and somehow managed to do away with death, the whole frigging world would be over run with people, animals, plants – old life – and there would be no room for new life.

I knew that then. I know that now.

And maybe it’s not death that I would eradicate, maybe it’s the not knowing. Those of the more fundamental faiths, who are able to place all belief, all hope on the Bible or the Koran or the Book of Mormon, may claim to “know” what happens when we die, but I don’t believe that.

First, I don’t believe they really believe they “know,” as in the same way we know that if we touch a hot stove, we’re going to get burned, or in how we know that if a car going 60 miles per hour runs into us while we’re riding a bike, our chances of survival are pretty slim.

I think people of those more fundamental faiths tell themselves they do indeed “know” what happens once we die because it is comforting. And who doesn’t long for comfort?

And I think scientists who will claim to “know” what happens when we die, who will bring out their reports and studies and will point to the cessation of brain waves, the stopping of the heart, and  will explain death in clinical terms – I don’t think they know either. And I suspect they may claim that science can indeed enable us to “know” what happens, because science, in its own way, is also reassuring. It provides the illusion of truth.

I call it the illusion of truth because scientific “belief” changes. As Stephen Jay Gould argued in The Mismeasure of Man, scientific fact can – and is – frequently interpreted by very flawed individuals, resulting in such claims that African-Americans are less intelligent than European-Americans, and further claims that science can “prove” it.

Or as Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in For Her Own Good, much too often, scientists – these ones doctors – have turned too many female experiences, including childbirth and breast feeding, into medical conditions that needed a doctor’s intervention, which frequently resulted in the unnecessary deaths of women and infants.

So scientific “fact” doesn’t always impress me. My stepdad was a chemist, a brilliant man, who – if memory serves – knew Francis Crick, who with Maurice Wilkins, were academically credited for discovering the double helix, the structure of DNA. In 1968, when James Watson’s The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA was published, my stepdad used to talk to me about Crick and Watson and the rivalry between the two.

Those talks demystified science for me. Science wasn’t something beyond me that always contained the “absolute truth” of the universe. Science was filled with scientists – humans – who could, and probably were, just as flawed and fallible as the rest of us.

“Absolute truth” depends on historical context.

For both religion and science.

So where does that leave me? A woman raised by a devout, Catholic mother and an atheistic and scientific stepfather? And most important, how does that contribute in any way to the discussion Anne and I had about being God and eradicating death (and also doing away with mosquitoes and those scary spiders down in Australia)?

Well, for whatever reason, I woke up this morning thinking about death. Blame it on my untreated Hashimoto’s Disease or my Irish Catholic upbringing, but lately I’ve been battling mood fluctuations that invariably lead to some level of depression. And issues of mortality.

Cheery, eh?

But then this morning – even before coffee – I was thinking it’s not so much death that bothers me, it’s the grief.

Nobody knows what happens, where people – even animals – go when they die. I watched Temple Grandin, and there’s a wonderful scene where she has her arms around a cow that is about to be slaughtered, I believe through electrocution. And she has her arms around the animal and as it dies, she asks: “Where did it go? It was just here. Where did it go?”

And that’s the question. Where do we go? What happens? And the not knowing results in grief that no one ever “gets over.” What happens with grief is it just keeps seeping deeper and deeper into your psyche, meaning the grief, the loss, simply becomes a part of you. Not a gaping, bleeding wound and not even a scab, it’s almost as if the grief courses through your veins.

My mother died in 1966. I was 14 years old. I never “got over” her death. Instead, her death shaped me, became a part of me, left me much more sensitive to loss. When my stepdad died in 1990, it didn’t affect me as much because I was already 38. I’d already experienced significant loss.

The loss of a spouse, to me, is going to leave that same kind of reaction that I had to the loss of my mother. There is that absence, and when that absence is combined with not knowing what happens when we die, I think the grief can be overwhelming. I saw that with my stepdad when my mom died.

She died August 26, 1966. By that Labor Day – a week? maybe two later? – my dad wouldn’t come home at nights. He’d go out drinking. He had 7 kids, ranging in age from 17 down to 3. For a long time, I thought my dad was refusing to come home; now I think he couldn’t. My mom died at home. Her spirit infused that house. There were too many memories, and kids, when parents are upset, act out. It was simply impossible for him, given who he was, to come home to that house with those memories and seven kids who needed him.

He was in a terrible place. A place that no one could comfort. No one could reach.

So what I would do if I were God? I’d let people – even scientists – know with certainty what happens when we die, where we go. I wouldn’t ask that they rely on faith. I’d show them exactly what happens.

I’d alleviate their grief.

And I fully admit that showing people what death is, what happens, where we go might be a very bad idea. If we all knew we were going to heaven or paradise, maybe we wouldn’t push through all the hard stuff here on Earth.

Yet, unabated grief pulls families apart. It pulled my family apart. Instead of turning to one another for comfort, we went outside the family. Or we shut down. Or like my stepdad, we drank.

None of that worked. At least not for me. I had to re-experience the grief I felt at losing my mom until I could somehow incorporate it into my being, so I could somehow accept being the ‘motherless child’ I was.

And now I see – and this is only my perspective – grief threatening to pull apart my own family and that of Jonathan’s.

Mental illness brings with it grief. Parents grieve for what their child could have been, could have become had it not been for the illness. Spouses and partners grieve for what they’ll never have – a partnership. Children – no matter the age – grieve for the parent who is mentally ill and for the parent opting to stay, to provide care, support, and love.

The problem then arises – just as it did when my mother died – is that people don’t want to deal with that level of grief. Grief is an uncomfortable emotion; it leaves people feeling much too vulnerable. Easier to be angry.

However, mental illness is a tragedy, and anger won’t make it go away. Nothing will make it ‘go away.’ Mental illness can never be cured. It can be treated and managed but not cured, and it has a tremendous emotional impact on everyone affected by it.

It’s not fun.

So if I could revisit what I’d do if I were God for just a minute, I’d remind everyone of the inevitability of death. (I don’t believe scientists will ever figure out how to make any of us live forever. I don’t believe that for a second.)

And, if I were God, as I’m reminding people of the inevitability of death, I’d maybe hit them over the head with a hammer, or maybe a brick, and let them know that death can actually be a blessing – and not only because is causes the cessation of pain – but because it reminds us – if we let it – that we are mortal beings. We have only a very limited time on this earth. And since we have such a limited time, we need to make each moment count.

We need to pick our battles.

We need to forgive.

We need to recognize that people are fragile; they make mistakes. Sometimes they make huge, hurtful mistakes, but we still need to accept what they did, forgive what they did, and move on.

So that’s what I would do if I were God:

I’d make people get along.

Thank you to Heaven Help Us for the clipart.

Geez, Asenath, I hardly know where to start. Maybe as Julie Andrews sings in The Sound of Music, I should simply start at the very beginning.

A very good place to start.

I met you in the Fall of 1980 at the University of California, Irvine. We were both non-traditional students attending an oh-so traditional school. I was 28; you were 30 – hardly old, looking at it today – but old back then. Old as in we’d been around. We were adults. Really adults. We had our shit together.

Go Anteaters!

We stood in one of the parking lots by the Humanities Building. Everywhere there were towering Eucalyptus, filling the air with what I’ve always identified as the smell of cat pee – love the smell of oil of eucalyptus that comes in a bottle and is used in aromatherapy, love the smell of eucalyptus when I have a cold or a cough and need to breathe better, but eucalyptus straight from the tree will always smell like cat pee to me.

Still, they are lovely trees, with stripped bark, the dry, crackly green-gray leaves. I think of California, I think of Eucalyptus trees. (And are you looking down from heaven, Asenath, or wherever the dead go if they do indeed go anywhere at all, and noting that sometimes I am capitalizing eucalyptus and sometimes I’m not? Is it driving you nuts?)

I like to think you're hanging out with Oscar these days.

I think of you, As, and I think of the writer you were. You were, by far, the best writer in any class I ever had. I know, later you wrote erotica under a pseudonym. I know because you and I talked about the synonyms for clitoris, including – if I’m not mistaken – man in a boat? I don’t know about you, As, but I have never once referred to my clit as ‘the man in a boat.’

Did you know you were the first person to show me porn? I was 30, pregnant with Kimberly. You were living in Irvine, and you set up a relatively tiny TV – maybe a 19 inch? – in the corner of your bedroom, and you and I sat eating 7-layer-dip, drinking Diet Cokes®, watching people having sex for no apparent reason.

I was 30. Way more naive than I can imagine. I remember I kept telling you, “I didn’t know they really did it.”

“What did you think?” you said.

“I figured they simulated it. You know, like the way the movies simulate people dying.”

I sat there for a minute, not speaking.

“What do you think?” you asked.

“Ehh,” I said.

“On a sliding scale,” you said. “How’d you rate it?”

“1 being crap? 10 being great?”

You nodded.

I stared at the TV a while longer. “Well, okay. I’d give the story a ’1′ and the positions, the sex itself? Maybe an 8. But it’s kind of messy, and I’m not really convinced that seeing some man come all over some woman’s face is all that erotic. And I’m not really sure that I necessarily need to see the inside of anyone’s vagina.”

So much for my foray into porn.

I miss you, Asenath.

Ever since I found out from Will that you’d died, I’ve had a hard time not crying.

I really miss you.

I’d so wanted you and Will to move out here to New Mexico, and then you, Pat, and I could hang out the way we did so many years ago.

Autumn in New Mexico: Today it makes me happy.

There’s that wonderful Joni Mitchell verse from “Big Yellow Taxi” — ‘Don’t it always seem to go/that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone?’

I was watching The Kids are All Right before I knew you’d died, and I kept wondering if you’d seen it, kept thinking you would have liked it.

I am being bombarded with memories of you. Memories of that first day we met, and you told me about being married to Rick and knowing Greg and the people you knew who’d won a Hugo or a Nebula. You must have thought I was as ignorant as they come. I didn’t know either of the Gregs; I didn’t what a Hugo was, what a Nebula was, who Freeman Dyson was. I didn’t know anything.

Until you started talking about Jimmy Buffett. Yay, I remember thinking. Something I do know. We sang a few bars of Maragaritaville standing in that parking lot – ‘lost shaker of salt.’

“You know my favorite of his though,” I said, “the one that got me to be a fan was Come Monday.”

You told me that Come Monday was one of David Letterman’s favorites, too. I’d never seen Letterman at that time – he was on too late for me, I’ve always been an early riser – but I knew I’d love Letterman if he loved Buffet’s music. And I do.

I love Letterman. Because of you, Asenath. Without you, I’d never have seen him.

Do you remember when we saw Jimmy Buffet at the Irvine Amphitheatre? It would have been 1986. I know only because he kept making jokes about hitting 40.

Hitting 40. Such a long, long time ago.

Yeah...That's kinda how I dance. Even back when I was young.

Do you remember when he did “Cheeseburger in Paradise?” All 20,000+ people got up and sang along. Alone. Same with “Fins” – “Fins to the left, fins to the right.” I kept going left when I should have gone right, right when I should have gone left. Never did know how to dance.

Later, on that old Tempo I had – or was it the Neon – I stuck a bumper sticker: “We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us About.”

And now I’ve kids I’ve my own.

You had Josh. I remember how badly you wanted him, how badly you wanted to be a mom, and how the endometriosis wouldn’t let you. I remember the cramping. My own arrogance. Never had cramps in my life and always figured women who complained  about cramps were just looking for something to complain about.

Until I hit menopause.

Boy, did I get knocked up side the head. Migraines that hit at 1 in the morning, stuck around for 2 1/2 days. Migraines so bad, I kinda wished someone would just shoot me, put me out of my misery.

I miss you, As.

I miss you so bad.

You were there when Kimberly was born, there to laugh when I told you don’t bring me flowers or plants or anything like that, bring me a St. Pauli’s Girl and a line of coke. I wanted my life back. I wanted the drinking, the carousing.

Kids don’t let you do that, do they?

And though you never did bring me the line of coke – I was kidding anyway, just being outrageous – you did bring the St. Pauli’s Girl. To the hospital. Little did I know that having a C-section would screw up my digestion so bad, just the thought of carbonation was enough to make me puke.

The thing is, though, you brought it.

And remember South Coast Plaza? I was nursing. Had on the stupidest nursing shirt with a high ruffled collar . (An aside – what really works for nursing is an oversized t-shirt, just stick the baby up inside. But I wanted to do things right. Maintain a little class.)

But we were at Broadway, maybe? And Kimberly was too little to sit in a high chair. I stuck in her the chair, she fell over bumped her head, started crying. And there were two old ladies at the next table (probably in their 50s, like I am now) who offered to hold her, so I could eat. And I wanted to eat, but I worried maybe they were kidnappers or crazy people. And I kept worrying they were going to steal her and I kept obsessing on it until you leaned over and said, “Maureen, even I with my bad knees could outrun them. I think she’s safe.”

So I let the old ladies hold Kimberly, so we could eat.

Thanks for that, As.

And then you got Josh. From Korea. So tiny. I wrote a letter of reference for you. Later you told me the adoption agency said it was the best letter of reference they’d ever received. But then, you know, that’s what writers do – they write. And besides, if you’d written the letter, yours would have been the best they’d ever received.

You were an excellent – an outstanding – writer. Incredible. Do you remember the story you wrote and you had a line about ‘receiving the odd mail,’ and I blithely, idiotically jumped forward, asked what was so odd about it? Could you expand? Was the mail threatening?

And you stared at me – we were in class, after all – for a couple seconds you stared until you said, “Odd as in occasional?”

“Oh,”  I said as if I’d always known that. Ha!

Still later, as the kids grew and you met up with Will – thank you, Will, for giving Asenath some of the best years of her life. Thank you.

And what I remember, As, is you’re telling me that finally you’d found a grown-up, you’d found a man who would take care of things if you couldn’t.

And from what I have heard, that’s exactly what Will did, Asenath. As you passed, he took care to ensure that your death was how you’d wanted it, was what you requested.

I wish, more than anything, you were still here.

Getting old’s hard, Asenath. And not because of the aches and pains, not because of arthritis, or strokes or any of the myriad of ailments that can strike.

No, As, getting old’s hard because, after a while, hanging on to what you believed in, what kept you going day after day gets nearly impossible. You start wondering what’s the point? What has all this meant? Was there any purpose? Divine plan?

And, maybe that’s the hardest thing, knowing you didn’t have a strong faith in Judaism or Catholicism or any other -ism. You were an intellectual. You embraced fact, lived life based on a scientific understanding of the world around you.

And you know what, As? I hope you’re wrong. I hope that ‘scientific fact’ is missing a few key elements for a thorough understanding of mortality, and I hope, like someone just told me last week, that you’re still in the midst of traveling to your final destination.

I hope when I talk to you, when I ask what you think, I hope, As – I hope more than anything – you can hear me because, lady, I miss you more than I ever thought possible.

Love for an eternity,

Maureen

I’ve been thinking a lot lately – dwelling a lot lately – on the subject of grief. Grief is different than sadness or depression. Grief is something else entirely.

When you least expect it – you could be watching some inane comedy on TV, laughing idiotically along with the laugh track – when all of a sudden it hits you. In the gut. What you’ve lost. What you’ll never get back.

And the thing is you don’t grieve just for what you’ve lost. You grieve for what you never had. You grieve for what you thought you’d have.

It’s complicated.

That’s actually on my Facebook page – under relationship status – It’s Complicated.

Just like grief.

So I was outside weeding, tidying the yard, watering. And it’s a beautiful day. Sunny. Warm. The dogs were outside with me. When, completely unwanted, images just kept hitting me. Again and again and again.

Images.

Dresses. Antiques. Mexican glassware. Saltillo tile. Moving. The U-Haul. The ocean. The smell of pot. The dog racing down the hall. The coffee shop. The Pike.  Those apartments. The Slush puppies.

All those images.

And all I can do is cry. Wrap my arms around myself and cry. I want my life back. I want what I thought I’d have. And I never will.

Ever.

And, hey, I’m surprised. Writing this post took less time than I’d thought, and I do have time to post a picture. A picture of seals taking refuge on a buoy. Out by the Pike. Back where my life with J started.

Seals Taking Refuge