Showing posts with label grief. Show all posts
Showing posts with label grief. Show all posts

Monday, June 6, 2016

The Dead Can Speak


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_quantum_laws

For most European Americans, the idea that the dead can speak from beyond their actual time on Earthin other time-frames than our ownis a story told to them solely though pop culture, in cheesy Hollywood movies about evil Ouija boards or haunted houses rife with demonic possession. But, if you delve just a little deeper into better content than the kind offered on generic prime-time t.v., you'll find a lot more varied factual accounts of our relationships with our ancestors, as told in our very blood and bones.

Forensic science, in the duel branches of forensic pathology and forensic archaeology, can uncover the brutally violent truths behind the deaths and oppression writ upon our ancestors bodies (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/), ones that that were denied life in the history books and textbooks of our mutual pasts, as white America sought to exploit their often weaker economic poverty through a cultural dominance that's extremely one-sided, because cultural assimilation often goes hand-in-hand with bloody wars for land and other precious resources, which means your kind of reminiscently Asiatic eyes are a most inconvenient feature to be dealt with evenhandedly. You are that which they wanted to destroy.

And so, with the now-modern inconvenience of genetic testing and cultural databases, it doesn't really matter what an opportunistic liar or an immoral cheat says or does, because the truth will come out in your blood work, whether you like it or not (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3122205/White-NAACP-leader-pretended-black-pictured-time-scandal-broke-responds-atatcks-saying-don-t-two-sh-ts-gusy-think.html). There's no hairstyle or skin tone that a wack-job looking to exploit white America's guilt about race can play, because science has made gaming the system obsolete. If you are just 25% Native American, you can get money from the state for college, just like a person of partial African-American descent can score pricey contacts and seed money for businesses from the NAACP, making your genuine ethnicity a very lucrative thing of the past. 


With your latest genetic test in hand, your reality changes, or, as the case with me, it becomes the history of your name (as my name) as it is written on the features of most modern Americans, now as your factually-verified claim laid to rest. It simply is so. But, it's way more than ancestral land rights or fishing claims, important as those are to indigenous people. Enter into the scene every carnival barker of yore who proclaimed their psychic ability to contact the dead, looking to take advantage of that ever-grieving parent who lost a teenager too early to a drunk driver, or a car accident of any type, or perhaps a grisly murder/suicide. So many questions to ask them...are they happy? What actually happened?

Then, the mystical arts of speaking to the dead become the fodder of anyone with an open question or hard emotional case that needs solving, especially if it involves child rape and/or murder, in our bids to relieve the extreme pain of a parent lost to grief. It's hard not to imagine what avenues we would not explore for them as a culture, in an attempt to alleviate such anguish. So what if she's a crazy housewife from "Lawguyland" (that's "Long Island" for the uninitiated) with a harsh accent and a phonily exaggerated appearance who "reads" people in an audience really well through their "tells"? We want to believe. I was no stranger to the allures of a good ghost story as a kid, buying book after book about poltergeists, only to be disappointed by a complete lack of supernaturally spooky life experiences. So, where the heck are they anyway?

And then the people I loved the most in this world died, my beloved grandparents, and with them, my tether to their pasts, as our ethnic stories and personalities that we had so lovingly clung to in each other, now together again in this new land of hope, faith, and promise. I started visiting my grandfather's grave alone, just to see what I would feel. At first, it was small but beautiful experiences, like a young stag grazing alone in the cemetery's grass with new moss on his antlers, looking up at me at the exact same time I reached my grandfather's grave stone, or hearing his distinctive old New York voice so clearly that I knew I had connected with him in my mind's eye with a searingly accurate recollection.

After that, it was game on. It was no longer a process driven internally by me and my strong memories, however great they were at alleviating my profound sense of loss. No, I could hear my grandmother laughingly explain to my maiden aunt living with her that now I was splashing around like a little girl in my bathtub, and then she would say the date and time in a future that held a middle-aged me alone in an old Hudson Valley home without her actual physical presence. It was so cheerfully normal, that I knew our sound waves were actually reaching each other in a way other people could hear, too, which is a discovery that's not without a rather extensive scientific past. 

Lots of audiophiles have sworn that they connected with their loved ones through a radio tuned to a particular frequency, like a son hearing his father (now deceased) talking to his grown son in the future using the same old device, ham radio aficionados both. Lucille Ball famously told the story of her dental work transmitting radio broadcasts through her mouth on live television back in the day (http://altereddimensions.net/2014/lucille-ball-picks-up-morse-code-radio-through-dental-work-fillings)! Hollywood made a sensationalist version of it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_%28film%29) by skirting around the real physics behind radio frequencies and audio signals that bounce around the earth's atmosphere, coming back around again and again after the earth's rotation is complete. 

What was once wacky science fiction becomes our reality with time, backed by real hard science (http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/k-4/features/F_Hearing_Voices_From_Space.html). Your grandparents and mine would no more have believed that you could hear voices from space anymore than my grandmother thought she would live to see the day we bought water from plastic bottles, free as it was for her in the city, the source of some of the best water on earth. It would have been unthinkable that such a vast resource as readily available clean water would be sold back to us through superficial hacks like "beverage companies", but such is the case as it is now. Why would anyone drink from harmful plastic bottles when the minerals of city water have amazing health benefits that come straight outta the tap? And my grandparents were right.

The same goes with our digital imaging advances and microscopic investigations. What was completely unbelievable a few short years ago is now our day-to-day reality. Computers and the Internet? When was the last time you went a full day without your smartphone or tablet? When was the last time you didn't have Internet access? Contemplate that, and you're already more than halfway there. The far-out astrophysicist who launched the best photographic lens we developed at the time weren't just looking for space dust out there. They were looking for the Eye of G-d and His Creation of the Universe we live in, beyond time and space, in this here-and-now for all times, because our real natural phenomenons come from the source of all life itself. Welcome to the space age, kids. It's a groovy place where we're one, even you there, that curmudgeonly old guy afraid of average machines like the common PC. This galloping mechanized horse engine now as wings to fly. See you out there! Now I can hear it.





Thursday, May 5, 2016

Them Lovely Bones

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Dead

One of the trips I look forward to the most in the future is visiting Mexico during their annual "Day of the Dead" festival (click on the photo above), because I think it's an absolutely beautiful tradition to keep. Native Americans* often have different funerary practices than European Americans, depending on the tribe and its geography. Out west, people were wrapped in several layers of decorative blankets, placed high in treetops on secured wooden platforms, and visited after the body was completely dessicated so their bones could be wiped clean, to be put back within a smaller bundle in a ritualistic design**.

I appreciate their traditions for representing a more mature attitude towards life and death. We are born, we live, and we die. Simple as that, or not, depending on your amount of life strife. But, wouldn't it be comforting to know that the children you gave birth to (and their children's children) came back to visit your grave in memorial every year, decorating the site with beautiful artwork made from the traditional designs of your culture? They would be the people who gently unwrap your bones, tucking you back into a fresh bundle, keeping your resting place neat and tidy. 

It's so cheerful, isn't it? Your family plot becomes a place people look forward to visiting, by celebrating your life (and theirs) eating and drinking the same foods you enjoyed during your life. It seems like such a loving thing to do, in contrast to our colder American burials, as performances of grief and mourning that often lack the real heart and soul of your loved one and their life. My grandparents were such fun people for me to be around, but their brood is most definitely not: there's nothing to be had for me by spending time with them, whether its over a burial mound or anywhere else, for that matter.

Then, why would I do something so intimate as grieve with them? They don't understand life! Would they understand death any better? They don't get it, any of it. I understand that life and death is a process because I was taught that and I've also experienced it, but I'm also the best student my family has ever produced. I'd rather be on my own, than suffer through a bad death with a bunch of people who lack feelings and emotions. Do you know what I mean? We need to change the way we feel about life before we can conquer death, or life-after-death, as part of G-d's eternal promise to us for an everlasting reality. That's the day I'm looking forward to: the greatest holiday of all time. ¡Salud!

*   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burial_Ridge
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prehistoric_sites_in_Colorado


Thursday, October 29, 2015

Rescue Me


http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/disney/images/c/cd/Frankenweenie_Poodle.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20130830231314


People involved with animal rescue are a special breed of human, oftentimes not for the better, as I found out during several unique situations in my life. After my werewolf, uh, M'Loot Mal*, pulled me aside for a bagel bite early one morning, I was too fucked up to care for him anymore. I had promised Ted that if couldn't take care of him, I would always provide for him (ALWAYS), and as a woman of my word, I always keep the promises I make. Me and my mom placed him with a loving "empty-nesting" wacko; someone we would never trust in our day-to-day lives, but at that point, it was either some kook in upstate New York who used to kennel Mals, or we sold him on the open market like he was a car from Craigslist. Uh uh. Not happening.

So, one afternoon, a couple of uneducated hicks from rural suburbia picked up my Mal at a boarding kennel in Brooklyn, but before that, they sat at my mom's small kitchen table, giving me the final sales pitch about why they would be good "pet parents", watching me avidly with greedy beady little eyes that tracked my signature across his breeding papers granting them ownership, with my crutches leaning conspicuously against the chair I sat on, but not without first asking me if he really was "free". If you don't know what Snow Dogs represent to me in my culture, try this one on for size: ask a professional working cowboy to part with his favorite work horse, or the barren cat lady next door to give up her little "Snuggly Wuggly" with all the cutesy-poo outfits, too, and you've got it down pat. I spent many hours creating the perfect companion, of a kind that brought my people to this land from very far away. They gave us this life we have, this destiny that we are so blessed to receive daily. It's, like, "way spiritual"**, in Anglo terms.

It hurt, but it would allow me to keep tabs on him through them, and that crazy-ass woman cared for him until the very end, because I saw the pictures she posted on social media (almost in real time), as she sat in the backseat of her car saying "goodbye" to one of the most rockin' spirits this planet has every seen, her eyes red from crying, but he was dying, and that was that. Honestly, I'm glad it was her and not me, though I offered to pick him up for her, or be there to hold her hand. I was sitting in another car when my mom and middle bro had put down my Samoyed many years ago, and it is one of the most excruciating pains I have ever felt in my life, but that's the way real life is. It hurts so good, you know? I wouldn't trade the love of a childhood best friend, so special to my particular ancestry, for all the tea in China. It means everything to me. I owe them my life.

But, that's not how fucked up people treat animals. They don't come from animist cultures that revere them as part of the Holy Spirit powering the entire universe, sacred fellow life forms that are a crucial part of this biosphere we all live in, worthy of our respect, just like we do it. Crazy Euros are no different in this "new" world sometimes than they were back in the old countries that place objects far above people, for no good solid reasons that make any real sense, other than their own rampantly unchecked ill health. I worked with such a violent, foaming-at-the-mouth bitch, who told me she rescued just one type of dog that she liked (letting all the other types of dogs die in "kill shelters" or puppy mills, if they weren't "her" special little breed), because, like I said, she's a real fucking bitch. She wanted me fired for getting injured, not once offering to shelter my type of dog, the very ones that brought Indo-Americans to this world across the Bering Land Mass many moons ago.

No, that fucking cunt wanted me and my dog dead, but she pretended to be a typically "bleeding heart liberal" to get free passes for her psychotic behavior openly manifested between calming doses of Valium at this particular wacky family business. Yeah...like that. Another no-talent dipshit even went so far as to tell her in front of me that she was, like, the best person ever, for using animals like pawns in her fucked up game of "madness played to look like pure chance". She justified her hatred towards her fellow humans by telling me more than once that she liked her terriers way more than me (and her beautiful, orange shorts-wearing daughter), because her parents (who met at the psychiatric institutional facility) "never showed her affection". That's right, this bitch tried to kill me because of her neurotic wealthy parents from Connecticut. Makes sense, no?

No, it doesn't. But that's not all. She went on to tell me (within clear earshot of the entire small company, because she yelled all of her answers by deliberately neglecting her hearing loss), that she adopted a terrier to a family with toddlers after finding out that the dog she "rescued" had eaten the face off of an elderly woman who died in her apartment alone. Wait a minute...what they fuck did you just say to me? I was baffled by her intentional neglect towards people. It was positively shocking. What about the children now left alone with the animal? How long had the dog been alone?! Dogs don't just start chowing down on old dead people unless they're absolutely starving to death. Well, she explained in a condescending tone, she didn't "have to" tell them by law, because dog rescue doesn't work that way. OK, bitch, fine, but don't you think this family has a right to know? Jeezus, you had small kids once, you fucking horror show. What about that?

Even without the cursing in my head (she'd use that as leverage against me, if I dared to use "unprofessional" language in front of her), my intent was perfectly clear. She narrowed her eyes at me in obvious disdain, and typically at this point, she would either A) clam up completely by turning her back on me, so she could play the "deaf card" and/or B) gloss over my point by waiting a beat, to make it seem like I did something wrong, then continuing on after a moment or so: "...anyway...", like I hadn't just made perfect sense, which I did. She closed her eyes halfway to telegraph her dislike for me, then said "Well, the records are sealed", turning her back to me completely, like the conversation was over. Except for this, Lisa. It's not over, bitch. It's over when I say it's over, or until I prosecute you for every legal infraction you've made. This conversation is still on the table, because now I hold all the cards. Is that clear enough for you? I think it is.


*   http://omalmalamutes.com/omal/kotzebuevsmaloot.htm
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism


Saturday, October 5, 2013

Birdhouses: Indoor Decor


The little white birdhouse.

I bought this pretty little house years ago, when I took care of my bedridden mom, down for the count with a broken back. I had spent some of the money I got from a contractual buyout (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2013/09/sunday-paper.html) to spend a month nursing her through yet another fall, the result of MS and her own inability to cope with the disease. She was depressed, angry, and prone to violent fits. My brothers had warned me over the phone that she had gone seriously downhill before I flew back East: a normally intensely neat women with daily cleaning rituals, her apartment started to become cluttered, dirty, and messy.

Years ago I discovered Feng Shui (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_shui), and while I wasn't a mad devotee by any means, I bought a few books on the subject out of curiosity. Much of it is simply basic good design sense for any space: lots of light, green plants for color, oxygen, and good health, water features for relaxation, and mirrors to bounce around the light, to make small spaces feel bigger. The different centers of the eight-sided Bagua correspond to different areas of life; there's one corner for wealth, another for health, and so on (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagua).

So, after nursing her physically and emotionally, I set about making her place warm and welcoming. First, I needed a lot of garbage bags. She had held onto papers that had the same year as my grandfather's death, which was never fully addressed in her mental health care routine successfully. I spent days going to her room to show her each and every piece of paper stuffed away into various nooks and crannies. She cursed me and fought me so viciously that finally, out of desperation and in exhaustion, I finally looked at her wearily and said "Look, honey, you can say whatever you want to me, but this process isn't going to stop. So do your worst. It won't change anything."

And like that, the spell was broken. I went to a crafts store soon after to begin bringing some cheer to her place. I created a little area of interest on top of a book case with a basket holding some fake ivy, and intertwining those branches, I stuck in these cheerful little birdhouses to add more interest. After I went back to Colorado, my mom thanked me for pulling her out of her downward spiral. She had gone to see a doctor who tested her for depression, and she had drawn a clock backwards, which is a positive sign of it. Her real recovery began, as so often happens when I am directly involved.

That time period taught me a lot about the power of beautifully decorated space, and how important design in the home is. It's where we spend most of our time. I hadn't really had a knack for interior design prior, because I never had the money or a place of my own to express myself, but once I came back to Brooklyn, my interest caught fire in earnest (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2011/01/joys-of-winter-comforts-of-home.html). This year, moving back home for my own reasons, my mom turned to me on the couch, and asked me, "What is that there?" Only the white birdhouse remained from my time nurturing her through that period. I took the little birdhouse away, into the other room, and there it now lives.