An Odd and Solitary Grief

I found out last week that an old girlfriend of mine had died. She had died a month earlier, but I hadn’t heard about it till a friend let me know. I hadn’t spoken to her in at least 36 years, and we broke up almost 37 years ago after a relationship that lasted less than six months when we were 20 years old. The start and end of the relationship were equally awkward for me to handle, and I didn’t do well at either task. I made a mopey ass of myself after she made it clear there was no point in pursuing the issue. I hated the feeling of rejection, and it made me a less admirable person for a few months. So I gave her good reasons not to regret her decision, I guess. She did do one nice thing for me after the breakup which I’ll always appreciate her for: She took a record to a Leo Kottke show I wasn’t able to attend and got him to autograph it for me. That made it hard for me to remember her with much bitterness, just a sort of general sadness.

My next relationship after that (not counting some trial and error dating) was with my future wife, and we’ve been together for 35 years. My wife always referred to my ex-girlfriend by some not very complimentary labels, and I was a good sport about that, since I understood the nature of dealing with the exes of your life partner. But aside from a time when we spotted my ex at a Star Trek convention the year we got engaged (which was a very weird coincidence, given that it was an extremely unnatural environment for all three of us), I never saw her again.

I knew that she was working as a public defender, and was a steward in their union, from the alumni directory that our college put out about fifteen years ago. Other than that, I didn’t think much about her. She still listed her maiden name, and I assumed she hadn’t gotten married. Not that a name is a reliable indicator, but I had a hunch she wasn’t the marrying kind. At least that explanation was easier on my male ego than some of the alternative explanations for her unceremoniously dumping me in 1973.

Ironically, when my college friends and I reconnected online a few months ago, one of the things we did was post and comment on some of the old movies and videos we’d taken of those years. On one group outing to my parents’ summer home, there was a brief silent movie scene with my old girlfriend. She was ignoring me as I tried to get her attention, and I made a dismissive wave in the general direction of her back and stomped off as she walked away from me. I was hamming it up for the camera’s benefit, but the scene was oddly premonitory of the breakup that happened a couple months later. Seeing that got me wondering about her, but beyond Googling her name, I didn’t pursue the matter. The Googling turned up almost nothing, except the year she passed the bar and the fact that she had been disqualified from the ballot in an attempt to run for judge three or four years ago. The ballot filing listed her address as the same town she grew up in, only a few miles from where I live now and where we went to high school. I wasn’t surprised to find out that the local old boys hadn’t let her run for judge. She wasn’t the type to kiss ass to get ahead, and I’m sure she had made some enemies. I sort of suspected that, given the line of work she was in, she had to be careful not to have any personal information floating around out there on the Internet for bad guys to find out about. So I left it at that and went back to my daily routine.

I had no way of knowing that, as I was indulging this idle curiosity, she was lying in bed dying of lung cancer. She passed away about two weeks after I thought of her, as I later found out. Had I Googled her name just two weeks after I did, I would have seen the obituary and the tribute from her union local, of which she had been the president, and where she was held in high regard and was compared to “Mother” Jones. The blog from her union included admiring anecdotes from attorneys and judges she had worked with, which portrayed her as a hard-nosed fighter with a heart. I found out she had been active in an organization working to abolish the death penalty in our state – ironically again, an organization that some of my fellow faculty members were also involved with. Apparently she had been thrown in jail on more than one occasion by judges who didn’t like her style. I also found out that, even though she spent most of her time at the criminal courts building, her actual office was a half block away from the office where I’ve worked for the last seven years. Who knew?

So now I have this weird feeling. On the most basic level, I felt like this was one more step closer to my own mortality and that of my friends. As my Irish co-worker puts it, “You realize that your rung is next on the ladder.” It’s not like losing your parents, or even like it was when I lost my older brother, who, at twelve years my senior, was of a different age cohort altogether. This was the Angel of Death swooping right into those college pictures and snatching one of us out of the picture. Never mind that she smoked when I knew her. A lot of us did a lot of unhealthy things - then and since - so you can’t just blame her “lifestyle choices,” as the current phrase puts it.

But this is a more complicated feeling than just hearing that a classmate has died. I first had that happen in high school. This was someone who was important to me. She meant something to me. But I can’t really have her mean anything to me now. Not without seeming disloyal to my wife and unappreciative of our time together. A time together which has endured, I might point out, sixty-eight times longer than my relationship with the deceased did.

And I looked at the online tribute messages and the comments on the union blog, some of which came from her family members whom I had met, and I had the same urge that we all have to leave some message of sympathy and tribute to a person who obviously made a difference to a lot of people. Not the least of which is the son that I never knew she had. I wasn’t surprised to hear about him either, and my wife and I both wondered if she had adopted him - it would have been consistent with the approach to life that we figured she had. But I tried to joke with my wife by saying that all I knew was that he wasn’t mine. She bristled a little more than I would have expected and said, “THAT would be a way to ruin 34 years of marriage!”

But what am I supposed to say in the way of tribute? “I dated her for six months in 1973 and hoped to marry her until she broke up with me and never spoke to me again. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

So I’m left feeling a bit relieved, and yet a bit disappointed, that (like an extra in someone else's movie) my part in her life will be forever unknown and unmarked now by all who shared her last years and months. And that I don’t have any real loss to mourn, except the same loss I mourned for those months in 1973 and 1974. It’s the loss of a life I had once hoped for which would have included her, and that loss is long put to rest. But the ghosts of that loss are stirred up again now, and there’s nothing I can do about them except wait for them to go back where they came from, into my memories – and my dreams, where she has shown up intermittently over the years, and where she can now join my parents among the restless dreamed dead. I can’t even raise a glass in her honor, because I don’t drink these days. But in my mind I can tip my cap to her like an old Irish gentleman, and use Richard Brautigan’s phrase to mark the passing of “…a good ass gone under.” She’d probably ask for nothing more than that.

Haiti and the Roots of America's Crazy Fake Populism: Astroturf is Nothing New

This is a line of argument that Joe Bageant has made convincingly in "Deer Hunting with Jesus." It's in the interests of those with economic power to keep the working-class white populace (especially in southern states) supporting politics that work against those whites' best interests. And one big way they do that is by stoking racial fears. As many have pointed out, they just do it less directly these days, using code words. They also do it by creating "debates" where there are none. The immigration "debate," the healthcare "debate," and on and on. Those are code words to defend and fan fears based on ignorance, and keep people from thinking about what they really want to stand for as a nation. This is a very good essay because it digs deeper into American history than Joe Bageant went. Greed seems to have trumped idealism since the Constitution was written.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost