Session 1

Since I was accepted in the study area that uses medicine, I saw the psychopharmacologist first. He asked me questions about me and my father which is the core subject of my participation in this grief study. Frankly have to say because my thoughts are all over, everything is so connected and unsorted, that it is hard to recall alot of what was asked because my answers were so drawn out... not unfocused as much as for me, one thing is related to another and another...its like a domino life. One incident triggers the world crashing down.


Triggers include a night of drunken screaming and accusations about my mother
next morning she might be beat up or they're not speaking and I have no clue what the cause is-I realized I wrote "cause is" and erased it to put "cause was" but that's indicative of how immediate 40 years ago remains for me.

And the crashing down is how the followig weeks would entail whispers in the kitchen with my mother-who suddenly found her 6 yr old useful or helpful-on how to resolve the standoff and get the family funds flowing again. Sometimes it involved me baking something my father liked or her making a dish of food he loved...there was always days, hours of thinking out to manipulate family members to get back on the dysfunction track=normal again.



So one thing I realized today is that I cant separate out one issue from another-everything is related. To make things worse, I found this was compounded by office politics were people say one thing to your face and gossip behind your back, thereby you never know who to trust, who's a friend and colleague and who's actively working to stab you. And then they say, "its not personal"

But its ALL personal...isnt it?

All politics are local, national, global...arent they?



I dont know that my domino defense is so far out in left field.



Feel free to write anything or say anything at any point, no hard feelings.



I've been asked to bring 1 family member in for one upcoming session.



This is nothing like conventional therapy-the first 3 sessions are preparatory for the 10 weeks following where intense grief work is done. Plus I was given reading material and homework to do each day. I keep a brief daily diary or worst sad/grief episode and least and then note what was going on that triggered a sense of grief, be it a thought, an actual incident, a person or whatever.



Laugh, cry, drift off in thought constantly...I had to pull myself back into the present tense over and over.



I went in at 1, left at 5:00pm. But I dont think the sessions will continue to be this long...I can take it...dont know if my doctors can LOL.

Complicated Grief

Where to begin on this subject, other than to say my life has two parts; 1953-1972 and 1973 until present day. My father died February 16, 1973, a week before my sister's birthday and no one was home except my mother. When an event is so defining, no matter the base feelings, the physical reaction to it sometimes feels like you got hit over and over, then chills, numbness, relief...and for me the most stunning thing, the same thing that happened on 9/11, was the change in the light. The natural light, the air around me suddenly became like sheer glass and clear like it had been washed in rain, crisp, clean so I suddenly saw things as if for the first time. The taxi I jumped into was such a bright mustard yellow and the driver was kind. I told him to hurry because it seemed my father had just died and when he pulled up in front of the West End Ave apartment he refused the fare and wished me good luck.
It is very hard to recall most of my childhood except in fragments and most of those images contain strange figures, catastrophic fires, pits of devastation and buildings collapsed (these are childhood dreams), the voices in German and hiding along a wall in a forest, feeling hunted, walking under water, walking on water, walking on a ladder in the sky, watching angels simultaneously ascend and descend on a revolving wheel.

My life was affected by the loss of my father and his death defined the direction my life took afterwards. So basically he lives with me in everything. However, this is not a sentimental attachment of benign love and easy emotion. While I never doubted how much love he stored for me, the dreams he wanted for me (lawyer), the money he spent to teach me music, his drinking and profound depression over took any ability to live a normal life for anyone in the family. His favorite expression was "dont do as I do, do as I say" and so he had a standard for himself and one for everyone else whom he expected to obey. He used drinking, violence and money to manipulate everyone to do what he needed and wanted. Particularly the women in his life. My sister was younger and terrified of him and avoided him at every turn. My mother used him, bled him dry instead of saving money knowing how old he was, how sick he was and she shoved me at him to be the mediator between them, his caretaker when barely out of childhood, his companion because she couldnt contain her disinterest or disgust at his age, gambling and drinking. In the end, she sat it out waiting as he took his daily sleep and pain meds, waiting and waiting as he got weaker, more feeble and then needed help even getting to the bathroom. She waited, then called me to say she couldnt wake him...yeah.

I became religious because I wanted a life that was the antithesis of everything my mother was. She broke his marriage to a Jewish woman and blasphemed the poor woman anytime she mentioned what was lost in the divorce. She accidently mentioned a daughter once and then denied she ever said anything. But she had said my father had a first daughter named Ruth. It wasn't enough to have taken everything from someone in this way, she then made herself comfortable with men her own age and ethnicity, breaking my father's heart and the cheating was at the core of every battle, screaming match, threat to her life and whatever lover of the moment she was involved with. Imagine going to bed and listening to your father threaten nightly he was going to kill your mother, "I'll kill you M." and then afraid to sleep because in the morning she might not be there. So for years, he was the Monster because he was older and hard to understand, he drank and was morose. He worried and I didnt know why because he showered us with money and we wanted for nothing, housekeepers, chauffer, I was nine years old and walked around with a $20 bill all the time for treats or books sold at school.
My mother loved to encourage hate for him, disdain is perhaps a better word while at the same time pushing me to care for him when he was drunk or wanted something special to eat she didnt want to cook. Friday night he demanded to say kiddush, asked me to say the bracha on the candles with his help, he handed me a yalmulka to put on, told me when to say 'amen' and always went to Cake Masters Friday afternoon from work to bring fresh challah, a huge box of mixed cookies, orange frosted sponge cake and a strawberry tart for my sister. His relation to Judaism is similar to mine-the thread is food. He had no family, they disowned him for marrying a shiksa. I grew up similarly without family, my mother liked me as much as she liked him, when we served a purpose she would be civil.

When he died, my only ally in this life, left me. I not only felt the light change but as if I had no arms and legs. I began to live on auto pilot trying to think what next step was next as my mother had no interest in either myself or my sister. Her obligation to being a mother was no longer, the reason for becoming one had been served, he was dead, she was free and decided to sell everything of value off and move back to her mother, good luck girls. Without blame but simple fact, the choice to run to Israel seemed the only path after losing NY residency. I didn't have work skills other than short order grill work and being a grease monkey was okay as a necessity while he was alive, because he was sick and old, but all my life? From pillar to post, thinking religion was the answer to cleanse myself, to purge myself from inexplicable pain and what I had lived through. But you cannot become 'religious' to cure mental illness, although religion often teaches just the opposite, pray to heal thyself, all things are with G-d and from G-d. Yes, and G-d gave us hearts and brains and when either the body or soul He meted out becomes ill from another human, it takes human care to fix the vessel. Prayer can help, it does, but sitting back and waiting for G-d to fix what humans have destroyed is stupidity at its peak. So of course I spent almost 14 years trying my darndest to be a frum happy Jewish woman when there was nothing but terror inside and a wall around me. And this was after conversion, in fact, everything was worse after conversion and kept getting worse as I had no one to help choose a suitable husband or help with anything to set up a kosher home, raisse kosher children. I jumped into the deep end
and doggie paddled to save my life until I couldnt anymore. Had I married a gentle man, it might have worked but I married someone with a violent abusive nature, a depressive. Although I would like to blame the shaddchun, I wanted the marriage and thought if that man wouldn't have me, no man would.
So many times I thought, my father was right, the cure is education. If I can get to college I can support my kids and be free of the domestic violence and lack of financial support. After a father as mine was, a man who worked until he could barely walk with a 3rd grade education, who gave his word in business with handshake and was good to his word, after a life with such a man, to live on charity for over a decade and watch my children being scorned as playmates by neighbors because their mother is a convert, their father was itinerant...maybe some women have stronger stomachs or spirits.

I moved to PA and 2 months ago was in the market and picked up a local paper. I dont buy newspapers because there's so much news online. There was an article about an ongoing study of 'complicated grief.' This type of grief is different from mourning the loss of a loved one, this is grief that alters a person's life, you become frozen in time and indeed I still am.
So I applied and the intake was long and intense, approval had to be from all doctors from each site and there are four study sites. Participants are randomly selected for 1 of 4  possible studies and I lucked out with the best, receiving weekly sessions with a therapist, medication (amazing how one medicine can help when another doesnt and you had given up all hope of ever having any hope)a weekly session with the prescribing doctor about how the medicine is affecting me and weekly assignments, I have to keep a journal that is brought in each week, so I'm forced to write which is most important for me to get me going finally.

There was alot of hesitation in posting this because it has to do with mental health and I was always the one to counsel students and alumni to remain in the closet on the subject, its the last frontier of intense prejudice. But I could not pass up this opportunity, its like a gift, alot of work and I hope to come out of the tunnel at the end of this, lighter and brighter for myself and my children.

Long times...

As excuses for a long writing absence, I have several. My new laptop has a different Windows and until R.K. posted a comment I actually could not find my blog. As it's listed above, its not listed on Blogger...so it "doesnt exist" much like I do not exist on the Anash list, so I'm invisible or 'dead' for Chabad.
Second, it hasn't been a really smooth adjustment from NY to PA, I prefer PA after so many years in NY, but the move was interrupted by a sudden diagnosis for the need to have surgery. That required alot of doctor meetings, discarding doctors and finding new ones and I am picky on the subject. This is one area where if the shoe doesnt fit, move on to another pair. Especially for women, who for years had to listen, and still do it seems in PA, to doctors tell us what we feel in our bodies is actually in our minds.

As I write this, my tiny apartment is so cold, the house is an old victorian and my apt runs along the outside walls and there's no insulation whatsoever...my breath mists. The thermostat reads 59 degree inside and its 30 outside. I ran the central heating one month before I got the bill of $178 and no longer use the central heating. I bought a raddiant heater, but nothing can fight this kind of cold. Except I learned you have to dress in layers, 2 pair socks, sweaters, run the gas oven while I'm home and I have the radiant heater now set up for the cats who were so cold had stopped eating and just huddled. They're snapping at eacch other. I have to get a 2nd small heater for the other cat, these two are in such a fiddle right now they dont want to eat next to each other.

Since my daughter told me everyone is too busy with their own lives and dont expect them to come by or call too often, I've had to readjust my brain and life. It's as alone here as in NY. But people seem nicer here overall. Things are slower and often dumber. Every once in awhile I meet someone who'll excitedly ask, "You from NY???!" and then conversation always begins with How do you like PA?
'I was in NY and its nice to visit, but I couldnt live there' Yeah, at least half of NYers might say the same.
But as I wrote somewhere else recently the New York signposts of my own life and more prominently, my father's era, are completely gone now. I was on the UPWS about a decade ago, the only thing that remained were the pre-War buildings on West End Ave, Ansche Chesed etc. Walk down to Broadway and its all gone. My father used to take me erev Pesach to the fish monger whose name is lost now as well. But it was 3 steps down, like a basement store and everything was cut, filleted and ground to order. The fish monger was a huge man who loved to take a large fish and whack it on the wooden plank before him, maybe it stunned the fish so that the knife went in without resistance. But my father was always particular about this tradition, whitefish, pike, fresh ground with onions, send the heads and bones ina  separate bag. The chinese restaurants Ling Nins, Harbin Inn, Murray's Fish Shop, William's Bar B Que, small dress shops like Ardsley where every season my mother sat as dresses where brought out for her to look at...gone. L'Oreal cosmetics where my mother's custom blend of foundation and powder where made to order as we waited is now a billion dollar prepackaged business. David's Shop that was filled with revolving glass cases of things for women like needlepoint compacts, men's tortoiseshell combs in slip cases, barrettes, handbags and the Riverside, Embassy, Rialto movie theatres. Right between the theatres was inset a Barton's Candy store where our neighbor Edith Bass hand boxed chocolates into their shiny black boxes covered with doodles of pink poodles, green buds, yellow ribbons. You could buy a piece or a box, or bridge mix that was filled with such an assortment of chocolate covered brazil nuts, toffee crunch covered in white chocolate, rum balls, plump raisins, pecans and walnuts all in either milk or dark chocolate that melted slowly as only real chocolate does.Viennese Crunch...2 words that say it all. Sometimes around the holidays Edith would bring us a large box of Bartons fancy chocolates.

 I never went back to the Garment District but venturing to 34th street to Jack's .99 Store it seemed most of 34th and 7th Ave had changed with Jews departing and replaced with Indian importers, Iranian rug sellers, knitting shops, fabric emporiums and Chinese junk shops of every variety Wholesale Only Please!
Crown  Heights is much the same...in one sense good that the community expanded with new buildings, but for me it didnt feel like a cozy home anymore. A new front was slapped onto 770 which is an architects nightmare of no design, almost mimicing the ugly extruded new front placed on the Brooklyn Museum by Diller Scofidio.

Anyway this is much too long for anyone to read...but that's as always. I've been accepted into a study for complicated grief, but that'll be another post.