BRING OUT YOUR DEAD

This line of thought hardened when I tried to phone my brother and was told he died two years ago. When I called cousins to tell them, they reluctantly added others who had died without me ever knowing. My cousin said, "We didn't want you to feel bad." Bad is not the word.  These were not pandemic deaths.  We're just an aging generation.

Researchers are beginning to wonder whether Covid19 affects brains, maybe later after the original life-threatening episode is over, even if it was less dramatic — just flu.  This issue is very lively to me because of family experience, mostly on the paternal side.  To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, here’s a terrifying story that was in one of my media feeds today:

https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline-brilliant-young-coder/?
utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

It is obvious to some, of course, that our President — even as he evades proper medical diagnosis and treatment — has this deterioration of the brain and that — linked with a devil’s disposition — he is killing people out of failure to perform his duties.  Do we forgive him for that because of frontal lobe deterioration preventing him from thinking? Not me.  "Bad" isn't the word.

In my immediate family there are three instances of brain deterioration because of trauma to the forehead which undoubtedly damaged that frontal lobe, though no one recognized it or understood it.  One was my father in a car accident in 1948.  One was my brother after a fall in the early Eighties, and one was my cousin after repeated motorcycle accidents.  We already knew about my mother’s uncle whose wife “had hardening of the arteries in her brain” so that she was in an institution.  The gentle rock-hound uncle never divorced her but occasionally had lady partners living with him in Oakland. My mother always liked them.

Of my aunts, the one on my father’s side and the two on my mother’s side all died demented, but not from identifiable frontal temporal lobe failure so much as global confusion.  I blame my mother’s sisters' failure on farm chemicals, fertilizers and particularly spraying for flies. My mother was clear-headed to the end. So was the cousin that grew up with her.

My family is in three streams because my mother’s sisters and cousin married brothers and a cousin.  They were from ag lives.  Two were sane to the end and one, a farmer, was not.  There is another brother who never married anyone because he was "paranoid schizophrenic" and mostly institutionalized.  No one names him or admits he exists.  I saw his photograph.

The most interesting case is my father’s only sister and her two children.  This aunt and her daughter both had a terrible case of flu when the daughter was in high school.  Both developed what was diagnosed as Alzheimers, to the extent that it can be diagnosed pre-mortem.  The aunt died, the cousin is at home.  The mother of this mother and my father, that is, my grandmother on that side, developed a severe goiter in the Thirties, thyroid disfunction because of living in northern Manitoba before iodine was discovered to be vital.  Knowing what we do about epigenetics it’s quite possible that my aunt’s and cousin’s “Alzheimers” are as related to the lingering cross-generational effects as they are to the strong flu infections.  Of the cousin’s two children, the girl seems stable, productive, and cheerful, but the boy has struggled with severe alcoholism since grade school years.  His own daughter is fine, an achiever.

Doubling back to consider the son of my father's sister, his own family -- I'm told -- struggles with autism.  He married a twin with autism tendencies and their only daughter who seems to have inherited them, married a man with those traits which passed on to three children. They don't find anything wrong.  I closed them out, so I don't really know.  Of course, Aspies -- high-functioning autistics   -- will claim they are simply an alternative and justified.

What I grasp from all this is that most families wrestle with mental and emotional issues without understanding or maybe even not coping very well.  Since there is sometimes no real scientific explanation and because the issues of attachment are so strong, a cloud of denial and excuses often moves the issues into moral judgement to justify excluding people.  Pain is evil, is it not?  There’s a price to excluding people who are evil, no? And unaccountability is always painful.

My father's family is particularly vulnerable to these kinds of issues because of their high valuing of intelligence and education.  This was their Golden Calf, a golden calfskin binding a book.  

One aunt who died in a nursing home was a nurse during WWII in a time of overwhelming air pollution.  In London she  said the smog was so thick one could barely see the counters in department stores.  She returned somehow changed.  The fog of war was a subtly killing mist.

Of her four children, one had the motorcycle concussions but was always strung tight, two were twins, one can’t hold a job and is obsessive-compulsive, and the girl became a nurse like her mother, the WWII nurse, who had a sort of Munchausen syndrome by proxy and became convinced that her daughter had some kind of brain problem which subjected her to medical scrutiny and invasion.  The son of this daughter was brilliant and became a scientist.  That daughter, who is now retirement age, lives in a culture of variant medicine that works on the edge of what is accepted.

What I’m saying and trying to analyze, is that humans are not at all the defined and identifiable standard individuals we assume, especially in the American culture of standing alone and resisting community pressure.  And then, secondarily, the attachment groups of family and community, try to stay safe from the ambiguity and confusion by denying and inventing, as often feeling motivated out of necessity and self-preservation, emotions that resist scrutiny.

My strategy has been high independence and sometimes invasive inquiry.  I want to know why.  I realize how much has been hidden.  When my cousins were clearly hurt and angry when I tried to talk about all this, I decided to simply withdraw.  It was ironic.  My mother’s side had already built a wall to close me out.  Now I closed the door on my father’s side.  My mother and brothers are dead, a final exclusion.

When I had the animal control job I got deeper into the physical expression of life in context — the dogs’ lives — and found the Unitarian Universalist movement which seemed invested in high thought and carried me to seminary at the U of C Div School.  Ironically, it was not the traditional Ph.D.-style education that had meaning as much it was the English psychological thought I began to find late at night at the Hyde Park Powell’s bookstore.  These thinkers were kinder, sweeter people than Freud, less inscrutable than the French.  No one in my family knows anything about these books.  But we’re many generations along now — I don’t know the younglings.  This fluid and erratic blog records what I do know.

On the news I see bulldozers burying the unknown dead in boxes closer together than recommended in life.  Their families will never find them, but maybe the families are dispersed.  It's a coming-apart time.