My world and welcome to it

Tonight I found out that a friend passed away on November 8. I knew she was ill. She’d been ill ever since I’d made her acquaintance. You just don’t know that this particular bout with illness is going to be the last. I am speechless. There are no words. I really don’t know what to say.

You see, I’d never met this woman. I didn’t know her real name or where she lived or how old she was, except in the vaguest terms. We were both chat moderators in an online RPG. She’d been in that role forever it seemed. I’ve only been doing it for seven or so years. She and her family live somewhere in the American Northwest. Her husband is disabled but still working for the post office delivering packages. One son works in a restaurant. The other son is problematic. My friend was in a wheelchair, had several emergency operations, and they lived hand to mouth. Every time we turned around, she had more problems, either with health or finances or both. Yet, she was cheerful, loved to have minimum price sales in her ingame store for poor players, ran games in the channel reserved for that, and everyone loved her. If they didn’t love her, they were terrible people.

One Christmas I bought and sent her gift certificates for a local grocery store so that she and her family could have a nice Christmas. I donated to her GoFundMe that her husband administered. I feel like I never gave enough, and yet most people gave nothing. Because of those gift certificates, I needed her email address, so I have an actual name, which is not her ingame account name. I won’t reveal it here. That wouldn’t be right. But when she hadn’t logged in for a very long time, I wrote her, back in October, asking if she was all right. I never got a response.

Someone noticed that her account had been logged into on December 10, but no one thought to look at her Display Case text until today; and that’s where we saw the news. Now I feel I have to mark her passing with a blog post. But I have so little say. I suppose she’s at peace. Or at least, she’s not suffering anymore. Those sentiments are so insufficient. She’s gone. That’s all. And I’m sad.

I am writing this in response to a recent post by my friend Andy Glasser. We’re not friends really. We’ve never met, never had a realtime conversation, but we have been reading each other’s blogs for years and often have common ground and mutual experiences. I’m sure if we were to actually ever meet, we would feel like we’d known each other forever. Stranger things have happened.

As a child, I believed in God, mostly because it was the thing to do. I never questioned it. I hadn’t been raised particularly religious, never went to synagogue, only performed the “fun” rituals. We didn’t even eat kosher at our house. But believing in a higher deity was part of being Jewish, and since that’s what I was, I never questioned it.

When I was 18, I got engaged to be married to a young man who was not Jewish. He’d been raised Anglican or something like that, and so he went for conversion classes. He even had a ritual circumcision, and as he’d already been circumcised as a baby, it was just a matter of drawing some blood to satisfy the rules and regulations governing such bullshit. But one day, after leaving him at the synagogue and walking home along a busy city street surrounded by automobiles and concrete and steel and glass, it occurred to me that a deity who had created the world as a beautiful garden for living creatures would never abide what mankind had done to that paradise. Hence, since the abomination of the city continued to exist without being destroyed by divine wrath, there could not be a god. I have not wavered from that belief to this day, 50 years later.

The dogma that Andy speaks of consists of words composed by human authors to influence human readers. They were not handed down from some divine mouth to be written upon a page, they are inventions of the human mind. There is nothing holy or sacred about them. They are just words. Sometimes they’re pretty good words, encouraging people to live in harmony with each other and nature, to be fair and just and kind. But people should be like that anyway, right? Unfortunately, the dogma part also tells people they will burn in hell if they don’t follow the rules, or will be rewarded with eternal life if they do. People need reasons to be good and just and kind. Otherwise, they’re all out for themselves. Even though I don’t believe in Hell, I think it would be awfully nice if there were one for all those so-called Christians who have never actually followed the teachings of Jesus as the name implies. Won’t they be surprised!

When my daughter was in elementary school where they had a choice between catechism and moral education, and you can guess which class she was in, she asked me what God was. She’d heard her friends throwing this word around, and it’s not a word we ever used at home. So I told her that God was an idea that people had made up to explain all the unexplainable things, and she should never, ever tell Grandma I had told her this. She has since become an astrophysicist and explains the unexplainable to other people without making stuff up. When asked what we are religion-wise, I answer that I am a Jewish atheist, my husband is a lapsed Catholic, and my children are godless heathens.

A very long time ago, before people had invented paper and writing implements and written language, they sat around a fire at night, looking at the stars, asking the kinds of questions Homo sapiens is known for: Why are we here? What happens after we die? Why does the sun rise every morning? Why do the seasons change? Of course they had no answers because they had no knowledge. So they made stuff up and told stories. Those stories eventually became religion. Those early cave dwellers needed to make God in their own image so that God could, in turn, make people in his own image. This is a classic example of existentialism: existence before essence. Not everything has to have a reason, but apparently people need to make up reasons because they can’t bear to be accidental. The reasons eventually became dogma.

Most of those questions have been answered now by science. We know why weather happens, what those pin pricks of light are in the night sky, why water freezes into ice or dissipates as vapour. But we’re still asking those existential questions, i.e. the reason for our existence, the meaning of life. As I told Dave in my discussion group a month or so ago, the answer is that we are evolved enough to actually ask the questions at all. There are no answers to the questions. How could there be? We were not created by a deity for some special purpose. We, as a species, have done more harm to this planet than all the disasters that occur naturally. If all the insect life were suddenly to disappear, everything would die. If humans were to disappear, nature would flourish.

A quick search for the definition of dogma gives me: “a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true.” Before believing in these incontrovertible truths, ask yourself, “Who is this higher authority and what makes it infallible?” My grandfather was born in a part of Eastern Europe where Jewish boys were taught Bible and the tenets of their faith starting at a very early age because it wasn’t unusual for pogroms and the rounding up of children to be raised by non-Jewish families and assimilated into a non-Jewish culture. This was an attempt to keep them Jewish, even if they were unlucky enough to have this happen. The very first thing they learned, of course, was that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1. My grandfather put up his hand and asked, “Who created God?” The rabbi turned purple and said to him, “A Jew does not ask such a question!” So my grandfather became an atheist from that day forth because he dared to ask such a question.

I have written a book. It started last July as a response to a prompt in my writing group, much as the previous entry did, except that the next week I felt compelled to continue, and for several weeks continued writing bits and pieces to the story. In a half-hour, I can fill three notebook pages with longhand, which is not very much when typed up on the computer. But I decided to do just that, type up what I had started, and in the process, I suddenly couldn’t stop. My story took on a life of its own. I would start typing away, and words just flowed out of my fingertips, without any idea where they were taking me, and a coherent tale grew that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

At certain points I would reach an impasse and have to stop for a few hours or a day. For example, it was necessary to write a sex scene. I’m not good at writing sex scenes. I’m naturally a prude. My own experiences with sex do not make me a good person to describe other people’s, and believe me, they are all different. But I would go to bed at night and use that time before I fell asleep to figure out how I would do this so it rang true to me and everyone else. Then, I wrote it.

My husband would ask me where my story was going. I had no idea. I had no plan. When he writes a musical composition, he knows how it begins, has thematic material he can develop, and knows how he’s going to bring it all together at the double barline. I had no such schematic. The story began as a fortune cookie from a Chinese restaurant following a meal between friends, and ended two and-a-half years later with most ends tied up nicely, except for those which the narrator warned were going to be unresolved.

I have read my own book about 10 times, proofreading, changing little things, rewriting whole chapters, until I feel that it is done. Several of my friends are reading it now to give me feedback. So far, it’s been good. My friend Margaret called this afternoon to tell me she’s totally caught up and loving it. My brother emailed that he’s already on page 82. My husband has started reading it off my old keyboard Kindle, but he’s not good with the teeny-tiny format. I’m not going to print out almost 300 pages just for him to read it. My publisher, if I ever get one, can do that.

Which brings me to the next thing. I suppose I should try to find a publisher. For someone as shy and retiring as I am, who does not put herself out there for fear of rejection, this is a daunting endeavour. I’m waiting on the feedback of my readers. Maybe they’ll catch more typos, places that can be improved, inconsistencies. Stuff that an editor would find. Then I’ll think about finding a publisher.

In the meantime, I’m going back through my notebooks from writing group, all the two- to three-page beginnings that I wrote in 20 to 30 minutes’ worth of longhand. I’ve always enjoyed the physical and mental act of writing. Now it’s all I want to do. It used to be that I knit all the time and only wrote at writing group. Now I’m writing all the time and only knitting at knitting group.

Wish me luck.

The day the spaceship landed in Horston High’s baseball diamond was the day Emma got her period. She had excused herself from grade 9 math class and fled to the girls’ bathroom at the end of the hall to find out what was happing in her underwear. As prepared as most teens for the onset of menses, she had neglected to keep a supply of personal hygiene items in her purse or school bag under the common misconception that something as odious as menstruation could never happen to her. Unfortunately, this was not the case, as she discovered when she pulled down her pants and surveyed the bloody mess in her drawers. Frantically, she started rummaging in her purse for the quarter that would buy a pad from the machine on the bathroom wall. 

Thus occupied, with tears stinging in her eyes, she was unaware of the momentous events taking place on the other side of the school. While she was washing her panties out in the sink and drying them under the hand dryer, her math teacher, Mrs. Crispin, was trying vainly to keep order in the classroom. Something enormous had materialized in the baseball diamond beyond the parking lot and playground, spilling so much heat that the air around it shimmered and warped.

Later, when the reporters interviewed individual students asking what each had seen, no two answers corroborated each other. Jimmy Stevenson had seen a great pool of blackness, the light never returning from its surface. Jessica Beuler saw a great, glowing orb. Monica Stacey swore it was a huge cube with shimmering portals, and Kerry Gill saw a typical flying saucer. Mrs. Crispin said it looked like a desert mirage, complete with palm trees and a shimmering lake, surrounded by the wavering heat. They all agreed that it was massive, taking up all the space from home plate out to left field.

Poor Emma, gluing the strip on the bottom of the sanitary napkin to her now clean but slightly damp panties, saw nothing.

I’m a knitter and I belong to a knitting group of woman of a certain age, as we say here in Quebec. At 68 (just turned last week) I am one of the younger ones, although there are a couple younger than I, most in their 70s, with one octogenarian. We are mostly educated, middle class, white and anglophone. I say “mostly” because there are always exceptions. But we are diverse when it comes to our political and religious leanings, and we get along because we don’t discuss these things when we get together to knit. We all agree that the recent president-elect of our neighbouring country is a bad man and can’t understand how that even happened, but then one of our number said something yesterday that got my hackles up and my blood boiling. She said, “Well, he’s done some good things.” I said, “Name one good thing he’s done,” and she said, “He’s made transgender illegal.” I practically blew up at her. I said, “That’s not a good thing, that’s a terrible thing!” I would have said more, but we are a civilized bunch and the subject thankfully got changed to something else, but not before I said, “Wait until he takes away the right for women to vote,” and my colleague said, “He wouldn’t do that,” and several of us who do not think as she does and who actually pay attention to the news said, “He just might. We wouldn’t put it past him.”

You see, my knitting friend is a fundamentalist Christian who belongs to an evangelical church, the same one in the lobby of which we knit every week. She has forgotten that Jesus ate with sinners and taxpayers, that he lobbied for the rights of the underprivileged, that he fought for those marginalized and on the fringes. No where does it say that he despised gays, lesbians and transgendered people. In all the stories I hear in Church on Sundays when I sit quietly in the choir loft have I heard that he performed miracles to make homosexuals straight. So where the heck does she get this idea from that being transgendered is criminal? What the fuck is wrong with people like that?

What I want to say to my friend, although I’m having second thoughts about calling her that, is that it is against human rights to legislate whom you may and may not love. One does not suddenly decide that he wants to be transgendered. It’s like being born black, or Jewish, or with a different assortment of chromosomes than the norm. There is nothing unnatural about feeling that you are in the wrong body. Is this particular president going to say that ADHD doesn’t exist? That bi-polar disorder is a made-up thing? I am seriously rethinking if I want to knit with this person anymore. Apart from this one quirk in her way of thinking, she is not a bad person, although she did decide not to continue volunteering for the Literacy in Action programme to help francophone health workers improve their English for working with anglophone clients because she got nothing out of it. So maybe she is more shallow than I originally gave her credit for. Do I want to be friends with this kind of person?

But then, Jesus ate with sinners and taxpayers, and maybe I, too, can be an example to her. Somehow. I have a feeling that she is incorrigible, though. She’s so set in her beliefs, there may be no turning her away from the dark side. But I still needed to vent here. For reasons.

An enlisted man said this in the chatroom of the game I play and I thought it needed preserving and repeating:

“The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them.
I’m not scared that he will ruin my life. That’s silly. but the fact that the rule of law died so this could happen is a real bummer.”

It’s been a terrible year. And it just got worse. My condolences, America.

I have already been to five funerals this year and accidentally missed another. The day before one funeral I learned that another dear friend had chosen to be sedated rather than go into palliative care, and the next morning I found out she’d died during the night from liver failure. Her funeral was the following week. We had a service last week at church to remember people who’d died during the previous twelve months, and I ended up lighting two candles, one for my sister-in-law whose funeral we went to last February. So, yeah, life sucks, and then you die.

I live a 45-minute drive from the Quebec-Vermont border. I have no intention of crossing that line for the next four years. Or ever, if it comes to that.

Notes jotted down at church:

A. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into heaven.

Rich men don’t enter heaven for the mere reason that you cannot take your material wealth with you. Everyone enters heaven, if they in fact go to any such place, without a body or pockets and definitely without any of their earthly possessions. Therefore, anyone entering heaven is exactly on the same footing as anyone else, no matter their financial status during their life. So, not rich.

B. Giving your wealth to the poor is a bad business model.

If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day, but if you teach him to fish, he will eat for a lifetime. If you give all your wealth to the poor, the poor will be able to feed and clothe and house themselves until the money runs out, and then what? Better to give the poor jobs and pay them living wages instead of giving them charity which will make them feel indebted and humiliated for having needed the handout in the first place. 

C. Follow me and have eternal life.

This is a hard one, because I cannot know what Jesus actually believed. Jewish tradition does not say that one dies and goes to heaven or hell. Instead, they die, are buried, and when the day comes, presumably when the Messiah shows up (my father would have said, “You should live so long”), the righteous souls will rise and be dressed in flesh once more and live in “olam ha ba”, or the world to come. The not-righteous souls will not rise at all. Just remain dead. 

Jesus went around gathering up followers, convincing them to hang out with him as an entourage while he went around the country, trying to spread his word of loving one’s neighbour, helping the poor and the needy and the sick, and treating one’s fellow man/woman/child as an equal. In order to get people to take his message to heart, he had to dangle a carrot in front of them: eternal life. If he had just said, love they neighbour as thyself because that is the right thing to do, people would never have listened to him. But because his message came with the promise of redemption in the next life, something he absolutely had no authority to offer, it actually had an impact on the people he preached to. If we were to substitute the word “love” for every time he referred to an external deity, we would see the spiritual value of his outlook. But by promising eternal life in the kingdom of heaven, he had a reward in sight for good behaviour. We tell children to be good so Santa will bring them gifts. This is no different, except that children don’t have the experience to see the consequences of their actions and adults do. 

I subscribe to Martin Buber’s story about the atheist who does good works without an expectation that he will be rewarded by god because then the good works are truly meaningful, not a form of currency to cash in at a future time. 

My friend died this morning.

Goddamn.

Once there were Three Ladies. We used to meet for lunch once or twice a year, exchange little gifts at Christmas; we even put on a trio concert once. I became the third in the group as a latecomer, and they named me Jussi, while they were Flor and Vlad. I could explain the names, but I won’t. It’s funnier that way, at least to me. But Flor and I had our own names for each other: she was the Duchess and I the Contessa. They arose from a train ride we took together to a reunion of the university choir we both sang in at different times when the conductor thereof retired. I had a nursing babe and could not leave him at home, so brought him along and Flor’s parents, for the reunion was in her home town, babysat while she and I attended the festivities. The absurd conversation of a couple of twenty-somethings in the seat opposite us, about who did what at a party and who flirted with whom and so on, prompted us to have our own equally absurd conversation, where we “dahlinged” each other and talked about wintering on the Riviera in our chateaux.

Vlad got cervical cancer and eventually died, as one does. I am ambivalent about our relationship. She claimed to be my friend on so many occasions, and then did mean things which made me wonder how exactly we were friends. Before either she or the Duchess was diagnosed with cancer, newcomers to the academic neighbourhood started driving wedges to facilitate their social climb. They successfully estranged me and Vlad from Flor. But when Flor was diagnosed with breast cancer, 20 years ago, when I felt I should be there for my friend, her treatments kept me at bay. She remained cloistered to prevent getting sick due to a compromised immune system, and I left the ball in her court, that she should let me know when it was a good time to get together. She never picked up the ball. Vlad, on the other hand, took the ball by the horns and returned play. I asked her once, when we were frolicking in her swimming pool on a very hot day, why it was that Flor let her in and not me. Her answer, which I still count as possibly the worst answer ever, was that Flor needed her because she was a Christian, and I was not. As though the fact that I didn’t believe in עולם הבא meant I was not qualified to be a friend in Flor’s time of need. I can’t believe I stayed friends with Vlad right to the end.

But she got hers soon enough. In fact, the Duchess played the organ at her funeral.

Yesterday Hubby got a note from the Duke that his wife had been admitted to a palliative care centre. Six weeks ago she had voluntarily gone off the chemo because it was no longer helping, and in fact the side effects were making her sicker than the cancer. She soldiered on, still able to go up and down stairs unaided, until three weeks ago when she just couldn’t get out of bed. Their doctor arranged her admission and, luckily, there was a room available. We went to see her today, stopping on the way to pick up some flowers and a blank card which I wrote in on the way to the hospice. Her husband and son were there, as well as a long-time family friend. The Duchess herself was in an almost comatose state, having been given relaxing medication to keep her from coughing. She is so very very frail. She was probably unaware that we were even there, although her husband said that she does have moments of wakefulness and he would take that opportunity to tell her we had been and read her the card.

Today I found out she had been stage four for the last nine years. Usually a cancer patient has a year to live at that point. She beat the odds and made it almost a decade. I am so very sad. I have all the feels tonight. Here’s what I wrote in the card:

Dear Duchess:

You and the Duke have been our oldest friends since we moved to the Townships. We raised our kids together, celebrated our anniversary together. We've made music, rejoiced and mourned together. Now it comes time for you to continue the journey by yourself. Our love has been with you every step of the way and will continue to follow wherever you are headed. Bon voyage, friend.

With all our love,
The Contessa and Earl