A Time for Compassion

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Like the rest of the world, I awoke to the news this week that the tragic crash of the Germanwings flight 9252 was due to a deliberate act of the co-pilot, and my heart sunk.   My immediate thoughts were for the families of everyone on board - there would be so many questions, so much pain.  All these beautiful, innocent lives lost in a horrific and random act, how incredibly unfair and what an enormous trauma for their loved ones to have to make sense of. 

Among those lost, were every day people including students, teachers, families, opera singers, tourists, university graduates, babies, journalists, business professionals and newlyweds. People with so much to live for, people who will be greatly missed. So many families who will never be the same again, so much grief. 

However my heartbreak was not only due to my sympathy for those whose lives had been lost but also because I knew I would have to brace myself for the inevitable media circus of assumptions and speculation on what lead this man to this catastrophic act. 

This is a difficult topic to write about because it ignites a range of complex and personal emotions, all of which are valid, and there is potential to offend or cause hurt to those who have been affected by similar events. There will be readers whose loved ones were taken due to the actions of others.  And there will be readers whose loved ones, for various reasons, caused others to pass with them.  So I’d like to ask you to join me in making this a safe place for anyone who might feel personally affected by this topic.

I lost my husband to mental illness, he was not of a rational or sound mind when he took his life.  He couldn't see the devastation his death would leave behind and the ongoing pain and trauma he would inflict on those of us who love him.  This is because he had a disease which robbed him of his mental capacity, logic and reasoning.  I have had to come to understand and accept this, however part of my challenge is having to face comments from people who are ignorant about mental health and use words like 'selfish' and 'weak' when speaking about suicide.  

I don’t have the added burden of other lives being lost due to his actions and couldn't pretend to imagine how difficult that would be. So my heart also aches for the family of the co-pilot who have lost a son and are now left to both try and make sense of how he came to be in such a dark place and carry the weight of the hatred and anger being directed at him.  

Please let me be clear here, I am in no way defending or excusing the actions of anyone who takes another  life. This is never ok and there is never a justification for a murder/suicide.  More often than not these horrific incidents are carried out by people who aren't just mentally unstable, but who are trying to consciously cause pain, instil terror or control others due to reasons such as religious extremism or racial hatred. 

Most of us will never know what drives someone to carry out an act such as this. However the fight to raise awareness and reduce the stigma around suicide takes a few giant steps back when public conversation jumps to the assumption that this person was evil and fails to acknowledge that these tragedies are caused by a vast range of reasons, including someone being mentally ill and not accessing the help they need.  

This doesn't excuse or justify their actions - it doesn't make it any less painful for the families left behind. But as a society that is trying to make sense of such events and identify how they could be prevented in the future, it is important to remember there could have been many different causes. 

It's devastating news and, as humans, it’s natural for us to talk about these events in a bid to make sense of them.  So of course people are going to talk about it... but I feel my face burning and my heart sinking, as words get bandied around like ‘selfish’, ‘evil’ and ‘cold-blooded killer’.  The water-cooler gossips in my office and media reports are always quick to jump to the most dramatic speculation but there is never a call to wait with open-minds and compassion, until further facts are known.  

A colleague of mine lost her good friend a few years ago when she took her life, and her daughters, in a very public way that caused shock in our community.  This woman had been battling severe depression and it is her loved ones' opinion that her actions were driven by her belief that she couldn't go on any longer and would be sparing her daughter from the grief and shame that would be associated with her mother's death.

Speculative, nasty and inflammatory comments in the media about the incident added so much extra pain to their grief. In no way is it logical or 'right' but they could never consider her to be a hateful or violent person or a bad mother and their grief was compounded with the despair that she would always, in the eyes of the public, be remembered this way.

When something like this occurs we have the mammoth task of needing to process what has happened and find some peace in a place where there is no logic.  This is not something that our brains are wired to do.  We have an instinctive need to pigeon hole or diagnose or label a situation in order to file it away in our sub-conscious and lay it to rest.  When this is not possible, when the cause is either quite complex or beyond our realm of every-day comprehension, what are we to do? 

My hope is that when people hear about these events in the news and find themselves trying to understand what caused them, they come from a place of compassion rather than judgement.  This man was not well.  His family are grieving his loss as well as coming to terms with the enormity of his actions. The one thing they will know for sure is that their son was suffering so badly that nothing made sense, including his reasoning for taking the life of another.  

So I am choosing not to quickly judge something I don't and could never understand.

Shielding Myself

I've been attempting to shield myself from the recent tragedies. I already avoid the news completely. If it weren't for Facebook and Saturday Night Live, I'd never know what was going on. And that's a choice. I just happened to hear about the bombings in Boston because I accidentally heard the radio for a few minutes shortly after it all happened.

On one hand I feel guilty about this. It's a head-in-the sand attitude. I don't want to know and that makes me a bit...selfish, I guess? Uncaring? The other part of me is protective of my selfishness. I've reached a limit for the sadness my heart can contain. Or maybe it just affects me more now so I can't tolerate it like I used to.

Every bit of suffering I hear about weighs so heavily. I can't hear about a tragedy without thinking of those left behind. I can't even see an ambulance shriek by without feeling my knees go weak, imagining the possible horror that people are experiencing right that moment.

Before Dave died, I didn't quite think that way. I had already experienced my share of death and I logically knew that when someone died, people were left behind to grieve, but now I know intimately what that is like and I imagine those souls simultaneously feeling a lot like I did in the hours, days and weeks after Dave died. I know what it's like to survive the worst that can happen.

I relive and I mourn again. I also feel so helpless. Though I can donate money and time to help somehow, what I can't do is make the years and years of pain go away for those who've lost their love and their lives as they knew them. That's a road we all essentially have to travel alone. And that makes me crazy.

So I avoid the news, the truth. I simply can't take it. Even the good parts, the parts about good outweighing evil, the stories of the way the tragedy brought people together, the parts about healing. They only make it marginally easier to hear. I'm done with misery. I've had enough of my own and everyone else's. I want some time to feel free of the weight of sadness. I want things to be easy.
 
I want to pretend, just for a few days in a row, that everything is okay. Everywhere. It's completely unrealistic, but it's true. I want to be in denial.

So much so, that I've been filling my brain with the exact opposite of harsh reality. I've been watching The Pioneer Woman cooking show on Food Network. The Pioneer Woman is Ree Drummand, who started out as a food blogger. Eventually, she got this gig with Food Network. She and her husband and four kids live in rural Oklahoma on a cattle ranch with dogs, cats and extended family. The show is, of course, a sparkly, pretty, happy version of the truth, not real life. It's an image, polished up and molded for TV, as all shows are.

But it's how I want to pretend life really works right now, instead of families torn apart, missing their loved ones and trying to understand the unfathomable.

In the alternate reality of The Pioneer Woman, both parents are well and happy, the kids are healthy  and rosy-cheeked, there's always home cooking, love and laughs and friends and family gathering around. Even both sets of grandparents are alive.  It's a little pocket of life created by a TV network, safe from all harm in the bubble of life we see after editing.

It both soothes and irritates me and I can't stop watching it.
I want to move in.
I want to cook for my family, like Ree does.
I want to do all the boring domestic things that I imagine a family would do.
And then I'm reminded of a couple of things before I tumble down the dark tunnel of "woe is me".

First, everyone has sorrows and problems and pain, even Ree. We just can't always see them and none of us are immune. To live is to feel pain. It's doing me no good to compare what I have with what others have. There will always be someone worse off than me.

And second, it's the loss I've experienced that has allowed me to appreciate what I do have so much more. And I hope that if I'm lucky enough to have a family of my own to cook for, I'll be less likely to take it for granted. I will hold my loved ones closer and hug them more often.

Or, maybe I'll be lucky enough one day to even get to the point where cooking for my family becomes mundane. Where I have moments when I think "I'd kill to have some alone time!" or "I have to cook for you AGAIN?!" I think I'd even appreciate that. Or at least I'd appreciate the chance to feel that way.

Sometimes, people who have intact families make me want to sit them down and tell them how lucky they are. Regardless of how hard it is to parent, to be married, to be a sister, a mother, a wife, a father, a daughter, a son, a brother. Regardless of how mundane their lives feel sometimes. I want to tell them to imagine a time when those loved ones no longer exist and how much they'd wish they had all that mundane, annoying, day-to-day domestic drudgery back. How much they'd miss every second of it.

If these horrific tragedies have to happen to us, I hope they at least remind us of what we have to be grateful for. I hope it reminds us all to tell our people how much they're loved, and how they make life worthwhile.

 I hope we take each other for granted a little less often.

Eggshell

 The fridge of an anal compulsive. The magnets match. The edges line up. If you come over and mess it up, I'll wait till you're not looking and make it perfect again.

I've always used control as a way to try to hold things together. Attempting to control my environment, my life, has been a little like keeping all the delicate pieces of a shattered eggshell together. It's so easy to lose focus and allow the pieces to fall apart. And once that happens, who knows how I'll ever be able to fit all those fragments together again!

It's reflected in my physical environment. I like things just so. Living with another human being for as long as I did helped me learn some flexibility with this one, but now that I live alone again, my drive for order and neatness has resurfaced, full force. There is just something about my space getting cluttered and messy that makes me feel out of control. The moment I can get the clutter under control, I feel myself relax. All is right because that which I actually have direct control over is under control.
And wow, how helpful it's been to have everything lined up just perfectly. Obviously, the fact that every drawer is perfectly organized has really made life so easy for me! Wait...life hasn't been so easy. Oh.

It shows itself when I leave my home. I compulsively go over a list in my head that ensures that nothing terrible happens while I'm gone. Stove? Off. Candle? Extinguished. Door? Locked. Sometimes I head back to my door after walking away, to try the lock, just in case I forgot to lock it. I can't fully relax until I've convinced myself that, when the tragedy comes, at least it won't be directly my fault. I imagine that the next terrible tragedy is around the corner, waiting for me. All of this has been really effective in warding off terrible events. Oh, wait. Dave died anyway. Huh.

It reveals itself in my relationships. There is a part of me, always readied to shut down in anticipation of abandonment or rejection. I replay things I've said and done in the company of others and try to pinpoint the behavior of mine that will end up being the final straw for them and cause them to reject me. I give people I really like being with "off ramps" as my good friend has termed it. Off ramps are when you give someone lots of chances to do what you are just waiting for them to do eventually, anyway, which is reject you. It works like this. Instead of saying to someone "You and me. We're spending some time together soon. So there," I am more likely to say "Do you want to hang out? I understand if you're too busy, so it's fine if you can't." There's your off ramp to make it easy for you to say no, because I expect rejection anyway. The lovely part of this one is that I probably come off seeming disinterested when, in reality, I'm so interested that I'm afraid of being rejected. That might not be working so well for me. Hmmm...

So, if these super rational and productive ways of life aren't helping me and in fact are making me a little bit cuckoo, why do I keep doing them? I think I've struck upon the reason. Of course, part of it is that they're ingrained. Everyone knows how hard a habit is to break. But the other reason is that when I can't control something (life), I desperately search for something I can control, and direct my energies to doing so.

Little by little, I'm learning to let go of the death grip I have on my eggshell. I'm watching the pieces fall apart and noticing that the world didn't end when they did. I've watched as people didn't reject me outright (or if they did, I was better off without their influence in my life anyway). I've watched as I jumped into the unknown and uncontrolled world of this new life of mine and I didn't fall flat on my face. I landed relatively gracefully and carried on. Even when the pieces were all over the place, never to be put back together in the same configuration again.

We can't control a damn thing and when we think we can, it's an illusion, anyway. It may feel comforting to control little details, but these rituals don't ward off bad things.

I'll probably always prefer a zen, orderly home. I'll probably always fear rejection. I'll probably always check my stupid lock three times before I leave. But all of that was true of me before tragedy struck and my life as I knew it was completely upended. Lots of help THAT was!

To that end, I will make an effort every damn day to let go of some of the unhelpful control and let the pieces fall where they may. Let love in. Let mess in. Let risk in.

There's something strangely freeing in knowing that the shit will hit the fan no matter what I do, so I might as well loosen up and free up some space in my life to just enjoy the ride as much as possible.

Just don't judge me if I line up the books on my coffee table so their edges are perfectly parallel with the table. It makes me feel better.