Progress report

I think I'm still doing "illness as avoidance." My belly symptoms have mostly cleared, though I'm not sure I'd say the digestive system is operating "normally" yet. I have a follow-up with my gastro-enterologist this afternoon, and perhaps I'll learn something useful. Or perhaps I'll just know which supplements to take daily and which to take whenever I'm "uncomfortable" in either direction.

At least by now we've ruled out the catastrophic diagnoses. I like that.

But in the meantime, I've caught cold. I think this week is the sickest I've been in a few years, fever and chills and sneezing and sniffles and sinus headache and post-nasal drip and coughing -- both the wet kind and the dry, scratchy kind. I think I've finally reached the "getting over it" phase, but it's been a long week.

Things successfully avoided by getting sick this time: going to Sunday services just because that's what I do.

It was interesting to see that the last several times I've been there, I've wandered around feeling that there are a few folks here I want to connect with, though I'd rather do it more deeply than standing chatting over coffee, but an awful lot of this time seems wasted. Sometimes I find the services profoundly moving, often thought-provoking, but sometimes they're just blah. And sometimes even when they're moving or thought-provoking I find myself wondering if that was really a better use of the hour than something I might have done elsewhere.

(Which is a much better question when I've been productively working than when I've been surfing the web or reading the blogosphere or playing Spider Solitaire.)

It was also interesting to see which people e-mailed me with specific requests, along with a comment that they missed me, and which people it didn't seem to matter to. Hmm.

What else have I avoided? Major house de-cluttering project.

Though I have made some inroads on micro-clutter, and I'm pleased with those.

Also, major financial discussions.

Though I have made some progress toward paying things on time, watching out for and reducing impulse spending, etc.

Otherwise it seems that what's being avoided by this illness is mostly the 'Being Present and Aware' aspects of my Life.

Like recognizing my resistance to trying to catch up in a class on Religion and the Law, which I continued to flog myself about until finally I saw that climbing out of a sickbed to go to the law library wasn't going to work. I think I should have recognized sooner some things I have known about myself for a long time:

I love being in class because it keeps me in focus.

I hate playing 'catch-up' with the homework because it feels like giving short shrift to important parts of the process.

I'm in the class in the first place for the feeling of dwell-time with the material. If I wanted to "learn" the same "data" in just a few days I could read a book. The reason I chose class is that the "data" isn't the part I want.

Also I've been avoiding the memoir, and reading over the comments, I can see exactly why. Or at least, one of the 'exactly' reasons.

About a month ago I was writing about January-February 1968, during which, in order:

My brother was in a car accident that would prove fatal.

Less than 36 hours later my first child was born.

Less than two weeks after that my brother died of his injuries, without regaining consciousness.

In her grief, my mother became clingy and possessive -- just at a time in my life when I needed some space to learn how to do motherhood.

My reaction (a deeply reactionary move, right out of my own reactivity and anger) was to move my new family 3000 miles away, which I did in June.

So I'm writing about this in a memoir class, and my first attempt was 5000 words that covered mostly the ground of the last five sentences. People asked the questions you would expect, I received important feedback about places I had summarized where a full scene would have been helpful.

So a couple of weeks ago I was writing some of the scenes to fill in the blanks. I'm pleased with myself -- look at all the detail I can remember about that child's birthing process. I'm surprised at myself -- look how little I remember (at least, so far) about the last night I ever saw my brother alive.

I'm shocked at the amount of emotion that bubbles up just trying to write the scene of that last meeting. I can date it very well ... he and a couple of friends pooled their resources and got into his car for a weekend visit to all three of their homes. They stopped at my parents' house for one night, and dropped the girl off where she was going ... and then the next evening the two boys stopped at my apartment for dinner, and went on to where the other boy's parents lived. The fatal injuries occurred on the way home just a couple of days later. For quite a long time the details of that last dinner were painfully etched in my mind. But just now I was surprised at how hard it was to access them.

I can't, for example, call to mind either the name or face of my brother's passenger, nor recall anything he may have said. I remember what I cooked (I was a very new cook in those days, proud of the few meals I could fix that seemed good enough for 'company'). I can construct realistic-sounding dialog for the kind of banter my brother and I would have engaged in, by I don't actually recall anything we may have talked about. The baby, obviously, who was due any day now. College, obviously, where he had just finished his first semester as a freshman. But what did we say? Who knows?

My brother's 18-year-old face is very clear in my mind, though some of that is the aid of photographs I'm sure. But I can't any longer recall what he smelled like, or how his voice sounded (except for a few phrases from much younger, before he began to acquire the baritone he was working on). I'm distressed to have forgotten these so-important pieces of this important person. Who has been dead 40 years and more.

And I notice that this illness mirrors, fairly precisely, the illness that began the day after his funeral, when I ran a fever of 102 F and was delirious, and only had symptoms of 'the flu' ... for almost two weeks, that time. That time, too, it seemed the illness served to insulate me from my grief.

Is that what it's for now? when all I'm doing is trying to remember that grief?