Monthly Archives: June 2015

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Lately I have been thinking about death, The recent deaths of a relative and the son of a co-worker who was only in his early thirties have probably brought this on. The death of any young person is very hard to understand. There is so much left unsaid and undone .My cousin’s husband died last fall. He was eighty and had lived a very full life. His funeral was full of children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. The difference in wakes was more than age. There was a different mood. The only thing they had in common was death.

My grandfather died in October 1950 when I was five years old. There was a three-day Irish wake at a funeral home. My cousin and I were brought in for two of the nights. My cousin has memories of us wandering thru the funeral home. I just remember it being very warm. After the funeral my grandmother went into a perpetual state of mourning. She always wanted my mother or one of her other children to take her to the cemetery. She lived with us off and on until her death eleven years later. She often wore black or dark clothes when she went out and would pray at least two rosaries a day for my grandfather until she herself died.

Another clear memory I have is when I was in grade school and the father of a classmate died. We all went to the funeral mass. The wife of the man who had died began screaming and threw herself on the casket. I remember that this frightened me because I had never seen this type of emotional response. When I think of it now I realize that the man who died was probably a young man who left this poor woman alone with a very young family. No wonder she was so upset.

Death is going to happen. Nobody knows when and most of us dont want to think about it.. Whenever I had a suicidal patient I would work hard to have them think of the others in their life. I would try and get some type of contract with them so they wouldn’t do it. . This is standard practice, but if someone is really serious, it is very hard to stop. There was a young man in the hospital that hung himself with his own pajamas. My wife told me a story about a patient at Rush who killed himself with his hospital bed, , Then there are the sudden unexpected deaths from accidents/heart attacks/aneurisms, and whatever. These are usually very hard on the family because there is no real closure. It is most hard when there are many ambivalent feelings about the person who died.

There was a woman who was in a terrible marriage with long history of verbal and physical abuse towards her and possible sexual abuse towards her daughter. She had finally decided after almost fifty years of marriage to divorce. On the day she was going to tell her husband, he died while driving in a car with her and two of their friends. The friends and the woman suffered minor injuries, but the husband had a major heart attack and died on the scene. This woman who had bemoaned her fate for years was now not sure how to behave. The marriage was over, just not the way she wanted.

Another man told his wife in my office- “One of us is going to die and then the survivor will finally have a chance to be happy”. He ended up drinking himself to death, but she had developed Parkinson’s and is now in a nursing home. I doubt if she is happy.

Later this summer I will be 70 years old. I can’t even begin to accept that. My denial system is extremely strong and every time I am confronted with the reality of my age , I turn the music up louder. I like it when people say, “I can’t believe it—you don’t look that old!” However the reality is I am. I wonder what my wake will be like. I told my wife jokingly many years ago that I wanted a Rolling Stones song played as they were carrying me out. Now I am not so sure. Perhaps some bagpipers? I can picture people coming up to my casket and saying “Doesn’t he look good?? They did a great job on him!!” The thing about any wake or funeral is that it is a reminder of mortality—and that is still something I am working on.

We recently spent a week in Door County Wisconsin. I am an early riser and would usually go for a morning swim. One morning after the swim, I went for a walk with a cup of coffee and came upon two deer. They were only a few feet from me. They looked at me and then continued to graze until they slowly walked away. It was a moment of wonder. These moments are few and far between, but they still exist and continue to make me glad to be alive. Maybe I need to focus more on the wonder of now and not so much on the end. There is still a lot to see.

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I was raised a Roman Catholic and that really has influenced much of my life. Thoughts of right and wrong don’t just appear in a humanistic form in my head. I think the good nuns and priests that have taught me over the years are still there whispering in my ears. I do have my own doubts about the Church and right now I am probably still a cafeteria Catholic in that I can take most of their teachings, but let some of the others go.

I think I am writing this because of some thoughts about our new pastor. He is somewhat more conservative and formal than the previous pastor. He reminds me of some negative contacts with religious that I have had over the years. Due to this I am thinking of joining a new parish. He probably is a very good man, but my own stuff is getting in the way.

To understand this you really would have had to grow up in the 1940s and 1950s. My wife doesn’t understand some of this. I remember being taught by nuns all thru grade school and priests all thru high school. We looked down on the kids that went to public schools. We used to classify kids as Catholic or Public. I remember the “Marian Year” in Chicago and tens of thousands of people marching to Soldiers Field. I remember in grade school how the statue of Mary would be passed from house to house so families of the school children could say the rosary. I remember how priests were treated as royalty and their words as almost commands. Divorce was unheard of and birth control was never talked about. My mother was once criticized for only having three children when families with ten or more were praised.

This whole thing begins to make me think about the nature of power. In my childhood and adolescence the clergy and religious were the ultimate rulers of right and wrong. There was even a Legion of Decency that listed what movies a good Catholic could watch. The Church infiltrated every area of life.

Things are obviously somewhat different now. Divorce is part of the norm in the 21^st century and families are more complex than ever. Birth control is never talked about because it is assumed that every couple practices it. I am writing this about two weeks after Ireland passed a law making same sex marriage legal. This was totally against what the Church wanted. People who were interviewed about this basically said that the Irish had grown disillusioned with the Church and were not listening to them as they had in the past. The scandal of clergy abuse has turned many away.

Pedestals are difficult to stand on. It’s very easy to fall off and very difficult to get back on. Right now there is also an ongoing scandal with a former Speaker of the House of Representatives. I think it was Warren Buffet who said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it”. The Church has lost much of it’s splendor because of the scandals and also because the world has changed. The clergy used to be the most highly educated members of the community. This is no certainly no longer true. It was easy to do what “Father, Sister says” because of what they represented, but now that has been tainted. Perhaps that is not all bad.

As a therapist I often had to deal with the tendency of my patients to put me on a pedestal. I would continually try and climb down because I really didn’t want to be put in that position. I never wanted to make decisions about other people’s lives. That is up to them. I think that one of the goals of all therapy is to help people take responsibility for their own lives. It may seem easier to have someone else take over, but that is usually the way to disaster.

One therapist used to tell a story that he felt like someone on a hill watching two trains rushing toward each other. He would jump and shout and wave his arms, but it was up to the trains to stop. He couldn’t make them. This again brings up the difficulty in letting go and trusting people to make their own choices. Sometime this is easier said than done. I am still struggling with this and when I have someone telling me what to do, I have a very difficult time. I can respect what the Church is saying, but I still have to make up my own mind. I have to work on doing this without being a rebellious teenager or a stubborn child. I still feel the need for what the Church offers. I am still working on how to accept it.