Coming of Age and Current Events

“So, where’s your brother?”, demanded several of my little playmates all shouting at once.

Proudly I responded, “My brother DeDe is in Korea.” 

I was about 4 years of age when American armed forces were leading a United Nations coalition in a “police action” on the Korean peninsula.  I, then as now, was an only child.  But, I wanted to have an older brother.  So I made him up.  And I explained his obvious absense to anyone by saying he was “in Korea”. 

Now, one would think I was quite sensitive to current events at such a tender age. However, rest assured I had no idea about “Korea” other than it seemed something far enough away that inquiring minds were well satisfied and pestered me no more about where he was.  A maturity of mind makes a difference to an ability to perceive what is happening in space way outside one’s immediate experiences.  And, at the age, I was not yet mature enough to have grasped the real meaning of “Korea.”

I bring this up on the occasion of a conversation with a colleague which brought together the subjects of mourning and of Chris Mathew’s book, Jack Kennedy:  Elusive Hero.

To my scholarly associate I had voiced in our conversation a wrong-headed assessment of JFK’s political and governing policy and a hard-hearted feeling toward the first Irish-American Catholic elected President of the United States. 

He said I was out-right wrong and unsympathetic in saying I thought this President someone who was a man with great skill and insight, but captured by a time, a cold warrior well satisfied with exploiting the fear of Communism still pretty raw then for personal political gain and with further Americanizing the counter-insurgency in Viet Nam, with fully understanding the history of discrimination of groups in the US, especially Irish and Catholic, yet, fully understanding the need to appease those forces in the American South so he could get his legislative agenda enacted.

He said I had a stone for a heart when I asserted:  There seems to me, for those who then needed the hope of JFK, a continued deep need to believe in the promise he was thought to embody. Indeed, the sad events in Dallas, I continued, cut down the prospect of being disillusioned, as it appears always is the case when the real politique of American governing hits the image.

Well, we can argue policy another time, for I am willing to accept that I might be wrong, although I sense not.  What was striking to me was my scholarly associates umbrage over what he construed as my feelings toward this President, as he assumed I, as an American Catholic of Irish decent, which I proudly say I am, brought up through the ethnic-religious piety of the 1950’s, which I surely was, should be as identity bound with our beloved JFK as Irish Catholics were then and remain today.  But truth be told, for me, I had as much associative correspondence between this man and me as I've had with other presidential figures of the days of my young youth, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, that is, none at all.  As the word “Korea” had only a vague meaning of a place far away, so too these names held a vagueness:  They were this thing called “President”, whatever that meant.  Neither the title President nor the identities holding the individual human names did I feel correspond to who I felt, or thought, I was or wanted to be when I was the ages they were running for or actually holding the office of President.

As I explained, between 1960 and 1963 my world was a kid's world, a sheltered existence in late grammar school and very early high school. My Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, neighborhood had its occasional violence, but it was far removed from my experience. The folks on my block-I was third generation on that particular block-were blue collar, but were all working and emotionally, and financially, stable. I got into the usual school yard scraps, you know, the name calling, the pushing-shoving and the rare fist to stomach or mouth. I was an average student: I had the smarts to overachieve, but not the interest in so doing, nor did I have the cause to rebel either.  During that time my world was occupied with attracting girls, trying to be serious about my homework, which more often I wasn’t, and engaging in sports with friends-those whose fists usually found my mouth and stomach.  I had yet to discover drugs, but rock’n’roll was key-I had the beginnings of one heck of a 45 rpm collection.  Oh, and I loved to dance.  In fact,  my partner and I came close to wining the Twist contest in our eighth grade graduation dance.

Yes, I know exactly where I was when I heard the dreadful news:  coming from my Manhattan high school walking from the

69^th St.

subway station to my home on

72^nd St.

As I came along Fourth Avenue walking closer to Ovington Avenue, I kept hearing hushed voices in small crowds talking about the death of the President, some crying, most just standing in shocked silence.  Cars continued to move along the avenue and the side-streets, but I was one of the only ones moving on the sidewalks.  But the meaning of it all truly escaped me as I had no personal connection to either the political office called President or to the person everyone so affectionately called "JFK".  I vaguely understood it as a piece of "History" but, again a history removed from personal experience as almost all of history in books are so removed.

As I had only a vague notion of History with his death, I was even more clueless over the events in his Presidential life.  So, the Bay of Pigs didn't register and in the same way didn't it register when the world first learned about the Soviet missiles in Cuba, about the embargo, about when it come toe to toe and the Soviet’s blinked taking the missiles away.  I was a sheltered kid and oblivious to all these things.

Since coming of age, emotionally, intellectually and politically, I haven't studied JFK as there was, is, no affinity either drawing me to the man or to his role in the civic events of his time. It may be interesting to note that when I began to look at the role of the Irish in American politics during my “Irish period”-from Bloody Sunday through the second Hunger Strike to the Good Friday Peace Accords-I felt a kinship to the images of James Michael Curley of Boston and Al Smith of my home state of New York and not to the remembrance of JFK.

To be honest, my American presidential education began in earnest with LBJ as I came to maturity after he committed the country to Viet Nam  as JFK had not.  I was coming up to draft age under LBJ’s direction of the War; so, I learned much from necessity at that point. Ten years after the Paris Peace Accords were signed, I undertook a study of Viet Nam concentrating from the period of 1965 onward, only noting JFK's contribution to how we got so much involved, as I did not have a strong attraction to a time before my personal concern.
 
I also was coming of age when Martin Luther King, Jr., was stirring crowds. But, it was only when he was killed did I hear and read his "I have a Dream" Speech and it was only at that time was I aware enough of what was going down to understand its meaning within the broader social context of slavery, Jim Crow and institutional discrimination.
 
No, it isn't that I am hard-hearted, I said to my friend, it is just that coming of age brings with it affinities for those things which register, which resonate with an awareness of the world outside of self.  And, for me such sensitivity was not present until I was two years a collegian.

My Mother, Me and Depression

(Author's Note:  My mother died in the late afternoon on May 9, 2011, after years of decline and a short illness.  The absence from this blog since the last entries in June, 2011, is entirely due to my reaction to her passing.  I am slowing gaining an emotional balance sufficient for me to move forward.  Still, the closeness of our relationship and of my intimate care-giving in her last months placed burdens in me I had not anticipated.  I knew the greiving process would be difficult, but I had no idea how hard had turned out to be for me.  With this new post I am starting anew and I am hopeful I can regularly report my thinking to all who wish to read it.  Thank you.)

“Hey, we’ve moving to North Texas”, my wife, Karen, exclaimed. 

“Well,” I replied, “I can be depressed anywhere, and North Texas is as good as any to be depressed.”

And it was true:  I was as depressed in our little city of Denton as I was when we lived in Brooklyn and in the lovely hamlet of Ashley Falls, MA, from which we were removed to Denton.

But you know, these places have nothing on being in the house, being in the bedroom, where my mother died, where I, with help, rolled her over from side to side to clean and to dress her, to make and remake her bed and to try to comfort her to her last breaths.

My father died in a hospital and my mother got a call from there letting us know of the event.  That is bad, but I still had my mother.  And yes, I still have my wife and our son, but that’s different.

I’ve wondered over the years if my mother went before my father if the father-son bond would be as tight and as deeply seated as  mother-son, after all while I am definitely a product of my father, but it is from the mother we humans are born, are borne.

Anyway, I’ve stuffed down the loss, repressing most conscious thinking, but at times the hurt hits releasing sad remembrances.  Of late I am becoming ever-more teary-eyed as I lay in her room, on my bed, on the same side of the bed as she, staring up in the same visual aspect of the ceiling as she, trying to fall asleep quickly, but failing.  And in failing I am remembering her last days, her last moments:

I see her lying in the bed in the hospital, we knowing her health is weakening, and she still self-aware, not yet engulfed in dementia, full of hope she will be going home the next day to recover and to live to see beyond her 95^th birthday.  The hospital care team understands she is in her last days and makes arrangements for Hospice services.  The physician Director of the in-patient Hospice sees my mother letting her know who he is, his responsibilities in the hospital and the plans being arranged for my mother.  My mother, a nurse of long standing, understands the meaning of all this and it puts her into a deep, deep depression from which, I believe, she did not recover, and which, while she fought it, it hasten the end.  She was not yet ready to die!  We were not ready to let her go!

I see our pastor praying over my mother.  Karen had called the rectory early in the morning as see could see my mother could not last much longer.  By now her dementia was full.  She had stopped eating for nearly three weeks, stopped taking water for a week.  The Monsignor read from his book, he and I prayed together.  Then he said, “Lord, I commend the soul of our Frances to your care”.  As soon as he finished “care”, my mother began her dying breaths.  Hospice lets folks know the stages of dying and the very last is what they describe as breathing like a fish out of water.  I’d seen this before several times and I knew what it looked like and what it meant.  The breathing slowly shallowed, retaining the fish out of water rhythm…a wispy inhale, a wispy exhale…a nearly invisible inhale, an equally invisible exhale, then nothing, her face whitened, her partially opened eyes starring but not seeing…

I was alone with my mother when she died, although Karen had just parked the car arriving from work and my son had gone out to meet to let her know what was happening. 

It seems to me the Western way of dying is with others:  Dying should never be undertaken by oneself.  I suspect that is one of the reasons suicide is such a trouble to our society as the act by its very nature is alone.  The “ideal” death is with family and friends.  So, at least with my mother she had me.  But, you know, witnessing her last moments by myself has placed a psychic burden in me I had not anticipated.  My Karen can empathize and comfort which she does, but the second to second moments of the experience of the death can never be shared in the same way when others are not present to see them.  And here, I think, is the genius of the Western Ideal, in that the living, who must move on with their individual lives, can deeply share a comfort from feeling the presence of others at the moments of death, something of which a lonely son cannot partake.