orphan bear and chapter one
Hey All,
I have more bear stories to tell you, but it's 3:10 in the morning and I need to turn off my lights.
I'll say one thing. The two year old black bear is certainly the bear whose mother died or whose mother left him in the tree outside my living room. He was pretty close the other day and I got a really good look at his face head on, and I recognized his face. He's got a smaller head than some, and a very foxy face. There's a brown bear who is a little bigger, who may or may not be his brother who was also in the tree. I haven't seen his brother since 18 months ago in the fall, and I've always said I hoped he just went somewhere else, but my always unspoken fear had been that he had died. I know the black one is the one from two years ago, but don't know about the brown one. I'll let you know when i get a better look.
below is chapter one, again.
Thank you,
Derrick
Chapter 1: Change
Sometimes, transformations announce themselves with the clarity of the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth, but often their significance only becomes obvious as what has already been set in motion reveals itself stage by stage.
The call came at three in the afternoon.
“Can you come help with my chores?” my mom asked. “I’m in a lot of pain.”
This in itself was an extraordinary request. She was at 85 the same sturdy and stoic Nebraska farm girl she’d been from the beginning, and most of my “taking care of her” as she got older had consisted of watching movies and baseball games with her, climbing on her roof once a year to clean out the gutters, using wheelbarrows to carry her annual purchase of two cords of firewood into the garage, then stack it; then carrying in an armload or two every day during the winter (to be honest she did about half of this till she was 82 or 83), and, if I happened to drive into town, stopping at a restaurant to pick us both up some dinner.
I hurried over, asked if she wanted me to take her to the emergency room. She said no. I fed her dogs, brought in some wood, put some lengths in the stove, asked if she wanted something to eat.
She said no. The pain, she said matter of factly, was the worst she’d ever experienced.
I knew this meant worse than childbirth; worse than the broken neck, arm, and ribs she’d suffered in a car wreck; worse than the beatings and rapes she’d received from my father; worse than the sciatica she’d had a few years previous.
I asked again if she wanted to go to the emergency room. She said no.
Part of her refusal had to do with the hope she’d get better on her own, and part of it had to do with being scared of the local hospital’s reputation: its real name is Sutter Coast, but even some of the local doctors call it Slaughter Coast.
With no decrease in pain as afternoon turned to evening, then evening to night, night to midnight, her calculations changed, and she let me take her to the emergency room.
#
Much of why I was unprepared for my mother’s death is that she was the first human I knew intimately with whom I went through this process. I’d sat with plenty of nonhuman friends through their deaths, and to varying degrees I’d known a fair number of humans who had died: my grandmother, but I didn’t know her so well as my mother; my father with whom I hadn’t spoken in decades; a basketball buddy when I was twenty who died in a car wreck; one of my best friends in college whom I learned by searching the internet decades later had died of cancer. But I’d gone through that process with no one. In none of these cases was I even in the state when the person died.
When you look across all human existence, only recently is it reasonably possible for someone to reach his late fifties before intimately encountering a human death. We evolved in groups of 60 to 120, and even long after leaving our hunter-gatherer past most of us lived in villages of roughly that size: nearly all humans have lived in either mobile or stationary small groups.
To make the math easy, let’s say there are 120 in the group, and the average adult lives to be sixty. I know we’ve all been told that in prior times life expectancy was 25 to 40 years, but that’s statistical sleight of hand, in that, like many other creatures, humans in their natural state have fairly high mortality among infants and young children, but if you make it through childhood, and if you don’t die giving birth, you’re probably going to live a long time. Example: say you have a sample size of ten, two of whom die at birth, one at three, one at five, one at 25, and the other five live to be 73, your average lifespan is still only 40.
When you control for infant mortality on one hand and antibiotics on the other, and exclude deaths from, until recently, appalling waste disposal in cities, all of our technology has only increased life expectancy a few years for those who make adulthood and don’t die in childbirth.
The point is that for nearly all of our existence, if there were 120 people in your village, and the average lifespan was 60 (not including children who died), by the time a person reached the age I was when my mother died, that person would probably have witnessed more than 120 adult deaths.
And of course that many people still die around us, it’s just we don’t have relationships with most of them, or participate in any meaningful way in the leadups to their deaths or the deaths themselves. All I know in my neighborhood is that at some point I stopped seeing the Watsons at the community mailbox, and sometime later their house went up for sale. The same happened more recently with the Wangs. And then there was that old woman who lived alone in the yellow house, and then that other old woman who died and her crack addict son moved in and suddenly there were people showing up at his house at all times day and night, going inside, then leaving five minutes later.
And I’m certain the same is true the other way. “It’s been a few years since I’ve seen old lady Jensen or Johnson or whatever at the mail boxes.”
“Musta died.”
One person’s tragedy is another person’s offhand summation.
I didn’t know any of these people and they didn’t know me. I just lived near them.
#
Whether or not we do it consciously, most of us most of the time make decisions based on marginal return/marginal cost calculations. I’m doing one right now: am I hungry enough that the pleasure I receive from eating a brownie from the kitchen will be greater than the trouble of getting off the couch and walking in there? And then of course there’s the question of what the sugar in the brownie will do to my A1C, and to my (ever-so-slightly) expanding waistline.
Spoiler: I ate the brownie. Two of them in fact.
We make them regarding relationships. Dear Abby said the most basic question about relationships is, “Are you better in than out?” Do the positive aspects of being in a specific relationship outweigh the costs?
We make them regarding jobs: does the emotional and financial compensation outweigh the time and energy I devote to this job? My first degree was in physics and engineering, and I would have been compensated well financially, but I didn’t enjoy it. Instead I became a writer, about which it is truly said, “Writing is a terrible way to make a living, and a great way to make a life.” I wasn’t aware I was making this marginal return/marginal cost calculation when I quit science and engineering, but I was.
Mortality often enters these equations, and not just in the fact that death cap mushrooms are reportedly delicious: I don’t think the joy brought by eating one would outweigh the fact that I would die a horrible death within the next couple of days.
I’ll just have another brownie.
In the face of Hurricane Katrina, a primary deciding factor for those in New Orleans who remained in their homes—as opposed to going to a shelter—was age. This makes sense. We have less energy as we age, so anything we do takes a greater percentage of what we’ve got. When I was a teenager my friends and I would buck ton after ton of hay bales, take a fifteen-tacos-apiece break, then go play basketball. In my early fifties I’d haul ten wheelbarrow loads of firewood into my mom’s garage and be too pooped to peep. Now in my early sixties I have to do a cost/benefit analysis before I can be bothered to get off the couch to go get a brownie. (Spoiler: I ended up bringing in the whole container.)
But more importantly the older people didn’t go to the shelter because of mostly unconscious marginal return/marginal cost calculations based on how much longer they had to live. If you anticipate living a long time afterwards, staying a few weeks or months in various shelters is a lesser or greater inconvenience, but if you have only a few months left anyway, do you want to spend a significant chunk of that living with strangers in refugee conditions?
Say you had perfect information, and you knew you were going to die in three weeks, and you had a choice of spending those three weeks at home before a tree crashes into your beloved home and crushes you, or three weeks crammed into a refugee camp with strangers, which would you choose? But if you’re twenty-two, with lots of energy and the anticipation of living another 60 years, you might see this as an unpleasant adventure you’ll be able to recount for decades with enough frequency that eventually at the mention of any towns starting with “New” or any weather events starting with “K,” all of your younger relatives flee the room.
I realized in my fifties that this same marginal return/marginal cost reasoning incorporating my mortality had since my thirties affected even something as seemingly non-related as my reading decisions. In my twenties and early thirties I read—slogged through—a lot of difficult philosophy and literature. This was developmentally appropriate, because I was trying to understand life and my role in it (and frankly I was more disappointed in most philosophers than I was in the people I interviewed at the nursing homes: the philosophers understood far less than the average person about life, and communicated what they did understand far less clearly). These days I’m more like my mom and grandmother, and mainly read histories, mysteries, and thrillers, and now that I think about it, sit on the couch and eat chocolate, in the form of brownies. I realized several years ago that in my twenties I was willing to read abstruse books in the increasingly vain hope that they would more resemble the synonym for abstruse “profound” rather than the synonym “obscure,” because if I gained something from the book, I’d be able to use it for the next fifty years (as I’ve done with, say, Martin Buber’s I and Thou). But not only has the disappointment of reading too many philosophers who basically had their heads up their asses (I’m looking at you, Foucault, and you, too, DeLeuze, although in Foucault’s case his head up his own ass is the secondary problem; a far more serious one is his own dick up little boy’s asses), but even if I do find a good one, these days I’ll only be able to use what I gain for a couple more decades. I’ll at least stick with something I know I’ll enjoy.
Such is how we make decisions daily, and such is how my mother finally decided to go to the emergency room.
#
Meanwhile, my brother and his family had been making calculations of their own, primarily having to do with my mother’s will.
There’s a sense in which I don’t want to write about family dysfunction, or relatives behaving badly. I’ve never fully agreed with Tolstoy’s famous line about how all happy families are the same, but all unhappy families are different in their own ways. It has long seemed to me that much family strife and dysfunction follow an endlessly tedious sameness. Sure, the details are often unique as well as fascinatingly tacky, but the dysfunction often seems to almost follow a script.
And I hesitate to air dirty laundry in public. I know that sounds odd coming from someone who has written many books about my father’s abuse of my family: breaking my sister’s arm, giving my brother epilepsy from blows to the head, raping my mother, my sister, and me. But I see a difference between exposing and analyzing the effects of my father’s abuse on my family as well as exploring what his behavior says about society in general; and writing about tawdry familial conduct.
Who would find that interesting?
Well, I realized, almost everyone.
I remember sitting in the back of a taxicab with a now-long-ex-girlfriend. She was mad at me, wanted to argue. I kept hissing that we could talk when we got out of the cab. She ignored my hissing and kept laying out her side of the argument.
The taxi driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror were both why I didn’t want to have that conversation then, and why I’m going to talk about family dysfunction now. His eyes were saying, “Favorite fare of the night.” When his shift was over he was going to try to remember as much of the conversation as possible, and relay it to his wife. He’d say, “And then she said. . . .”
His wife would laugh and ask how I responded.
He would mimic my hiss, and they’d both laugh and laugh.
Gossip comes from Godsib, short for godsibling, like godmother or godson. It means close friends—godsiblings—who can and do talk about anything, including—especially including—what we now call gossip.
We all enjoy hearing dramatic stories, probably including, all the way back to ancient times, stories about one romantic partner wanting to fight in public and the other hissing, “We’ll talk when we get out of the chariot.” We’ve probably also long enjoyed hearing stories about how poorly other people’s siblings acted when their parents died. Lord knows there are enough of those in the Bible. These stories make up a significant portion of almost any mythology you care to mention. And let’s not get started on the popularity of soap operas.
At least my family wasn’t royalty, and no one chopped off anyone’s head.
I also realized it would be dishonest to present an account of any beloved elder dying that didn’t include conniving, maneuvering, ignoring the wishes of the dying, avoiding, and every other form of bad behavior. Years ago I saw a cartoon of four siblings at a table, with one saying to the others, “Mom’s dying. Let’s assign tasks. Who’s going to do all the work? Who’s going to disappear? Who’s going to make it all about them? And who’s going to steal everything?”