My Brother Lew Has Cancer

for Lew

My brother Lew has cancer. 

He is diagnosed early in 2011 at sixty-six.   He  has just spent a few weeks on the beach in Florida to get away from the New England winter.  Wonderful trip.  Then, suddenly, after returning to Rhode Island his left leg begins to swell.  What could it be?  A spider bite?  Some weird allergic reaction?  An infection?  A series of doctor visits and scans, from the local hospital to Massachusetts General and then the diagnosis.  Metastatic carcinoma of unknown origin.  It has probably been growing undetected for a year.  They don’t know where it started in his body.  Along with the multisyllabic diagnoses come multisyllabic drugs of, well, to us, unknown origin—xeloda , cisplatin, carboplatin, gemcitabine, taxol, pemetrexed, vinorelbine.  The names do not roll off the tongue.  They represent a new language to be mastered.  For all their strangeness, they might as well be the names of half-human, half-insect kings from the other side of the universe.   I feel as though I have razor blades in my mouth every time I try to say one of them.  There is, early on, also the possibility of multiple surgeries with “ectomy” at the end of each one…meaning cut it out.  Remove this.  Remove that.  Ironically, when a scan reveals microscopic signs of cancer in other areas of the body, the surgeries are ruled out.  They won’t give him the supposed quality of life they are intended to give. 

My brother Lew has cancer. 

He is twenty-seven months older than I am.  We have always said it that way in our family, from the time we are kids.  Not “roughly two years older”.  Not “two years and three months older.”  Twenty-seven months.  There is a certain love of precision in our blood, when it comes to some things.  Now that precision has brought us perilously close in a way we never imagined.  Twenty-seven months apart.  One of us has cancer.  The other doesn’t.  But now I am sixty-six.  Could I be next?  Only a pathological optimist would fail to wonder.

                                                  ***

I’m seven years old.  My father is a writer.  I am going to be a writer.  My first undertaking is a novel called “Little Lewie”.  My older brother Lew is the hero.  He is twenty-seven months older than I am.  Actually, he is twenty-six months and three weeks older.  I have just figured this out, at seven.  Precision is important. But I’ve learned you can round up and still be considered precise.  Lew is my hero in my first book because he is my older brother and I love him.  Even though we are close in age.  Even though there is some strange energy between us sometimes.  I later learn it is called “sibling rivalry.”  I do not have this with Larry, who is seven years older.  He is an island apart.  His thoughts and feelings are beyond us.  Seven years is forever, especially when you’re seven.   But whatever that energy is that I will later learn to call rivalry, there is something else far more powerful.  I love my brother.  I think he is really, really neat. My parents love him, too.  They think he is really neat.  I love how they love him.

I type my story on my father’s yellow copy paper, commonly used at newspapers these days, something that will vanish in about five decades as computers take over.  But right now, this yellow paper is my parchment, my holy scroll.  I type only short paragraphs.  I have to push hard, one finger at a time, on the keys of my father’s massive Royal typewriter.  Then I draw pictures on each page.  It’s a basketball story.  Heroism on the court.  Little Lewie is, well, little, but he can really move and shoot. I start with stick figures, then draw the flesh around them and erase the stick lines or shade over them, stretched out on my stomach in the grass under the dogwood tree.

                                                ***

My brother Lew has cancer. 

It’s now two years downstream from the moment of diagnosis.  The moment when a doctor says, “You have cancer.”  The moment when only you can know what it feels like to be the “you” in that sentence. Lew is beating the survival odds.  He is in the one tenth of one percent category.  But he still has cancer.  There has been no surgery, other than an arduous initial one to get a biopsy.  So he has all his organs.  He is a whole person, but his body is gradually experiencing the insurrection of rebel cells.  First radiation and then chemo have become part of the daily experience.  This is my second visit from across the country.  The first was this time a year ago.  His left leg was swollen to about two and a-half times the normal size. The initial tumor is in his left hip, inoperably surrounding the femoral artery.  Still, during the first visit he is in what our father often referred to as “fine fettle,” all things considered.  (That phrase, “all things considered” has taken on a whole different meaning. )  He wears a compression stocking which is hard to get on and off.  The swelling is due to what is called lymphedema.  Still, he is able to drive and insists on taking me all around the area where he has lived for nearly forty years…and which I have never visited in all that time.  He takes me to the campus at University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth where he won eight national awards for being one terrific French professor and  from which he has just recently retired.  The campus is an impressive collection of massive concrete rectangles and open walkways.  I can imagine him in a lecture hall.  I can imagine him being stopped by a student with a question as he makes his way from one building to another.  I can imagine the respect, even adoration in his eyes.  I don’t have to see him lecture to know he is capable of spellbinding lectures of the richest kind.  He takes me all around the Rhode Island-Massachusetts boundary zone.  We drive across big metal bridges and onto low rocky beaches.  He shares memory upon memory, forty years of life I have missed being in California.  He takes me to the whaling museum and the church across the street where whalers worshipped before going out into the big sea after behemoths, the church Melville mentions in Moby Dick.  He takes me to a number of his favorite lunch places including the Inn at Castle Hill, a grand old building sitting on a hill above a bay.  It looks like something out of The Great Gatsby.  A broad lawn runs from the Inn down to the water.  There are lines of bright, empty white Adirondack chairs.  It’s still spring.  The wind has a chill.  No one will sit in them for a while.

My brother Lew has cancer.

I keep saying it, thinking that maybe it will fully sink in if I do.  Because it hasn’t.  It feels as if we are in an alternate universe.  If we just find a window we can wriggle through, we can get back to the one where he is enjoying his retirement, cancer free.  We lost dad in 02 at eighty-five.  We lost Larry in 04 at sixty-four.  For the first time in our lives, we are both older than our oldest brother.  We lost Mom later in 04.  Now it’s Lew and me and we are dealing with this demon again.  I’m looking for that window.  If we can only wriggle through…

The second visit.  This morning Lew is seated in the large reclining chemo chair at St. Anne’s Oncology Hospital in Fall River, just over the line in Massachusetts.  For two years, there has been nothing in his lungs but small dots.  Now, suddenly, a golf ball-sized mass in the lower left lung.  How does this happen in only a short time between scans?  The demon. Lew is holding his shirt above  his chest as he did when he was a kid to show our mother his chicken pox. This time, it is so the nurse can slip a needle that looks like a kitten’s claw into the port that has been installed just below the skin above his right pectoral muscle.  I ask if it hurts.  He says, “Yes, but just temporarily—a pin prick.”   The nurse adds, “We are penetrating just a little skin.” 

Fifteen minutes earlier, we are with his oncologist, Nancy, a woman in her late thirties, who talks to him as if he might be an old boyfriend from high school.  She is sweet, but she is also very direct and thorough.  Lew has a lot of questions.  He knows he is at the stage where the hope for any kind of enduring remission is a slim-to-none possibility.  He wants to know what the end is like.  When he can’t handle the pain any more, or when it’s too much labor to breathe, will they put him on a drip?  No, the doctor tells him, we rarely use drips any more.  The necessary pain meds are delivered orally in pill form, slipped under the tongue. He’s surprised but I tell him Mom was given morphine pills, under the tongue.  The doctor confirms.  Under the tongue.  The same tongue he stuck out at me when we were kids to make brilliantly outrageous faces.  The same tongue he stuck out for the doctor who examined him for tonsillitis.  The same tongue that helped him articulate millions of words as he lectured and coached university students for thirty six years.  The same tongue that he no doubt shared in the ecstatic clutch of love with his wife of forty years.   Now, the tongue that will be the mail box for pain suppression until there are no more funny faces possible, no more words, no more love.

                                                ***

A lot of us say we want to live to be a hundred…or more.  We don’t think about the potential dark side of that wish.  My mother lived to bury her first born child when he was only sixty-four.  Had my father not died two years earlier, he’d have been broken by Larry’s death.  Were he alive today, he’d be ninety-five.  If he knew his second son was unlikely to make it out of his sixties, he’d have gone from broken to pulverized.  My mother would have been crushed beside him.  People say they want the power to see the future.  They could get rich betting on the Kentucky Derby and Superbowl, knowing the outcomes. And they could get paralyzed foreseeing the coming calamities.  We all signed the lease of life without the term being filled in.  It’s an act of faith.  Without the ignorance of what is in store for us, it isn’t living.

                                               ***

Lew looks at the doctor straight on as she tells him that the recent onset of fatigue is the cancer, not the fentanyl patch, not the dilaudid, not the high doses of ibuprofen.  That’s why we’re trying this new chemo, docetaxel, to get you some energy back.  To give you some good days. 

He tells her, he has shared with me that he doesn’t expect to see his 69^th birthday seven months away.  She looks right at him.  We know where this is going, she says.  She doesn’t confirm the timeline, but the direction and the gist.  I am struck by how present she is, how honest, how empathetic without being unctuous.  This is her everyday life, I guess.  She is here to help people live a little longer and then leave comfortably.  Lew seems grateful for her honesty.  He is beyond struggling.  He doesn’t hit her with twenty “what if’s”. 

I ask Lew if he is afraid.  No.  I ask him if he is angry.  No.  He has told me in detail about his belief in reincarnation.  He is sure he has been here before and will be again.  He sees no tragedy, just some disappointment.  “I thought I had more time.  I ask if he feels sadness at times.  Yes.  Sadness.  For Anne, for his grandson, Ben, whom he has raised as his son for his two sons, Tommy and Jeffrey and their partners, Jackie and Tina.  He knows they are bound to him.  They’ll “be okay” whatever that means.  In that okayness, they will miss him terribly.  They will hurt for a long time.  But Lew has accepted he doesn’t have long.  His stoicism comes straight from our mother.  Certainly not Dad.  Though he was calm and accepting when his time came, Dad was eighty-five.  Had this happened to him at such a young age, he’d have been mightily angry, and mightily depressed.  I am more like him but Lew’s calm reaches me.  Besides, we are both old enough to stop asking why bad things happen to good people, and good things to bad.  As one of the mantra’s of our age says:  It is what it is.  But Lew does have a new mantra, a surprising one.  Several times a day he sighs from fatigue and/or pain, quietly uttering the old Yiddish expression, “Oy vey”.  It means, “Oh, where?” as in “Oh, where am I?”  Funny that a people should develop that habit of asking, “Where am I?” when they are hurting.  Ironic, since we have never been very religious or even ethnic.  I doubt Lew has been in a synagogue in decades.  Still, the words we heard from our grandparents and on occasion, our father, seem to say it best right now.  “Where am I?”  Am I still here where I get to be the person I have always been?  Or am I now somehow in a different place, in an alternate universe where weird multisyllabic kings dictate who I am and what I can do? 

                                               ***

The docetaxel is dripping into him.  He is in no pain.  He rests with his eyes closed, turned on his right hip.  A new nurse shows up, crouches down in his direct line of sight, touches him gently.  He opens his eyes.  “Jan!”  They hug and hold each other as dearly as lifelong friends.  “I’ve missed you!” he says.  She returns the feeling.  She was his first oncology nurse.  They got close.  She got transferred to another unit.  She heard he was asking for her.

The hugs, the deep direct gazes.  These people are either brilliantly trained or just brilliantly attuned (or both).  Why don’t we all look at each other this way every day?  Why do we wait for cancer to make gazing a true communion?

At least four different nurses interact with Lew and at some point, each one of them does a double take when they look at me.  Then, it’s either the straightforward, “You must be Lew’s brother!” or the teasing, “You can’t be Lew’s brother!”  Do we really look that alike?  Of course, we are family.  We have the same skin tone, high foreheads, the barest thatch left on top, similar hands…but aren’t our noses, even though they’re both prominent, actually quite different?  Our mouths?  The overall configuration of our heads?  Have we missed something, something that is both physical and sacred that is obvious to others…something that is the essence of what it means to be brothers?

                                                ***

During my visit, I have a series of dreams:  I am in a strange landscape…vertiginous cliffs, massive tsunamis, buses swept away filled with children, entire cruise boats disappearing into the valleys of wave mountains.  I do not recognize any place or any one.  I keep asking, “Where am I?”  “What is this place?”  “How will I ever get home?”  I wake up, heart pounding…not racing, probably not above 65, but pounding all the way to my ankles.  Maybe high blood pressure is generally a silent killer, but at this moment, it is loud and clear.  In another dream, I am told by a grizzled old man that I must follow the rules.  I object.  “I have been self-employed a long time.  I don’t follow your rules.  I follow mine!”  He points to pictures of my parents, Larry, Lew.  I wake up, again, heart slamming into my chest.

                                                ***

I’m at Tom’s Market in Tiverton, RI.  I have a list from both Lew and Anne.  I’m only here for three days but this is one thing I can do.  I can take a few tasks off Anne’s plate.  I can ask someone where the summer sausage is, where the prunes are, whether or not they have some of Lew’s favorites.  I can also walk the dog, Magnet, a 52 pound muscular chunk of Australian herder.  He has spent hours laying on the bed next to Lew, sleeping, but he is young and born to run.  I can also show Anne how to use the Jack LaLanne Juicer.  She’s not a tech person.  We put the juicer together and throw in some carrots, cumber, celery, apple. 

                                               ***

Lew has no quandary over the meaning of life.  His time has been beautiful and rich.  You have touched so many, I say.  Think of all those students who love you.  Think of the teachers who moved you.  Teachers never know the expanses of time and terrain their teachings will cross…but they travel.  Your teachings have wings.  People a half a world away at this moment might be talking about their time in one of your classes.  He smiles at the thought.  And think of the durability of those contributions as they move from life to life, without anyone even knowing their point of origin was a lecture you gave.   If you are right, Lew, if reincarnation is real and there is an upward progression to greater and greater consciousness and goodness, think of what might be next after a life as rich as this one.  The word “Wow!” would be appropriate.

                                              ***

He is laying on his bed talking about the final arrangements.  He has written his own obit, as he calls it.  He doesn’t want Anne to worry about it and he certainly doesn’t want someone who never really knew him slapping it together.  He will be cremated.  There will be no memorial service because he doesn’t need it, nor does Anne.  They know who they have been to each other.  All these years, he has had a nickname for her, a term of endearment in French.  Perfect, because she was also a French teacher. Perfect because uttering it was a daily gift.  Perfect because it implied both heaven and earth, defying and submitting to gravity.  Perfect.

                                              ***

I am sitting outside on the front steps of his house while he naps inside.  I notice the Japanese cherry tree in full bloom a few feet away.  Further down the lawn, the dogwood’s flowers are just emerging from their own buds and still cherry colored themselves.  On the other side of the lawn, a forty foot high maple is beginning to leaf.  I remember our childhood yard.  We had a Japanese cherry.  We had a dogwood under which I wrote and drew about the heroic exploits of Little Lewie.  We also had a maple from which we took the wing-like seeds, split them and stuck them on our noses.  Is this coincidence?  Accidental poetry?  Is it our mother and father’s hands reaching beyond the grave to shape our choices?  Is it proof of the themes that move with us from one life to the next?  Is it a montage of more images from mirrors within mirrors and windows with a little wriggle room?

                                            ***

My brother Lew has cancer.

It is tempting to think of the situation as a battle.  So many people do.  We can say that cancer is The Claw and The Fist and Lew and all those helping him are Tookie.  But the war metaphor doesn’t seem accurate.  In the war metaphor, if a person dies, then he has lost.  He is a loser.  But in my brother, I do not see a loser.  I see courage.  I see curiosity.  I see concern and gratitude and love.  A person can die badly or well.  My father, my mother and my oldest brother, Larry died well, with surprising clarity.  To die well is not a loss.  It is not a victory.  It is a beautiful gift to both yourself and those who love you.  It has so many layers and colors and movements.  It is music, art and poetry in one final act.  That is what I am thinking, sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark, as he sleeps in the room below.

                                            ***

I have to leave early.  Lew is still sleeping.  Anne comes out to say goodbye.  We kiss and go to hug and have one of those moments that could be awkward but turns out to be funny and dear…we both move to put our heads on the same side.  We haven’t hugged enough to have it down.  We will no doubt be doing a lot more.  We’ll get good at it.  She encourages me to go into the bedroom.  Lew is turned on his right hip, curled up, looking to me about eight years old.  I lean over and kiss him on the forehead and say, “I love you.”  He wakes up and thanks me again for coming and says we’ll talk soon.  I realize on the way to the airport that he didn’t have his hearing aid in.  He didn’t hear me say I love you.  I will say it again and again between now and “We know where this is going.”

On my way home, in the airport men’s room, I catch a sideways glimpse of myself in the mirror.  For a second, I think I am looking at Lew.  This happens more and more lately.  I catch a glimpse in a car or shop window and see my father or our older brother, Larry, or Lew. 

I am me and not me.  I carry the family with me.  Even my mother shows up in the mirror from time to time.   Is this a resonance from my earliest days when I struggled as the youngest to enter into the sphere of everyday exchanges?  Do I carry a primal uncertainty about who I am; or being the youngest, am I designated to carry the memories, the images, the family history, the endlessly rearranging montage of who we were and might have been?                                              

                                                ***

Over Arizona, the red landscape, the edge of the Grand Canyon, areas blackened by the shadows of clouds.  It looks like a cancerous lung to me now.

                                                ***

As little kids, Lew and I share a bedroom.  When Mom and Dad have said good night and gone downstairs out of earshot, Lew brings out the flashlight he has been hiding under his pillow.  The show begins.  He projects shadow characters on the ceiling with his hand.  There is The Fist.  There is The Claw.  These are not good guys.  But then, there is Tookie.  Tookie is the shadow of two fingers.  Tookie is our hero.  He leads us through endless adventures.  We lie with our eyes fixed on the ceiling.  I’m sure Lew doesn’t know from one moment to the next what his characters are going to do.  They take on a life of their own.  Somehow, with the exploits of The Claw and The Fist being played out above us each night, the daytime reports of “scary” Russians and Chinese and nuclear bombs from which we are drilled to hide under our desks at school are not so scary.  We have Tookie on our side.  Tookie will keep us safe. 

                                                ***

Another clear set of memories.  As kids, we say, “I love you,” all the time.  Mostly to Mom and Dad…and they to us.  I love you Mommy.  I love you Daddy.  I love you Bobby, Lew, Larry.  Then, somewhere along the way as our ages require two numbers, it stops.  Years later, when Dad is dying, then Larry, then Mom, those words come back to us.  Not as musical little toss-offs but definitive statements we enter, tentatively at first, but then with full ownership.  It’s as if we lost love’s seeds for years and ultimately found them in the bottoms of our pockets where they’d been waiting all along to be taken out one by one, delicately, between finger and thumb, to plant in each other’s hearts.  We were gardeners as children.  We learned it from our parents.  Then lost it…then found it again, thank God, in time. 

I love you Mom. 

I love you Dad.

I love you Larry.

I love you Lew. 

I love you Tookie. 

I see you, even in the dark…especially in the dark.

I see you gazing back at me

                                   in true communion.

C 2013 Bob Kamm

Winning and Losing in Love Relatiionships, Part II

What an irony that we spend so much of our lives longing for our “soul-mate” and then, when we find him/her, it doesn’t take long before we begin finding fault and treating our partner as if he/she is our competitor rather than our teammate.  This is inevitable.  Once the romantic period is over, our deeper psychological dynamics from our early years reassert themselves.  Unfortunately, there is no short-cut for eliminating the powerful impulse to make our partner wrong and ourselves right.  Its roots are tenacious.  Being “wrong” as a child has such hurtful consequences, we quickly learn to be “right” or at least avoid being “wrong” in our parents’ eyes.  The speed with which we as adults throw up defensive arrays of verbal and behavioral countermeasures, speak to the fact that we each grow up experiencing thousands of interactions with our caregivers that follow certain patterns because our caregivers have their own deeply grooved ways of being.   Look, I loved my parents and they loved me…and, like all of us parents, they were far from perfect.  My mother had a subtle way of shaming me when I made a mistake, did something outside her wishes or exhibited feelings that caused her discomfort.   My father resorted to teasing and sarcasm.  Both of them occasionally engaged in frightening outbursts of anger along with swatting the back of my head or my butt.  No doubt, many of us go through memorable moments of big, visible trauma.  But the idea that we all suffer them, and that they are the principle cause of distortion in our development is probably over-emphasized.  However, what is true for nearly all of us is that we are immersed in family cultures as children that have their own strong color schemes, as mine did.  That scheme is quickly absorbed into our cells.  We are “stained” into adaptive responses by the sheer volume and force of interactions and our powerful need to be safe and belong.   We accommodate because we actually are dependent as children.  The simple ability to feel and express those feelings clearly is often a casualty of this process.  Consequently, as adults, anytime we sense “wrongness” coming our way, we mobilize against it and the hurt it unconsciously summons from those early years.  You could say our defenses are psychological white blood cells trying to kill an infection.  The density and vigor of that counter-attack is one measure of the force of early messages. 

 If as adults we could just release the “fight to be right” by thinking our way out of it (using solely a cognitive approach) the world would already be a much calmer and more harmonious place.  Taking on a new thought is relatively easy.  Changing our ways of reacting emotionally and behaviorally is a much tougher undertaking.  For the most part, we humans are not run by cognitive, logical and linear processes.  Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize documenting this in a field as seemingly logical as economics.  The evidence is overwhelming that no quick and easy fix exists.  Sports metaphors such as I cited in Part I, can be seductive for their simplicity. In basketball, there is a play called a “kick-out”.  The ball-handler drives toward the basket hard as if he’s going to shoot.  The defense “collapses” in around him, leaving other shooters free on the perimeter.  The ball handler now reins in his desire to go for the two-point dunk and instead passes the ball out to one of his teammates who is free of defenders and has a clear shot at a three-pointer.  Now imagine yourself driving hard toward the idea that you have to be right in a given moment.  And imagine that just as you are ready to hammer home your point and make your partner wrong, ripping at the flesh of your relationship, instead, you kick-out…releasing the need to be right and refusing to engage in that struggle.   When you push less to be right, your partner has to push less, too, and perhaps, with a little luck, you both let the issue go, realizing that the energy beneath it is from the past and the consequences in the present are relatively minor and quite workable. 

    It’s good to remember the “kick-out” option.  It’s one of those touchstone ideas that might help you let go once in a while.  But most of us know that once we’re triggered into “fighting to be right” it is very difficult to just switch off that energy, which derives from our survival endowments channeled through the family landscape.  For real healing, there’s no avoiding the depths.  Long before modern psychology, philosophers, religious figures, poets and story-tellers have had implicit knowledge of this.  Fairy-tales and contemporary literature attest to the real “threat” hiding in the shadows, in the cellar or attic, in an old house, at the bottom of a lake, the top of the beanstalk,  in a cave, under a bridge, or close to natural forces such as volcanoes, dark forests, the untamed sea.  Unconsciously, the entire human race knows where the nemesis hides.  However, only a small percentage of us appear to be explicitly conscious of it. The birth of deception is self-deception.  For those of us trying to transcend early destiny, we know a great initiation is unavoidable.  We know the “monsters”  born in those tender years when our brains were not fully developed must be defrocked of fiction till the bare truth is before us. 

We can do this.  Now we are adults.  Our brains are fully developed (finally, by around age 25!) so we  have the resources to experience fully what was held in a kind of cryogenic freeze within us because it was overwhelming for our tender, underdeveloped brains and beings.  As Tara Brach has pointed out in a recent article in Psychotherapy Networker, C.G. Jung referred to this unprocessed pain of childhood as unlived life.  He urged us to be courageous and live out that unlived life so that we can integrate it and move on.  He is exhorting us to a hero’s journey.  The irony and the great challenge are that we are wired to avoid the lairs of predators and the pain and fear they cause.  However, and this is key, if the pain and fear are already in us, avoiding them means accepting that we are divided selves. 

How can we heal a sundered inner world?  By surrendering to what the Persian poet Rumi referred to as “the pearls of God,” meaning tears.  Our unshed tears from those early events are the waters of unlived life, held like crystals in caves high and low along the fault lines of the soul.  Their resolving force awaits us, awaits the moment when we are ready to transform them from solid back into liquid for the ride up and out of their subterranean holds into daylight. Without this liberating adventure, the division within us as individuals will become a division between us and our partners.

Because this work is indispensable to releasing psychological energy and literally rewiring the basis of  personality, the Imago Dialogues embody, for couples, the essential wisdoms and practices.  Developed by Harville Hendrix and Helen La Kelly Hunt, the Dialogues are arenas that invite the emergence of the heroes hiding within us.  They are crucibles for grieving and empathy.  When, in dialogue, we get beneath an issue in the present and visit the subterranean depths of our own divided inner world as it was wrought in our early years, we ride unshed tears into the sun.  Suddenly, our partner is no longer a competitor with whom we must struggle to make our own needs dominant.  He or she is a witness to our life.  So touching is this moment, and neurologically dynamic, that it leads directly to a releasing of clenched fists on the weaponry of winning without any admonition to do so--we by living out the unlived grief, our partner through the experience of profound empathy.  Grieving and empathy are the two great resolving alchemies of human life.  By taking turns as griever and witness over months and years, we emerge into daylight over and over again until the shadows recede and we own the day, together.

Winning and Losing in Love Relationships

By the time we reach adulthood, most of us have participated in some form of team--athletic, social, religious or work.  We have been exposed to people who place their own ego's above
the success of the team.  Probably the easiest example to consider comes from a sports team.
Think of an athlete, man or woman, who has great stats game after game.  Now imagine that in spite of their performance (or more likely, because of it!) the team loses game after game.
Would any of us, with the perspective of adulthood, call that person a success?  Unlikely.  We might marvel at his or her persistence and talent.  We might also think of him/her as "a ball hog"
or selfish.  Does any of us believe that Kobe Bryant or Mia Hamm would consider themselves successful if they hadn't won championships?  A no-brainer, right?  But here's the thing.  A love relationship is a team of two.  It calls for an even greater commitment to collaboration than other teams because our hearts are so fully engaged.  We are more vulnerable on the "love team" and our childhood hurts are so much more likely to be triggered.  But the core question is the same as on a sports team:  are you a team player or a ball hog?  Do you push for your own victories over your partner as if they were actually the other team...or are you capable of letting go of the need to win in order to serve the greater good of the relationship?  

We know what the answer is for most of us much of the time.  We have a hard time letting go
of having our way or being right. Why?  Because being wrong has such powerful resonance during our early years.  When we are little, we need to be attached to our parents.  It is not a desire.  It is a biologically written need whose goal is to serve our survival and optimal development.  Far too often, when parents correct children they come down hard.  They forget they're dealing with a small fragile being whose brain is nowhere near fully developed.  As children, we immediately fear the loss of love, which is potentially catastrophic for such a genuinely dependent being.  Since our parents tend to react to us in fairly consistent ways, we develop a pattern of adaptations to those moments.  We try hard to be right, to be on their good side.  Some of us fight for it, meaning we cry, flail, object, blame someone or try to talk our way out of a situation.  Some of us flee, meaning we hide within ourselves and physically withdraw from our parents.  Some of us freeze in the moment, become paralyzed and speechless.  Some of us discover it is safer to just submit.  In all these cases, we are feeling a great deal of discomfort because the withdrawal of parental love, even for seconds at a time, is so potentially devastating.  

Fast forward to adulthood and you find yourself and your partner having a difficult time allowing the other to be right.  On an unconscious psychological level, the dynamic is, "If you are right, I am wrong.  If I am right, you are wrong.  Whoever is wrong is going to feel bad.  Someone is coming out as the parent and someone the child."  It's a zero-sum game that parallels the childhood pattern when parents had all the power and we needed them with all our hearts.  So here we are in our twenties, thirties, forties and on, being ball hogs in our relationship so we can avoid feeling that feeling.  Of course, we don't live with a coach in our home to help us run better plays.  We don't have crowds cheering us when we serve the team. But we can gradually learn to get in touch with the deeper feeling that drives this reaction, grieve it and be liberated from the impulse that drives us to create win-lose.  We can do some of this work when we are single, but the deepest work comes when we are in a relationship for there are wounds that are only triggered and therefore available to work on when we actively seek to be in loving connection with another.

We are strange creatures, aren't we?  We long for love.  Then, when we find it (after the 
romantic phase is over) we treat our partner as if he/she is the competition, not a teammate!  We have to defeat the very person who might love us...for fear of feeling unloved.  Once again we see how early patterns can hijack the present and deprive us of the thing we cherish most.

Losing Phil Smart, Sr--a Eulogy

My dear friend, Phil Smart, Sr, the sage of Seattle, died over the weekend.  He was 93. When we lose someone close, we are prompted to ask, “How do we measure the value of a life?” The easy answer would be, “We measure a life by how much good a person did in the world.” By that measure, Phil’s life had exceptional value.  For twenty-six years, he was Santa Claus to the young patients at Seattle Children’s Hospital, to whom he referred as the “angels among us.”  He gave innumerable speeches to tens of thousands of people exhorting them to use the “third eight” hours of their day beyond sleep and work to do some good for others.  He gave ridiculous amounts of money away to right causes.  He was an exemplary automobile dealer, as is his son, Phil, Jr, in a business that does not boast many exemplars.  And, of course, he was a veteran of WWII who actively continued to honor veterans of all wars in any way that he could. 

These and many other notable accomplishments have been and will be cited by those who will eulogize him.  I only knew him from 1995 when he was 75, till the present, less than 20% of his life so I am not the most qualified person to list all the good he did in the world.  But it was my privilege and joy to spend many hours over those eighteen years sitting in his office at Phil Smart Mercedes-Benz at 600 East Pike Street chatting about business, family, philanthropy, war, politics and love.  His eyes were always bright and engaged and continued to be as he passed into his nineties.  He was a master storyteller whether sharing something seemingly mundane about home life, a vignette from his childhood, an authentic drama from the war or the miracles he had experienced at Children's Hospital.  He loved to talk about his faith, pointing often to the collection of feathers he had found one at a time and kept as a sign of angels at work.  He loved to walk through the dealership and check in with the team (he knew everyone’s first name) to see how they were doing personally and professionally, through good years and lean.  A moment with Phil lifted the heart.  He continued to do this long after he had sold the business to his son, understanding that he was a key spiritual force in helping Phil, Jr,  to keep the sense of family, style and commitment to do the right thing as alive as possible in each person who called 600 East Pike his or her work home.

So I have no doubt that using the usual measure of a life, Phil’s was both beautiful and very, very good. But I have another measure of life that occurred to me when I heard that he had left us.  I knew he was well past his ninety-third birthday.  I knew he was ailing. I had watched over the years as frailty gradually settled in him.  I knew he had already lived a superb life, a life to be envied and emulated for its vitality and generosity right to the end.  It shouldn’t have been a shock when my good friend, Don Stevens, a long-time Smart leader, told me he was gone.  But it was.  And it is.  I felt as if I’d taken a punch to the gut.  The wind went out of me.  My knees felt weak.  I had to sit down.  It seemed like a large rip had opened in the fabric of reality and something of rare value had been stolen. 

So for me, this is the measure of a life—do people feel like they’ve had the wind knocked out of them? Does the world tilt and spin as if its sense of true north has been shaken?  I have no doubt that thousands of people in the city of Seattle know exactly what I’m talking about, and many others across the country.  I contemplate a world without him with a mixture of visceral sadness and profound appreciation…and am moved to say, “Thank you, Phil.  Thank you for all that you shared, all that you gave, all that you exemplified.  Thank you for your life.” 

We will all reclaim our breath.  That’s what he would want.  We will walk with more determination in our stride and when memories of Phil visit us, which they will often, we will salute or nod or doff our hats and then shift eyes forward to the next opportunity to do some good.

C 2013 Bob Kamm

In the Beginning and Still...

After decades of scratching and tapping

letters on paper

    and launching verses

                from lips

and listening in the night

    for the infinite magical

                combinations

of which the human vocal chords,

jaw, teeth and face are capable,              

the poet finally enters

the central holy ground

 of language

understanding

that in the beginning

there most assuredly

was the word

              and the word really

was with God

               and the word actually

was God and is God.

It doesn’t matter what name, gender or genders

                we give the Creative Force

                --Yahweh, Vishnu, Allah, Jesus, Nature,

         even Laws of the Universe.

                                Truth is truth.

And the Truth is

everything is comprised

not of zeroes and one’s

       as the young masters of technology

would have it

or

               neutrinos, quarks

          protons, bosons

and such 

                    as the old masters of physics

                                would have it

but of vowels, consonants, clicks, pops,

syllables,

sibilance’s, suspirations, gutturals,

                glottal stops,

   and

 all the permutational possibilities

of syntax and grammar.

These make up the essence of

all things,

the irreducible

tightly wound  subatomic

 scrolls of sound

                rolling out of

                                  the dark seeds

                of the universe

                                       into

time, space and matter

--God’s original tongue

 made manifest

   everywhere

at once.

There may have been a beginning

but there will never be an end

because long after

man has come and gone

                spewing a language

                                        that has spiraled

                                further and further

from the first vocabulary

                                     God will still be speaking.

                                               

So now the poet

knows for certain

 the answer

to the age old

                                        tree-in-the-forest

                                conundrum.

If a tree falls in the forest

                and no human ear is present

there will be a sound

because the tree itself is a living tower of words

                  just as its tumble

is a cataclysmic poem,

    the leaf shower, the bird scatter

                        the tearing of the forest’s flesh

       --all part of a great epic

                                whose every utterance

God

is speaking,

                                                God is hearing

                                                     until

            silence

 and rest

               and the next

ecstatic rush.

C 2012 Bob Kamm

A Poem of Thanksgiving

A Poem of Thanksgiving  

By Bob Kamm

Inspired by elder Gerry Oleman
of the Coast Salish People of British Columbia
during his welcoming remarks at the 9^th Annual Imago Conference in Vancouver, BC

 Long before us

              skies

    sun and moon

     oceans

         deserts

forests

                                meadows

                                  mountains.

Long before us

eagle

       and all that lived beneath her.

Long before us

                rain tapping on the beetle’s back.

Long before us

reflections in pools of quiet creeks

flowing and frozen,

    reflections of overhanging trees,

the movement of light on berries,

the faces of buck, doe and fawn,

                raccoon, wolf, cougar,

                      ovenbird rocking on twig,

the tightening of night’s grasp

       on trunks and rocks.

But no images

                of human face

                        not one

not in puddle or pond

          not in the hand mirrors of ice-clad leaves,

               not even in the eye of predator or prey.

Long before us

      beings of all kinds

            writing their exquisite

and desperate

      life stories

on pages of earth, air, water, bark and stone,

leaving behind few traces

-- faint echoes broken by wind.

Not for us the great awakening of life

but each life for itself

and the shimmering whole

and the joy and sadness

of The Mother and Father of All Things.

The Mother and Father of All Things

who through their

restless risky dance

     made the universe

                          from a solitary seed

-the seed of all seeds

all beings

all things.

We are here now.

Though we strut about

proud parrots,

we are small.

We are late-comers to the festival.

We still don’t know the dances.

If we are honest

we must wonder

if The Mother and Father of All Things

for a single moment

in the reckless ecstasy of creativity

imagined

we would become so discontent

with the abundant gardens They provided,

would set out

to live

not just outside them

                                but

       everywhere

with such fiery intention

our success was assured.

Did Mother and Father,

having birthed all things

in the reckless ecstasy of creativity      

from the seed of all seeds,

pause

     even for a moment

to imagine

that one day

their favored principle

of hunter and hunted

would run amok in us,

that we would

discard and devour

                so much of the earth

and hound so many species

as well as our own mothers, fathers

                brothers, sisters

                sons and daughters

into a Great Vanishing?

With such history behind and within us,

how is it that Mother and Father

still let us live

let us struggle to find our way

                toward redemption?

Are They simply indulgent weavers who cannot discard

a deeply flawed blanket

whose dark designs they have come to love?

Or are They truly possessed

of  a compassion beyond our comprehension?

At this moment

life is ours.

Let us set our feet on the path

with prayers

of thanksgiving.

Let us say, “Thank you!”

to Mother and Father.

Let us say, “Thank you!”

to all They put here before us

that led to now,

“Thank you!” to all that is,

“Thank you!” to all that will be.

For fourteen billion years

we

    were

not

                                     yet.

Mother and Father birthed the universe

without a hand from us,

worked out its drama

through cold and hot fury,

barrenness, solitude, roar and silence,

then

gave us

     the chance to wriggle

from long-ripening wombs.

Why us? 

Why was each of us born and not others?

Why did we make adulthood and not others?

How can we show our gratitude and worthiness

for such a chancy investment?

Let us offer still more thanks.

Let us give thanks

to The Mother and Father of All Things

 for having

the wild, foolish, restless impulse to choose

us

and not brother sperm

                or sister ova.

Let us thank the earth They made

which has given rise to all we draw upon

                for sustenance and succor

--to the waters we use

to grow and cook,

slake our thirst,

 clean our bodies,

          frolic and fish;

 to the soil that gives rise to plants

that give us sweet air to breathe,

 plants we eat,

 plants we use to weave, build, warm,

trap, hunt, play  and heal;

Let us give thanks

to all the beings

         from the tiniest we cannot see

to the largest

whose flesh, bones, sinews and skins

we have taken

with ecstasy and sadness

for we know they were not made for us

but for themselves,

for the shimmering whole

 and for Mother and Father

in their incomprehensible creative fervor.

Let us give thanks to the long bead chain of grandmothers

who

carried and birthed other grandmothers until

our own mothers ripened and carried us

and helped us wriggle into the wild,

beautiful,

sad and terrifying

world.

To all who were present at the moment of our births

we give thanks,

the family and tribe that cared for us

in our helplessness

when we were pure

and yet

 knew nothing

and all those who caressed and patted us

                along our way to discover

                how to become human beings

how to live and love

with elegance and awkwardness

                                brilliance and ignorance

                how to sing, dance, drum, whoop, laugh,

          whisper and weep

                                together,

how to hold each other with bold affection

                and yet step back so each of us can

                                hear

                                the song of his own being.

May we raise our children

                with such right love

                    --devotion without indulgence--

                that before long

                across the many lands

                each soul is a gathering place

                                where all souls are safe.

Then may our ways

                           be fragrant as spring soil

and  tasty as ripe berry juice

                                                                to Mother and Father

so They might find us worthy

     of their work and worry

give us

lives

   that are

good

                and long

and end
  
with our cheeks

      on Their chests

as we listen to Their hearts

drum

  drum

      drum

before setting out

                for the gardens

in the bright reaches

of their eyes.

C Copyright 2012 Bob Kamm, reproduction by author’s permission only.

        

 

The Central Problem of American Democracy

As in communities across the country, we had an election here on June 5th in San Luis Obispo County.  Thirty-nine percent of registered voters actually cast ballots.  This means that just over 19.5% could have determined who the next County Supervisor will be in a given district, or whether or not a proposition imposing a tax on cigarettes passes.  The news wasn't much better across the state or across the country.

If you go all the way back to 1960 and look at turnout in Presidential elections, the highest turnout
was in 1960, the year JFK was elected.  The fact that he was a Catholic was a big controversy back then.  In fact, it may have been the central controversy of the election.  An awful lot of people got riled up.  You'd think, then, that perhaps the turnout was above 75% or even higher.  But no, it was
just above 63%.  In our most recent Presidential election in which the first individual of African-American heritage was a candidate--another point of controversy--the turnout was just above 58%.
You have to wonder what it would take for our turnout to rise above 70%.

When you look at these numbers, you can't resist the basic arithmetic that less than 30% of the registered voters in America can determine who becomes President, what kind of economic policy will be put forward, what kind of foreign policy, who is likely to sit on the Supreme Court, immigration policy, education policy--and other matters of great consequence to every living person in this country...and in most of the world.  And that 30% does not even have to be informed.  It only has to be motivated.  Given the absurd amounts of money allowed to be legally pumped into our political system, it is not hard for corporate or other interests to sway with marketing and advertising just enough people to carry an election, with the same kind of approach used by agencies that represent food, detergent, cars and technology companies--short, catchy phrases and flashy images that have little or nothing to do with the challenge of making a sound voting decision.

Since 9/11, it has become fashionable to make fun of the French.  But the French just had an election for their top position and the turnout was above 70%!  In Peru, the turnout generally runs upwards of 95% because you cannot get a driver's license if you don't vote.  Over the last year, we have regularly seen the looks of joy and the huge turnouts in countries in the Arab world exercising real voting rights for the first time.

I could marshal more examples but I think the point is pretty obvious.  We trumpet to the world that we are its greatest democracy yet a large segment of our citizenry is, for various reasons, asleep at the wheel or willfully not participating.  So when you feel like screaming at the people in your local government, or in your statehouse or in Washington, think again.  If you're going to talk to anyone, maybe it should be the neighbors or friends who tell you they never vote.  After our 2000 Presidential election, who can claim that votes don't matter?  How can we have a government of, by and for the people when the people don't vote?  What does it say about a person's integrity if they fail to vote but love to complain about the way things are going?  Even worse, what does it say about a person's integrity if they have never voted and then run for office, as happened in the last gubernatorial
election in California?

Obviously, it is also important that we cast informed votes, that we actually relish the responsibility of learning about what is going on in our country and voting for real people rather than deeply wounded people with grandiose dreams of self-gratification, and for real issues rather than those pumped up by special interests. When you look at the kind of people our founding fathers and mothers were, it is easy to imagine that their vision of America two or three hundred years after the Declaration of Independence was a society of highly engaged, fully informed, community-focused individuals reveling in their freedom, exercising it robustly and spending much of their leisure time in discourse and actions with friends and neighbors designed to make the common good even better. Given that they were thoughtful, educated people, we can imagine their thinking of our future much like the grand discussions in the Greek polis of ancient times--the original democracy--where all the men (alas, even the Greeks had not discovered equal rights) were vitally engaged in discourse that was passionate yet civil.  In my own nearly two-year experience on an Israeli kibbutz, in my early twenties, I saw this in action only with women fully empowered.  The "asifa" was the meeting of all adults in the community.  There were brilliant, articulate debates over what served the greater good. 
I'm not saying it was perfect.  After all, the members were human.  But by and large, this was exactly the kind of respectful, committed engagement our founders must have dreamed.

For the moment, I leave it to you to think about why a significant portion of our populace does not vote.  No doubt, there are different reasons for different segments that may have to do with socioeconomics as well as educational, religious and cultural factors.

But how do we avoid the conclusion that the lack of informed participation in American democracy is our great hypocrisy and great shame?  Do we think the rest of the world doesn't see this?  More importantly, this failure to fully engage is probably the prime contributor to the conviction many of us have that the citizenry does not control the nation's destiny in today's America, that we are certainly not being led by the best and the brightest our society can produce and that our national ethos and essence are gradually leaking away into the sands of history.  To put it more bluntly, there is an old saying, "Use it or lose it."  We're not using it, so we're losing it.

C 2012 Bob Kamm