Endless Knots

On the 25th anniversary of my mother's death...

Here, from seven years ago, a repost with the letter she left for her funeral.

And a just-discovered Pottstown Mercury news item from Oct 30, 1945, announcing that this 34-year-old Brooklyn transplant, who'd been in Pottstown less than a year and who had an 18-month-old child, would teach adult ed classes in introductory and advanced lipreading for three hours each Tues and Thurs night at the Y. My mom.

And now the blog repost from Sept 9, 2007:

Eighteen years ago today, my mother, Ethel A. Lipnack, died at the age of 78. This morning, I had the chance to stand on the doorstep where she had passed so many times--at the corner of Myrtle and Clinton Avenue, where she was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. A Connectict Muffin shop occupies the candy store that my grandparents ran at the edge of what was then a very posh neighborhood. I write this tonight from our daughter's apartment, just a few blocks from my mother's original home. In all the years since she died, this is the first time I've been nearby on this anniversary. Sad and happy, all at once.

My mother liked to say that she started working at age five, delivering newspapers along Clinton Avenue. She was just 20 years old when she graduated from Hunter College at the height of the Great Depression. With a German major and a French minor, there weren't many jobs available yet she managed to turn her love of language into a lifelong career. She was one of the first teachers of lipreading in Harlem, a skill that she took with her to Pennsylvania when my parents moved there in 1945, founding the first lipreading school in the Philadelphia area. Coincidence: I married a man with major congenital hearing loss (60% loss in the speech range). My mother called my husband one of the greatest natural lipreaders she'd ever met.

In her late forties, my mother turned her attention to teaching high school English, where she got to spend her days with the age group she loved most--teenagers. She taught for many years at Daniel Boone High School, in Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, where she eventually chaired the English department. After she retired, she continued teaching reading and English. She was leaving the business school class she'd just taught when she had a massive stroke on March 26, 1984; she lived for five-and-a-half more years, requiring round-the-clock care, but never losing her sense of humor and or her love affair with cigarettes.

I found a letter she'd written for her funeral in a drawer the day she died. About the young people she so admired, she wrote: "Teenagers are great sources of joy, but most people don't know that. They should take time out to discover this."

One paragraph from her letter stays present across the years, the last sentence so compelling that we made it the epitaph on her gravestone:

My big fight with our society has been against bigotry. It is unfortunately pandemic. I wish I had had a magic formula for eradicating it. I didn't, but I do think I raised people's consciousness about it. So we're different from each other. Good! Let's learn about the differences. They're fascinating. At least I've found them so. This is my legacy:

Love each other despite differences and because of them.

And now my mother's letter in full, which my cousin read at her funeral:

1989 

Dear Family & Friends,

I hope this is not a sad day for you. If I were with you, I would not shed one tear. I would, instead, say that I am glad for her. This is what she wanted and she finally got it. One can live too long and I think I did. When I could no longer work, I felt no need to go on. Life seemed pointless and endless, let alone empty.

My children and grandchildren have been a great source of joy to me. They are beautiful people and should be treated like fine crystal. These are the true values in life. The rest is all hogwash. Along with them were my students. I hope they knew how much I loved them and how I profited from knowing them. Teenagers are great sources of joy, but most people don’t know that. They should take time out to discover this.

Grieve appropriately but not too much. Just be glad we knew each other.

My big fight with our society has been against bigotry. It is unfortunately pandemic. I wish I had had a magic formula for eradicating it. I didn’t, but I do think I raised people’s consciousness about it. So we’re different from each other. Good! Let’s learn about the differences. They’re fascinating. At least I’ve found them so. This is my legacy. Love each other despite differences and because of them.

Let’s not have any more wars. They seem never to solve anything. All they do is make a shortage of men for our beautiful young ladies. O.K., I think I’ve said it all!! Make love, not war, grow and understand. Be happy today and in the future. I wish you all well. I’ve had the best of it—my children, my friends. I owe you all a great deal. I hope I’ve been a good friend to you—I wanted to be.

If I’m in Pottstown, I’m happy. It’s where I wanted to be. It’s not Paradise but it’s been home to me for over 40 years. Brooklyn is where my heart has been.

Your confidences were always safe with me as I’m sure mine were with you. OK—get it over with. Do not cry. I’m relieved—truly. Please respect my things, my books, my art, my collections. I enjoyed them. I hope you do too.

                               Ethel A. Lipnack

 

PS. Try to find an alternative to nursing homes. To do this, you’ll have to take the profit out of them. They’re horrors in their present state. People are segregated by age and they have very little in common. I have found them a terrible home. I’ve done the best I could but that’s not good enough. Had I been in this last mausoleum much longer, I would have gone mad.

"What does December look like for you?"

Is there a good way to respond to this email that came this morning? I've got one. It's in the same vein as my responses to the telephone calls Jeff continues to get.

The email:

Jeffrey:

I hope this email finds you doing well.  My name is Jonathan XYZ, and I represent UNKNOWN REAL ESTATE COMPANY.  I am a commercial real estate advisor specializing in the central 128 Market.  My team helps groups like yours with market analysis, financial analysis, lease negotiation, early lease work, and many other helpful services.  

In any event, we would be happy to provide a market overview, and answer any questions relating to your organization’s particular real estate situation.  What does December look like for you?

The response I'd like to send.

Dear Jonathan:

I hope this email finds *you* doing well. My December? Well, kinda grim.

How about yours?

Oh, hell. I'll just send a link to this post.

 

 

 

 

The news ricocheted off the walls

I was sixteen, a junior at George School, on this day in 1963. Many years ago, I captured my memories in "The K.O.B," a short story about those initial moments of the first of five deaths that rocked our staid school over five months. 

My roommate Robin edged me in the back with her three-ring binder, the signal that a note was on the floor. I slid the message forward with my foot until it was angled between my loafers. Pretending to scratch my ankle, I reached down to pick it up.

“Qu’est-ce qu’il se passe la-bas?” It was hard enough to concentrate in French class; we both had noticed the strange ruckus outside the Language Building.

Normally, no one circulated on campus during classes but not today. The history teacher, who’d raced up to the circle in front of Main Building in his Plymouth, threw open the car door, then leaned back in, appearing to be fiddling with his car radio. The identical red-headed twins of the school treasurer raced down the Main steps and veered off into the Faculty Lounge where students were forbidden. A Corvair pulled up behind the Plymouth, the Latin teacher jumped out, yelled to the history teacher, and they both ran into Main Building.

“Mademoiselle, s’il vous plait, quel jour est-il?” Miss Rhodesia, dull as ever in a brown-plaid shirtwaist that looked like it came from the Salvation Army, nodded her head with each syllable.

“Aujourd’hui, c’est vendredi, Madame, vendredi, le vingt-deux du Novembre.” I sputtered over the sequence. 

“No, no du. Pas de du. No, no, encore, no. Vous ne m’ecoutez jamais!” 

By the dismissal bell, no one was listening to her. The whole class bounded into the hallway.

First came Linda's cry. “The President’s been shot.” She was running toward Robin and me. 

“The President?” 

“The President. The President. The President, President Kennedy.”

News ricocheted off the walls, an echo chamber for fragments of information.

“Hey, Miss Robertson won’t call class off!”

“You’d better get to Russian!”

“Russian’s cancelled!” 

“What about Religion?”

The three of us joined the rush for Main Building and the school’s only TV.

 

And remembering my two roommates

Robin Smith (1947-1989), George School graduation, 1965

 

Linda Brice Russell Haber (1948-2003), with Meg Turner, George School hockey game, 1964

 

 

The Golden Doris

Waiting now for the full obit that recognizes her achievements and her vast body of work, news from London today via a few paragrafs in the NY Times just now: Doris Lessing is dead at 94. If you haven't seen the video of her learning that she'd won the Nobel in Literature at 87, you must watch this. Clearly, her life was not about the glory. 

Talking with reporters at her house after learning she'd won The Prize
(Shaun Curry/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images, thanks!)

A crappy bronco ride on a chipped pony: Advice for Liz's friend

"I'm writing for some advice," the note from Liz began. "My friend L is now at the end of the road; likely to die within a few days.  Her husband, J, is facing the quiet of the house without her so soon, and I'm wondering what (if anything) your amazing friends offered in those first days post-death that may have been either comforting/helpful or really off key (so I can do some things and avoid other things)...All advice most gratefully accepted."  

I met Liz when my husband was dying. "I'm an amateur oncologist," she said, by way of introducing herself. I noticed her silver bracelets (I don't leave home without them) and laughed at the same line I'd been using. If you're paying attention when people you love are dying, you learn a lot very fast about drugs and blood tests and tumor markers, in our case, the CA 19-9, whose rises and falls you watch like the weather.

I hadn't heard anything new about L for a while until the night before last when I got Liz's note and so we spoke.

She’s right, by the way. I do have “amazing friends,” who have known when to drop by (once late on a bad Saturday night), what to say when they called (“can I bring lunch over?”), how to help me empty the drawers of Jeff’s study (“let’s just put all this in a box labeled ‘later’”).

I offer this in the spirit of "this is what worked for me." There are no prescriptions for grief. They all must be custom compounded in our own weird laboratories of survival and any advice that comes with musts or have-tos or don'ts should be returned to sender at about twice the velocity it was delivered. At least in my experience.

Here's what I said to Liz:

Clean out: I had all of Jeff’s belongings removed from our room the day he died, kindly engineered by a friend of my daughter’s, who also stayed with me off and on in the months following. Nothing was thrown out; everything was neatly folded and put in plastic boxes. Even the items on his bureau were removed. For some people, seeing these things might be comforting but there was so much of Jeff everywhere in the house that having less in the bedroom made the minute-by-minute a bit less raucous. It took much longer (more than a year) to completely dismantle his study but that room was not on my regular route around the house.

Phone it in to the funeral home: Our friend Tom went to the funeral home with me a few hours after Jeff died to make “arrangements.” In retrospect, I should have insisted on having this meeting on the phone. I remember having to wait an agonizingly long time in the pale carpeted halls of the funeral “home” for the funeral “director” because he had “a customer,” which is what I thought I was, but because we were going for a simple “package”—no limos or hearses to drive the single mile from the Unitarian Church to the cemetery—he treated us more like people at the bargain bin in the basement. (In retrospect, I forgot to tell this to Liz. Bottom line: engage with the funeral people via conference call if at all possible, alternatively, as briefly as possible.) 

Tell a bedtime story: My kids did something unexpected, spontaneous, and very soothing that first night. They came into what had been just a few hours earlier our but what was now my room, sat on the bed, talked, then stayed until I fell asleep. Granted, they’re adults so you might expect such a thing, but I didn't and still can't quite believe it. It was their dad who’d just died in that very room, in that very bed. It was their incalculable loss and they had the generosity and maturity to realize what such a night might present after thirty-nine years of marriage. 

Get out of Dodge: We all left just a few days after the funeral, my younger daughter back to work at an artist residency that she was running that summer, the rest of us to New York, where my older daughter, son-in-law, and grandkids live. From there we went really away for about ten days. I think. I can’t remember how long it was. We went somewhere exotic, to an island I’d never heard of in the Caribbean, one that was too expensive, of course, to a rental with a pool and a cook and lots of gates on the doors and windows. I had my own room in a wing off the kitchen, which was good because I was able to cry and not feel as if I would disturb the kids more than they already were disturbed. I tried to write but that was futile. We swam, ate, and watched movies. I worried about the twins, who were not yet two, cracking their heads on the tile floor. I remember the looks on the faces of the cook and her sister when I defined “just” in regard to when my husband had died. Takeaway: go away if you can. Not for a “vacation,” because you can’t really enjoy anything, but for a transition. We might have done just as well in a rented house in the Berkshires but in retrospect I think being in such unfamiliar surroundings was a very good thing. Everything was going to be different and this was a good way to make that palpable. Even the food was unfamiliar.

“It gets better:” My son-in-law’s mother, whose husband died swiftly of a vicious cancer when her boys were eleven and fourteen, said these three simple words as she was leaving my house the night of the funeral. I so hoped she was right because the beginning is a crappy bronco ride on a chipped pony with some mean critter continuing to stuff quarters into the coin box. Which reminds me of something my older daughter said “at the beginning,” when I referred to “the beginning,” perhaps a month after Jeff died. “Mom, the beginning is going to go on for a long time. The first few years are going to be the beginning.” After decades of marriage, the beginning is still going on, thus, as usual, she was right. As was her mother-in-law.

It also can get worse: As the months wear on, the crowds die down and the weekends loom. We talked about this a lot in our grief group. I’ve told this story elsewhere, the value of sitting with the same nine people, all of whom had lost mates around the same time, in a safe setting every week. Did our group go on for six weeks? Or six months? Or was it a year? Did we meet every week or every month? I can’t remember now but with that group—Barbara, Doug, James, Jim, Susanne, Mary Ann, Margaret, and Dagmar, led by Sue—the weird torques of reality that ached like slivers of glass in the soul seemed normal. What to do on a Sunday. How to fill a Saturday. Whether to sell the house, a question we all raised at about the same meeting, a confrontation with the way life has been that hit us all at about four months, the same time for me that the near-nightly dinner invitations died down.

“You’ll learn things about yourself you never knew:” Marianne has “lost” two husbands, one suddenly when she had three small children, the other slowly after she and her new husband had brilliantly blended their families, leaving her with six. Others have written about this use of the word “lost,” as if you went into the woods together and one of you wandered off, never to be found again. Or like you misplaced your keys. Permanently. It’s like that. Marianne asked me out to dinner about six weeks after Jeff died and offered this advice. I thought she meant I’d learn things right then. Immediately. The only thing I’d learned up to that point was that my hearing was attuned to every movement Jeff made in the house. He was a very quiet partner, actually, soft on the stairs, not the type who banged around in the kitchen. He never even watched a football game (though he would hunch forward watching his young hero Bode Miller, who skied on the same mountain that Jeff loved more than any, Cannon, and made the occasional cheer for him).

As time has passed, Marianne’s advice has proved true. I have learned to climb out of all the gender related traps that we’d fallen into—being willing to part with money for help with things I don’t like, for example, such as climbing a ladder to clean gutters. So that’s one of a string of very obvious things, superficial even. As I write this, I realize that I can’t put words to what those other things are right here and right now but I know the deep interior of me has different contours than its architecture of nearly two and a half years ago. Death grows you too.

 

"Ducking Grief"

I just wrote a long post re: this haunting column in today's NY Times by K.A. Ledding about the suicide of her teenage daughter and, as I was writing the last sentence, the screen went blank. I leave it to readers to interpret. Having had this happen in the past, I'm prone to ascribe all kinds of meaning -- and to try to reconstruct a complicated piece.

Just this for now: I hesitate to write about grief at all for reasons the author of the Times piece clarifies: This column explains why there are a lot of people studying the nutritional content of canned goods in grocery stores.

That which is unsaid is often what the griever needs to hear most: the hug, the nod, the wordless walk on a path the dead person loved, shawls--one made by hand, a floral arrangement sent by a child on an important date.

Asking *how* someone is doing is not that helpful. And as we used to say in the (RIP) newspaper biz...

-30-

Lindy Hess changed our lives and those of so many others

It was 3 AM and I woke, cold, which, given the heat of the past weeks, seemed impossible. None of my tricks for getting back to sleep were working so I engaged in the one activity that we now know is the worst, reading on a screen where, as usual, I went straight to the obits. There Katie Hafner's extremely sad one about Lindy Hess, who ran the Columbia Publishing Course.

Photo by Lilian Kemp swiped from NYT obit and how Lindy looked when we met her (thanks)

We met Lindy in 1981 on the very day Reagan was being sworn in as president and the hostages were released in Iran. About nine months earlier, Jeff Stamps and I had sold Networking, our first joint book to Methuen, the British publisher, which was starting up an American list (for the publishing historians, Fred Jordan, for many years of Grove Press, was the publisher of this effort). The sale was thanks to Ron Bernstein, our agent at the time. But not long after we'd signed the contract, Ron called to say that Methuen's parent company in the UK had decided to cancel its plans to publish an American list. He was reassuring that he could sell the book again, which he did in very short order at a bit more than twice the original advance to...

Lindy Hess at Doubleday. It was a good break for people bringing out their first book with a major publisher. Lindy knew what she was doing. At 31, she was such a pro that the venerated old house had given her control of an imprint (Doubleday Dolphin). Because she appeared to be so knowledgeable and clearly was very talented and because we'd done the deal on the phone without meeting face-to-face, I thought she'd be much older than I. Instead, when we went to the swanky building on, was it Park Avenue, we were greeted by a woman three years younger with shoulder-length hair held back by a, was it velvet, headband that she removed and reinserted every few minutes. We talked in her office for a while about what was ahead in the process, mentioned that "Jackie Onassis" was now an editor at Doubleday, described her as "very nice" and "hard-working," and shortly thereafter asked if I needed to use the ladies room.

We went together and, as we stood in front of the mirror fidgeting with our hair after peeing -- isn't that part of the ritual: pee, wash your hands, fuss with your hair? -- she said I looked "elegant." I was wearing a long-sleeved ivory silk blouse with a self-tie that I'd borrowed from my friend-neighbor Emily, a dark-blue, knee-length wool skirt with two unusual pleats and one pocket that was stitched not quite right (I'd gotten it at a designer-discount shop) causing me to fuss with *it* constantly, and the most expensive pair of tall boots I'd ever bought, then about five years old. It felt like quite a compliment standing with "my editor" in Manhattan.

Things went well. Lindy liked the book and, when we made a most unusual proposal, she was game, a story I told here about four years ago. We were, how do you say, computer-savvy early on and thus had the ability to write, edit, and create the files for typesetting the book electronically. Doubleday had never done this but Lindy's response was enthusiastic. She inquired around to make sure it would work; she got a positive response; and she gave us a second contract for the typesetting, which, by today's standards, was a GIANT KLUDGE. We wrote the book on a Wang 2200, whose files were then converted by Typesetting Service in Providence, RI, that had a Digital PDP-11 and which could then output and paste-up pages in the format and design that Doubleday specified. It was the first time Doubleday had ever done a book this way and it worked. (The only thing that went wrong was that the FedEx truck delivering the final paste-ups had an accident on the West Side Drive in NY!)

Shortly after the book was published (my memory is that it was only weeks), Lindy left Doubleday and, if I've got this right, moved to Boston, and not long thereafter married her husband Bill Appleton. I was happy for her and sad that our acquisition editor had orphaned our book. A very nice guy took over -- Gerry Helferich -- who later went on to work at Wiley (a later publisher of Jeff's and my books) and who now writes his own books.

We saw Lindy a few times after she moved to Boston, us visting her house, she visting ours, but as time went on, we lost touch. Then about five years ago, David Miller of Garamond Agency, a new agent whom we worked with for a while, told us he was going to teach at the Columbia Publishing Course, which led to a discussion of the program and, alas, that's where Lindy had ended up, spending 25 years making that program and many of its graduates extremely successful.

Once you've been published, you can never be unpublished. There have been other people who have come along in the years since Lindy published Networking, people whose work has made a very big difference in Jeff's and my writing careers but Lindy was the first book publisher and I'd give anything at this moment to see her take that headband out and put it back in.

 

 

 

Restorative justice with The Dialogue Project

About six weeks ago, I received an email with the subject line "Interest...:"

Good morning Jessica!

I was wondering if you do invited talks on working virtually?

I’m running an event for a senior team at [a well known European company] with whom I have a long standing relationship.

My expertise is in dialogue and perhaps we could consider doing an interview with you to close a two day session in late January? Or maybe you’d prefer to do a talk, in person or virtually!

Do let me know if it’s worth us having a chat on Skype or something about this.

By the way – I read your writing about Jeff on your blog and found it incredibly moving and eloquent. Thank you.

Yours,

Karl James
Director
The Dialogue Project
20 Temple Sheen Road
London
SW14 7QG
+44 (0) 20 8878 0929
Twitter: @2plus2makes5

What ensued were a couple of conversations during which Karl explained the engagement and we developed the kind of rapport one does with like-minded people whom you meet only over Skype or on the phone. I sent him an essay I'd written about New Zealand; he sent me a link to an extraordinary radio program he's done for Radio 4 in the UK, which airs today.

Listen to "A Different Kind of Justice." Keep yourself busy while listening in whatever way makes you comfortable but you don't want to miss this. Karl (by the way, also a theatre director, for example, Malvolio at the New Victory Theatre in New York right now) brings two people into conversation. And what ensues is remarkable. He should teach us all how to do it.

And, yes, I accepted the invitation, which turned out to have many unexpected gifts attached.

 

 

For the Newtown Network: The measure of a single death

I went to high school in a different Newtown (Pennsylvania). During my junior year, five sudden deaths cracked our confidence that tomorrow wouldn't be more horrific than today. The explosion of extinction was impossible to comprehend in our bucolic, privileged boarding-school world.

In November, President Kennedy was assassinated.

Three weeks later, my close friend Katie's mother died of a brain hemorrhage.

Eight weeks after that, my father died of a massive heart attack.

A month after that, the school librarian committed suicide.

A week after that, the 28-year-old wife of our favorite teacher also died of a brain hemorrhage.

In our 16-year-old way, we cleverly covered our bottomless grief with sarcasm, irony, and humor. I returned from my father's funeral to find a note that Katie had left on my pillow.

"Welcome to The Club," it said, inviting me to join her and her roommate, Lee, whose father had committed suicide a few years earlier, in a cynical game: We would ferret out the parental status of every student and give awards for people with the worst family situation--like the boy whose parents died and whose adoptive parents then got divorced. We "presented" the accolades secretly, of course, because those not in The Club didn't understand our pathetic, yet for us, life-sustaining "research." We named the school librarian "President-in-Absentia" of The Club.

Oh. I almost forgot. In June of that year, the three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi. The younger brother of one of them became a lifelong friend when he and I, and the following year, Katie, all went to Antioch College.

Nearly half a century has gone by since the founding of The Club and I still think about that string of deaths, especially my father's, almost every day.

It made me a first-responder to grief, showing up when friends have had to face the ultimate disappearing act, which I thought would make it easier when I had to confront the monumental loss of my husband, Jeff Stamps, eighteen months ago. I knew about death, I thought. I understood its dimensions, its contours, what to expect. I didn't. Each death leads into its own labyrinth of grief and I've had moments when I've thought I'd never find my way out.

Yet Jeff's death was so different from that string of deaths -- and the unspeakable agony of last Friday in Connecticut's Newtown--that it's nearly impossible to label them all as "death." Jeff's death was anticipated, not sudden, natural in the sense that it was cancer, not brain hemorrhages or suicides or, it's so hard to even type, the gunning down of little bundles of potential and joy, six and seven-year-olds (and the six adults, we can't forget them) who only went to school, not Mississippi.

Yet...and this is the reason for this post...the lifelong effect of these deaths, all of these deaths, can't be captured in a blog post or a memoir or a church service like the one I went to yesterday where the minister (like President Obama last night) read the names of all who died.

Living through the grief is a moment by moment thing, especially at the beginning, when those who survive are only barely present, only barely eating, only barely sleeping. It's a bit like they way people describe an Everest climb, I think -- after great struggle, you make it to base camp and think you can breathe, then have to drop down to catch your breath. You try to ascend again, then have to drop down even lower, gasping, thinking you'll never really breathe again.

People, trying to help, say stupid things to you like "it takes time" but the time-taking is precisely what is so excruciating. Here I'm reporting on my most recent experience. The beginning was indescribable, really, even if I appeared to be functioning, going to meetings, working, giving presentations. But when I was alone... I'll leave it there for now.

All of our hearts are in splinters for the families and friends of the murdered in Newtown--and there are some of us, too many of us, who know how long, steep, arduous, and sometimes hopeless the journey ahead is for the survivors. We, those of us not directly connected to Newtown, will remember but the magnitude of what's happened there is beyond measure for the families. Just one death, just five were gargantuan and everlasting.

As so many before me have said, you never get over such loss; you just get a bit more used to it. But that takes a very very very long time.

Don't leave them alone. Not now. Not a year from now. Not ever.

 

 

 

More from "A Dangerous Experiment" on Lybbaverse

Lybba, the "do good, be well" nonprofit founded by Jesse Dylan, is a groundbreaker. Its vision is to build an "open-source health and learning network offering a model of personalized medicine that is scalable, affordable, and broadly available." I had the chance to work with them two years ago and was mightily impressed by their approach and reach.

Recently, Bruna Mori, managing editor of Lybbaverse, the organization's blog, asked me to contribute a portion of Jeff Stamps's memoir about his dying, "A Dangerous Experiment." You can read that excerpt, from the beginning of the memoir and never before published, here.

Thanks, Bruna, and David Fore, Lybba's executive director, who made this happen.