Endless Knots

Repost of July 10, 2011 post: Mo(u)rning has broken

Strange things happen in blogland. Trying to fix a broken link earlier today on this post, originally written on July 10, 2011, it reposted as if it were written today. It wasn't. But it's still true:

 

Today marks 30 days, the traditional grieving period for widows in Judaism. In Islam, it appears to be four lunar months and 10 days. I watched my beloved Tibetan Buddhist friend recite prayers (puja) for 49 days after her husband's death (a year ago tomorow), the time it takes for the person to pass through one of the six "bardos," the transitions between life and death... and life. I'm keeping track of that marker too because of Jeff's deep interest in Tibetan Buddhism.

None of this means that grieving is over. Having lost a fair number of people since I was very young, I know the sneak properties of grief, how just when you think it's not going to grab you by the throat again, it does, how seemingly insignificant things can trigger it, how anniversaries and big events and chance remarks and maybe even a chocolate brownie can set it off.

Still that initial period of becoming accustomed to the altered universe -- the absence -- has a way of shedding its shock value and that's where I am.

My old blog readers are aware that I've posted practically nothing in the past few months. While I've continued working through this whole period - including some novel and interesting projects, I've lacked the urge to post, my mind consumed with what was ahead and what was happening right then, particularly in the last six weeks of Jeff's life.

So I offer this post as a gate to the next phase and a return to the many topics I've felt compelled to cover in the past four years.

And I can't get this hymn out of my mind, performed by one of Jeff's favorite artists, Judy Collins. Though the words don't all reflect what I'm feeling, mo(u)rning has broken.  

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.

The branches of coincidence during the "anniversary"

Yesterday marked three years since Jeff died, which we spent together, indulging in massages, and eating his favorite meal.

"You're here because it's Dadpa's birthday," either Lake or Finn said when I arrived.

"It's not his birthday," the other said. "After you die, your birthday is called your anniversary."

It was so clever that it wasn't worth "correcting." Right. Forevermore, June 11 is Dadpa's anniversary.

A few hours later and quite out of the blue, I received an email from our neighbor Eleanor Rubin, an artist whose work we loved (we bought several pieces) and whom I only have seen occasionally over the years and not at all in the last three:

Hello, Jessica

It is impulsive of me to send a note and say hello.  I hope my note does not feel intrusive.  I think of you often and miss seeing you both.

Today, reading a book called " The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge," I came across an image of an "OrgScope by Jeffrey Stamp."  It made me remember a day, (must have been '11) when I met Jeffrey out walking his dog and he told me of his diagnosis.  I'm sure my response was inadequate but the moment is etched in my memory. I wished then as I wish now that I'd known how to respond fully.  Jeffrey seemed so much himself and yet I doubted that I'd ever see him again.  And I never did...

And then I remembered that about two years ago, I received a permission request from Manuel Lima, asking for permission to include a picture of OrgScope in this book on "visualizing branches of knowledge." And that I'd blogged one of Manuel's very clear talks here.

 

Explain to me why my neighbor wrote yesterday. Explain, please.

Maya, who lived in Stamps, Arkansas

When people die, their good can inflate to fill the sky, fill the screens, and so they are everywhere for a few days. Which is how we've been learning so much about Maya Angelou this past week, how the glorious tribute from her son, Guy Johnson, also a writer, is in many links. He said the kind of thing you might hear from a child in a eulogy but in this case he said it while she could still hear it: How was it growing up in your mother's shadow, Oprah asked? I grew up in her light, he said.

His tribute matters most but the others are remarkable too, including "Maya and Me and Maya" by Charles Blow in the May 28, 2014, NY Times. "The news of Maya Angelou’s death arrived with the abruptness of a great twister — violent, without warning, tearing things up and flipping things over." And that's just his lede.

 

It got me started on a search for Stamps, Arkansas. Stamps, as in my children's last name, as in my late husband's. Late? As if he's just behind schedule?

 

Charles Blow was from a small town about 50 miles from Stamps, which was where Maya Angelou (née Marguerite Annie Johnson) lived with her grandmother from the age of three to seven and again a few years later during the period when she did not speak (rendered mute after being raped at age 8 by her mother's boyfriend who was subsequently murdered--"[a] breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart," she wrote, none of which should be in parenthesis).

 

So I looked Stamps up and, yes, the Stamps for whom that little town (pop. ~2000) is named is descended from Thomas Stampe, who arrived in Jamestown, VA, in 1635 from Oxfordshire, England, the same ancestor of said husband and those children.

 

In any precise mapping, it's not really a connection at all but it's the way my mind works, always searching for another anchor, another way to tie everything to everything. And so in the subtle world, where faint lines reach across generations, across boundaries, in the vessel that contains all that is and was, a hamlet in Arkansas connects my daughters, their cousins, my grandsons, my in-laws to Maya too.

 

A distant cousin (someone with a genealogical bent could do the math) likely knew of Maya's grandmother in Stamps, extrapolating from this line in I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings:

 

Early in the century, Momma (we soon stopped calling her Grandmother) sold lunches to the sawmen in the lumberyard and the seedmen at the cotton gin. Her crisp meat pies and cool lemonade, when joined to her miraculous ability to be in two places at the same time assured her business success.

 

The races were segregated and without a lot more research I cannot find the clickable link, the node that connects the Stamps family to her directly, but they breathed the same dust in that corner of Arkansas, just across the Texas and Louisiana borders.

 

 

 

Wheat House is on the market and the Boston Globe likes it

 

 

 

The Samuel Wheat House
399 Waltham Street, West Newton, MA

In about two weeks' time, my house will look like this again. The peonies, which I transplanted from the far edge of the property to the front garden some years ago, always bloom around my birthday, the moment that may be Wheat House's most glorious.

Why Wheat House? Read on. But first: the house is on the market and Boston Globe reporter Eileen McEleney Woods gave it a very nice write-up in Sunday's Globe Magazine. Scroll about halfway down the article and you'll find this description:

PROS Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the Samuel Wheat House, a pre-Revolutionary Georgian built in 1735, exudes warmth: Much of this gambrel, particularly the kitchen, is sunny, five rooms (including two bedrooms) have fireplaces, and the original wide-plank hardwood flooring is golden. Amid all of this history (the dining room was once used as a doctor’s office, and the original doorway, ornate and stately, still graces the front entrance) are modern conveniences, such as the stainless appliances in the kitchen and the sink in a mudroom closet. It’s a five-minute walk to the commuter rail. CONS Take care pulling out of the driveway.

Thank you, Ms. McEleney Woods. It's heartwarming to read such a glowing description of the abode that our family has loved so deeply for so many years.

There are houses that people live in and there are homes that even the one-time visitor remembers. Looking at comments on my Facebook page where I first posted about the house being on the market, I find a number of visitors who were there perhaps once or twice.

• I will miss your house dearly!
• Love your house. 
• The house looks amazing Jessica, I have a lot of fond memories ...
• I have MANY very fond memories of that house, even before you moved in... don' t forget to tell people about the bomb shelter under the back yard!
• I remember that lovely home very well.....and leading the seder at your dining room table during college!
• I will always cherish the first time I went to your home it was wonderful and I love the house.

It's an instant nostalgia machine, a great place for gatherings, and a very easy house to live in. It's also in walking distance of the famed West Newton Cinema, one of Boston's premier movie houses; 10 places to eat including Lumiere, Blue Ribbon, The Local, Shogun, L'Aroma, Comella's, and West Newton Pizza; the commuter rail; the express bus; and at least 45 banks (a new development).

And further to two of the Globe reporter's points: 1. It is indeed sunny because, wisely, those pre-Revolutionary builders knew what solar advocates today seek--it's the only house on the street that faces south (all the rest face east and west); and 2. Yes, when a road is built around a house that went up nearly 200 years before there even were cars, then driveways can be a problem, which is solved by creating a turnaround so you're always facing out.

 

 

Having lived here for so many years, I know every nook and cranny, every detail, like these facts:

• What is now the den has seven doors (to the second floor, to the cellar, to the china cabinet, to the playroom, to the dining room, to the kitchen, and to the passthrough);
• There are four giant linen drawers outside the second-floor laundry (the best place for a laundry);
• There's a plug in the middle of the dining room floor because that's where the doctors who previously lived here had their offices;

 

 

• There's a third floor with a full bath and two bedrooms or studies or studios or whatever you want there that are so far away from the kitchen that it's as if you're in a different building;
• The original horsehair insulation is so good that until it's well over 90 for a few days running you don't even need air conditioning;
• What was the sixth bedroom is now a walk-in closet, making for easy living;
• The closets overall are large, plentiful, and unusually ample for an old house;
• There's a coat closet under the front stairs;
• With six rooms on the ground floor, a hundred people can still circulate at a party;
• The post in the northwest corner of the kitchen is actually a tree trunk;
• The wideboard pine floors (18" and wider) in the former dining room were installed in the early 1800s (you can tell by the nails, one refinisher told me); 

 

 

• The yard in back feels like a secret garden and, once inside, you have no notice of the street; and,

• Bucky Fuller had dinner here on February 10, 1977.

 

It's a treasure and it's hard to part with.

I pulled together a history of the house for use by the real estate agent (this link takes you to all the pictures). There are relatively few houses in the US with this kind of provenance that have survived intact.

The fine condition of the house is a testament to the quality of the materials and the skill of the original builders. In all the years that we owned it, we never had a major repair, just the typical things that householding brings: painting, replacing appliances, the occasional clogged sink. And so, herewith, culled from a variety of historical records, including the Massachusetts Historical Commission's superb compilation of multiple sources, and which I quote extensively here, though without the quote marks as I rewrote it somewhat extensively--thanks MHC!, I offer...

Wheat House, A History

The house at 399 Waltham Street, known as The Samuel Wheat House and named for its first owner, Dr. Samuel Wheat, has been owned by eight families since it was completed in 1735.

Listed in the National Register of Historic Places, this pre-Revolutionary Georgian retains architectural details typical of the period, including a steep gambrel roof and narrow side elevations. Evidence of alteration includes chimney additions and a six-over-six window sash in the 19^th century and such 20^th-century additions as the garage and library in the 1930s, and the sunroom in 1985. Even with these changes, the house remains remarkably intact and is considered to be of major historical significance.

Samuel Wheat and his wife, Hannah, whose gravestone lists her as a “professor of religion,” were reported to have had 17 children. Dr. Wheat, who came to West Newton in 1713, was the village doctor. First one of their sons, Samuel Jr, and also a doctor, and later their daughter, Catherine, who married Capt. Thomas Eustis, owned the house, which eventually was sold at the turn of the 19^th century to the Davis family, perhaps the same people for whom nearby Davis Avenue is named.

Briefly owned by the Woodford family (he was treasurer of Second Church), the house then became the home of Samuel S. Kilburn (a designer and an engraver) and his family, who lived here until the turn of the 20^th century. In 1898, Mrs. Edward Augustus Holyoke Allen, moved into the house with her children, following the death of her husband, who was a first cousin of Nathaniel Allen, who taught at the Allen School on Webster Street, where the educator Horace Mann also taught.

In 1929, the house was sold to the Baker family, who made a number of renovations, including turning the woodshed into the library, adding the mudroom, the garage, and the sun porch, removing the side door on Waltham Street, which is now where the shelves are between the dining room and the den, and planting the gardens, many of which specimens still survive. The Bakers owned the house until 1955, when they sold it to Dr. Nick and Joyce Stahl, who were married in the garden.

Mary and Richard Burack (who was also a doctor) bought the house in 1959, raising their five children here. During their tenure, they removed the old bake oven in the den, built the fireplace and paneling that now surround it, replaced the front sill, replaced clapboards on the front of the house, and built a bomb shelter in the backyard.

They sold the house to authors Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps on April 18, 1972, three months after they were married, and who renewed their vows in the garden in 1986. While previous owners had previously used the current dining room as a doctor’s office (an electrical plug remains in the middle of the room for the former examination table), the new owners converted several bedrooms to studies where they wrote many books, bringing the first computers into the house when they moved in.

They added storm windows and doors, enclosed the sun porch making it a four-season room, opened an interior window between the kitchen and the den, added 220 wiring throughout, removed all the peeling wallpaper, installed first a woodstove and then a fireplace insert in the den, stripped, stained and polished the mantel around the den fireplace, lined the chimney, replaced the roof, added wood flooring to the kitchen, planted the decorative flower and herb garden in the front yard, added the 1868 bell to the front door, installed brass and porcelain locks on the first floor windows, converted one bathroom to a laundry room, converted a half-bath in the mudroom area to a utility sink for gardening, added Italian glass tiles to the half-bath off the dining room, and returned the house to its original color—red.

They raised two daughters here, Miranda, born in 1977, and Eliza, who was born in the house in 1980; held many birthday parties, meetings, and gatherings; hosted many weddings and wedding receptions for friends; and celebrated the publication of many books of their own and for those of friends.

The house is being sold for the first time in 42 years.

 

Leading ourselves via "the lattice"

June Holley, whose insights and methods for establishing and growing networks are in a class of their own, points today to Phanish Puranam's post on the INSEAD blog, "What Bossless Firms Can Teach Us."

Puranam's round-up of companies that have eschewed traditional hierarchy and bureaucracy for more intelligent self-management points to some popular and successful examples: Valve, the Seattle software company where employees vote with their seats for projects they want to work on (no votes, no project); the California tomato processor, Morning Star, that, as Puranam writes "bases its organisation on a sort of mission statement that is negotiated peer-to-peer rather than imposed by a boss, laying out each employee’s tasks and organisational affiliations;" and, the grandparent of them all, W.L. Gore and Associates, which I mentioned here.

 

We (Jeff Stamps and I) stumbled upon W.L. Gore when we were doing research for The TeamNet Factor, our 1993 book. Given all the hoopla about self-governance and jettisoning old authoritarian structures, I'm offering this excerpt which details how Gore has done it all these years. It's simple, sensible, and worth a try, C-Suiters. Good sense can prevail when the agreements, policies, and governance are in place throughout an organization, top-to-bottom. Gore's approach reflects both good organizational design, mutual respect, and a mature approach to how people come to work.

Take a look and see if this makes sense to you, noting Bill Gore's realistic caveats, typically overlooked in the idealistic vision of "leaderless" organizations espoused by people who haven't carefully considered what it takes to make people-working-together work.

From The TeamNet Factor, Chapter 4:

Meet the Lattice: The Free Form Organization That Makes Gore-Tex

Gore-Tex is" a miracle weave in the fabric of the world’s outdoor life." It evaporates sweat while protecting its wearer from the drench of rain. Gore-Tex is a visible, distinctive partner with producers of ski gloves, tents, and clothing of all descriptions. Like Dolby sound, Gore-Tex is known for the special contribution it makes to a wide range of products.

If ever there were a company whose product mirrored its culture, it is W L. Gore & Associates. This lattice textile is made by a lattice organization, a company designed for horizontal interactions where employees are known as “associates.”

In 1982, Inc. magazine runs a cover story on the Newark, Delaware, company best known for its popular product Gore-Tex. Headlined “The Un-manager: Without Ranks and Titles,” the story describes Bill Gore’s “not your average” almost-billion- dollar company. By 1991, the company is among the “400 largest private U.S. Companies.”2

The name “W. L. Gore & Associates” captures the essence of this remarkable enterprise. The design of the company is that of a network. Its core glue is the philosophy of its husband-and-wife founders, Wilbert (“Bill”), who died in 1986, and Genevieve, who remains involved in the company. Business Week features their son Robert in 1990 in an article titled “No Bosses. And Even Leaders Can’t Give Orders.”

The 1982 Inc. story so excites us that we call its author, Lucien Rhodes, who in turn forwards us a poorly typed document with a few handwritten notes on it that Bill Gore has sent him. “The Lattice Organization—A Philosophy of Enterprise” describes the Gore “bureaucracy”:

People group around projects undertaken on the basis of commitment.

The firm’s 5,600 associates (not employees)—now in 46 plants in six countries— have sponsors (not bosses), who serve as their mentors and advocates.

Gore’s projects are boundary crossing teams. “The mathematician, engineer, accountant, machinist, chemist and so on provide a combination of capabilities of a much broader scope than the mere sum of their number. This synergism . . . impels us to join together for mutual benefit.”

STUMP SPEECH TO THE TRIBES

Bill Gore’s paper, written in 1976, was the basis for many talks that he gave over the years to the company’s associates.4 (Which brings us back to the name: everyone who works at W. L. Gore & Associates is an associate.)

It’s not your typical corporate speech. With his ponderous, sometimes mystical tone, Gore sounds more like a 19th-century transcendentalist than the late-2Oth- century entrepreneur that he is. He begins with the “Nature of Man,” the starting point, usually unstated, of every corporate culture. One part of our heritage, he says, comes from hunters and predators with the urge to attack, destroy, loot, vanquish, and overcome competitors. Fortunately, humans evolved new social capabilities that carried the species far beyond this endowment. ‘A further great evolutionary invention is the cooperation of groups made possible by friendship and love.... The tribal group ... combines aggressive capability welded together by emotional interactions.” To Gore, the essence of human nature is co-opetition.

Besides being capable of friendship and love, he says, people are also dreamers. He asks what would happen if people doubled their brain capacity. “If the norm in our society is the utilization of say 10% of our inherent human capabilities, what would be the result if we were able to restructure . . . this to double to 20%?”

People participate in groups because together they can accomplish more than alone, he says. Gore believes accomplishment peaks with about 150 people in the same group. After that, results decline, and it’s time to form another group, a principle that the company puts into practice. Gore breaks plants apart when they exceed 150 to 200 people. This is, roughly, a tribal size, the upper-limit size of groups that people lived in after the invention of language but before the development of agriculture and cities.

When groups pass out of the realm in which everyone knows everyone else, Gore believes “we" quickly translates into “they.” This tiny language signal announces the beginning of turf wars, the identification of enemies, and win-lose maneuvers that eventually bring down even great companies.

THE LATTICE BEHIND THE FACADE

There’s another downside to groups of more than 150 to 200, Gore says. “Beyond some such level, it becomes necessary to impose rules, regulations, procedures and the like that dictate how the cooperation shall be done. Special teams evolve within the lattice structure usually led by someone particularly competent in the discipline or activity of the team. One individual may participate on several such teams and have a leadership role in them. These multi-participant people serve an important liaison function and are often involved ina number of different teams,” Gore says.

To avoid bureaucracy and to reach for that doubling of human capabilities, the company uses the lattice, which has these characteristics:

• No fixed or assigned authority;
• Sponsors, not bosses;
• Natural leadership defined by followership;
• Person-to-person communication;
• Objectives set by those who must make them happen; and
• Tasks and functions organized through commitments.

Leadership “evolves” at the company, according to Daniel D. Johnson, who eventually followed in his former co-worker’s footsteps, leaving Du Pont to join Gore. “You look behind you, and you’ve got people following you.”

In Gore’s view, “Every [successful] organization has a lattice organization that underlies the facade of authoritarian hierarchy. It is through these lattice organizations that things get done. Most of us delight in ‘going around’ the formal procedures and doing things the straightforward and easy way. The legendary subversion of official military procedures by the ‘non-coins’ is an example of this. All astute military leaders utilize this sub rosa lattice.”

For all his unusual ideas, Gore is not a romantic. He doesn’t propose replacing every aspect of hierarchy with lattices because of what he calls obvious difficulties:

• “Stability and long-term constancy require a firm hand at the helm;
• “Decisions must be made. Complete consensus is never achieved;
• “There seems to be some upper limit for which the lattice is effective; and
• “It’s unrealistic for people to set their own salaries."

VOW TO AVOID BUREAUCRACY

“The rest of Corporate America is only beginning to think about how to motivate employees now that there’s a shrinking hierarchy to slot people into,” Joseph Weber says in the 1990 Business Week article. “But Gore, a quirky, family-held plastics company, has never had much of one: It has been experimenting with an almost free-form management structure for 32 years.... Gore isn’t some little countercultural outfit, mind you. By turning a flexible form of DuPont’s Teflon into Gore-Tex, used in fabrics and assorted medical, electronic, and industrial products, the company has grown into a nearly $700 million a year outfit, whose return on assets and equity puts it in the top 5%, whose sales quintupled in 8 years.”

As irony would have it, of course, Gore started his own company because “as a DuPont chemist, he couldn’t get his innovation—Teflon coating for electrical wires—marketed by the big company. When he left, he vowed to avoid stifling bureaucracies, so he tossed out the traditional chain of command for a ‘lattice’ system. In it, any staffer may take an idea or complaint to any other: A machine operator can talk directly with plant leaders.”

In his lattice organization paper, Gore gives DuPont credit for inspiring his “ahead of the time” ideas. “The concept of the lattice originated from my consideration of the operation of ‘Task Forces’ created during the 1950s to carry out research and development within the Du Pont Company. The original ideas have been refined and extended over the past 18 years. The record supports the belief that a lattice organization releases and promotes the creativity of human beings.”

Task forces at DuPont and lattices at Gore are just two expressions of the worldwide, simultaneous, uncoordinated “experiment” with boundary crossing teamnets in the past few decades. 

 

 

"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.

 

 

 

 

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-

Boston Globe endorses John Barros and so do I

In a rare full-page editorial, the Boston Globe today endorses two of the 12 candidates for Boston's preliminary mayoral election next Tues: John Barros and John Connolly. For those not in Boston, this is a run-off to narrow the field to the two candidates who will go head-to-head in November.

If I lived in Boston, my vote would go to John Barros.

I know John very well. I've sat in dozens of meeting with him, have spent many hours talking to him about strategy, have seen him present to large groups and small. John has vision, compassion, and intelligence, and, over the course of the campaign, I've watched his ideas about how to run one of the world's premier cities evolve.

It's very easy to idealize politicians and celebrities, even in this cynical world, and I can easily see John being lionized given his smarts, charm, talent, and good looks. But like all of us, John doesn't walk on water and, when you work as closely as we did (see below), you see "improvement opportunities," things that made me hestiate at first when I heard he was running. As I've watched the campaign (I went to see him talk at a friend's house very early on and fired off a note the next morning with suggestions for how to improve his pitch), I've seen him grow and become more clear about his plans, expand the purview of his concerns beyond education and the Boston Redevelopment Authority, and clarify what he means by "changing the conversation." I think he would make a very good mayor. 

Now, for those of you who don't know him...

Only 40 years old, John has seen a lot. The son of Cape Verdean immigrants, he grew up in the 'hood, went to the private Jesuit school, Boston College High, and Dartmouth, opted out of a career in New York finance in favor of coming home to work in his community. Anyone who's interacted with Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) knows the measure of its work: providing 225 units of permanently affordable housing on its 32 land-trust protected acres in Roxbury; working to create a charter school just a few doors from its office; helping engineer the turnaround of one of the city's most troubled schools; aiding scores of community residents with problems; and winning one of the US Department of Education's treasured Promise Neighborhood grants.

I first met John in 2010 when the Barr Foundation provided a grant to Interaction Institute for Social Change to hire network experts as advisors to three of its projects. Both Jeff Stamps and I were assigned to work with John at DSNI. I'd known about DSNI because I knew its first executive director, Peter Medoff. But I didn't know John until we started working with him. Soon I realized that this was a remarkable person, confident without being arrogant, warm without being fawning, and sought after without becoming a diva (what's a male, a divo?). He also has a great devoted family, including his wife Tchintcia, her siblings, and parents, and their growing family--two little sons and counting. (He once told me that they wanted to see a child in every seat around their large dining room table.)

It was one thing to be an external consultant to John, seeing him every couple of weeks, but after my husband died in June 2011, I was sitting in a meeting with John a few months later and impulsively agreed to be his "executive advisor," a fancy title for helping him with his correspondence and schedule.

Everyone who knows the work I do -- and have done over the years -- thought I was crazy to take this on, i.e. I essentially became his administrative assistant. The job itself was not the point for me. Although I had my usual roster of client engagements -- speeches, trainings, consulting -- I had a lot of time on my hands after Jeff died. Because we'd worked together for our entire lives with our home as our office and our schedules intertwined, I suddenly found myself in our life-long house alone day after day. I needed structure; I needed to see people; I needed a reason to get dressed. Anyone who's been through the death of a spouse understands.

So I took on this part-time job, which provided everything I was looking for, including learning first-hand about the nonprofit world in Boston, making some very good friends, and allowing me to have my Barbara Ehrenreich-like moment (see her book, Nickle and Dimed on her taking on menial jobs to write her book): I got to experience first-hand the difference between being regarded as a "world expert" and being someone's admin. (There are one or two people who've endorsed John whose behavior, I am certain, would have been quite different if they'd "known who I was." :) Another distinguished friend who works at Boston University told me that "most people wouldn't admit" to doing what I did.

Thus, this is how I got to know John -- very up-close. We didn't always agree. I've been working closely with senior executives in large organizations all my life so I had lots of opinions...but in the end (I left after nine months once I got my bearings), I came away knowing that he's a leader and he's a learner. Just right for Boston.

The photo here, courtesy of Travis Watson, shows Jeff and me at a meeting with John in January 2011. John and Jeff had special affection for each other and it's wonderful to be reminded of that in this picture. Thanks, Travis.