Life as I have known it

for Karen B. Hunter
Nov 23. 1951 - Sept. 2. 2005

A close friend said to me, "Life as I have known it, does not exist anymore."

I have understood that phrase since Sept. 2, 2005 at 9:15pm.

To be more precise, I got the call on Sept. 3. at 10am, that Karen's plane crashed. But, all night I had been wondering why the hell I hadn't been hearing from her and I had left a ton of messages on her machine. So, part of me knew something was wrong. I didn't sleep and neither did my cats. When I got the call, Larry just looked at me like, "It's THAT. THAT. I thought so." I went into automatic mode, was on the phone with all sorts of people, sorting through papers, and then more of her friends came over and they sorted through papers. The family wanted all of her records at the funeral. Nice people. At some point, I stopped doing anything and a friend's dog and I just communed. I wanted someone to mix me a drink and just go sit on the deck. But, I stayed in the middle -- I doled out some things to some of her friends before the beastly family got there. When I got back to my apartment -- Larry and I curled up, and Henry leaned on me. We were in shock -- what one of my friends calls "God's novacaine." Henry just knew something very very bad had happened, but not what. All he wanted to do was make me comfortable.

The next day, when I got to the apartment, the family was already there, arguing over who got which of her books. I was late because I had to buy a suit for the funeral. I wasn't showing up to her funeral looking like a mess, she wouldn't have it. They laughed at me. Clearly, they had come ready to bargain with me over a price tag. "What did I want?" All of Karen's girlfriends had taken her to the cleaners. I explained that I just wanted to help. Really. They were cynical. They pressed on about how the most important person was her daughter who SUFFERS IN SILENCE. My best friend, who was with me, looked at me as if to say, "Can I sock them in the face, NOW?" I told her not to. I was going to really suffer in silence because that's how I pretended I was raised. Or maybe I was. I don't remember. Somewhere between Hebrew School, a lot of Romantic and Existential literature, core philosophy classes and your standard Verdi repertoire, I'd developed a code of honor. These fools could say what they wanted. They weren't going to get to me. I didn't need their money or their pity. They would either learn who I was or not, but I was not going to fight with them as they were Karen's family and I wanted to be able to attend her funeral and I would accord them the respect necessary to do so.

And that's when life had started to really change. When I had started to sing private arias in silence in order to gain the smallest tokens of what were due to me. Of course I should have been able to go to Karen's funeral. But, I wasn't certain they would let me go. And I don't know what they did with her ashes to this day. I never saw her body, and in the back of my mind, there is always this part of me that wonders if they wisked her away alive and hid her from the world. I'll never know for certain. Nobody who knew Karen will believe that any government document, including a death certificate, cannot be forged. Of course, I accept what is standard common knowledge. But, when you have come into an apartment of a person you cared for, to find her brother and sister arguing over a copy of Freakanomics and later, her daughter and sister discussing a job interview as they are looking for clothes to dress her body in, you kind of wonder what's really going on.

I'm sure they found me just as odd. I'm sure what they were doing was just a defense mechanism for the pain -- a result of God's Novocaine. I'm sure later, they broke down and that, like for me, only now are more memories, especially the best ones, beginning to really come back. I guess I just wish they had been a little more reserved like I wished they had dressed for the funeral. If not for Karen's sake, for the sake of her friends. Call me the boorish lower middle class. There are some places where tradition exists because it provides a certain amount of comfort. At least, it would have, for me. My apologies. I just couldn't handle the striped shirt and plaid jacket on her brother and the tight white shirt and cords on her nephew and the gold shoes on her daughter. It wasn't proper. I begged my uncle for money for a suit. You just don't do things like that. You just don't. I wore a suit, I tore the collar, as we do according to Jewish tradition. My friends came to support me and they dressed.

Since that day, I have fallen into a space where I am continually astonished by the capacity for humans to hurt one another. It's as if I fell into a zone in which
1) I can assume that I am allowed nothing
2) I can assume that people will not CONSIDER MY NEEDS AT ALL

Some of this is just the result of being thrown back into the economy without being part of a "we". I didn't depend on Karen, at all economically, but we did do things together and I had a kind of feeling that I wasn't alone, at least. I certainly depended on Karen emotionally and she did me and it was wonderful to have someone you could rely on. And we had love, that incredible thing that makes you more you than you ever knew.

This is an economy that kills love. That's why it was so important in 1984 for Winston Smith to be in a relationship and for that relationship to be broken by "Big Brother". In this economy, we are asked to be so brutal to each other -- to not understand when our own friends are in trouble because we can't afford to lose our jobs -- that we can't fully love. At least, we can't fully love everyone we want to. And love becomes a different thing. I know that people have looked at marriage as a business for centuries, but that doesn't exclude the possibility of love. With time shrinking and people singing more and more private arias, who has the prospect of loving, where?

Karen and I went to see Verdi's Otellotogether and she thought it was so important that the Iago had been given a motivation for what he had done -- it made what he had done so human. (I know, I know, she was a psychologist -- but it's still a brilliant point.)In it's simplest sense, Otello tells the story of a beautiful young Italian girl who falls in love with a War hero who happens to be a person of color. In the Shakespeare, Iago, his ensign drives him mad with jealousy, telling him that his wife is cheating on him with Cassio, and later providing him with false evidence, quite brilliantly and he kills Desdemona. The play is a test case in how a person can be slowly convinced by his own ability to be jealous to hurt the one person he loves most. In the opera, Iago does this because he was passed over for a promotion and because he is generally cynical about human nature -- he is a man full of bitterness, not unlike those in his contemperary audience, perhaps.

I remember how shocked she was by the simple brutality in the staging -- just Ben Heppner's (as Otello)throwing down of a paper on the floor in a harsh fashion with Desdemona in the room. She hated brutality and was really sensitive to it. She loved light and especially glass that picked up light. She had this big yellow glass plate that looked like a sun.

So, now we are a world of Iago's, Otello's and Desdemona's. And some of us are bystanders like those in the play or the opera. And in being so, there is the possibility for change. Life is no longer the way it was. Then it must become something else. It cannot be this. I know that I am no war hero. I have encouraged no one to murder. And I seem to be still breathing. Yeah, I've been nearly choked to death and so have some of my friends. We've survived some pretty hideous places and we're in some now. But, we're not dead. We can still get away, we just have to plot how. So, they and I are bystanders.
Or audience. They and I have a choice. For once, there's an advantage to having not been given the leading role.

I'll be shopping for a lot of pretty glass this fall and thinking.