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“I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” This famous line from Network came into my head the other day. I think it has to do with change. As I’ve gotten older I know that any change in routine can increase my irritability. I tend to lose things more now, although my wife disputes this and reminds me of keys I lost for almost two years. That also can set me more on edge. I think what is really behind this is the possibility that a major change in our life is coming.

Our sons are grown and live more than an hour from us. We want to see them and their families, but it takes a lot of planning on everyone’s part for this to happen. The decision we are facing is whether to move or to stay in the home we have lived in for 35 years. The thought of moving away from a place I am comfortable in is very difficult. I remember a line from Nikos Kazantzakis “When a man is young, the world is too small. When a man is old, his village is too big.”

My family moved into this town in 1959. I moved away in college. After we were married we lived in a small apartment in Forest Park and then bought a townhouse in Villa Park, IL. We lived there for a few years and then, with proceeds of my mother’s estate, were able to buy a home in Warrenville. My wife was pregnant with our youngest son when we moved in. He will be 35 in a few months and now has his own wife and life.

In 35 years you can accumulate a lot of “stuff” as George Carlin used to say. What should be kept and what can be let go of? Where should we live? How much space do we really need at this time in our lives? I go back and forth with these questions and I know I really don’t want to move/change.

Perhaps this is me just settling. Retirement has been fairly peaceful. I can read and work out and maintain some contacts with people, but I know I’m not really challenging myself. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been thinking that the productive part of my life is over, and now I’m just waiting to die because my usefulness is done. In my mother’s final days she wanted to come back into her home in Warrenville. She had been living in my sister’s home. She was able to come back and die in her own home. In my family most of my relatives died in their homes. My grandfather was one of the first of his generation to be waked in a funeral home rather than the house he lived in.

Morbid thoughts, I know, but very appropriate for a winter’s day. We went and looked at a townhouse a few weeks ago. I suppose it would be possible to live there, but I could feel all of the complaints and criticisms rising as we walked thru it. It is large enough and we wouldn’t be on top of each other, but there is no yard etc,etc.

The reality is that as we get older this house may be more difficult to care for. There is a yard and two furnaces/air-conditioners. The house will probably need a new roof in the next year or so. If it snows, the snow has to be removed. The real bottom line is that we are getting older and may not be able to provide the care the house needs. I am getting older and know that after I do a lot of strenuous physical activity, I can feel it for more than a few days.

I don’t like change. I don’t like disruptions in my daily routine. On my worst days I can see myself as Ebenezer Scrooge yelling at those “damn kids and their music, dress and behavior”. I’m not there yet but I can almost hear myself yelling “Bah Humbug!!”

Carl Whitaker is one of my therapeutic heroes. He was one of the first family therapists. He always believed in trying to connect with people in the here and now. He thought connecting with a family system was one of the best ways to initiate change. He once wrote “Ten Rules to Keep the Therapist Alive”. I would always have a copy available and when I was feeling really burned out I would read them over and over:

   “Relegate every significant other to second place.

Learn how to love. Flirt with any infant available. Unconditional position regard probably isn’t present after the baby is three years old.

Develop a reverence for your own impulses, and be suspicious of your behavioral sequences

Enjoy your mate more than your kids, and be childish with your mate.

Fracture role structures at will and repeatedly.

Learn to retreat and advance from every position you take.

Guard your impotence as one of your most valuable weapons.

Build long-term relations so you can be free to hate safely.

Face the fact that you must grow until you die. Develop a sense of the benign absurdity of life-yours and those around you-and thus learn to transcend the world of experience. If we can abandon our missionary zeal we have less chance of being eaten by cannibals.

Develop your primary-process living. Evolve a joint craziness with someone you are safe with. Structure a professional cuddle group so you won’t abuse your mate with the garbage left over from the day’s work.

As Plato said, “Practice dying.” ”

He also believed that you never stopped growing. Up until the point of his death he was trying new things and challenging himself. Maybe moving into a new town/community might be just the challenge I need. I could still maintain contact with people here, could still see them, could maybe meet new people and just maybe I could do more than just practice dying.

So today I don’t have to stick my head out the window, go all Network and yell at anyone. I just need to keep believing in the positive of change—at least for today.

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It continues to amaze me how the past never dies but continues to live on in different shades, colors, and levels of meaning. My sister called last week and told me she had found an old folder of my mothers. Inside were my father’s Army discharge papers, an old will, and some letters that my grandmother had written . There were also two old love letters from my father. I went over and looked at all of it. The amazing thing about it was that  I began to see both my mother and father in a new way. The letters were from 1936 and 1938. He begins one letter with “Darling” and another with “Beloved”. There is nothing overly salacious in either letter. It is just the way they are written. He was born in 1917 and she was born in 1919. I think they began dating in 1935 or 1936. He was 18 and she was 16. He agrees to go to a dance with her and asks her not to share the letter with her friends (which I’m sure she did). In another letter he is obviously on vacation with his family and wishes he was with her. Both letters are very innocent but the very fact of their youth comes thru. My parents were teen-agers once with all of the stress and strain that goes with that. Dating during that time was somewhat ritualized because of lack of resources. Most dating was done in groups because no one had any money. Thinking of my parents trying to find time alone really does make me think.

They continued to date and, due to the circumstances of the time, he joined the Army before being drafted. He went to Officer Training School and became a lieutenant. He knew he would be going overseas to the war and she agreed to marry him before he left. They were married in 1942 in Seattle and he was sent overseas to the Pacific shortly after. He came back in late 1944 after being wounded and was discharged in late 1945.

There are some pictures of that time of both of them. One of my favorites is where they were caught making out:

I think the war made everyone more open to risks. My mother had probably never been more than 15 miles from the south side of Chicago in her whole life, but she agreed to go thousands of miles away to marry my father before he left. They had been dating 6-7 years. She was 23 and he was 25. They wanted some time together because of the uncertainty of the war. They were so happy to be married that they sent everyone a telegram:

There is another picture shortly after they were married:

It is difficult to think of your parents being intimate and having the same needs and drives as everyone else. I’ve had adolescents make gagging sounds in my office if their parents made any suggestive comments to each other. Young adults can’t picture their parents like that despite the obvious fact of their own conception. I think we all think our romantic sexual life is amazingly individual and no one can really understand or appreciate how we feel. The reality is that the wheel of life continues to turn.

There are some pictures of both of my parents during the time he was overseas. My mother literally began to waste away. She wouldn’t eat and had trouble sleeping. She lost a great deal of weight and everyone was worried about her. My father was in the South Pacific in a very hazardous area. He also looks terrible. When he came back they couldn’t wait to be together again. I was born a little over 9 months after his return.

I think we all think of our parents as old. They are the most powerful people in the world when we are small. As we get older our perceptions change. They become old fashioned, overly concerned. Their beliefs and ideas are ancient and out of touch. I think this whole thing has made me reconsider this. I’m reminded of Mark Twain’s famous quote “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” What astonishes me is that my Dad was 14 once,and 18, and 25. He survived the Depression and the War and tried to make a life. He died young, 48 , and it broke my mother’s heart. She never got over it until her own death 13 years later.

I know there are lots of stories like this, but this is mine and I need to keep remembering it.

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Do relationships ever really end? I don’t think so. Whether a relationship is good or bad, it leaves remnants that go with us forever. These relationships don’t have to be with husbands, wives, lovers or friends. Think about a teacher that has had a lasting influence. How about a childhood friend who you haven’t seen in years? We are all a sum of all the relationships, both good and bad, that we have had. One of my colleagues used to say that whether you liked it or not sooner or later you would hear your mother’s words coming out of your mouth. She was right and I wonder where my mother and her mother got the words. I think the same thing applies to close friends and to lovers. If it’s not their words, a lot of feelings and attitudes and history have gone into making us who we are.

Sometimes when a relationship ends badly I will hear “thank god he/she is out of my life!” Yet I don’t think they are really gone. I remember once I was seeing a woman for years. She had difficulty from childhood abuse and long-term depression. Her husband was very successful but often wasn’t emotionally there for her. She would often talk about her childhood and the abuse she experienced and the amazing effort she made to overcome it. However she never discussed her first marriage. After a number of years working thru many of her issues I brought this up to her. She told me of her issues with trust. She then stopped and a different look came over her face. She began to talk about how this successful older man had literally swept her off of her feet. She was only 20/21 and he was very wealthy. They married and she began a life of leisure. She would spend all day in the sun, the pool, riding horses. One day they went to the movies and he excused himself to go to the washroom. While there he propositioned a child. She discovered that he had a long history as an abuser. She couldn’t handle that and left him. How did a woman with such a terrible history of abuse end up married to an abuser? Why did it take so long for her to talk about this even though it still has repercussions in her present life and with her current marriage? We are not linear beings but vastly complicated organisms with multiple layers to our reality.

There are countless movies and songs about falling in love and lust. From Sinatra to Elvis to Kanye everyone believes they have something new to describe our hormonal attraction and how wonderful it is. I can’t remember how many adolescents and young adults sat in my office over the years telling me that I didn’t understand or just “didn’t get it”. They were either heart broken about the end of a relationship, or angry with their parents for not understanding that this was really true love and their parents shouldn’t be upset that they had snuck out in the middle of the night. I don’t think any of them believed that their parents or I had ever been young and had gone thru the same hurricane of emotions.

Yes there are a lot of songs about “love”, but right now there is not a lot written about long term relationships. I saw a picture today that made me start thinking about this again. Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter were caught kissing each other.

He is 91 and she is 88. They have been married for 69 years and still seem to love each other enough to show simple affection. What is it like to be in a relationship that long? I can’t believe that they never had any disagreements or difficult times. We all do. The image of a river comes into my mind. Sometimes it seems very peaceful and idyllic. Sometimes there are rough and wild patches with rapids and unexpected drops. Sometimes there are floods and sometimes droughts, but the river keeps on until it ends in a larger place. Domeena Renshaw from Loyola used to tell a story about not focusing on the ending so much. She used to say you “missed all the scenery along the way if you do that “. However it’s hard to focus on the scenery with all the distractions and resentments of everyday life. Even the smallest thing can lead to an argument or emotional withdrawal. Right now the buzzword in therapy continues to be mindfulness and practicing focusing on the present. It is hard to do that in a relationship. Romantic love is stressed too much. Commitment is more important. The belief that almost any difficulty can be worked thru if it can be done together is more important. As the river slows down or speeds up or has a stagnant patch, keep believing that if we hold hands, it will move on and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

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Autumn and Fall are such nice words to describe the most beautiful season in Illinois. I love this time of year as most of us do , but it also is a time of dying . Leaves turn a wonderful color and then fall off. The harvest is plentiful, but the corn stalks turn brown and brittle. My son’s dog died on Friday after a devastating illness. It was very sad to see such an active dog waste away. I also recently attended a funeral for my brother-in-laws sister. She was in her 80s and her health had gone steadily downhill over the last few years. The funeral service was a Catholic mass. The ritual was comforting, but the reality of death is ever present.

We are all going to die. You are going to die. I am going to die. What does that mean ? I still struggle with this as most of us do. I know this is the last third of my life and I keep focusing on the positives I have experienced, but the great unknown is still ahead. I wonder how I will be remembered?

In my culture there is always a wake. People come and say the usual comforting words to families and view the body. Some of our family wakes got quite loud and rambunctious. I remember one of our cousins from Ireland passed out in front of my father’s casket. At an uncle’s funeral, the procession to the cemetery got so out of control that people had to drive 70-80 miles an hour just to keep up with the hearse. After the burial there is always the luncheon. Sometimes this can go on for hours with much drinking, talking and remembering. The next day the reality of the loss begins to emerge. The loved one is no longer there and the family has to work thru this.

Customs are different depending on where you live. About 125 years ago in the Midwest, widows had to wear black for an entire year and really couldn’t go out unaccompanied. My grandmother wore black almost daily after my grandfather’s death until the day she died. Visits to cemeteries are quite frequent and emotional the first year. My mother would go almost weekly to visit my father’s grave. After she died we would go out occasionally to clean the headstones but now I cant remember the last time I visited the cemetery my parents are buried in.

How we remember and honor the dead is something that is not talked of much. We are more into the present than the past.. Halloween was originally called All Hallows Eve and the next day, All Saints Day, was the bigger feast. Now we celebrate Halloween where children and adults dress up in costumes, give candy to children, go to parties and even decorate our homes in neo frightful ways. Retailers report that this is one of the biggest holidays in their calendar year. One of my son’s neighbors seems to celebrate Halloween all year long. His garage is filled with monsters and skeletons. He frightens many of the children on the block and no one seems to know much about him. My son said he had some work done there over the summer and he wondered if even the contractors he hired were a little anxious about being around him. Halloween seems to be one of the only times we really think of death, but in a “fun” kind of way.

The Mexican tradition is certainly different. They celebrate the Day of the Dead on November 1^st.   This is a feast which involves actually going out to the cemetery and celebrating the lives of your ancestors. Some families decorate their family graves and even have family dinners around the tombstones.

Cemeteries here are very different. Most of the ones I know are very sad places. I haven’t seen a lot of happy times at the graveyard. There may be some effort to change this now. There was a recent story that one of the cemeteries in Washington DC has become a gathering place for young people. They try to schedule parties and even have film nights. I don’t know if I would be up for “Night of the Living Dead” at the Queen of Heaven Cemetery. I guess you really have to be in the mood.

Most of us forget our dead. Maybe we are remembered for one generation, rarely for two. I keep thinking of a cemetery in Alabama . A few years ago we visited an elderly cousin of my wife in Auburn Alabama. He began to talk of family history and told us that he knew where some of the distant relatives were buried. We agreed to go with him to visit this place. I remember walking thru overgrown forest and weeds until we came here:

It was an old family graveyard that no one had taken care of in years. Stones were cracked and many were almost unreadable.

I’m sure every one buried there had loved ones who missed them and cried over their deaths, but they were soon forgotten.

Maybe that is the way it is supposed to be, but I think the tradition of the Day of the Dead is a more positive way of celebrating and remembering. I have been saying for years now that I want to go out to the graves of my parents and grandparents. I think this year I will. Maybe I hope that my sons and their children will someday come out to mine. I don’t want any tears though. I really like the idea of a party and children playing around my grave as they hear family stories about some of the crazy things I did. The thought of adults and children laughing and celebrating will make me smile no matter where I am.