Shedding Tears

I've decided to be fully present during each seizure and shed tears, at least afterward. The word shed.  Dutch and Germanic, Old English root: to separate out, to scatter, to divide. I remember watching a scene in a movie -- maybe Zorba the Greek -- where a bunch of women are wailing in the streets about something or another. I can't find the scene, though, so I might have made it up or perhaps reached into my cellular wellspring where the Middle Eastern and southern Italian histrionics lie embedded. The word histrionic. The dictionary states that its origin is the 17th century, and I imagine some Germanic guy or Anglo-Saxon with the whitest of skin took the Latin root for drama and acting, twisted it into something unfavorable, applied it to women, in particular.

I have a friend whose adult son is schizophrenic. She's done things like cleaned his shit from the walls of his apartment. She and I recently sat in a car outside her house and discussed how we imagined ourselves screaming in the streets with other mothers, other women. Tearing at our hair and wailing, rending our garments.

How fitting to shed --  to empty oneself that way.

Watching a person twist and jerk and grimace over and over, in minutes and then years, helpless to do anything but watch and abide in the moment -- surely this calls for tears afterward as much as efficiency or quiet?

Are there enough tears?

There's nothing to be thankful for with seizures.

I don't believe in prayer and would as soon as stand on a pew and wail then beg.

There's gratitude, though, in tears.

I bought some daffodils the other day. The buds were tight, the stalks like paper. I stuck them in water and watched them unfold into yellow.

The Full Catastrophe

Fight the Power as an Italian or at Least Wander Around It*

Italian anti-Fascist fighters, November 1944

Oh dear Lord. Please no one ask me what I think of the woman who identifies as a black person when, in fact, she's a white person. I just don't have it in me to join the discussion and will leave it to less exhausted finer minds than mine to figure it all out. I'm generally fascinated by these kinds of things, but lately I've felt nearly comatose and even bored when the newest wild story comes out. I know that says more about me than anyone else and is probably indicative of mild depression or at least a dissociative disorder, but it's the truth. I'm having a hard time not saying I don't care when people ask me what I think about anything these days. Ironically, one of the things I'll be working on beginning next week when I leave for my residency at Hedgebrook involves my own wrestling with identity -- both mine and my daughter's. Hopefully, I'll be out of this funk and able to organize my thoughts and care.

As I drove around the shitty this afternoon, listening to the interminable talk about the woman who identified as black but who was really white, I did think about my own ethnic identity -- how I'm one-half Italian, one-quarter Syrian and one-quarter Scotch English. If people ask me what I am, I tend to say Italian because I definitely identify more with my Italian ancestry than the Middle Eastern or northern European. I can't tell you why exactly, but I feel Italian. Yesterday's post provoked some really great comments, including Mary Moon stating that she'd heard Italians don't believe in God so much as God's mother. Ha! That's true of me!




I was also thinking about The Powers That Be today, mainly because I got a letter in the mail informing me that our insurance company, Assurant, will no longer be in the health insurance marketplace as of January 2016 so we'll have to start looking for a new individual plan in November during that open season which sounds like we're all going hunting (and wouldn't you love to hunt down an insurance company and hang it, stuffed on your wall?) but actually means you're allowed to enroll in a certain window. Insurance companies and the whole healthcare system in this joint are kind of fascist, don't you think? God, I wish I could say that I don't care, but I'm going to have to care and scurry around and do all the stuff that needs to be done, including making sure that Sophie's Providers are covered and that her drugs are covered and that we can afford the premium and it's all so exhausting and I just don't care.

On the other hand, I've been engaged with one of my favorite Realm of Caring people, Heather, on Facebook who has done an incredible amount of work with this medical marijuana thing. She's one of my heroes, to tell you the truth, and just a pleasure to know as a person. She's indefatigable -- probably not unlike one of those Italian anti-Fascist fighters even if she doesn't exactly identify as one. She shared my recent blog post titled Access Public Service Announcement where I took to task the head of the American Epilepsy Society who was just so dooooooown on that recent Dateline special. It turns out that I did a radio show back in April, and the doctor with whom I spoke was the very same one! You can listen to it here. She was equally as dooooooooown on the radio show, too, and Heather and I can't figure out why these people aren't more excited by our stories (Heather's son has been seizure-free with CBD for nearly two years!). I said would it kill them to express some enthusiasm and marvel a bit because they've been stymied so long? Then again, maybe they just don't care, and lord (or given my Italian identity should I say Mary) knows, I understand that.








*This post is a ramble, a wander and it might make no sense. Read at your leisure.

The Italians

I've had two very long conversations with my father recently when we've discussed, among other things, the new PBS four-part special The Italians. I've only seen the first part which chronicles the years in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when millions of southern Italians immigrated to the United States. I confess to being ignorant about the incredible contributions Italian-Americans made to this country. I was even ignorant of Italy's history -- how it really wasn't a country until Garibaldi "united it" in the late nineteenth century. It's a fascinating documentary and confirms many of the stories that have been handed down to me from my father and his brothers and sisters, my aunts and uncles and cousins. I've posted the photo above of my grandmother Josephine when she was a young woman, and I'm struck again by her penetrating gaze, her eyebrows, the carefully-placed choker and long strand of beads or rosary (I can't tell) hanging down her dress. My nonna was illiterate and came to this country with two children. She'd have three more (my aunt, father and his twin brother), and she'd never learn to read or write or even become a United States citizen despite living here for more than fifty years. Yet, she so very much lives on in me, in my children, in the stories that we continue to tell and even see on specials like The Italians. It's amazing to me how much has changed in such a short time -- that only a couple of generations before mine, my family was tilling other people's fields, scrabbling by on literally nothing, making grueling sacrifices and setting out on journeys to places utterly foreign to them and then making new lives. I found myself scanning the photos and video footage of the documentary, looking for "people I know." My father joked that many of the people were his mother. We spoke about la famigilia, about secrecy and mistrust of authority that linger even today in parts of our extended family. We talked about the similarities of immigrant experience today -- how vilified certain immigrant groups continue to be. I look forward to watching the rest of the series and learning more about my family's immigrant experience and the history of Italian-Americans. Even if you're not Italian, I encourage you to watch them.

Communiste

My Uncle Tony (Anthony Romano, on the left) and my father, (Michele Benito on the right) are talking to their Sister Mary in New Jersey. Uncle Tony and my father are fraternal twins, and they like to mess with her. They sound so much alike that she thought she was talking only to my father. Henry and Oliver thought this was hysterical, but my mother and I just rolled our eyes.

Fun fact: My father and Uncle Tony were born the fourth and fifth children in New York City to my grandmother Josephine who was a recent immigrant from southern Italy. She could neither read nor write in Italian or English, was a devout Catholic and retained her thick accent until the day she died at nearly ninety years old. Her surprise twins (she didn't know she was carrying two until she gave birth) were named after Benito Mussolini, a hero, at the time, to southern Italian peasants. Romano was Mussolini's youngest son. Evidently, anything bad in the world was quickly called communiste in my Noni's thick Italian accent. Bad actions were all those things that went against the norm: not going to mass, late garbage pick-up, etc. I have only fond memories of my grandmother, although I'm certain I would have been called communiste if she were alive.