"Ask Amy"

“Ask Amy” is a syndicated advice column written by Amy Dickinson.  You may be familiar with her delightful memoir, The Mighty Queens of Freeville.

In a recent column, a woman wrote about a friend of hers who had died, and was quite lonely at the end.  Long-time friends had abandoned her while she was ill.  The woman writing was distressed by the unnecessary loneliness and isolation her friend experienced.

Death is not easy or comfortable or something that our society even finds easy to discuss. We don’t want to talk about it.  We want to avoid the topic as long as possible.  I suppose it’s why we talk in abstract terms of “if something happens to me…” 

If???

Have you avoided a friend who was dying? 

Maybe you didn’t know what to say. 

Maybe you felt like there was nothing you could do to help. 

If so, you underestimated the power of friendship.

"Ask "Amy column - Feb. 22, 2011
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/tribu/askamy/ct-live-0222-amy-20110222,0,7354878.column

“Why Didn’t You Tell Me?”

I was going to write about Longtime Companion today, but realized I’d already posted about AIDS this week. 

I received an email from a friend the other day.  I’d interviewed her for my book a while back, and she had a painful story about a friend of hers who had died.  They’d lost touch, and when the friend died, she wasn’t notified.  It was months later when she heard the news.

Her email was almost unbelievable:  the same thing had happened two more times.  Three friends of hers had died.  Three families had failed to notify her.

Now, I haven’t talked to her since I received her email.  She was clearly stunned that it had happened – twice – again.

It did, however, get me thinking.

Consider for a moment your friends.  Maybe you grew up with them, went to school with them, worked with them, volunteered with them, or traveled with them.  Maybe you live hundreds or thousands of miles away from your family.  Does your family know your friends (and I don’t mean the Facebook variety)?  Do they know these people exist, much less how important they are in your life?

Who would notify them?

When we plan for the future – not that many of us do – we leave instructions for funerals and donations and how to divide up our belongings.  Rarely do we leave instructions for whom to notify in the event of our death.

Maybe you had a similar experience to my friend.  Think back at how hurt you were – not just by your friend’s death, but by finding out about it months or even years later.

Now, promise you won’t do that to your friends.

Monday – “Ask Amy”

Wednesday – Our Parents’ Friends

Friday – Chuckles the Clown

"The Concert for George" Live Streaming 2/25

This Friday, February 25 would have been George Harrison's 68th birthday. 

In my post The Concert for George, I shared the story of how this concert was created: as a way for his friends to honor George and to mourn their loss.

On his birthday, "The Concert for George" will livestream on his website for all to enjoy.

Feel free to sing along!

30 Years of AIDS - Part 1

I have two degrees in theatre. In the 1980’s I was working professionally in the Chicago theatre community.  There was no way to escape AIDS.

By the end of the decade, I could’ve covered the walls of my one-bedroom apartment with the AIDS Quilt panels of people I knew.  I’d left the theatre to be a professional fundraiser, mostly working with AIDS organizations.

Most were men, though not all.  Some were classmates from college, or colleagues from one production or another.  Some had lived at one of the AIDS residential programs I worked for.  Some had been volunteers of mine; one was my assistant.

I remember picking up a coffee-table book about the Names Project, and staring at the cover: one of the quilt panels was for a guy I’d worked with in college.  That’s how I found out he was dead.

I developed a bit of paranoia in those days whenever I lost touch with one of my many gay friends.  No news was rarely good news.  As recently as last year, a name came up in conversation, and because we’d lost track of him, we assumed he had died long ago of AIDS.

In the fall of 1991, I went through a stretch where someone I knew died every week for 11 weeks in a row.  When the eleventh one died, I booked a seat on Amtrak, Chicago to Los Angeles: two days, no phones, no conversation unless I wanted it.  Of course, I couldn’t really escape, but that was how I coped. 

If you had told me in 1981 that 30 years later there would be no vaccine, no cure…that you would find people living with HIV and AIDS in virtually every country on earth…that there would still be a stigma attached to it…I would’ve said you were nuts.

As it turns out you wouldn’t have been nuts.

But you would’ve been right.

Types of Grievers

What kind of griever are you?

One of the hardest things for some people to understand is that everyone grieves in a different way.  Throwing yourself back into your “normal” routine may be perfect for some people, but the worst possible thing for others. 

I’m not even talking about gender.  The differences I’m talking about today are personality differences.  Of course, gender, ethnicity, even age may have an influence on these behaviors.  But that’s what they are:  responses to a situation. 

Personality and behavioral assessments are used in business every day: Enneagram, Meyers-Briggs, DISC.  In Dr. Kenneth Doka’s book, Disenfranchised Grief, he offers a description of different types of grievers.  You may see yourself and others in these descriptions:

1.      Intuitive:  Some might say an intuitive griever is typically a woman, and certainly in our society, a woman expressing her grief through crying is accepted.  But this griever can also experience other physical manifestations of their grief:  anxiety, confusion, inability to concentrate, physical exhaustion.

2.      Instrumental: Similarly, an instrumental griever may more likely be a man.  This is someone who is reluctant to talk about their feelings, and anxious to get back to “normal”.  They may also be the person who needs to “do” something: bring food over to the deceased’s family, organize a memorial service, or clean out a closet.

3.      Blended:  You may even be one of those grievers who possess qualities of both the intuitive and instrumental grieve.

4.      Dissonant:  This is a person in conflict: a man who wants to express his grief, but feels like society won’t allow that.  It could also be a woman who feels guilty for not crying a lot.  You don’t feel like those around you will allow you to grieve the way that makes the most sense to you.

I’m not trying to perpetuate stereotypes. 

But I wanted to point out these differences because often those who mourn friends are criticized for grieving.  The people around them don’t understand the depth of the pain they feel, because the person who died is “just” a friend.

Recognize that everyone grieves differently. 

And let them.

"My Name is Alex"

Family Ties was a successful sitcom in that ran on CBS from 1982-1989  A family led by parents who’d been hippies in the ‘60’s included one son, a conservative Republican, played by Michael J. Fox.

Arguably its most famous story is “My Name is Alex” from the fifth season.  Performed live in two back-to-back episodes, the second with no commercial breaks, it opens with the Keaton parents and their two older children returning from the funeral of Alex’ best friend, Greg.  The parents are concerned about their son’s reaction to what has happened.  Indeed, Alex is a model of forced cheerfulness.

When he’s alone, Greg appears to him – a real, physical presence, cracking jokes about how being dead is a great excuse for missing his economics test.  Alex apologizes again and again, because there’s more than grief at work here: there’s guilt.  Greg had asked Alex to help him move furniture, and because Greg had shown up late, Alex had refused.  “I couldn’t be bothered,” he tells his sister.  “Selfishness saved my life.”  Minutes after that refusal, Greg died in a car accident caused by trying to make up for lost time.

“I was supposed to be in that car,” he screams, finally falling apart.  His parents send him to a therapist, and Alex is resistant, to say the least. 

But as he begins to talk about his family and his childhood, he becomes less cynical and condescending, especially when it comes to his memories of Greg.  Greg’s willingness from their first meeting to treat the brilliant Alex P. Keaton as just a regular guy was something Alex cherished. 

Whether, as the therapist insisted, it all came down to whether Alex believed in God, is debatable.  What was clear as the episode drew to a close was that Greg’s death – and life – gave Alex a new perspective on his own future:

“Greg’s dead and I’m alive and I can’t change that.  But I can keep his memory alive.  I can take his sense of humor and his energy and his warmth and I can make it my home. I can be the best Alex Keaton that I can be and I can use the gift that I’ve been given and I can take time to appreciate the beauty in this life.”

Maybe you are one of those people:  someone whose life changed dramatically when a close friend died.  Maybe you became a “different” person. 

Or maybe you just took the best parts of your friend and made them your own…

Monday – Types of grievers

Wednesday – AIDS 30 Years Later (Part 1)

Friday – Longtime Companion

Welcome, She Writers!

Welcome to my dance in the B&W Bloggers Ball!

This is my very new blog, born Feb. 1.

As I worked on my first book, 'It's Not Like They're Family': Mourning Our Friends and Celebrating Their Lives', I realized that I needed to raise awareness of the unique experience of grieving the death of a friend.  The 10,000,000 people in the U.S. who will have this experience each year have few resources - in print or online - to help navigate and validate their grief. 

I'm pretty new to be giving blogging tips, but the best thing I ever did was have Networked Blogs link this to my Facebook and Twitter accounts.  It's generated a lot of traffic here, and saves time.

So, enjoy your dance here, and I look forward to dancing with many of you!