Things That Remain Painful / Bengal Tiger At The Baghdad Zoo

"Stand-up is how comedians process things that are painful."

-- Billy Crystal, quoted by interviewer during an interview with Robin Williams in 2011.

Robin Williams' early comedy didn't bring me much laughter.  I was severely depressed during those years. What was evoked for me then was the pain that prompted his sense of humor. Although I've found much peace as a sober alcoholic, I sometimes find myself on the depressive side of things.  My gratitude goes out to Robin Williams for the ways he used drama to help himself and us process war and suicides, grief and loss.  There are some things that I can't process through laughter. Depression and active alcoholism are two of them.  

In the interview above, he tells this story:

"Years ago I was reading a story to my daughter.  I was doing voices and everything, and she turned to me and said, "Just read the story."

I'm with his daughter.

In the order that I saw them, these are Robin Williams movies which made a lasting impression on me, helping me to know that I was not alone:

1982 -- The World According to Garp (after watching that movie at age 34, I decided that I did want to have children, but my husband decided that he didn't, and we divorced soon after.  I never did have children)

1989 -- Dead Poets Society (although I remember only speechless anger at the way the movie ended)

1991 -- The Fisher King (wanting to see it again, I looked in vain for this movie in the drama section of a video store and was bewildered to find that this great drama was filed in the comedy section. "Parry is also continually haunted by a hallucinatory Red Knight, who terrifies him whenever he shows any confidence." The quote is from a Wiki article on The Fisher King)

1991 -- Hook (I loved that it wasn't about Peter Pan at all.  It was about Hook.  Robin Williams could just as easily have played Hook)

1997 -- Good Will Hunting

What I'd like to see now is "Bengal Tiger At The Baghdad Zoo." It took Robin Williams' suicide for me to become aware of it.  

"Some nights people come expecting me to riff, and I'm not going to do it. I can't."

(Robin Williams, in the above interview with Charlie Rose in 2011)

I'm feeling all off-balance today.  It's been difficult to determine what I want to say to express my unexpected flood of feelings of grief and loss. I do see a connection between Virginia Woolf's suicide at the beginning of World War II and Robin Williams' suicide in the context of the United States conducting air strikes in Northern Iraq and the recent events in Gaza.

"Ring them bells for those of us who are left."

(Bob Dylan, 1989)

AN EARLY MORNING MEDITATION ON ANGER AND GRIEF AND FEAR AND GRATITUDE AND LEARNING THAT I DID LOVE MY MOTHER ALL ALONG AND ALWAYS WILL

Thirteen years ago, around 11 o'clock on the morning of December 3, 1994, during Hanukkah and Advent, on the day before my parents' 45th wedding anniversary, my mother died unexpectedly at age 78 of a massive heart attack.

Beginning in 1987, at age 36, when I began my recovery from many years of bulimia and anorexia, I had felt an increasing resentment toward my mother. On the day that my mother died, I woke up feeling an unexpectedly deep and painful anger toward her, which I wrote about at length in my journal that morning. Later in the morning while I was at work, I received a phone call from my youngest sister who told me that our mother had died that morning. I had not experienced before, and have not experienced since, the profound shock I felt in that moment. In my shock, I "saw" a dark heavy cloud, located at the level of my eyes, lifting up and disappearing and revealing clear sky, and I said to my sister, "I don't believe you." Then I said, "She can't hurt me anymore." Then I began to cry. In the following 24 hours, I began to experience the anger and grief that had been building up since I was a tiny child. What was missing was the fear I had always lived with.

One of my earliest memories, at somewhere around 2 years old, is that my mother was angry. I didn't know why she was angry, but I didn't sense that she was angry at me. She was vacuuming the living room in the apartment where we lived. My father was at work. I don't know where my baby sister was. I listened to my mother's angry words and thought, "Anger is stupid. I will NEVER be angry." How a 2 year old could come up with that vow is still a mystery to me, but that was my vow -- a vow I tried to keep, consciously and unconsciously, to the detriment of my physical and mental health, until after my mother died. Now I know that anger is not stupid. It is a challenging and revealing part of being human. I understand now that my mother may well have been experiencing unexpressed grief in the form of expressed anger and rage that blocked her ability to live in peace and love fully.

My mother's first memory was that she was a very young child in a room full of people, that she looked out a window and saw a human body fall from above and said, "Body," and that no one understood what she was trying to say. Soon it was discovered that someone had committed suicide by jumping out a window. After my mother died, my father told me that when my mother was a young woman in her 20s, a young man killed himself after she expressed that she was not interested in a relationship with him.

The last time I saw my mother, in February of the year that she died, she told me that she was tired of being angry. Until she died, I had always had a hard time understanding other people's anger because I had not been able to consciously experience my own anger. After she died, I was shocked to discover the extent of that anger. As a child and until after she died, I don't remember feeling love for my mother. What I often felt in connection her was fear and something else I couldn't identify but now understand was anger and grief.

My mother's mother wasted away and died at home of gallbladder cancer when my mother was 20 years old. My mother told me that she had felt anger toward her mother long before her mother became ill and that she had felt anger towards her mother throughout her mother's illness. When I look at the above photo of my mother and her mother in the year prior to her mother's death, I see the physical and emotional "distance" between them. I suspect that my mother, too, was not able to love her mother until after her mother died. I believe that there was considerable emotional distance between my grandmother and her mother. When I was in my early 30s, always deeply ambivalent about motherhood and never having been pregnant, I made a clear decision not to be a mother and at age 36 underwent a tubal ligation, creating an irrevocable distance between me and the possibility of giving birth to a child.

When my mother was in her late 60s, in the years when she was considering converting to Judaism, she began to study Tai Chi. My favorite photos of my mother are those of her as a child, as a young woman on a horse, and as a 70-year-old woman practicing Tai Chi. On the first photo of her in the series of photos above, her mother had written, "Miss Independence." Maybe "independence" is what I first began to love in my mother after she died, something that made her somewhat distant and confusing as a mother but which now endears her to me, as well as this sonnet she wrote thirty years before she died and in which she expresses both grief and gratitude. It has taken me a long time to learn to begin to understand and love my mother who at age 50, as she began to turn away from organized religion, wrote:

The answers rise and fall like waves. I wait

Then blindly stumble on towards heaven's gate.






















Sometime in the months after my mother died, I was startled to experience a vision of my mother inside heaven's gate, being greeted by her mother whose name was Irene and whose name means "Peace."