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Reality and Truth, Fantasy and Lies

January 22, 2013 — Pat Bertram

untitledv Yesterday I proposed the idea that online we are who we say we are, that the truth of us comes out in our writings and postings. This topic is interesting to me because of something else I’ve been thinking about — reality and truth, fantasy and lies. I’ve always wanted to know what is real, but what if nothing really is? Then isn’t fantasy the same as truth?

So many of us still love men or women who are dead. For all practical purposes — since they are not here on Earth and do not respond to our attempts at having a relationship or even just a simple conversation — what is the difference between that and someone creating a fantasy lover for oneself? Or a reader getting immersed in the fantasy of a romance novel? Or a writer falling in love with her hero?

Yes, I know there is a difference on a cosmic level, assuming the person still exists somehow. And even if there is nothing beyond this, there is the difference that they once were real while a fantasy never was. But here, now, in an everyday sense — is there a difference?

The other day I watched the Goldie Hawn/Steve Martin movie Housesitter, and though it gets silly in spots, the story of a woman who created a fantasy life that became real intrigues me.

Hawn’s character changed herself all the time, which made me wonder, do we have to be ourselves, or can we recreate ourselves on whim? And if we do recreate ourselves — recreate the story we tell ourselves of our past, our backgrounds, our way of acting — is it a lie or just a pre-truth?

A corollary to my question is how much truth do we owe people? If we lie to con them or cheat them, of course that is wrong, but is it the lie that is wrong or simply the con that is wrong? If you recreate yourself because it seems like fun or because you’ve come to hate yourself, if the game goes beyond a certain point, do you owe people the truth? But by that time, what is the truth? What if you’ve become the person you were pretending to be?

Sometimes I get the impression that life is eternally elastic, a kaleidoscope of ever dizzying permutations that we rein back with our collective fantasy of life here on earth. If it were possible to break out of that collective fantasy, what then can we become?

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” All Bertram’s books are published by Second Wind Publishing. Connect with Pat on Google+

Posted in culture, life, relationships, writing. Tags: do we owe the truth, fantasy and lies, Housesitter, lie and cheat, living a fantasy, reality and truth. 7 Comments »

Sharp Writ Book Awards Winner!

January 20, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Last night I was notified that Grief: The Great Yearning has been awarded 2nd Place in the 2012 Sharp Writ Book Awards Memoirs / Biography category. They said I’ll be getting a Certificate of Achievement and gold foil ribbon labels stating “Sharp Writ Book Awards Winner” that can be affixed to book covers, but today I got an email telling me it was a mistake, and I’ve been awarded 3rd place, which leaves me feeling ambivalent about the whole thing.

To be honest, I was already feeling ambivalent about winning an award for a book that I wish I’d never had occasion to write in the first place. Still, it’s an important book, and I’m pleased to see it getting any sort of recognition. More than that, I hope the increased visibility for Grief: The Great Yearning will help people find it when they need it. Grief is such an isolating experience, we need to know that whatever we feel, others have felt. Whatever seemingly crazy thing we do to bring ourselves comfort, others have done. And, as impossible as it is to imagine at the beginning, we do survive.

A fellow author and sister in sadness wrote: “Grief: The Great Yearning by Pat Bertram is a book of empathic understanding. How many recently bereft have looked to society’s guidelines for grieving and found these “norms” did not correspond to what they were feeling? How many were left confused and even more depressed because they were not “progressing” like the experts said they should? Bertram’s book is a comfort to those of us tossed into the grief whirlwind of disbelief and agony. The entire book is raw and real. Grief: The Great Yearning is a companion guide from someone who has already been there. It is a forever love letter.” —J J Dare, author of False Positive and False World.

A staunch supporter who works with the bereft wrote: “The grief journey is one of unbelievable pain to the psyche, to every part of our being. It’s a journey of missing the individual; spewing at the injustice of death, our powerlessness over death, our absolute lack of knowing what exists beyond death (despite claims to the contrary); replaying over and over our relationship with the deceased. All the while trying desperately to function in a world forever changed.

“If people were to ask me for an example of how grief can be faced in order for the healthiest outcome I would refer them to Grief: The Great Yearning, which should be the grief process bible. Pat Bertram’s willingness to confront grief head on combined with her openness to change is the epitome of good mental health.” —Leesa Healy, Consultant in Emotional-Mental Health.

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Posted in books, culture, life, writing. Tags: Grief: The Great Yearning, memoir, Sharp Writ Book Awards Winner, the grief journey, the grief process bible. Leave a Comment »

The Sad Song of Grief

January 16, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Music I started crying at the grocery store yesterday.

The last time I cried in public was a year and a half ago at that very supermarket, which reminds me of where my deceased life mate/soul mate and I used shop. I don’t often go to this store, but it’s the only place I can get the salad dressing I use. After I picked up the salad dressing bottle, I looked for some other flavors in that same store brand, wondering if I should try something new, and I saw a dressing he liked. It struck me as being unbearably sad, and right there, in the salad dressing aisle, I started to weep.

The tearfulness caught me by surprise, but I should have expected the flare-up because I’ve been struggling with sorrow for the past two weeks. This year was the third New Year since his death, and inexplicably it began with tears. Grief had been leaving me alone, and I hadn’t had a strong upsurge for a long time — I thought I was through with grief, to be honest — but when the calendar rolled over from 2012 to 2013, grief came calling once again.

This new phase of grief is different from all the others. There is no great pain, no bewilderment, no shattered heart, but sorrow is always with me like a sad song playing in the background of my life. I don’t notice it all the time or pay much attention to it, but still, it’s there.

Last night I watched A League of Their Own (the version he taped, where he cut out the bickering between the two sisters to make it more of a baseball movie) and it affected me more than I thought it would. When one girl got a telegram about her husband dying in the war, I realized that never again would I have to deal with the horrendous shock and sorrow of seeing my mate die, and when Bill Pullman came back from the war, I realized never again in this life would I have such a reunion with my mate. And Madonna’s “Playground” at the end about tore me up.

This used to be our playground (used to be)
This used to be our childhood dream
This used to be the place we ran to
I wish you were standing here with me

It dawned on me then that this latest version of grief feels like sorrow for the end of childhood. I am a long way past childhood, but there was an innocence to our relationship, a belief that no matter how bad things got, we would survive because we had each other. As I discovered though, my love for him couldn’t make him well, couldn’t take away a moment of his pain, couldn’t keep him from dying. The innocent belief that love conquers all, the belief in “us,” is destroyed forever, and I will never get it back, not until I’m dead, too.

It’s ironic — so much was destroyed by his death, but the one thing I thought would be destroyed (me) is still going strong. Sad, but strong.

I got through everything else grief has thrown at me, and I’ll get through this sad song, too. Just, apparently, not yet.

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Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: A League of Their Own, end of childhood, end of innocence, grief and New Years, love conquers all, Madonna, Playground. 6 Comments »

Willpower vs. Won’t Power

January 11, 2013 — Pat Bertram

tugofwar I got spammed by a company that wants me to go to its site and take some sort of psych test to assess my willpower. The comment said their studies show that “when it comes to being disciplined and making healthy lifestyle changes, men tend to have a stronger resolve than women” and that “women may have a little more difficulty staying away from temptation and sticking to healthy habits this year.” Apparently, 46 percent of women rated their willpower as good compared to 61 percent of men.

Since the company has obviously made up its minds about my determination to stick to my resolve based on my gender, there doesn’t seem much point in following through. But besides that, the study seems dubious.

Their sweeping statements about men and women’s relative resolve was based on approximately 200 self-assessments, which isn’t exactly a “study” but more of a poll. Many things could skew the results. Perhaps men who didn’t have a strong resolve when it came to health resolutions didn’t want to go on record as having a weak resolve and so didn’t respond. Perhaps women are harder on themselves than men are, and see any infraction as a lack of resolution where men let it slough off. Perhaps men overrate themselves. Perhaps women have a better knowledge of themselves. Or perhaps men and women interpret their resolve differently. For example, if someone vows to eat healthier and passes on a second piece of cake when normally they would eat three pieces, that could be interpreted as sticking with their resolve and having willpower.

The poll revealed that “if pressured by a friend to “pig out” (after eating healthily for an entire week), 7% of women would totally give in, 46% would only share some of their friend’s junk food, and 47% would stay disciplined and eat healthy. For men, 8% would give in, 41% would share, and 51% would stay disciplined.” Not exactly a resounding indictment of women or a pat on the back for men. Assuming that the participants in the poll were equally divided between men and women, only four more men than women claimed they would stay disciplined. Which means that almost half of both sexes say they won’t. (The poll didn’t reveal if in fact more men would stay disciplined, only that they said they would.)

New Year’s resolutions are always difficult. By making a big yearly resolution, you’re setting yourself up to fail because it’s very difficult to make a major change all at once and stick with it. For one thing, habit is too strong. For another thing, you have to retrain your family and friends so they don’t pressure you back into your pre-resolve lifestyle. For still another thing, once you’ve broken the resolution, there seems less impetus to re-resolve.

Willpower in action seems more like “won’t power,” — “I won’t eat potato chips. I won’t go off my diet. I won’t sleep in instead of exercising.” For myself, I stay away from “won’t power.” The more I say I won’t do something, the more I want to do it. As for willpower, I think it’s highly overrated. I try to do the right thing for my health most of the time, and if I get side-tracked, I don’t beat myself up for it.

One thing for sure — I won’t go to the spammers site and rate my willpower. And I won’t even need any willpower to stick with that resolution!

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Posted in culture, internet, life. Tags: men vs women, new years resolutions, pigging out, sticking with resolutions, willpower. 3 Comments »

Is Grief a Medical Disorder or a Part of Life?

January 7, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Every once in a while I write a post that really strikes a chord with people, and such a post was The Half-Life of Grief. It’s garnered over 126 shares on Facebook alone, so apparently it’s an important message: grief is not simply emotional, but it’s physical, too. And if it’s physical, then no amount of sublimating our emotions will get rid of the grief. It’s in our very cells.

This is a message that the American Psychiatric Association doesn’t get. According to the updated Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to be released by the American Psychiatric Association, grief is considered a medical disorder, and should be treated as major depression. There used to be a bereavement exclusion in the description of major depression, but they have taken that away, and now more than a few days of pain after the loss of a loved one is considered a crisis. There can be “a few days of acute upset and then a much longer period of the longing, the tearfulness. But typically sleep, appetite, energy, concentration come back to normal more quickly than that.”

As I said in 2010 when I first posted the information about the APA getting rid of the bereavement exclusion: In whose world is grieving a medical condition that needs to be treated? Not my world. In my world, grief is one of the bookends of a relationship. Love. Grief. If grief is a medical condition, then watch out. One day love is going to be considered a treatable disease.

During the past couple of years, there has been a concerted effort by grief counselors, therapists, and other health professionals to rectify this gross misrepresentation of grief, but the American Psychiatric Association is sticking to their decision that grief is a medical disorder.

A medical disorder? For cripes sake, it doesn’t take a fistful of degrees to understand that for the majority of people who have lost someone important in their lives, grief is a completely sane and healthy reaction. So what if grief is hard? Someone we loved dearly is gone from our lives and will never return. What do they expect us to do, just blithely continue with our lives as if nothing important happened? As if the dead had never even existed? As if we’re happy about the situation? And even if we wanted to be joyful despite it all, there is the simple matter that our bodies also grieve, and we’d have physical reactions even if we were drugged into placidity.

I realize that in certain cases people do entertain thoughts of suicide, but those thoughts are part of the grief process. It’s only when people start stockpiling pills or buying guns or starving themselves on purpose that grief might become a medical concern.

Admittedly, some people do manage to continue after a major loss as if nothing happened, and to be honest, I thought I would be one of those people, but death and loss have a way of making themselves felt even in the strong and stoic.

It might seem from these grief posts that I dwell on grief, but I don’t. I dwell on life. And grief is part of life. I understand that. And so should the American Psychiatric Association.

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Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: American Psychiatric Association, bereavement, death, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, grief as a medical disorder. 6 Comments »

The Half-Life of Grief

January 5, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Recently I’ve been coming across a lot of articles and books touting the idea that people don’t need to grieve — it’s detrimental to their happiness and it doesn’t really gain them anything. These writers believe that when sad thoughts enter your mind, you should simply observe them and let them go. They are only thoughts, nothing real, nothing that can hurt you. The same goes for feelings of sadness. Examine them and let them go. In themselves, the feelings have no power. The only power is what you give them.

Sounds good, right? And to a certain extent this method works. But . . .

First of all, thoughts are real. When you study particle/wave physics and even quantum physics, it’s hard not to believe that at rock bottom, we are all just thoughts. Together, we think our current world into existence. Maybe we even think ourselves into existence. Or perhaps we are thoughts of the eternal Thinker. Who knows, certainly not me. But the point is, thoughts may not be something that can be touched with your fingers, but they are still tangible.

Second of all, grief is important. It’s a way of honoring those who have died, a way of pulling our world around us to accommodate the void they left behind, a way of learning to live with their absence and without their presence, a way of developing into our own person and renewing our reasons for living. Of course, we can develop and renew without grief, but being so familiar with death brings an urgency to the process.

Third of all, not all grief is emotional and mental. Sometimes grief is visceral. Physical. If you have lost a child or a soul mate, you literally lose a part of your physical self. Your child is connected to you by shared genes, and in the case of mothers, a shared body. With soul mates, you are connected by your very being. A lifetime of living together also connects you physically by the air you breathe, the foods you eat, the cellular materials that are exchanged via viruses and microbes, the energy fields that overlap.

One of the reasons such grievous losses as that of a child or a mate are so devastating is that not only do we grieve, so does our body. There were many times I could keep from feeling the loss emotionally or mentally, but I could still feel it in the marrow of my bones, in my cells.

People tell me that it takes three to five years to get past the worst of such a loss. Most people I know woke on their fourth anniversary to find a sense of renewal, and it makes sense that four years would be the half-life of grief. Our cells are continuously dying and being renewed. If it takes seven years for all the cells in one’s body to be renewed, then at my current stage of grief — 2 and 2/3 years — most of my cells still bear his imprint. By four years, less than half my cells will bear his imprint. And so gradually, the physical grief fades.

From the beginning, I was determined to get through my grief as quickly as possible so that I wouldn’t dishonor him (and me) by mourning his death for the rest of my life. I thought I was so strong and emotionally stable that I’d whiz through the process, but that did not happen, partly because I never took physical grief into consideration. I never even knew such grief existed, and neither, apparently, do writers who say that all you have to do to be happy is to let the feelings of sadness pass without feeding them.

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Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: being happy, grief and happiness, half-life of grief, loss of a child, physical grief, the reality of thoughts, thoughts. 33 Comments »

Believing Impossible Things

January 4, 2013 — Pat Bertram

In an effort to see life in a new light, I’m going try to believe impossible things. I’ve always wanted to know the truth, but grief has thrown so many of my perceptions out of whack that I don’t know the truth of anything any more, so I’ve decided to believe things that are untrue. For example, I’m going to believe I am at the perfect weight. And maybe that’s the truth. Who’s to say? Only me, and I’m not talking.

And hey. Why stop at weight? Maybe I’ll believe that I myself am perfect. Now that I think about it, that is the truth. Since I am the only me in the world, whatever I am is perfectly me.

I’ve always been very self-aware — knowing both my good points and my bad points, my successes and failures — but if the universe is unfolding as it should be and I am where I am supposed to be, then there can be no good points and bad points. There can be no successes and failures. There is just me, a creature born of stardust, the culmination of billions of years of creativity and change. Odd to think that I (well, all of us) are a part of this process.

Maybe we are the process.

This thing called grief has given me an interesting perspective on life. A day or two after my life mate died, I couldn’t visualize him, so I looked at the only photo I have of us, and I wept because I did not recognize him. When that photo was taken, it was an exact likeness of him, but during the subsequent years of illness, he lost the fullness in his face, first becoming distinguished looking, then gaunt. When he died, I an idea/image of him in my mind, perhaps a composite of him through the years, perhaps what he actually looked like near the end, and that single photo I have of him does not resemble the person I knew. Now, however, the photo is how I remember him since it’s the only image of him I have. (Occasionally I can remember his smile or the way he looked when he died, but mostly he has faded from memory.) The way he looked in the photo and the way he looked at the end are both parts of his process, so I’m content remembering him when he was still relatively young and healthy.

It’s not just our internal images of a person that changes to accommodate the vagaries of age; our internal image of the relationship itself changes to accommodate the vagaries of life. Most of the transformation of a relationship from youthful and passionate to aged and (perhaps) wise and companionable goes unnoticed. We are always who we are. We are always in the present.

In other words, we are a process. Do we have an existence beyond the process? Someone told me recently that we can’t prove we exist. Maybe this is why we can’t prove it — whatever we try to pin down is already gone, lost in the past.

I never had much use for photographs of myself, but after my mother died, I inherited a bunch of photos taken of me when I was young. I put them in an album and I leaf through it occasionally, seeing the progression of myself from a baby to a young woman, trying to figure out what those girls have to do with the me of today. I’ve always felt like just me, and yet, (for example) I cannot remember this little girl in the photo, cannot remember being her. She has receded far into my past. Or perhaps she’s become subsumed into my current persona. Either way, she no longer exists even in memory.

But she is part of the process of me.

(Hmmm. Maybe there is something to this idea of believing impossible things. I’ve already found one new way of looking at life.)

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Posted in being me, culture, life. Tags: believing impossible things, born of stardust, life as a process, seeing life in a new light, the process of living, unfolding universe. 7 Comments »

Grief: New Year’s Day and Beyond

January 3, 2013 — Pat Bertram

eternity This past New Year’s Day was the third one I have lived through since the death of my life mate/soul mate. That first New Year’s Day was one of relief. I’d managed to live through the worst year of my life, and I greeted the day with acceptance and looking toward the future, building hopes and creating dreams.

The second New Year’s Day was a day of dread. The last week of that year was one of waiting. No grief, no strong emotion. Just . . . waiting. But with the dawning of the new calendar year came the dread. I still don’t know why (to be honest, I’ve never totally understood the whys and ways of grief), though perhaps the dread came from an awareness of moving further away from our shared life. I could no longer say, “Last year, we . . .” “Last year, he . . .” There was just me, balanced precariously on the precipice of a life alone.

This third New Year’s Day inexplicably began with tears. Grief had been leaving me alone, and I hadn’t had a strong upsurge for a long time — I thought I was through with grief, to be honest — but when the calendar rolled over from 2012 to 2013, grief came calling once again. And once again, I do not know why.

A new calendar year has never meant much to me — it’s such an arbitrary date, beginning at staggered times around the world, and even celebrated on different dates in various countries and religions. Now that I am alone, however, I try to make a ritual of such things, to note the passing of the days. I need to know that I am still here and I am still alive. And despite the arbitrariness of the date, apparently something in me senses a change from one year to the next and reacts to it.

People tell me that it takes three to five years to find joy in life again, or at least to find a new beginning, and three months into this year will be my third anniversary of grief. It feels like a milestone, though I can’t even begin to guess what it will mean to me besides one more year further away from “us” and one more year closer to . . . I don’t know what.

But I can’t think of that now. If I’ve learned anything during these past two years and nine months, it’s the importance of taking life one step at a time. I’ve already taken three steps into this new calendar year. Tomorrow will be another step. Beyond that, the future will just have to take care of itself.

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Posted in culture, life. Tags: death of a soul mate, grief and loss, joy after grief, New Year's Day, New Years and grief, third anniversary of grief. 15 Comments »

All Right With Death?

January 2, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Mystical desert A friend who lost her husband sent me an email today, relating something a woman told her. The woman said, “I’m not trying to put anything bad on my husband, but I think that if he died I would be all right with that.”

The statement shocked my friend, not just because of the tactlessness, but because of the lack of feeling.

People have said the same thing to me, and to be honest, it’s the way I felt when my life mate/soul mate was dying. I truly thought I would be okay. He’d been sick for so long and in such pain, I thought I’d be relieved when he died. And I was. For about an hour. Those last years of his life, I did many things to prepare myself for going on alone, and I thought I was prepared. That’s why my grief shocked me so much — it came from somewhere so deep inside, I had no idea such a place existed. My grief was beyond rationality, beyond emotion. It was visceral, as if part of my body and half my soul had died.

Some women truly don’t feel much after their husbands die. Sometimes the husband had been sick for so long they did their grieving before he died. Sometimes their relationship was so bad they were glad when it was over. And sometimes people are unable to feel anything. After all, about 5% of all humans are sociopaths — not killers, simply people without human emotions.

But the woman who made the remark could also be in denial, or not know the power of grief. If you know how you would feel if your spouse died, it would put an unbearable burden on you, especially if you think you are an independent woman. I mean, grief to such an extent as I felt seems anachronistic in this liberated day when we are all supposed to be strong and self-reliant. When people found out about my loss, they often gave me strange looks, as if I were an alien species they could not understand. Sometimes after such a look, people would said they could not imagine how they would feel if they lost their spouse. I always told them not to imagine it. They couldn’t. Until you have been there, you do not know the depths of such grief. You cannot know.

To be honest, I wish I didn’t know. Such grief changes your whole perception of yourself and your relationship to life. It makes you rethink who you are, where you came from, and where you are going, and there are no easy answers. The truth is, I was strong and self-reliant. Sure, my mate and I did everything together, but I was perfectly capable of doing things on my own. Still, 2 and 2/3 years after his death, I am struggling with feelings of pointlessness and meaninglessness, as if our shared life was the only thing that mattered. And maybe it was — then. For thirty-four years he was the focus of my life, and to a certain extent he still is. I feel his absence the way I once felt his presence.

For me, the strangest part of the woman’s sentence is her implication that not only would she be all right after he died, but she’d be okay with his death. In my case, I am mostly doing okay dealing with my mate’s absence. I can even accept the idea that he is dead — I have to so I can go on with my life. But as long as I am alive, I will never be all right with his death.

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Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: being all right with death, death of a spouse, dying, giref after two years, grief and independence, power of grief. 7 Comments »

Close Encounters of the Coyote Kind

December 29, 2012 — Pat Bertram

SANYO DIGITAL CAMERA In A Spark of Heavenly Fire, I had a character meeting up with a coyote as a way of showing that the character was becoming “untamed,” that she was finding her inner savage. She went from searching for self-affirmation from the men in her life to finding affirmation in herself. But more than that, she overcame her squeamish nature to do whatever she needed to do to survive.

Although her communion with the coyote seemed a bit trite or maybe just too pointedly mystical, I couldn’t think of a better way to show the change in her. And perhaps it only seemed trite because such things do happen. Yesterday, while walking in the desert, I came across not one but three coyotes. They were far enough away that I was never in danger, but they all stopped and stared at me. I stared back. We stood there for a minute or two, then I got distracted by a noise, and when I looked for them a second later, they were gone.

Perhaps this encounter was symoblic, a way of showing me that like my character, I am becoming untamed, embracing my inner savage, willing to do whatever I need to do to survive. More probably, the coyotes had come close to civilization in an attempt to find food. Either way, it was an interesting synchronicity of life imitating art.

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Here is the coyote excerpt from A Spark of Heavenly Fire:

She had traveled only a mile or two when she felt a presence. Someone. Something. The awareness vibrated in her body, jangled her nerve endings. She stopped. Looked around. Although she didn’t see anyone, she knew she was no longer alone.

On full alert, she walked farther, and suddenly, there he stood, silhouetted on a hill.

A coyote.

Pippi froze, afraid that if she made a single move, he would spring on her. She thought of the knife, but it didn’t give her any comfort; the knife was so small and the coyote so large.

She tried to remember what you were supposed to do in a situation like this. Look the animal in the eyes? Look past it? Look at the ground?

Too late. Her eyes locked onto the coyote’s.

As she looked into him and he looked into her, she could feel her fear draining away.

They stood motionless, staring at each other for a long time — eons. Then the coyote’s ears pricked up. He cocked his head as if listening to something in the distance.

Pippi cocked her head, too, but all she heard was a quickening breeze.

Casually, as if he had more important things to do than to stare at this insignificant human, the coyote trotted off.

He turned to give her one last look, then he was gone.

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