Officials at the National Organization for Women and the Older Women’s League in Washington said they knew of no other support organization in the country with such a focus, even though the financial burden of divorce still most commonly falls on women. One often-cited study says the average woman with children experiences a 73 percent decline in standard of living after a divorce, while her ex-husband experiences a 43 percent increase. A Social Security Administration study of recipients shows that one in four elderly divorced women live below the poverty line, compared to just one in 20 elderly married women.
NOFAW, which now claims 140 members, is working to help women going through marital strife, separation and divorce become economically savvy by linking them with accountants, investigators, financial planners and mediators who are hip to husband tricks. Brand is at NOW’s annual convention in Cincinnati this weekend soliciting both new members and specialists for a planned self-help directory. She said NOFAW is also pushing for reforms in tax and pension laws and attorney codes of conduct.
The ironic thing is that Dad paid all your bills and sent you half his income every month. The man who was supposedly abusing you financially funded the founding of NOFAW.
DECEMBER 4, 2009
Jon and Sue and their spouses arrive and we hug and talk and cry and talk and it feels so good, this talking, so free. It was impossible to have deep, honest conversations when my mom was around. Jon and Magdalene tell us how hard it was for them to even visit Dad. “It would always hurt him,” Magdalene says in tears; after their visits, my mom would ramp up her accusations about Jon and our dad being in cahoots, about them plotting against her. She couldn’t just let our dad enjoy a visit with his son; there was always a cost.
There is a sweetness to all this talking, all this grieving. Elizabeth tells us how easily she’s slipped into a retiree’s schedule—early dinner, early bedtime—how sweet it’s been to stay with Dad, to speak with him so openly. We’re all grateful to have a patriarch who—for all the silences in our family—is encouraging us to be honest now.
“Can you imagine what it would have been like if Dad had died first?” I ask Elizabeth and her eyes widen at the thought. Our mom would have gone on and on about trying to find his hidden fortune; she would have gone on and on about his supposed deviousness. It would have added another painful layer to the loss. Now we can face grief head on—at least as head on as we can with all the questions surrounding her death.
Our dad arranges for a rabbi to swing by, and when she arrives in her purple and blue knit yarmulke and attempts to facilitate conversation between us, we realize we’ve already done this, ourselves; we’ve already gone deep together. What helps most is her leading us through the Kaddish, the Hebrew mourner’s prayer. We read the transliteration from the yellow photocopies she brought with her, and it is comforting to know that millions upon millions of people have read the same words in the midst of loss.
“Why don’t we go around the circle and say what you’ll each miss about Arlene,” the rabbi suggests, prayer still thick in the air. Sue says, “She was my stepmom and I loved her.” Larry says she made him laugh. Jon talks about how his anger toward our mom has turned to compassion. Magdalene calls her ballsy, a spitfire. Elizabeth says how much she appreciates the parenting advice Mom gave her—answer every question your child asks; she appreciates how our mom taught us to question, to seek justice. Dad says, “I fell in love with her the moment I saw her and I never stopped loving her.” Michael says she came to represent family. I talk about how she thought outside the box, how she taught her girls to think outside the box; I talk about how she used words to make the world a better place. “I remember her soft skin,” I find myself saying. “Her hands.”
I stop there. The rabbi asks if I’ve said everything I want to and I nod, even though there’s so much I could say about my mom, so much more I could say about her graceful, elegant, hands. She had been a hand model when she was a young woman; there are close-up photos of her hands facing one another, gently curved in supplication. They remind me of tulips; they remind me of wings.
I look down at my own hands—they look so much like my mom’s now, her older hands, wormy veins rising on top. My hands aren’t as soft as hers were, though—the skin on my fingertips is papery, peeling. This started when I left Matt—I thought I was having an allergic reaction to all the cardboard boxes during the move, but the peeling’s continued off and on ever since. My dermatologist thinks I might be allergic to something—most likely my keyboard. My mom would never let this peeling happen to her hands; she would have been more proactive about treating them. I’ve tried various creams to no avail—she would have found one that worked. She would never pursue treatment for her mental illness, but her hands, she would treat. Her hands were always supple, graceful, except for the one pinky finger that rebelled, kinked itself into a jagged lightning bolt. It was her hands that did the work in the end, her hands that lifted the scarf or rope or whatever she used to make the noose, wrapped it around her neck. Her beautiful hands that—perhaps at this very moment—are being burned down to nothing but ash.
RE: SEARCH IV
Death by Hanging
The day before my novel Delta Girls came out, in 2010, I bought a large French educational poster titled “La Multiplication Vegetative,” with drawings that detail several growing processes—“Les Metamorphoses Florales,” featuring the growth cycle of a rose, “La Greffe,” showing how to graph one tree to another, and “La Taille des Arbres Fruitiers,” illustrating how a pear tree bears fruit. Delta Girls is set on a pear farm, and I thought the pears were a good omen; plus, I knew it would be nice to have a reminder of organic process in my writing space.
When my sister saw the poster the first time, she pointed to the word “ligature,” where a cord binds a graft to a branch.
“That’s the technical term used in a hanging,” she told me. My sister had found some obscure hanging trivia since our mom’s suicide—because of her, I knew that asparagus grows well beneath gallows, fed by the semen let loose by the hanged, and that weeping willows, our mom’s favorite tree, are associated with that kind of death. She flinched, her face full of apology. “I hope I haven’t ruined the picture for you.”
She didn’t ruin it, but she definitely changed my relationship with the poster. Now when I look at it, I am reminded by that word, that image, to look my mom’s story straight in the face. The reality is always there; I don’t want to shy away from it.
It took some time, but I finally started to do some of my own research on hanging.
I learned that hanging is the most common form of suicide worldwide, accounting for 53 percent of men and 39 percent of women who take their lives (in America, it’s the second most common method behind gunshot for men, the second most common method behind poisoning for women).
I had assumed that the cause of death for those who hanged themselves was a broken neck, but learned the neck usually only breaks when someone is hanged from a gallows, known as a “drop” hanging. Most suicides by hanging are considered “suspension” hangings; the cause of death in these cases is compression of either the carotid artery (5kg of pressure required), the jugular vein (2kg of pressure), or the airway (15kg). Drop hangings are supposed to be less painful and faster than suspension hangings; I can barely stand to think about that, to think of any pain my mom might have felt, to think of how it might have taken a while for her to lose consciousness.
Hanging survivors report having seen flashing lights, having heard ringing sounds. I hope a real light show ushered my mom out of her life. Like being on a dance floor. Like going into hyperspace.
A couple of months before my mom’s death, Lady Gaga pretended to hang herself on stage during the MTV Video Music Awards. I remember cries of protest by suicide survivor organizations, saying members had been traumatized by the image; I remember thinking—cruelly, I realize now—that these people were being overly sensitive. Now I understand completely.
&nb
sp; Words related to suicide became serious triggers for me. I found myself going through elaborate verbal gymnastics to avoid using the word “hang,” even in the most mundane and innocent of contexts. I’d say, “I want to . . . put that picture on the wall,” or, “Could you . . . drape that towel on the hook for me, please?” For a while, I avoided playing “Words With Friends” on my phone because the pop-up ads for “Hanging With Friends” would jab me in the heart.
Glib references to hanging abound, as Elizabeth and I quickly discovered. “This yeast infection makes me want to kill myself” one of her colleagues said before she mimed wrapping a noose around her throat and letting her head drop to the side. An innocent offer of a game of hangman made me lose my breath.
“We can’t expect the world to tiptoe on eggshells around us,” Elizabeth and I would remind each other. We told each other that every time we had to confront an upsetting word or image, it helped us learn to cope. And at some point, I tricked myself into believing I was coping just fine. I pushed my pain beneath the surface, where it grew grotesque in silence and darkness, like a potato sprouting eyes.
MOM DIED BEFORE MY WEDDING
ARLENE: It’s probably the one event in my life that of all the sadnesses is really the saddest one for me. Um, I painted to Dvorak’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me.” Um, we were very connected (starts crying). She was a great mom. Well, my mother died on January 13, 1967, which was just about five weeks before my wedding and couldn’t have been a more terrible time to deal with her death, but, um, as you see, I was married February 22, 1967, so it was a terrible time and still a very painful memory.
Mom,
You had black-and-white promotional pictures taken as A. J. Brand, wearing glasses you thought made you look professorial, an uncomfortable smile on your face. You found a vocal coach to help give your speaking voice more authority, although whenever you attempted the lower register you had been trained to use, you sounded like you were trying to mimic a male cartoon character of some sort—Marvin the Martian, perhaps. You sent letters to every talk show you could find, from Regis and Kathie Lee to Gadget Talk. You appeared on a few shows produced in Chicago, both TV and radio. You started to gain more and more members. You created two sister organizations, the Coalition to End Financial Abuse in Marriage and the Coalition for Financial Fairness. You self-published a book, A Guide to Divorce: Answers to Questions You Didn’t Know to Ask, although we were sure you had plagiarized it or had it ghost-written; the writing didn’t sound like your own. You trademarked the terms “consumer of divorce” and “Divorce Empowerment.” You organized a national conference, where you presented an award named for Olivia Goldsmith, author of The First Wives’ Club, to Lorna Wendt, who had fought for half of her husband’s General Electric fortune during their divorce. You had a plaque engraved to Wendt “In appreciation of your efforts to enhance and elevate the role of the homemaker in marriage.” You did everything you could to enhance and elevate your own role as A. J. Brand. You did everything you could until the paranoia returned and you felt people were trying to undermine you, to wrest your divorce reform empire away from you, and you dissolved it all, yourself.
A few months before you died, you sent me this e-mail:
Subject: divorce reform
From: Arlene Brandeis
To: me
In the event anyone cares about the correct detail:
The divorce reform I initiated is and was a state issue. I lobbied Illinois State Senator Kathy Parker in 1995 about “financial fairness in and during the divorce process.” Many women after decades of marriage, often to professional, high income spouses ended with nothing and sometimes homeless.
It was during this process US Senator Carol Mosley Braun asked me to participate in a Pension Reform Committee.
Pension law (at my suggestion) was changed to require a spouse be notified if they opt for a larger pension payment during their lifetime.
That option leaves the surviving spouse with no pension income. That nasty surprise is why your sitter Ruby Cox (and thousands of women like her) was forced to baby sit or live in poverty after her (the spouse dies,) husband died.
I’ve been meaning to clarify that for a long time. Maybe you’ll use it for my obituary some day.
It took me years to appreciate what you had done with NOFAW and its sister organizations. I was too mad at you for what you were doing to Dad, too unsure about how to talk to you, how to deal with your mix of delusion and activism. For years, I shrugged off that whole period of your life, dismissed it as part of your mental illness, didn’t let myself see how much you had really accomplished. We didn’t even mention NOFAW in your obituary, not specifically, although we did reference you had worked for social justice. The whole NOFAW chapter felt like a sad, ironic joke. Then last year, I got a Facebook message from a woman you had helped. You had been a true inspiration to her during her divorce, she wrote; you talked to her many times over the phone; you gave her the information she needed to protect herself; you gave her the motivation to move to another state with her children, to start law school at forty-three. “That my children and I could survive was in part attributable to your mom,” she wrote. “I am thankful for that.” I am thankful for that now, too.
DECEMBER 5, 2009
All the out of town relatives are staying at a hotel near our dad’s place. We gather there before we head to the Oceanside harbor for our mom’s memorial. Cousin Bobby has made it from the airport. Matt has dropped off Arin and Hannah—it is so good to see them, to hug them, to just be with them. My beautiful kids. Nancy and Jenn arrive, too, bringing their warm, grounded energy.
We walk down the hallway. Just ahead of me, Elizabeth has birth and death in her hands—in her right, Asher, ensconced in his car seat; in her left, our mom’s ashes in the silver bag from Oceanside Mortuary. The bag looks like something from a high end department store, Nordstrom’s maybe, the paper thick and gleaming, letters elegant and white. Our mom would approve; she always aspired to luxury—it makes sense she would even after death. Only the best for her chips of bone.
Asher. Ashes.
The patterned jewel tone carpet makes light shoot dizzy inside my eyes. Elizabeth looks like the incarnation of Lady Justice as she walks ahead of me, or Lady Libra, birth and death balanced evenly on her scales. Asher/Ashes. Ashes/Asher. She stands tall, arms strong as she walks forward, bearing their equal weight.
I don’t feel nearly as graceful, myself. I am stumbling down the hall, holding a diaper bag, a purse, the flimsy necessities, straps digging into my shoulders. I am leaking milk and blood; I am leaking and stumbling while my sister holds her head high between life’s outermost poles, a steady pole herself, a fulcrum between two worlds.
Asher. . . . Ashes.
The owls on Asher’s car seat are turquoise and orange and brown; his baby contraptions are way cuter than any available when my grown kids were little. It suddenly strikes me as funny that baby things are designed to be cute. I’ve come to realize over the past couple of days that newborns are terrifying. Asher is sweet and beautiful and fresh as a flower, but he is also terrifying. A wild animal. All hunger. No reason. We try to soften it up with owls, but there it is—the dark and glittering abyss in his tiny open mouth.
Asher, Ashes.
Just one letter apart. R and S, letters that sit next to each other in the alphabet, even. So little separating the two words, the two poles.
Asher.
Ashes.
Just one breath apart.
When Arin was born nineteen years ago, I cried and cried knowing he would die someday, not able to bear the fact I had brought this beautiful life into the world and one day he would be gone. Matt forced me to wrap my hand around the baby’s limbs. “This is his arm,” he told me. “This is his leg. This is real. He is here, alive, now.” And I held those pulsing limbs in my hands and tried to not think of them vanishing.
Asher to Ashes. I can’t bear the thought now, eit
her.
Ash er
Ash es
Later my sister will tell me that as she held Asher, held ashes, in the hallway, she felt a bright current pass through both her arms, a pulsing, a vibration so strong she could barely hold on to the two charged things; she had to stand straight to hold herself together. Life and death coursing wild and hot through her body. But now I just see her standing tall, holding all of it with grace as I stumble stumble stumble in her wake, leaking blood and milk, my own edges blurry . . .
. . .
ash/er/ash/es/ash/er/ash/es
dust to dust to dust
ARLENE: The Ehlers-Danlos side was obviously on my mother’s side. She had this very milky-white, flawless skin that was very indicative of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Um, she lived until she was sixty-seven, although just weeks before she died, she had these huge bruises on her back and they were obviously mid-sized arteries that were spontaneously bursting. That happens with vascular EDS. Um, so she was — When I told a doctor about it, I was so angry with a doctor that she had, when I was trying to explain this, and the first thing he said to me, “Well, did anyone hit her?” And I said, “Well, for heaven’s sake (laughs), you know, nothing like that; that’s the farthest from anything that could be possible.” So that was his first assumption, and um, then she died very suddenly. I had breakfast with her that morning, Friday the 13th. I happened to be off of work that day, and we had breakfast together, and then ten minutes later, I took a telephone call, and then ten minutes later, she was dead on the sofa, and it was just that sudden. The same way my four brothers died after that, between 1970 and ‘80. They talk about most people not living beyond their thirties and forties with vascular EDS, but you know, I just turned seventy—I’m telling the world (throws out her arms and laughs)—and my mother was sixty-seven and my brothers were mostly in their forties, one fifty-one, and my grandfather, thirty-eight, but all died the same way, and all thought to be sudden cardiac arrest.
The Art of Misdiagnosis Page 15
