Trying in 2014—From Barf Tunnel Blindness to New Point of View

About a year after my mother’s death, Julius, Skyla, Rowena and I attended another funeral.

And it was at that memorial service, for San Francisco artist and teacher Dwayne Calizo, that I saw clearly how good our life had become.

How we’d made it through the barf tunnel.

The barf tunnel is a phrase I learned from Leslie Cooper, the mother of Rowena’s and my friend, Sean Riley. Some 15 years ago, she explained to Rowena and me that yucky stretches of life such as break-ups, personal reckonings and losses of loved ones are like crawling through a tunnel lined with vomit. Completely unpleasant paths dripping with emotional stink that seem to have no end and yet do not allow U-turns. You just have to keep moving through them blindly.

From mid-2014 to mid-2015, our path was defined by the sadness of my mother’s dying, Rowena’s cancer diagnosis and treatment, financial insecurity and other troubles. Lots of dark and dank.

But we’re through it.

That’s not to say things are perfect now. Take my mom’s death. I continue to miss her. But like Obi Wan Kenobi, my mom is in a way more powerful to me than she was before she died. Her portrait photo on my desk at home, placed there after her death, frequently reminds me of her principles of love, joy and service.

And while my father has had a rough time adjusting to life without her, little by little he has come around. A big break came around Christmas last year. My father had been despondent to the point of wishing he were dead and with my mom in the weeks and months following her death last July. But while spending time with old friends the Battaglias in his home town of Buffalo, a light flickered on. “For the first time since mom died, I actually had a feeling of happiness,” he told me at the time.

My dad now lives in St. Paul, pursues business projects and grocery shops with my brother Kirk every Saturday. He also cooks big dinners for Kirk’s family every Sunday night. He recently told me how pleased he was that his granddaughter Tigist enjoyed a Greek chicken dish he’d prepared. “And she’s my toughest critic,” he said proudly.

Rowena, meanwhile, is out of the breast cancer and treatment woods. Her early-stage tumor was removed, she completed chemotherapy in February and finished radiation treatments in April.

To be sure, cancer took something out of her. Or things. For starters, her sense of certainty around knowing her own body and her ability to heal herself. Then there was the sapping of her energy and physical wellbeing, as chemo poisons infiltrated her whole physique and radiation blasted her breast. Every tissue was touched. My famously flexible dancer wife could barely touch her toes, so tight were her hamstrings after the toxic tonic.

The loss of her hair was surprisingly tough on both of us. Rowena had a mane of wire. Rain could barely penetrate those thick strands. But chemo strafed her follicles, and clumps of hair began to fall out over Christmas. She reluctantly agreed to shave the rest off. And it didn’t come back quickly. I wondered if baldness might be her new normal. Whether she might be suffering a Samson-like fate—that with the hair went some of her power on a permanent basis.

But this summer she sprouted a new head of baby-soft hair. Grayer, maybe, but chic and a surprising new texture for her. Rowena’s physical strength also has recovered. And perhaps most importantly so has her artistic oomph. I think she has three projects in the works at the moment, including a reading soon on the “Dirty Laundry” of cancer.

It’s a similar, better story on other fronts. Last December, I got a full-time position with research and consulting firm Great Place to Work, resolving my fears about financial security. And although I’ve experienced some job uncertainty amid changes at the company this year, I’m excited about my role at Great Place to Work heading into the future.

Meanwhile, things are going swimmingly with my body. I mean that quite literally, in that I’ve made a regular practice of swimming. Front-crawling a mile or more two to three times a week not only is easing aches and increasing fitness, but marks a triumph over long-held swimming anxieties. In two weeks I will do something I once thought impossible for me: swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco.

My back is back as well. Despite some reservations, I had a nerve-burning procedure on my lower back in June. It succeeded in killing 60-80 percent of my pain, and alleviated a lot of my stiffness. I started playing soccer on a weekly basis, returned to yoga classes and am imagining triathlons. I can even see attempting a comeback in my beloved sport of basketball. For the first time in a long time I’m feeling hopeful about my body and athleticism.

And the new hope is more general. A widely applied sense of appreciation. Gratitude about the goodness all around me.

My sister-in-law Melanie Danke captured this feeling in a blog earlier this year:

“Every damn day I should be "AAAAAH! My freaking fabulous, fortunate life!!!!!" But for whatever reason, we humans don't seem to be wired that way. Probably there is a good reason. If we allowed ourselves to be overcome with the tender fragility and miraculousness of our lives we probably couldn't get on much with our days. Undoubtedly bills would not get paid. Very possibly commerce would grind to a halt. There is a chance our hearts would flat-out explode. I guess the best we can hope for are these periodic moments of lucidness, when we are filled both with an overpowering love and a profound sense of loss, reminding us, just for a second, that amidst the toast crumbs and lost mittens and bank statements, something fairly wonderful is going on.”

Melanie titled that blog item “Sentimental Horsetwaddle.” And it is hard to avoid sounding sentimental about this stuff. But the truth is the curses of the past year came with blessings tucked inside. Not just a sense of wonder but some gems of wisdom. The old saws about patience and persistence paying off. About what doesn’t kill you making you stronger. I believe those adages more than ever. And I think I’m better prepared to teach them to my kids.

I also think our family’s little story is part of a bigger, human family one. The ancient one of getting through trials and tribulations with courage, perseverance and community support. And a contemporary, hopeful tale as well. Of potentially greater enlightenment and kindness as a species. I’ve been reading a book with the claim that humanity is headed to better and better days. Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright, argues that things have been moving in a generally positive direction since life began. Although human nature contains the capacity for cruelty and selfishness along with goodness and generosity, the benefits of “non-zero-sum,” win-win exchanges keep pushing people to greater levels of cooperation and interdependence.

“More souls are crammed onto this planet than ever, and there is the real prospect of commensurately great peril,” he writes. “At the same time, there is the prospect of building the infrastructure for a planetary first: enduring global concord.”

Despite all the bad news in the world today, promising signs that Wright was basically right can be found in plenty of places. From what we at Great Place to Work see as the beginnings of a new era of better working environments, to the rapid progress America has made in recent years in terms of treating gays and lesbians with dignity, to the Iran nuclear deal that carries the seeds of greater Middle East peace.

Julius, Skyla, Rowena and I aren’t always paragons of peace these days. Our tempers flare. We can be unkind. Maybe some of the animosity is a product of the past year, when all the stress strained our ties and made us wobble at times. But overall I think we’re closer, sturdier than ever. That’s partly because we have tighter bonds with friends and family. We know we can lean on them, as well as turn to mental health pros if things get too overwhelming. And we are committed to spiritual practices that sustain us.

Like funerals. This July, we went as a family to the memorial service for Dwayne Calizo, a long-time artistic collaborator of Rowena’s. And I noticed parallels between Dwayne and my mother. That comparison is ludicrous on the surface. My mom was a conservative Catholic educator, while Dwayne was a radical, queer musician. But like my mom, Dwayne brought out the best in people. Especially when it came to their voices, and his work with them as a musical coach. Dwayne was sometimes penniless and wrestled with addiction, but hundreds of people came to the memorial service and told of the profound impact he had on them by believing they could sing.

Singing, in fact, also linked these memorials. My mother’s in St. Gertrude’s Church in Chicago included “On Eagle’s Wings”—a spiritual song deep in my bones from childhood. At Dwayne’s service, in a San Francisco theater space, Rowena and other former collaborators sang “In This Heart”—a Sinead O’Connor acapella tune that I have sung as a lullaby to Julius and Skyla for many years.

I cried like a baby as we sang the song at the memorial. Tears for the loss of Dwayne. Maybe also for the loss of my mom. But also joyful tears. I am grateful for both Dwayne and my mom. Inspired by both. Informed by their spirits.

Dwayne’s memorial service concluded the following day, with a dozen of us taking handfuls of his ashes and carrying them into the surf at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. I could feel what seemed like grains of bone between my fingertips. As a wave crashed into me, I dunked my head, let go of Dwayne and prayed my glasses would stay on.

They did. And I now see that Dwayne’s funeral was a kind of bookend to the year. An emergence from the barf tunnel, complete with an ocean cleansing of crud and bile. I hadn’t quite noticed we were out until that moment. The worry and sense of foreboding had lingered after we’d made it through the worst. In fact, the insight that we’d been in a barf tunnel and had crawled clear came to me as I saw Sean Riley at the memorial service. I hadn’t seen him for perhaps a year or more, and I summed up how we were doing with the metaphor his mother had given me. “Suddenly, it seems like we’re out,” I told him.

“That’s the thing about barf tunnels,” he responded. “You don’t see the end until you’re through.”

But once you’re through, life smells and looks so much sweeter. The view opens wide. At least it has for me.

So yes, this past year was trying. But it gave me new eyes with which to see the world. I’m not sure I can hold on to this gift as life gets easier. But I'm going to try.

Trying in 2014—The Hand of God

When I couldn’t sleep over the past year, I sometimes said this prayer: “God, please hold me in the palm of your hand.”

And I had a vision of a particular hand. A thick, soft, warm hand. With pillow-y finger tips and pads at the base near the wrist. A hand like my father’s hands. But a giant, 10-foot long version. Its fingers would curl slightly to make a kind of hammock, in which I lay safe and comforted. 

With that plea and that image I would try to let go of the worry gripping my mind, the thought loops around the aftermath of my mother’s death, my wife’s cancer, financial insecurity and other troubles. I would try to put things in God’s hands for a while.

And this spiritual sleep-aid gets at the way faith is the final piece in the puzzle for how my family and I got through a tough year. 

Thank God for the help. But that’s not to say my relationship with God has been a simple, purely positive one. And spirituality for my wife Rowena and kids Julius and Skyla likewise is complicated.

I was raised a Catholic, by a mother who had a lifelong career in Catholic education and a father whose family had a building named after it at the local Jesuit high school. There is a lot I cherish about growing up Catholic and going to Christ the King church every Sunday. God loved me and all people. And I loved God back, especially through singing.

One of my earliest memories is standing on the blond wooden church pews of Christ the King’s lower, less formal chapel. Standing so I could see the front of the church better, and singing with joy. Folk songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and contemporary religious tunes like “On Eagle’s Wings.” That song gave me the image of being held in God's hand:

And he will raise you up, on eagle's wings
Bear you on the breath of dawn
Make you to shine like the sun
And hold you in the palm of his hand

Part of what I loved about singing that song and others in church was harmonizing. Finding notes above or below the melody that somehow fit with it. There has always been something mystical, something sacred, about harmony to me. About two or more notes that are distinct but belong together. Maybe it captures something about the human condition, of us being social yet separate creatures. Or about our relationship with the divine—familiar yet apart.

So Catholicism enriched me with spirituality. But it also took away some of my sense of self. Limited me with the weight of its martyr message. The Jesus-sacrificing-himself-for-us story was something I took deeply to heart. So did my mother. I learned only after my mom died that she spent much of her adult life eating pizza with our family even though she disliked cheese! As she got older, my mom got better at setting boundaries and getting what she wanted. But with her as a role model, and Catholicism as a guiding philosophy, I had trouble as a young person knowing my own mind and acting accordingly.

In the years after college, for example, I applied to and got into law school as well as PhD programs in history and education. I ended up deciding not to go to any of them. And while I grew in vital ways through my first marriage, the fact that it ended in divorce had something to do with that same self-sacrificing impulse—of putting other people’s interests above my own.

Fortunately, I found a counter-weight to Catholicism in the spiritual traditions of the East. This started by distancing myself from Catholicism. Beginning in college, I grew critical of the sexism and hierarchy of the church, and of the intolerance of other religions by much of Christianity. I also was drawn to the notion that I could wrestle with God and find my own version of the sacred. Inspired by the Gnostics of early Christianity, I came to believe I had an important divine spark and could determine the God I wanted to respect and serve rather than just accept the deity that came with my upbringing.

And then I came to choose elements of Buddhism and Hinduism, largely through the yoga classes I began taking in San Francisco in the mid-1990s. On some level, I see the chanting during yoga and calls for inner peace during the final, shavasana, pose as superficial. But over the course of some 20 years of yoga, those religious, New Age-y overlays have worked for me. Especially from some of the wiser teachers, the spiritual commentaries have stretched, relaxed and elevated my spirit as much as the poses have done these things for my body.

Over the past several years, I have found a way to bridge this West Coast, Eastern spirituality with my childhood Western, Midwest faith. A foundation of the bridge is Old First Presbyterian Church in San Francisco. Old First and its Pastor, Maggi Henderson, reconnected Rowena and me to the Christian tradition. And over the past, difficult year, Maggi’s sermons and the church community have strengthened our spirits and provided welcome practical help.

I like to say Maggi’s “got the spirit”—not only an abiding faith in a loving God but an ability to exude that soulfulness in ways that comfort and inspire and provoke. Without smothering, losing touch with reality or getting “preachy.”

I especially like the way she makes the Holy Spirit feel nearly tangible. This third leg of the Christian trinity has long appealed to me—I have grafted onto it the “Goddess” that is found in many pagan spiritual traditions. Maggi doesn’t typically talk about the Holy Spirit as a “She,” but she portrays it as a constant, caring, nearly maternal presence. She often ends Sunday morning services at Old First by charging us to go “knowing that you are not alone—the Holy Spirit goes with you always and may lead you to places you never expected.”

One place I never expected to make a holy sanctuary is my bathroom. But given the lack of privacy in our one-room apartment, that is where I practice a morning mix of meditation, Christian prayer and Eastern chanting. Toward the end of it,

I say this: “Ommm-men”

It’s a blend of Ommm and Amen, my attempt to stitch together East and West in a word.

This personal practice may seem batty or the equivalent of flushing a “real” religion down the toilet. But I’m not alone in having found my own way in the realm of the spiritual. Nearly 1 in 5 Americans calls themselves spiritual but not religious, and Christians have dropped from 78 percent of the U.S. population in 2007 to 71 percent in 2014.

A blend of religious traditions also helped me make it through my mother’s death last July.

At my mom’s funeral, I knew I wanted to deliver a eulogy. One that did her justice and honored her strong Catholic faith while also staying true to my own understanding of what her death meant. I was nervous. Worried I couldn’t pull it off, especially in the company of my extended Catholic family. But I think I did a decent job. I hinted at the Eastern stuff in noting my mom’s recognition of the importance of relaxation and of a positive attitude before those things got such a big mindshare in our society. And while I have at times doubted the Jesus resurrection story, Old First has over time restored my faith in a God that does bring us home. I was able, then, to end with these words:

Martha Frances Frauenheim died in the arms of her beloved husband Ed Frauenheim. At St. Frances hospital. Right at the feast of St. Martha—who prompted Jesus to say “I am the Resurrection and the Life. He who believes in me will live a new life.”

My mom used to say—usually over a chocolate chip cookie—“It’s like dying and going to heaven.” Mom, I trust you are there. As your friend Elena White put it, “If Marty isn’t in heaven, the rest of us are big trouble.”

Following my mom’s funeral and into Rowena’s cancer diagnosis and treatment, Old First continued to raise me up. If not on eagle’s wings, on the soaring melodies of the choir, on the reassuring, thoughtful sermons from Maggi, on the lavish generosity of Old First friends. When Rowena’s cancer became known, the church responded with expressions of concern, prayers and practical assistance. Meatballs, soup, a necklace with stones with supposed healing properties for Rowena, they all came our way from Old First folks.

Rowena has plenty of skepticism about religion, including Christianity. She also is drawn to the Gnostic notion of a divine spark in every person. “If I were to define God, it’s that light inside all of us, the collective light.” Neither Rowena or I feel comfortable officially joining Old First because of the creed members have to recite—a creed that feels paternalistic and smacks of intolerance toward other religions.  Still, Rowena attends Old First, well, religiously. She sings traditional Presbyterian hymns to the kids as lullabies. And she wore that necklace like a talisman throughout her cancer treatments.

Old First was a comfort to her this past year, mostly because of the people. “The idea of being prayed for by all those people is powerful,” she says. “Isn’t that what church is? The place to be loved and lifted up? You don’t go the gym to be loved and lifted up. Church is very unique that way.”

Church, or some version of spirituality, also bolstered the kids this past year. Skyla and Rowena have a ritual of singing the nightly prayer--“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” Skyla told me she imagines God as a face made of clouds, with a bushy moustache and a goatee.

“I dream about him a lot,” Skyla said. “Once he said his name was George, another time he said his name was Fred. Apparently he doesn’t know his name.”

Vintage Skyla, a sometimes irreverent 10-year old. But she also told me she sometimes takes comfort in thinking of God looking down on her. Skyla also makes earnest, touching art during Sunday school. Like this poster Skyla produced during a lesson on Martin Luther King, Jr.

Julius, meanwhile, got interested in the Daoism he studied this year. He and his classmates wrote a play in which a wise Daoist emperor gives a beggar food and farm land, telling him “Yin and Yang won’t let you starve.” In other words, Julius explained to me, the forces of dark and light in the universe provide a balance, a harmony.

Whether we experienced moments of sacred grace through musical harmonies, sermons or art, spirituality sustained us amid struggles. Faith helped calm our fears.

Looking back at a sad, scary year, I also can say that I made a certain peace with the tension between accepting God’s will and determining my own destiny. Struck a better balance between letting go and not giving up. It had something to do with realizing the distinction between sacrificing one’s self and hearing the call to serve others. For me, that call sometimes took the form of helping out at monthly Old First dinners for local homeless people. It also meant helping Rowena give herself daily immune-boosting shots in the stomach for nearly a month despite my queasiness around needles.

As difficult as that was, my biggest burden over the past year has been helping my dad recover from my mom’s death. As he puts it, he and my mom were more than entwined—they “lived within each other.” Despite his own Catholic faith, my mom’s death left him despondent and struggling to find meaning and some sense of happiness. As the person who probably spoke with him most frequently right after my mom died and for months afterward, it was sometimes hard to help him see any brightness in the present or future.

But my dad himself—his body and his spirit—eased my burden. My dad can be a very affectionate and loving person. He recently told me he almost always held my mother’s hand or was physically in touch with her. I bet she loved that. I know I love holding my dad’s hand. Its warmth and softness make it the most pleasant, comforting, cozy hand I’ve ever held.

A few months ago, I held my dad’s hand. And I told him that I thought of his hand when I thought of God’s hand. He smiled. A bit of comfort back to him.

And for me as well. When I pictured the dad-inspired hand of God holding me during boughts of insomnia, it usually worked. My mind would take a break from worrying, my body would relax and I would fall asleep.

Trying in 2014--Life Support from Killer Counselors

I’ve written about a range of ingredients that went into our family keeping it together during a trying2014. Our own resilience, the aid of relatives, the power of pals.

We also had professional help. And the assistance from mental health experts proved vital.

First was the family counseling: Hanna and Anna, the two counselors who’d been working with our family since fall of 2013.

In essence, Rowena and I had developed some “clogged pipes” when it came to communication. By the middle of 2014, after about nine months of working with Hanna and Anna, we’d made a lot of progress. But then we took a few steps backwards. The strains of my mother dying, Rowena’s cancer diagnosis, job insecurity and other troubles made me, at least, revert to some unhelpful behaviors and positions. Especially right after my mother died in late July, I found myself losing my cool with Rowena and feeling like we might never agree on how to raise our kids.

Hanna and Anna to the rescue.

Not only did they give us a weekly forum to flesh out our emotions, but they equipped us with a ritual to find common ground on our own. It was simple but effective: let the other person talk for five minutes straight, and then paraphrase their words and your own emotional reaction to them. Only after this active listening to your partner do you get to say your piece for five minutes.

Rowena and I added a physical routine to this communication tactic. Our one-bedroom apartment makes it nearly impossible to have a conversation without our kids hearing us, and Hanna and Anna strongly suggested we not hash out conflicts in front of Julius and Skyla. So we would talk while taking a walk around the block. These mobile conflict-conversations almost invariably put us back in rhythm. Reconnected us. 

I still chuckle at the names of our family counselors. You can’t help but think they are an act out of Vaudeville or the Muppet Show. Hanna and Anna, the amazing twins of talk therapy! Or Hanna and Anny, the dynamic duo of family counseling!

But they were real-life superheroes to us.

And they weren’t alone. By late fall, after Rowena’s cancer diagnosis in September and growing worries about whether I’d have a job come the new year, I found myself in a state of high anxiety. I knew the aches and pains I was feeling in my back, feet and other body parts had something to do stress. So I turned to another mental health pro: Dr. Robert Foster.

I’d seen Dr. Foster a few years earlier for another bout of anxiety. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve wrestled with excessive worry and fear. My anxiety probably isn’t quite at the level that Atlantic editor Scott Stossel experiences. He bravely describes the nearly debilitating way phobias affect him as well as his response, which includes finely calibrated use of alcohol and sedatives to make it through public speaking events. I haven’t faced such consistent, extreme anxiety. But I’ve had awful enough episodes of worry and corresponding psychosomatic troubles. These include during my first college final exams, when I was beset by hives, and on the eve of my son’s birth, when I was convinced I’d become incontinent.

Thankfully, my mind wasn’t trying to play that trick on me this time around. But I was hopeful Dr. Foster could ease that troubled mind of mine. And he didn’t disappoint. Dr. Foster had introduced me to meditation the previous time I’d seen him. And I had continued to meditate several times a week.

But now he added a twist—quite literally. He suggested I try a more active, Tai Chi style of mediation, and that I start shaking.

Shaking?

Yes, he said, citing a book by stress expert Peter Levine that highlights the way animals recover from trauma by shaking their bodies. My initial skepticism soon gave rise to curiosity and a connection to dancing—something I’ve always loved and found I could do no matter how much my back seemed to hurt. Rihanna’s words from “Please Don’t Stop the Music” came to mind: “I gotta get my body moving. Shake the stress away.”

So I took to shaking. A full body shimmy, usually coming just after a series of back stretches during my morning shower.

And it seemed to help. Dr. Foster’s primal detoxification joining forces with the relationship repair services of Hanna and Anna to ease my mind and mend my marriage. To make life much better.

During a year marred by one death and the threat of another, our counselors were killer.