Melancholia Greatest Hits

Speaking of grief, there is something perversely funny about the low, sad moments in life. Windows are opened and looked out of, then closed when the shivers set in.

1. The Russian Soul

Getting over a hard breakup, I had the bright idea of cheering myself up with a summer abroad. Hello Russia, distiller of the finest misery in the world. It was my third visit, but I thought everything was different now that Russia was a democracy (!) and valiuta was out in the open.

I remember my first morning waking up in post-Soviet Moscow, staying with American acquaintances in an apartment in a subproletariat concrete apartment block, looking out over the scene of cracked cement, weeds, and cottonwood trees blowing fluff all around. It was a landscape from an anti-totalitarian fairy tale. There were dumpsters. There were long tubes in the entryway in which to pour the trash – musorprovody. Garbage conductors. Drunk men had marked the territory thoroughly, like feral cats. If there were any actual cats they were starving.

There was nothing to eat and no visible place to get anything. Up from the scrubby horizon poked the spires of the local neighborhood attraction, the BDHX (Vay Day Enn Kha) – formerly a permanent exhibition of Soviet agricultural prowess. (Look at this fine rich soil preserved in plexiglass! Look at this dried up corn!), now used mainly for car showrooms.

I remember drinking vodka to retreat from the horror (and thinking this was a new idea, although obviously, duh), and talking to a former prostitute who was very enthusiastic in the feminist direction. Da. Do svidania. Please go away.

2. Sawdust Soup and Bucket Latrine

Whose idea is it to make girls in their junior year of high school stock up on war narratives (in history class) and Holocaust survivor tales (in English)?

Dear impressionable fledgling person-let,

You already know that the world is a hostile place, that people are falling all over themselves to humiliate and ridicule you, to pull the wool over your eyes and hurt your delicate feelings, to tromp on your sensibilities and damage your hearing – but it gets much worse. Ha, ha. You are weak.

3. Knitting

The sad, unfortunate thing I am thinking of will go away if I just knit another 5 rows of this lumpy scarf. Okay, 10 rows. Acrylic yarn really isn’t so bad in this light, and at that price?

Another 25 rows would do it. 50? When my limbs are numb and my lips are tingling from lack of blood flow, and my wrists are thinking about carpal tunnel as I flick the needles, then I’m almost there. But wait, is the scarf as long as the person I am not thinking about is tall? No? Better keep going.

I see that the examples amuse me because they come from the Black Forest of youth. The melancholia of middle age is a different scale. Empty baby hats. Small children in the ER. Elders losing their marbles. Reading glasses. Not funny. Maybe when I’m older these categories of thought will be real knee slappers, but for now, no.

Good Grief

When I was booking up the 101 away from Grandma's funeral in San Luis Obispo, I thought, good, now I can lie down and cry for a week. There never was any good time to let it all out. I could have cried a lot more at the service, but even waterproof mascara has its limits, and besides I wanted to keep a hold of myself because I knew I had to get up and read three-quarters of the way through.

Crying doesn't satisfy, though. You end up with a nose so stuffy your body aborts the mission -- "Mayday, mayday! Abandon ship on the higher emotions because we aren't getting enough oxygen up here!" Then the bottled-up anguish collects around your brain as a crust of unsavory biochemicals, and, bam, one side of your cerebral cortex is a rotten melon oozing with maggots and the pain is so excruciating you'd like to get at a machete so you can hack it off. It might work to scrape away the worst bits, but the toxic mold has probably already spread its spores to the other side and they are going to go off in a minute.

So there are no rational and tidy ways to clean up after grief -- no easy 12-step program (Denial. Check.), no modern social customs to ease the burden (wailing mourners for hire). I was sure for three days during the week they stopped feeding Grandma that if I could just get my hands on some real Victorian mourning jewelry I would feel better. I bought some genuine jet beads and hand-knotted a necklace; I did web searches for terms like "cabochon" and "bog oak", but these were only distractions and Grandma died just the same.

Idealism gets tangled up in there, in all the tiny beads and the pocket packs of Kleenex. The imaginary Grandma who did not have Alzheimers and was secretly even more wise and analytical than the Grandma I knew probably had lots of coherent things to say which I will never get to hear. Only the Grandma in my head can say those things now, and it's possible she's the one who's been saying them all along.

The mind plays tricks. When a white-haired person stepped out of the hall and into the hubbub of the post-funeral supper, the corner of my mind thought, "Oh good, Grandma's here now. She shouldn't miss this." And I reflect that the human life span is shorter than our brain capacity would seem to require -- what, bow out now? Don't you want to see how everything turns out?

Crying still seems like the only option, although crying all alone seems too solipsistic and unproductive, and crying with other people seems like barking up the wrong tree. There is only one person who would really "get it" -- the affront of this loss and the nuances of what it all means. There's one person it would be great to talk it all over with and work through it and while we're at it, figure out the rest of the family. Oh, wait a minute.

Marietta Who?

Marietta Holley was a dyed-in-the-wool North Country local who made a name for herself in literature. It seemed farfetched, even in the mid-nineteenth century, that the daughter of religious rural folk from the area near Adams, New York would grow up to write, but she did it anyway. One crabby old woman in the family's social circle cackled at her and told her she wouldn't earn enough to pay for the postage on her letters. But either in spite of or because of the naysayers, she wrote, and her work sold like hotcakes in the 1870s and 80s. She made enough of a living to build a Queen Anne mansion for herself on the site of the old family homestead, and the friendly, supportive citizens of Adams took to calling it "Holley's Folly."

Holley was a feminist, and her shtick was to argue for reform in the voice of homely, hefty, folksy goodwife named Samantha Allen. Samantha tries to talk sense into people in the down-to-earth dialect of her native village. Certain of her locutions are uncannily familiar -- she talks just like my Grandma Guthrie. Unlike Grandma Guthrie, however, Samantha shakes her head at the overblown conservatism of her fellow citizens. She's a common-sense progressive, but not a radical -- she promises that giving her the vote won't make her shirk her duties where pies and laundry are concerned.

The Samantha novels were bestsellers, and Holley was put in the category of a "regional humorist" (like Mark Twain). She kept churning out Samantha novels long after literary fashion had moved on to other things.

I find it fascinating that she was able to create a literary life for herself against the odds, to set up her own independence, to define her own politics. I doubt it would have been possible for her to launch herself any higher than she did -- not without cutting ties to Adams and moving to the big city. In the end, she did not turn out to be a female Mark Twain, but she did pretty well. Are there any modern Marietta Holleys coming out of Adams today? If there are, how long do they stick around after graduation?