In the course of maintaining my first blog, "The Flatland Oracles" at Salon, I noticed that a lot of people were hitting a particular posting at my sight that dealt with issues of death and coping with dying.
This is a subject to which I've given a lot of thought, having lived through my mother's very painful widowhood, and then been widowed myself in my early forties. Though death is truly the universal human experience, it's not one for which our culture really prepares us. Those of us who belong to the religions that talk of an afterlife may hold some sort of belief of what follows; but it's hardly comforting for your average believing sinner to contemplate the prospect of imminent judgment.
Having seen how many queries get submitted to google related to death, dying, and coping with death and dying, I decided to write about my own experience with grief and to provide what advice I could about how to minimize the social consequences. The problem is that social consequences do (eventually) matter and can permanently damage or alter the grieving person's other relationships.
Since I only give advice concerning matters as to which I've made multiple mistakes, I'm at least speaking out of real knowledge of what the experience is like.
Also: speaking of Mel Gibson, not that I was, Nick sent me a copy of what is supposed to be the full transcript of his arrest. It made Nick more feel more disgusted by him and me feel sorrier for him. It was more of the same, really, but it was the quantity as well as the quality that showed just how far gone he must have been.
I had a relative who had a serious drinking problem when I was growing up. Sober, he was generally amiable, though inclined to fly off the handle a bit too easily for me to feel comfortable around him. Drunk, he was a different person. A person I couldn't stand, because no rational person could have.
My mother used to say, "He's a different person when he's drunk." When I began studying psychology as a child, I realized that this is completely possible. Many people have a shadow self that they keep rigidly under control when sober but that comes ravening out when they are seriously drunk (and he was seriously drunk).
I wonder whether it is right to hold a person responsible for things they say when they have ceded over the controls to the part of themselves least capable of driving the car. Having lived as an adult with an alcoholic, I found that I was unable in the end to separate the drunk crazy part from the rational part; to me, they were all of a piece, though what one said the other consistently contradicted. I felt---in fact it seemed clear to me---that despite his denials when sober, he couldn't have said or done the things he did while drunk without the propensity to do so all the time.
As I said before, no amount of alchohol could make me utter an anti-semitic or racist comment because I simply don't hold such beliefs; it would never occur to me. So I think that the Mel Gibson revealed Saturday night was certainly a part of the real Mel Gibson----only not the whole Mel Gibson.
But really, I'm done with the whole issue. I am really just so sick of witnessing the implosion of the wealthy and celebrated. What I'd really like to know is what Gibson had to tell himself about his life to become alcoholic in the first place. Why isn't anything ever enough for these people? One reason I rarely read so-called "celebrity gossip" is the wretched excess of their so-called "lifestyles."
I always thought Gibson was supposed to be the stable and respected husband and father of what is it, nine children? and one of the people who hadn't drunk the Hollywood Kool-aid. So what the hell is wrong with him?
Ah well, good luck to him in the Very Public Intervention and Rehabilitation that's in store. I wish him all the best, even though I'll be working very hard not to know about any of it.
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