Category — Uncategorized

Another post about Normal People that is not about Normal People. There was a post on Longreads in which a woman wrote about posting on social media after her mother died. Her mother died at 4 am. By 8:30 am, she had posted her news. She writes,

Now she was gone, and it seemed appropriate, even convenient, to let people know through these broad, digital strokes … Relatively speaking, I took to social media quite soon after Mom breathed her last, and when I consider this, it feels — at least immediately — both crass and bizarre.

Is it crass? Is it bizarre? Isn’t it where we’re going to go to mourn if it’s also where we go to celebrate? Those who don’t spend a lot of time online, it would be bizarre. For people who spend a considerable amount of time online, it makes sense.

It ties into a part in Normal People. There is a death, and a character goes on the Facebook wall of the person who died. They write,

Lots of people from school had left comments on his wall, saying they missed him. What were these people doing … writing on the Facebook wall of a dead person? What did these messages, these advertisements of loss, actually mean to anyone? What was the appropriate etiquette when they appeared on the timeline: to “like” them supportively? To scroll past is search of something better? … Thinking about it now, she can’t understand why it bothered her. None of those people had done anything wrong. They were just grieving. Of course it didn’t make sense to write on his Facebook wall, but nothing else made sense either. If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.

Is there really any right way to mourn? And just because you mourn one way for one person, do you have to keep mourning that way for others?

I’ve never gone on someone’s Facebook page after death and written them a message (that I can remember), though I have read other people’s messages. I once spent a whole night, scrolling back through messages that people left an old friend after he was gone. It made me feel connected to something. Less alone with that grief that had nowhere to go. Isn’t that a small good thing?

I read Normal People (Sally Rooney) a few weeks ago, but this isn’t really a post about Normal People. (It was good, by the way. Very good.) It’s a post about infertility.

There’s this part in the book where one of the characters is going through a depressive episode. During this time period, they go out to a book reading and end up having a nice evening. They go home and re-read old notes they made about a story they wanted to write, and the character describes this moment of happiness inside the hell that is depression “like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything” (p. 228).

Despite everything.

The words felt familiar because there were moments like that with infertility; moments where I felt this break in the heaviness and I got a full ten minutes of feeling happy before the other feelings started flooding back in. It reminds me of painted photographs. Do you know how people take black and white photos and use paint to dot in colour in one tiny section of the photo? Like a black and white photo of a woman, but the rose she’s holding is a dusty pink. Or a black and white photo of a child holding a balloon, and the trailing balloon is a cheery yellow.

Spot colour photography. It’s like that. Unexpected colour; unexpected happiness.

So the words felt familiar, but I couldn’t actually pull out any happy memories from that time period. I could remember a lot of not happy moments without needing to consult a diary or photo album to remember. But I couldn’t think of moments of joy like that despite knowing that they must have existed since the words in the book felt so familiar.

Maybe we just remember sad moments during sad times more vividly.

It’s my birthday today, which means that I have a new immortal friend. Except this time, it’s a polar bear, and this time there are TWO of them––twin immortal polar bears.

The first is named Hillel. I decided to keep with the theme of Jewish philosophers––Akiva, the immortal quokka, Hillel, the immortal polar bear––because my animals are also very wise. You can tell by looking at their furry faces:

I am calling him Hilly, for short. Mostly because I had a friend in college named Hillel that we also called Hilly or Hils. And I always thought that was super-cute.

I was only expecting one polar bear but two showed up. So I named the second one Houdin after Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, the father of modern magic. He is from Blois, a city that is special to our family, and… well… I love real magic AND fake magic.

Hillel and Houdin. H is pronounced in Hillel and not in Houdin.

Stuffed representations of my very real, very immortal polar bears.

So… my birthday. I am having big feelings about this birthday. I had a hard time leading up to it, and I’m having a hard time today.

I wish I could cuddle up with the real Hilly and Houdin, though I imagine that if I tried to burrow into their fur that it would smell like fish and sea water. (Let’s not talk about what bears could do to a small lady and pretend that Hilly and Houdin would never harm someone who loves them this much.) But since cuddling with the real Hilly and Houdin is not possible, I’ll just gorge on ice cream instead.

Happy birthday to me.

Lifehacker lays out a scenario where someone cancels plans, and then asks: “What are you going to do with this unexpected freedom?” Seriously? Are there really people who stand like a deer in headlights, not knowing what they would do if their plans get cancelled? Doesn’t everyone know the only acceptable option is to binge Netflix?

No?

After I stopped rolling my eyes and they returned to their normal position in their sockets, I started thinking about what I would do if I found myself with a free evening and wanted to be productive. I have a long “do this at some point” list: work on the family tree (I want to recopy it because I’ve written all over it, and it’s a little messy), work on a photo project that I’m doing of the kids, or work on the Scotland photo album. (Yes, we’re talking about the trip from 11 months ago… no… it isn’t finished.)

I do work on those things, but it’s hard to carve out time for them when there are so. many. shows. on. Netflix.

What would you do with found time?

My mother sent along a link to a new Holocaust archive that opened to the public consisting of scanned documents and general information. Name, town, prisoner number, concentration camp. I dove into it, trying to find my great-grandmother’s brothers.

And I think I found them, many alternative spellings later; two men who fit in terms of name, town, and camp. I knew they were in Buchenwald and the town they’re from. There is a birth year listed on one of the documents, so I asked family members if they could name my great-grandmother’s siblings birth order. Was one of her brothers 9 years older? If yes, I found them. If not, this was someone else with the same name.

But no one knew.

And all the people who would have known are gone.

It made me so incredibly sad. I’m seeing a lot of family members this upcoming weekend, so I was going to carry around a list of names of her siblings and see if we could put them in order by pooling everyone’s information. Maybe no one can put them in order on their own, but perhaps they could at least say person A is older than person B, and in doing so, the order will logically present itself. At least, that is my hope. Plus I have a few papers to go through that have family stories written on them, and maybe there are clues to the birth order in those papers.

I guess it just brings up how sad I am that I don’t have my grandmother anymore, so I can’t ask her these questions. She would’ve known where her mother stood in relation to her siblings.

I actually knew they were in Buchenwald because Elie Weisel was in Buchenwald, and they were from the same town. It always gave me comfort that I knew some of their story by reading his story. They are one of the various townspeople crowded together with Weisel in the ghetto and the train and the camp. And so I knew they also ended up at Buchenwald, though unlike Weisel, they did not get out.

This is my first time diving into Holocaust records. And, on one hand, it’s upsetting, but it’s also all I have left except for a photo and a few stories. These documents confirm these people existed. They were my great-great uncles, and they had wives and children and lives in Europe. And they should be remembered, their documents collected, like everyone else on the family tree.