Goodbye, Dad

My father died Tuesday July 13th, 2010.

He'd been in a slow decline for about a year, becoming more confused and communicating less and less. Then the last five or six weeks before he died, he stopped drinking any liquids unless Mom made him. She'd been taking care of him at home, helping him dress and bathe, which he'd forgotten how to do. When I'd call, she'd stopped putting him on the phone since he was no longer able to make any sort of conversation-- though I did talk to him on Father's Day, and I believe he had some idea who I was, though it's difficult to say. Anyway, he collapsed at the kitchen table in the early afternoon, and was gone in a few hours.

Mom usually puts up a good front, and she dealt with Dad's death by focusing on all the legal and social tasks that soon followed. In part, I think she felt some relief that Dad's death was relatively quick and painless, and that the stress of caring for him while watching him steadily decline was over. Becky and I went down to see her, Becky the next day and I a few days after. We helped her with some paperwork, looked over 15-year-old drafts of the will and trust documents, and just kept her company. She was generally in good spirits, though once I caught her in silent reverie thinking about Dad. A week and a half later I went down again with Lillian and the kids (a trip we'd already planned) and we stayed with her a few days before leaving for family camp. Mom was generally OK then, too, but teared up and let the loneliness show when we were leaving. I just talked to her again tonight after we got back (no cell phone access at family camp) and she mentioned feeling lonely. Before, taking care of Dad and planning meals gave her a focus and purpose, even though he was no longer real company. Now that he's gone, she finds herself alone with little to do. These few months are going to be difficult for her. I've heard that death rates are higher than normal in the first few months after a spouse's death, and I expect loneliness and depression due to the loss are a big component of that. In this case, since she'd been losing Dad gradually over the year, perhaps the shock won't be as great. Mom's in general good health, both physical and mental, except for her eyesight and a bit of arthritis, so I'm hoping she'll weather this. I will probably go down once or twice more in the fall.

Becky and I are thinking about helping her move up here where it would be easier to visit. Mom's only direct social contact, as far as I can tell, is Susie, a woman who helps her shop once a week. All her other friends she keeps in contact with by phone or email (and email is difficult because of her failing eyesight). So I think having her move up here might work out. But, of course, Becky and I would have persuade Mom to move up here, and arrange things for her. Mom's not keen on assisted living, though I think the chance to talk to more people in person would be good for her. On the other hand, leaving her own home and moving into a small apartment in a new part of the state would be a big loss for Mom. She wouldn't have to cook for herself, which is either a plus or a minus depending on how you look at it. So I really don't know what would be best for her, and I suspect neither does she. Before, when Lillian or I would mention to Mom and Dad the possibility of them moving up here, neither was really willing to entertain the idea. Now Mom is, but keeps putting it off— she just mentioned that she'd have to stay in the house until January because of needing the taxes and paperwork to clear. There's no real necessity to stay there, of course, it's just easier to put off the decision.

And I can relate to that. I knew, and yet didn't really admit to myself, that Dad was dying once Mom told me he had stopped drinking. I was going to go down and see them, but put it off, first for work and then for some things we'd planned for Lillian's birthday. It seemed clear that the clinic they went do wasn't doing anything for Dad— not that I'm sure anything could have been done— but I didn't step in. Just as several years ago it seemed clear that Mom and Dad should move up here, but I didn't really push them to seriously consider the idea— I barely brought up the subject, in fact, Lillian did so more often than I did. Avoiding taking action is something I am unfortunately quite familiar with.

As for my own reactions to Dad's death... well, it's difficult to say. The day he died, when I was aware that he was worsening quickly but before I'd heard the news, I went for a walk after work at lunch. I sat by the creek and thought about growing up in Las Vegas, and knowing him as a kid, and recalled some vivid, happy memories. What strikes me now, though, is how I never really knew him as an adult. I don't remember any extended chats, any discussions of issues of the day, any personal stories. You'd think there must have been some. But our interests and our politics differed, and since my family avoids conflict, that put a lot of topics out of reach. Also, Dad was a rather private person, not inclined to personal reminiscence or revelation, as I suppose many men of his generation and background were. Our talks on the phone, for the last decade or more, were always perfunctory. We'd exchange a few sentences about the weather, and perhaps about some game he'd watched on TV that afternoon, and he'd always thank me for calling and say how much Mom enjoyed my calls. The last several years he'd always ask where I was calling from, or where I was, and I'd remind him where I lived. He'd ask if I could use any help, and I'd say no. That was really the extent of it. Despite being an engineer by profession, he never asked me about my work, or was interested in discussing it when I would raise it as a topic.

And, perhaps the hardest thing for me, is he wasn't interested in Nick or Allie. When they were babies, and children, and even when they were teens, he wouldn't talk with them, or ask about them, or express any interest at all. Since they were so important to me and such a big part of my life, this was difficult for me to come to terms with. He barely talked with me on the phone, let alone them. So I can't imagine what impression they have of their Grandfather. Just as their birth seemed to leave no impression on him, his death has had no impression on them, except as it's affected their Grandma. And, you know, why should it have?

Still, I remember being a kid. Dad was distant, but he tried to have a relationship with me. I remember building and flying model rockets with him. Discussing an estimate in the newspaper that seemed way off base and thinking about it together to come up with a better one. Accompanying him on some of his morning bike rides before work. Learning to drive. The pulley system he came up for raising my model train set up to the ceiling of the porch. Him coming home to eat lunch and swim in the summer during the work week. Him being a moderating influence when Mom would get upset with Becky and me for leaving messes around the house, or not helping with dinner or dishes. Him being proud of me when I did well in school, or when I figured out some mechanical issue, like the gearing necessary to make an Erector set's robot head move. I had a relatively happy childhood, and he was a part of that. My sense of humor owes a bit to his, and my sense of ethics owes a lot to him— he had a very strong and mature ethical sensibility. I'm really indebted to him for that.

So, Dad, goodbye. I wish I'd been a better son to you, maybe we'd have had a better relationship and you'd have kept more of your spirit, had a richer life, in your middle age and retirement. All I can do now, of course, is be a good father to my own children, and do my best to keep my spirit intact and my relationships with them strong. Already I find myself starting to fail to do so... so let me keep vivid my good memories of you, that I might manage to do a bit better.

Stripping Bare the Body

... by Mark Danner

A month or so ago I found myself in the local Border's, walking the aisles waiting for something or someone, and happened to see Mark Danner's book displayed on one of the shelves. This surprised me at the time— political journalists don't typically command much attention from booksellers, especially ones like Danner, who don't blow horns for those in power. But he's a Bay Area local, and this was Palo Alto after all, so it did make some kind of sense. Of course, I had to buy it.

I've been a subscriber to the New York Review of Books for a long time, since I was in my late 20's. Somehow I'd managed to get through college and several years of work without taking a strong, public position on any political issue. But a colleague of mine at the time, Sha Xin Wei, was fond of political discourse, and through the encouragement of his example I slowly started to take sides on issues of the day. He subscribed to the NYRB, loaned me some issues, and I eventually subscribed myself. Though eventually I dropped most of my many magazine subscriptions, I've kept the NYRB (and the New Yorker). So it was that I was fortunate enough to read Mark Danner's articles during the Iraq War.

I came of age just as Nixon resigned. I remember the Viet Nam body counts on the TV every evening at the dinner table, the asassinations of Martin Luther King and of Bobby Kennedy, the assurances by Henry Kissinger that "peace was at hand" in the lead-up to the election in '72, the secret Christmas bombings in Cambodia, my mother's occasional swearing at the TV... I was 14. If ever there was an era to make you cynical about politics, that was it. Then on into the mid-70's, with drug burn-outs on every street corner putting the lie to the tune-in/turn on/drop out sex/drugs/rock'n'roll mantra floated by folks cashing in on the late 60's hippie mystique. Then to the 80's and the Reagan era— the shining city on a hill, tax cuts combined with increasing military expenditures, trickle-down economics, massive debt, presided over by a congenial but uninformed TV personality turned politician. Cynicism about politics and social movements is second nature to me (btw, if you ask me cynicism gets an undeservedly bad rap). But even I was unprepared for the strident, overweening mendacity of the Bush presidency and the ease and completeness with which it swept aside all rational, informed discussion among the media and power elites who shape the political climate in the US. What a dismal, dismal time it was.

Mark Danner was one of the very few who kept my spirits up. Now, that's an odd way to put it, because he often brought some very discouraging and chilling news. But he also brought his deep moral clarity and understanding of war, what it means to those who wage it and are caught within it. I cannot begin to describe what relief it was, reading his articles and understanding that he knew what suffering was being wrought, knew it and abhorred it. The way politicians and pundits talk about war, like a football game— an event you go to, participate in, and leave— well, it's just nauseating. People like Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, talking tough, making the "tough" choices— there's no true understanding, no empathy, in these people. They just do not appreciate, nor do they care to appreciate, the human consequences that result from the choices they make. It is their very job not to understand these things— otherwise they could never wield or retain power.

Mark Danner does understand. It comes through in his writings. He's not strident, not accusatory. He's informed, rational, clear, calm, methodical— and moral. His style of journalism requires that the journalist not only investigate and report the facts as fully as he can, but also bear witness to the events that unfold.

So, I was curious about the book. What else had he written? "Stripping Bare the Body" is a collection of his war reporting over the last two-and-a-half decades. The pieces, he says, are for the most part presented as originally written. I can't find at the moment information about where each piece was published, though the introduction says he was in Haiti on assignment for the New Yorker in when he was doing work on the first piece, "The Legacy", published in '89. (Turns out he, like me, was born in 1958, so he was 31 then.) This chapter describes, first hand, in chilling and bloody detail, killings and anarchy during the first few years of military rule after Baby Doc Duvalier was removed from power in '86. It's difficult for me to imagine living and reporting in such an environment. I, at age 31, was a new father and still (as now) unformed and immature in many ways. I would have neither the courage nor the ability to live and report in such a place. But I can imagine what impact that would have upon one, the first-hand experience of the rawness of violence and power. He's quite aware that he's protected, but just barely, by the thin bubble of his whiteness and foreignness. Just reading this is exhausting, experiencing it must have been several orders of magnitude more so.

It's a long book, around 600 pages not counting the references and end notes. I've only read the Haitian sections so far. Following those are pieces from Sarajevo, another sterling period and place in human history. I'm looking forward to the rest of the book with an admixture of dread, but I read these stories because I must— you can't truly know our times without knowing these things, our humanity demands it— and because they are so compellingly written.

George Packer's review in the NYT is not positive. While commending the early first-hand reporting, he's critical of the later work based on other sources. There's more going on here than just a book review, of course, George Packer (and the NYT) was an early supporter of the Iraq war, one of the "Liberal Hawks" along with folks like Tom Friedman. These people were, shall we say, a bit overcome by their anti-Saddam fervor and forgot what they should have learned about politics and war growing up in the Vietnam era— good intentions aren't enough, and none of the actors has completely good intentions in the first place. We'll see what I think when I finish the book.

Anathem (and Kindle)

For Christmas, Lillian gave me a kindle, so I thought I'd try to read something on it. This wasn't a slam dunk, most of the things I like to read are books that have been around a few years and have accumulated enough good reviews for me to decide they're worth reading, and many of those aren't on the kindle. A significant number of the books I'm interested in are available second-hand for less than they cost on the kindle (even with shipping). Also, some technical or science books have diagrams or other color photos, and the form factor and display capabilities of the kindle are not well suited to them.

Anyway, Anathem had enough good reviews that I figured it would be a good book for giving the kindle a try. Snow Crash still carries a lot of weight with me, especially the first 50 pages which are maybe the most enjoyable 50 pages of 90's science fiction. I'll forgive Neal Stephenson a lot for that.

As a reading experience, the kindle is passable, but not great. Some things are more difficult to do than they should be. For example, sometimes I want to review a passage I read half an hour before— the story refers to it, and I want to look again. The small size of the 'pages' on the kindle make paging cumbersome, and there's no obvious way to, say, jump back 20 pages or so. With books this process is much easier, you can jump back a lot or a little, as you need.

The pages are too small. In particular, they are too narrow. The kindle justifies the text, but doesn't have a hyphenation dictionary, and so often the spaces between words are jarringly wide. It's more like reading a newspaper than a book. While I suppose this is a tradeoff for battery life, I find it annoying. There isn't quite enough content on each page in any case— I'd rather have a screen that can display the same contents as a page of a trade paperback.

Anathem uses a fair number of terms in an invented language. 'Dictionary' entries punctuate the story, often indirectly foreshadowing events to come. Kindle has a built-in dictionary, which is pretty handy, since it makes it much easier to look up words on the spur of the moment. Unfortunately, the book's dictionary isn't part of it. It would have been pretty cool if the book's dictionary could have been used by the kindle, but such a special-purpose use was not envisioned by the creators of the kindle or of the digital book format it uses, and probably would not be worth the effort when translating into book form. On the other hand, just the smallest support for linking, as on any web page, would have made it easy to get the same functionality.

One thing that is nice about the kindle, though, is the element of instant gratification. Delivery over the air means you can get the book immediately. There's a certain enjoyment in that, silly and unfortunate as it is. Impulse purchases are, of course, bad for consumers, so the facilitation of this is actually not a good thing. That doesn't mean I can't enjoy it, but (as is always the case with me) I can't escape feeling a bit disappointed with myself, and like I've let myself be taken advantage of.

Despite all this, the kindle works for me. Reading Anathem on it was fine even with the poor formatting. The screen is readable in lots of lighting conditions. I like the faceplate images the kindle puts on the display when it goes into sleep mode. Search functionality (I need to learn more about this) is handy. You can keep several books in a small package thats portable and can go for days without power. I definitely see the appeal, and I've purchased another book to read.

Back to Anathem. The comparisons to A Canticle for Leibowitz are apropos, especially in the first quarter of Anathem. The monastic setting, with an initiate puzzling out the mysteries of the order in which he finds himself, is quite familiar. This goes on a long time (like all Stephenson's recent works, the book is a long one) and many reviewers find it slow going. I wasn't particularly bothered by this, though— in a sense, the relatively slow pace of the story worked well to convey the stately pace of the monastic life and the long historical time scale (thousands of years) that is the background of the story. Long, slow immersion in another world can be fun, and with science fiction, much of the enjoyment is putting together a coherent picture of the alternate reality from the brief glimpses offered to you as the characters go about their business.

The action picks up when the principal characters are removed from the monastery and start encountering the outer world (which they normally have very little contact with). I'll avoid spoilers but suffice to say the long historical record is about to receive a major jolt.

Both settings (inside and outside the monastery) provide Stephenson an opportunity to present chunks of detailed information (in this case, about mathematics) in story form. Unlike Snow Crash, where I found the story suffered from the long intricate detour into the of the doings of various Sumerian gods, the astronomy, physics, and math concepts in Anathem are treated more lightly and woven into the story better. Part of the enjoyment of the story is identifying the relationships between our (western) scientific/philosophical history and those of the world of Anathem. So this works well, too.

But... I still ended up being a bit dissatisfied with the book. And I think it's because I'm too old. If I were in my early twenties (about the age I was when I read A Canticle for Leibowitz) this probably wouldn't have bothered me, at least not nearly as much.

First off, I'm not sure it would have carried the same resonance with me as Canticle does, because Canticle is ultimately dystopic— the scientific and technical knowledge preserved by the religious faith through the eras of darkness after civilization's collapse is ultimately restored to the world, first to great benefit, but ultimately leading to an even greater disaster and the complete collapse of civilization. In short, there's a moral story here, which is that perhaps we are not morally or culturally capable of managing the technology we are intellectually able to develop, that our best instincts still lead to unintended and unwanted consequences, and that ultimately we cannot help but destroy ourselves and our planet. Written in the early 60's, in the middle of the cold war and the nuclear race and at the tail and of a long era of 'gee whiz' science fiction, Canticle is a pretty serious story. Like all genre fiction, it's easy to dismiss, and the moral message is unsubtle and blunt, but the moral concerns are true and stir some unease.

Anathem has nothing so serious to say. The implication at the end is that the word continues pretty much as it has before, and in fact the corrections and insights brought about by the dramatic events will be of limited duration, at least on the historical time scale that is the backdrop of the novel. Nothing to shock you into serious reflection here.

But that's ok, really. I don't need a moral, and I'm naturally dystopic enough so that I don't need more of it. So if this was it, I'd still be happy with the book.

The big problem for me— and again, this is due to my age— is the lack of adult personalities and relationships.

This book seems to be written for, well, intellectually precocious but socially lagging teens. (Yeah, I know, it's science fiction). The monastic life is basically undergraduate life at a small college, and the young (19-year-old) protagonists are essentially the key driving actors in what is nominally an adult world. In this way it feels like the new Star Trek, where cadets, friends and rivals in the academy, end up taking all the command positions in a starship— I mean, sorry, but kids are not going to take control of a starship. Similarly for Anathem, the chances that a small group of students all the same age, who all know each other, from the same monastery (just one of a number around the world), are going to all be major players in a world-sized drama are, well, nil. Even characters introduced later in the story turn out to be related— the 'spy' they uncover and get to help them turns out to be the husband of the (one) woman who rebels and dies delivering information to them. Um, my willing suspension of disbelief goes only so far, and it breaks under the stress.

Furthermore, the relationships between the characters are frustratingly simple. There's a crush, a first kiss, going steady. Sorry but it's been too long for me to relate to this. Granted the story involves students in a monastery, but the romantic relationships are ridiculously immature even for that age. Rivalries are minimal and play virtually no part in the plot. There's no real jealousy, competitiveness, frustration, schadenfreude (love that word), or personal struggle and growth. Even in science fiction there ought to be something resembling real personalities and real relationships. But instead, you get what basically are stock teen characters. There's the bright guy, the determined-and-pretty-in-her-own-way girl, the guy who's more physical (martial arts), the guy who's not remarkable in any particular way but is just well-rounded enough and has enough street smarts to somehow be the leader and central protagonist (read: stand-in for the reader)... Aieee! It makes my brain hurt just describing these characters.

And it's too bad. As science fiction— a story whose plot line is driven by science and speculation based on science— it's great, but as engaging adult fiction it just doesn't work for me. Perhaps the tropes of science fiction are just too difficult for me to digest when it's a group of characters instead of the usual protagonist, love interest, and enemy or rival. I suspect, though, that the book was just written for a much younger audience. At least it doesn't have his Shaftoe character (who just isn't amusing to me and gets on my nerves, it's why I couldn't read Stephenson's Quicksilver trilogy). But it doesn't have either a real adult protagonist or an interesting genre parody of one. And I guess these days I need one. Even a reasonable 25-30 year old I could relate to. But not these teens. Pity.