The Dish

Popova highlights a passage from Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, written after the death of her husband of 40 years:

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.

In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to “get through it,” rise to the occasion, exhibit the “strength” that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

Update from a reader:

I know that a lot of people, widowed especially, identify with Didion’s magical thinking perspective where grief is concerned, but it’s dangerous at worst and simply unhelpful at the least to assume that grief shares more than just a handful of touchstones for everyone. I couldn’t read her book. It didn’t resonate with my experience as far as losing a spouse went. I never thought my husband would show up one day and wonder why I’d taken over the closet. I never mourned our lost future because he’d succumbed to a terminal diagnosis and I’d put away our future long before he died.

And I always moved forward because it was the only route I knew that would ensure my survival. I didn’t have time to be crazy. I had a toddler, a full time job and a life that I couldn’t outsource.

There were dark days and angry ones and days when I was just so tired of it all that I cursed my husband out for leaving me stuck to deal with it while he bounced around on clouds without a care, but I laughed too. Found joy. Started dating and before the first year had passed met the guy who is now my husband.

Yeah, it sucks, but it’s not forever in the bottomless-pit way Didion would have us believe. We don’t all lose our minds.

(Photo by Ibai Acevedo)

Another big round of personal emails:

I have closely read each and every miscarriage post, out curiosity and compassion. I am a single 30-year-old male who is now absolutely paranoid about the possibility of not being able to have kids one day, which I very much want to (more than I want to get married, but that’s another story). One of your recent posts mentioned guilt on the mother’s part – I would imagine the mind can be awfully cruel and somehow blame oneself for a miscarriage. But it raised another question: is the viability of an embryo totally dependent on the mother’s health? Or does the father’s sperm count/quality play any role? It feels like it would be best for couples not to know who is to “blame” in these situations.

It looks like chromosomal abnormalities from either partner can cause miscarriage, as well as damaged sperm. Another reader:

I was reading this post at work today when my 7-week-pregnant wife called to tell me she started bleeding and is being sent to the emergency room. Now I am writing while we wait for an ultrasound and hoping for the best. If thing go badly, these series of post will have been helpful in dealing with the grief, knowing we are not alone. Thank you.

He follows up:

After a four-hour stay in the ER, it turned out that the bleeding was caused by a fairly common occurrence of the egg sack pulling a piece of the uterus lining away during the implantation process. It usually heals on its own and everything is fine, but sometimes it keeps pulling away and eventually detaches leaving the the fetus cut off from the uterus. We’re ok for now, but have to keep watching.

Another reader:

After 40 years of marriage and three healthy children, this still stands as the single most loving thing my husband ever did for me:

he forced the hospital to give him the fetus so he could bury it under a tree in our yard.  We had brought the tiny one-inch body into the hospital with us, wrapped in toilet paper, to show what had happened suddenly at home. What followed was an emergency D&C and an overnight stay for me, and he went home with our two year old daughter.  That’s that, I thought.  Nothing is in my control.  But when he picked me up in the morning, he related his having had second thoughts upon getting home and his subsequent big loud angry argument with staff in the hospital hallway over whether it belonged to him or to them.  He had won.

From another woman who experienced miscarriage:

I was devastated. I’d already picked a name for the baby, it already had a nickname with my co-workers, and it had all seemed so right. The 24 hours I had to wait until I could have the D&C seemed like an eternity. After reading one of the stories you posted, I am grateful that I did not have to go to a strange doctor to have the procedure done. Given how common D&Cs are for reasons totally unrelated to abortion – later in life, I had several simply to treat excessive menstrual bleeding – I’m stunned by the notion that OB-GYNs are not being taught to perform this procedure as a matter of course.

As overwhelming as my grief felt those first few months after the loss, as real as that “dream baby” seemed to me, my experience only increased my fervent support of reproductive freedom. Only once I had been pregnant did I truly understand the countless changes that occur to a woman’s body even at the earliest stages of pregnancy. Only once I knew my pregnancy was doomed did I know how intolerable it could be to “wait for nature to take its course.”

Another:

Contrary to one of your readers who was reassured when she was rushed past all the pregnant ladies for her post-miscarriage D&C, I quite a different situation.  After arriving at the hospital for a D&C, not only wasn’t I shuffled away from the pregnant ladies, but to wait for my procedure I was put in a double room with a young woman in active labor!

I spent the first five minutes silently cursing the hospital and feeling deeply sorry for myself, but then I started noticing that the young woman was definitely not having an easy time of it.  She was quite young, certainly not out of her teens, and all alone.  Clearly no one had coached or mentored her on what to expect because she was handling her contractions all wrong, and in doing so making everything a lot harder on herself than it needed to be.

I spent the next hour doing my best to teach the young mom to be what I could remember of the Lamaze method (thanks Elizabeth Bing!).  Slowly, she learned to work with the contractions, to focus, and to calm herself.  When the nurse came to get me, she expressed regret that I’d had to be placed there in that room.  I told her, and believe to this day, that it was one of the best things that ever happened to me – not only did the experience take me right out of my own misery, but I was able to pay forward what I was taught, helping a stranger make the most she could of a tense, scary and painful situation.

One more:

First, to echo many, thanks for airing the stories of miscarriage.  These are stories that for all kinds of reasons need to be heard and aired to better understand the varied realities and experiences of women and men who go through miscarriage.

My personal experience aligns with a few of your readers – a missed miscarriage followed by a D&C – though my grief was slight because I had two children already and knew the statistics that as many as 1 in 3 pregnancies actually end in miscarriage.  I think the lack of information around reproduction, and the ability to know you are pregnant only three weeks after conception, have combined to cause far too much grief.  Our culture fears discussing conception and reproduction because it is so intertwined with the myopic politics of abortion, but that leaves the average woman without the knowledge your PhD reader has.

Lastly, the statistics – up to 1 in 3 pregnancies end in miscarriage – and being a practicing Catholic make me wonder at the apparent wastefulness of miscarriage.  The platitudes about not knowing God’s plan or God only giving you what you can handle don’t seem quite enough.  Is the obsession with life beginning at conception, and the silent suffering around the common experience of miscarriage, just one more example of the Church’s (and much of our culture’s) refusal to really know and understand women and their biology?  What would the Church’s teaching on life look like if it were informed by these stories, and the biological realities of one of the most complicated/least understood things the female human body does? How might that teaching then be pastoral instead of dogmatic and actually minister to women and their bodies in the world?

Readers keep the popular thread going:

I think lying to kids is one of the many things that affluent parents over-think. I promise that the mother who just told her 4 year old there is no Santa that her kid is not sitting around contemplating the social and economic implications of children without coats and where is Santa in their lives. Yes, she will likely tell her peers there is no Santa, but they won’t believe her because they are in the developmental stage of magical thinking. She may know Santa is not real but she likely wonders if her toys come alive when she isn’t watching them, or some similar age appropriate example of magical thinking. Does her Mom plan to root out every magical thought she has and squash it for the sake of feeling like she is honest with her child?

Choosing to out Santa as a fake is a legitimate parenting choice, but it doesn’t need to be wrapped in high minded, socially conscious explanations. “I am uncomfortable lying to my child” will do. We give to an orphanage (yes, they still existing the US) in lieu of exchanging gifts with adult family members, and not once did our kids, who actively participate in the process, question why Santa is not providing for those children. It is possible for them to believe in Santa AND recognize the hardships faced by others.

Another reader:

To me, by far the most disturbing aspect of the Santa “lie” is the moral angle. The lesson is that kids should only be good for a material reward. Forget developing one’s conscience, or doing the right thing, or learning to make ethical choices to become a better human being – it’s about the cash/material payoff.

Another:

My husband and I are so incredibly committed to lying to our children about Santa Claus that we are traveling to Lapland next week with them – they are 9, 6 and 3 – to see the real Santa (as well as the northern lights, and to play with reindeer, etc):

This is mostly about the magic of childhood, storytelling and human imagination, and very little about lying in the true sense of that word. I prefer to think about it as “extending a fantasy” but I also see how it can be taken as lying. It depends on the perceiver of the extension/lie and how they wish to define lying for themselves.

Another:

If you lie because your kid is going to react badly when you tell them Santa isn’t real, they’ll still react badly when they find out it. It will probably be worse for them because it will be public or they’ll be older and even more embarrassed. But maybe it will be better for you because you won’t have to be there and at least it means you don’t have to deal with it right now. Sometimes parenting well means confronting uncomfortable or painful situations with your kids rather than leaving them to deal with it on their own without you. Sure it is easier to tell them you never did drugs or had sex but doing that tells them drugs and sex are shameful and leaves them to navigate those issues by themselves.

Another shifts gears:

This is a great thread.  I’d like to make it even better by tying it in with another great thread, the cannabis closet.

Being a long-time casual smoker, I have worried for years about my son asking me about drug use and how I would respond (he is now 11). I have always believed in telling the age-appropriate truth when possible, but using a white lie when required, so was genuinely conflicted on the matter.

Fast forward to election 2012, when Washington state legalized weed. Hooray! During that time, we had many conversations with our son about this issue, basically reiterating the arguments you have made at the Dish. He seemed unfazed about the whole topic. Sure enough, about two weeks later, my kiddo walks in on me as I’m blowing smoke out, pipe and lighter in hand. He looks at me quizzically and asks what I’m doing. While internally freaking out, I calmly say “nothing, we’ll talk about it later.” He looks at me with a blend of mischief and glee, then says: “Moooooom, are you lying to me?” I repeat that we’ll talk about it later at bed time, and to please give me a moment (translate: get the hell outta my bedroom!). The little shit knows he’s busted me and is relishing it!

We had a long conversation at bedtime about marijuana use. I told him I used to smoke pot when I was younger even though it was illegal, framing it as “people sometimes make poor choices”. I then said I had quit years ago (white lie #1), but now that it’s legal, I decided it was OK to use it occasionally (white lie #2 – I smoke almost daily). We ended up having an in-depth conversation about drug use, truth-telling, being safe, and stupid laws that the government sometimes passes. He thought it was all interesting and a bit funny, especially the part where he busted me. In the end, he said he was less concerned that he saw me smoking pot than the idea that I was hiding something from him.

Since then, we often discuss the new legalization and how it will unfold. The whole episode worked beautifully to address and demystify marijuana use for my son. Given the frankness of our conversations, I hope he’ll remember this as he grows into the teen years, when we know most kids start experimenting with drugs. The conversation that night, cuddled up in his bed, was very open, loving, and sweet. In the end I’m glad it happened the way it did.

Another reader:

Two things:

1. The truth is WONDERFUL.
2. The truth can FUCK YOU UP.

We adults can wrestle with the moral implications of this because we’re developed enough to handle some (but not all) of the onslaughts that the truth brings down on us. We’ve felt the highs and the lows of unvarnished truths. We’ve had valuable life experiences that eventually translated into wisdom. We’ve got perspective. Kids don’t have that. Padding the truth is fine, but it’s not always enough. Sam Harris’s one exception was a lie, not an evasion. And that’s fine. Telling a tiny person who has no concept of human depravity that there are people who cut each other’s heads off and cause them to be dead forever is a HARSH fucking trip.

But you don’t have to wallow in it and fuck with their minds to amuse yourself. Just don’t be a dick. Simple enough.

One that note:

Speaking of lying to kids, I always loved this one from “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey”:

One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. “Oh, no,” I said. “Disneyland burned down.” He cried and cried, but I think that deep down, he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late.

One more reader:

The only truth you will ever tell your kids that remains absolutely true forever is: I love you. I will always love you. There’s nothing you can do to change that. That’s the big Truth, and it’s not as easy to get through to your kids as you think. That’s the Truth that’s going to get your kids coming to you when they’re in trouble. That’s the Truth that’s going to keep them coming home.

Last week, MacGillis argued that Obama’s presidency is far from finished. Douthat pushes back:

Obama’s struggles have inspired comparisons to George W. Bush’s second term, and invocations of Hurricane Katrina and Iraq. But of course all kinds of consequential choices were made in the Bush White House after his approval rating reached the flirting-with-dismal level where Obama’s numbers are today — with the Alito confirmation, the Iraqi “surge,” and TARP probably looming largest, and lesser examples abounding as well.

But contra MacGillis, I think most of the writers making the Obama-Bush comparisons understand that point, and they would presumably say, “okay, yes, Bush retained the powers of the presidency, but somewhere between the failure of Social Security reform and the 2006 thumping he passed over a crucial threshold where 1) he no longer had a hope in Hades of moving big-ticket legislation through Congress and 2) he no longer had a plausible path to recovering the public’s trust.” That’s what Washington scribes tend to mean when they apply the shorthand term “finished” to a presidency, and it seems perfectly reasonable to look at a chief executive in Obama’s position — his second-term numbers mirroring Bush rather than Reagan or Clinton, his base eroding, his party’s odds of losing the Senate rising, his defenders beginning to talk about long-term policy vindication more than short-term political success — and ask whether he’s reached that point as well.

Ezra thinks not:

Though Obama isn’t going to pass major new laws in his second term, he’s going to have plenty of opportunity to implement major laws from his first term. Obamacare’s roll-out was disastrous, but the program could be a success by 2017. On Tuesday, the Volcker rule is dropping — a reminder that the Obama administration is still engaged in a difficult and complex effort to re-regulate the financial system. And then there’s the effort to use authority under existing environmental laws to regulate carbon emissions from existing power sources, which could prove a significant climate legacy for a president who hasn’t been able to pass a climate bill.

All that’s before getting to foreign policy, where Obama also has considerable autonomy. A successful rapprochement with Iran would be a very big deal. So, too, would be destroying Syria’s chemical weapons — particularly if it’s somehow coupled with an end to Syria’s civil war. And who knows what other opportunities in the foreign policy realm will emerge before 2017?

The drug most commonly found in Ecstasy, pure MDMA has done wonders for patients where other treatments have failed:

In a follow-up video, Doblin outlines how such psychedelics can gain more acceptance for medical and even non-medical use, and he believes the DOD and VA could play a major role:

Rick’s previous videos are here and here. From his bio:

Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). He received his doctorate in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he wrote his dissertation on the regulation of the medical uses of psychedelics and marijuana and his Master’s thesis on a survey of oncologists about smoked marijuana vs. the oral THC pill in nausea control for cancer patients. His undergraduate thesis at New College of Florida was a 25-year follow-up to the classic Good Friday Experiment, which evaluated the potential of psychedelic drugs to catalyze religious experiences.

His professional goal is to help develop legal contexts for the beneficial uses of psychedelics and marijuana, primarily as prescription medicines but also for personal growth for otherwise healthy people, and eventually to become a legally licensed psychedelic therapist. He founded MAPS in 1986, and currently resides in Boston with his wife and three children.

Our extensive coverage of the spiritual and therapeutic benefits of psychedelics is here (or, in chronological order, here).