I know your tribulation and poverty

Of death, memory, and survival

1.    Last week on my customary amble around the ’hood I was thinking a lot about my stepfather Jim. She married her boss, Mom did. (“I married my father,” she told me much later, a widow. “Right down to the way he peppered his eggs.” Her father’s name was Carl; Jim’s middle name was Carlton.) The family men had abandoned the women. Jim had money and we didn’t. Not until him.

2.    Last week I had just finished reading a Japanese author’s book about the psychological theories of Alfred Adler. One main Adler concept is “separation of tasks.” As in, what I am to do in life is my task to figure out; what you might think or feel about it is yours. Not worth the powder to blow him to hell, my stepfather Jim once said of a meddler – a person who had not learned about the separation of tasks.

3.    Last week I texted with

Joan Stommen

, widow of my former co-worker Jim. Many funny stories about him. One I heard at his funeral involved a faulty van, the sliding door of which kept detaching itself, literally coming off the panel. “That’s not possible,” the guy at the dealership said. They argued. Finally Jim got up and left, returning in a few minutes with the van door, which he placed on the man’s desk. Separation of tasks (customer, dealer)! And of vehicle parts. Two Jims.

4.    Last week I was scrolling through Instagram, waiting for the Zoom meeting with

Laurie Stone

Laurie Stone to begin. For the first time I saw images of the flooding in Smyrna, 17 miles north of Atlanta, where I live. I don’t watch TV, had missed these. Looked bad. I thought of the Biblical Smyrna. I know your tribulation and poverty, but you are rich. After Jim, we felt that way.

5.    During the Zoom, a writer asked Laurie about writing and how to structure her piece about inter-generational substance abuse. Laurie said, “What are they getting out of the mess?” Not when are they getting out of it, but what is the reward for staying in? A very Alfred Adler-type of question. He was less interested in “Here's what happened to me, which is why I am this way” than in “Here's what I plan to do next.” Or: “My last mate was abusive to me, which lets me avoid taking chances with potential new ones.”

6.    After the Zoom, I read for a while the new book I started, which is about “memory as a way of surviving death,” writes

Sue William Silverman

. She dedicates the book to someone named Randy, “who helped me survive myself.” I’ve always disliked my first name – an embarrassing adjective. Which isn’t really my first name but the middle. My first name is Thomas, after my father (who art now in heaven). When, in the throes of substance abuse, he ran away, Mom started using my middle name instead of the first.

7.    I looked up Silverman’s Randy, who was Randy Groskind, her therapist when she lived in Atlanta. His office was in Smyrna. Groskind died suddenly in 2005. The day was May 11, which is also the day my stepfather Jim died.

Things like this happen to me often … tangled or woven together facts and circumstance … and have done so ever since I can remember. I don’t call them “coincidences” or, donnishly, examples of synchronicity – to use the term from the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. They’re gifts.

Jung was influenced by Goethe and Nietzsche, both Germans. In German, “Groskind,” Randy’s last name, means “grandchild” – which I was to the Carl whose image my mother married in Jim. Gifts, like Jim was to us when we needed one most.