Living with the Dead

On my way home from the shops this afternoon, I wander into the local cemetery, or crematorium, as they call them here. I used to walk through this cemetery, often, after home visits in the neighbourhood, and I have missed it. When I lived in the village in Mexico, the graveyard was the only place I could go to be alone, and I took refuge there, daily, sitting among the plastic flowers and tissue-wreathed crosses with my journal and a pen. Here, in England, the world outside my little flat is noisy and crowded, my solitude penetrated by the sputtering of car engines, the pounding of footsteps against my ceiling, country and western music blaring from the fellow who lives in the flat next door. Sometimes I long for the wide open spaces of the states—big roads, big yards—lots of room to roam without intruding upon another person’s domain. So I have come to sit for a moment, at Croydon Crematorium, where I share space only with the dead.

I feel peaceful here, seated on a wooden bench, my hands gloved against the cold. Old gravestones, toppled and worn, are interspersed with marbled monuments, their etchings elegant and deep. This cemetery allows people to plant colourful plants and leave flowers at their loved one’s graves—not like my dad’s cemetery, with its symmetrical stones lying flat against the earth, designed for the convenience of riding lawn mowers, who shear the grass in summertime. These graves seem more natural in their uniqueness, like the people who inhabit them once were. Some of them are covered by a layer of coloured rocks, framed by silver incense urns, and I picture weeping relatives at these tombs, their grieving somehow soothed by the pungent aroma of smoke as it rises to the sky. Others show fresh tulips, resting in plastic vases, next to their monuments. Still others display green plants, slightly wilted by the cold, rooted in black dirt plots, bordered in stone.

There are graves of children who died too young, and graves of ninety year olds who died soon after their partners passed. Across the paved path, in perfect rows, stand the gravestones of young soldiers who died in WWII. The English do not seem comfortable with the word death. Their stones bear anachronisms like ‘fell asleep’ and ‘taken from us.’ Their etchings are wordier than ours, poetic, almost, with long descriptions of how much their people were loved, and proclamations that God must have needed them in heaven, more than they were needed, here. It is strange how we use kind words to soften the ugliness of death. It is like a mask we don to spare those around us from witnessing the full measure of our loss. Perhaps such gentle words serve as a balm for our wounds, as well.

I’ve found my own ways to soothe my grief. I’ve sought the aid of mediums, here, where they are abundant, and work without the stigma attached to them in the United States. I have attended a spiritualist church, here, too, in hopes the ‘presenter’ would find, among the souls whose loved ones are in the audience, a message from Mom or Debra to me.

I wanted to have a chat with them, to find out why they had to leave so soon, and to let them know how much they were missed. But the sessions did not accomplish what I had wished. They could not fill the hole in my heart, or make me feel like part of a family again. I still dream of them, at night. So maybe it is only through my dreams that we can meet.

In every country I have visited, I have found myself drawn to their cemeteries, where I read the names and dates of those who lived and died and are memorialized, there. In Wales, the dead lay below moss-covered tombstones in old church yards, close to where their loved ones worship and pray.

Sweden’s grave sites are clean and orderly and sleek, like the country’s quiet streets. I visited the grave site of Jim Morrison, of The Doors, in Paris, the resting place of Chopin and Oscar Wilde and many other famous folks. For years, the relatives of families buried in that cemetery tried to have Jim Morrison’s body removed. They grew weary of the scruffy young folks flocking to his site, where they smoked dope and broke whiskey bottles and had sex atop his tomb. His grave is surrounded, now, by a chain link fence, and patrolled by a private guard, yet people continue to leave their offerings of liquor and pills next to his stone—a twisted tribute to the tools of his untimely death.

My mother never asked for much, but she did make explicit her desire to have her remains interred with my dad. I asked her, through the years, if she was certain she wanted to spend eternity with the man who made her life so tumultuous and crazed. But she loved him, with all his wild faults, and it was her wish that she rest at his side. I wasn’t able to spare her from suffering in her last few months of life, but I am happy I could place her where she wanted to be, in death.

Like many cities in Europe, Paris lacks the space to bury their dead, and the plots are rented as family plots, with one body piled on top of another inside them. People in England, too, tend to cremate their loved ones, adding only a name, instead of a body, to an already established monument. For some reason these monuments are important to us. It is as if the names of those we loved, immortalized in stone, grant some kind of final meaning to their time on earth, an assurance that their impact on us will be remembered for generations to come.

My sister, Debra, never wanted to be buried. A diabetic since the age of 14, with few of the customary complications, she often referred to her body as a miracle of science, and she hoped to have it donated for research. But an earlier infectious illness made her ineligible for donation, and shortly before she died, I had to tell her she would be cremated instead. She took the news as she had taken most disappointments in her life—in silence, and without protest.

On a cool winter evening in Florida, my sister slipped away, and Mom and I watched them lift her body from the hospice bed. Within a week they called me to pick her up—her presence reduced to three boxes of ashes—one for Ben, her son, one for Dennis, her twin, and the other one for my mother and me. A year later, I added my mother’s ashes to my shelf.

Debra wanted to visit a foreign country, and it was one of her last wishes before she died, but her time was too short, and she was too weak. So I brought her ashes here, to England, where they sit upon my tiny mantelpiece. I still cannot look at pictures of the women I have lost, but the urn is a comfort to me, somehow, and I am glad that I have her with me, here.

It is almost dark, when the crematorium closes its gates, and I must enter into the stream of noise and life, again. There is quiet among the dead, but a bit of sadness too, a sense of missed opportunities, perhaps, a swell of lingering regrets. I walk the path past toppled stones and marbled monuments, and board the bus that will carry me home, to the world of the living, in my little flat, footsteps on my ceiling and country music blaring, its lilting rhythms a blessing to me.

Autumn comes to my little street

The Queen's English

I am a lover of words, and language, and I believe that the language of a people says a great deal about who they are and what is important to them. Since I have been in the UK, I have come to appreciate many of their sayings, and to recognize them as a reflection of their culture. And others are just funny and entertaining!
Here are just a few:

Are you all right?: When I first came here, I thought my body language or facial expressions must be signalling that there was something wrong with me, because people were constantly asking me if I was all right. But I have come to know that the English use this as a more honest greeting than our American “how are you?” They don’t really want to hear a long tale about what is going on with you, they just want to make sure you are all right.

Well done: I overhear English parents say this to their children. It is used as we use “good boy,” or “good girl.” I like it because it praises the act of the child instead of tying the act to their essential goodness. It feels less conditional, and more real.

Unwell: The English use this to describe people who are sick or even mentally ill. It just seems less harsh than ‘sick,’ or ‘ill,’ and implies a temporary condition that is fluid, and subject to change.

No worries: This is often heard as a phrase instead of ‘no problem,’ or ‘not an issue.’ It feels like a kind of commentary on how they handle things in general—that there are no worries worth causing a problem in relationships, or worth troubling ourselves.

Leave it to me: This phrase is used when someone agrees to take responsibility for getting something done. Although it is used sometimes by people in the service industry and I don’t often trust that the person is really going to follow through! Sometimes it just feels like a way to get me to stop perseverating about the problem on the phone!

At the end of the day: I love this phrase because it reflects the idea that, in the scheme of things, whatever it is that seems so big and important really doesn’t matter, much. I hear this used a great deal in my work environment. It helps us to keep things in perspective.

Cheers!: This greeting is usually used at the end of a conversation, in place of or before saying goodbye.

Isn’t it, or i'n it: This phrase is used at the end of a sentence or thought, as we would use ‘you know,’ or ‘know what I mean?’

I am sure there are others, which I will share in the future as I encounter them. For now, here are some other entertaining turns of words and phrases that I have had to learn in order to adapt to the life here!

Pants: trousers
Sweaters: jumpers
Stove: hob, or cooker
Restroom: toilet, or loo
Umbrella: brolley
Thrift store: charity shop

Trunk: boot—I went to a ‘boot fair’ recently, expecting rows of boots for sale, and found only people’s junk that they had brought to sell in their ‘boots’—what we would call a flea market or garage sale!

Fries: chips
Chips: crisps
Cookies: biscuits

Life continues to entertain and amuse me here, as I settle into my new world across the pond!

The land of the Brattons, Wales

Settling In, Coming Home

I have not written in almost two months. I have been spending time adapting to my work and my new flat and trying to absorb all that it means to work and to live in this country so different from my own. I have also had so many thoughts swirling in my head about my work, and the different approach here, and those thoughts have mixed with the memories of my mother and my sister and my childhood. As I have thought about these issues, they have become more and more complex, and I have resisted writing about them because I don't want to trivialize them or simplify them with words that are trite and easy.

With all of our talk about and money spent on family preservation, in the U.S., it is not a concept that we practice well. We remove children of parents who test positive at birth, whether that positive test is for cannibis or cocaine. We bring families into court and force them into treatment when we are barely certain of the extent of their addiction. We separate newborns from their mothers and they are fortunate to get visits one hour a week. We don't provide poor families with housing and then we take their children away when they are homeless. We expect parents who are struggling to find work or keep their minimum wage jobs to attend court hearings in the middle of the day and to come to visits at the convenience of the workers and to attend parenting classes that cost money that they don't have. When the parents begin to falter, or miss a visit, or show up late because they have no transportation, we write their failings into court reports. And if, God forbid, they become overwhelmed and let their despair and feelings of hopelessness cause them to drink or use drugs again, we judge them to be unfit to parent their children, and we move for termination of parental rights.

Here,if it is decided that a mother cannot safely parent her infant on her own, we place the mother and baby into a sheltered environment where her parenting can be assessed, and where mentoring is provided. If she does not want to go into a placement with her infant, we arrange daily contact for at least an hour a day. There is a respect, here, for the importance of family.

There are those who will say that we go too far, here, in the other direction. Indeed,there have been several scandals in the UK that have included horrific stories of abuse and torture and death. But do we not have those scandalous stories in the U.S.,too? In spite of all of our courts and authoritarian approaches and our placements and our speedy moves toward adoption, do children not die at the hands of their abusers there, as well?

I cannot say which approach is right, or which works better. Both have their faults. I can only speak from my own experience.

When I first became involved with abused children, I was a young woman working in the Tenderloin area of San Francisco, with an inner city drop in day care center, and I came to know many children who lived in the hotels in the neighborhood, whose parents were addicts, and for whom life seemed pretty bleak. I was appalled by the conditions I saw there, and I thought that the answer was to get them away from these parents, to place them into nice homes where perhaps they would have a future.

It was the 80s, when I was working there, and there was a psychological theory afloat that posited the idea of "toxic parents," "toxic families," and "toxic shame." It was a time when victims were urged to cease all contact with their families in which abuse or neglect had occurred, to make new families with friends and like minded folks, to turn their backs on their pasts, to liberate themselves from the anchors that their families had become, and I became a part of that movement.

I was beginning to understand how some things that had happened in my childhood had wounded, indeed, scarred, me. I was never exposed to intentional cruelty or brutality by my parents. Instead,I was the youngest child of a father who had an alcohol problem, who wasn't a great provider, and a mother who was depressed and overwhelmed with the care of four children, and I knew deprivation and hunger and feelings of abandonment as a result. Other things happened. Life in the Bratton household on 75th street was fairly chaotic when I was growing up! And I was exposed to things I should not have known at such a young age. It affected my image of myself and my relationships with others. I cried alot (still do!), I suffered from depression and addictions of my own, I had a hard time trusting folks, and as a young adult, I moved from state to state, trying to outrun my past.

For much of early adulthood, I carried an anger about the things that had happened to me. I used to wonder what it would have been like to grow up in a family that had stability and structure and routine. I tried but never succeeded in cutting off contact with family members. I swore I would never be like them. I moved as far away from them as I could get.

But something happened. Circumstances caused me to move home. And as a result of that, I grew. I saw my childhood in a new light. A wise man I know once said that the older (and more sober) he got, the better his childhood had become. He began to understand not only the pain but the blessings he had received, as a part of his family, and he began to view his past with a new pair of glasses.

And so it was with me. I learned to appreciate the humor and the joy my father exuded, even when he didn't have two pennies to rub together. I have a vivid memory of my father shaving at the bathroom sink, singing and smiling at himself in the mirror. "Oh, you handsome fellow," he'd say. "Oh, you lucky dog." I must have been about six. I remember looking around at our rusty bathtub, the cracked toilet seat, the coal dust covered walls, and thinking, "is this lucky?" But my dad loved living. He was a happy drinker. He loved people, and they loved him, and he never met a stranger, because he turned them into friends.

With the current climate in the US, my behavior in elementary school (I had temper tantrums daily) would have brought me to the attention of child welfare folks. They would have investigated the conditions of my home, and I could easily have been removed from my family. And I don't know if they would have been able to get me back. It's not that they wouldn't have wanted to. But my Dad didn't like government intervention, and he would have rebelled. My mom would have felt powerless to comply with all the stipulations the state would have required. And they may have given up.

And so I could easily have grown up in a different family, as someone other than a Bratton. I may have been spared some of the pain of my wild and traumatic childhood. But I would not have known my dad.

For much of my life, I had a difficult relationship with my mother. I blamed her for leaving me when I was twelve, when she went on the road with my dad, who was a travelling salesman, and I held her responsible for not protecting me. But, the birth of my own child helped me to see her in a new light. Where I had viewed her before as weak, and submissive, I came to recognize her quiet strength. I came to respect her intelligence, her spiritual understanding, her tolerance, and her particular way of showing love. She helped me parent my son. She taught him his ABCS and took him to get his shots. Had I been separated from my family, I wouldn't have come to know her this way.

When Debra died, my mom and I had had a tense moment, after we watched her take her last breath. She followed me into the lounge of the hospice, while we waited for them to come and take Debra's body away, and she apologized to me for not being there when I needed her. My own son was struggling with drugs at the time, and I told her that I saw how hard it must have been to try and handle four kids, two (my brother and I) who were acting out. I told her I understood how helpless she must have felt, and tired, and I told her it was okay. Had I been separated from my family, I would never have had that chance. I would never have healed that place in myself that blamed her, and she would never have heard me say it didn't matter anymore.

Had I been separated from my family, had I been raised as someone other than a Bratton, I would have missed the opportunity to help my sister die with dignity, to watch her heal her own old wounds, to see her thank my brother Dennis for all he had done to help her, to watch my brother Allan, with whom she had had a conflicted relationship, carry her from the bed to the toilet and back, to be a witness to the tender exchanges that brought us a moment of grace in the midst of the suffering and sadness.

Had I grown up in another family, I would not have been able to lay by my mother's side at hospice house, cradling her in my arms, as she drifted out of consciousness. I would have missed the opportunity to rub lotion on her legs and arms, to care for her most intimate needs, to bathe her and help her to the toilet and to tell her that I didn't mind, that I was glad to do it, to let her lean on me.

I have seen many foster and adoptive children, in my years of practice, carry a deep and unmet yearning to know who and where they came from. Some of them have grown up in the most loving and kind adoptive homes. They have been given all the material goods, the educational opportunities, and the nurturance of parents who doted on their every need. Still they have felt fractured, somehow, like they didn't quite belong, like a part of them was missing. And many have gone to find that piece of themselves. It doesn't discount the brave and devoted parenting of their adoptive families. It just means that they need to know their connection to the blood ties that bind us as humans to each other. It is not the only thing that matters. But it matters, nonetheless.

Last weekend I travelled to Wales, and I carried with me my father's tales of the four Bratton brothers, who were kicked out of that country for stealing horses, and who set sail out of Donegal, Ireland, in the 17th century, for America. I walked the patchwork hills and viewed the little stone churches and met the Welshmen in their caps, fishing at the river, and I was so thankful to have had those stories, to feel a part of something bigger, to feel connected to the land of my ancestors, to feel like a piece of me had found my way home.

Race

I have had several encounters that have inspired my reflection on race and culture and the very different approach I am finding here, in England, yet I have hesitated to share them. I have hesitated because whenever the issue of race is brought to the table in my country, the US, defenses start to surface, barriers are erected, hackles are raised, wagons are drawn into a circle. I then began to parcel out my thoughts into careful, muted, words, afraid they would be misconstrued by some as typical white, generalizing blather, by others as naïve and wide-eyed and bleeding heart. And in the process of doing so, the message got muffled, and the words became bland and meaningless.

So I endeavor to tackle this issue with apologies to all who may find my thoughts and words somehow offensive. I am merely speaking from my own perception of what I have come to know in my interactions with racial issues in the US, and what I am learning about the very different way it is approached here, in the city I live, London, in my new country, England—a way that feels refreshing, and liberating, and fills me with a sense of hope about our ability to live together in a spirit of tolerance and harmony.

I was invited to live with a woman who offered a room to me in her lovely, large, Victorian home near my work. She is a black woman from St. Lucia, in the Caribbean, who came to London when she was twelve years old. She is a delightful woman of 48, who left her comfortable job with the Croydon Council to pursue her dream of becoming a trained therapist. And although our backgrounds and upbringing are very different, we have much in common. She and I share political leanings that can aptly be described as “leftist,” and I hear her, sometimes, shouting at the TV news, much the way I have been known to do, when she is outraged by some latest remark or development. We have long discussions, sometimes late into the night, about family dynamics and relationships and all of the pain and complexity that comes with being the youngest child. But our most interesting discussions are around race. We talk about how our respective races impact our views of the world, our interactions with others, our capacity for relationships with those outside our race. And I have found myself thinking that conversations like ours, between races, are rare in the United States, and, if they do occur, they are laced with the burden of our difficult history.

I related to Cynthia, my roommate, an incident that occurred at my last job, as a Social Worker in Medical Foster Care. We had a developmentally delayed African American girl, who was severely disabled and in a wheelchair, placed with an elderly white couple, and the mother in the family found coping with the little girl’s hair cumbersome and time-consuming. Transracial placements in the US are often impacted by issues of hair care, since white folks tend to lack knowledge of how to work with hair so different from their own. But the woman decided that it would be easier just to shave the little girl’s head, than to try to figure it out. And the Social Worker I was supervising, who had the case, felt that this was an outrageous act. Not only did it further stigmatize a little girl already stigmatized by her disability, it made her look like a boy, and it felt insensitive and racist. But when this issue was brought to the attention of our team, a primarily white team comprised of nurses, it was not perceived as a problem. To them, it felt logical and utilitarian, not neglectful or insensitive. They didn’t understand the racial overtones to this act, and they felt that my Social Worker and I were making an issue out of nothing.

Yet when I related this incident to my roommate, she was shocked and appalled that someone would do this, and that professionals would condone it. She spoke of how hair and the maintaining of it is a huge part of a black woman’s identity, and an important part of who they are and how they present to the outside world. And, even if this little girl was delayed, having a bald head, like a sheared sheep, seemed dehumanizing. I recognized, while talking with her that an act like that could never happen here. First, a black child would not be placed in a white home. Transracial placements are rarely done. And, secondly, preservation of identity and culture are central to every assessment and all the work we do here as Social Workers in Child Protection. It’s not on paper merely for the auditing people to check off. It is part of every discussion we have, when we are talking about these children and their families.

The other day, one of my colleagues at work had had her car stolen and her house burgled. She is from Rwanda but was raised in Belgium. She had an idea of who had robbed her, but, when I asked her if she had shared her suspicion with the police, she said no, that she didn’t trust the police to protect her, as a black woman, that she was worried they would tell the man of her suspicions, and he might retaliate. At the time, I thought that it would be unusual for a person of color in the US to share something about her experience of racism so openly with a white person she barely knew. She would keep that to herself, or share it with someone from her own community, but she would be careful about making a statement like that to someone who is white. Because we (whites) are so quick to dismiss such statements as prejudicial themselves, to characterize the person who said it as being angry, and defensive, as having a ‘chip on her shoulder.’ We deny that racism is systemic in our society, and we discount and minimize their experiences of it, so these feelings are not shared with us. They are there, but they are below the surface of our interactions, hidden, and untouched. It keeps us from fully understanding one another. It distances us from each other. It keeps us forever apart.

And, finally, I encounter the difference in the way we relate to each other everyday, here, when I step onto the double-decker bus that takes me to work. I see a few white faces, but mostly my bus is filled with people of color, and I think, as I sit with them, how a white person in the US would feel threatened when entering this environment. He would stand and hold the rail rather than sit down, she would clutch her purse closer to her side. Yet here, we sit together. There are Sikhs and men in kufis and women in hijabs. There are Indian women with shawls wrapped around their heads and men with dreadlocks down the middle of their backs. There are rhythms of languages from Africa and India and Poland and Romania and Palestine. We feel comfortable with each other. We don’t carry the fear and distrust that surrounds us in the US. Here, (at least in London—I am told it is very different in the countryside), people have learned to live together, to share a bus, a table, a grocery, to begin to make a stab at understanding one another, to look at each other, to talk.