Sad Music to Match My Mood

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

These Songs Help Me Feel My Sadness Around the Loss of My Mom (z"l)

Not all of the lyrics are sad, but all of the melodies make me feel sad, and not all of the melodies are entirely sad, but sometimes the lyrics are. And sometimes, they're neither, but they remind me of sad times. And sometimes, they're just moving to me in a sort of sad way.

Charlie Brown Christmas song by Vince Guaraldi

One Hundred Ways by James Ingram

Wedding Bell Blues by the 5th Dimension

One Less Bell to Answer by the 5th Dimension

At 17 by Janis Ian

Hard Candy Christmas by Dolly Parton

Problem by Ariana Grande, featuring Iggy

Porcelain by Julia Fordham

Where Does the Time Go by Julia Fordham

Father Figure by George Michael

Constant Craving by k.d. Lang

Rhode Island is Famous for You by Michael Feinstein

I've Got You Under My Skin by Nenah Cherry

It Never Entered My Mind by Rodgers & Hart, sung by Ella Fitzgerald - This was the song that made my mom (z"l) sad after my dad (z"l) died.

That's the Way I Always Heard It Should Be by Carly Simon

The Piano Has Been Drinking by Tom Waits

Such Unlikely Lovely Lovers by Elvis Costello with Burt Bacharach

God Give Me Strength by Elvis Costello

The Message by Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five

Mama Used to Say by Junior

Sof la'Sipur (End of the Story) by Yehudit Ravitz

Yo Ya by Poogy - reminds me of dancing to the record in the living room where I grew up, the living room that we'll be listing along with the rest of the house tomorrow, to be sold.

Lost in the Supermarket by The Clash

Luka by Suzanne Vega

Black Boys on Mopeds by Sinéad O'Connor

I Can't Make You Love Me by Bonnie Raitt

No One Is Alone from "Into the Woods" sung by Bernadette Peters

This is what grief looks like...

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Putting a Brave Face On It

This is the first day I've put on makeup since my mom (z"l) died on June 4th:

Pat said, "You look like your mother. At first, I thought that was a younger picture of your mother."

It has been 13 weeks since my last haircut. At first, I was honoring Shloshim, but now, I have three reasons for not cutting my hair:

1. When it's longer, it's wavier and my mom's (z"l) hair was wavy; it's a way of hanging onto her.
2. I feel young in my grief, not youthful, but like a teen again, like I was when my dad (z"l) died and my hair was longer then, too.
3. The longer my hair is, the more vulnerable I feel for whatever gender-stereotype reasons and it makes sense to me that my outside should match the way I feel inside these days.

This picture is not flattering, I know, but it's really how things are right now and I felt like documenting this time.

Thank God..

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

I'm Not a Forgotten Woman

Pat and I are watching a documentary, "The Forgotten Woman," which is more sad than "Water" because it's the true version, about the widows in Vrindavan. I've gotta watch cheerier programs. Before this, we watched the latest episode of "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency," and that episode had some especially poignant scenes.

Let's put it this way: I can't keep absorbing all this sadness without also blogging...and without getting more sleep. Yesterday, I went to my mom's for dinner on the way back from work (it's not really on the way, but...) and felt more sadness. The top step in front of her house had come off the day before when our 16-year-old nephew Zach stepped on it and the slab of slate sat off to the side.

One July, I remember sitting on that slate-slab with my oldest sister, Deb, staring up at the tulip tree in our front yard. Already, the stone was warm from the summer-morning sun. Who knew that less than a decade later, my dad (z"l) would be dead from bile-duct cancer? The problem, too, is that I'm on the last few pages of Joan Didion's *The Year of Magical Thinking*. She wrote that grieving is passive while mourning is active.

"If this is what God had in mind for women," I just heard a woman say in Hindi, with subtitles, "He shouldn't have created them." She's crying. Thank God, I was able to live peacefully with Pat in India.

Tomorrow, I will be more hopeful.

The Stock Market Is Down and So Am I

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Only the Stimulus of Blogging Can Help My Dip

"Writing is about not committing suicide," a friend of mine told me this afternoon.

I got my paper back from my professor this evening and called back my friend to say. "Just wanted to follow up from our talk this afternoon; you're right. I felt like killing myself over it."

She laughed. I told her, "Just as I was leaving the main building, I looked up from reading the comments on my paper while an attractive young woman was entering the door; she must have heard me talking to myself. I said aloud, 'I might as well just give up now.' I kept walking, mortified that a stranger heard such tragic self-talk."

When I described the mortifying moment to Pat, she said, "She probably thought you got an F."

I didn't. Somehow, I received an A for the course. She didn't even mark the paper itself.

Pat: "Me, I'd have said, 'Well, phew! I got an A!'"

"Sarah, can I tell you something as a trained professional?" said another of my friends, who is a psychotherapist. "You don't have to try to feel good tonight. You can feel however you feel and still do whatever you planned to do anyway....Just before you go, can I tell you that men are coming out of the woodwork suddenly? Now, should I feel that I'm not good enough when they're not swarming me? Should I care that they don't love me? It's analogous to what you're going through. So what if she didn't like the way you wrote the paper. It doesn't mean you're not a good writer."

Pat: "It's just a new kind of writing that you have the opportunity to learn now; it's different from business writing and blogging. It's writing for grad school. It'll be good for you as a writer to learn an additional way to write."

"You have a journalist background, right?" asked my first friend, the writer, this afternoon, when I was telling her that all I wanted was to be published, even though I do not want to have to revise anything I write. She flattered me in thinking I had journalism training, but I said no; rather, I made the comment in the context of anticipating getting my paper back, and how originally, my professor had said that it needed to include a literature review, if it was going to be publishable -- an encouraging statement, but I never heard another word about publishing after submitting the paper, I told my friend, and so I felt nervous to receive it tonight.

"You're a very good writer with a deep gift for observation and you deserve to be published. Well, but you are published; you're on the web with your blog. Also, you should ask her about the publishability of the paper."

"What I really like to write is personal essays."

"They're not just personal. You write about all sorts of things."

Psychotherapist friend: "What is making you feel so bad right now?"

"I'm embarrassed that I did poorly on the paper, especially when I delivered a paper she loved in a previous class with her. As I think back on it, there wasn't the same requirement for it to be ultra-academic. But this shakes my confidence in my writing, and makes me sad about it."

My professor's comment on the paper's title-page: "Sarah, I found/find the insights are here, but the writing needs greater depth and more alignment with academic conventions to be persuasive...." It goes on with examples of what she means by "depth." Ugh! I'm so embarrassed.

"Don't be discouraged," my professor said to me on my way out; she anticipated my feeling when I would read it upon leaving the department open-house tonight. "Keep in touch."

The open-house included a number of the people I like most in my program, but eventually, the evening turned sour for me.

Exuberance, Then a Crash, and Then Some Hope

At 4:30 pm, I arrived at Teachers College and went to the library to try to take out Reserve books for my upcoming course. It felt luscious to be back in that privileged environment. A steel-drum band was playing in the lobby and a student was dancing unself-consciously by himself in front of it. One of the librarians had a Michigan accent and turned out to be from Ann Arbor (where I had studied as an undergrad). I felt so at home.

As I checked out my books with the librarian next to her, she said that my ID was obsolete, but that she'd check out my books till I got a new one.

"When did they change?"

"In November."

"Ah, well, I was in India for six months and so I missed getting that done."

She seemed unimpressed. I was reminded that I really had been away from the campus for half a year.

I went to the department party and saw my professor, who hugged me, and I hugged my adviser and both welcomed me home. "How was India?"

I was just so happy to be back in an environment, where I was no longer forced to study on my own; I couldn't wax on about how great the experience was.

And then a former classmate, Caitlin, came in, providing dark-coral fresh air.

And then one of the women I know from QueerTC, and then one of the women I went through orientation with, and then another with whom I was in a workshop several semesters ago, and then I spotted my professor for my upcoming class.

Caitlin, my first professor and I talked about "Brokeback Mountain," since Caitlin announce d that she had heard of Heath Ledger's death. We also talked about where our families were from originally and our parents' Holocaust-consciousness and then a doctoral student with an Israeli accent appeared and my professor introduced us to him. He had grown up in Latin America, where his parents had fled from Eastern Europe after his grandparents were killed in the Holocaust.

Caitlin said she was getting a snack, and so I made my move: "Can you slip me the paper now, and I won't read it till I leave, but I'm afraid I'll forget," I told my professor. And then, "You told me it needed to include a literature review if it was to be publishable. Is that realistic, for students to publish while they're still students?"

"Sure. Now your writing needs to come a long way before it's ready to be published. It's too bullet-pointed -- not academic enough. I suppose if you wanted to publish in a trade publication...."

"Like what would be an example?"

"Like an HR magazine or --"

"OK, well thanks." I found a way to excuse myself because I just couldn't talk with her for another moment, since she thought my writing was so poor.

Instead, I went over to speak with my professor for my upcoming course. And then I introduced him to two of the students I know, who'll be taking it. One of them -- who I know less well -- said, "I hope this course doesn't take me over the edge because I just don't know how self-disclosing I want to be."

"I'm not a fan of pain, but I cannot control where the class takes it during the semester."

"Well, I just don't know if I'm prepared for it to be therapeutic."

Oh, God!!! That's just what I'm hoping it'll be. (I don't say this aloud.)

"You should be all right. The most important thing is for everyone to feel safe."

Well, I don't feel safe at all now. I feel like I'm too much. Too intense. I was ready to be super-self-disclosing. I mean, why sign up for "Leadership and Self Development: A Biographical Approach" if you don't wish to do some plumbing?

The stated purpose in the syllabus begins: "This course takes an in-depth look at leadership from the inside out. It is based on the assumption shared by current leadership theorists (e.g. Raelin 2003) that a leader must develop a strong internal foundation of self awareness and personal mastery to achieve great external results."

I excuse myself and return to the first professor, who had returned my paper to me, and to the doctoral student, to show that I wasn't running away from her, and to enable myself to run away from the other professor, who wanted me to feel safe(!)

God has a plan? My writer friend says to me while I'm driving home, "Your writing, your career, your education, it's all leading somewhere, and it'll work out."

Pricey Accordion and Tears

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

• "Laura's Theme" from "Dr. Zhivago"
  
• "Strangers in the Night," made popular by Frank Sinatra
  
• "The Godfather theme"
  

These and other tunes from an Indian accordionist make dinner in the Raj Pavilion cheerful last night.

By breakfast this morning, pre-work, a couple of tables over from where we sat last night, I am looking out the window at bright-red life-preservers, decorating the far side of the pool. Tears are streaming down my Himalayan astringent-stimulated cheeks.

The croissant-woman does not continue to approach me. I can almost see out of the corner of my eye that I'm scaring her.

I'm not ready for work. I just want to go back to our room and watch "The 4400" with Pat. It's not a program I watch with her when we're at home, but it's amazing how even "Terminator 3" dubbed in Hindi can appeal to me here; they even managed to find a guy that spoke Hindi with an Austrian accent.

I've not yet finished writing my remarks for this morning's meeting, nor printed them, and I've not prepared the chart I need to share with a colleague prior to our afternoon meeting at another site.

"Madam, are you on holiday? You're later than usual," says the maitre d' as I'm trying to gather my yogurt from behind the glass-fronted fridge.

"No. Everything's fine, thanks," I say, my throat catching, and wanting him to disappear. A waiter appears to take my yogurt to the table and another hits the backs of my ankles with the chair as he's trying to help me sit down.

"No more assistance, please!" I want to shout, "Just leave me alone." Instead of shouting, tears come. They are just trying to be lovely to me and I cannot respond in kind.

I'm too bitter about not getting to stay home and watch TV. I'm exhausted, having slept fitfully, beginning at 1 am. I miss Pat's cooking, which doesn't happen while we're still living in the hotel. I miss my mother and sisters, my nephews and niece, my brothers-in-law. I am too tired to have exercised. I can't smile at anyone right now.

I don't think I understand any of this as I'm sobbing silently, my shoulders just barely shaking. I'm trying to enjoy the release of it, but know that I also have to keep slicing the fruit that I'll add to the yogurt, so that my routine proceeds. The tears stop when I spoon the yogurt into my mouth and I'm reluctant to eat. The crying was feeling good, other than wondering if I'm the first westerner they've ever seen cry in public. Oh, well, it's humanizing.

It turned into a good day from there....