Re-Engaging...Or Not

I am reading Benjamin Mee's We Bought a Zoo.  The recent movie of the same title is a lovely, sweet melodrama that plays fast and loose with the details of the real story.  I liked the movie.  I am moved by the book.  In contrast to the plot of the movie, it is during the purchase and renovation of the Dartmoor Zoological Park that Mee's wife, Katherine, succumbs to a recurrence of her brain cancer.  The reality is far more powerful and painful than anything the screen writers could re-fabricate.

I resonated with Mee's inability to reconnect with what, after Katherine's death, seemed to be daily trivialities.  After her death, he was able to focus even more on the zoo and to re-double his efforts.  The little battles of daily life were a different matter.  He says, 

"...I didn't have the energy for anger.  But I did feel a strong sense of disbelief that people could be so petty.  I didn't mind seeing people arguing in the street, or not appreciating each other or frittering their valuable time in some other way.  I could understand that they had drifted into this perspective and it was quite normal." (We Bought a Zoo, pages 139-140).

When it came to matters about the zoo, his patience with pettiness met an abrupt wall.  "Everybody with any business experience that I spoke to assured me that 'staff' were always a big headache" he writes.  "But in my acutely distanced state, this seemed to me ultimately like a crime against the animals" (page 161).  His loss and grief narrowed his focus to the point that he could not take in such extraneous information and concerns.  I imagine it made him an enigma to those around him, at least for a while.

I suspect that I too live as such an enigma.  I continue to wonder if and when I will ever re-engage with things that matter so desperately to other people.  I'm not talking about the daily soap operas that consume the bulk of American middle-class energy.  I've never had much time for that sort of thing.  I have little energy and attention, now after eighteen months, for news or politics or high-level cultural anxieties.  I'm very interested in my wife, our family, our friends, in writing, in mediating, and in working directly with those who grieve, who are poor and who want to grow (separate but related groups of people).  I am passionate about things I can impact personally.  I have no interest in realities beyond that.

For a while I thought it was a passing phase.  Now I'm not so sure.  I believe this change in attention and focus is more of a permanent feature of who I am.  I am quite comfortable with the change but I also know it is a change.  It is interesting to read that Benjamin Mee shares some of the same experience.

"Before Katherine died, I would be out there, listening to everybody, trying to build bridges, trying to make sure that everybody got talking again.  After Katherine died, I was out there again, eventually, watching from close up but at what seemed like an extreme distance, not even able to muster the energy for contempt at the pathetic bickering, which daily demonstrated that even Milo and Ella [his children] exhibited more self-awareness." (We Bought a Zoo, page 161).

I can't speak for Benjamin Mee, but I know that I experience a certain amount of victim self-righteousness at such moments.  "What is wrong with you people?" I think to myself.  "Don't you know that someone you love could be dead in days or even minutes?"  I clutch up my guts and think, "Are these the last words you want your loved one to hear from you?"

It's far too easy for me to judge and to condemn from that lofty perch of grieving grandeur.  Real life continues for people, and I am learning to accept that such things are important to them.  We might all do well to consider our mortality with a bit more regularity.  We might all do well to let that remembrance temper our words and moderate our reactions.  I will do better, however, when I get off my high moral perch and re-engage real people in real life.  Some measure of balance between death remembrance and life engagement is where we need to live most of the time.

That's all true.  I still don't think, however, that I'm going to be able to get interested in anything on television at 6 p.m. except for re-runs of MASH and The Big Bang Theory.