Love, Madness, and Altruism

Sometimes, when we least expect it, the past comes calling and expects a response. Today it came in the form of a very sweet and lovely email from the youngest daughter adopted by Stanis and Ryan in the early 90's. She was barely five years old then, a shy and traumatized victim of  atrocities only war can inflict upon a sentient being still forming the basics of who she would become. For two years she refused to speak. She was Ryan's silent little ghost who followed him all over the house when he was there, and cowered under blankets in her room when he had to go out for even a few minutes. It took nearly ten years for her to feel safe without his continual presence.

Maria grew into an amazingly kind and compassionate young woman who wrote to me when she read my blog entry on Anna's 50th birthday. Ryan was Anna's brother and he died in a motorcycle accident a year ago last September. He never meant to die stupidly, but he did and he did it willfully because he was tired of his own demons, the continual gnawing inside of mistakes he thought he made, people he couldn't save, and guilt that never belonged to him but he took on as if it were tailor-made for him. I couldn't judge him for this because except for the part about the motorcycle and dying stupidly, I could write those same words about myself.

When I first heard he was gone, my first thought was for Maria, for the horror, the unfairness of it, the unspeakable nightmare of once again being the sole survivor of all those she loved. And yet, even then, through all the sadness, the incredible despair of her siblings as they made funeral arrangements for the man who gave them a new life when their old one died, she demonstrated a strength that astounded all of us. In her words, in her actions, in the self-less, compassionate way she turned her grief into a soothing hand to help the pain of others, she embodied the spirit and energy of the man who raised her. But more than anything, she reminded me of someone she never met and knew only through mine and Ryan's stories: her aunt Anna.

Maria never met Anna, and she believed the grief over her death left Ryan unable to share much about his sister. She never pressed him too hard because she knew the kind of pain that comes from such unspeakable loss. Maria lost her entire family in one cruel battle for the soul of her country. She told me she stays strong to honor them so they didn't die uselessly, a concept I think I understand but am afraid to explore too deeply. I only know I am not that strong. In spite of how painful memories can be at times, I can say with certainty I have not suffered enough to find my strength that way. I can never be as strong as this beautiful young woman who wears the love of two people I cared for very much in her eyes.

Maria told me she didn't want to hurt Ryan by forcing the memories from him so he could tell her about his sister, because there were many times when it was painful to even remember she once had another family, much less talk about them.  And like all of us when the people in our lives are still relatively young, she thought she could afford to be patient, that eventually he would be able to fill in the blanks for her about the auntie she knew only through photographs and brief slips of memory that came from Stanis, Ryan, and her two older sisters--and I also wanted to tell her, every time she looked in the mirror. She has her mannerisms, her expressions, a way of gazing at what interests her that is eerily similar to Anna. But they never met. It is a mystery I've tried to explain to myself in many ways and none of the ways end up fitting.

So she wrote to me and suggested we trade stories. I would tell her about Anna and she would tell me about Ryan because we both have holes in our memories and sometimes you just need to fill those holes in order to move forward. I am convinced that loss makes us confront all the unfinished conversations, all the words we were so sure would wait for another day, a better time and place, a more appropriate situation. Because of this, I saw it as a noble offer and I accepted.

And as I did so I thought of how I am currently writing my memories of Lydia for her daughters, and now I will be writing my memories of Anna for her niece. It makes me wonder how I ended up with so many memories that belong to other people, how I became the place others stored such valuable pieces of themselves. However, I know I am no different than anyone else in this way of collecting those we love and cherish when they are no longer with us, but we aren't able to let them leave us completely. Everyone has something to leave behind. I've learned that time and again.

We are all made up of those who came through our lives and left something of themselves behind. It can be as powerful as a life-changing experience, or as simple as it was with one person in my own life--just a scent, a certain faint memory stored in my senses  from a man whose name I never knew but whose delicious scent will be with me for life. I know nothing about him, of his life, who he loved or how he lived. We shared an elevator many years ago and he found a way to crawl into my tissue forever. Choice had absolutely no say in the matter. Why should it in anything else?

We tell ourselves it's our choice what we remember, but it isn't. Those memories don't go away. They are dormant little weasels ready to break through the ice of our consciousness when we least expect it. When I took that first crack with my ax of memory and freed the first weasel, what came out was a moment that at the time seemed so insignificant, I barely noticed it. And yet it became a defining piece of self that shaped, molded, and continues to direct who I am.

It was the first warm day in April after a bitterly cold winter. I had helped Anna transcribe the video testimony of a man whose mother survived the Nazi death camps. It was an angry, depressing session filled with his rage at all Germans. He repeated over and over again that everything Anna was doing was ridiculous because there were some things that could never be forgiven and no amount of forcing him to interact with the children of those who had committed such horrors would change that. I will never forgive!


It depressed me because Anna was German  and I knew other Germans who were kind, loving human beings. And no one was forcing him to take part in her project. He volunteered. But his rage was so total, so complete, so much a part of who he was, it was as if all those things had been done to him instead of to his mother,  and he blamed an entire country, even those who weren't even born,  for what was done to her.

In retrospect, I remember how much I focused on his anger, his inability to forgive, and how little I focused on what I felt in my response to him. I know now I went numb. I shut him out emotionally so I could continue to write down his angry words, his outbursts, the tears that were not from sadness or compassion, but a rage so deep inside him it poured out as tears.

Don't!


Anna's voice startled me. She never raised it, never let on that she was angry or upset or annoyed. Anna was an even rising and falling of whatever wave existed. She rode it and didn't let it wash over her. I asked her "Don't what?" thinking I was transcribing the words wrong.

Don't do what you're doing now. Don't become them. Stay true. Always stay true.


I've thought of those words a lot in the time since. There's so much of me that always existed outside the herd that I couldn't fit in even when I wanted to. People sensed I was different and it made them uncomfortable just as their embracing a lifestyle that was mostly self-indulgent made me uncomfortable. I've differed with most people in so many ways most of my life, that I'm always surprised when I meet someone who understands my differences, perhaps shares some of them, and most certainly doesn't run away screaming and shouting phony excuses to justify their own discomfort at having to confront themselves through my view of the world.

Most of my life, if I saw injustice, I spoke up and tried to see where I could fit in, what I could do to right the wrong. If I saw someone that needed help, I offered my hand because that's what it means to be human, to care, to share the planet with other sentient beings. If I had one piece of bread and someone else had none, I had to share it because I couldn't eat it if I didn't. It would taste dry and hard and would never nourish me as much as half a piece shared.

It  has been both a blessing and a curse to go through life this way. A blessing because I met people like Anna, like Ryan and Stanis, like Lydia...the list of amazing, kind, and loving people is endless and each day it grows longer. But it is also a  curse because it's an open doorway to those who know only how to take and use and never to give or reciprocate. It's not true that I don't see them coming. It is true that I won't allow myself to sink down to their level. I stay as I am, no matter how devastating the consequences could possibly be, because I can't imagine living any other way. I don't see other ways as living. I see them as existing on the most shallow surface possible and not caring enough to live any other way. But I've learned how to protect myself from actual tissue damage. The rest of it is just things and those are meaningless to me. If they ask, I'll give whatever I have to give. No one needs to take or lie or cheat or bullshit me. All they have to do is ask and it is theirs. But they take and lie and cheat and steal anyways. That always astonishes me.

 Anna called people like that "empty souls" because everything they put in ran out on the ground without those necessary stoppers of sentient beingness in place. They failed to understand it was their own selfishness, their own greed, their own need for vengeance, their own desire to always be one up on someone else, that left them with such an insatiable hunger. It was easy to avoid becoming them. It was easy to dismiss them as not worth the energy it took to relate to them in any way.

But Anna's scorn, an emotion she rarely let loose, was reserved for those who portrayed themselves as givers, as kind and loving people, but who were so focused on keeping the give and take balanced, that it eventually became the most important thing. She saw them as always keeping score, as having an emotional balance sheet that was every bean counter's fantasy.

So to Maria, I share this important piece of who Anna was that mattered the most: if your love, your compassion, your ability to share has limits, it is not love. It is not compassion. It is not altruism. Limits are for sane people, she always told me. But to live without limits on your heart is to leave yourself open to pain, to disappointment, to betrayal. It's pure madness to live in such a way. But can you really call it living if you live any other way?

I personally can't. I have to live this way because it is who I am. Maybe people who are selfish, who are unable to give of their hearts and themselves, maybe it's just who they are and  a whole lot of us weirdos may be wrong in insisting there is a better way. Maybe for them, there is no better way. Maybe that is where their own personal evolution ends. They are like that man long ago hating people who weren't even born yet for things that happened not to him, but to those he cared about. He didn't know the important thing Anna saw in him, the thing she told me kept her going back to try again with him: he hates them not because they hurt him, but because they hurt someone he loves. As long as he can feel pain over someone else's pain, he still has his humanity intact..


It really is that simple.

Sea Birds and Boat by northwest_photograph
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Love, Madness, and Altruism

Ten Years Later

I woke today startled to realize Stanis died ten years ago this month. The years pass too fast. They don't give us enough time to put all the pieces into the pot and draw them out when we're ready to understand their complexity. Instead, memory serves itself up half-cooked, seasoned with our biases and selective remembrances. It puts them all in front of us and says "Eat this!"

And so tonight I will eat from my past and draw out one of the most unlikely people I ever imagined I'd one day call "friend."

I didn't like him when we first met. He seemed dark, petulant and distant, like someone observing the room and making lists of everything in it in case there was a quiz afterwards. I was in a small conference room in downtown Bellingham listening to the reason I was there, a woman named Anna who was so passionate about world peace that she was going to the roots of hate to reset the planet.

She had handpicked those of us in the room to take part in that resetting. We were all children of war. Some of us had parents who either perished in the camps, or who managed to survive by some miraculous unknown that spared them what befell everyone else. The others in the room were the children of those who had put them in the camps.

To say you could literally feel the air in the room was the grossest of understatements imaginable. It was why Anna believed if she started with us, if she stopped the seeds planted inside us from our parents, intentionally or unintentionally, then she could begin the process of ending war forever.

Throughout all the dialogue that followed, the anguish of trying to share what most of us only knew small bits and pieces of as told in unguarded and often drunken moments, Stanis sat without saying a word. Every once in a while he would lean over a small notebook and write a word or two. But nothing seemed to touch him. Not the tears. Not the anger. Not the moving of chairs away from or toward each other.

Until a woman close to my age, early to mid 40's who said earlier she was  from Rome, stood up and gathered up her notebook, pens, glasses, and purse. "None of you can undersand...we couldn't even have German music in our home. I can't do this."

We forgave her before she was out the door and most were so focused on her they failed to see what I caught a glimpse of--Stanis with a brief look of pain so intense I ached for him. It wasn't the look of a lover but of a man whose last hope for a dream was suddenly dead. He caught me looking at him and the mask went back up immediately.

But afterward he sat next to me and asked me about why I was there. I told him I wasn't sure, but I knew that my desires matched Anna's and if she was so passionate about peace, then I owed it to her to help in any way I could. I told him that for me peace was more than a word, more than a concept. It was like a vein that carried the planet's blood, and I was part of that blood.

At this point, usually the tale goes on with "and we became deep and lasting friends." But we didn't. We were too different, and even though we were born a few miles from each other, all we shared was a similar gene pool on one side of our families. It wasn't enough for deep and eternal friendship. But it was enough to work on a common goal and we did that fairly well for awhile.

It was the height of the Bosnian War and Stanis was horrified at what was happening in the country of his birth. His grandmother and mine both identified themselves as Yugoslavians by birth. Mine was born in Pazin and his in Zagreb. No matter where they ended up later in life, that was part of them, that country that was created to unify southern Slavs.

It was Stanis who explained to me the linguistic nuances of the word "Balkans" and how the root of the word meant "crazy." But I also saw what he didn't say, that inside the turmoil of his soul that was always just beneath his surface, inside that detached and cool demanor, was a man so committed to world peace he made Anna's words seem tame. He was to put it in the simplest terms possible, ready to die for peace if that's what it took.

For the next two years he went against the autocratic tyranny of his father and his own place in the society that wealth and power digs for its children as a gravedigger puts his back into digging a grave for their lifelong interment. He couldn't single-handedly end the war, but he could try and save its victims. He used his father's money, borrowed the power of of his name and position and helped many children left orphaned find safe havens.

I'm guessing the final number was probably in the hundreds. He wasn't the kind of man to brag about the good he did in the world because he didn't do it for glory or recognition or even revenge. He did it, as he told me once, because he didn't want someone else to run from a room as the woman from Rome had done. As a violinist, an ardent believer in music as one of the keys to bringing together a diverse world, the idea that someone could grow up without ever hearing Bach or Beethoven was too much for him to accept.

It was an intense time for all of us involved in the peace movement at that time. It was a time when women dressed in black every Wednesday and stood in silent condemnation of the war on streetcorners all over the world. It was a time when sending a box of computer disks to an orphanage so the childen's history could be preserved was considered a violation of the embargo, the same embargo that denied the peace group in Serbia their peace grant because they weren't allowed to receive money, or disks or anything that would help ease the burden of war. If we were arms merchants, we would have had better luck getting something of value into that poor country in the middle of a horrible war. But for peace there were no exceptions.

Stanis, as the child of power and privilege, had a different concept of danger than the rest of us. He grew up in a world where the exchange of enough money, the awarding of a prestigious enough position, could erase most transgressions. We argued fiercely over it. I felt he put people I cared about in danger and he felt I was too timid in fighting an enemy that would kill me as easily as it killed other women and children.

He told me my Croat blood was a death sentence waiting to be activated by the right bigotry. He reminded me the only death camp in Italy was in Trieste, the city of my birth, and the most evil of the German commanders was stationed there specifically to put Slavs like me and my family to death because our blood made us impure Italians. He told me that as long as I was timid in my fight for peace, my actions were an insult to my family members and their friends who suffered at the hands of that monster.

I hated him a long time for those words at the same time as I understood why he spoke them. In all wars, in all crimes there are those who remain silent out of fear, out of a desire to not draw attention to themselves or because they convince themselves it's not their fight. It's how tyrants take over countries, how dictators appoint themselves overseers of decent people--through silence, ignorance and indifference.

Peace is about all of us and war is about the few. If Stanis taught me anything during one of those periods in my life where I was convinced I already knew everything there was to know, it was that lesson. War is about the few and it is about silence from the rest of us.

I last saw Stanis briefly in June of 2000. He was in the final weeks of Pancreatic cancer, far too young to die at just barely 51 years of age. He wanted only one thing from me, forgiveness for the emotional pain he knew he caused me, not realizing that when the war ended, so did my anger at him. I had forgiven him in 1995 and it took five years for it to catch up with him.

 As two devout Atheists, there was no afterlife to make it up in so it had to all happen in the present. I hugged him goodbye and cried at his thin and frail body where before he had always seemed so strong to me. It was a moment as brief as a soft breeze on a thin curtain. He was there and then he was not.

He left me a poem, a rose I dried and still have, and a memory of what it was like to live among people who lived so completely outside themselves, so completely for others, that none of them survived for more than ten years. But they saved so many lives, that they live on in the hearts of hundreds they touched. I'm the last one left of the group and not a day goes by that I don't make use of some of what they taught me with their complete and total altruism. They were all good people and I miss them dearly, and I especially miss Stanis because finally, at long last, I understand him and I'm sorry it took so long for us to finally become friends.

Leaves Adrift by orsobear
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Ten Years Later