Fevered Longing & Fiery Loss: Relearning to Let Go, Laugh & Love

The holiday season magnetically draws memories and images of family or former relations – past and present, joyful and painful – to consciousness.  Not being with my ex for the first time in ten years heightens the poignancy of the moment.  Perhaps a glutton for punishment, I’m presently working on a new book about my experience with “love, longing, and lust” (not necessarily in that order)…and what I understand of emotional death and rebirth.  The title of the new tome:

Fevered Longing & Fiery Loss:  Relearning to Let Go, Laugh & Love

Through Resiliency Poetry and Shrink Raps ™

Based on the title, the book will have three segments:

I.   Fevered Longing

II.  Fiery Loss

III. Relearning to Let Go, Laugh, & Love.

Also, each piece is sandwiched between an introduction of the poem’s origin or contextual background and “Discussion Questions.”

Here’s a Part 1. selection with substantial family context.  Enjoy.  Best holiday wishes and good adventures.  Mark

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Kindred Eyes

This poignant lyric captures three types of connections with the significant women in my life:  my grandmother (secure-warm), mother (intimidating-masked), and the ever elusive “soul mate” (fantasy-fevered).  I can’t recall what made me decide to examine these human-emotional links through the metaphoric lens of the eyes.  Perhaps I was seeking that proverbial “window to the soul” – their souls and mine!

As an aside, my grandmother died when I was thirteen; I was at sleepaway camp and my mother decided not to tell me of my grandmother’s death until I got home.  (I wish she had taken me out of camp as I was quite depressed and ashamed from being frequently teased and taunted by several peers.  I was a wounded animal; fellow “Boy Scouts,” especially those who knew me from home, could smell blood.)  Naturally, I didn’t attend my grandmother’s funeral.  I don’t recall anyone helping me talk about my feelings of loss.  In public school assembly, I recall praying regularly to my grandmother, a loving, simple, “saintly woman."  A state hospital psychiatrist called her a "one woman psychiatric ward" for somehow managing to keep my schizophrenic uncle in one piece.  He had his first breakdown shortly after she died.  Grandma never complained about her host of medical problems, including an amputated leg.  Sometime after her death I just stopped talking to “Gram.”

It wasn’t till a couple of decades later that I understood how bereft, angry, and abandoned I felt with my protector no longer living in our household.  Grandma was able to set some limits on my anxious-controlling mother.  My mother had 150 + IQ; she was the dominant figure in the family, the parent with whom I was most symbiotically dependent.  In fairness, my mother was running a MASH Unit with all the injured and wounded, ill or literally lame souls squeezed into a small three-bedroom ward.  I perceived “nurse-mother” as essential to my survival; not pleasing or annoying her made me quite anxious.  I looked up to her intelligence but also neurotically conformed to a fearful and submissive “identification with the aggressor” behavior pattern.  And while I was conscious of feelings of embarrassment towards my “less adequate” father, with his alcohol and sex escapist patterns, it was my mother who could most readily induce feelings of shame.  (Alas, after his breakdown and ongoing shock therapy regimen, a family secret, commencing when I was one-and-a-half years old and lasting till I was nineteen, my father, other than one panic-driven “cry for help” exception, was not able to be a buffer for me in the home or with the outside bullying.  More later on my father and our down-up-down “roller coaster” relationship.)

But getting back to my grandmother, she had been my nonverbal haven (speaking almost exclusively Yiddish) in a family shrouded in secrets, repressed emotions, and denial.  With my biochemical and psychic potential for depressed and panic mood swings, with silent night terrors and later runaway dread around being taunted or bullied, ever submerged in all varieties of escapism and a rigid “good child” mask, much of my childhood and teen years, especially after grandma’s death, was a living hell.  I can’t help but wonder, especially with the influence of recent 12-Step Group attendance, if a scared child, periodically wandering aimlessly in Hades, has an inordinate need as an adult to pursue a fantasy "heaven" (and woman/object) on earth.

Kindred Eyes

Grandma's eyes age old crystal wisdom
Starry eyes to bathe in heaven's light
Teary eyes mirrored soulful freedom
Cold marble eyes...farewell sweet dreamy nights.

Grandma's eyes, grandma's eyes
Warmed your heart like a sunrise
Grandma's eyes, grandma's eyes
Rays of hope in a sea of lies!

Momma's eyes their brilliance masked the danger
Magnetic eyes compel an iron will
Towering eyes watched her huddled strangers
Such lonesome springs would never get their fill.

Momma's eyes, momma's eyes
Her gold stars were the prize
Momma's eyes, momma's eyes
Why were they so idolized?

Are there laser beams dancing with moon vision
Two fire balls blazing their own path
Buddha blues in the face of confusion
Kindred cat's eyes when, oh when, you coming back?

My cat's eyes, my cat's eyes
From afar romanticize
My cat's eyes, my cat's eyes
Are you real or in disguise?
Are you real or in disguise?

©  Mark Gorkin   1992
Shrink Rap ™ Productions
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Discussion Questions

1.  Did you ever have a protector or significant other who provided a safe haven?  What about the person and your interaction made you and the relationship feel secure?

2.  As a child or teen, were you ever involved in a relationship with an intimidating significant other?  What about the relationship made it feel scary, demeaning, and unsafe?

3.  Was your safety, security, or sense of survival ever dependent on an intimidating figure?  If so, how does this impact the way you see this individual, how you view yourself?

4.  In what ways do secure and threatening early relations impact our need to seek out “real” or “disguised” relationships?

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Mark Gorkin, MSW, LICSW, "The Stress Doc" ™, a nationally acclaimed speaker, writer, and "Psychohumorist" ™, is a former psychotherapist and Stress & Violence Prevention Consultant for the US Postal Service.  The Doc is a Trauma Debriefing and Critical Incident Consultant for variety of organizations, including the national post-earthquake, Nepali Behavioral Health & Wellness Initiative. He has led numerous transformative -- silo-breaking and communications bridge-building -- Pre-Deployment Stress Resilience-Humor-Team Building Retreats for US Army Senior Officers and Sergeants.  He also provides international Stress Resilience and Burnout Recovery Phone-Skype Coaching.

The Doc is the author of Practice Safe Stress:  Healing and Laughing in the Face of Stress, Burnout & Depression and The Four Faces of Anger:  Transforming Hostility and Rage into Assertion and Passion, and Resiliency Rap:  The Wit and Wisdom of the Stress Doc.  His award-winning, USA Today Online "HotSite" – www.stressdoc.com – was called a "workplace resource" by National Public Radio (NPR).  Email stressdoc@aol.com for more info.