A pensive moment at 18 years old during a college field trip
Perhaps it’s been native anxiety that vexed me in life. I’m a nail-biting kid who grew into a nail-biting adult. The roots of anxiety are chemical but also familial and cultural. Raised in a family with three other brothers, a pushy father, and an enabling mother rife with her own fears (projected upon us) it’s no wonder my life bears marks of self-confidence failures.
That said, there was no more competitive kid than me. I compensated for anxiety by trying to win everything in sight. Sports was also a release for the high-energy needs of a kid with ADHD. But I never rationally understood that condition as a child. I knew that any boring subject turned me into a lost soul staring out the window during class. Or else I drew. Art was something I could turn that attention-deficit focus into something real. Later on, I found writing too. Those three pursuits are my life’s salvation. They fueled whatever self-confidence I could muster through those elementary school years through college.
I once had a 3rd-grade teacher who gave me a choice. “Chris, you can stay inside and work on the classroom play or go out for recess. Which do you want to do?”
Well, I was leading the kickball home-run contest during recess. It made me the hero of the whole school. But she didn’t ask me about that. I told her, “I want to go out to recess.”
“Fine,” she blurted. “You don’t get to do either. You can sit here with your head down the whole period.” That’s what she made me do. She punished me for a choice I had sound reasons to make.
But in 4th grade, I had a teacher whose Robert’s English Series curriculum combined writing, art, and plays. I thrived in that class and wrote about it once on this blog or another. One day I received a phone call from National Public Radio. A reporter conducted a Lexis-Nexus search about that curriculum and my writing was the only article that turned up. They interviewed me about it. It made me feel good to be recognized for appreciating the value of integrated education. It bolstered my self-confidence to hear that someone else understood the value of helping kids, especially neurodivergent kids like me, find self-confidence through innovative teaching.
These days, I substitute teach and notice many kids struggling with classroom attention. Perhaps I should have chosen teaching as a profession, but I’m not sure I had the self-confidence or self-assurance earlier in life to do so. It takes enormous focus for effective classroom management. I might have been too forgiving or unwilling to discipline kids acting badly.
Part of me also resists those tactics because our elementary schools in Pennsylvania used corporal punishment to control kids. In first grade, I shoved a kid for knocking over a Stratego game we were playing during indoor recess due to a rainy day. The kid tattled on me and instantly a vicious old lady teacher named Mrs. Paloney entered the room, grabbed me by the neck and hauled me out into the hallway where she told me to drop my pants and underwear to the floor and proceeded to spank my bare ass in front of other children in the hall.
Trauma transfer
Now, by that age, I’d witnessed my father thumping my brothers to the point where I was traumatized as a child seeing his fury. It frightened me beyond words. So being spanked further traumatized me. Later that afternoon, I saw my best friend spanked out on the playground for committing some small slight. I broke down in tears.
My first-grade teacher, Mrs. Cutler, saw me crying and somehow sensed a deeper fear in me. She escorted me inside and asked, “Is there something else going on, Chris?”
I longed to be honest with her at that moment but didn’t fully grasp why I reacted that way. What I do know is that many years later, during my late 20s, I awoke at night pounding my pillow in a fever dream of anger and rage. That’s the moment I realized that childhood trauma follows you and undermines the ability to have trust in yourself and self-confidence too. Soon after that I sought counseling. That didn’t work because the therapist wasn’t that good at discerning my need to reconcile the longstanding impacts of unfortunate life events.
With my late wife Linda (left) best friends Greg and Francie, and my mother Emily following my win in the Geneva Community Classic 10K circa 1984
The long way around
During my late wife’s eight-year cancer survivorship, I sought counseling to help me manage caregiving for my late father as well. After a couple sessions, the therapist asked, “You seem good at forgiving others. How are you at forgiving yourself?”
That question answered numerous questions for me. It also allowed me to search past relationships and examine social (especially dating!) failures caused by that combination of early trauma, native anxiety and neurodivergent sensitivities. From then on, in my early fifties, I began building a different kind of self-confidence.
Racing in college cross country. Our team placed second in the nation.
Despite my lifelong struggles with a lack of self-respect and confidence, I achieved great things on many fronts. I led teams to national championships in running. I published art prints and won awards for design. I built a literacy project that grew to serve 375,000 families. And I’ve now published four books with several more on the way.
I also stood strong through ten-plus years of caregiving for my wife and father. Through that I learned patience which has an incredible effect, believe it or not, in building one’s self-confidence. I also grasped through experience that I have strong character under all sorts of duress. That strengthened my resolve and confidence in other ways. I walked out my father’s door one afternoon after my mother passed away in 2005 and realized, “This is all up to you, taking care of him now.” And I knew I could, and would, do my best at that.
My father was in fact a loving man whose adoration for his grandkids proved it.
Which meant engaging with my father daily through all his medical and social needs. Over time, I came to realize that despite his fatherhood struggles raising four headstrong boys, he’d done much for me in support of my art and writing and sports. “Pay attention to your craft,” he once advised. That’s the best advice any father can give.
I believe I also helped my brothers dissolve some of their misgivings about our dad. Once the two eldest had trouble engaging with him, that ability improved in later years.
So, while the call of self-confidence waivers at times, and costs me opportunities due to fear, that’s my big “resolution” this year, to shove fear aside and continue on the paths I love. I hope you can too.
Are you overcoming fears this year? Share at cudworthfix@gmail.com
I’ve learned the value of humility the hard way, just like everyone else. As a proud young athlete growing up, my main concern was winning every contest I could find. My older brothers challenged me daily in sports ranging from table tennis to basketball and all points between.
Having older brothers toughens you up. I transferred that sibling rivalry to competing with friends and then participating in competitive sports. At the age of ten, I pitched our Local 285 baseball team to victory in the second game of the Lancaster, Pennsylvania city championship.
Throughout high school and college, I led the teams I played on, eventually turning to running full-time, where I ran as the first man on teams that won conference and district championships. In college, that success continued as I competed as a Varsity runner in a cross country program that won our conference all four years and as a senior captain ran in the Top Five all season, leading our team to 2nd in the NCAA Division III championship. In track I won conference three years and made Nationals three years in the steeplechase.
Even after college, I kept competing and set all-new personal records at distances from the mile (sub-4:20) 5K (14:45) 10K (31:10) 10-mile (53:30) and 25K (1:24:25). In my best year I raced 24 times and won 12 of those road and track races.
The reason I share this journey is to explain that all this training and perseverance was cited by my coach as having extreme value when my late wife was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2005. “Your whole life has been a preparation for this,” he told me.
But what I wasn’t prepared for was the degree of patience required to be a good caregiver. As a person with ADHD, I always struggled sitting still, waiting for things to happen, and not being able to “do anything” in the moment. Learning patience when you have to wait for hours to get results, sit in quiet (or noisy) hospital rooms at a bedside with your partner, and keeping track of important details day-to-day, these are all key requirements in a caregiver. I had to learn them. The hard way.
On top of my wife’s care I was caregiver to my father who suffered a stroke back in 2003. Through eight years of my late wife’s survivorship I tended to my father too. She lived through 2013. He lived through 2015.
I learned humility from all that caregiving. Never did I think that I was doing things perfectly. Mistakes are made no matter how hard you try. Sometimes, it’s emotional mistakes. Becoming impatient. Letting anger take over. Getting frustrated when the patient doesn’t seem to appreciate you. Feeling ‘put upon’ when relatives won’t or can’t step up to help.
And there’s money mistakes. Medical too. But you muddle through. But one thing that you learn from all that is practical humility. You don’t think of yourself as better than others. In fact, its possible to be too hard on yourself. One therapist called me on that one. “You seem to be good at forgiving others,” she reminded me. “How are you at forgiving yourself?”
Both of those traits require honesty. You have to “get real” in order to “truly feel” your purpose in the moment. Get to know where your weak points are, and understanding your strengths. Learning to lean on others when (and if) you can, and embrace vulnerability. It’s a superpower.
That brings us to the trouble with hubris. Once you’ve been a caregiver it’s easy to spot false pride in others. It’s painful sometimes to realize how insensitive and willfully ignorant people can be. In the United States, our healthcare system doesn’t favor the weak. It rewards the rich and employed and too often casually disregards those most in need. I read about how Black women can’t get a fair shake in medical offices because practitioner don’t take their word seriously. I’ve heard about other women than my wife feeling something’s wrong in their body and doctors just write off the bloating to water weight when in reality it’s tumors growing on their ovaries and spitting out fluids. By the time they’re discovered, cancer has advanced.
And when I see the callous way that certain political parties treat the healthcare system in America, it makes me angry. Now, I’ve been the beneficiary of non-profit forgiveness of medical debt, so I’m not personally complaining. One time AT&T even wrote off a $500 cellphone bill during one of my wife’s most tenuous cancer recurrences.
But the idea that rich people are now running around passing judgment on programs like Medicare without considering the life stories of those insured through it, or maligning folks counting on Social Security they’ve saved for decades to support them in elder years, it makes no sense why people vote for the hubris of these greedy freaks whose money obsession says more about their own fears in life than it does about their supposed success
Hubris is the opposite of humility, the quality that makes us all better people whether we’re caregivers or not. When you look to leaders, take stock of where their humility meter reads. If they’re arrogant and dishonest, don’t throw your trust their way. They’ll only use you and discard you as fodder for their selfish ways.
I am chagrined to realize that the last post I wrote in this blog was a year ago. On that front, I can simply state that my energies went into completing a book now published. It is titled Honest-To-Goodness: Why Christianity Needs A Reality Check and How to Make It Happen. If you want to keep up with that project and how it relates to the world we live in today, you can find me on TikTok as @genesisfix.
Today, on this blog, I have a testimonial to write. It has been ten full years on March 26, 2013, since my late wife Linda Cudworth passed away after eight years of ovarian cancer survivorship. She’s the reason I wrote the book The Right Kind of Pride, A Chronicle of Character, Caregiving and Community. The book talks positively about vulnerability, the aspect of character enabling people to be honest about their circumstances and trusting that other people will understand.
The actual definition of vulnerability is somewhat harsher than my description above. Vulnerability: the quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally.
Perhaps that’s why people shy away from the idea of being vulnerable at all. Fearing attack for showing their true selves, they feel safer keeping their distance or even letting a sign of supposed weakness show at all.
We purchased her a bike to ride when neuropathy made it hard for her to do the daily walks she loved.
For us, I can testify that showing weakness turned out to be a sign of strength. We were blessed by the support of so many people that at times the help almost overflowed. That’s not bragging. That’s an expression of gratitude. Without the help of others through years of cancer treatments, chemotherapy, surgeries, medical challenges + emergencies, emotional breakdowns, loss of work, financial stress, and finally, a move into palliative care and hospice, those eight years would have been hard to endure. My brothers helped. Our friends helped. Even strangers helped. In some cases those people became friends. In others, they were practical angels when needed most. All were appreciated.
We made it through to enjoy periods of remission where things sort of felt normal. She got to attend school plays and concerts, see her kids graduate from high school and watch one of them graduate from college. She only missed seeing her daughter “walk” during college graduation by a few months.
So this isn’t a complaint or a “woe is us” moment. This tenth anniversary of her passing is a statement of respect and love. She lived as fully as anyone that I ever met. In fact, her example resonates to this day with all that knew her. I still get messages from people whose gardens still blossom with the plants she divided and gave them over the years. I also meet the parents of the former preschool students that she taught. They recall her kindness and loving nature with fond hearts and gratitude. Those were her two loves outside God and family. Her garden and her “kids” were always close to her heart.
The watering of her lilies and garden in late June.
She loved so many things that I used to kid her that I was glad to be ranked in her “Top Ten” any given week. She’d laugh a bit because we kidded each other often. But Linda was also known to have a biting sense of humor on many occasions. Despite her sweetness, there was a sharp intellect and cutting sense of humor inside her. She used it mostly with those she loved the most, creating inside jokes that made potentially dull moments more interesting. She’d also tease our kids sometimes, but mostly she found ways to praise them.
Our children Evan and Emily Cudworth posing for a Christmas photo with a Red Ryder BB gun famous from A Christmas Story.
She looked for ways to bring unity to many situations. During a family reunion up north in Minnesota, she wryly nicknamed the handsome young (often shirtless) dock attendant Mr. Boat. That was his job, fetching fishing boats moored away from shore, and whenever one of us wanted to go fishing she’d chirp, “Better call Mr. Boat!” Her powers of observation were that way about many things in life. She chose her favorite shows based on a high standard captured in the phrase, “This is interesting,” which was not given out to just any old show. Usually, that meant the show was either refined or educational. She also loved historical dramas such as Upstairs, Downstairs the series Downton Abbey, and nature shows narrated by Richard Attenborough.
And yet, she loved the silly stuff too, as with shows such as 30 Rock, where an episode could send her into fits of giggles if the absurdity caught up with her.
Nothing captured her imagination quite like gardening, however. She’d pore through catalogs seeking the best new plants, especially specimens few other gardens had. A walk through a typical garden center with her elicited winces and looks askance at the colorful yet commonplace pansies or petunias. Her garden pots as a result were works of genuine, living art. And once during my participation in an Artists In Action event in downtown Geneva, Illinois, her dried plant arrangements outsold my artwork by a far margin. I didn’t hear the end of that for quite sometime.
During one of our fall travels to the Morton Arboretum. A small portion of her ashes were discreetly placed in the Daffodil Garden.
I loved her for all these reasons. Yet I also knew that once the cancer diagnosis hit, it would be tough for her to live it out beyond a certain number of years. Had I not chased her to the gynecologist that spring of 2013, she might not have lived even a year beyond whenever it showed up at last. But getting checked out saved her life in many respects. It took aggressive surgery and chemo treatments to knock back cancer, but she/we did it time and again. She was tough as nails so many times. Even her doctor, a highly respected gynecological oncologist with many years of practice told her, “I don’t think I could do what you’re doing.”
A formal portrait from our church. We moved to a more open-minded congregation during the last year of her life.
That was her will to live at work. Obviously, I was her closest admirer, but there were many whose involvement in our lives proved vital to her survival. But by early March of 2013, when the medical oncologist saw that she could not rise from the examination table on her own, I was pulled aside to learn that it was time to prepare for the end. That’s when I really knew. It was time to say goodbye.
In truth, and I don’t say this with shame, I’d been preparing myself for many years before she passed. This is called anticipatory grief. It takes place when you see parts of someone you love being taken away. People dealing with situations in which loved ones or friends aresuffering from diseases such as dementia or Parkinson’s know the process too well. Bearing witness to the disappearance of that person you knew is painful. Indeed, my freshman-year roommate and running teammate Keith from Luther College was diagnosed with Parkinson’s not long after losing his wife Kristi to ovarian cancer. He dealt with its effects for more than a decade, including slowed speech and movement limitations. Yet he kept his wry sense of humor. Yet what a strange thing to have to happen in life. Those two 18-year-old kids that roomed together as cross-country teammates at Luther College could never know that both of our wives would battle the same disease.
My roommate Keith leading our team. I’m at left in the second group.
Keith and his wife Kristi had been together since they were high schoolers. She and my late wife had quiet conversations about their respective cancer journeys whenever we were all together at college reunions or other events. Recently, one of his daughters sent me a Luther College Bear made from some of his tee shirts. We keep each other company in spirit.
I wrote a poem about the anticipatory grief experienced in preparing for Linda’s passing. That’s the only way I could put all the thoughts together. I’ll place that poem here for your consideration. Perhaps you’re experiencing a change in your life that brings grief about in some way. I hope you know that you’re not alone. And if you feel moved to do so, you can share your experience at chris@christophercudworth.com. I’ve communicated with many people over these years. Sometimes it helps a bit to share.
Anticipatory Grief
At four o’clock a.m., she woke me from sleep
and shook a sheet of paper calling out, “I found the car!”
She’d been up for an hour researching new Subarus
on the Internet and that fact alone was shocking
because she despised almost everything
about technology and how it seemingly ruled our lives.
Our car is still rolling ten years later.
She dug into the website of Gerald Subaru to look through the selection of Outbacks and found the bronzy brown color she desired and printed out the sale sheet with all the stats so that we could go that day and buy the car.
Already we’d experienced the side effects of steroids
from the cancer that passed through the blood-brain
barrier even though it is never supposed to do that.
On December 26 we met with the neurologist
who explained the procedure he proposed
in fine detail, with the clamp on the head
for excision and radiation followed by
a prescription of steroids to stop the swelling.
Her personality grew my increments as the drugs
did their job, reducing inhibitions dramatically
as she spent money we did not have and looked up
cars that we probably should not buy
because I was taking time out of work
to care for her needs.
Like mother, like daughter.
Fortunately, my credit rating was so high up on the charts
that the car dealership didn’t ask too many questions
and we drove the new vehicle off the lot
with that strange sense of hope enhanced
by that new car smell.
She would get to ride in that car just three more times
as the steroids wore off and her body slowed down
unable to keep up with the rolling effects of ascites
and everything else that goes with ovarian cancer.
It had been years since her first diagnosis
in late spring when my mother also learned
that she was fighting a different kind of cancer
and my father was tied down with the effects
of a life-changing stroke.
Upon hearing these bits of news, a longtime coach
and friend called on the phone with encouragement
saying, “Your whole life has been a preparation for this.”
All that run training, patience, and perseverance learned in athletics
was called upon in caregiving for years to come.
There were late nights sitting in hospitals waiting
for surgeries to finish, and days spent perched
on partly comfortable chairs waiting for her body
to recover with some sign of digestive activity
usually indicated by a loud fart of some sort
at which the nurses often cheered.
We found humor where we could and between
repeated rounds of chemotherapy there were periods
of remission in which she could return to gardening
her primary love in life along with God and family.
Son Evan with Linda and Chuck, our dog.
My job was supporting these efforts no matter which direction
they tended to move, and without the help of so many
there were times when I might have frozen in place
lacking hope where there should be some despite all the worries.
The prayers piled up as high as they could go
and people even laid hands on her in a religious attempt
at ridding her body of disease, but she hated it,
the ceremony I mean, because it felt to her
like testing God, or what we knew of such things.
Her main goal was to be free of cancer somehow
and did not like being the center of so much attention
or the need to get so sick that life itself felt like a cruel prank
in the face of nausea, neuropathy, and skin peeling
from her hands as she was gardening.
Linda in her parent’s backyard on the 4th of July, one of her favorite holiday. But she loved them all.
Eventually, her hair was all gone and never came back
while the veins in her arms were so tired from injections
that the nurses had to warm and slap the skin
just to find an entry point for the medicine
or whatever one might try to call the poison
that cancer treatment so often requires.
The wigs she chose evolved from modest
to a bit wilder as she said “Fuck it!
I’m going to look like I want to look with the time that I have.”
Yet she was never negative, only resolute.
Visiting my Paoli apartment during our second year of dating in 1982.
For exercise, she wanted a bike because walking
numbed her feet so we picked up a matte green
Trek and she went pedaling on the Great Western Trail
while I rode along behind because I did not want
to pressure her to go too fast. That was how we proceeded
in many things, because I wanted her to last.
She let it all out that day with a burst of speed, clinging to the wig
on top of her head as the tires rolled on crushed limestone
taking her away from the feeling that life was limited.
I rode along behind feeling the breeze of anticipatory grief across my face.
In some way she knew what was coming as well,
and that Subaru was a last grasp at life itself.
A week later she could hardly get off the examination table
And by early March of 2013, when the medical oncologist
pulled me aside, there was true empathy in her recommendation
that we go to palliative care.
Sharing a kiss after I’d won a road race in 1984.
In many respects, I’d been there for years
because the woman I’d known, or the person she wanted to be
had been slowly stripped away by cancer’s rigors
and all that it represents. That means letting parts of yourself go
because there is no other choice.
She gave up calling me by the nickname “Lover”
and used the name Chris whenever we talked.
During those last weeks, I sat by her bed
asking forgiveness for whatever ways I might have failed her
if that was the case. In response, she turned to me and said,
“Oh, Chris, I’m sorry about all the stuff.”
She referred to all the keepsakes and everything kept in boxes
throughout the house from basement closets
to kitchen cabinets, and while she was no hoarder
I found more than thirty baskets in different styles
along with some money kept in quiet boxes
as a stash for new garden supplies.
Never did I begrudge her a dime spent on her love because
she’d sit outside facing her garden with a gin and tonic
admiring her work as the sprinklers graced the lilies
with moisture and the bergamot shared its wild bee scents
on summer evenings. Bats flew overhead and an occasional
nighthawk with its odd reaching up to a partial moon
as evening fell.
These things sustained her determination,
as she didn’t quit living even to the day she died.
We had to move her from the back bedroom
to a living room medical bed
and the EMTs rolled her through the house
on a computer chair in an act of inelegant
practicality. When she was settled back in bed
She looked up at me with a laugh and said
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to suffer.”
As the medical team went about its work that day
It was advice from her gynecological oncologist
that stayed with me. “This is coming to a close,”
he advised, “There’s nothing to be gained
in being negative. So be positive. Lie if you have to.”
Linda with my parents and Evan, our firstborn.
Those are the mercies of reality
because let us not fool ourselves with false positives
or true negatives. Instead, reckon with the truth
in each our own way. Years before, I’d ushered her
through an emotional breakdown brought on
by the fact that the cancer was back.
That truth was far too hard to condense
and much harder to swallow and I lost my wife
for a while to wherever the mind goes
when it can’t take it anymore.
A close friend and nurse then told me
“She’s going to need you now more than ever,
as her entire affect is off, and she’s afraid
of everything but you.” That was true,
so we held hands everywhere we went
until the shock finally wore off
and we invited short visits from trusted quiet friends,
those women she loved that could comfort her soul.
One of the many monarchs we “ranched” and released from her Batavia garden.
We never knew how cancer took hold, the disease
perhaps emanating from baby powder or talcum
as the legal advertisements later implied,
yet far too late for a cure, or recompense.
There is no room for second-guessing the past
when the future bears down on you from behind
and the difficult part about dealing with death
is how to handle it with children still facing most of their lives.
Surely, I did not handle that perfectly well
because anticipatory grief is an advance
salve for the soul before it all comes to pass.
That is also why on the week that she died,
I attended a Good Friday service and my brother told me,
“Dude, you’re walking straight into the pain.”
At the service, an interim pastor greeted me
with a tear in his eye and said, “It’s good that you’re here.”
Who knows the proper way to handle
the passing of a spouse of twenty-eight years
and four years of dating before that?
The immediacy of life’s endings all depend
on practical facts such as when
the afternoon nurse gives way to the night nurse,
and things seem to be winding down.
I recall her presence well, a slight woman with deep dark skin
and an even deeper appreciation of all that was about to transpire.
She stepped in the door and greeted me with something different
than a smile, but not sad, instead taking a long look across the room
at the woman in the home hospice bed breathing deeply.
Then she moved into the kitchen to prepare for the evening.
My son and daughter and I remained in the living room
with their mother and my wife for hours as her breathing grew heavy
and finally the night nurse came into the room and gestured to us
to gather at the bed, each family member holding a hand
or gracing her face with a kiss. Then it grew quiet
because there was nothing more to say.
I glanced at both my children, as each had come
from different places, one in New York and the other
from college to be back with their mother
who’d survived eight hard years to see them
grow into adults, or at least part of the way.
A trip to Chicago during one of her remission periods.
Then the arrangements began and we knew not what to do
but retreat from the finality of her last presence
as the funeral people took over for the transition to ashes
as were her wishes, but not her hopes.
That night the three of us could not bear to be apart
so we joined as children to watch the movie “Wreck It Ralph”
and its playfully destructive theme seemed just right
to distract us from the woes of loss and pain
and numbness, a heartfelt stain that does not always go away.
Our family was always able to talk
But never so amusingly as the day
that I dragged them all to therapy
when the news first hit
that Linda would be fighting cancer
and I wanted us all to be on the same page
in holding our bonds together.
They all participated patiently yet after the session
my son turned to us and said “I could have done all that.”
He proceeded to describe all of us in terms of personality
and how we got along and then he said some words
that I vowed to respect when he advised,
“Dad, just tell us the truth.”
That is what we all tried to abide during all those years,
allowing concessions for caution when the news
was not clear or the prognosis was still being determined
and only then could we be truthful enough
to offer direction, a parent’s prerogative.
The book I wrote about our journey.
These words are begging forgiveness for my own vain need
to tell all these stories as the means to process
what so many others go through in so many different ways.
I only hope they aid some others familiar
with these transitions in life.
I will also confess to needing affirmation on many fronts,
even going so far as self-aggrandizement on more than one occasion.
Also noted are mistakes made during all that caregiving
and one stands out in my mind, the day that she
needed to choke down the most awful liquids
in advance of a barium treatment test
and I grew impatient with her knowing
that her chemo regimen made even good food taste bad.
Yet I still stepped out on the back porch to chide her
with a call to just get it done. Her eyes flashed
and she raised two middle fingers with just two words
that to go along with that gesture,
and I deserved that.
The real object of her fury was the disease itself,
because it was the cause of all that trouble
and deserved to be told to go away
in the harshest of terms.
As they say, we “lost a good one” on March 26, 2013,
and yet there was one more moment of mysterious reckoning
when a friend of my daughter stayed over one night
as night as a gesture of support in the week following
her mother’s death.
The young woman lay on our couch with her feet facing
the spot where my wife’s head had been positioned
in the medical bed, when a set of three orbs of light,
one green, one white, one red, appeared glowing
in the darkness. Her scientific mind hesitated to tell us
that next morning, but we trusted that what she’d seen
was genuine and real.
A photo from our honeymoon taken at Waterton north of Glacier Park, 1985
These events form a helix of memories and realities
that we all seek to unravel with time, yet my perspective
on finality has forever been changed by the people lost
to life’s vagaries and its inevitable conclusion.
Call it anticipatory grief if you will, but I’ll not forget what
the night nurse told me after my wife had passed away.
“She was already gone before I arrived.”
A year after the world changed I sat next
to one of my wife’s closest friends who told me,
“You know, she told me that she knew you’d date
after she was gone.” I thanked her for that,
but related that I was glad she waited to share
that information because we all still need to make
Taking pride in vulnerability does not mean always being scared or sad. It’s quite the opposite. It’s about being authentic in whatever situation you find yourself in life.
One of my new work cohorts encouraged me to take an Enneagram test to see where my personality fits on the spectrum of such things. I signed up on Truity and paid $19.99 to get the full results. The outcomes were interesting, with all my best qualities and flaws laid out in black and white.
Somewhere late in the PDF, which is replete with graphs and charts about personality and life traits, I noticed a quote highlighted in the headline of this article. “True strength comes from the courage to be vulnerable.” I sat there a minute and thought: “That’s exactly what I meant by calling my book “The Right Kind of Pride.”
The Right Kind of Pride is precisely that: the consistent action of taking pride in the willingness and courage to be vulnerable.
As for that book, I’m pretty sure that some people are scared or uncomfortable about reading a book about cancer survivorship. But it’s not JUST about that. The eighty-plus blogs I compiled speak to the the value of authenticity in all situations.
Here’s the basic fact: All of us must be survivors of one kind or another. Plus, none of us gets out of this world alive. All I can say is that when it comes to getting through the tough things in life, vulnerability is truly powerful.
Caregiving
Before our marriage in 1984.
Over eight years of caregiving that was the principal way that I found hope and support.
Originally, I oversaw my mother’s journey through lymphoma and pancreatic cancer, followed by a stroke and finally hospice. Her passage left me in charge of caregiving for my father Stewart Cudworth, a stroke victim from 2002. I would remain his caregiver through his passing in 2015 at 89 years of age.
That all began in 2005, the same year that my wife was diagnosed with Stage IIC ovarian cancer. Immediately I was graced by an offer of support from the preschool director and her team of teachers at the school where my late wife Linda taught. For the next eight years, those people and many others (thank God) were willing to help us through the ups and downs of cancer treatments, including surgeries and recovery, chemotherapy, prodigious drugs and side effects, and emotional challenges deeper than we’d ever imagined possible. We’d make it through one segment of treatment to remission only to have the cancer return. That progressed with rapidity like the sound of a ping-pong ball as it taps out from its original dropped height.
During all that time I blogged to our caregiving support group about the blessings and challenges we experienced, and things we learned along the way. Those blogs formed the bulk of the book I wrote titled The Right Kind of Pride. Then I wrote a prologue and epilogue, including A Goofball’s Guide to Grief. Because I am. A goofball.
Making the most of my hair before it all went away in my late 20s.
Personal journal
But I also kept a personal journal for thoughts that were not ready for public consumption at the time. I’d actually forgotten about those words until recently when I opened up a thick journal given to me by my mother-in-law for my July birthday in 2012.
I’d been thrown out of work earlier that year by an employer who fired me the day after they learned my wife had cancer. So I was freelancing and trying to cover everything from COBRA insurance costs to the daily costs of living. Fortunately, I was able to find bits and pieces of work to tide us through, all while dealing with the difficult fact that Linda’s health was decreasing in quality. She started having seizures in the fall of 2012, and then we discovered a brain tumor that required surgery, radiation and steroids to treat, and after that, things got really tough.
Calm realizations
At that point in February of 2013, I landed a new job and was trying to do my best at it. But the daily challenges of helping her through were significant. By February 11, it was even tough for her to get around. “Linda sleeping on the couch upstairs,” I wrote in the journal. “Chuck is on the Ottoman, leaning on my leg until a few minutes ago. Following me around all day. Linda improved a bit, for a while anyway. Big day tomorrow. Meeting Dr. Ferris and Dr. Dolan.”
We made it to the appointment with the medical oncologist Dr. Ferris. But things didn’t go all that well. She could barely stand to lie on the table, and the doctor pulled me aside and made a calm recommendation of palliative care going forward. I knew what that meant. And besides, Linda was too exhausted from gut swelling and fatigue to make the trip from Warrenville to Advocate Lutheran General to see the physician that treated her so well from the outset. I could barely get her home.
Constructive thoughts
I wrote in the journal on February 14, Valentine’s Day 2013, “Well, my objective with this journal is to focus on constructive thoughts rather than destructive, which so many other journals in this house seem to have been. In a constructive fashion, therefore, it is still important, most important, to acknowledge that Linda Mues Cudworth––or Linda Ann––is in the process of dying. She has been a most wonderful wife all these 28 years, and wants to continue if only she could. But her cancer is catching up with our dreams of going places together and doing things. We had both promised to get to Glacier this year––together, if her health would allow it. Now it seems more likely she will be gone, the earthly part of her that I so love anyway. Our relationship has gotten richer these past 8 years. Richer than money and wealth combined. Our mutual failings and weaknesses have fallen away. She has told me that she loves me and I believe her now. I have told her that I love her and she knows it now. Our wedding vows have been fulfilled; for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.”
We made many trips to Decorah, Iowa over the years. One of the prettiest spots in the Midwest.
Reading those words again nine years after she passed away on March 26, 2013, gives me both sadness and satisfaction. We did the best we could all through those years. “Sunrises and sunsets still await,” I continued writing in the journal that February. “And spring as well. Hurts so much to know that she may not be with me. So soon. So sudden. Yet we have lived well together, the best we know how. I love you Linda. I always will. God Bless your kind and spirited heart. Forever.”
The promise of vulnerability
It would still be weeks before the end of her life came. But we opened our lives at that point, trying to bring our children and family, friends, and associates into the sphere of vulnerability. If you absorb nothing else from these words, please embrace the truth that “true strength comes from the courage to be vulnerable.” We lived that reality and I can promise you that while things don’t always happen or end how you’d like or expect, the courage to be vulnerable is one of the most valuable human traits of all. It expands all the good things that life has to give.
It’s fascinating to study yourself objectively through a test like Enneagram. It’s a valuable thing to learn what emotions and character traits drive you from within, and how that translates to life and relationships. And it’s the core of who we are that matters. Letting others see that in you can be a wonderfully empowering force in life.
Linda Cudworth passed away on March 26, 2013. While appreciating her life, I am grateful for the things life and love continues to bring.
The single most frustrating aspect of living through this pandemic is the persistent strain of obstinance evident in so much of the population.
Obstinance: is a characteristic of being impossibly stubborn. Like a bull that won’t budge, obstinance keeps people from going with the flow.
We’ve seen obstinance from people refusing to wear masks.
Obstinance from people refusing to get vaccinated.
Obstinance by arrogant people gathering in social gatherings without masks to create super-spreader events.
It’s been one bit of obstinance after another.
Obstinance is mostly a matter of false pride. Clinging to a belief that is tightly held, often for all the wrong reasons.
Image credit: The Guardian
Like mask-wearing. Was it ever a question of personal freedom? Is asking people to wear a mask any different than asking them to wear pants in public? It’s not. But people chose to fight the idea of masks rather than consider the value or the purpose. They branded it an imposition on their “personal freedom.”
But masks work. Look at how low the flu rates were in America this year. Cases were way down. All because people wore masks in most public places. Currently the only places where Covid cases are on the increase is areas where vaccination rates are low.
Like Missouri. The so-called “Show Me State.” The origins of that phrase are interesting, as documented on the website of the Missouri Secretary of State. “The most widely known legend attributes the phrase to Missouri’s U.S. Congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver, who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1897 to 1903. While a member of the U.S. House Committee on Naval Affairs, Vandiver attended an 1899 naval banquet in Philadelphia. In a speech there, he declared, “I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.”
Obstinance as a worldview
There’s a degree of obstinance in that “Show Me” tradition. It is a trait of impossible stubbornness. The same sort of obstinance drives certain religious beliefs as well. Biblical literalists known as creationists refuse to accept the theory of evolution because they claim there is no proof. “You have to show me,” the logic goes. “Or I will not believe you.”
Of course, there is evidence of evolution in every single living creature on earth, but the obstinate among us refuse to see it and choose to project simplistic explanations on all of material reality.
But evolution is not just real. It works. One can map out the relationships of DNA among all living things and find enormous commonalities. In fact, the only reason diseases such as Covid can jump from one species to another is that living things share the same basic genetic structure.
The Vail Health Foundation describes how the Pfizer vaccine is designed to work:
“While the vaccine is new and has been produced quickly, mRNA technology has been around for many years. The vaccine essentially takes a piece messenger RNA from the viral cell and causes our bodies to produce the protein that triggers the immune response and antibodies to ward off infection.
An mRNA vaccine does not actually contain the virus itself. An analogy is to think of it as an email sent to the muscle cells at the injection site that shows what a piece of viral protein looks like and then — like a Snapchat message — it disappears. Our bodies will develop an immune response to kill the viral protein and remember how to recognize it in the future. It is an amazing technology and a breakthrough in modern medicine.”
I took the Pfizer vaccine. The only noticeable side effect was a half-day of fatigue after the second dose, then things were fine. I was vaccinated against Covid-19. Not once did I have to give up personal freedoms to achieve that status.
Stubborn defiance
Rather than consider the medical technology that developed the Pfizer vaccine, obstinate anti-vaxxers instead invent all sorts of obstinate reasons not to get vaccinated.
The roots of anti-vaxxer psychology have grown over the years, with some making connections between vaccinations and conditions such as autism and other brain disorders. According to the Global Citizen website, “The CDC estimates that more than 21 million hospitalizations and 732,000 deaths among children born in the last 20 years will be prevented because of vaccinations.”
Obviously many of the 600,000+ deaths caused by the Covid-19 pandemic could have been prevented if a specific vaccine for the virus had been available from the start. That’s not the case when a new infectious disease variant spreads into the human population. Thus it is critical to conduct research into pandemic diseases, which is what the lab in Wuhan, China was doing.
Blaming China
Some ask if Covid sprung free from that lab to infect us all, but there is no evidence so far to indicate that as a fact. The precautionary measures to prevent such an occurrence at all such facility is high. Then there are the cynical among us insisting that China purposely spread the disease and tried to hide the source.
That’s known as a conspiracy theory, an approach to opinion popular among extremists, some of the most obstinate people on earth. Even when faced with facts disproving their “theory” about why things are happening, or how, they cling to a conspiratorial version of “reality” because is it a worldview they can own. It is giving up control that obstinate people fear the most.
That explains the illogic driving anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and anti-science people in today’s culture. They are immensely proud of their seeming ability to provide “secret” explanations that justify their distrust of a world they can’t explain or control. First they deny the science driving knowledge of infectious diseases, then they invent irrational explanations to cover up their ignorance. Obstinance is the last empowering gesture of the terminally disenfranchised and self-persecuted.
Dog whistle empowerment
It is no wonder these folks clamber to authoritarians talking to them through dog-whistle language and obstinate tactics. What they also refuse to understand in these actions is how dangerous and dumb their obstinance is to themselves, and all of us. That brand of obstinance is forever the wrong kind of pride.
Today’s blog on The Right Kind of Pride is titled The Wrong Kind of Pride. It addresses the obstinance of anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists and how it endangers us all. But there’s a history there…
Personally, I don’t think the United States has ever been any different. There is a strain of obstinance––the “wrong kind of pride”––woven into the American populace from the beginning. The wrong kind of pride is responsible for horrific moments in history such as the proliferation of slavery and secession in an attempt to protect it. The wrong kind of pride also fuels white supremacy, anti-Semitism, anti-feminism, and anti-gay bigotry. The wrong kind of pride drives religious hatred, wars of choice, and resistance to the truth of all kinds.
The wrong kind of pride is as much a part of American history as the so-called “exceptionalism” with which rabid patriots love to credit the nation. That explains why Critical Race Theory is considered such a threat to the preferred narrative of American superiority. Critical Race Theory is a humble attempt to address American wrongheadedness and prejudice. We can see who’s resisting it with political force. It is the fearful and arrogant among us, the selfish and unkind. It is all those wielding the wrong kind of pride to their own personal advantage.
The farm in Upstate New York that I loved to visit as a child.
At six years old, most of us don’t have a great grasp of the world around us. Life revolves around parents and family. The rest of life is a mystery until we experience it.
During the summer after my second grade year in school, my favorite aunt and uncle traveled from their farm in Upstate New York to visit our family in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. When the time came for them to leave, I begged my parents to allow me to go with them back to the farm. To my surprise, my parents agreed.
A half hour later a bag was packed and I was plopped in the back seat of their car for the trip north to Bainbridge and the farm that I loved.
But the next morning, I woke up with a horrid feeling in my gut. I was homesick. If you’ve never experienced that feeling for yourself, it can be best described as a deep combination of longing and loss that penetrates your whole being. All you want to do is go home.
Confession: I was always an anxious kid. Already at that age, I chewed my nails. Looking back through a life of dealing with aspects of anxiety and depression, I realize that homesickness was a product of who I am. Learning to cope with anxiety is a lifelong job. I don’t blame myself for it, and these days I know myself well enough to function healthily. It wasn’t always that way.
The morning of my homesickness, I recall my aunt making a phone call to my parents, who drove up from Lancaster that day to fetch their anxious, homesick son. Apparently all involved had pity on me. Perhaps they knew those feelings well enough to realize there was no cure except to send me back home. Sometimes good caregiving is a matter of listening to the people involved.
Keeping me on the farm a couple days might have cured the homesickness, but I must have been a sorry sight with all those aching tears. I guess I can be grateful that adults had compassion for my condition.
The giant elm that once stood in front of the Nichols family farm where my mother grew up.
I looked up homesickness on the Psychology Today website. It had interesting things to say about homesick feelings. “A number of studies have suggested that homesickness can be associated with psychological difficulties such as loneliness, depression, anxiety, difficulty adjusting to new situations, and psychosomatic health problems. Given that being away from home can be accompanied by the sadness of missing it, one wonders why we form such powerful emotional bonds to our home. Surely, attachment is at least partly the product of all the wonderful experiences we enjoyed during our childhood.”
It goes on to say, “As poet Robert Frost famously explained, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Our bond extends beyond enjoyable experiences. It encompasses unconditional love, commitment, loyalty and enduring connectedness.”
Still, no specific mention of fear as a cause of homesickness. Perhaps there’s no reason. That emotion is woven into the DNA of anxiety and depression. It is both the cause and a symptom of those conditions.
The PT article continues,” Efforts to prevent homesickness must contend with a paradox. Although research findings have been inconsistent, homesickness seems to be more likely when children have had prior experiences with separation from home as well as when they had had little or no prior periods away. If homesickness is the price we pay for attachment to a strong loving home, would anyone want to diminish the quality of a child’s home to prevent the possibility of future homesickness?”
Like many children in that day and age, I lived in a home that was both loving and at times, a conflicted place. My father lost his mother to complications of cancer treatment when he was just seven years old. He went to live with an uncle and two aunts because his own father experienced profound depression at the loss of his wife and also brought on in some ways by The Depression.
So my father’s upbringing was at times gruff. His pain at losing his mother at such a young age was probably never adequately addressed. No doubt there were feelings of homesickness after being shuttled from his family home to a life with a tough old uncle and two unmarried aunts. The sense of loss must have been profound. Thus despite his largely caring character, he bore an anger within him that spilled out at times. His four sons tried to meet his approval but there was an exasperating and sometimes frightening tone to certain aspects of our upbringing.
So that feeling of separation from home as a place of safety and comfort is both a physical and emotional reality for all of us. Yet to this day, I still view our Lancaster house and yard as “home” in many ways. We moved away when I was twelve years old. A type of homesickness has traveled with me all these years. We’d have never left that place if I’d had my way.
A Google Maps photo of the family home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Yet that would have denied me all the experiences that were to come and those were good. So while homesickness is real, it is also not permanent and is no way to define or limit one’s time in this world. We have to rip off the bandage at certain times in life, and move on.
All of us have some sense of home that lives within our souls. Sometimes it’s just the smell of a room when the windows are open… or the curl of a pillow as you roll over to face that person whom you love. It can be heard in the song of a bird calling in the trees, or the sound of a car pulling into a driveway.
Take in those sensations and indeed, you’re home again. That’s the right kind of pride.
Note: I’ve shared impressions about homesickness before on this blog because they symbolize so many other aspects of life. May you find that sense of home wherever you are.
People nearing my age often retire. Some run their career course and it makes absolute sense to cash in and cease working in the conventional sense. Others plan wisely and have the financial resources to allow them to quit working and do what they want with the rest of their lives. I’m glad for all those who achieve those milestones. They’ve typically earned them.
Yet I’m also glad for people that choose not to retire at a given age. While the age of 55-65 is often the traditional age for retirement, there is nothing that says you have to quit working at that stage. Our current President of the United States, Joe Biden, is 78 years old. The masterful Bob Dylan just turned 80. Many great artists work even into their 90s. What’s the damn rush to quit working?
Still, the pressures to do so can be daunting. I know a sales executive, now retired, who could not find employment after his company consolidated departments and he wound up on the outside. He’s living now in Arizona, and enjoying it. But at first he was hurt by the sense that he was no longer valued in a working way.
Those are challenging emotions for people at any age, and losing your job or needing to step back from employment is often a solid blow to the ego. So much of our identity is tied to our working life.
There is also the sense of “earning a living.” During my peak earning years I found myself out of work several times during caregiving for my late wife. At several times during eight years of caregiving she needed me home to take care of her through surgeries, chemotherapy treatments and recovery periods of both physical and mental consequence. The timing was seldom convenient to long-term success or building the perception of a steady-growth career. Each time I peaked in income, rising from $80K to $100K, cancer whacked us with a recurrence, and it was hard for her to work as well.
It felt like starting at Square One during each of those comebacks. Sometimes the return to work involved taking lower-paying jobs that were closer to home during periods of cancer caregiving. I won’t claim that I was a perfect employee during those periods of change, either. During those eight years, I was also principal caregiver to a father who was a stroke victim. The dual demands were daunting.
Yet I still managed considerable successes that included winning large accounts, earning national awards in public relations and marketing, and building a literacy project that served more than 375,000 families. But my failures included forgetting meetings, allowing the occasional typo to slip through, and trying too hard to protect my job by posting a sample of client work to my personal website. I was under enormous stress in the moment and didn’t think that decision through. It led to my dismissal just a day after I’d revealed to the company that my wife was a cancer patient. They brought in a lawyer to protect their interests in that circumstance after they’d promised to support us no matter what. It was hard not to consider that a cheap shot.
Plus, that situation left me with no job and COBRA insurance premium payments of $2000 a month. To say that some of our premium earning years were compromised by cancer struggles is a massive understatement.
So I’ve forgiven myself for not retiring at age 55 when some of my peers managed to do so. But here’s the odd truth about my actual attitude. I’m not eager to retire. In many respects as a writer and content developer, I’ve never been more capable and productive. Quitting now would be a shame, from my perspective. I still enjoy the challenges work provides.
I’ve also been an athlete all my life, and I’ m swimming, riding and running every week. I enjoy the sensations of being fit and active. That aligns with my daily writing, painting or producing creative content across a spectrum of platforms. Perhaps it would be nice to retire, but I feel like I’d still be doing the same things I do now even if I weren’t traditionally “working.”
As for a retirement plan, there is still time to make up the difference and that’s what I plan to do. The other main goal I have in life is to MAKE A DIFFERENCE. That is why a series of books I plan to publish are so important to me.
The first is a book titled Honest-To-Goodness: Helping Christianity Find It’s True Place in the World. It is a treatise on the roots of Christian tradition and how legalism leads so many people astray. It is a collaborative project with a Professor or Religion named Dr. Richard Simon Hanson.
The second is a book titled Nature Is Our Country Club. It is a book about the way golf courses thirty years ago realized there was a better way to manage their properties than pouring chemicals all over the ground and mowing everything in sight. The narrative traces how natural landscaping relates to the world at large, and what the human race needs to do in order to protect the earth on which we all depend.
The third book is Competition’s Son, a biography about life that deals with the effects of competition in all aspects of life; learning, sports, family, relationships, business, religion, success and failure, and emotional conditions ranging from anxiety to joy, from depression to salvation.
The first two books are finished and being prepped for release. My goal is to begin speaking and producing content around those topics going forward. All the while I’ll continue working because I love what I do. I’m glad for those who retire, but I’m also glad for those who don’t.
To me, that’s the Right Kind of Pride. How about you?
I’m not a big believer in the idea that the deceased are able to talk with the living. No amount of talk by so-called “mediums” convinces me that people in this life can connect with the dead through supernatural means. I once read that a famous celebrity promised his wife that if he died, she would someday see his presence revealed in a white feather floating in the air. I don’t think that ever happened, or we might have heard about it.
Instead, I believe that when it comes to all things supernatural, it is up to us to find meaning in everyday experiences that trace the lives of those we have lost. Yesterday, I felt the strong presence of my late wife in a teaching experience with children the same age that she once served.
As a substitute teacher the last month and a half, I’ve had the opportunity to work with classrooms ranging from first grade through middle school and high school. Having been in many teaching situations over the years, including adult and higher education, I’m exploring how I can expand that love of teaching at this point in my life.
It has been a challenge and a joy to learn how to work with students of all ages and abilities. Like my late wife, I’ve also worked with special needs students across a range of abilities. Her ultimate career choice was a preschool teacher, a bit different than the higher-paying public school positions to which she once planned to return, but her love of teaching young children won out.
I always knew why my wife loved teaching children that age. They are getting ready for the big world of kindergarten. They need guidance in social skills as well as basic learning in the alphabet and numbers. They also love to explore the arts and play.
As a teacher one learns to adjust to aptitudes and witness how personalities are already forming. It is also a calling to help form those personalities in an encouraging way.
That means you use what talents you have available to connect with kids. For me, that means read-aloud time and drawing. Those are my best teaching attributes. While moving from group to group during play time, I shared some drawing time with a left-handed little guy who absolutely loved the process of copying what I drew on the board. At one point I drew the head of a mouse. He then completed the body and legs, and drew a companion mouse next to the first.
Such are the serendipitous arrivals of teachable moments. Sometimes you make them happen. Sometimes you let them happen.
Over a twenty-year period my late wife experienced thousands, if not millions of such encounters. Those kids were a gift to her in life. Though her life ended earlier than she ever planned, the children and raised (our kids) made it the richest life imaginable. She saw it through their eyes, and the purity of the moment is made from the absence of time. It will be eight years since she passed away on March 26, 2013. It was nice to feel a bit of connection with that life through some preschooler’s eyes.
My rendering of a female figure from a life drawing class in college. There was seriously not a trace of lust in me while creating this image.
So many of us are taught to not feel proud about having sexual feelings. Yet human beings are biologically wired to have sexual attractions of one form or another. Many of these are characterized as taboo or against the teachings of a particular religion. We’re told these feelings are sinful and are thereby urged to repress some of nature’s most powerful instincts.
Feelings of sexual desire are loosely characterized as “lust,” a word that bears a negative connotation in context with scripture and other moral guidebooks. To “lust” after something is characterized as a craven or base instinct, something to be resisted. The website Biblestudytools.com describes it this way:
Lust is a temptation and an evil that overcomes many of us. It is born of Satan and the flesh. Every single one of us is subject to lust. If we are to overcome it, we must be strong. Use these Bible verses to find out why you should resist lust, and use them to strengthen yourself.
The quote attributed to Jesus in Matthew 5:28 is most often cited as a directive to resist lust at all costs:
28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
A drawing I produced from a Playboy centerfold when I was a sophomore in high school. There was definitely lust involved in producing this drawing.
This is an image of the centerfold from which I rendered the drawing above. The beauty of the female figure is aptly captured in this centerfold.
Yet the natural curiosity to know more about the human body isn’t just about lust. There is also appreciation involved. Even scripture recognizes this aspect of adoration in the Book of Psalms, where a lover clearly lusts for his divine partner:
“Your breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle.” (7.3)
“Your stature is like that of the palm, and your breasts like clusters of fruit.” (7.7)
“My lover is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts.” (1:13)
Okay, so now we know that exploring and expressing lust is not all bad. Many of us recognize its allure within us from a young age. I well recall, at the age of eight or so, reaching into my father’s closet to pull down copies of Playboy magazine. The sight of naked women fueled my desire even before I entirely knew what to do with it.
The drawing of Playboy model Claudia Jennings that I produced in 1972. It also drew from lust, but it was more than that as well. Look at the clothing…
The centerfold on which the drawing above was based.
So strong was my urge to understand the female body that I took to tracing outlines of those women on the pages of Playboy. I stored those tracing paper drawings in the depths of my closet and returned the magazines to my father’s room.
I even drew images of naked women on the steam-covered bathroom mirror. On Sunday mornings the sight of Blondie’s buxom figure on the cartoon pages even got me going. I copied those cartoons too, but not only those. I began to replicate all sorts of cartoon figures on my own. I was learning to draw. To appreciate what I was seeing. That gave me a sense of ownership and power over my observations.
By the time I reached my early teens, I was drawing and painting regularly. My mother bought me paints and paper. I rendered wildlife that I’d seen and copied pictures from books. My desire to capture the essence of birds and other creatures was a lust of sorts.
A 1973 watercolor of a great horned owl copied from a painting by Louis Agassiz Fuertes.
As a sophomore in high school my drawing skills began to come together in all new ways. In a fit of drawing immersion combined with lust, I rendered highly-detailed copies of centerfolds from Playboy magazine as shown above. I didn’t always get the face quite right, but doing the shading on their bodies was captivating.
This is the same model as the drawing at the top of this blog. I produced this single image from a long series of separate drawings. The female figure celebrated.
Then I reached college and took a life drawing class. My curiosity about the female and male body was greatly satisfied by drawing live figures. There was no lust in this brand of appreciation. My entire focus was on rendering the human figure with accuracy, detail and subtlety. This applied to both men and women.
It struck me as odd that when I arrived back at my college dorm room, male classmates would gather around to look at the drawings I’d done that day. To many of them, the images constituted “naked chicks” and while I laughed about it then, my interests were migrating from lust to appreciation.
Not long after college I hired a model on my own to pose nude for an afternoon drawing session. She arrived at my studio apartment, disrobed and posed on the couch, and left at the appointed time. I compensated her for the time, and did not feel any particular lust for her body while doing the drawings.
The model I hired to pose for a life drawing session. It is an interesting reflection of the piece I created from the centerfold years before.
Yet I can’t honestly say that I never looked at pornography again. The nature and accessibility of naked images, especially of women, evolved with technology. I did a search of Playboy centerfolds and can identify the year and month that I last purchased that print magazine. It was 1994. In a strange twist two years after that, I was parked in a White Hen lot and looked down to find a Playboy magazine sticking out from beneath the parking block next to the sidewalk. I pulled out the magazine and was stunned to see that it was dated 1976. Patti McGuire was the centerfold. Had that magazine survived under that block for twenty years? I doubt it, but it was still strange to find it there.
These days it’s not just Playmates who show up half-naked or completely naked in the digital and real world. World-class athletes on social media know that a touch of sex sells. It’s part of the gig to attract followers, be they males lusting after fit girls or women appreciating the hard work it takes to look like that.
World-class female athletes know that a touch of sex sells when it comes to gaining followers.
Society has grown to accept the sight of fully exposed female buttocks as a natural part of empowered fashion. Social media encourages nakedness at many levels, including women that willingly pose without clothes or get involved in the porn industry to make money. It’s seldom glamorous, as Rashida Jones shared in a telling Netflix series.
Exploitation, whether by self-choice or by revenge porn, is a far different enterprise than building appreciation for the human body. Some of the world’s greatest art features nude human beings. That is an accepted part of culture. Yet there’s also no avoiding that lust drives considerable occupation with the human figure as well.
A pencil drawing of film star and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe.
I think the right kind of pride sits somewhere in between the worlds of lust and appreciation. Maintaining that balance is a sign of maturity and self-actualization. When I consider the manner in which attractive actresses are expected to bare all for movies, it makes me wonder how they feel about having their naked bodies out there for all of eternity. Women such as Marilyn Monroe were supposedly able to turn that lust magnetism on and off. It was a persona, they say. And yet, we tragically learned, it also wasn’t.
A drawing from a Playboy photograph rendered in the 1970s.
We all conduct our own mind experiments and learn our flaws and obsessions. The range of human sexual expression, orientation and gratification is far more diverse and appreciated now that society is becoming more honest about it. Clearly we still have a ways to go, and some argue that sexual images and exploitation are signs of a morally decaying society. Yet knowing about sex and having a better understanding of the human body ultimately empowers everyone in the end. Being educated and making choices is better than being repressed and succumbing to fears, guilt, and mistakes in conscience.
Ancient attitudes of automatic repression and hardline theology don’t do people any favors. They depend on a brand of hyperbole that comes from an age when sexuality was poorly understood, and lust along with it. It’s not true that people conduct adultery in their heart every time they look at a woman (or man) lustfully. Sometimes it’s just that: a look to wick off desire. Then we get back to appreciating the ones we love, and even making art that inspires appreciation of the human condition in all its forms.
One of our Christmas gifts this year was a set of colorful masks. I also received a set of three free from a retailer where I bought gifts. All in the spirit of Christmas.
As Year 2020 grinds to a close, we can agree that we everyone has shared in the difficulty of a manic year. The pandemic disrupted all aspects of life and normalcy, and people are grieving loss and pain at many levels. The active symbol of that grief is the face masks we’re wearing to keep the pandemic from getting even worse than it already is.
Some people resist wearing face masks, claiming it is an impingement on their freedom. The reality is that wearing masks in public is an act of respect for the health of others and for ourselves.
The irony is that so many people seem determined to deny that reality.
Spreading disease––knowingly or unknowingly––is the least acceptable option in a civilized society. Wearing a mask is not a restriction of freedom, it promotes it. If more (even all) people wear masks in public we’ll all have greater freedom as long as this pandemic lasts.
All societies depend on etiquette to protect lives and get along in a civilized manner. The basic rule of driving on the Right side of the road in the United States is an excellent example of people agreeing that social order depends on predictable behavior to govern safety and protect lives. In other parts of the world, people drive on the Left side of the road.
Being required to drive on the Right or Left side of the road isn’t an impingement upon freedom. It is a guide designed to provide greater freedom for all. The same holds true with wearing masks during a pandemic. These are not political demands. They are practical measures designed to keep people safe.
The threat of getting sick and dying during this pandemic is real. More than 330,000 Americans have died from infection. The numbers continue to climb, and America’s infection and death rates are devastatingly real, as bad as anywhere on earth. But why?
It’s simple, and symbolic: some people still find the request to wear a mask in public a great affront.
A recent Huffpost story shared the heartbreaking tale of a man battling Covid-19 in the hospital. Days before he was intubated, he wrote his wife a series of messages, including this loving recognition of his mortality:
“If I don’t make it I want you to know that I lived a happy…life with you and would never have traded it for all the riches in the world.”
He also gave his wife a blessing to live a happy life and find love again if he passed away. That is the right kind of pride: Gratitude and selflessness are the two greatest signs of character in this world.
Yet some people don’t get that. Some people thumb their noses at the idea they have to listen to anybody when it comes to wearing masks. They appear determined to hold out due to some selfish sense of tribal pride. “Don’t tread on me?”
The irony in that the same people determined to avoid wearing masks seems so eager to obey the cynical directives uttered by politicians, business moguls and religious public figures eager to exploit the masses for political, financial and personal purposes.
That’s because the wrong kind of pride vanquishes conscience and steers people away from the truth in favor of arrogant, selfish motives.
Bathed in the light of vainglorious cause, the people that claim to hate wearing masks seeks out alternate views of reality to replace those they hope to avoid. There is a massive psychological game being played in American culture in which people that respect others enough to protect them from disease by wearing masks in public are being portrayed as ignorant and sheeplike. That is gaslighting.
The wrong kind of pride encourages people to embrace resentment, greed, and fear over genuine conscience and consideration.
Even religious channels are being used to communicate this alternate view of reality. This brand of corruption is toxic and painful to witness. It encourages people to care only about themselves, or their tribe. That is the exact opposite message of the world’s major religions, all of whom seem to embrace some form of the Golden Rule: Treat others as you would have others treat you.
While most of us mask up and recognize that this pandemic can end if people use common sense and gain enough perspective to know that the suffering will someday end, those who refuse to do so literally separate themselves from the norms of humanity and in the process, bring more suffering upon themselves and others.
That man dying from Covid who wrote loving last words to his wife knew better than everyone the value of life, and love. That is the message more people need to hear; that life is precious, and the right kind of pride is having the humility and respect to care about others.
The Right Kind of Pride 