Missing David

My nephew David - my twin sister's first child - died on June 29, 2005 from a brain tumor that grew and grew and grew and eventually snuffed out his life. He was 6 years, 1 month, two weeks old. I found him. His mom had tucked him in, kissed him and told him she was the luckiest mommy in the world to have him as her son, to have a boy like him who was so wonderful and special. She left and was downstairs on the telephone when I came in at about 8:15 - finally arriving after having been at a work function. I wanted to leave that event earlier but it was work, there were people I needed to meet, and the trains just didn't come often enough. So I got the one that arrived around 8:15, and rushed to get to the house. I knew. I just knew something was going to happen that day. And when I saw Alana laughing on the telephone, I thought it was OK, nothing bad happened. So I went upstairs to say goodnight - first to Julia who was with her Daddy reading stories. Then, I went into David's room, knelt down by his bed - really, a mattress on the floor because that's what he wanted - and kissed him, saying "good night, sweet David." Then I noticed that his eyes were half open. So I called his name a little louder, touched his shoulder and gently shook him, watching for him to wake up, to respond, to acknowledge me, to know that Auntie Julie was there. I learned later that he'd been asking for me all day and evening. And I wasn't there. I think he must have known I was there, heard me come in. At least I hope so. I so hope he knew I was there. Alana thinks he died knowing I was there and it was OK to go. Oh yes, she had said to him that he could go, she would be OK. I am crying so hard when I'm writing this, making so many typos I then go back and correct. I can't sleep tonight for missing him, for grief. I opened a drawer and saw his little sweatpants that I kept because I need a piece of him with me. And he'll always be that size. He'll never grow up. Never. It's beyond words. I miss him so much. I am engulfed by grief. I worked so hard at that damn job. I stopped crying after a while because I had shut down there, become invisible - even to myself. Now I'm free to cry, and I do. I went to the cemetary a couple weeks ago and just cried and cried so deeply sitting on that beautiful bench, looking at the words on the footstone "David Leland Coble, Best Boy in the World." And the worst thing about all this is that I don't feel entitled to this grief. I'm just his aunt. But that's not how I feel. I feel he was my child. I was with him almost every day for the two years of his illness, and was there a lot before, too. He was my boy. I was the "almost mom." He'd call me Mommy a lot - mostly because I look so much like his mommy, but I also think I behaved like a mommy to him, I loved him like a mommy, I would have done anything to protect and save him, like a mommy. I have been blessed to feel that I would give my life to save his. And the futility of that wish, that desire is deadly. I feel myself go numb. I find it so hard to accept that David is really not coming back. I know it, I see the grave, I hear the absent footsteps and silenced voice, I feel the empty arms and loadless back.

celebrity dreams

When I was a little girl, I dreamed that I would marry a millionaire and be famous. I thought I'd be the first woman President of the United States. I also thought I was an alien child left here by my parents, and they tried to contact me through the ringing in my ears. How I explained that to myself is a mystery - after all, I was a twin! And my sister was living evidence that I was no alien, I was no orphan, I wasn't adopted or abandoned.

I so desperately wanted out of my relationship with my mother. It was impossible for me to believe that I could be stuck with her for the rest of my life. Some day, all would be revealed and made better - that I was with her by mistake and I really had another, kinder, more loving and understanding mother.

This was no adolescent rebellion - these fantasies began when I was five or six or seven. What desperation at such a young age. Poor little thing. I see photos from that period and what a scowl I always sport! Or at most a shy little smile. Contrast that to my sister's wide smiles, clear glee. Why was our childhood so different? We are twins, after all. Today, she's married and has a family - great tragedy, too, with David dying of brain cancer at age 6. So I'm not envious, simply curious. How did she turn out relatively normal, while I remain single and capable of intimacy only sporadically?

Does this have anything to do with celebrity dreams? Of which I have had plenty. And yet never have had the will or willingness to pursue with the single-minded determination one needs to become famous and loved by millions.

My recent experience at NYRP has so disillusioned me about celebrity. I can't read the celeb mags withouth thinking "she must be a real bitch in real life" or "I bet he treats his staff badly" or "she looks so sweet but I bet she's a pain to work with." It's as though the best-loved celebrities are the most obnoxious, controlling, arrogant, belittling people in their real lives. They believe their own press. Well, at least the celebrity I got to know believes her own press. She actually thinks she's a nice person. People should only know. But actually that would destroy their fantasies and dreams.

My dream of being one among the constellation of stars has suffered a great awakening, that the constellation of stars isn't really a very nice place to live or even visit. People say they'd love to meet so and so, or have dinner with so and so. If it were arranged by the publicist and the sponsor of a contest, that meeting and dinner would no doubt be quite pleasant. Because the celebrity would be acting, fulfilling the public role and personal they have created and nurtured over time with the collusion of all those around them - some paid, some unpaid. But get inside the inner circle and there's controlling, disdain, contempt, pouting, and blaming. I called it "shoot first and ask questions later."

People learn to keep their heads down, to stay quiet, to couch everything they say so that it's tailored not to generate an explosion of abuse. Above all, people learn that they are NOT the celebrity's equal, that their opinion doesn't matter, that only the celebrity's opinion and passion count. It all has to be her idea, her passion, her values, her credit.

Fear is the mechanism for controlling others. I actually was an object lesson for everyone around her, for I dared to challenge her and do things without her permission. And look what happened: I was fired. I annoyed her, so I was fired. Lesson for all involved: don't act independently. Don't have your own agenda. Don't suffer from the illusion that you will ever matter enough to be indispensable and that you will ever have the ability to take liberties of familiarity or equality.

Susan M. likened the place to Henry VIII's court, with courtiers jockeying for position and favor. It was very true. And those who succeeded were those most successful at sublimating their own ideas and opinions to fawn on her. It's not that they didn't have opinions, it's that they had learned how to phrase things so they weren't directly challenging her. Rather, they were building on her ideas, helping her see all sides of it, subtly encouraging her to evaluate the idea and come to the result that the idea was a little nuts or foolish or expensive or unoriginal.

That last had to be done really subtly because she couldn't stand the fact of other ideas or programs existing that perhaps were better than hers. Collaboration never seemed possible even though NYRP was theoretically working with other groups - NYRA, other greening groups. Most of the collaboration took place sub rosa - very few of them were highlighted. Those who worked longest with her were wisest - they had seen clearly that it was only NYRP's work that she felt pride in and happy about. Other groups had the potential to steal credit from her. Ix-nay on at-thay!

The puzzling thing for me is why I was hired in the first place. I was not subtle in the interviewing process, and I think Phillips Oppenheim knows that I am not a subtle person. I'm straightforward and above-board, openly passionate and incredibly creative, collaborative and team-focused, self-confident and driven. I do not kow-tow. My strategic abilities are for the center stage, not behind the scenes. I like to have partners, I like to share, I like to invite and engage others to become involved and invested and passionate. (Twin stuff? Possibly.) And I was a non-profit superstar. I'd taken City Harvest to its pinnacle, turning around a dying organization and building it into a force for change and a highly visible player on the city stage. So it's not as though I hid myself and gave the impression that I would be a suitable courtier.

I imagine that others thought that I could recognize the difference between myself and the diva, and that I would be suitably deferential and subtly strategic in working with her. I guess they saw my ability from the outside and ascribed attributes to me that I don't possess. In the context of building something from nothing or very little, my abilities are perfect - scrappy, dogged, enthusiastic, public, even a little brash. In the context of an established entity with powerful egos in situ, my abilities and style are not so good. I tend to clash with folks in authority. Never was a good sponsee, either. I really don't like people to look down on me, to assume that I am stupid or less than or somehow inferior to them. I approach people as equals, and pride myself on it (uh-oh, pride goeth before the fall...). I anger people in power. I think I do it strategically, but I really do it emotionally. I can't let go, I can't take the longer view in terms of my position, even as I take the longer view on the issues. For example, I know that ultimately America's Second Harvest will have to become a more inclusive place. That will be probably five to ten years down the road, however. I was way too pushy for that to happen now. It couldn't. And I couldn't see that or keep my mouth shut about it. Talk about not listening to people. Talk about not being subtle. Talk about being pigeonholed as that b**** from New York. Talk about failure to communicate, failure to accurately assess a situation, failure to come up with a game plan, failure to accurately assess myself and have a plan for what I would do. Wow. Hindsight is even better than 20/20. It's actually quite horrifying to look back and see how I behaved. I was so angry, so emotionally invested, so wounded by the betrayal within the ranks of Foodchain, and so deeply irritated by the condescension and patronizing of the boys from Second Harvest. I just couldn't see anything else. I saw reality and sold it very well to Foodchain, but couldn't help myself hating the reality and acting out on that aversion to the bullying denigration of their negotiating demands and their intransigent position of moral superiority based on being better "businessmen."

That's a fundamental weakness of mine - that I don't quite get the "it's only business" explanation for bad behavior and cruelty. It's like the diva saying "I'm mercurial" as an explanation/excuse for yelling at people and being abusive in her comments about someone's idea or opinion. You just have to suck it up, because that's the way it is. And if you have any feelings about it, keep them to yourself because they're not relevant to this discussion. Of course, the powerful one's feelings are completely relevant. Their feeling of fear, for example, that someone else has an idea and could upstage them. Or the feeling of anger that another is challenging their decision. Or the feelingsof disgust or contempt or envy, jealousy, self-pity, suspicion, or hostility. All of those were relevant. As are the feelings of impatience and exasperation in a Board that decides they don't want to play out a situation and see what happens, or even give someone a hearing. So while it may be business, it always has to do with feelings. Unfortunately, the feelings of love, caring, compassion, respect, generosity, sadness, kindness and willingness rarely come into play when a difficult decision has to be made. I suppose that's where the saying of "act in haste, repent at leisure" stems from. Because the feelings of passion - anger, lust, impatience, etc. - drive immediate action and really act against taking one's time to evaluate a situation dispassionately and come up with a course of action that DOES take people's feelings into account and can express some kind of caring.

It's interesting, the juxtaposition of passion, dispassion, compassion. One leads to regret, the second is perhaps necessary to arrive at the third. More to think on here. Because I am a passionate person, driven by passion. I also like to think that I'm compassionate, able to take into account other people's feelings and to walk a bit in their shoes so as to arrive at a decision and an approach to implementing that decision which acknowledges and respects the other person's feelings and material needs. Dispassion is more difficult for me, yet can be an incredibly useful tool. As I look back at my own behavior dispassionately, I gain perspective and perhaps the hope of behaving differently in the future.

I no longer want to be a celebrity, for I see the price is very, very high. Watching a diva up close allowed me to see her mistrust of and hostility toward the outside world, a world that wants something from her even as it gives her what she needs - adoration and adulation, riches and power. I don't know if she is capable of intimacy - she must be or she wouldn't have a husband for so long. But it's within a very small circle, and I don't actually know how someone gets into that circle. The deep disappointment for me is that I couldn't manage to get in, I couldn't make her see me as a wonderful person in my own right, I couldn't make her trust me. Because I couldn't play by her rules. No, I wouldn't play by her rules. At first I didn't know what the rules were. Then I did, and I grew more and more despondent as I played by them. It was a relief to go.

It was another situation like my childhood. I felt I was in an alternate universe with no connection to reality. The diva was my mother all over again - and I simply couldn't stomach the unpredictability and emotional violence. I'm really disappointed in her, myself, the situation. It reminds me that I was deeply disappointed in my childhood and my mother. I had to settle, there was no choice, she was in fact my mother and that fact could not change regardless of my fantasies. I would have settled at NYRP, too, had they not asked me to depart. It's familiar, the settling.

Have I settled elsewhere? Probably. A little thought about settling for Alana having the family, the friends, the life, the success, the independence from me has popped into my head. Paying attention to stray thoughts is a useful tool, for in them lies my truth. My twin has the life, I have the disappointment. My twin has her path, I have hers, too. Ay-yai-yai.

So now I feel my life is over. I have no idea what I want to do or will be willing to do or hope to do or even can do. And I sort of don't care. Today. We shall see what happens as I continue on this path of exploration on the meaning of being a twin. That seems crucial and unsatisfactorily explored to date.