We are all the children of Cain

I was in a hurry to find a parking spot and get a little shopping done. Let me say I was in a big hurry.  But the parking lot was filled.  I drove up and down the rows—desperate to get my shopping done and go home. I was getting more upset by the minute.

Then I noticed the brake lights of a car pulling out. I also noticed a car closer than mine was standing ready, lights signaling.  I quickly signaled also.  And charged into the vacant spot, applauding myself for beating the other car.  I was the winner.

But I was the loser. I had taken a parking spot that didn’t belong to me. I didn’t ram the other car, but I took whatever means I had to win.

Trivial?  Not at all. When we take what we want when we want it, time after time, it becomes part of our nature. Being set aside is not acceptable. We live with the pressure to win. I hated myself for my action. But my need to park seemed most important.  I was following societal protocol. 

Consider this: The coach who can’t produce a winning team is a reject.

The business executive who can’t show a winning balance sheet doesn’t last long.

The TV show that doesn’t make top ratings is dropped.

The pastor who doesn’t make a church grow is voted out through a vote of “non-confidence.” 

The wife who isn’t an asset to her husband’s career is discarded for a newer and fancier model.

Once you the internalize the need to remain on top at any cost – it has the potential for greater anger -- and eventually, violence.

I use the word “violence” deliberately, for all violence is the same, writes Jacques Ellul, whether physical or psychological. They are on a continuum.  Both are life-destroying. Both break relationships. 

Jesus taught that anger is the same as murder, lust the same as adultery--strong words that got former President Jimmy Carter into trouble once.

Violence is as common as dandelions in spring. 

If you have an inconvenient pregnancy, you choose an abortion.

If you’re against abortions, you shoot the abortionist. It happened in our city just a few years go. 

If the infirm are taking too long to die, you neglect them.

If things go wrong at work, or your favorite football team loses, you bang the wife and kids around, or at least holler at them until they’re terrified. Statistics show that domestic abuse increases after a big national game. 

Children take weapons to school to defend themselves against bullying.

When nations or ethnic groups disagree, they slaughter one another.

 “We shoot to kill,” householders warn in today’s  gun rights era.  We are becoming a country armed against ourselves. For many people, violence, shoving people to the bottom by any means  is their way of keeping the world in order. 

Psychological violence comes in many forms, including verbal abuse, gossip, slanted reports, clinging to secrets as a power play, becoming manipulative.

What does our society admire, almost worship?  People with big mean mouths who can neatly cut someone down with a few well chosen labels or phrases. Secretly we wish we could do the same.  

It’s okay to call political leaders the choicest derogatory words in our vocabulary.  It’s a righteous act, patriotic, to show we have strong convictions.

And here’s another point: To condone one kind of violence means condoning all kinds.  When we condone abusing someone with words, we condone hitting that person with a club. Once we start bullying it is hard to stop at just words.

In ancient times, according to Genesis, Eve gave birth to two sons: Cain and Abel. The first became a farmer, the second a sheepherder. Both men brought sacrifices to God: Cain possibly a sheaf of wheat, Abel  a rack of lamb. 

We are not told why God favored Abel’s sacrifice over Cain’s, but we do know that Cain became angry and killed his brother. He used violence to keep his world arranged the way he wanted it—so he could remain the winner – this time with God. 

Our society has come to believe Cain’s method of dealing with his problem is better than Abel’s.  The violence of Cain will take care of everything. Violence answers all problems.

I believe we are all children of Cain, because we all have Cain’s problem: wanting to get the parking spot when we want it.  

However, we need to read the rest of the story.  God placed a mark on Cain – a sign of God’s grace.  But he also told him he could choose  his actions.  He was a free moral being. He could let sin in or keep it out. Being violent or not violent is a choice—always. 

The writer of Genesis  uses a vivid word picture: “Sin is crouching  at your door.” It is like a wild animal, wanting to get in.  In John Steinbeck's classic East of Eden the servant Lee makes a compelling argument with Cal, one of the twins who are the counterpart to Cain and Abel, about  the glory of human choice when it comes to violence. 

The American Standard version reads “Sin is crouching at your door... but you must master it.” Lee  argues that “must” in the Hebrew is actually “mayest,” (timshell). He wants Cal to know that He has the choice to follow sin or not.  

Choice “makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course....”  

He adds that the human soul is always “attacked and never destroyed” because of the possibility of choice.  To  Lee the human soul is a “glittering instrument.” 

“Thou mayest...” versus "thou must...." 

Choice cuts the feet “from under weakness and cowardliness and laziness.” 

When I took that parking spot, I was weak and lazy.   I was one of Cain’s children. But I can choose to yield to keep my soul "glittering."  

We have the choice. We are Cain’s children.  That is his legacy.

About love, paraplegia, and assisted suicide

Jojo Moyes’ recent novel Me Before You is most often described as a modern love story.   I enjoyed that aspect but it intrigued me for another reason.

The setting is England where 26-year-old  Louisa Clark has recently lost  her job in a café. She is desperate for income.  So with strong encouragement from her family, all dependent  on what she brings in, she accepts the position as caregiver/companion to Will Traynor, a paraplegic because of traffic accident.

Will, a former successful businessman, an angry man, is bitter about the  accident  he did not cause that has determined  he will be without feeling from the neck down for the rest of his life. Forever in a wheelchair. 

He tells Lou: “I loved my life. Really loved it.  I loved my job, my travels, the things I was. I loved being a physical person.  I liked riding my motorbike, hurling myself off big heights.  I liked crushing people in big deals. I liked having sex.... I led a big life.”

He is determined that the “rest of his life” will be short. He plans to travel to Switzerland where, with the help of the organization Dignitas, he will take the final action to end his life.  

Over the weeks, as Lou cares for Will, she learns to love the person he is, not what he can do.  She accidentally becomes aware of his “due date” in Switzerland and determines to make him to see that even without mobility life is still worth living because she loves him.

On the other hand, as Will learns to know Lou, he  recognizes that although she is physically able,  she is paralyzed in other ways.   Though 26 years of age, she has never had any goals other than earning money.   Intelligent, she has never read books, heard classical music, or traveled.  Her boyfriend, a physical trainer, provides her with sex, nothing more. Life is a dead end for her as much as it is for Will. 

Even as Lou  is determined to keep Will alive, he is equally determined to bring her to life  and  see the possibilities of a rich, full life outside her little space. 

While I enjoyed the love angle, I kept comparing Will’s determination to end his life to my brother’s efforts to stay alive though also a paraplegic for the last decade of his life. He died in 2010 at age 83 of a stroke.  

My brother, Jack Funk, had multiple sclerosis, first diagnosed in the late 1960s.  When life was getting too difficult without more assistance, he and his wife Patricia moved from their home on the bank of the beautiful Battle River in Saskatchewan, outside Battleford, to Saskatoon to a care facility. 

He took up residence in a room with all the equipment needed to hoist him and look after his needs, she moved into an apartment in an adjoining  building. They left behind 18 years of significant living:  a comfortable lifestyle with hot tub, breakfast on the deck, weekend trips, and visits from family and friends. 

Behind him was a 23-year career in education followed by years as a senior official in the Saskatchewan government and then assistant superintendent of education for the Department of Indian Affairs.  As he researched this group of people he grasped the depth of their oppression and became a voice for telling their stories. 

In Jack’s book If You Wait Someone Will Come: Life in Interim Manor, he admits the move was traumatic, because such moves are an admission of failure, for him  caused by a combination of “ill health, frailty and circumstances.”  They  couldn't  carry on alone any  longer.  A cure was not in the future. Now what? 

His book, a mixture of satire, humor, and information, looks at life in a care home from the viewpoint of a careful observer.  His insights into life with paraplegia  merit wider distribution. The cartoons are priceless, the humor without equal. “There’s a  lot of nudity around here, but don’t expect Madonna,”he comments.

Jack’s  openness about his condition did not come about readily. For many years he wrote me letters, often weekly, with never a hint about his health. He edited an occasional Funk family newsletter, with news provided through emails from family members scattered worldwide.

His computer was his lifeline.  He described wonderful restaurant meals, concerts, lectures, and more. He valued visits from children and friends.   But his condition deteriorated until he could  move only his head and speak. He dropped the newsletter from his self-assigned tasks.  

He became depressed when he could no longer communicate with others at will. But then he turned to voice recognition software, which once again gave him an opening into the world outside his small universe.  He wrote books, with Pat, his faithful wife, helping with editing and aspects that needed footwork. 

But multiple sclerosis is relentless, if slow-moving. . Only when I read his book did I sense fully that at times he must have felt like Will Traynor—ready to give up.  He yearned to be listened to, to be seen as still relevant.

He wrote that the  task of  helpers and friends  is  about letting residents  know they are “people of value, that they are needed, even in their family. They need to experience that they still have a contribution to make, simply by being here.”

Simply being there. 

What do you do when you’ve been  pushed into a spot in the care home and forgotten?  You’re there, but does anyone else care? Do you watch the grass grow? Count the flies buzzing in the room? Guess the number of feet one fly flies in 15 minutes? He can’t scratch an itch. 

His  only operative muscle was  in his neck which allowed him to nod, turn his head, and push buttons with his chin. But when you’re “parked” you’re  away from your television and computer and your  call button gets no response. Help is hired, and most helpers are wonderful people, yet it is hard to synchronize body functions when you are paralyzed with a worker’s schedule. 

So for a while each time he waited he made note of what was said in response to his call button, pushed with his chin. He tabulated the responses:  “Did you want something?” (12 times) “Wait, someone will come” (18 times), “In a minute” (15 times), “Your girl went for supper,” (14),  and others.  

 If he waited long enough, someone would come. Yet he acknowledged the wonderful people, often overworked, on the staff. He trusted his life to them. 

Moyes’s Will doesn’t want to live without sex, a major part of his life before the accident.  Jack describes what for him is “conjugal time,” a poignant but tender description of intimate times with Pat though helpless.

Read Me Before You for a great modern love story.  Read Jack’s book for realism about life as a paraplegic.  

Jack’s other books are I Was Younger When I Was a Boy and Outside the Women Cried (available online) written with voice recognition software. 

Coming to America: A survey of immigrant novels and memoirs

Here is a reading list of books  I discussed recently in a class at LifeVentures in Wichita.   My topic was  Coming to America: A survey of immigrant novels and memoirs. I enjoy reading and discussing these books because my parents were immigrants to Canada in 1923 from the Ukraine. I was an immigrant to the United States with my husband and family in 1962.  With immigration much in the news these days, we could all benefit by learning more about why people leave homeland for a new unknown country.I am adding a new book written by me:  My Emigrant Father: Jacob J. Funk, 1896-1986.  It is the story of my father's side of the family beginning in Prussia to their death in Canada, always emigrants, always leaving, never quite arriving.

Questions to consider when reading these books:

1.      Where did these people come from?

2.      Why did these people leave their homelands?

3.      What did they bring with them?  Leave behind?

4.      What did they hope to find in their new homeland?

5.      What obstacles did they face in achieving their new goals ?

6.      What did they eventually  gain?

7.      Why were several of these books rejected at first by their own community?

Roelvaag, O.E. Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie. Sell also Peder Victorious and Their Father’s God.  Husband and wife Per and Beret Hans come from Norway to the Dakotas to face snowstorms, fire, locusts and their own fears and superstitions.  One of the best in this genre.

Moberg, Vilhelm. The Emigrants, Unto a Good Land, The Settlers, Last Letter Home. These four novels depict the struggles of the Swedish Nilssons’ early years in the northern states.

Grove, Frederick Philip. Settlers of the Marsh. Swedish settlers come to southern Manitoba. Grove also wrote Fruits of the earth, Over Prairie Trails, A Search for America and others. His first book was banned for a while because it was considered too explicit.

Lagnado, Lucette.  The Man in the White  Sharkskin Suit. A Jewish family leaves Cairo for the New World. In  this memoir the  main character  never quite makes the transition from being somebody in Cairo  to being nobody in America.

Luxenberg, Steve. Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret. A memoir about a Russian Jewish family and the terrible secret they kept hidden while living in Detroit during the Depression, a secret that might have prevented their entering America. 

See, Lisa. Shanghai Girls. A historical novel about the difficulties faced by Chinese to gain entrance to America. It describes  the reality of a “nightmarish immigrant experience.”

Toepfer, Amy Brungardt. Conquering the Wind. A saga of the Volga Germans who settled in Western Kansas in the mid 1870s. This book was banned for a while because it was considered uncomplimentary  to the Volga Germans.

Wiebe, Rudy (no relative). Peace Shall Destroy Many. German-Russian Mennonites struggle to conquer the land and their fears of the outside culture in northern Saskatchewan. This novel almost destroyed the peace of a branch of the Mennonite church when first published. Now studied in Canadian schools as a classic.

Wiebe, Katie Funk. The Storekeeper’s Daughter: A Memoir.  The author shows the conflict between her German-Russian Mennonite immigrant parents’ culture and the new fascinating Canadian culture.

 Yen Mah, Adeline. Falling Leaves: The memoir of an unwanted Chinese daughter.  The author moves from Hong Kong to England and eventually to the United States to become a physician.

My coming out as a geezer-ess

It happened such a long time ago, I can’t remember the details clearly any more. 

Shortly before retiring from college teaching I got my first  “geezer” messages.  I am using geezer as meaning an old person,  not just  a male Englishman who likes drinking, football and violence. 

Several decades ago, as I paid my lunch tab, the clerk asked innocently, looking at my hair – or maybe it was my wrinkles, my slow walk, my something or other, “Shall I give you the senior discount?” 

I turned around to see who she was talking to.  There was no one behind me.  

I wanted to shriek: “I’m no eccentric old geezer of the female variety!”  I paid and walked out in a huff. 

For weeks when I passed a mirror, I glanced at the baggy, saggy woman reflected in it, sucked in my stomach, and threw back my shoulders. I could lick geezeritis. I was not just another little old lady-writer in pink Nikes stumbling down the hill.

For a time I yielded to the sinister message the entire culture was flooding me with  that this next period of life, being a geezer,  was a dead end and had no redeeming features. Its appearance, its non-activities, and its noninvolvement  with life shaped  the size of the ever smaller tunnel I was being ushered through. 

I was being told clearly, blatantly, that it was best to go gently into the dark night and carry a bottle of aspirin in one hand and hair dye in the other. Becoming old was a disaster.

Then, sometime during the day, a friend I hadn’t seen for several years, said, “Katie, you haven’t aged a bit in ten years."

Another friend said, “Katie, you look younger than your pictures.” 

I preened  my soul feathers.  The jowls under my cheeks disappeared suddenly  without liposuction. The wrinkles smoothed out around my eyes. The world was good.  I lapped up the compliments like Kansas soil during a rain after a long drought.

I was beating old age after all. 

I knew I would never be a geezer or geezer-ess or geezer-anything.  I would be forever coltishly young, kicking my heels in the meadow, with agile muscles and joints, slim tummy, smooth skin,  energy without measure.

And that’s the way it went for several years, my resisting being considered old as if it was some rank contagion to be avoided at all costs -- until I  realized who I was and who I thought society thought I should be didn’t mesh. I was  growing old. 

My coming out as a female geezer was slow, but with time I learned to accept a number of things about being old. Here are just a few of them. 

--It is not treason to look my age. Aging is not a social and personal disaster, a disease  nobody should admit having.

--Accepting aging does not mean retiring from life, only from certain aspects  of it. It does mean plunging into life in a different way.

--Aging is a stage in life, an important time of life for those in it and for younger people hopefully watching their elders navigate through this stage of life. They will model their own aging after what they have observed in parents, grandparents, and older friends. 

  

--Even though church and society may devalue its elderly, actually often  waste them by setting them aside or  encouraging them to pursue trivia, we as elders should encourage our age cohort to  pursue activities  that engage intellect and spirit.

I am convinced that in these conflicting times we need elders, especially those  who see the world steady and whole and who can offset the zeal of the young with wisdom and inner stability. We need each elder according to his or her gifts and talents. Each still has something to offer others – if they are given the opportunity despite frailties and foibles.

Final words: Do not go gently into geezer-hood.  It can be one of the most rewarding times of life.