RELIEF

 by Mary Reiman

Some of you will remember the Rolaids commercial from the 1970s:  How do you spell relief?  Rolaids were tablets to relieve stomach pain. Isn't it interesting when one phrase conjures up such memories.  And even more amazing when you suddenly hear a word over and over and over to describe a variety of feelings for a variety of different reasons. Many of us would say life has given us quite a bit of stomach pain in the past year. I should have checked to see if they still sell Rolaids. 

Relief. Two syllables that have become one of the most often used and powerful words of the month. Describing the depth and breadth of our feelings. A simple word for complex times.  

March 25th, 8:40 a.m. was the moment I received the second vaccine. Relief. It carried a powerful message to my brain that a weight, an inordinately heavy weight, had been lifted. And the word just wouldn't leave my head. It soared and swirled just as the magnificent eagle I saw later that week as I was driving to Iowa. I believe eagle sightings are good omens. I believe certain words are also. This two syllable word kept returning to my consciousness and I knew it had to be addressed before it would let me move on.

March 28th, 2:00 p.m. I walked into the Milford Care Center and hugged my mom for the first time since March 1st, 2020. They were now allowing 30 minute visits each day. Joy. Gratitude. Relief. Joy that she still remembers me. I believe this because she waved as she rounded the corner and I'm just sure she was smiling behind that mask. Overwhelming gratitude. Gratitude that I held in just long enough to get back into my car 30 minutes later where I dropped my head onto my steering wheel and sobbed. Relief. A truly indescribable feeling in my heart and soul that Sunday afternoon. 

April 13th, 10:00 a.m. Relief to be back at the Care Center now sitting beside mom in her room, yes in her room, holding her hand and watching her sleep. As I left the room an hour later, I turned back to say the same phrase I say every time I end a conversation with her, 'I love you.'  Sometimes this past year when I called her on the phone, she just hung up. But that day, that special day, she opened her eyes and replied, 'I love you too.' 

April 20th, 4:15 p.m. The breaking news report. The verdict. A collective sigh of relief. There is no way I can articulate it more clearly or succinctly than the many journalists who have described and shared the thoughts and feelings of so many. Justice. 

It's not about the size of the word or the number of syllables. It's about the visual depth of the meaning. Yes, this month has been filled with emotion and thankfulness, gratitude and joy. That's how I spell relief.

A favor in the rearview

Photo credit: Associated Press 

By JoAnne Young

I’m thinking a lot this week, as many of us are, about the deaths of unarmed Black men and women, killed by police who are sworn to serve and protect. 

 

The death of one in particular, Daunte Demetrius Wright, the latest to be highly publicized, brings me back 10 years to a forward thinking senator in the Nebraska Legislature: Sen. Tanya Cook of District 13 in south central Omaha. 

 

In 2011, Cook introduced and succeeded in passing a bill that would alter existing Nebraska law that allowed police to stop and detain a motorist for having an air freshener, rosary, tassel or other object hanging from a rearview mirror. 

 

In Nebraska, it’s no longer a misdemeanor crime, but now a traffic violation that can bring a fine and a point assessed on your driver’s license. And it’s a secondary rather than a primary offense, meaning police can ticket you for the violation but it can’t be the primary reason they stopped you. 

 

And it doesn’t create a criminal record. 

 

In the case of Duante Wright, police in a community that borders Minneapolis pulled him over, and shortly thereafter shot and killed him. It all started with a traffic violation. The death penalty, as it were, for a traffic violation. 

 

Police say officers stopped him because his plates had expired. But he told his mother, who was on the phone with him, that he was stopped because he had air fresheners dangling from his rear-view mirror. Police say the air fresheners were noticed only after he was stopped. 

 

Even the possibility that air fresheners could have started a succession of events that led to Wright’s death has added to the outrage. Protesters have hung air fresheners on a temporary chain link security fence outside the Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, Police Department.

 

In a majority of states, including Minnesota and Nebraska, anything that can obstruct the view of a driver is illegal. Many people believe such a law enables racial profiling. 

 

So Tanya Cook decided three sessions into her first term to try to make changes in Nebraska that could at least reduce the chances of those kinds of stops here. She had become aware of the law during debate a year before on a bill that made texting while driving a secondary offense. 

 

A majority of states have an “obstruction of view” law of some kind, some more vague than others. They are included in a set of low-level offenses, “such as tinted windows or broken tail lights, that civil rights advocates complain have become common pretexts for traffic stops that too often selectively target people of color,” according to the New York Times. 

 

The Times also reported the mayor of Brooklyn Center said police should not be pulling people over because of an expired registration during the coronavirus pandemic.

 

During a hearing and debate on Cook’s bill 10 years ago, she said charging a person with a misdemeanor crime for hanging an air freshener was grossly disproportionate to the act, that law enforcement should not be able to stop and detain a person for such a vague and uncertain offense. 

 

Several years before that, an Omaha Police safety auditor had reported those types of stops were done disproportionately to minority drivers as a pretext to stop and question them, called by some a motor vehicle “stop and frisk.” 

 

The Omaha Police Department opposed Cook’s bill in part, saying reclassifying it as a secondary offense would defeat the purpose of the law, which was safe operation of a vehicle to prevent an accident. 

 

I talked this week to Cook, who term limited out of the Legislature in January 2018 and is now the National Black Caucus of State Legislators policy lead and a member of the Metropolitan Utilities District Board of Directors. She said some made fun of her “fuzzy dice bill.” 

 

“Which was fine,” she said, “because I didn’t want people to realize what I really was attempting to do, or the audience I was concerned about. … It got through because it was early, (and) their … ignorance is so pervasive that it could just go through ‘ha, ha, ha, fuzzy dice bill, she’s looking for something to get across the finish line.”

 

It passed easily on a 46-0 vote. 

 

It’s too easy to say this shows how important it is to have people of color in the Legislature and other policy making areas government, which was my first inclination as I sat down to write this.

 

That puts too much responsibility on them to not only represent their district and what’s important and interesting to them, but also to watch what every other bill and committee and interest group may be doing, Cook explained.

 

“That’s unfair. I’ve done it. I don’t want to do it anymore,” she said. “But it also lets white people off the hook … and then you’re exhausted from not only getting your own bills across the finish line but trying to make sure nothing slips through that has a disproportionate (effect).”

 

It’s everybody’s job, and not just that of the one or two Black representatives, to use their energy, and whatever political capital they have, to prioritize, navigate, communicate, she said.

 

People in the Legislature, who are by a wide majority white, just lose their minds about property taxes, she said. If they would get as excited about life and death issues for other Nebraskans, “that’s the rubric I’m looking for.” 

 

They would be doing us all a favor. 

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The Power of Name

by Marilyn Moore 

 Every teacher knows the power of being able to call a student by name. Teachers pore over class lists the days before the first day of school, becoming familiar with names, looking for names they might recognize from some other context, noting those names with which they may need help in pronunciation. They are preparing for that first day, when the challenge of attaching a name to a face begins, and then the deeper challenge of connecting name to face to voice to the unique qualities of the student. It starts with name, and at the point the teacher can greet the student by name, the relationship begins…. Knowing each student’s name, every student’s name, makes everything work better. Discussion is better, organizing is better, motivating is better, class culture is better, feedback is better…and it all starts with a name. 

It’s true for adults, too. Just as five-year-olds and thirteen-year-olds want to be known by their name, so do people beginning a new job, a new book group, a new team, a new neighborhood. Astute employers, managers, leaders, and members of a community know the importance of name, and they get to know people by name, and they have all kinds of brain tricks to remember names. In some way, we know that to be known by our name is to be known beyond label of age, or gender, or occupation. 

Names are part of custom, culture, and tradition. In the majority culture in this country, we generally have a family name, which is placed last, and a given name, or two or three given names, placed first. That is not true world wide, and one of the wonderful puzzles of traveling to other countries, or in welcoming children from immigrant and refugee families, is figuring out how names are ordered…which part of the name is the family name, and is the family name from the mother’s or father’s side of the family. And for everyone, is there a story in the name…a family tradition, a family friend, the popular name of the time, a compromise that had to be made between parents who just couldn’t land on a name that both adored, or some other story? Is the given name the preferred name, or is there a nickname? If the given name can be shortened, Elizabeth to Betsy, Edward to Ed, is it? Does the person prefer it? 

There are times in life when a person’s name is especially important. Graduates and their families want to hear their name called as they cross the stage to receive a diploma. In Christian christening and baptism ceremonies, a name is given and blessed. Jewish babies receive their Hebrew name in a naming ceremony. In some Native American cultures, a name given at birth may change as the child or adult grows into a new name. Vows and oaths include the name; we own our name when we make a promise. And at death, the name is said, with fondness, with sorrow, with an intent to hold onto the spirit of the person by remembering, and saying, their name. 

This was especially evident in the response to last week’s 5 Women Mayhem blog by Mary Kay Roth, in which she wrote about her brother Doug, who died by suicide. Hundreds of people read that blog, and dozens responded with “His name is…” saying the name of the person in their lives who also died by suicide and who was not forgotten, who must be named. Each year at the memorial service for those who died in the terrorist attacks on September 11, the names of the victims are read. Each year on All Saints Sunday, the names of the persons in our church who have died the previous year are said aloud. The names of the victims of the Vietnam war are etched in marble at the Viet Nam War Memorial in Washington D.C.; it is an achingly somber and spiritual place, more than 58,000 names to be found, and touched, and remembered. 

There have been times, too many times, when names have been deliberately and cruelly dishonored. Native American children, forcibly sent to white boarding schools, were required to stop using the name given to them at birth and instead be called by a more “American-sounding” name. Immigrants from eastern European countries in the late 1800’s routinely received papers as they arrived in the US with their names “Americanized.” Enslaved persons were stripped of their names, and their children’s names were changed at the whim of an owner or overseer. Jewish people sent to concentration camps were known by number, not by name. And the names of children, separated from their parents at the southern border of the US, were not kept in a system that could reunite them with their parents. In each of these circumstances, and in many others around the world and across millennia, the loss of name is accompanied by, or caused by, loss of identity and loss of dignity. 

It has become customary, and what a god-awful statement it is that such a custom must even need to exist, that the names of victims of mass shootings, or police violence, are noted in news reports. The names are spoken aloud, the names are remembered, and the names recall the lives taken in violence. It is as if we acknowledge that as a society we are unable to prevent death by mass violence, but we attempt to give honor by naming the name. And to a grieving parent, or spouse, or child, it is hoped there is some solace and comfort in hearing their loved one’s name…. 

At all ages and stages of life, at life’s high points of celebration and at moments of great tragedy and sadness, we are reminded to “Say their name,” because we know that calling someone by name begins, and sustains, a relationship, an identity, a recognition of the inherent value of the person who bears that name.

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Holding family secrets up to the light in this season of forgiveness

 By Mary Kay Roth

Doug died.

I’ve long wanted to write a book about my older brother – and those simple two words would serve as the first sentence in the first chapter. Because that’s the one truth I know for sure.

Forty-five years ago, at 26, Doug executed a perfect swan dive in front of a Greyhound bus. I’ve always found it curious that, according to the police report, a witness on the bus did not say he did a swan dive, but that he did a perfect swan dive. For years I have nurtured a fantasy in which I would hunt down that witness and ask why he said the dive was perfect, what Doug looked like flying through the air.

Since that bizarre and awful day, everyone in my family has crafted their own personal version of Doug’s demise. Mom and dad wrote a painstaking obituary that maintained he died in a traffic accident. Initially, my sister harbored a simmering anger that probably helped sustain her, resentments she ultimately soothed and released. My younger brother has always considered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as Doug was a newly returned veteran from the Vietnam War.  

My own truth is that Doug was killed by the ravages of schizophrenia and that he took a leap of faith that day and finally quieted the voices in his head. But no matter which story we chose, ever since that bitter cold November of 1971, it felt like we put my brother’s name to rest when we put him to rest. 

We simply have not really talked much about Doug. And when we have tried, upon occasion, we merely nibble and dance around the edges of truth. 

“How many siblings do you have, Mary?”

• There are just three of us, I’m the middle child.
• There were four of us, my older brother passed away long ago.
• He was always a little different. He survived a war.  He battled addictions.

I was only 21 when Doug died. Afterward I almost flunked out of college, barely finished school and promptly headed for a newspaper job in Florida. Many counseling sessions later, I realize that I was likely attempting to escape a family in crisis, perhaps even terrified I would hear my own voices someday. Through the following years I married, had kids, divorced, found meaningful work, was pretty darned content – astonishingly oblivious to a person who had shaped my life and still haunted my conscience.

Over time, however, even the toughest armor gets brittle. And this spring it cracked wide open when I picked up a 2020 book called, Hidden Valley Road, by Robert Kolker, the true and unflinching tale of a family swallowed whole by schizophrenia. The Galvins lived at the outskirts of Colorado Springs on a coincidentally appropriate street called Hidden Valley Road. On the surface they were a postwar American dream – where the mom tried to bake a pie or a cake every day – while inside the house, life was a nightmare. Six of the 12 Galvin sons would eventually descend into schizophrenia: young men born about the same time as my brother, young men diagnosed in their twenties during the 1970s, also just like my brother.

As I turned the pages of that book, I was almost sucked down into a bewildering undercurrent of long-lost memories that left me breathless. The Galvin brothers brought back a vivid picture of Doug in his final years, a young man who was angry yet kind, distant and disturbed, reckless and lost. And, like the Galvins, my brother’s story consumed our family. 

I remember exactly when the trajectory of our lives began to rock and reel with an ill-omened, official notice: Doug was coming home from military service due to a diagnosis of schizophrenia. He had stripped off his Navy uniform and waded out into the ocean, because he heard voices telling him to greet an alien space ship hovering over the waves. 

I remember when he finally returned to Lincoln, a different person than the one who had left, watching him see-saw, week to week, month to month, one moment using mind-numbing and barbaric prescription meds – another moment turning to alcohol and drugs – another moment, attempting to slash his wrists with stained glass broken from a neighborhood church.

Ultimately, I was the last one in our family to see my brother alive. My parents had talked him into going back to college and since I was a senior at the university, each day my dad would drop us off in front of the Student Union.

“Good bye, baby sister, be good,” he said that morning – as he always did.   And he walked away. 

Later that afternoon, Doug disappeared.  It was several days before we discovered he had hopped a plane to Hawaii and was walking along the shoulder of a highway near Honolulu when he decided to jump into the void. More than four decades later my heart still wonders if I should have said something that morning. Nonetheless, a week later we met his casket at the airport, stood beside a freshly-purchased cemetery plot during an early-winter snowfall – and buried the ache. 

This spring, however, I think it’s finally time to dig up those family secrets – hold them up to the light –and take away their power.

My parents would probably have cringed at the thought of this blog, but oh how I wish I could wrap my arms around them and tell them there is absolutely no one to blame. Just like the Galvins, although heartbroken, mom and dad pretended to their friends and colleagues that nothing was wrong – while falling short when faced with an antiquated mental health establishment that knew little about schizophrenia. For years they were consumed and overwhelmed with saving Doug. For years after, they were consumed and overwhelmed with the shame and guilt of letting him go.

“I was crushed,” the mother says in Hidden Valley Road, “because I thought I was such a good mother. I baked a cake and a pie every night. Or at least had Jell-O with whipped cream.”

My own mother could have spoken those very words.

“For a family, schizophrenia is, primarily, a felt experience, as if the foundation of the family is permanently tilted in the direction of the sick family member,” the author writes.

Indeed, much like the surviving Galvin siblings, my sister, younger brother and I had lived in the shadow of the child in pain, creating a strange but shared experience that left us with an elusive sense of abandonment – and the lingering, unspoken question: Why couldn’t we save Doug?

I read somewhere that you die twice, once when you stop breathing and a second time, later, when somebody says your name for the last time.  

In this glorious season of light, redemption and resurrection, perhaps it’s finally time to excuse our family for any shortcomings and imagined sins. Time to forgive our brother – and forgive ourselves. 

Perhaps today is the right moment to lift Doug up and truly bring him home. To say his name. 

So, how many brothers and sisters do I have?

I have three siblings. I have an older sister, a younger brother – and I had an older brother who suffered from mental illness and killed himself.   

He was a goofy little kid who made us laugh because he always seemed to hear the beat of different drums. 

He was the smartest of the four of us, easily bored, so he would experiment with unusual ways of taking school tests and drive my mom crazy when she would receive yet another call from the principal.

He hated to dance but loved The Kinks.

He never judged people, though he never let them get too close.

He grew to be the tallest member of our family and eventually enlisted in the Navy after pulling a low lottery number during the Vietnam War. Several years later he returned home, lost in a fog of demons and poisonous voices. He never found his way out.   

He called me baby sister.  I loved him the best I knew how.  

His name was Doug.

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