I have been a widower for eight years after being married for 40 years. While I have a few friends where I live, none of us are in the habit of getting together at each other’s homes.
I live in what’s called a continuing care retirement community (or CCRC) where I am in the younger, at age 74, totally healthy cohort. We are a very progressive Portland, Oregon facility with 450 residents who hail from mostly from the scientific, education, and healthcare professions with only a smattering of folks who made their money in business.
Some of the loneliest times I experience are when there's breaking news which I would be sharing with my wife. As I sat with tears flowing down my face as I watched the MSNBC coverage of the March for Life yesterday, all I could think of was how much I missed having my wife sitting with me choking back her own tears.
We were always a team fighting injustice.
As graduate students at Michigan State, she in English getting her Ph.D. and me in social work working on my MSW, we marched together in the anti-Vietnam War protests and helped organize rallies.
She stood by me when I engaged in what was a fight stressful for both of us — but ultimately successful legal battle with my own bosses when they tried to fire me for disciplining several staff therapists for mistreating their clients without going through the personnel department first. Alas, one played golf with the CEO of our $30 million program.
When she went against her own boss in another battle which she won, I was always there for her.
We also fought a winning battle (one of the first uses of the Internet) against a giant corporation, an agricultural co-op we were members of, which led to their CEO being fired and Board of Directors being replaced. This was covered in the major media from The Wall Street Journal to The New York Times.
We sat in bed together watching Obama winning his first election and cried tears of joy when he won. I bought a $100 bottle of scotch for her, a cheap scotch drinker, which she said was so unbelievably smooth she'd be hard-pressed to drink Dewar's again. I tried a sip and it gave me a nosebleed. Bright red blood dripped onto my laptop. We had to laugh at that.
There are too many treasured memories to mention.
Now along comes the Stormy Daniels “60 Minutes” show.
I will more than likely have to watch it alone. Unless that is, someone from where I live wants to join me. Portland Kossacks are invited too (just RSVP by private message).
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Recent Daily Kos stories:
Monday, Mar 26, 2018 · 12:47:20 AM +00:00 · HalBrown
5:30 PM Oregon time. While the 60 Minutes has already aired and is being commented on in the media I am not looking. I want to see it firsthand at 7PM our time without preconceptions. I am really looking forward to my little gathering of like-minded folks to watch it together at my house where I’ve been rearranging seating so I can accommodate at least 10 guests comfortably, not counting those who want to sit on pillows on the floor.
I hesitated to reveal so much of my feelings, my grief and loneliness but because the Kos editors put it on the recommended list and all of you made such supportive comments I am glad I did.
As a therapist, for 40 years I often disclosed my own feelings if I thought this would enhance the therapeutic relationship. I found that many of my clients, and the clients of my staff, who saw other therapists had previously told them they never really believed their therapists cared about them because they seemed so closed to revealing their own feelings. This doesn't mean sharing personal details of your life, that has to be done judiciously and not suggested for neophyte therapists.
This is very different. Doing so much self-disclosure in a public venue like this is new for me.
One of the many books that I read early on as an undergraduate was The Transparent Self by humanist psychologist Sidney Jourard. Here’s a good but brief review. I was quite eclectic my approach as a therapist, having being trained both by humanists including a student of Carl Rogers named G. Marian Kinget, and also by Freudians,. some of who were also psychoanalysts. I read Carl Moustakas, whose seminal work was a best selling book called Loneliness. He was a friend and mentor of mine, and Irvin Yalom in his work on Existential Psychotherapy and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.