Appreciation (50) – Toots gone too soon

Torrey Orton
May 26, 2013

Honouring her…

 

Toots went out a few days ago and did not come back.  I didn’t know she wasn’t coming until I got a phone call from a vet up the road from us later that morning…not Toots’ vet. He announced, in the de rigeur, indirect way that’s common now, she had “passed away”. Toots was a two and a half year old, short-haired tortoise shell domestic with four white paws and a white chin, amplifying eyes and whiskers of unusual grandeur. She had encountered a car somewhere over the back fence from us, the vet imagined. Damage was slight and death was quick.

A woman had brought her in to the vet’s and left without leaving a name we would have liked to thank her for her effort. Strange what people don’t want to be involved with these days – the prospect they might be thanked which turns into a prospect they might be blamed for a samaritanism spontaneously provided. Let this be our thanks. Otherwise Toots might have been an Otty – our cat who disappeared a year ago and is a fate for us worse than death.

Toots seemed to be much more weighty dead than alive. Perhaps a feature of death that the loss of life weighs more with us, or its value is more present to us in some respects than life?? Presenting her to me for her last ride, the vet had wrapped her in a greenish towel and tied up her package with a length of light purple tape, topping it off with a note saying “Honour” - her original registered name they found from the micro-chip identity tag which had brought them to me a few hours earlier…

Toots started as of a few days ago to push up daisies in our garden along with many of her predecessors, under a rock or a bush as the habit of each epoch’s burial over our 40 years here assigned them. She will probably push more vigorously than some because she had a certain sparkling liveliness mixed with an intensity of gaze that commanded attention.

Toots was Lulu’s caretaker, to the last ensuring the younger, deeply traumatized long-haired owl-faced one was cleaned up on request and providing a pillow for most sleeps. There was occasional testing of the pride lines, mostly initiated by the junior who now still wonders at her senior’s absence, retreating to her earlier anxiety about the great outdoors of our garden, wandering forth with more cautious steps because Toots isn’t there to lead the way. They had shared a caged existence for 6 months in a local cat shelter before we found took them away with us 8 months ago.

We miss Toots lots…too short loved, too long gone. Lulu does, too.

Learner therapist (21)……Fate, destiny, choice and hope

Learner therapist (21)……Fate, destiny, choice and hope
Torrey Orton
July 31, 2012

 

Some words for a wounded patient….

 

Forethought:

"…an object is defined by its nature. In order, then, to design it to function properly – a vessel, a chair, a house – one must first study all of its nature."

Excerpted from Bauhaus Principles at Bauhaus Archive, Berlin, Germany 230712

 
This principle can be applied to people. We are just organic "objects" endlessly in search of our nature (well-being?), which it seems difficult to agree on, either with ourselves or others. The initial stages of instructing students at the Bauhaus included a year of free-association, follow your inclinations and intuitions exploring of the nature of materials in their own right, free of prospective uses (in making objects).
This stage can be usefully thought of as play. Trouble with adults is they often have to be taught how to play in this sense. The Bauhaus was erased by the incoming Hitler government's early efforts to ensure no-one learned anything officially unapproved (and a few dozen other prohibitions as well, of course!). Even some Bauhaus students were probably relieved. Serious playfulness is tiring and challenging and disturbing to the accepted orders of things.
So what? Often enough to warrant writing this, a patient shows up with a major trauma of long duration and intensity – the kind which renders them repeatedly wondering why did this happen to me and elevating their pain by declaring themselves responsible in part for it, by feeling guilty about it!! In fact, I have such an issue arise about once a week and similar ones are working in the background with many more patients a week. In a way, people who show up for therapy think they have to fix themselves, not that others have to fix themselves. They sometimes come around to the latter view after a while, often quite a while.
To have hope of recovery from their injuries, some intrinsically positive signs are helpful, along with some acquired capabilities effective in keeping further trauma at bay. The latter are most important; the former are among the way stations to recovery. Without a good defence, hurtful patterns are recreated in dysfunctional present social, vocational and intimate relationships. To achieve such defensive capabilities often requires placing the bad part of one's life aside enough to appreciate the positives, or at least potentials and possibles through which one can get to decisions to move towards new probables.
Finally, to make a choice which implements a personal policy with some hope of meeting the requirements of the situation often, in turn, requires courage. The courage both pushes back against the lingering forms of the original hurts and counters the fear that stepping outside of one's relationship comfort zone(s). Simple so far, but often stepping out into the world of new, safe relationships requires letting go of some of the defences which helped one survive the original trauma(s) – usually a somewhat rigid personality structure which provided, and continues to provide, an internal and external space for development, but not for the next life stage development! This capability is assertion, going on the offensive….
I am aware that the terms destiny and fate cover overlapping grounds, often being used for the same aspects of life by many people. The reason for going into this is that part of a recovery, or a life, is a sense of its wholeness – a sense which does not come from techniques and skills alone. Wholeness has to do with ones place in the world, ones meaning in the world and meaning to the world. Fate, destiny and hope with courage is existing language for this level of self.
I think of the fated part of ourselves as what we are born with: our internal orientations, temperament, biological potential and so on, our gifts so to speak, plus the externals we arrive into: our family, social class/status, ethnicity and general surrounding socio-political-economic conditions. These externals are our givens. We can make no claim for our worthiness arising from our various inheritances. What we can claim is that we worked on our inheritance virtuously. We tried. This brings us to destiny.
I think of our destiny as what we choose to do with those gifts if we can get a chance to develop them, or how we respond to lack of opportunity to do so. Destiny is the chosen part of our lives, what we can answer for. We can be judged for our destiny, but not our fate. My various inheritances gave me a starting place and certain destinies I have never pursued. Many of those inheritances are absences of discernible capability. Maths comes to mind unless it's the intuitive kind that's good for guessing dinner tabs without calculating, but not for building or analysing at all! My brothers got the usable types.
Other inheritances are life opportunities arising from our fate which give us a head start in certain directions which may also be false. It can take quite a while to work out what part(s) of our fate are most important to us. We are often actively discouraged from taking on certain gifts. Especially those in esoteric activities like dance, writing, singing, playing, theatre, and painting are areas with a known likelihood to produce barely sustainable lives of noisy desperation.
That such gifts exist is powerfully attested by the numbers of would-be musicians, painters and writers who persist with their aspirations for love of them. They certainly can't be doing so for money. These gifts are also where fate and destiny overlap most clearly: not being able to / allowed to pursue one's calling(s) is experienced as a failed destiny by many; pursuing successes in the forms that are socially rewarded but personally inappropriate may be to accept ones fate rather than seek ones destiny.
In the end, from where I am now in my destiny, the question of worth cannot be answered by what good I have done, but how well I tried to do whatever it was I was trying to do. Put differently, being successful comes in many forms, the most important of which are the least visible. It cannot be the case that the basis for self-evaluation is "success" in any of the vaunted senses our commercialised reality daily espouses. Many lives never get a chance to be successful in those terms and so they cannot just be worthless, can they?!
Most religions recognise this explicitly and devote much of their energies to reducing the toll of various inequities on life chances. However, their pretending to Caesar that his success is most honourable, and welcoming all the little caesars into their fold while encouraging the less fortunate to interpret themselves in the mould of the caesars, who for all their success seldom get enough recognition in their own eyes for their achievements….this latter path is the one that guts religions from within. It needn't gut our patients.

Views of life-death

Views of life-death
Torrey Orton
Feb 18, 2012

Note: this piece is the first in the life-death series, the second of which was published here on April 17, 2012. This one was composed out of three separate posts two-three years ago. It sets the problem subsequent life/death posts will address. It was published on the Kings Tribune website on the date above and in the magazine's march 2012 issue.

"You're driving down a road in the desert, and the engine suddenly stops. .. no Pep Boys, no Auto Club to help. Whether the road continues is of no consequence. It has ended for you."

This is Edward Schniedman, dead at 90 in LA, predicting his own death's nature. While death is death, what it means seems to be a matter of opinion. Even what it is seems so, too. So, I offer some views of death as my contribution to the debates and discourses about death.


I have a stake. I'm old enough (68) to know that I'm nearer the end of my term than its beginning. I've outlived my father and his father by 4 years. I'm pretty clear I want to die when I want to, if I can, and have taken steps to encourage that possibility.


I share this view and intent with my wife. We've signed the necessary papers to ensure that the 'life support' technologies are turned off, or left off, if we're incapable of being consulted. Some things stand in the way of complete confidence they will be turned off, mostly others with other meanings to death, who may want not to accept what I have legally decided. Their meanings of life give different tones to death from mine. Some of those differences are catastrophically confronting for people like me. This is the terrain of naturally fundamentalist thinking in fact, not merely in faith or theory. The resurrected are only seen in faith tracts and films. How can I understand this better, and maybe them, too?


The purchase of assuredly effective means to end my life cleanly, with minimum clean-up required of any others is, however, not legally available. I do not want to count on under the counter substances with uncertified contents, etc. I would be happy to engage with a variety of safety requirements, especially ones aimed at ensuring the drug(s) cannot be accessed by anyone other than me. This would require a regime somewhat like the Swiss one portrayed in the Pratchett video. For a local perspective, see the Victorian branch of Dying with Dignity FAQs here.


Some initial takes on life-death

These views on life-death are undertaken with wonder at the difficulty of the task of making sense of death, and life. The counter point is my emotional wrenching by the uncertainty of fulfilling my preference for choosing my own death time, as much as that is possible. These are matters where perspective is nearly all in the struggle to give judgment a sustainable foundation. Here are some first takes. They do not pretend to be complete.


There is my notion of a 'good death'. Dying on one's own kitchen floor or over-night in bed, as one of my parents did, qualifies for this label. In some pre-modern societies there was an understanding that one's time had a limit and making way for others was both necessary and honourable. Another 'good death' may be that at home with more or less extended periods of relatively painless decline and social intimates present continuously on the way. The fact of dying attracts moral attentions of every imaginable sort.


The climate for dying

Second, we have the increasing squeamishness of late modernity about any perceived damage to the self, driven by an implicit assumption that we can be protected from all imaginable dangers (see some of the submissions to the Victorian Royal Commission based on assumptions that the actual 2009 bushfire conditions could have been foreseen and planned for comprehensively).


A handmaiden of this aversion to the material tribulations of everyday life is the philosophy of 'nice'. Be nice; don't trouble others; adjust your thinking and feeling to not confront anyone, even unintentionally.


'Nice' has been enhanced by the actions of the damages lawyers and the health marketing fraternities. The latter sell hopes of endless life and instant recoveries (you deserve a lineless face or pot-less gut as much as you deserve a Gucci or a Ferrari) from the costs of living (obesity, wrinkles, varicosities and lost hair among them).


The lawyers sell (actively marketed these days) reprieve from perceived slights to soul and self which have been legally or administratively excluded from polite discourse. Defence against bullying grows into defence against anything "uncomfortable" like a different perception of our workplace worth from our self-perception – the foundation of performance management, or learning! Warnings of the dangers of overhanging limbs and maybe fallen rocks compete with trees for attention on our highways.


So, we are not to see death or damage in public. My ex-countrymen – Americans - take this even further by banning the showing of those dead from defending the country. The Pratchett video mentioned above received 800 objections to the fact it showed, without flinching or inflating, the last breaths of the patient's life! In case we might be overwhelmed by reality, our TV stations all prepare us for possibly disturbing images.


Nor should we even speak disturbing images. Our public servants are trained (I assume; why else this tortured rhetoric and toneless, robotic delivery by cops and docs and pols?) to say anything but 'dead', 'body' or similarly explicit language. Rather we are given 'the deceased' who 'passed on' (just to somewhere else?) or more grimly 'passed away' (finality is acknowledged), or, more evasively, just 'passed' (like a train in the night?). Yet all are considered "tragedies" that befell "victims" (with the exception of publically recognised crims and malefactors) in print, on screen and in the mundane discourse of our neighbourhoods.


Demographics and politics of life-death

The demographics of life-death are this: a few (about 20 %) of the electorate in Australia are prepared to fight (to the death?) to preserve the right of every conception to come to term and every adult to be constrained from dying on their own terms, assisted or not. This 20% achieve a larger electoral influence than their numbers warrant because the total field of voters is finely poised between the major parties. Small factors shift small margins in finely poised electorates. Electorally true and ethically incorrect.


The facts of death – who, how many, when, but not often how or why – are available daily, along with births. With one exception: suicides, successful and attempted, are seldom reported unless unavoidable and even then only implicitly (notably death by train). So the fact that we begin and end are matters of public record, presumably because enough of us are interested to warrant the use of space that might otherwise be sold for ciggy and alcopop ads. We cannot meaningfully speak of death or birth separately without being in denial of the absent partner – we are living-dying beings; we live for a while. However long we do, it never amounts to how long we have not existed. Hence I talk of life-death.


In addition, the boundaries are a bit suss on both ends. For example, where does IVF fit with naturally occurring conception; similarly where does life support machinery fit with naturally occurring death. Notice that neither of these options is available to the poor anywhere. Some of the poor some places do have the chance to sell a part of their biological resources to the rich (comparatively) elsewhere, giving them a surrogate participation in others' longevity. As the Everest example below highlights, human rights are easily over-ruled by specific disabling circumstances, plus variations in courage (or, as I'd have you think, variations in need for martyrdom, which is just a label for a split-second decision). This is also the land of everyday hospital triage under disaster conditions.


A program of explorations

I hope, after building various views of life-death, to arrive at a place where fully rounded treatments of life-death issues can more often be achieved. To do so would mean, for example, considering all specific issues in the context of the materially and socially enabling factors through which any resolution is constructed. In other words, to use consistently the biopsychosocial construct on which some evidence-based medicine attempts to stand for all life-death matters.


So here are some views of life-death to come in this series. The first I have elaborated a bit to give a sense of the material argument. The other six are skeletal images. The order is not assured, nor are the topics guaranteed as stated. I'll be learning as I go and that may change my overall perspective and the features in its view. Reader suggestions welcomed!


Extreme sports and....the permeability of rights in pursuit of meaning – some examples:

Cathy O'Dowd's Rewind 1999 piece in Sunday Life (24 May '09, pg. 30; Melbourne) included a report of her passing by a dying woman on the north face of Everest. "The general public don't get this: they think, 'As long as she's alive, you can't leave'. But they live in a world where you can call the police or an ambulance. You can't do that on Everest."

 

High risk sports - like sky diving, paragliding, bungee jumping , base jumping - have been around since lion-baiting was the entry price for manhood in sub-Saharan hunter-gatherers.

 

In Australia we have our own sport: binge drinking - specialty of the young and younger olds, with death dealing potentials and fulfilments every weekend. These are called "tragedies" when they are merely excesses of youthful riskiness.

Beginning of life and ...rights to life. The IVF opportunity and challenge


'Normal' end of life and... is death for embracing or defeating?


Martyrs, those who serve and the costs of justifiable violence


Suicide attempts, successes and failures...irretrievable meaning statements


Choice – what can we really choose, how much should we choose?

 

Near deaths - insights from those who passed over and back again.



 

My 50th boarding school reunion bio

SINACCORD
                

11 Wertheim St., Richmond, Victoria, 3121, Australia

Tel. (+613) 9428-7462 FAX (+613) 9427-8174 Mobile +61 419 362 349 E Mail - torreyo@ozemail.com.au

 

June 29, 2011

This is what I submitted as background info in me for attendees at our 50^th reunion May 12-14, 2011. I thought I'd post it because it captures a certain present self-assessment and history that isn't covered by topical posts but probably affects them in more and less subliminal ways. The pic's a bit out of date, so I dropped it…

Taft School Class of '61 Bio for Torrey Orton

I am leading a life I have mostly chosen, missing some things on the way that being less devoted to choosing would have given me. Much of it has been composed of things I never thought of, nor knew of, at Taft - living in Melbourne (35yrs), Beijing (2yrs), Shanghai (1.5yrs) and Paris (1.5yrs) for starters. Some has been planned like becoming a psychotherapist and organisation consultant in my 50's. As a result of meeting Jane by chance on a hot July, 1970 NYC afternoon, I started learning deeply that there are other worlds than the American one(s), whence an eventual change of citizenship couched in the Melbourne body of my life.

 

Much of this life has been an exploration of different worlds, inner and outer, prefigured by a helping professions orientation which was emerging at Williams and confirmed in 5 years of HS teaching, and alternative school and commune building in New Haven, moderated by 2 years of a Yale philosophy Masters over 1965-72. In the following 40 years I only once slipped outside the helping life to run a bank IT systems project 1989-91 – but even then it was an HR system.

 

The bank was merged-over by a neighbour and I got an unexpected redundancy package jump start into consulting, which was where I meant to go next anyway. My consulting has always had an organisational focus and in intercultural flavour, with a personal development infrastructure (I started a small psychotherapy practice in tandem with consulting). This combination produced my second biggest adult learning experience – partnering and coaching a Chinese partner in a start-up in Shanghai from 1998 til now. The third was living in Beijing in 1981-83. The fourth is a toss-up between fulltime therapist and part-time blogger for the last two years...taking both seriously, but not enough to step up or out a quantum jump. Maybe it's time to go back to aikido.

 

Jane has been accompanying me and being accompanied by me since that July afternoon in International House at Columbia Univ. The commitment to things Chinese has always been her lead. My following there has acquired its own momentum and valences, while adding my therapeutic and organisational tones to hers. She stepped into the retiring time of life 2 years ago by launching a career-topping innovation in Chinese language teacher education, with about every complexity I can think of!

 

My first biggest learning will probably be what emerges from here on. One theme is rehabilitation of public life, which I have blogged for two years with special interest in ethics and public discourses about difficult issues – climate, science, thinking while in danger. Another is living in reach of mountains and water, which will be in 3 month French chunks since we both seem likely to work til we drop, more or less. If I could give up worrying about the world it would be simpler; I cannot.

 

The great unknown is resilience. I've just been reminded this month (January '11) that I'm as prone as any to surprise attacks on the body personal – this time acute pancreatitis. 8 years ago a slow heart beat dropped me in a street. The beat has been picked up by a pacemaker since then. Along the way I enjoy more aspects of life than ever – many only accessible through the windows of age!

 

January 30, 2011

www.diarybyamadman.blogspot.com

Appreciations (4) …my “sick sinus syndrome” saviours

Appreciations (4) …my “sick sinus syndrome” saviours
Torrey Orton
May 21, 2009

Here I revisit a “heart event” I had six years ago. Much of the following text was written four weeks after that event and I present it as written with a few editorial deletions and insertions. Some additional setting description and commentary (like this) is added in italics.

I was walking down Clarendon Street in Sth Melbourne on my way from one meeting to another about 9:15 am. I’d been walking 30 minutes at my normal quick but not breathless pace, feeling fine, when I suddenly felt faint, fuzzy, weak and thought, ‘where can I sit down?’ – which was the last conscious thought I had until I woke up on my back looking up at Jane and some medicos around 11:30am the same day in The Alfred Hospital trauma unit. Lesson number one: if you feel faint just sit down regardless of the dignity protocols that may be compromised in the act. I figure it was 1-2 seconds between the first conscious sensations of losing my senses and fully doing so. I’ll try to remember that – though I shouldn’t have to again if the pacemaker works. ….

And I haven’t had to remember for safety’s sake, but the story is a powerful one for showing the difference between the speed of thought and unconscious processes. As for my dignity, it’s still likely to be a cause of concern.
…
It appears that I had hit the curb from my full height (191cm, which the trauma people told Jane was twice the minimum level considered a dangerous descent) with a significant proportion of my full weight (107kg, at the time), fracturing slightly “a small bone” a bit above the right ear, leading to internal bleeding in the brain which prompted a seizure that went on for some minutes – thrashing around enough in the public pathway to chew a tear in my tongue, bounce my head on the hard parts a few more times, swallow a reasonable amount of blood into my stomach, inhale a portion into my lungs and attract the attention of someone who did two smart things (at least): call the ambulance service and take my handkerchief (I almost never use the things these days but have always carried one in the same place for 35 years of more) from my right rear pants pocket and stuff it into my gnashing mouth. …

..and on the way did not take anything out of the other pockets – keyset, wallet, watch: all present in the hospital bedside cabinet, including the blooded handkerchief..
…
The role of chance / luck in all this – One example: if this moment had occurred at the same time a day earlier I would have fallen out the door of a Bridge Road tram under one of two cars that were illegally passing the tram after it had stopped (I was leaning out to check if any yobbos were passing the stopped tram, which they do so often here that not looking before getting off a stopped tram is an invitation to an earlier death). Another example: if this moment had occurred while driving us around the Falls Creek neighbourhood a week earlier we could still be unfound down a ravine, which was subsequently incinerated a week later by the bushfires we could see ringing the high country we were driving through. And so on. A newly acquired respect for fate, luck, chance, etc, …
…
Finally, there’s the status of me as meat* – which is the only intellectual position from which I can summon the images of my unconscious states, especially in the first hour of the events. It’s a peculiar result of seeing myself as an object / subject of fate – as an entity whose intentionality is wholly in the hands of a series of others (some of whom I never saw – the critical care ambulance guys and who ever called them!). These others collectively by their actions affirmed what I could not: that I was more than meat and thereby made it true.

My experience of being saved by the system is what I want to recognise and celebrate. I am very aware from living in other places – notably China – that this kind of health system is not widely available across the world. Second, where it exists, it may not be well run, especially at the level of service provision. The para-medics service (Ambulance Victoria) has been an object of political contention and governance doubt for some time, but whatever the sources their service was excellent. Third, it is stunning that a matter so life and deathly should be handled with such precision and care both by the stipulated role holders and the passing public. My thanks, again.


*See here http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.shtml for a wonderful take on ‘meat’ which illuminates various pretensions of the meat class of conscious beings.