When I was working my way through graduate school, my last waiter job was in a cute little restaurant near Berkeley Repertory Theater. The chef Johnny, unlike so many chefs, was good-humored, funny, and uncharacteristically gentle and kind with us, the waiters. One of the things Johnny routinely said when we ran out of something, was “That’s all she wrote!” I liked that; it reminded me of the old TV show Murder She Wrote which I had always liked. When Johnny’s business partner, also named John, died of AIDS, all of us were devastated. John was quirky and difficult but wildly charismatic and a brilliant businessman and we all loved him. Before too long, in his grief, Johnny sold the place, moved back to his home in Baltimore, and opened a new place. One time serendipitously when I went to a conference of the US Association of Body-Psychotherapists I ran into Johnny on a path on the Johns Hopkins campus and he took me to his new restaurant which was much like the one I knew. I never forgot his old expression “That’s all she wrote.”
Years passed, and I had a ritual with our beloved dog, Angel. Angel, in her own idiosyncratic doggy way, loved the crunchy stems of broccoli and other green vegetables and some other colors too. She would hang out expectantly, hoping for her quota of stalks from me as I made dinner every night. Our ritual was me giving her, for obvious reasons, the measured quota of roughage, and that was it. I would say, “OK Angel, that’s all she wrote.” Her part of the ritual was to linger with pleading eyes. I would say, “Angel, you know what that means. Don’t pretend that you don’t.” She would continue to hang around plaintively, hoping, until she saw my husband start on the salad. Meanwhile, he would never laugh at our repeated routine. Until at the ripe old age of 16, Angel finally was the one to say, “That’s all she wrote.” In all her grace she left us for the next world. But not without leaving behind an important reminder or lesson.
Loss is the core injury of neglect. The neglect story, or non-story as it were, is the story of nothing, of colossal loss. Abandonment, rejection, absence, all the iterations of nothing, are a compendium of loss. The reminder/lesson was that any loss large or small can be a traumatic reminder, an activating stimulus, or to use a word I deplore and avoid, but which everyone seems to understand, it is the ultimate neglect trigger. I found to my dismay, that I was exhibiting some of my most outdated symptoms of withdrawal, disconnection, inward focus, mistrust, and numbing. Of course. It was how I had always coped with/avoided grief. I was dismayed that after all this time, I could still go unconscious that way. Humbling. Fortunately, I awoke to it before long. I was used to neglect survivor clients getting painfully activated by my long and short absences. And recently my closing the Oakland office that many had been coming to for multiple healing years, years, evoked a wave of backlash, and loss reactions. It was a sad reminder that all loss, besides the often-substantial sorrow in its own real-time right, can elicit the potato bug-like constriction, closing up tight. Thanks, Angel. Do rest well.
Magic
In my usual quirky way, I plow through even the heftiest of biographies, especially athlete biographies. Don’t ask me why I had a fascination with pro athletes, even though I never ever watched any sort of professional sports or any spectator sports for that matter. Although I was an activist in the world AIDS charities and research for over a decade, and I knew that Magic Johnson was an iconic basketball star who contracted AIDS, I really knew nothing more of him, except perhaps that renowned, magnetic smile. So this bulky new-ish biography, Magic: The Life of Earvin “Magic” Johnsonby Roland Lazenby (Celadon, 2023) called out to me. I knew he was a bigger-than-life talented athlete. And I was intrigued to know more.
I am now close to the 832-page end. Whew. It could probably have happily been a satisfying (to me) 350 pages without all the play-by-play descriptions of countless important and even famous basketball games, that were admittedly lost on me.
Earvin was already 6 feet 9 inches (205.74 cm) by the time he was 14 years old. He grew up in a poor working-class family in Lansing, Michigan in the early 1960s when the experiment of integrating public schools by busing to distant districts to mix up the races, was barely beginning. It was rather horrifying to read about how it was done. I guess I never really knew. Kids were merely thrust upon each other without any help to actually integrate. Earvin was one of the first schools in his town to “try,” it.
Earvin discovered spontaneously that he loved basketball. And he had a special talent for making his team better. Passing balls to teammates in such a way that they could readily score. More interested in winning, for the team, than scoring himself, he made everyone improve. His love of the game defied race, as well as facilitating racial harmony. Almost in spite of himself, he became something of an ambassador and leader, while also evolving into an exquisitely talented player. His success in college and then the NBA is legendary. And in the model of similarly notorious basketball star Wilt Chamberlain, he became known as a prolific and unabashed womanizer, scoring numbers shockingly in keeping with his basketball scores. However, although his activities predated the “me-too” movement (and at least according to this book were with willing, even eager women), it was at the height of the AIDS epidemic before safer sex practice had become a norm in the first world. His testing positive for HIV shocked the world even more because it was contracted through heterosexual, unprotected sex.
Although being diagnosed with a potentially fatal disease, and in his day (1992), HIV was considered a death sentence, is a wallop of not only shock but devastation. And for someone who lived even more than the rest of us, by his body, and who loved that almost more than life itself, it was a devastating loss. It was not yet generally understood that testing positive was not the same as contracting the disease. And we did not yet have the wealth of life-prolonging medicines we have now.
It appears, at least from this book, that Johnson was blessed with a securely attached background and truly loving parents who supported him unconditionally. If we find people to be irrationally blaming about COVID, AIDS has been even more wildly villainizing of its sufferers. Especially as it was for years thought of as a “gay” disease. In reality, a vast majority of the international numbers of AIDS sufferers are heterosexual. When he found his feet again, Johnson once again became an ambassador and a pioneer, as well as a tremendous liaison and conduit of AIDS awareness, using his charisma and his established esteem to influence and change attitudes. He became an impassioned and impressively successful fundraiser for AIDS research, as well as a fervent advocate for safer sex practices. And to the chagrin of some, (and my admitted appreciation), he did not preach abstinence as the “best safer sex practice.” He rapidly regained his contagious and notorious smile, and although he made a brief comeback to the game, he ultimately decided to hang up his shoes and devote himself to philanthropy and business. He transformed his profound and devastating loss into something positive. That’s magic.
Found
Which brings me to me! Although mine is a modest story, nonetheless it is a story of lost and found. I am on my way to present at the Boston Trauma Conference. It is the 35th year and as I have been touting for some weeks now, I have been to most of them. For years I was a silent lurker, the quintessential child of neglect, I was uncertain of my own existence, let alone existence in anyone else’s eyes or mind. I remember when I first learned the term “object constancy” which means, staying connected even when not in the presence of the other, what? It seemed like one of those weird concepts in physics that were similarly hard to fathom. I remember when my husband laughingly transposed it to “object incontinence,” which made almost more sense. Seems like a long time ago. The Cubans say “Seremos como Che!” We will be like Che! We will be in our own way like Magic. I am the poster girl for trauma and neglect healing and much of it I learned at this conference. I never thought I would believe I had something to say. But I guess I do. Neglect is the story of nothing. And nothing is NOT nothing! Nothing is something! And nothing matters. Perhaps that is all she wrote!
Today’s song: