The Bauer Confidential

I’ll start with a warning, this is not a light-hearted post.  There’s something I need to work through, think about, process, something that’s plaguing and distracting me, so I’m going to write about it, in the hope that putting it out there will help free some dark things from my mind.

As we grow older, we become increasingly more acquainted with death and dying; that’s an accepted part of life, the reality of nature.  In the past three years, in our family, we have witnessed the passing of three family leaders, some of the eldest generation of our relations, and we have mourned them and missed them, knowing life will go on, hating that it seems to do so effortlessly.  How ever expected, how ever aged, how ever loved, it seems that the loss of our oldest loved ones cuts deeply, but we are able to go on because we know that’s the way of the world, that they lived good lives, touched the lives of others, they left a mark through their many years that cannot be easily erased.

But when we loose the young, all sense and logic seem to fail us.  The world seems to turn upside down.  In high school, I lost two class-mates.  One to cystic fibrosis, the other to a car accident.  I’d known both, had classes with both, liked both.  I was sad then, but somehow that teenage mind of mine quickly filed them away, quarantined their memories just out of reach, perhaps to protect me from grief, but more likely to maintain the illusion of indestructibility most teenagers seem to seek.  A couple years after I graduated from college, I got a call, a mutual friend was taking lessons to become a pilot.  She was practicing “touch and goes” when a wing clipped the run-way, she and her instructor were killed instantly.  It felt as if the breath had been knocked out of me.  This was a girl in my photo albums, not a close friend, but someone I really enjoyed.  She was one of those rare people who seemed to posses an internal light that never faltered, whose smiled was infectious, whose humor was healing.  And like that she was gone, her light extinguished.  She died doing what she loved, they said, to some it was a solace.

This week, I received another such call.  A colleague and friend from graduate school had keeled over at work, out of the blue, and that was it.  28 years old and life was over like that, plans gone, promise unfulfilled.  This was a guy, who when he talked to you, you knew he was listening, he gave you his attention, made you feel like you were worth listening to.  It seems like a simple thing, but it’s a skill few possess.  And he was bright, and quick, and kind, a go-getter.  I’d always thought, someday I’d turn on the news and there he’d be, a Senator, hell, maybe President.  He seemed like a born politician, without the smarmy stuff, a leader, the sort of person you wanted to follow.  And we went to high school in the same town.  And his wife and I share the same first name.  And this is where I really get stuck, on her, his wife, under 30, recently moved half-way across the country, walking into their home, alone, lying down on their bed, alone.  I can’t stop turning it over and over in my mind.  Her grief, her loss, constantly running through my head.  And knowing, however bad I’m imagining it to be, it’s worse, because for her, it’s real.  He’s gone, and she’s changed, forever without him, always missing him.

Death makes me sad for three reasons: the first is that I will always miss the person who is gone, the second is that the world takes such little notice, and the last is that it reminds me of all I have to loose.   There are also the feelings of injustice, followed closely by the feelings of gratitude for all that we have, and an introspection that makes me uneasy.  The question nags at me: what am I doing with my life, am I spending my days in ways that make me happy, or will I regret?  I’ve been doing a lot of revising of plans, hopes, dreams, all in the abstract though.  These passings, these losses, keep bringing me back to a feeling that it’s time to act, to do something to ensure that I do more than bide my time, that I seek out what adds to my happiness and rid myself of things that bring me down.

I’m not sure any of this makes much sense to anyone but me.  I am mad at myself too, for turning the death of a friend into something that’s about me.  I want to remember, be grateful, to celebrate a life, short but brilliant, but I’m just not there yet, still lost and angry but powerless, and so I can’t keep from imagining…

I have a secret to confess: I love Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.  It feels good to get it off my chest; I’ve been hiding our relationship, perhaps not well, for years.  Yet my love affair with P&P didn’t start out so well, P&P was assigned reading for AP English Lit class my senior year of high school.  Like many seniors in high school, I had a bit of trouble motivating myself to do my schoolwork, and Merciless Mercer, my teacher, didn’t inspire me to do much more than sit as far from her in the classroom as possible.  I didn’t finish a single one of the many novels we were assigned in that class (lest you think me a total slacker, I read every play, poem, and short story).  I think it was a quiet, self-destructive form of rebellion; I’d always done my readings in every other English class but I had more important things on my mind (namely a real-life version of the subject matter explored in P&P, like most 18 year olds).  I really started to fall for P&P when a friend checked out the BBC’s mini-series version from the library the summer after graduation, we spent many hours enthralled by the characters, costumes, and story.  If I’d been able to picture Mr. Darcy as Colin Firth when I’d been assigned the book, no doubt I would have been able to finish it.  Whenever A&E would play the P&P mini-series I would stop what I was doing and watch it, all five hours of it, often enticing even the most macho of my family members to get sucked into the drama.

In graduate school, when DVDs started getting cheap, I bought the BBC mini-series, and I watched it, a lot!  Whenever I would get depressed about my love life, or lack-there-of, I would pull out the P&P DVDs and lose myself in Jane Austen’s world, usually watching all five hours at one go.  This happened more than I would care to admit.  Eventually I decided to go ahead and try to read the novel again, this time finishing it easily.  It’s been many years now since I’ve felt the need to watch P&P for a romantic escape, but I still watch it from time to time, just for sheer enjoyment.  And I’ve seen all the other reiterations, the Kiera Knightly version of P&P, the Bollywood take “Bride and Prejudice,” and “The Jane Austen Book Club” film.  I’ve read both Bridget Jones novels and adore the first “Bridget Jones’ Diary” film (in case you didn’t know, Bridget Jones is a blatant, modern-day rip-off of P&P, with both movies even having the same Mr. Darcy).  I’ve read novels written by modern day writers trying to explore what happened after P&P.  I’ve also read a set of books that are a contemporary writer’s attempt to tell P&P from Mr. Darcy’s perspective (she took three books to do it).  The P&P world is a bit of guilty pleasure for me, you see, I generally eschew “romance novels” and P&P is widely considered to be the original.

When I saw Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, I was outraged: how dare someone be so sacrilegious to poor Jane?!?  My initial reaction was quickly overcome with amusement at the concept.  I choose Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for my book club selection with the thought: I like musical mash-ups, so why not a literary one?  This novel takes the classic P&P tale of Elizabeth Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy and adds a dash of ninjas and a sprinkle of zombies.  The “undead” have become a nuisance in polite British society, waylaying carriages, eating brains, and just generally making themselves unwelcome.  Not only does society value manners and breeding, it also values proficiency with sword and musket (even if guns are unladylike).  The British have turned to the far East for fighting skills, with the wealthiest training in Japan, with lower ranking families traveling to China for training.  The zombie plague even affects some of the inner circle the main characters.  In the end, it’s still P&P.  I’m not sure how well the zombie thing really works, the words just seem wrong.  Elizabeth Bennett discussing dojos and self-mutilation cannot blend with the prose of Austen, or at least it doesn’t in this novel.  I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy the book, and chuckle at the new additions from time to time.  In the end though, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a gimmick, and though fun to read, unless you feel like refreshing your P&P, it may not be worth your time.

Berkeley, CA. December 2009.
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