Father Joseph Martin, 1924-2009

Posted on March 16, 2009 by Hugo Schwyzer

Today would be my father’s 74th birthday. He’s been gone almost three years, and I think about him almost every day. That he never got to hold his granddaughter Heloise Cerys Raquel is a source of great sadness; the hope that I have that he sees her now is a great comfort. And most importantly, I pray that the gentleness he bequeathed to me comes through my words and my fingertips when I hold my baby girl.

Today I note the passing, too, of an influential figure in my recovery from addiction. Many an alcoholic or addict who went through treatment in the ’80s or ’90s will recognize the name “Father Martin”. Joseph Martin’s “chalk talks” about alcoholism, depression, and anger were marvelously insightful and comforting. His common-sense approach to the disease of alcoholism (and I remain a passionate adherent of the disease model) continues to shape how I think about my sobriety, though I haven’t seen any of his tapes in over a decade. Along with John Bradshaw and Leo Buscaglia, Father Martin was one of those popular (and often amateur) psychologists whose writing and whose VHS tapes were script and soundtrack for my recovery. Joe Martin saved a lot of lives, and made a lot of lives better. May there be joy and laughter as he comes to the far side of the Jordan.

On “O du Fröhliche” (again)

Posted on December 19, 2008 by Hugo Schwyzer

My favorite Christmas carol is the one which comes into my head every year at this time: “O du Fröhliche.” (Here’s an old Youtube clip of the Vienna Boys Choir singing a rather stately version.) Along with “The Holly and the Ivy”, “O du Fröhliche” would certainly make the upper end of any top ten list I compiled.

But I write this morning thinking of my father, for this was indisputably his favorite carol, and his memory of hearing it sung as a small boy is especially poignant. My father was born in Austria in 1935 to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father who had converted to Rome. After Hitler’s takeover of Austria in 1938, my grandparents took their children and fled successfully to England, living a refugee life in London, then Ellesmere Port, and finally rural Berkshire. (Most of the rest of my grandfather’s family perished.) When World War Two broke out, however, the British government interned my grandfather. A citizen of an enemy nation, it didn’t seem to matter — at least at first — that he was an ethnically Jewish refugee from Hitler. He was released after about a year, but spent the first Christmas of the war — 1939 — in what my father says was a reasonably comfortable camp in Scotland. (He was not interned with actual prisoners of war.) Women and children were not interned; England’s policy was apparently more lenient than that shown by the Americans to the Japanese.

That Christmas, when my father was four and a half or so, my grandmother took him and his older sister on a long train trip up to the north to visit my grandfather in his camp. My father remembers very little of the visit, but he does remember that the assembled internees (all of whom were either German or Austrian men) sang some Christmas songs. The last one they sang was “O du Fröhliche”, and my father remembers that his mother and many other grownups wept. For the rest of his life, he was very fond of the carol.

I’ve sung “O du Fröhliche” all my life. And I’ve heard many recordings. But the version I love best is one I’ve never heard. I often like to imagine the one which was sung in December, 1939 by dozens of German-speaking men, ranging from adolescence to late middle age, internees in spartan barracks in Scotland. I imagine their mostly unprofessional voices, and their faces as they gazed at their families who had come to spend a few Christmas moments with them. I think of my grandfather, a then 37 year-old physician, himself descended from a line of Moravian rabbis, but now a loyal son of Holy Mother Church; I imagine his mixed feelings at being safe from Hitler only to be shut away from his family in this strange northern country. And I imagine my father, not quite five, missing his daddy as I, a man of 44, miss mine this Christmas.

It’s a fine carol.

Merry Christmas.

Modes of grieving: my father, Matilde, and disenfranchisement

Posted on December 12, 2008 by Hugo Schwyzer

I just came across this nice discussion of “disenfranchised grief” and masculinity in the Feministing community.

Disenfranchised grief is grief over a loss that is not conventionally acknowledged or socially acceptable in your culture. Couples who experience infertility, terminate pregnancy due to some genetic disorder that the fetus had, or have a miscarriage often experience disenfranchised grief. Other examples include grief over the incarceration of a loved one, the death of a pet, the breakup of an unacknowledged relationship (i.e. gay couples who haven’t come out yet or have been rejected by their families) or the death of a partner in an unacknowledged relationship, the “loss” of one’s parent due to Alzheimer’s, the death of an ex-spouse or lover, the recurring grief of a birth mother who gave up a child for adoption, and the grief of an adopted child for the relationship they might have had with their birth parent(s). In many of these cases the people who surround the grieving individual may not understand the depth of the grief involved, or may think it’s something the individual should be able to get over already. In other cases, such as in the case of unacknowledged relationships, the individual may not be able to share their grief at all.

So as I’ve been thinking about this it occurs to me that men may often experience disenfranchised grief more often than women, because it’s more socially acceptable for women to express their grief, and because men are often expected not to have the same depth of feeling. I’ve known several men who really wanted children, and were deeply emotionally invested in having a family. When they (and their partner) encountered infertility or miscarriage, their grief was barely even acknowledged, while their partner received a lot of support. When men do express their grief over infertility or a miscarriage, or don’t “get over it” quickly enough, they’re viewed with a mixture of confusion and disapproval. So I think this is one example of the damage a patriarchal culture inflicts on men. What do you think of this? Are there other examples of disenfranchised grief I haven’t thought of? Are there cases where a woman’s grief is more disenfranchised than a man’s?

Check out the comments below the original post (made by Rachel in WY).

Without knowing the term, I’ve written several times about “disenfranchised grief.” I’ve written about my strong and enduring reaction to my high school girlfriend’s abortion. My most instant connection to that sense dates from June 2006, when I lost my father and our beloved first chinchilla, Matilde, only eleven days apart. I wrote about both deaths, but when I announced Matilde’s death, I shut off comments. I knew that news of my father’s death would elicit tremendous sympathy, but I feared that posting about my devastation at the passing of a 600 gram rodent (albeit one who had captured our hearts and given rise to our rescue charity) would also elicit ridicule. And at that point, if even one idiot had made fun of our grief over the death of Matilde, I would have been crushed. I got so many sincere notes from kind folks who read the post and were unable to comment that I opened up a later post. My own fear of being teased led me to be more mistrustful than might have been necessary. Continue reading →

Of dreams and fathers: Barack Obama, growing up abroad, baseball, cricket, and daddies

Posted on December 2, 2008 by Hugo Schwyzer

Among the various books I read on our trip to New Zealand was Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. I’d put it off for some time, but started it on the long flight down to Auckland and finished it in a Sydney hotel room. It’s the best book I’ve read by a president (or president-elect), and I’ve at least glanced at most of what our recent office-holders have produced. (I tried to read Bill Clinton’s massive autobiography, but ended up getting overwhelmed by detail, and skipped about.)

It’s not original to note that Barack Obama is an extraordinary figure, absolutely unlike anyone we’ve ever seen in American politics — at least, absolutely unlike anyone who has risen so far, so fast. Dreams from my Father, which is all the more powerful because it seems to be written by a man without any conscious sense that his words might be used against him someday, reveals Obama to be more exceptional than I had previously imagined.

It would be a bit ridiculous to say that I identify with our president-elect. I not only have not achieved what he has achieved, I have not had to overcome the obstacles he has had to overcome. (Though addiction and mental illness posed challenges that my socio-economic and ethnic circumstances did not.) But all good autobiography contains universal themes; we all have parents, after all, about whom we have often mixed feelings. Many of us struggle to discern a purpose and direction for our lives, and go through a quarter-life crisis of confidence. Barack Obama’s journey, in a broad sense, is a common one, though in its specifics it is both unique and jaw-droppingly impressive.

One of the things that I like best about Obama is that he has lived abroad; indeed, more than any other president in recent memory, he spent a significant portion of his childhood outside America (in Indonesia). Obama doesn’t hold dual citizenship as I do, and despite the slurs of a handful of ignoramuses, his devotion to the United States is unquestioned by any serious person. But he has tasted living abroad, and not only doing so, but doing so in comparative poverty. Not all international experience is the same. It’s one thing for the scion of a wealthy family to do a junior year at the Sorbonne, living off parent’s money; it’s another thing altogether to live as Obama did as a child, playing with street children in rural Indonesia. Anyone who is going to make claims for American exceptionalism ought to have had some first-hand experiences of living in — and not just visiting — other parts of the world. Though the child is not always the father of the man, reading Obama’s biography makes me hope that it will be so, particularly in regards to how he thinks about America’s place in the world. Continue reading →

Wimmerata and the Hubert Schwyzer Quartet

Posted on September 6, 2008 by Hugo Schwyzer

If you’re going to be in the Santa Barbara area tomorrow, there’s a concert honoring my father and raising money for the Westmont College quartet that will bear Dad’s name. Actually, two concerts: “fiddling” Americana from 4-6PM and a classical concert from 7:00PM on. $25 dollars at the door; the concert is at Santa Barbara’s Trinity Episcopal Church.

Hubert Schwyzer Quartet Update

Posted on July 11, 2008 by Hugo Schwyzer

Scott Craig at Westmont College kindly sent me a link to this press release: Newly-Crafted Instruments Resonate Well. It begins:

The Hubert Schwyzer Quartet, a unique ensemble of instruments commissioned by Westmont, is taking shape under the hands of master violin maker James Wimmer at his workshop in Santa Barbara. Named for a former UC Santa Barbara philosophy professor and cellist, the quartet will be used by Westmont faculty and students during the school year and loaned to the Music Academy of the West in the summer months.

You can see pictures here.

The whole family is very eager to hear the first music produced by the quartet that will bear my father’s name in perpetuity. When you think about what lasts and endures, few human-made things are still useable centuries after they were made. Good instruments, however, can remain playable for three or four hundred years if well cared for. Dedicating a string quartet in someone’s memory, in a sense, is more lasting than getting their name up on a building.

We are still fund-raising for Westmont and its music program. You can, if you choose, give here; note Schwyzer Quartet in the gift designation area.

Dad’s DVD

Posted on June 23, 2008 by Hugo Schwyzer

Another busy day. My wife and I were up in Santa Barbara yesterday; my sisters and step-mother hosted an intimate garden gathering at their home to mark the second anniversary of my father’s death. It’s hard to believe that two years have passed; we got to see the “final cut” of a DVD based on interviews done with Dad in the final weeks of his life. When he received his final prognosis, giving him only weeks to live, he consented to be filmed with his wife and children answering questions and talking about his life. We’re very fortunate to have his voice and his face preserved for us forever.

Interview the living, people, and preserve those interviews as best you can.

I’ll see if I can get another post up later today.

Missing Dad

Posted on June 14, 2008 by Hugo Schwyzer

Tomorrow is Father’s Day, the second such since my father died two years ago next Sunday. I find myself missing him more this year than last; my experience with death is that the second and third anniversaries of the passing of a loved one are often harder than the first. With the first anniversary — or birthday, or other holiday — there’s a sense that one needs to be prepared for a significant emotional hit. But we live in a culture that puts a time limit on grief, and there’s an expectation that things will “get easier” each passing year. That’s true in general but not in specifics; while the overall trend of sadness is downward, pain can “suddenly spike” when least expected.

There’s also in me, I think, a kind of embarrassment about acknowledging that grief endures. No one told me that there would be a time limit on how long I would be allowed to weep for my father, but I’ve imposed one on myself. And it doesn’t seem that I am doing a good job of adhering to this self-created limit.

My father is gone, and I am not yet a father — I feel stuck in a gap between what has passed on and what has not yet come. May there not be many more such third Sundays in June.

“Fun Dads”, “Strict Moms”, the myth of male weakness and female anorexia: some further thoughts on Courtney Martin’s book

Posted on April 23, 2008 by Hugo Schwyzer

When I was in grad school, I started doing quite a bit of reading about eating disorders. Some of that interest was personal, as I developed (relatively late) a rather serious obsession with food and exercise in college. Some of it was intellectual, as it intersected nicely with my interest in women’s studies. At one point, back in 1992-93, I got involved in an outpatient treatment program for folks with disordered eating at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. It was a mixed-sex group, and I was one of only two guys in a group of about fifteen students who met weekly with a clinician.

I remember that no topic came up as often as did parents. And the clinician, at least, generally asked questions about mothers. Indeed, I heard her once say something like “The first question I ask most women who have eating disorders is: ‘what is your relationship like with your mother’?” Most of the research done on anorexics and bulimics has been done on women; indeed, it’s only been relatively recently that we see a formal acknowledgement that eating disorders are becoming more prevalent among men. And for over a century, the assumption of therapists and doctors has been that a young woman’s disordered eating is almost always tied up in the invariably complex and entangled relationship she has with her mother. As Joan Brumberg illustrates in her essential monograph, Fasting Girls: A History of Anorexia Nervosa, as early as the 1870s doctors suggested that food refusal in middle-class girls was a form of quiet rebellion against the strictures and limitations for women modelled by their mothers.

There’s a lot to be said for that analysis, but it often has the unfortunate tendency to let dads off the hook. In her wonderful Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, Courtney Martin offers a chapter called “The Male Mirror: Her Father’s Eyes”. Some of what she says is new, some of it has been said before, but her analysis of the role of the father-daughter relationship and its role in the development of eating disorders is very good, and it offers a special challenge to those of us eager to help adult men transform the ways in which they relate to young people, particularly their own teenage children. Continue reading →

Waxing poetic at the Sandpiper Lodge

Posted on April 3, 2008 by Hugo Schwyzer

I’m blogging from the Sandpiper Lodge in Santa Barbara, a place I’ve stayed quite a few times on previous visits to this, the town of my birth. This afternoon, I rented a large Ford E350 van from the Avis franchise in Pasadena, drove to LAX, and picked up my brother, sister-in-law, and their three children who had just flown in from England. We loaded all their gear into the gas-guzzling monstrosity that is the E350, and drove up here to Santa Barbara. My brother’s family is staying at my stepmother’s. I considered driving back down to Pasadena tonight (it’s 92 miles, door to door), but I’m beat from a hard week of traveling and teaching. The Sandpiper has free wireless and decent coffee in the morning, so this works for me. I’ll drive back down to the ‘Dena tomorrow morning, and my wife and I will be back up on Sunday for a more extended family visit.

I have a lot of serious things I want to blog about, mostly in the usual categories. (And you may notice, I’m rapidly adding more categories on the sidebar, trying for greater precision). Tonight, I’m too tired for anything serious. Tonight, I’m by myself in a cheerful two-star motel in the city where I was born, and where I watched my father die, and I’m feeling both deeply exhausted and deeply content. I’m wearing polka-dot boxers, a half-buttoned dress shirt, a wedding ring and not a damn thing more; I’ve been here less than an hour and somehow have already managed to make a mess. (I’ll leave the room tidy in the morning — I am very good about not making more work for the maids.)

A moment ago, I stood in the harsh fluorescent light of the bathroom, struck by how old my face looks — and how much like my Dad I am becoming. Both in my ageing and in my growing resemblance to my father, I feel blessed. A month shy of 41, I am living out what Donald Justice wrote in the second part of his most perfect and famous poem:

…And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His fatherâ€™s tie there in secret,

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

Something is filling me, deep and enormous and ancient and good. And there is still so much more to come.