From: aberson@enh.nist.gov
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Landscapes
Date: 15 Oct 92 15:41:33 GMT
Organization: NIST

The following was a letter to the editor, Miami Herald, October 10, 1992.

"A mother grieves for two sons lost to AIDS."

During the two terrible years that my sons were dying, I wrote about my
fear, anger, and confusion, setting my precarious emotions on paper.  In
the six months between Scott's burial on Mother's Day - May 8, 1988 -
and Doug's death on November 19, 1988, I wrote about my loneliness, 
frustration, and guilt, pouring my endless tears into hard copy.  Writing
was my only familiar activity, of those years.  It has always been
easier for me to withdraw and to write than to speak.  Always.

But [Hurricane] Andrew has turned me inside out.  I have read the countless
personal commentaries from the many talented Herald writers and I have
felt their words.  Yet, strangely, my own desire to write was absent, and
my ability to express my thoughts has failed me.  Instead of writing, I
retreated within myself again and spent the days and the nights asking myself
why.

The only feeling i was sure of was the haunting sense of deja vu.

After my sons died, I would sit staring across the ocean, my eyes searching
for a horizon, hoping to see a pale blue and white sky meet the deepest
blue of the sea.  But there was never a horizon within my gaze.  The sea
was black, and the sky was black.

For four years there have been no happy thoughts, no joyous, or even just
comfortable, emotions to describe in vivid colors or muted pastels, for
grief is alternately gray and black - and black is not a color, it is
just the absence of light.  Events too brutal or devastating, the 
unexplained catastrophes, the holocaust, which we somehow survive, we bury
deep into our subconscious, for they are too emotionally debilitating
to confront in the daylight, in the open.

The aftermath of Andrew, the confusion of the missing landmarks causing
me to lose my way, the sense of disorientation as I drive down once-
familiar streets, has become a phenomenon common to us all.  But to me
it's paradoxical:  The disorientation, the strange-looking streets, are 
not so unfamiliar;  I've been on those roads before.

As I navigatede Galloway Road from Kendall to Southwest 104th Street the 
other day, I felt as if I were plowing through a canyon.  Sky was visible,
but the road had 15-foot-high walls of debris and tar and trees and leaves
and branches.  The rest of the roads were barren - no shade, no color.

That night I awoke about 3am.  I was crying aloud, "They didn't call me,
they didn't even call me to see how I was.  Why didn't they call me?"

It took several minutes for me to realize that they have been dead for four 
years.  I stood on my balcony.  The city beyond was without power, black
from the absence of light.  Yet, the view was familiar.  The nightmare
seemed to brush away my confusion, and my disorientation began to fade.

The confusing familiarity, the sense of deja vu, is real.  It's the same
scenario as when I first lost my children.  I would drive without knowing
where I was or why I was going there.  I lost my way daily.  There was
no shade, no color, no breeze, only despair.  The roots of my life
were gone.  Thirty-six years of love and joy, pain and disappointment,
motivation and succeses, dreams and hopes, work and beauty, all had
been toppled, destroyed in only moments by the arbitraty negligence of a
few corporations steeped in greed and disregard for human life.  My head
pounded accusations at the men to whom profit was more important than
their neighbors' lives and at the system that did not hold those
profiteers accountable.  Nature might have unleashed its random fury,
but man could have prevented much of the destruction that resulted in 
such catastrophic proportions.

Andrew has given my nightmares a daytime life.  My internal life of
grief and devastation has found its external, environmental companion,
a landscape to match my mindscape.  What I and my neighbors in South Dade
are now experiencing in our lives and our community is what I have seen 
and felt in my mind and in my heart for the past six years.  Our minds
and our labor, our determination and our cooperation, will restore our
walls, rerun our wires, rebuild our roofs.  But, who will bring back
Scott and Doug?

Maxine Segal
Miami
_________________________

As usual I find using the words of others easier to express myself.
This is my answer to those who express to me that life should be getting back
to "normal" here.  Will things ever get back to "normal?"

Aside to Jess:  The first turkey buzzard of the year just passed my window,
right on schedule (October 15).  Winter has arrived.

       Sim Aberson   Ft. Lauderdale, FL   aberson%3328.span@sdsc.edu
"It's always Beach Party Barbie, or Malibu Barbie....  That shit does not
prepare you for the true horror of a real woman's life.  Where is Single,
Abused, Trailer-Park Barbie?"             - Roseanne Arnold