Dying can be a dance, not a battle

 

CC Jean Stimmell

Why do so many obituaries praise the dead for waging a heroic battle against their fate? Why does death have to be described as such a heavy-weight brawl when, in the big scheme of things, death is part of the circle of life? 

Like it or not, we’re all part of nature. Why can’t we view our death like a falling leaf in autumn, not as a desperate ending but as the promise of rebirth in the spring? Or, for religious-minded people, serenely entering into the Kingdom of heaven.

Kubler-Ross, a pioneer in near-death studies, wrote, “Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.^⁠1

I’ve always had an interest in understanding death but don’t consider it to be a morbid subject. Quite the contrary: I believe you can only understand life if you first pick apart your attitudes toward death. I am now reading another book about it recently on the NYT Best Seller list: The In-Between: Unforgettable Encounters During Life’s Final Moments by Hadley Vlahos. 

Vlahos is a hospice nurse. I found her portrayal of eleven of her patients, while sometimes sad and tragic, to be comforting on the whole because their last hours were often mundane and peaceful without hand-wringing hysterics. 

But, beyond that, the author explored an intervening spiritual element!  Death was not black and white as she had previously believed. “There was certainly an in-between…Patients from all different religious and non-religious backgrounds were having spiritual encounters that I couldn’t ignore.”^⁠2

Vlahos describes herself as spiritual but not a member of any religion. 

One of her observations stuck close to home for me. When her patients have these in-between experiences, she’ll ask what they are experiencing. They might say something like: “‘Oh, I’m going on a trip,’ … So the conclusion I’ve come to is whatever is next cannot be explained with the language and the knowledge that we have here on Earth.”

I had a similar experience with my mother when she was dying. While sitting with her, I saw her eyes moving and asked what she was looking at. She said she was transfixed by the flickering candles on the mantle, but the candles were merely standing there, motionless and unlit. She hesitantly confessed to me that she felt like a little girl waiting at a bridge for someone to come to take her hand and take her across.

Like Vlahos, I am spiritual but not a member of any organized religion.

My mother was an Episcopalian and did a lifetime of terrific work through the church to help others. But she was a hard-headed Yankee who would never buy into any New Age woo-woo. While I could see her vision transported her, I had to prod her to tell me what she was experiencing because, as she sheepishly confided, it seemed like such a silly idea.  

A silly idea or not, she passed shortly after that. 

To me, my mother’s death experience, like that Vlahos writes about, points to the likelihood that the universe is way more profound than we can ever imagine. A reality that has always been self-evident for practitioners in the spiritual realm. Now, at last, it is becoming true for scientists.

Working with Complexity Theory– one of the three most important discoveries of the 20th century – along with Quantum Physics and Relativity – scientists have discovered that, as human beings, we have more in common with each other, living or dead than we ever could imagine.

Rather than priding ourselves on being the dominant force on Earth above all others, it would be more accurate to see ourselves as part of the “Earth itself, whose atoms have self-organized to form these transitory beings that think of themselves as self-sufficient and separate from each other, even though they only ever arose from and will inevitably return to the atomic substance of the planet?”^⁠3

I know this is extremely difficult for us to understand – like trying to comprehend Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. But if these scientists are proven correct that consciousness resides in every atom in the universe, not solely in our separate brains, then, truly, we are all connected as one.

And, if that’s the case, talking about life after death should be a piece of cake.

xxx

¹ On Death and dying by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D. The MacMillan Company, New York: 1969. Page 246-7.

² R.N., Hadley Vlahos . The In-Between (pp. 36-37). Kindle Edition.

Page 53

³ –Theise, Neil. Notes on Complexity (p. 73). Spiegel & Grau. Kindle Edition

Mindful Forgetting

CC Jean Stimmell: 2015

The cricket’s persistent song of autumn used to haunt me, reminding me how brief life is, especially now I’m old. But it doesn’t have to if we follow David Henry Thoreau’s example and  reframe “the cricket’s song: Turn it into an “earth song,” a reminder not of life’s brevity but of eternal return.”^⁠1

Reimagining things as Thoreau does is crucial to being truly alive: The secret to doing so is forgetting old stuff. That’s the topic of Lewis Hyde’s award-winning book, A Primer for Forgetting. While a Wall Street Journal reviewer claimed his book shocks the mind like leaping into a cold lake, to me, some passages threw me into free fall like I’d fallen off a cliff.  

The book was powerful without any guiding narrative, just an accumulation of what often feels like unrelated anecdotes.  The glue that holds it together is Hyde’s celebration of forgetfulness. On a single page, Hyde summarizes Plato’s claim that an oral culture is best because knowing how to write “strips forgetfulness” from the minds of the people. 

“Relying on writing, they will cease to exercise imagination, calling things to mind no longer from the quick of present attention but from a past frozen in ink. What you have discovered is a recipe not for the mastery of living speech but for dead speech to master the living.”^⁠2 

The statement, “Dead speech to master the living,” seemed dead-on to me, reflecting to my jaded eye the true nature of today’s 24/7 media circus consisting mainly of political double-speak about how black is white and advertising brainwashing us to “shop until we drop.”At the same time, our world is imploding from income inequality, escalating wars, and climate doom.

Maybe Plato was right: Perhaps our most unheralded trait is the most important: our unequaled ability to dance spontaneously in the present moment. Unfortunately, during our Modern age, this essential human spark has been lacquered over with an impenetrable layer of media, written and otherwise. 

It’s like we have become encased in amber, like those fossils we visit in the museum.

To regain our mojo, it is necessary to go back to the future: Forget (delete) the chirping virtual crickets projected upon us by our new high-tech masters and, instead, seek out actual crickets as Thoreau did, singing in the present an authentic “earth song.” 

Today, going back to the future means revisiting science!

Old science could be viewed as part of the problem, doing its part to encase our living world into an impenetrable armor of abstract facts and blockish equations. Science today is different: it is flying high, pursuing theories dealing with relativity, quantum mechanics, and complexity –  not static notions from the past but the infinite probabilities that exist in the present moment.^⁠3

Contemporary science rejects the notion that we are living beings moving about on this rock called Earth. Instead, we are “Earth itself, whose atoms have self-organized to form these transitory beings that think of themselves as self-sufficient and separate from each other, even though they only ever arose from and will inevitably return to the atomic substance of the planet?”^⁠4

As Neil Theise states in Notes on Complexity: “At the atomic scale, each one of us is both our own separate self and, in complementarity, also just walking, talking Earth.^⁠5”

David Henry Thoreau would certainly agree.

xxx

¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/23/opinion/henry-david-thoreau-time-crickets.html

² Hyde, Lewis. A Primer for Forgetting (p. 285). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

³ https://nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/notes-complexity-scientific-theory-connection-consciousness-bookbite/42793/#:~:text=Complexity%20is%20the%20scientific%20theory%20of%20life.&text=While%20the%20two%20more%20famous,see%20in%20our%20everyday%20lives.

⁴ –Theise, Neil. Notes on Complexity (p. 73). Spiegel & Grau. Kindle Edition

⁵ Ibid.

Being blind doesn’t mean you can’t see

Butterfly in my garden

I had an epiphany reading about how a blind man could still see – and, surprisingly, in a more profound way.  Stephen Kuusisto enlightened me about this in his memoir, Planet of the Blind, as described by the poet Mark Doty.

“Kuusisto describes a moment in Grand Central Station when he and his guide dog have just gotten themselves lost in the great urban hive of transport. Steve sees a dark, suggestive blur of shapes and colors…His dog is new to the intricate passageways of the station, crowded with ranks of commuters… Steve could reasonably be terrified. Instead, he reports this as an occasion of pleasure, a perceptual adventure; both he and his companion animal are exhilarated, and having, as we say, the time of their lives.”^⁠1

My revelation was that while blindness can indeed be an occasion for adventure, so can growing old! 

Like the suggestive blur on Steve’s retina in Grand Central Station, the accelerating cacophony of incoming images I encounter each day arouses me, even though they flash by too quickly for my old mind to read the fine print. If I don’t panic at this barrage of strangeness – if instead, I take a deep breath – then the sum of all this chaos can sometimes feel exciting and alluring, suggesting that something bigger than we can imagine is about to unfold. 

Samuel Beckett, perhaps the most famous  playwright of the 20^th century, confessed to experiencing something similar about growing old during a 1987 Paris Review interview with Lawrence Shainberg:

“It’s a paradox, but with old age, the more the possibilities diminish, the better chance you have. With diminished concentration, loss of memory, obscured intelligence—what you, I suspect, would call ‘brain damage’—the more chance there is for saying something closest to what one really is. Even though everything seems inexpressible, there remains the need to express. A child needs to make a sand castle even though it makes no sense to him. In old age, with only a few grains of sand, one has the greatest possibility.”^⁠2 

Beckett was seventy-four years old at the time. I’m 78. Perhaps we are discovering that putting words on things can keep us from envisaging a greater truth. Or, as the artist Robert Irwin has summed it up: “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.”^⁠3  

Why?

Because when I name something, I separate it from what comes before and after. Doing so puts the multiplicity of ongoing life on pause, turning it into a frozen fact. I've witnessed the consequences: Putting words on my awe at encountering a fluttering, kaleidoscopic butterfly, removes her from the immediacy of the now, pinning her forever, static and faded, in the museum of my mind.

Young children, on the other hand, have an uncanny intuition about the true nature of the cycles of life because they have yet to be separated from the rhythms of the universe. My son, when he was about four, declared with utter conviction something that mystified me at the time: “When I get big, you will become small again.”

Now I see the truth of his prediction.

xxx

¹ Doty, Mark. The Art of Description: World into Word (Art of...) (p. 4). Graywolf Press. Kindle Edition.

² Exorcising Beckett   Lawrence Shainberg

THE PARIS REVIEW NO. 104 Fall 1987

https://www.samuel-beckett.net/ShainExor1.html#:~:text=%22It%27s%20a%20paradox%2C%20but%20with,to%20what%20one%20really%20is.

³ https://tricycle.org/magazine/uselessness/

My Obsession with Hurricanes

Sky off Fort Foster
CC Jean Stimmell: 2013

As I write this, Lee, a major hurricane, is slowly churning northward off the eastern seaboard. While it’s too early to tell where it will make landfall, it now looks like it will at least brush New England. I am following the storm closely, coming as I do from a hurricane-obsessed family. 

Our weather addiction started with the hurricane of 1938 before computers existed to track storms. September 21st, 1938, started out like any other. No one knew that “one of the most destructive and powerful hurricanes in recorded history” was bearing down on us, according to The National Weather Service^⁠1.

The storm has been called New England’s Katrina; it had sustained winds of 120 mph with a maximum recorded wind gust of 186 mph at Blue Hill Observatory, MA. The peak storm surge was 17 feet above normal high tide and a 50’ peak wave height at Gloucester, MA. Across the region, 700 were killed and 8,900 homes and businesses destroyed, resulting in damages exceeding 41 billion (in 2010 dollars).^⁠2

Over the region, the hurricane destroyed an estimated two billion trees. The damage was still evident decades later in the woods behind my grandfather’s house where an entire mature pine forest was ripped asunder with the trunks haphazardly coming to rest against each other as if a giant had been playing a game of pick-up sticks.”

My father was mesmerized by this cataclysm materializing like black magic out of a blue-bird bright sky. It turned him into a weather nut. I remember growing up watching him, hunched over his crackly AM radio, monitoring the forecasts morning and night. He was not about to be caught with his pants down again.

According to my father’s calculations, he determined we should expect a hurricane every 20 years.  When I was nine, history seemed to be bearing  him out. In 1954, “A tropical one-two punch that was almost unimaginable hit New Hampshire,” according to WMUR TV.^⁠3

That’s when Hurricane Carol, a fast-moving hurricane following almost the same track as the Hurricane of 1938, ripped into us. Again, it arrived unannounced, as far as my mother, brother, and I were concerned. My father, away on a business trip, missed a chance to warn us – if, in fact, there was any official warning to give.

On that day, we had driven to Hampton to visit my grandmother on what we thought was just a run-of-the-mill, rainy day. But throughout the morning, the wind strengthened, getting serious by the time we started home.

My mother was a white-knuckle driver under the best of circumstances. This time, it was warranted. The old metal bridge spanning Great Bay was swaying back and forth in the wind as we crossed. Driving back through Northwood, trees were toppling over along Route 4.

Then, just 12 days later, Hurricane Edna slammed into NH with sustained winds over 60 mph. The ground, already weakened by Carol, added to the damage, bringing down even more trees and power lines.

That’s when the hurricane bug was passed on to me. But now, much of my enthusiasm has fizzled.

Back then, we were innocent bystanders, standing in awe of the transcendent power of Mother Nature. Now, we are all co-conspirators who are responsible for adding to the destruction destined to rain down upon us through our short-sighted daily actions.

xxx

¹ https://www.weather.gov/okx/1938HurricaneHome

² ibid.

³ https://www.wmur.com/amp/article/timeline-history-of-nh-hurricanes/5169483

 

Secondary Passions Promote Beginner’s Mind

A child is open to many possibilities
while the expert sees only a few*

I thought I had retired as a psychotherapist, but I continued on by other means writing a column every week for the Concord Monitor. While I told myself I just liked to write, at a subconscious level,  I was trying to bring together warring factions in our polarized community in the same manner I had labored in my practice to reconcile the feuding parts of a patient's personality.

To accomplish that goal, I tried to be even-handed, although I admit that sometimes, I lost my head and joined the fray. Recently, I decided to take a break after it finally dawned on me that I was still working, still chained to my desk, just substituting one job for another.

Now, having space and time in my life again, I have found myself returning to photography, another long-time passion of mine – and enjoying every minute of it. Right now, I'm in the process of trying to get juried into two upcoming exhibitions. 

At that point by chance –  although Carl Jung would call it synchronicity – I came across an article in the Boston Globe with an absurdly long title describing precisely what I was feeling and doing:  “The counterintuitive rewards of not being very good at something: Devoting ourselves to a secondary pursuit sparks flow in the work we consider our primary purpose.”^⁠1

This essay is by the prominent author Adam Gopnik who attributes his writing success to his secondary passion: his love of cooking – "the one that fuels all others." Of course, to liken myself to Adam Gopnik is like comparing a dog tick to a bald eagle. That's why I need to make clear I'm only comparing the role secondary passions play in our lives.

My primary passion for a long stretch of my life was psychotherapy: It has been my greatest honor and privilege to be allowed into another person's secret inner world, to team together to find a way out of their constricted, self-constructed maze. At the same time, my secondary passions were equally essential to my success, boosting my creative thinking and preventing burnout, working, as I did, primarily with patients with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from war and sexual abuse. 

Photography has always been my secondary passion, starting when I built a darkroom in my parent’s basement while a teenager. Writing, my other passion only appeared on my horizon when, as a returning Vietnam veteran, I was attempting to make sense of my feelings about the war and my country’s reaction to it.

For me, it is always such a rush when I create a photograph that stirs my soul or, when writing, to sweet-talk my words into an artful embrace. Gopnik expresses the euphoria this way:

“This moment, not of self-possession but of rapturous self-loss, is one of the strongest cognitive opiates human beings produce. There are many opiates available to inject into our veins; this is one that we produce ourselves and self-inject into our brains."

Gopnik compares this experience to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ’s concept of  “flow,“ a state, familiar to most of us, where we lose ourselves and find happiness in an all-absorbing activity.” Gopnik makes a key observation that this sensation is more likely to happen when pursuing our secondary passions,  not our primary one. Why is this?

For me, Shunryu Suzuki provides the answer: he was the Japanese priest who is credited with popularizing Buddhism in America. One can almost encapsulate his whole philosophy in his now, oft-repeated statement: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few."^⁠2

What he is advocating is letting go of our preconceptions and, instead, cultivating an attitude of openness toward life. When you are a true beginner, your mind is empty and open. That's what my secondary passions do for me: Allowing me to become like a child again, seeing the world as full of possibilities.

It’s a good exercise to pursue, especially in these times when so many experts are predicting only doom-and-gloom.

xxx

¹ https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/06/29/opinion/adam-gopnik-ingres-violin-creative-flow/?et_rid=1947323415&s_campaign=todaysheadlines:newsletter

² Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice

The Donald Show

The exact origin of the God Emperor Trump character is unclear. On June 16th, 2015, an image of Trump's face photoshopped on to a Warhammer 40,000 soldier was submitted to 4chan's /pol/[1] board 
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1696628-god-emperor-trump

The Donald Show

Remember “The Truman Show,” the hit movie starring Jim Carrey about “a man who grew up living an ordinary life that—unbeknownst to him—takes place on a large set populated by actors for a television show about him.”^⁠1 

Everybody knew the truth except Truman, who was tricked into thinking it was real. We now have the opposite situation with our current blockbuster, “The Donald Show:” The star knows it is fake, but he has duped the rest of us into believing it is real.

Trump, the canny sideshow hustler, understands what the talking heads don’t: You dazzle your audience with a good story, not learned treatises or artful commentary.

As David Loy, a professor and Zen teacher, explains in his book, “The World is Made of Stories^⁠2,” we make sense of the world through stories: they “teach us what is real, what is valuable, and what is possible.” In a word, it is by stories we make sense of the world. 

Telling stories is the life blood of Donald Trump.

Trump’s master story is that he is an outsider who doesn’t get the respect he deserves. It is a tale that can take you a long way. Just ask Rodney Dangerfield: it was the essence of his schtick.

It’s easy to be taken in by this particular story. Whether we admit it or not, we all feel like Rodney or Donald to one degree or another. Thump has built his whole political career on it, empowering not only himself but giving voice to millions across the country who feel victimized and under-appreciated. 

Donald has become their maestro, the master storyteller they tune into each night to discover the latest chapter in his saga – and theirs.

While Rodney provoked laughter in his audience at our foibles, Donald ignites anger and fear: Anger at the faceless “deep state” which has brought them to their knees and fear of the “godless, communist democrats,” who are lying in ambush, ready to finish them off. 

It is the classic plot of fairy tales and comic strips. The people cry out in their distress for a super hero, that one person who can save them by doing battle with their enemies. In westerns films, that is when Clint Eastwood rides into town.

In Donald’s fairytale world,  the super hero is, of course, himself, something he has regally proclaimed  since descending his golden escalator in 2016, vowing  to solve all of America’s alleged problems. How? Because of who he is: “I am your voice. I alone can fix it.” 

Of course, the idea that “one person could solve the myriad troubles we face today is absurd and deeply undemocratic, but one can understand the temptation to buy into that fantasy. It is a soothing fiction that someone will swoop in to save the day^⁠3, says Alison Danes, a professor of political science.

Danes talks about Donald’s fantasies while I talk about his fairytales. We are not alone.

A professor emeritus and fairy tale expert, Jack Zipes, agrees, “There is a fairy tale-like aspect to all his talk and presentation, because he wants to take charge of the narrative. Most fairy tales are stories about hope. Whether he does it consciously or not, Trump has found a way to narrate a story in which he is the star.”

But nothing lasts forever.

All shows have to come to an end, and “The Donald Show” is no exception. America has become exhausted by his nonstop bluster and litany of endless grievances. I predict he will soon get his just deserts, precisely as Hans Christian Anderson predicted in his fairytale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

While Trump, running for president again, is strutting around in his “perfect,” new-look finery – which is actually the same as his old – some brave Republican will summon the courage to finally blurt out the truth: The emperor is wearing nothing at all.

xxx

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show

^{2 2}David Loy, “The World is Made of Stories, page 3.

³ https://www.mischiefsoffaction.com/post/the-comedic-stylings-of-donald-j-trump

Something Snapped

 

CC Jean Stimmell: Ice breaking up on Exeter River (2017)

I was struck by a recent essay by Timothy Denevi in the NYT about the writer Joan Didion.^⁠1  On the surface, it seems strange that I should be so affected because Didion was a conservative supporter of Barry Goldwater and distrustful of the Kennedys. On the other hand, I am an unabashed child of the Sixties who, while growing up, was inspired by President Kennedy's inaugural address challenge: "Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.^⁠2

Something snapped in me when Robert Kennedy, JFK’s brother, was assassinated: I  found myself sobbing uncontrollably as I watched the news unfold. His death was too much to bear: I see now it was the final straw, causing an irreparable rip in the fabric of America I had been taught to believe in.

Something snapped in Joan Didion, too, despite our differences. As RFK lay dying, his last words were, “Is everybody OK?”^⁠3

Neither of us was – along with a lot of other people.

It was the final blow in the sickening series of assaults on our image of what America stood for in the aftermath of the murders of MLK, Malcolm X, and President JFK, not to mention America’s massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai and Charley Manson’s California killing spree.

It caused Joan Didion to have a mental breakdown, “an attack of vertigo, nausea and a feeling that she was going to pass out,” for which she underwent an extensive psychiatric evaluation and was prescribed amitriptyline, an antidepressant."^⁠4 As for me, recently back from the rivers of Vietnam, it completely unmoored me from the reality of what my country represented, catapulting me on a crazy drunken ride through the frenzied times that lay ahead.

Didion was a master storyteller detailing how the unprecedented changes of the 1960s caused America to fragment, according to  Michiko Kakutani of the NYT.  She questioned whether our nation would survive, quoting lines from Yeat’s famous poem: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”^⁠5

Of course, the center did hold – but at a high cost: The rabid polarization that divided us in the 1960s caused social fractures that didn't heal. Whereas previously, our nation was like a new puncture-proof tire guaranteed for 50,000 miles, we were now an out-of-balance retread, patched with distrust. 

“It turns out that Didion was also remarkably prescient in writing about the fracturing of truth as people increasingly filtered reality through the prism of their own prejudices”^⁠6  It was only a matter of time before these wounds reopened. And indeed, they have:  once again, we are living through times of chaos and uncertainty, contending with epidemics, insurrection, racial hatred, and mass shootings in our schools.

Yet this time around, I am too old to snap – only sag further. But with age sometimes comes wisdom, and in that spirit, I will suggest what has been lost: our sense of community – the linchpin that really made America great.

Again, I find common ground with Joan Didion: In an interview before she died, she acknowledged that folks “no longer count themselves as part of the community.” Too many Americans “didn’t really care about any of it; the broader narrative of patriotism and pride was just an excuse for doing what they wanted — for their self-interest — a narrative they could apply and discard from one situation to the next as they saw fit.”^⁠7

One thing that would help revive our sense of community is mandatory national service. 

Here's an example from my own life I've written about before. On one occasion, my ship had a major crew turnover: almost a quarter of the crew was new. On our return trip back to the rivers of Vietnam, "all hell broke loose in a crude kind of diversity training, representing as we did, a cross-section of the nation: East coast, highly educated, college dropouts and midwestern kids who hadn't finished high school; hip city slickers and country folks right off the farm; We had Native American, Hispanic, and black sailors, along with staunch segregationists from the south.”^⁠8

At first, fights and animosity reigned, but we were thrown together in a situation where we had no choice but to work together: As we got to know each other, we learned that underneath, we were more alike than different. It was no love fest, but we came to respect one another. Most importantly, we had an overarching dedication to a common purpose, prompting us to do our jobs like well-oiled machines.   

Don’t mistake my example as an endorsement for war. The Peace Corps is a perfect example of mandatory national service. So is working in a  hospital, cleaning up after a natural disaster, planting trees, or pulling the detritus of our consumer society out of our dying rivers.

Joan Didion is right: Without a sense of community, things will continue to fall apart and, this time, maybe the center won’t hold.

xxx

¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/opinion/joan-didion-mystery-rfk.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20230609&instance_id=94592&nl=todaysheadlines&regi_id=30753738&segment_id=135085&user_id=273ae8c1ede4fde7d59a2b0627accb92

² https://www.jfklibrary.org/sites/default/files/2018-06/Ask_not_what_your_country_can_do_for_you.pdf

³ https://www.10tv.com/article/news/nation-world/man-who-heard-robert-kennedys-last-words-when-he-was-teen-dies-california/530-7ced5556-644c-483d-8408-761dcacdd7e6

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/24/opinion/joan-didion-books.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

⁶ Ibid

⁷ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/opinion/joan-didion-mystery-rfk.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20230609&instance_id=94592&nl=todaysheadlines&regi_id=30753738&segment_id=135085&user_id=273ae8c1ede4fde7d59a2b0627accb92

⁸ http://jeanstimmell.blogspot.com/2022/03/one-for-all-all-for-one.html