Learning to Love Later in Life (eBook)

A Teaching Memoir

James Richard Krum (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
164 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-8558-3 (ISBN)

Infos

Gaining freedom from conditioned behaviors and mastering new ways of behaving is the storyline of the book. As a 'teaching memoir,' periodically readers are prompted to ' pause, and ponder' how what they are reading relates to their lives. And, at the end, readers are encouraged to create a roadmap to change their own lives. Telling the author's life story, the book is broken into several parts including 'Living Among the Dead,' 'Reflections on My Forty-three Year Marriage' which includes a section on 'What It Was Like Being married to Me,' and 'Finding Love in my Eighties.' The roadmap includes sections on understanding what it is to be human and becoming aware of barriers to love. It ends with sections on 'The Practice of Love' and putting together the pieces of a puzzle to change one's life.

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If you are attracted to the title, you may be divorced as I am and looking for love later in life. In this book I share what I have learned about love which is working in a relationship that began when I was eighty and a beautiful woman, also divorced, walked into my life and stayed. The followed points summarize what Mary Anne and I have learned about love and are practicing in our life together. Rumi: "e;Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find the barriers within yourself that you have built up against it."e;Love is found at our deepest level of being and flourishes in the present moment. The human egoic mind represents the greatest barrier to love. Experiencing love ascends beyond the cognitive mind state through a mystical process. Awakening is the Buddhist term for accessing the mystical mind state. Awakening our Buddha nature --pristine multisensory awareness--leads to practicing loving kindness and generosity. Who we are results from interactions between our DNA and our life experiences, our nature and our nurture. As humans, we experience a dark side which is the antithesis of love. Simply recognize your demons for what they are, fleeting images from your dark side, and let them fade away.Don't identify with these negative thoughts and feelings because they are not who you are. Loving relationships have the capacity to heal our wounds. We are all addicted to some substance or belief.Co-dependence is a common addiction in relationships. Meaningful change results from owning the addiction and making a commitment to overcome it withthe guidance of one's higher power. Our values determine how we use our time and resources with generosity and greed being polar opposites. The latter is a major barrier to love. Before we can change our values, we must recognize and question them. Are they ego-centric or benevolent and loving?Because feelings and emotions tend to cause our reactions to events unconsciously, we must become conscious of our unique repressed emotions that create barriers to love. The ability to accept life's many contradictions with serenity is critical to learning to love. The ego-centric mind and the loving heart represent opposites. As it requires a conscious effort and time to understand yourself, a similar conscious effort must be made to know your partner's potential and his/her wounds that your love has the capacity to heal. A relationship is an organic entity with a life of its own. If not nurtured, it will die. "e;Stop. Look. Listen,"e; the caution often seen at a railroad crossing, is a good metaphor for loving communication which is critical to creating a loving relationship. Don't criticize, compliment. We live moment to moment. Accepting the reality of each moment and loving it works better than denying it. This does not mean it can't be changed in a future moment. In short, be here now. Creating a sense of oneness, an I-Thou relationship, shrinks the tension of the opposites and evolves over time as trust builds. If you have a desire to change and create a loving relationship, this "e;teaching memoir"e; will show you a roadmap which begins by recognizing your true nature and your unique barriers to love. Overcoming these barriers allows you to uncover the loving nature your were born with.

Textauszug

Chapter 1:
Living Among the Dead

Preface

Chapter 1 looks at my unusual childhood and adolescent years growing up as part of a business rather than as part of a cohesive family unit. I’m sure you have heard the term ‘family business.’ However, mine is the story of a business family. In essence, my early life was molded to meet the needs of my parents’ undertaking business. There were no boundaries between the business and our family and the needs of the business always came first. Being an undertaker is a 24/7/365 commitment. When a call comes in reporting a death, the business springs to action. It’s something like a 911 call reporting a fire. A sense of urgency pervaded our family life. This urgency, combined with never having bonded with my mother, whose primary job was managing the office of the business, has festered as a wound my whole life. These two factors had detrimental effects on my being a good husband and father, and were passed on to my children in subtle ways.

When M.B. Met Elsie

Enterprising businessman, widower with two small children, seeks eligible woman with bookkeeping skills and good community contacts.

If newspaper classified personal ads had existed during the mid-1920s, I imagine my father might have written the above advertisement in search of a new wife. M.B. stands for Mizpah Bean, my father’s first and middle names. Mizpah comes from the Bible, and Bean was his mother’s maiden name. My father was an only child.

Elsie Evans was a good candidate. She came from a large family and was a member of the Lutheran church in the town where M.B. had both his furniture store and his undertaking business. Elsie was a business school graduate. For her, M.B. Krum was a good catch. By temperament, they were opposites. M.B. was a risk-taker who was happiest when he had money borrowed from the bank to expand his business. Elsie kept track of the books and knew how stretched they were financially during the Great Depression when I was born in 1934. I have no idea whether I was planned or not. Being born is one of the few events in my life that I have not had to figure out and manage.

Take Him to the Funeral Home

For many people, their last ride is from the hospital to the funeral home. For me, it was my first ride. Living above the funeral parlor robbed me of my spontaneity and the freedom to be a normal child. I was left in the care of Martha, our live-in housekeeper, who had a large apartment to keep immaculate in addition to doing the cooking and the laundry and taking care of three other children. There was little time for me. As an infant, I must have cried, of course. Eleven years later, when my nephew lived with us as a baby, I can recall my father saying, “Can’t you keep that kid quiet?” Early in life, I learned that expressing emotions was not allowed. Eighty-seven years later, my emotions remain bottled up in my body causing anxiety. I still don’t cry. However, my anxiety shows up every day in subtle ways. Most mornings, I wake up with it.

As I’ve tried to understand my infant years, I’ve envisioned being “abandoned” by my mother when she left me with Martha and walked downstairs to the office of the funeral home which was her comfort zone. When my father’s first wife died giving birth to my brother, he hired Martha, a childhood friend, to take care of his two children. Thus, Martha was part of the household before my mother arrived a few years later. As far as I know, the existence of two mother figures in the family was not a source of conflict between them. They each had their role in the business family. If it created a confusing triangle for me, I have no memory of it. Martha became the anchor in my young life. As a youngster, I recall getting up in the middle of the night, walking past my parents’ closed bedroom door, through the kitchen to the other side of the apartment. I would go into Martha’s room, and say, “Marty, I’m scared.” Martha would get up and sit with me until I fell asleep.

Four statements Martha uttered while introducing me to others or putting limits on my behavior have had great impact on my life:

“This is Jimmie; he’s the baby of the family.”

“This is Jimmie; he’s a sickly child.”

“This is Jimmie; he’s just like his mother. Jean is like M.B.”

“Jimmie, you’ve got to be quiet; there’s a funeral on.”

All four statements were true. I was younger than my three siblings. While Jean was an extrovert, I was clearly introverted like our mother. I suffered from ear aches until my tonsils were removed when I was about three. Receiving ether to have a tonsillectomy was one of the scariest experiences of my life. It must have been like a near-death experience. I believe the joyous human spirit I was born with gave way to fear when I was three.

While my mother and I lived largely in the world of the business family, M.B.’s life was out in the world, including evenings spent playing cards with his cronies in their clubhouse with its beer cooler. Jean was clearly feistier and out in the world with her friends, like our father. Although we were born three years apart, I have no memories of having her as a playmate as a child.

Dinnertime in Our Business Family

We ate dinner in the middle of the day. The seven of us sat around the table in the kitchen. We only ate in the dining room on Sundays. With a funeral scheduled for 1:30, we had to eat and clean up before family and friends of the deceased arrived in the parlor below our apartment. After that, I had to tiptoe around to avoid being heard downstairs.

My father sat at the head of the table in his black suit and tie. To me, my father was larger than life. Although he completed only six years in a one-room schoolhouse plus a short course at embalming school, M.B. purchased the Rohland Funeral Home and with his entrepreneurial genius, personal warmth, and easy laugh, turned it into Lebanon County’s leading funeral home. Grayce, my older sister, and my mother sat across the table from my brother, Bob, and me. During the day, the only time I saw my mother was at the dinner table. At the other end of the table, my sister, Jean, and Martha sat across from the patriarch of the family.

If the phone rang during the meal, Elsie would jump up to answer it. Before returning to the table, she would call Charlie and Ed and tell them to go to the hospital to pick up a body. (In my life, body remains associated with the word ‘dead’.) Charlie, Ed, and Dick—the men who worked in the business family—were other influences in my young life. Of the three, Charlie was the only one I enjoyed spending time with.

I seldom said anything at the meal table. The conversation of the adults was about the families of the current residents of our hotel for the dead. With the weekly parade of local humanity through the morgue, slumber rooms, and onto the place of honor in the viewing area, there was never a lack of people to gossip about. If the conversation turned juicy or sensitive, the three adults switched to Pennsylvania Dutch, a form of low German, that I was never encouraged to learn.

At a very young age, I learned that pleasing women (Elsie and Martha) and not upsetting M.B. must be the focus of my life. I learned not to disturb the sensitive balance of our business family. I became a good boy but somehow lost myself in the process.

The Undertaker’s Two Sons

Bob was my half-brother, but I did not know that distinction as we were growing up. He was nine years older than me. Although we shared a bedroom until Bob enlisted in the Navy following Pearl Harbor, I have no memory of us spending time together there. After the war, Bob married his high school sweetheart and went to embalming school. Bob was the “crown prince,” always destined to become an undertaker. He walked through life in our father’s footsteps, both in the business and in the community. At the age of sixty-one, Bob suffered a stroke and retired before dying of cancer at 69. The last time I visited Bob and his wife in their apartment over the offices of the funeral home, they were sitting in a dark room watching television and smoking. I find it sad that Bob never broke out of our father’s shadow and went out to create and live his own life.

At the viewing before his funeral in 1995, I talked to a man who identified himself as Bob’s cousin. He said that when he came home from the Navy, Bob told him that he had reservations about becoming an undertaker. However, Bob did what was expected of him. A few years after his stroke, Bob visited me at my cottage in Maine. When I brought up the topic of our childhoods, Bob said, “We had unusual childhoods. I prefer not to think about mine.” I’m sure he was referring to growing up as part of the business family.

My contributions to the business began at age five or six. When a funeral was over, my mother would yell, “Ho Jim,” up the stairs. This was my cue to go down to the parlor to put the chairs and flower stands away and run the vacuum cleaner. Before graduating from college, I worked at the funeral home during the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 11.8.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Esoterik / Spiritualität
• ISBN-10: 1-0983-8558-6 / 1098385586
• ISBN-13: 978-1-0983-8558-3 / 9781098385583