A light in the winter dark

It is the cold dark bottom of the year here. I need light.

Winter came early here in New York State. Snow on freezing rain on snow left an un-skiable white weight on the fields. In December I was pouring salt on an ice dam on the roof. My beard iced up in my pre-dawn runs – doesn’t usually happen until January or February. My friends deemed my latest openDemocracy column uncharacteristically pessimistic. They didn’t all see the light at the distant end of the article.

One quote from 2003 stands out for me: the only real news is science news. It implies that everything else is the “same old” wars, lies, egos. A number of people I have known who are ‘spiritual’ regard it as incorrect to have faith in science. And postmodernists have been telling us for a while now that science is just another story. Bad science is just another story. But good science, science that increases knowledge, is more than this.

It seems like half the people I know are only alive today because of medical science, and last year I became one of them.

Good science is also one step closer to power – power to heal and kill, to blind and liberate. That’s why it’s news, and I agree it is not always good news.

Artists, postmodernists, writers, serious filmmakers pride themselves on looking unflinchingly at the world. They see the ways we are all selfish, callous, dishonest; the ways we make our own stories about the world that pretend to truth, but really just serve our own interests. In this bleak vision of the world power rules, and power is self-serving and bad.

I can’t live in a world like that. And as I look around, it doesn’t even seem true. All right, it’s got a lot of truth to it. But there are other facts that contradict the gloom induced by so-called ‘realism’ and give me hope.

There are people who have suffered yet who go ahead and do the generous thing for others. This too is realism. Writing about these people is as true as writing about the bullies and the victims. So I am going to write about my friend Heidi, who has had some of the worst experiences of anyone I know, and who gives as much to others as anyone I know.

I first heard of Heidi about a dozen years ago, when I was editing a sort of pre-internet list serve about the intense religious movement she and I were raised in. This was in many ways a good movement, and I have defended it often, but like many such its over-zealousness at times caused wounds, it had its witch-hunts, its dark side. Heidi wrote a stunning letter that broke silence on some of the cultic craziness her family had endured. She had grown up in the deep silent shadows cast by saints. Even those who had suffered and left, did not speak out. Heidi spoke out. And got severely criticized by some in our natal community.

We met in a café in San Francisco. She lived in sunny suburbs way out there, and appeared in what I took to be a housedress, a not entirely flattering garment. She was middle-aged, overweight and cheerful. I was in my post-hippie carpenter double-decade, wild of hair. I thought two more different people could hardly have been imagined. But we both knew the religious shadows. And we were closet writers.

She had a great manuscript on being a California farmer. She and her husband had treated the stream of illegal immigrants coming through as individuals worthy of respect, and fought battles on their behalf. The farm failed only after heroic efforts. The most arresting image was of her snake-crazy daughter appearing out of the fields with a snake that had caught its fangs in her eyelid and was dangling there – she just needed a little help getting it off.

We became fast friends, but in 1993 I left San Francisco for New York and we haven’t met since. Thanks to email, her bulletins never stopped.

I love Heidi’s ebullience as much as her truth-telling but you can’t correspond with her without being prepared for her jaw-dropping disasters. She had lupus, she fell down a flight of stairs and broke her neck and was in constant pain, she had operations that went wrong, she is constantly in and out of hospital. Her beloved husband got cancer, had an experimental bone marrow transplant and it all went wrong in horrible and painful ways, stretched out over months and years to his death. Her three vibrant and now adult daughters had more than their share of bad luck: a terrible assault, a husband with a brain tumor, a baby boy born blind and traumatised by so many painful operations that one wondered if the fight for sight was worth that training in mistrust of fellow humans (it appears now that it is – but that’s a story for another time). There were times when I could hardly bear hearing another Heidi bulletin of disaster. It seemed unreal. No family we knew in a peacetime country lived through so much.

But an unflinchingly realistic portrait of Heidi can’t stop at her disasters. Heidi breaks rules, and one of the primary rules she breaks as a middle-class suburban grandmother, is that she gives herself excessively to help hard-luck cases. Against the advice of friends, she has given so much away I can’t conceive how she has anything left. She has adopted an entire family of Iranians, political refugees who fetched up in her neighbourhood devastated by the loss of everything in Iran.

Hashim (not his real name) lived in his car for two years to save enough to bring out his wife and kids. He succeeded, but a young adult daughter was left behind, in serious danger. Heidi badgered politicians and diplomats mercilessly for years to get this girl out to Turkey, financed her there for a year while she waited for United States clearance, and finally reunited her with her family. Meanwhile Heidi started a restaurant with the family to enable them to earn their living, and went through a complete Heidi-esque catalogue of disasters with builders and food inspectors.

She says of the depressed affluent women she knows, obsessed with plastic surgery and diets, “Why are these people not out having a good time like I am?” She quotes Bette Midler: “I could die tomorrow, because I’ve lived to breed.” And adds, “After the kids, it’s all frosting.” Heidi’s frosting (icing on the cake, to speakers of British English) is having fun helping people.

She is working and spending money now to help a Russian immigrant get her two young daughters from Moscow: a horrible story in which the girls’ father, a drug addict, has neglected them to the point of severe malnutrition, the girls wild and uncontrollable, the four-year old the size of a two-year old, the ten-year old so skinny and weak she can’t walk. The father kept them locked up and fed on bread and water, spent all the money the girls’ mother sent from the US on drugs. The story goes on week by week as they try to get the girls passports, Heidi befriends and badgers US diplomats, on and on. Heidi has turned down other hard-luck immigrant cases – after her success with the Iranians, she has many requests. But she has stuck with the Russian woman.

When winter seemed heaviest last month, in came Heidi’s Christmas letter. Here, with her permission, are extracts. She starts by recalling the last Christmas she had with her husband, three years ago. They had a Christmas ritual of watching the Albert Finney version of A Christmas Carol. This year she watched it alone, and cried her way through (“I figure I get one night a year to indulge the grief”). Then she gives news of kids and thriving grandkids, and adds:

“I can contrast this to the little boy that I “adopted” as a grandchild seven years ago when he was in Kindergarten. He was in [granddaughter] Kara’s class at school and came covered in flea bites and ragged clothes. I got to know the family – a mentally ill mother and a paraplegic father who is unable to work. Every year I outfit him for school and every Christmas and birthday he knows he can count on me to do something special with him. I try to see him often, but he can absolutely count on having a grandmother remember him. The last few years my present to him has been the only one under the tree. I picked him up yesterday after breakfast and we had our special day together. We saw the last Lord of the Rings movie – terrific – then we went out to lunch together. I gave him a wallet with a hundred dollars in it and asked him where he would like me to take him to shop. He chose the grocery store. Every cent went for food and little trinket items for his mother. After he had spent his money, I took him to a Toys R Us to buy him a present for himself. I had to. He picked out something little, because he stated, “I don’t want you to spend too much.” I don’t do this to be nice. I am crazy about this ragged, smelly, fat kid. He has so much potential and all I can do is let him know how proud I am of his good report cards.

I have been spending hours on the phone to Russia again this week with a major dilemma with the Red Cross travel documents for Lola’s children. Her mother told the Red Cross that she was expecting Uzbek passports for the children, so the Red Cross canceled their work on the documents. The Uzbek government kept the $4,000 bribe and refused the passports. Now the US Embassy says it will be March before the Department of Foreign Affairs in Moscow will give their permission. On hearing this, the grandmother decided to send the children back to the drug-addicted father in Uzbekistan to wait until March. Lola called me hysterically at one in the morning. The grandmother had seriously “lost it” in the snow and one room apartment with the wild, sick children. It took a long time to convince her that any place in Moscow was better than sending them back to their father. It took a fortune and months to bribe him to let them go. If they returned, Lola would never see her children again. To condense a long saga, Lola’s sister has come from Uzbekistan to care for the kids in an apartment the American Embassy helped locate outside of Moscow. The stressful thing is that she is brain damaged from when a burglar came in her home and finding her there beat her head in. She has emotional control issues and epileptic seizures. Lola’s mother is flying home tomorrow. Needless to say, Lola is a wreck. She is seven months pregnant so she can not fly over there. Besides, she has no passport as a political asylee. It is difficult dealing with the Russian government, and Immigration, but throwing Lola’s dysfunctional family into the mix has made it almost impossible. It makes all of my family seem so wonderfully normal and happy.

Hashim and his family are doing well right now, although Mohammad [teenage son] still doesn’t leave the apartment except for school. [He was beaten up in a racial attack, his eye socket broken, concussed]. I have invited them over for Christmas Eve – my Muslim family sharing Christmas with me. Mohammad said he wasn’t sure he would come. I told him he had to, or I would have my feelings hurt. He has reluctantly agreed. I am wracking my brain trying to think what I will fix for dinner. All my American dishes are so boring compared to Iranian dishes.

Hashim knows everyone’s name and life stories at the restaurant. We have about fifty “regulars” who come every day. Over the holiday season they are leaving $20 tips for their sandwiches or coffee. Hashim turns around and spends it on the homeless. I think instead of a business, he is becoming the local therapist. One day last week I took over for him for a few hours while he did banking, and an elderly man, a regular, came in and when Hashim wasn’t there, he almost burst into tears. He waited two hours for Hashim to come back. What is so touching to me is that Hashim genuinely cares. He calls me up to tell me who he is worried about. When I mention the bottom line of profit, Hashim discounts me with, “God will take care of that.” So far, God has.

I hope all of you have a holiday season as filled with joy and love as mine. Hugs from me to each of you. Love, Heidi”

All that is realism too. It happens. People love and care and pass it on. They are everywhere. They don’t find the pain of the world’s condition cause for despair. They find the pain of individual human beings cause for rolling up their sleeves and doing something. They are Muslims and Christians and members of every other religion and none. Medical science has kept Heidi alive, as it has kept countless others alive. But that kind of progress alone is not what gives me the most hope. It’s the people who care and who act from that care who give me faith for the future.

You can respond to Dave Belden’s column or add your own reflections here.