frank after his life: journal 2001

frank after his life work & days: a lifetime journal project

Vancouver BC, January-May 2001

Edited extracts from my journal for the first half of 2001.

18th January

I was lying awake an hour ago in the dark remembering Oma Konrad and Clearbrook Road. I was seeing the house, the brown radio on the corner of the counter next to Opa's chair at the kitchen table. The feeling of their success, that house and land, young people driving up and parking on the yard, fruit trees, nut trees, grape vines, currant bushes, bright floors and a dining room window to the south. How they made that wealth from nothing, with eight children, in thirty years. Oma's humor and Opa's command. The clean order their work achieved.

When I was thinking of it I felt something for an instant. It was as if the center of gravity of the time and place. I felt something drop in my body. Then I thought of Grandpa Epp's place in that time and felt it drop further. This is not sayable.

January 20th

What do I know about drugs. To be in a state of fullness needs moral action of great bravery. If one fails in that, one is cut off from joy and exploration, which is unbearable, so then inner and outer drugging. The solution to a drug problem is only and ever always everywhere personal courage. Person by person. Drugs should be legalized and people should trust life and tell the truth.

January 27th

I don't want to be awake. It's only four, black and clammy.

I was with Frank. He was showing me pages of a story. Then later he came back saying he had smoked a big joint. He seemed stupefied. I gathered my few things. I guess I'll leave. He's indifferent. See you. Then I'm walking around looking for my car. What I felt with Frank was that he was cutting himself back.

Waking from this I feel I'm in a drugged state.

February 14

My mom phoned to say Frank killed himself in the middle of January, the 19th. The funeral was the 24th. He'd been in the psych ward, had shock treatment. His marriage broke up some years ago. His two sons weren't at the funeral. He was 60.

February 16th

When I lay down this afternoon a sore heart for Frank that I hadn't felt until then. I was holding out my arms to him, to his young body. It was his body I was grieving and wanting to comfort. I was seeing his chest and shoulder, the round sweet muscle.

He had to have hated his story to end it that way. It is an end that hates his children, his parents, everyone. He was happy with me. He was happy in the time he knew me. He loved me, himself. He loved his family. He loved his friend Marvin. He loved to walk out into the valley to see Mt Baker in the southeast, a white pile on the valley's rim.

February 17

He was twenty one when I met him, five years older than me. There was always a strong physical field between us. I would feel it from across the room.

His ironic Fraser Valley voice. The ironic curl of his mouth. His stubs of thick eyelashes. His brown wrists. The way he walked in his loose work pants and moccasins. The way we'd stand and hold each other quietly and then he'd want to crush me.

He was five foot eight, strong. He wanted to be tall. He looked beautiful, dangerous, in a suit. He would sometimes smoke a cigarette. He got kicked out of Christian high school.

The red truck in the rain. His guns. His woods and fields.

He liked to drive. He impressed me driving with one hand, shifting gears through the spokes of the steering wheel.

He was the oldest in his family, like me. They farmed on Ross Road. His father was a silver-haired man, the choir director. He had two sisters and two brothers. His mother looked harsh I thought, thin-lipped.

Er ist trauherzich my Grandma Epp said.

He loved me in a moment to moment way I miss. He loved my being in the moment. He was the only lover I've had who knew where I came from. He knew my grandparents, the farm, my parents when they were young, my brothers and sister when they were kids, my country. He was fond. "You have a kind of lassie quality," he said when I wore the green nylon blouse. The fond daily voice of his letters. The easy lucid way we belonged together.

For my 18th birthday, after we broke up, he sent twelve carnations without a card.

What was Frank's weakness? He'd often say he wanted to take a gun and just head into the wilderness. I knew he wouldn't. He had rebellion but he didn't have certainty. He wavered about the church, went back to it. "I thought they might have some answers." He had love but he took shortcuts into scorn. He didn't have a passion to learn. He wanted to sneer at DPs and rail at people on welfare. He had a streak of anger and melancholy. He'd think everything was going to the bad. His sister Judy getting pregnant, his sister Margaret marrying a Frenchman, Marvin getting married and being controlled by his wife. When he was down I would sink with him and then he'd cheer himself up by cheering me up.

We slept together in the back corner cabin at Dyck's berry farm years after we'd broken up. I was there alone when the other pickers had left to go back to school. He'd arrive at nightfall with a bag of grapes. We'd be in the bottom bunk with the hotplate glowing. He'd put the condoms through a knothole in the floor. His truck was parked behind an evergreen hedge. He'd leave at daybreak. Later he said it was a splurge of time but I don't think so. It was true. I felt the immensity of the sky as I never had, when I ran naked to the outhouse through the dew.

I said I wouldn't marry and I never did. I'd often dream him. If he were alive in an afterlife and I could talk to him, I'd want to say I didn't forget him, I didn't spoil my time with him. I thought it would be like that for him too, a well of goodness that would keep him going.

What did he want to kill in himself? The woman, it says. He shut down, he didn't stay connected to his sources.

February 21

My cohort. Frank and Janeen. I thought of the stream of bubbles blown from a wire loop, all perfect, all reflecting the whole world, all journeying forth, some larger, some blown further forward in the first puff, some wandering up, some sinking to the grass, some sailing confidently across the road, each popping suddenly out of existence, some much sooner.

I felt Janeen's death differently. I felt the death of her voice. Her wonderful gusts and lulls. I hear it now.

With Frank, I was grieving a death that came before he died, I was grieving his fond quirkiness, his young soul.

[I phone Frank's sister Margaret.]

He lost his farm in a divorce settlement when he was 45, a while after I last saw him, which might have been 1976 or 1977.

The day he died he was calm, Marj said. He sat with her and watched a Christian broadcast on TV. When she went to her volunteer job at the school he asked when she'd be back. She said she had a chiropractor appointment at 2. Throughout the morning he answered the phone when it rang. Three people spoke to him, the last at 1:30. One of them was his sister Judy.

He put on his jeans and work boots and his old blue jacket. He set the stepladder next to some of his stuff stored in the garage, honey from his bees. The coroner said it was an expert hanging. He used electrical cord and tied eight knots.

The psychiatrist said he was very intelligent and therefore hard to help.

Talking to Marj I said mm encouragingly and tried to listen through what she wanted to say. She said, You couldn't bullshit Frank. Tell him the truth or don't say anything at all. I said I didn't think it had ever occurred to us to bullshit each other, there wasn't any need.

She didn't want me to talk to Sharon. She thinks Sharon would tell lies about him.

Last October he arrived one morning in a terrible state, she said. He had dreamed that he hanged himself. She took him to the clinic. He had electroshock six times in October and November. When he came home he said he couldn't remember right. "I'm finished," he said.

March 22nd

Albie Sachs on Ideas on CBC. The men around him are cultural men; he is a political man. He speaks clearly and joyfully about the possibilities of committed life. He said the conflict was between patriarchy and intimacy. "In many ways things have improved."

April 16

It's Frank's birthday. I read some of his letters last night. Turquoise ink corner to corner on the paper, no margins, small pointed writing. This time through I am watching for early signs, and find them, but it is still their naturalness and affection I feel. They still warm and support me. He is a farm boy living at home, going to school, sitting late at night with the radio, telling his life. My letters to him were less natural, and yet he trusted me. They established trust. I am wanting to write to him, or about him or for him. I'm more natural now, I'd be able to meet him better.

That he is gone and his letters can still affect me. What I thought last night was that it's his state then, the state not the person - I haven't recovered the thought. My friends die before they die. His state survives him in the letters, but it didn't survive in him. He became unbearable to himself.

Is Frank truly and totally gone? Yes.
Is there anything I should do? Yes, let the delayed energy of loss come through.
I am quite numb to loss. Yes.
Has it been delayed ever since I lost him? Yes.
Do you want a sentence? Get an overview by sharing pleasure in the structure of coming through.
Do you mean mine? No, his.
Was his affection his weakness? No his cynicism was.
Were we in touch when he died? No.
Sometimes, though. Yes.

When I think of writing something for Frank, about him, I don't feel there is a truth to be told, I feel unformed space. If I wrote I'd draw a line behind me. There would be something made. Make something not about him or for him but something else. What? It is not a gift to him, though it would like to be. It is not a memorial because what people would remember would not be him. It would record his state, which was a core state, simple, true, generous, lonely, afraid, trusting, sharp and good.

Frank after his life.

I spend the day reading his letters, copy some of them, and then am tired of it. I run into rants about communism, welfare and the ungrateful French. I think of him as affectionate but often he's peevish. He improved when he went back to school.

April 17

I had the day off yesterday and this morning am still with Frank's young-man life, 21 in 1961. What it was like for him. His writing is strong in spots but it is not strong enough to carry a book. The life itself is what I remember, farm work, teaching Sunday school, Marvin. Seen now it is a right-wing life, guns, church, rage at taxes, and at the same time he's listening to Brahms, reading Jane Austen, feeling fear at the rush of celestial galaxies.

April 21

These evenings I am transcribing bits from Frank's letters. What am I learning. I'm noticing his style more as I transcribe it. He leaves out periods, capitals, possessives. He says f or x rather than I, and then settles on the lower case i. He's a young crank, though he's very sociable: sleeping on a hard mattress with no pillow, adoring his guns. He loves the weather. Yearning love for Marvin. Fishing and hunting. He's there in his basement room reading Pride and prejudice with pleasure while his rifles stand company in the corner, smelling of gun oil. He's interested and autonomous, quirky. He doesn't shut off. When he misses me he is in real pain. It's a staying-behind life, he finds a book by a man who uses science to prove creation by god. He doesn't leave home, ever, his own farm is across the road from his parents', he dies just a few miles from there. He's affectionate but he's patriarchal too. He says I shouldn't read Brave new world, though he has. There are words he can use I shouldn't use, he thinks.

Is there any of this I didn't know. I can feel him. I know - I believe I know - what it felt like to be him, a wry ardour. He's more intelligent and original than I knew, more frightened of himself than I could imagine. Both intrepid and afraid. Should I go on trying to imagine his life?

It's not obvious what I could make, is it obvious to you? Yes.
Is there something you'd like to tell me? Yes, reserve, loss, masculinity, money.
Those are the themes. Yes.
Was there central loss? Yes.
Will you tell me of what? Conflict, feeling, growth, friendship.
Had he already lost them when I knew him? YES.
It seems to me he had them all, do you mean he had begun to lose them? Yes.

Do you want to say more? Despair, judgment, early love, illusion.
Still listing? Yes.
Did he have a central illusion? Alone, heartbreak, work, community.
That he alone was heartbroken at work and in the community. Yes.
Is that like lacking compassion? Yes.
It's about my father too. Yes.

April 23

How to proceed. Stay with the feeling. I don't know very much about his places. Or his tasks. I know where it begins. He's putting on his work boots. There's the moment he stands on the step ladder before kicking it over. I know where it ends, he drives off the yard.

Is it a tragedy? No, a life.
Was he correct in believing he was finished? Yes.
Killing himself was the correct thing to do. Yes.

Was he much more than I knew? YES.
Will you say in what sense? No.
Is it there in his letters? No.
Coming out of the Mennonites. YES.
He stayed on the border. YES.
It was unbearable. Yes.

April 24

Frank's tirades of unconsidered political opinion. In his letters to my folks, many numbers, the weight of fish he catches, the number of months the trees were in cold storage, the horsepower of tractors. I saw something I hadn't realized, that Mennonite isolation had given the men a sense of command in the world, and when the culture had to open up men like Frank were in a fury of insufficiency. They knew nothing, they had no hold. He wants to be competent and in any larger space he's not. I had a ticket. He didn't. He went for land ownership. He would have had competence in the church community but at the cost of believing lies. His dreams of escaping were dreams of escaping from felt insufficiency. Marvin contained him. I eluded him. He respected that. He showed me his best because I didn't want anything from him. He was a person with a native hunger for friendship. My father never had a friend.

Is the conservative thing about competency? Yes.
This is centrally about mind and land. Yes.
How to have communities of competence in the land. Yes.
What works against connection. Yes.

-

What a mixed day. I wrote this morning and started the next chapter but then sat with my journal, June to December 1961, and did not leave it until I'd got through it.

Frank's father once whipped him with a "rubber cord," an electrical cord, I assumed. The mental pain, he said.

The story of my meeting with Frank was riveting. He was a bold electric straight-up thing and I met him with keen clear interest. Another thing is the way the waters parted around us. I had no idea of it at the time, but now I see we were something for everybody who knew us. And then, too, the way I did not lose my head. I took note. I didn't hide and I calculated it through. I was on a roll before I met him. I was mopping everything up. As for Frank, I kept exclaiming as I read, he was so neat.

April 25

Do you want a sentence? Reserve struggling to graduate into overview.
Was my reserve correct? Yes.
Is there a but ? YES process struggle between feeling and intelligence.
That's what I was doing. Yes.
I acted on intelligence and observed feeling. Yes.
That was my necessary device. Yes.
Another sentence? Loss, loneliness, withdrawal, conflict.
You're telling me there was a cost. Yes.
I was lost for years after. Yes.

It was a withdrawal from love woman. YES.
That's why I look at my university years as if they were nothing. Yes.
I did not any more attract men of heart. YES.
And haven't again until now. YES.
Butter and eggs. Yes.
More? Process, to graduate, to writing, intelligence.
Teach love woman to write. Yes.
Did she stay that age? YES.
Do you want to tell me how? Overview, delay, child's, truth.
See how it connects to delayed child's truth? Yes.
It was my device with my mom. Yes.
I went to intelligent overview . Yes, have excluded child come through and learn mutuality.
That's what writing about Frank is for. Yes.

The human connection was right, the social context was wrong. YES.
I had to close my heart because given the context it would have been used to trap me. YES.
But the cost was very high. YES.
That's the story for both of us. YES.
The way it was when I said goodbye to him tells me what my open heart was like. Yes.
I was in the wilderness emotionally for thirty years. Yes.
Frank and I was the realest relationship in my life. Yes.

I have come through. YES.
I couldn't write because my heart was closed. Yes.
And is it still? Yes.
Tom's heart is opening, opening. Yes, be honest and act to write despair.
Do I need Joyce for that ? No, persist in the excluded gifts of loss.
I don't know how to get to them. Shatter the structure by struggling to process intelligence.
The Frank project .... Yes.

Grieving for my friends is a pain so different from - I don't know what to call it - personal psychic pain. It is like keeping them company. It's a form of love. I like it because it's that. I don't wish to escape it.

April 28

I want something this morning before I start working. I'm with Frank every day, quite dimly. In the journal of 1961 I am more interested in him than in me. It's my reserve making me coy in an unpleasant way. I want to have been better company for him, and to have taken him to more freedom, which I could have done if I had known what I now know. What I was afraid of in him I thought immutable, because I never saw it handled in my father. His redneck contempts and rages. I could take him through them easily now. I've done beautiful work with Tom who is so much less my own self. I was just on the edge of stepping out, further back than he was. We didn't have birth control, we both had to hold on to our horses.

I keep running up against the realization that he's gone forever, I can't do anything now. Every time it surprises me.

He loved the land, he loved human powers. He surged and was afraid of his surges. He was a strong intuitive - very strong electrical field - with other powers maybe of telepathy, tuning in, those unconfirmed powers of knowing and being. If there had been a theory he might have understood depression. He sometimes thought he was crazy. He thought the dream was telling him to do it. His unconscious wanted to kill him - is that the way to say it? Those times when I've felt suicidal, what was it - it's just part of strong pain - murderous pain.

Do you want to tell me something about it ? It's a hidden part of processing and coming through betrayal.
That means he was betrayed. YES.
Is it like shame at not having been able to defend oneself from betrayal? Yes.
The unconscious doesn't forgive it. Yes.

It's the child's unforgiveness of the betrayal. It's worst if the betrayal isn't acknowledged. The unconscious needs for you to ride through the suicide-thought feeling the betrayal for what it was. The betrayals by his parents of his ardent spirit. Among the Mennonites, first the belief in breaking children, then the enforcement of defenses against knowing that betrayal.

When you've ridden it through the unconscious forgives you. Yes.
Is there any good reason it is organized like that? No.
Can the unconscious kill you in other ways? Yes.
Is depression always the unconscious mad at you? YES.
Is the unconscious a person? No.
Do you want to say more? Search to gain balanced judgment.
That's the task in relation to him. YES.
He never acknowledged what was done to him. Yes.
I should do the balance. Yes.
It's too late for him but it still needs to be done. Yes.

-

[I phone Sharon, Frank's ex-wife.]

Wow, is everything she said true? Yes.

She thought it was all behind her but these days she is remembering the good times. The first ten years were good but he was never completely there. He drank a lot in the last ten years. He'd sit around with his weird bachelor buddies. He'd make cracks. His mother was always dropping in. Depression, schizophrenia and learning disabilities in that family. He beat her up only once, but he used to fire his guns on the yard. The neighbours called the police. He never had anything good to say to his boys. He stood his son up on his graduation day. He wouldn't shave and clean up. She didn't think he'd come back to her but she thought one day there'd be acknowledgment and appreciation. Her kids were afraid for her life. He took a sawed-off shotgun to the psychiatrist's office. He kept finances secret. If she and the kids worked hard he'd buy another five acres of land. He was afraid of hell.

I said we cut it off when it was at its height and that had kept us attached to it.

When I was on the phone with Tom, after a while he tuned in. He said what he's feeling in me is grief, maybe a grief under a grief. When he said that, I began to come into tears. I said I'd felt Frank loved me utterly. Tom said, If you felt he loved you utterly he did love you utterly. Maybe that was it for him. Maybe that was all he could do in his life. It seems like you bonded, you didn't get married but you bonded.

This ends my project. No.
It opens a chasm under the letters. Yes.
And under my feeling for him. Yes.
Rural gothic. YES
He was a really hateful man. YES.

What I'm feeling now is the wrong of having slept with him when I went back when I was 20. If he had told her she wouldn't have married him. If he hadn't done it he wouldn't have had a secret from her. With such a secret the marriage could not be true. Without a true marriage he could not be a true man, nothing else could be true.

I didn't do it to her, he did. But did I do it to him?

April 29

I didn't sleep well. I was feeling revulsion, horror, at the life I saw in Sharon's story. Stupidity, insanity, insufficiency, evil of the Mennonite community and his family in it. Backbiting, gossip, denial. Frank with his concordance bitterly arguing with the elders.

The extraordinary lack of compassion of the Mennonites, especially the Mennonite men. What Joyce taught me about the difference between compassion and attachment. What it takes - the time, good will, and best professional help - to work through attachment into compassion.

The ten commandments I can see are rules for living in a small community. Teaching the rules without understanding souls doesn't seem to work. Souls are lost or found in proportion to their loss or recovery of early love. Frank's soul was lost through male brutality and his decision to take its side. He had no compassion for Sharon, he made a cynical decision to get a helper for his life on the farm.

Last night heart pain was hard rather than soft because I was not willing to love him after what I had heard.

What Sharon told me first was that she was in a car accident and he went home and told the kids she was dead. I keep seeing her smashed skull.

Is it possible that he truly and compassionately loved me and then viciously exploited and hated her and the children? Yes.
Was it because she wasn't me? No, because he didn't deal well with his contradictions, it was rooted self-hate.
When he was with me he wasn't in self contradiction? No, he was.
I didn't get in the way of it. Yes.
If I had married him I would have. Yes.
That's the long and short of it. Yes.
If he had not slept with me it would have been the same. Yes.

I notice I keep wanting to be sitting at a table with my parents talking about it.

Is it true that I split at the point of Frank and have come back to it at the point of Tom, and everything between was nothing to love woman? Yes.
Is it alright to love the Frank I knew? Yes.
Is it compassion rather than attachment? Yes.
Could Christianity have helped Frank? YES.
If he had taken it as love rather than doctrine. Yes.
The doctrine is nonsense. Yes.
The love is real. Yes.
The worlds of doctrinal discussion are sheerest insanity. YES.
Faith is about keeping people in touch with innocence. Yes.
There needs to be a way to separate faith and metaphysics. Yes.
Is self contradiction necessary, built into all foundations? Yes.
That's the human starting point. Yes.
Cultures of repression do great evil. Yes.
Will Buddhism only work for the intelligent? Yes.
Religion should say acknowledge and integrate, acknowledge and integrate. Yes.
In a better culture could Frank have been saved? YES.
There was something very wrong with Frank's mother. YES.
Enough for now. Yes.

-

Louie came at noon and heard the story crying, and when she was crying for herself, which was only part of the time, she was crying that her love woman feels there is something wrong with her, that she hasn't had any experience. I said she has had experience, experience of loss.

There was an Australian writer on Eleanor Wachtel [CBC books program] this afternoon, a rural satirist he said, who is concerned that young rural men are killing themselves. They don't know how to behave to women if rage and violence, which defined manhood, are not allowed.

Is that why they are killing themselves? No.
Why are they killing themselves, do you know? Lack of responsibility, lack of friendship.

Exclusion from love, and then rage and violence were ways they used to cope with those things.

April 30

I dreamed Luke as a boy, bare and thin chest, a lanky maybe fourteen year old, with me at the corner of the porch, lying down in the dew in a chill dark. It was heart-rending. He seemed so sad, lonely, done in, despairing. I was saying, Come inside. I wanted to wrap him in blankets and hold him to warm him.

May 1st

not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am

Nelly, I am Heathcliff - he's always, always in my mind - not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself - but as my own being; so don't talk of our separation again

I've fought through a bitter life since I last heard your voice, and you must forgive me, for I struggled only for you.

Tell her what Heathcliff is an unreclaimed creature, without refinement - without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone. He's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.

May 3

What Frank would have made of Wuthering heights and Pride and prejudice. WH has gothic passions and some weather, Pride and prejudice has satire lightly and precisely framed and little countryside. He would have liked himself in Heathcliff and Darcy both.

What is it I'm feeling about Frank - something I've never felt, that there was ambition and calculation in his desperation to have me. Is it so? I didn't realize I was connected to a good family in being connected to the Konrads. He wanted me to save him.

Frank could not be bothered to write sentences, even. I suppose my family allowed us because they weren't sure I could do better.

Heathcliff is a dream of bad temper, Darcy is a dream of fortune, both are men invented by women who had never lain in bed with a man. What was my dream of Frank: that he was a true-hearted man who loved me dearly and would love me 'til he died. He was not a true-hearted man, he did love me dearly though not 'til he died. An attached heart is not a true heart, it is a mad heart. He was malicious with his wife and sons. And then: his attachment did me good at the time. I've had a romantic view of him. He wasn't a good man, though he loved weather and land.

There was a preacher on KARI last night ranting about ho-mo-sex-u-al priests and the abomination of the Catholic church, Prophet Hansen, he called himself. That ranting was Frank and other madmen of the church. Religious madness, what is it? Early brutality, the hatred of fathers. The bedlam of religious community, a boot camp.

-

My mom phones. I tell her my joy about coming through with Tom. She won't say my dad was wrong. She's anxious about her own fear. She can't want to know more of my story. When I say Frank did the Mennonite thing and would not praise and encourage his sons she will not agree.

May 5

Discovery Institute selling intelligent creation scares me. The agenda is moral authoritarianism, which is the authority of male money inevitably. The digital revolution is the men surging ahead again - it's a serious threat.

Do you have a comment? Watch and wait for now.

It's a threat to women's intelligence and enterprize, to general sanity and to physical earth. Supporting Bush increases danger of war. I felt Clinton was loose enough not to escalate. Bush gives me the heebie-jeebies. Moral authoritarianism = repression = dangerous split-off dark side = hatred and outbursts and vigilant oppression.

May 15

Disordering. Coarsening. Soul loss is relative not absolute.

"I was with Frank, he was showing me pages of a story."

Into the ashes a stone for each.

I've dropped Frank's story because it isn't consoling me anymore.

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