"Weary of Life," Dignitas Helped Her Die

Spring Friedlander

We were not friends. She was an acquaintance of mine. We were in a group together OLOC ( Old Lesbians Organizing for Change). I also remember Spring Friedlander when she was a plumber and active in Tradeswomen. A couple months ago at an OLOC gathering,  Spring announced that her plans were set and she would exit this world soon. I took the news with a grain of salt. Spring was 75 and moved, looked and acted as though she was in good physical health. Mental health was another issue. She was clearly not okay and had been suffering quite a while. She often dominated meetings with rambling diatribes about her life as well as her plan to die.

Like any quasi-political group, especially one of old women, we were not equipped to address her needs. There was not a lot more to do than tell her when she used too much time that her turn was over. We failed her but we were not alone. Alienation and suicide are at record numbers in this country right now. Getting old is not fun, especially when you are alone.

I believe in assisted suicide. In 1973, at twenty-two, my father, myself and a dentist friend helped my mother die. She had terminal ovarian cancer. She was in pain and was being used to try out experimental drugs and procedures. She had no hope of survival. Euthanasia is mercy. It is now legal in many states including California. But what about legal suicide for depression? There are drugs. There is therapy. There is always tomorrow.

That's why I was so upset to find out that Spring had gone to Switzerland and, with the help of an organization called Dignitas, had made her final exit of this world. Her reason was short and simple: She was "weary of life."

Her memorial page is extensive. She expounds on her life, her motivation for ending it, her accomplishments etc. Spring was obviously a prolific writer. She could have at least had the goal of publishing this work as a memoir.

I don't know how I feel about this kind of suicide. It seems a shame, feels like a waste. Anyone at anytime may feel weary of life. But then it passes. There is always one more pizza. One more movie. One more beautiful spring day. I cannot provide any pat answers. I pass on this information simply as food for thought. Life is long, hard and convoluted. Death is an experience we are all assured of having. Morals and ethics are for pontificators and philosophers not for me. Rest in peace Spring Friedlander. I'm so sorry we failed you.

Commemorating International Women's Day Collage

After Twenty Years...

I can’t say I didn’t see it coming. Things between us had been bad for a while, a long while. But sometimes I can be like the deer in the headlights, stunned into paralysis, mesmerized by the oncoming car, yet unable to get out of its way. Perhaps my expectations of this life have always been too low. Being from a family of alcoholics who had no real use for the dynamics of child-rearing, my sister and I learned, by trial and error, to parent ourselves. We did okay. Financially, each of us has made her own way through this world, held on to civil service jobs, bought our own houses without help, basically held her own. The things we were unable to incorporate have to do with self-esteem and relationships, things we were never shown. Like how to have faith in our own worth, how to give and receive love.

Time matters. Especially at sixty-seven years old. I sense denouement in the wings as my entire generation nears the end of our earthly sojourn. It makes sense to be kinder to each other in this chapter, but often, it doesn’t work that way. My parents had an open relationship and I stretched my limits to be flexible with a partner, who described her onset of sexual changes as just one component of a late-in-life crisis. She had my blessing to do tantric workshops, orgasmic meditation, anything within a structured sexual environment was not threatening to me. She said that she’s trying to get in touch with her “inner gay man,” but gay men have a host of opportunities for casual sex that are not open to lesbians. A quick b-j in a parking lot or bathroom stall and a visit to a sex club with private rooms and “glory holes” are not options in the lesbian community.

My parents’ first rule of non-monogamy was that each of them could do whatever they wanted provided they didn’t talk about it. The polyamorous community is the opposite. The bylaws are fundamental honesty combined with mutual consent. My partner started by attempting to follow those rules, but the problem was when I felt I couldn’t handle her having a sexual/romantic relationship with no guidelines whatsoever, there was nowhere to go from there.We all have limits to what we can withstand. 

I can’t help feeling betrayed. Although the responsibility for this split is my partner’s, it is upsetting that her new paramour knows me and was peripherally part of our friendship circle. I don’t understand why anyone would make this decision. Aren’t there enough lesbian strangers out there? Now I must worry about running into a person harboring negative, or worse indifferent, feelings regarding my well-being in this tumultuous world.   

Today, in this toxic soup of ash and particulate waste around me, I feel discarded, alone. When your world is burning, you are without choice, you must save yourself. Letting go of this relationship is not the path I would have chosen, but, like so many things beyond my control, it has chosen me. It remains to be seen where it will lead.

The More Things Change...(Collage)

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Me Too

I’ve been obsessively mesmerized by this whole ramming through charade known as the Kavanaugh "confirmation" hearings. I even got up early this morning to watch the testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Of course, I believe Ford as well as Kavanaugh's other accusers, Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick. This whole morass has been compelling for me. It obviously strikes a deeper chord, resonating with something I haven’t wanted to think about or speak to for over fifty years.

Dr. Herbie Duber was our family doctor. In the fifties my family lived in tract housing on the East side of Cleveland. He was a neighbor who live with his wife and children just two doors away. I believe he purchased life insurance from my father but he was also a well-known physician in the Jewish Community. Looking through old photographs of parties, photos of him and his wife appear, almost always with drinks in their hands. Lots of booze, what was called then, "wife swapping" and plenty of general bawdiness were all part and parcel of my parents social life. Although Herbie was not a pediatrician, he became the default general practitioner for both me and my sister.

As a child, my mother came with me during these physical exams which happened only once a year at the most. When I grew older, my mom would sometimes not come into the room but stay outside chatting with the receptionist. I think I was about thirteen when I went for an exam now that I was a "woman." Because I started menstruating at nine years old, by thirteen I was a child in a woman's body. Nonetheless, I wasn't sure of the parameters of what a "physical" for a woman would be. So when he began pushing at my tiny breasts, I thought well breast cancer is a problem. By the time he was sticking his fingers inside me, breathing hard and asking if I had any boyfriends, I was fairly sure that most physicals didn't proceed this way. After hastily dressing and meeting up with my mom, I left his office feeling humiliated and confused.

I never told anyone until very recently. Not my mother, not my friends. I did say that I didn't like Herbie Duber and wanted a different doctor which, by then, was not a problem since he had come up in the world and was no longer lived in our neighborhood. It took a while for me to realize how far out of bounds this examination was. When the charges came out against Larry Nasser, doctor on the Olympic Committe who sexually assaulted patients, I began pondering my experience. And now, with the "Me Too" movement I have been considering the role of this incident in my young life. Dr. Duber has been dead for many years. But don't relax or get the idea that anyone is safe. Worldwide, there are millions of men like him being born every minute.

Beyond the Gender Binary

In the fifties era of butch-femme relationships, those who played the role of butch or femme, switching at will, were known as “ki-ki”. In later Second Wave Feminism of the sixties and seventies, butch-femme role playing fell out of favor in middle-class circles. The word for lesbians with gender-neutral identity was “androgynous.” The androgynous lesbian was a preferable alternative to the dehumanizing sex-role stereotyping that had been the norm in the fifties and earlier. 

In today’s world this option is known as “non-binary.” Ideally, this would mean that everyone would be free to select ideas and behaviors from a smorgasbord of choices. People of many genders and orientations can fit under this umbrella because we are all so much more than the bodies that we happened to have been born into. 

The thing about both transgender identity that confuses me the most is the way that sex role stereotypes are idealized, romanticized, even fetishized. When I hear about a little boy who loves pink and playing dress up, or the little girl who wants to play sports or be a cowboy I don't automatically think that these are children occupying the wrong bodies. I first wonder if they're just having a hard time coming out as lesbian or gay. 

Yes, some people are genuinely transgender. But other people are truly in pain and confused about their identity. Some are looking for a simple solution to a complex problem. In Iran the government will pay for transgender surgery when it means that the person will no longer have same-sex attraction. If a man who loves men becomes a woman, he will present as straight. Surgery can be used as a means to insure heterosexual normativity at any cost. 

After my uterus was removed for medically necessary reasons, the doctor told me about groups organized around grieving this loss. As a sixty year old lesbian who has remained childless by choice, I found this ridiculous. The body parts I have emotional attachment towards are ones that either can be seen, make my body systems function well, or propel me physically through the world. I never developed an attachment to my uterus and have always viewed the prospect of childbearing as far too similar to “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

When I was working as a reference librarian  in San Francisco a regular patron, male the day before, came in and announced s/he was now female. I knew this person’s gender-neutral name and don’t have the greatest memory, so it was inevitable that a few days later I referred to that patron as “he. Very upset, this apprentice transitioner said, “I’m a woman, just like you.”

Okay then, if you’re a woman just like me, you don’t give a damn if people mistake you for another gender, unless you’re planning to sleep with them, in which case, hopefully, they would already know. A “woman like me” has zero attachment to behaving “like a woman” or presenting as such. You would want only to be accepted for what you do and how your mind works, not how you look because you would not see yourself as decorative, but as functional. A woman just like me would believes that the concept of acquiring “femininity” is both ridiculous and a huge waste of time. 

I don’t comprehend the need, in this culture and many others, to place gender markers on everyone and everything. Everywhere I go now people call me “Mam.” I hate it. Not just because of the age reference but because of the explicit gender. I wouldn't like "Sir" either. Why is it necessary to continually point out each persons gender? Can’t you just ask a question without tagging it as female or male directed. What’s wrong with, “Can I help you?” period. Or if you have to add something why not “friend” or another gender neutral word. Even worse are words like poetess or aviatrix, the height of condescension for people with female bodies.

We are all unique individuals. I find sex-role assignment dehumanizing. I aspire to neither of those limited definitions. We all deserve the freedom to do what we want with our bodies and that includes modifying them for any reason. At some point in the future, we might have a society where every person is accepted and accepts their body no matter what shape, size, color, age, orientation or ability it presents. Unfortunately, that Utopian vision is far removed from the reality of the world we do our best to stumble through today.

Lessons From Foremothers and Former Selves

Carol Seajay, Pell, Tiana Arruda, Kit Quan, 1982 

We were either closeted or forcibly ghettoized in the those decades. The late sixties, seventies and early eighties brought so much change to the lives of women and lesbians. A lot of us looked different and distinctly lesbian but none of us aspired to the female sex-role stereotypes. Obsequious, flirtatious, decked-out, made-up heterosexual women were the norm then and seem to have made a comeback since. But we really had to be circumspect in dealing with the outside world. There were no job or housing protections and, we were vulnerable to discrimination. Organizing was imperative. There was so much work to be done.

I defined myself as a radical lesbian feminist in those early days. I went to San Francisco State and took groundbreaking women's studies classes from pioneers like Sally Gearhart. I hung out at bars like Scotts, Maude's, Kelley's, Pegs Place and A Little More. It wasn't just the Michigan Women's Music Festival that was happening. Old Wives Tales Women's Bookstore opened, followed by Artemis Society. Plexus newspaper emerged. Osento Hot Tub flourished in a Victorian on Valencia Street. The Women's Press Project began printing pamphlets and books by lesbians. The laws were against us, lesbians were hated and under attack by fellow citizens and police, but it was a heady time in our community, full of hope and promise.

I think my first break with the radical feminist philosophy was when the realization dawned that I didn’t necessarily believe that women were special and could save the world. I was attracted to women. I loved and respected many of them. But I could look back at history and find women falling on the morally incorrect side. Some early suffragists supported racism. In every struggle against fascism there were lots of women taking a stand with murderous dictators. Fighting for more than just lesbians rights seemed necessary. As a Jew and a working-class affiliated woman, often a strictly radical lesbian feminist analysis didn’t speak to every aspect of me. Because I found many lesbians ignorant of these other components of struggle, the romance between me and this simplistic take on the world, faded.

The political work I did with lesbian groups like Lesbian Schoolworkers, Lesbians Against Police Violence and Revolting Lesbians were organized around lesbian liberation but also tackling other issues of oppression like...racism, poverty, and class struggle.

During the day I was a working stiff. To survive in that arena required me to make alliances with all different kinds of people. The line between gender and demographic groups. I’m an odd individual. The folks I liked, and who liked me, varied tremendously. I made friends where I could, usually with people who minimally identified with the workaday world and had other, more interesting and creative pursuits. They helped ease my way through the forest of b-s and artifice. I never stopped going to concerts or conferences or music festivals for dykes, I just stopped seeing that road as the only possible path through life’s jungle.

As organizational work toward lesbian protections found some success, I felt less confined to one small community. My friends became more eclectic, square pegs but not necessarily lesbian ones. Maybe coalition was possible. Perhaps we can explore our place in a broader society. I left the so-called safety of lesbian community for the prospect of a larger life, much the same way I’d left the Jewish community in which I was raised, to take my chances with the larger, multi-racial, diverse world. My family warned me often that, because of hostility,  I would regret that decision, but that was not the case. 

So where does all this leave me today? Older, but still much the same. I incorporate new information and curse the times we are living in. I still despise sex roles for humans but respect each person's right to call themselves whatever they want. And I do the same. As a writer and an individual, I have no desire to generalize or tar everyone with the same broad brush. But I am not willing to toss aside the fore-mothers of lesbian-feminism either. When I see young women throwing out the baby with the bathwater, it saddens me. I want to tell them to read, to study, to learn about what we were up against, the obstacles we encountered and faced down making life a bit easier now for everyone.

It is foolish to place leaders of another time in current society to decide how you feel about them. In order to see the Second Wave generation of feminism clearly, you must first rise to a height where the entire picture comes into view. Many young people are incapable or unwilling to do so. But not all. There are folks, like myself, who will value those who came before them, the lessons that ancestors teach. Violence and hatred have moved large groups of people throughout history, but have left behind nothing which inspires goodwill or pride.

Those who dismiss their elders will get their comeuppance with time. Life is impermanent, yours as well as ours. If you believe you know everything and will live forever, time will prove otherwise. The past is not your enemy. Those who cleared the path before you are not your foes. If you willfully choose to ignore history, it will rear up and bite you at the most inopportune moments. Who knows? Years from today, you may find yourself writing a piece, like this one, engaged in the very same argument. And then, perhaps, you will choose to reflect back on your former self with wisdom and compassion.