Friday, December 30, 2011

2011

I've had a word rumbling
around in my head the last few days.

Telos.

It is a Greek word I learned in seminary.

It means END-

but not just end like tonight is the end of another year and tomorrow we start all over again.

Rather, it is an end with a purpose. It is like the fulfillment of all things, the end of the story, the point of all this, the final answer to all the questions, the strivings, the wonderings of why we walk on this earth, the final fulfillment of all our aches.  And it is bigger than us and our individual stories, but it is not complete without our individual stories.  It is the answer to all the stories.

Friday, December 23, 2011

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Kids Today. Or Was it Yesterday?

"No earthly way of knowing, which direction we are going," squeaks a little six year old voice in her best Gene Wilder imitation. Fortunately, from the back of the minivan, I don't hear the next line of the song "is the grisly reaper rowing?."

"Ok, Mom, now you sing at the same time the Oompa Loompa song and we'll make that spooky song blend with the Oompa Loompas."

I oblige my daughter's attempt at harmony and begin my rendition of "Oompa, Oompa doopity doo" as she adds some extra spook to the scariest song in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  We end at the same time with me singing, "You will live in HA-PI-NESS too.  Like the Oompa, Loompa, doopedy, doo!."

Why is this suddenly very disturbing to me?  The Oompa Loompa's aren't happy!  They're prisoners of a madman with red faces, green hair, and endless wheelbarrows of chocolate to push.  There is something strangely dark and sinister about this whole minivan ensemble we have going on.  I guess you could say we've watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory one too many times during this holiday season.

Sunday, December 18, 2011

A Gingerbread Caper

For the last week 
Mr. Truman's Third Grade Class 
has been rehearsing hard for...
A GINGERBREAD CAPER!  

Check out our own  little thespian-
 shot live by Jason from his front row seat
 on the cafeteria floor.

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Opus



Jude Law is interviewed on Letterman tonight (HERE).  Letterman asks him, "If you could choose film or theater, what would you choose?."  Law answers, “Theater....the relationship with the audience is irreplaceable.”  

Tonight (before watching Letterman) Jason and I are part of an audience.  In another tiny theater, by the Bryn Mawr stop of the Red Line, a play is performed to a sold-out audience of forty people. There is sweat. People jump in their seats. An actor’s final lines are spoken by Jason’s right ear. I stare at an actor standing next to us and wait for him to break out of character in this small space. He doesn't.
One of the things I love about Chicago is the chance, on any random night, to step into a small storefront theater and watch a story unfold.  There are plenty of huge productions from which to choose, but there are also many small theaters where some amazing acting is taking place.  Some shows are definitely better than others.  But for as little as $10 you can catch a show (see what’s playing for cheap in Chicago at hottix).  Hopefully, the longer we live here the more we'll know where to go and what to see, but for now I am enjoying the adventure of exploring and discovering.  
Tonight’s show is Opus.  With a cast of five it tells the story of a string quartet, the ups and downs of their relationships, and the power of music to bind people together.  The climax of the play centers around the quartet performing Beethoven’s Opus 131.  I know so little about classical music, but this play does what any great story does.  It makes me want to learn more.  It makes me want to listen differently.  Have you ever listened to Opus 131? Until tonight I had not (you may have heard it on HBO's Band of Brothers).  Nor did I really care.  But seeing live people on stage wrestle through the challenges of relationship and respond to music as creatures made in the image of God,  I begin to care. I read tonight that Beethoven, when asked which of his quartets he considered the best answered, "Each in its own way, Art demands of us that we should not stand still.”  What is it you might like to explore?  Where might you begin? 




Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Flyboard

Because getting a mysterious infection
 and spending a few nights in the hospital 
isn't enough to put new wrinkles on my face,
Jason tells me today that he wants 
THIS

Sunday, December 11, 2011

A Small Patch of Earth

On this crisp Sunday afternoon, in the last light of a short December day, our family takes a walk.





 It isn't always easy, living in a big, sprawling urban area,
 to get lost in the woods. 

 I am reminded today that it really doesn't take much
 to to get a little nature fix.  

A small patch of woods.
A few sticks.

A semi frozen lake.

And let the games begin.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Ish

I spend a fair amount of time at the grocery store.  Interactions manifesting human nature unedited  often happen in the mundane aisles of our modern temples to food.   Today, while smashed between fifty new flavors of gum and three rows of periodicals claiming to have new tips on everything from sex to crock pot meals, I enter the usual checkout line coma.

“How are you today ma'am?,”  I hear an elderly man ask the cashier as he puts his fifth frozen chicken pot pie on the conveyor belt.
Long black hair, recently refreshed with dye from Aisle 6, flips across the register. 
“Good...ISH, ” replies the cashier drawing out the ISH as if begging to be known by another human being.
Across the man's face deep wrinkles twitch in perplexity as I slide my plastic divider behind his frozen cuisine on the moving belt.
Dropping my bag of lentils precariously close to our plastic border protecting anything that might be HIS from that which will soon become MINE, I bite her hook.  "That's a loaded ISH," I say.
“Well, I lied once to my mother.  It was a lesson of a lifetime."  I notice her red lipstick is starting to creep into the lines of her upper lip.  She reaches for the last pot pie and sweeps it across the scanner. The machine beeps in an obedient reply.

"Something I’ll never forget.  I swore then, I’d never lie again.  So, I’m not gonna lie." She looks at the old man in earnest, "You asked me how I am.  I’m good.  But  I'm only good- ish.  A girl’s got to tell the truth.  So that’s all I got for you.  I’m good, but it’s gonna have an ISH on it today.”
The elderly man gathers his plastic sacks and waits for the bright red nails to rip the receipt churning with a mechanical cluck through tired fingers. 
She turns to me in a final catharsis, "You gotta be real, ya know.  Sometimes it’s all in the ISH.”

Saturday, December 3, 2011

Tree's Up

Friday, December 2, 2011

Get Comfy. Read. Maybe Write.


Last week, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I attended the last lecture of Introduction to Russian Literature: Tolstoy & Dostoevsky.  Like coming to the final chapter of a good novel,  I both want it to end, for freedom of time and resolution in my mind, and I don’t want it to end because that will mean a loss of something that has been a source of pleasure.  The class was a wonderful experience which I think will continue to surface as I read other books.
Picking up a new novel is difficult.  Nothing seems to satisfy.  So, I decide to pick up a book I’ve started many times and give it another try.  A familiar paperback, one that has stared back at me from many different shelves in our various homes, seems a good transition from the Russians. And so Marilynne Robinson’s book, Housekeeping, finds itself in my hands under a hand knit blanket and with a warm cup of hot tea.  The book is a bit strange.  Reading it feels like entering a dreamlike state.  After watching an interview with Robinson taken at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, I understand that this is how she writes. (her whole demeanor reflects a calm, peaceful creativity that will make you want to read a book)
She says in the interview, “When I write fiction I like to be very comfortable, as in prenatal or something!  I like to be in comfortable clothes with no distractions and so on. I like to be in one corner of my house.  When I write nonfiction I sit upright in a chair, and I write on a word processor, or laptop.  And the mood or character of concentration is completely different.  Fiction is much closer to dreaming, a sort of inducing a very strong imagination of something and trying to preserve the integrity-the movement- of it.”



Sunday, November 27, 2011

Advent

Every time I hear Handel's Messiah I cry.  My love affair with this three hour piece of music begins in high school when I first hear it performed by Westminster's Ensemble choir and symphony.  Brian Baumgartner, now famous for his role on the Office, slams into a big drum during a performance of "For Unto Us a Child is Born."  Then the entire choir belts out, "And His name shall be called.  Wonderful! Counselor! The Mighty God! The everlasting Father.  The Prince of Peace."  And I am hooked.  My faithful friend and roommate treks over to Duke chapel with me almost every year of college for their performance of the Messiah.  Even my children succumb during a children's performance in Portland.


 Unexpectedly, it is not the Messiah but the Portland band The Decemberists that brings tears to my eyes on this first day of Advent.  Tossing together a plate of Thanksgiving leftovers for the girls,  I slip the newly ordered CD into my laptop. When I actually lived in Portland I didn't listen to this band, but now far away from its culture and place my eyes start brimming with tears.  When the tears start dropping into my children's leftover mac&cheese I hit repeat again.  Why do we do this to ourselves?!?   I decide to just let it ride and enjoy the music.


Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Monday, November 21, 2011

Parking

It's the holidays. 
We all need a little extra cash.
 Chicago is trying to make up its own budget deficits.
How?

But I think Evanston and Wilmette 
have turned parking sign delirium 
into an art form.
See if you can figure out from these photos why,
to park on the North Shore,
you need
a calendar,
 a Northwestern football schedule, 
a ruler, 
a tape measure,
 a holiday schedule, 
 a clock,
and maybe a PhD in logic too.



Sometimes I wonder why the cities 
don't save themselves a little cash on printing
 and just say...

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Happy Thanksgiving

From the Little Family
In the Big City





Friday, November 11, 2011

11-11-11

Happy 40th Jason!!!

1 year


3 years
Can we bring back the hair wave?
Senior in High School

August 2011
Summit of the Grand Teton

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

How Do You Look?


How do you look?  Have you checked?  Caught a passing glance in a reflective storefront window or a long stare in the bathroom mirror?
But how do you look... at others? 
In my last blog entry I introduced Anna Karenina to you as she sat on a train having illicit thoughts about a man.  But what happened after that train ride?  Tolstoy tells us that when Anna got off the train “the first person that attracted her attention was her husband. ‘Oh, my God! Why do his ears look like that?’ she thought” (Tolstoy 120).  Really, ears?  After that dramatic scene in a moving train this is what we get?  Gary Morson points out this famous passage to draw our attention to the way Anna makes a tiny choice to see her husband in an uncharitable light.  By beginning to see in this way she justifies her own guilt, so that it is his unattractiveness and not her unfaithfulness that dominates her mind.  Morson writes, “The more she ascribes lack of feeling to [her husband], the more she comes to see him that way automatically” (84).
Do we do this?  Do we make quick decisions about a person and then fixate on the negative in order to justify ourselves?  How often do we pick people apart so we can feel better than them, not intimidated by them, or more justified in who we are?  Have you ever stood in a grocery store line silently staring at magazine covers hoping to find a flaw in the beauty that shines on the glossy covers?  Why do we delight when the powerful, the beautiful, or the rich mess up?  Deep down do we revel in the failure or demise of those we envy?  Or closer to home, how often do we criticize people in our lives or undermine their accomplishments so they do not threaten our own sense of ‘being better?’  
Morson points out Anna’s reaction to her husband’s ears to show how the tiniest decisions we make about people are often quite ordinary.  Usually we don’t condemn all at once, but bit by bit we adjust our perception of another, focusing on the negative, until we can justify our behaviors or thoughts toward them.  Morson writes,
“We can look charitably or uncharitably. We can pay attention only to what is worst in a person; everyone possesses characteristics that can be seen as irritating or repulsive.  Tolstoy wants to teach us that what we do at every moment of our waking lives-how we look and direct our attention- has supreme moral value precisely because it is so ordinary, precisely because it forms habits” (Morson 84).
How would our relationships change if we viewed others not with a critical eye to make ourselves feel better but with an eye to find the beautiful in them and rejoice in it? 
Today, as you move through your day, how do you look?  On what will you focus?  That which makes you feel better about yourself by picking another apart?  Or that which is truly unique and special about the person?  Will you fixate on their faults and tear them down in your mind?  Or will you seek to find the good to appreciate even if it means making yourself less?
Knowing we are loved by God and knowing that our brief little lives really DO matter in the eternal story of redemption gives us the freedom to rejoice in who God made others to be. Knowing that in Him we can see others with a more accepting love, we are free to be ourselves and love better. Those small little decisions we make about people affect the way we love them. His ears. Her voice. The way he does that.  The way she always does this.  Morson argues that “each uncharitable act of looking is a choice” (85).  
Knowing that God, in His mercy, has looked upon us and made us beautiful in Him, we can see others with the same grace.  How would our hearts change if we sought, by His grace, to look with an eye of charity.  Might these charitable reads on people actually bring us closer to them?
So, how will you look? 

Friday, November 4, 2011

If Life Could Write

A woman sits on a train trying to read a book.  Her mind wanders dangerously to thoughts of a man she shouldn't be thinking about.  The train gets hot and hotter until her surroundings blur from reality into a frightening dreamlike nightmare.  A fur cloak becomes a beast and returns to a cloak as she slides a paper knife slowly down her neck. A peasant is gnawing on a wall... or is he merely checking the temperature in the train?  Shapes and sounds swirl around her as she hears fearful shrieking and banging “as though someone were being torn to pieces.”  She feels as “though she is sinking down.  But it was not terrible, but delightful.”

The latest in late night television?  Some dark horror movie with an erotic bent?  Nope. Leo Tolstoy, my friends, drawing his readers into the mind and imagination of Anna as she begins her descent into her own desires and cravings.  Will they destroy her?  You’ll have to read the novel.  I can’t spoil it for you.  It is just too good.

Monday, October 31, 2011

Sunday, October 30, 2011

A Visit to Sunshine

This afternoon we got a small glimpse of love in action
 during an Open House visit to
in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago.


They opened their doors for friends to come 
and see how the grace of God 
and a little vision 
can begin to transform a community.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Monday, October 24, 2011

Chicago by L: The Loop



So, what does it mean anyway?  The Loop.  During my first year in Chicago I heard people make comments all the time like,
"Do you work in the Loop?"

"Is it in the Loop?"

"Oh, I used to live in the Loop."

"Have you tried that restaurant?  It is in the Loop."

Like any good Southerner I sort of assumed that "the Loop" meant some large interstate that circled the city (I know, go ahead and laugh you Chicago aficionados).  Wrong.  To the eyes of an out of towner the L map looks like a preschool crayon drawing of colors that meet in a central psychedelic rainbow.  This is the Loop.  It is the historic business district of Chicago.  Towering canyons of skyscrapers -hemmed in by Lake Michigan to the East and the Chicago River to the North and West- dwarf business men in suits and tourists with cameras.  And circling all this world class business and money making are the elevated tracks of the L.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Wildcat Alley

Northwestern Football 
is only a few blocks away-
right here in the neighborhood.
Feeling slightly guilty 
that my children are painted
 like Northwestern Wildcats
and don't even own a Tar Heel t-shirt...
I probably need to get to work on that one!

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Boogers in the Library


Have you ever known the rush of discovery and exploration of finding something in the library?  Something small captures your imagination and sets your mind on a search for a new idea, a new discovery, in the bowels of a library.  You wander among the quiet stacks looking, your eyes scanning the spines of books hoping to find the one you are looking for.  You pull two or three that hold promise, scan the table of contents, the index, or the chapter titles for a clue in your treasure hunt.  Then, on page 115 of a book that hasn’t seen sunlight since 1972 you see a word that ends your treasure hunt. On a yellowed page, marked with red ballpoint pen and a booger,  is the passage for which you have searched.  This journey is only for the brave of heart and, perhaps, stomach...boogers not withstanding.

Friday, October 14, 2011

Apple Picking



For the last few weeks Chicago has been enjoying an unbelievable stretch of beautiful weather- bright blue skies, warm temperatures, and sun. (Before you get too jealous, I'll also add that the weather reports are predicting this winter to be one of the worst in Chicago's recorded history.  How do they know these things anyway?) Last Monday, a Columbus Day holiday, we went apple picking.   This involved an hour and a half drive through Chicago sprawl before the endless stoplights gave way to farm land and apple trees not far from Wisconsin!  I think we'll be eating apples until Easter.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Yoga is Hot

Yoga is hot.  Studios are opening on main streets and in malls.  Yoga is in ads selling everything from cell phones to insurance.  It has become so pervasive in pop culture that you might be tempted to dismiss it as cliche.  If you told me five years ago that I would be standing in a room heated to 105 degrees, dripping sweat in spandex, with a spontaneous smile spreading across my face I would not have believed you. I first put my face down on a stinky yoga mat at the Chattanooga YMCA five years ago and have been slightly addicted ever since.  This post is my attempt to convince you to try it, maybe just once.  Wait!  Before you click away, consider the top excuses I hear from people.  I dare you to not be one of them.

Saturday, October 8, 2011

Chicago by L: Bucktown!



Bangs, boots, beer, and bikes.  Get your hipster game on because this is your virtual trip to Chicago's  Bucktown neighborhood.  In Bucktown you can get a get a Chicago microbrew, stop by one of only three Chrome stores in the US (Chicago, New York, San Francisco),  or dodge hipsters in cowboy boots to wiggle your way into a used bookstore or boutique liquor store.  What used to be a working class neighborhood, whose name may have originated from the large number of goats-bucks- raised by Polish immigrants that settled there in the 19th c., is now a neighborhood not unlike Portland's East side. Take a few cowboy boot clad hipsters in skinny jeans, toss in a few Chrome accessorized bike commuters and moms in expensive yoga wear, and you will have a good sense of Bucktown.  

Friday, October 7, 2011

some thoughts from Dostoevsky

I promised you a few weeks ago that I'd give some periodic updates on my journey into Russian Literature. After only a couple of lectures  I'm still only 100+ pages into The Brothers Karamazov.  I have to really concentrate when writing 'Karamazov' in order to spell it correctly (3 'a's!).  The book is incredibly rich, both theologically and philosophically, but it hasn't yet begun rolling along with all that juicy love and lust that keeps the pages turning in Anna Karenina.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Just a few Pics

It's been sort of serious around the blog lately.
All that talk of Russian Lit and health insurance.
I figure some of you granmas and aunties out there are saying,
"Come On, Caroline!  Just give us some pictures of the kids, please." 
These are not the best pictures, 
but they capture some of the happenings around here in the last 24 hours.

The side ponytail...
and you thought you'd only have to live through the 80s once.
Wrong!

Monday, October 3, 2011

Ma'am, It's how the system works.

The health care system.  It gets a lot of press.  It is a big controversial subject.  It is incredibly not fair.  We sit at the top of this food chain.  I recognize that in the last week Jason has received better health care than 99.9999 % of the rest of the world at relatively little cost to us.  It is the cost to the system that boggles my mind.  I know the services rendered to us Westerners enjoying modern medicine are very expensive.  But sometimes the lack of efficiency is as downright annoying as the fifty styrofoam cups they give you in the hospital.  Let me walk you through the last six hours.

Incident #1: Those of you who faithfully read through my ramblings in the previous blog post know that Jason is currently being treated with heavy doses of antibiotics through an internal catheter called a PICC line.  This is a very efficient system set up in the hospital which enables him to go home to receive intravenous antibiotics without being in the hospital.  After a few visits from a home health nurse both he and I are trained to give the medicine.  We've had a standing date at the same time each day for the last few days for lots of sterility, saline washes, drugs, and other fun things.  The only cost to our insurance for this (not counting the drugs)?

The 1x/week visit from a home health nurse= $200.

We find out today that this is NOT covered by our insurance because Jason is receiving OUT OF HOME physical therapy for his knee.  So, technically, if he can get out of his home for physical therapy,  he should be able to get out of home for his meds.  So what IS covered- by the letter of the law- is for him to trek out to a hospital infusion center  EVERY DAY to receive his medicine.  You do the math.  Even if the infusion center is cheaper, let's say for kicks $100/visit, the insurance company is agreeing to pay for these visits EVERY DAY for the next two weeks instead of paying for only one more visit from a home health care nurse.  Like I said...you do the math.  Our health insurance is covering medical expenses, but it is at an incredibly higher cost to them (and eventually to all of us) as well as effort to Jason.  

Incident #2: Eleanor needs to visit her pediatrician for a minor health issue.  I make an appointment for later in the week, but as we walk past the office on our way home from school I decide to step in to see if they can fit her in this afternoon.  The receptionist, who looks like she should be at some shady lawyer's office in a cheap movie instead of in a neighborhood pediatrician's office, says with a fake smile, "Ma'am, I could let your child see the doctor, but I'll have to charge you an extra $80 for being a 'walk in' patient."  She quickly releases the muscles surrounding the lipstick that has bled into the cracks of her upper lip, and her smile disappears.

"You mean," I ask incredulously, "that if I stand in this lobby and call you on my cell phone to see if Eleanor can have an appointment at 3:45 I will be considered a scheduled patient?  But if I actually talk to you and ask if she can see the doctor at 3:45 you will charge me an extra $80?."

"Yes, Ma'am, it's how the system works."



Saturday, October 1, 2011

on russians and writing

The week before last, while auditing Gary Morson’s  Intro to Russian Lit class at Northwestern, I began to think differently about the importance of writing- even about those things that seem mundane- for the human heart.   
Morson explained to us that Russians see literature as not only the highest of the arts but as the very reason for existence and the essence of our humanity.  To write or become the subject of writing is what makes you truly human.  There are stories of millions of people -dying of mass starvation under Lenin- who were keeping diaries.  They are quoted as saying, “This is why I have lived- to record this.”  Dostoevsky, writing a response to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, said of the book, “At last, the reason for the existence of the Russian people is justified.”
One of the most identifiable experiences of Dostoevsky’s life was that he suffered through what has come to be known as the “mock execution.”    He was brought out as a prisoner to be shot.  For one hour he thought he was about to die before being surprisingly pardoned and sent to four years in a Siberian prison camp.  This experience  made one of his fellow prisoners go mad and kill himself.  Dostoevsky?  He took the emotional trauma of the experience and wrote The Brothers Karamazov.  His experience and the reflections on the psychology of what a person goes through right before an execution would color his writing for the rest of his life. Why? Because, according to Dostoevsky, part of being human is the sense of a possible future.  When that possible future is taken away- even for a few agonizing hours- the experience changes you.

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Way to Go, Chattaboogie!



Congrats to my Chattanooga readers
That's Rynn!  Age 3 
 on OUTSIDE magazine's poll that rated Chattanooga the #1 place to live.
 Wow!  What'd y'all do to that web poll? I'm glad I can claim it as a home -even though for a mere five years.
 I still miss those Tennessee hills.
Chattanooga even beat out Portland, Seattle, and Boulder!
You guys are awesome.

Check it out @ Sweet Home Chattanooga

Friday, September 16, 2011

Wrigleyville


"Wrigleyville is a neighborhood of young Americans trying to make their way while living in the shadow of a team that proves dreams don't always come true."
 -Wright Thompson, The Kansas City Star quoted in Wrigleyworld: A Season in Baseball's Best Neighborhood

As promised a few posts ago,
the first in my exploration of Chicago by L
is
WRIGLEYVILLE!

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Chicago Botanic Garden- a field trip

Today I join Rynn on her field trip to the 
We spend most of our time
 on this chilly September morning 
studying the native Illinois prairie.


Monday, September 12, 2011

"Fool that I am..."

A shot explodes in a dark room.  Blood splatters on the floor.  A man falls.  Another man leaps from the darkness in an acrobatic defying of gravity, whips out a sword, and demands justice. The lights go down.  The small theater is cool, still, and quiet.  "Vengeance is mine," says the Count.  "I will repay."  

It is another night at Lifeline Theater in Chicago, and Jason and I are sitting on the fourth row of this small theater enjoying a preview showing of the latest production The Count of Monte Cristo.  BIG STORIES. UP CLOSE. This is the theater’s tag line, and so it feels Friday night when I’m glad we are not sitting on the front row!  The story of The Count of Monte Cristo is one well known to many- man is treated unjustly by friends. Man spends 14 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.  Man’s mind and spirit are awakened in prison by an old priest who teaches him the arts and sciences.  Man escapes. Man seeks revenge.  In his revenge he not only ends up destroying that which he truly loves but himself as well.  He says, in an emotional speech at the end of the story, "Fool that I am that I did not tear out my heart the day I resolved to revenge myself" (Alexander Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo).

Literature is a powerful medium for helping us understand ourselves, our passions, our hungers, our desires, our struggles, our weaknesses, our sin.  It is a rare and powerful thing when literature gives a poignant picture of the human struggle with sin.  The Count of Monte Cristo, in all its richly textured costumes, sword fights, and choreographed battles, in the end, shows a man’s desire for revenge completely destroying him.  Rather than forgiveness it is self seeking justice which drives the story and revenge which destroys.  I find myself thinking of Gollum in Lord of the Rings, that powerful character who in his hunger for power and jealousy for the ‘ring’ withers to become ugly, deformed, and a mere shadow of his former person.  
Leo Tolstoy, in his sweeping narrative of 19th c. Russia Anna Karenina, describes this ‘withering’ through identifiable characters.  The love which once inspired an affair begins to wither through the lies and deception.
“She was not at all as he had seen her in the beginning... He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has plucked, in which he can barely recognize the beauty that had made him pluck and destroy it” - Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
In Anna Karenina Tolstoy notes even the subtlest of human expressions and interactions to make you fall in love with his characters, get angry with them, and then want to throw the book across the room because you are so frustrated with their choices...all the while knowing that what is so insanely frustrating about them is that they are not unlike ourselves.  And what a perfect picture of the temptation that sin offers us- a beautiful flower we desire and want to consume.  We pick it, like Eve with the fruit, and watch it wither in our hands as we wonder what we desired so deeply in the first place.  
Using one another through revenge, lust, envy, or anger can destroy us, but repentance and forgiveness can change us.

“At his wife’s bedside he had given himself for the first time in his life to that feeling of tender compassion..which he had previously been ashamed of as a bad weakness.  Repentance... and above all the joy of forgiveness, made it so that he suddenly felt not only relief from his suffering but also an inner peace that he had never experienced before.  He suddenly felt that the very thing that had once been the source of his suffering had become the source of his spiritual joy, that what had seemed insoluble when he condemned, reproached and hated, became simple and clear when he forgave and loved” (Tolstoy 418).