A cardboard sign

What if the body is always on the way to resolution?  What if there really is order at the base of things, barely discernible, under the currents and we aren’t just making up laws to suit our puny human take on things. Or to assuage our trembling fears, that it is, indeed, all for naught? Is this part of the appeal of Christmas?  Of religion in general?

There is a story, onto which we can graft our own sensibilities.  A raft in these tumultuous seas, that calls to us.  A beacon, a star, something true, no matter what disorder washes our way.

I opened the door this early morning, in the dark, to place Coleman’s breakfast on the porch, where he has the least number of steps to the yard afterwards.  My breath froze.  Immediately  I thought of the man who stands at the corner on our way to the Interstate with his cardboard sign.  Ironically, he stands at the edge of a cemetery and behind that a church, and yet no one takes him in, neither cemetery nor church, and we have joked in our nervousness at seeing him day after day that he needs help with his marketing strategy, as the corner he has chosen is one where it is impossible for cars to stop.  Where is he on this frozen night.  I closed the lids on my cold frames to protect the lettuces.  Where is he? I handed him no money, no jacket even though we have a closet of extras.  And it is Christmas.

We will travel across the mountain today, Eamon, John and I will get in our car full of gasoline with the heated seats and we will take with us a big basket of presents:  lotions from a local salon  whose owners pledge sustainability and who serve on the board of the battered women’s shelter; indulgences for my diabetic mother that we’ve been baking for days:  brownies, blondies, cherry brioche, chocolate chocolate cherry scones.  I have cut everything in small pieces to help slow down the sugar rush, and I will tell the nurse that my mother has these.

I don’t want to go, frankly, but I will, and we won’t stay long even though the drive is four hours give or take.  We won’t stay long because it is too hard, and because we will have house guests that will arrive before we get back.  I say it is too hard and then I think of the  man on the corner and I have to say I don’t know what hard is.  My worries this Christmas are getting clean sheets on the beds before people need to sleep on them and embarrassment that I only got lights on the tree and I’ve run out of time.

It always feels as though I am running out of time, that we are running out of time.

Next . . .

We go on because we have to, and because we are breathing rhythmically, in and out, and therein is momentum, that combined with the turning and the rising and the setting. . .we go on.

We pay the bill, prepare the meal, wash the clothing.  We make the phone call; all because there is a "next", a time when the bill will be overdue, when the meal will be digested, the clothing worn and back in the hamper, when the information given over the phone will no longer be needed, will have evaporated.

We call into the next room to someone who is there, for now.  We make a lunch date, write an appointment on the calendar, remember that we forgot something that is now more urgent, all because we assume there is a "next."

And yet, as we do all these things one after another, there is a drag, there is a darkness that stretches to Newtown, Connecticut, to the black hole that began with. . .well, we honestly don't know where or how it began, but its focal point is a young man, was a young man, lost, lost, lost. It is unfathomable to most of us how one can be so lost that the only way home is. . .well, you know.

This lostness has reverberated around the world. And we are pulled by it, mesmerized by it, into deep deep confusion and sorrow.

I can't help but imagine that when Made-In-The-USA missiles fall out of the sky from an airplane driven by a computer and a faceless "operator" thousands of miles away, and they explode into a village, sometimes into a school in a place where we can't pronounce the names of the victims, where they won't be read out loud by the American president, where there won't be banner headlines declaring "Before Their Time," where the deaths won't be the topic on all the American news channels for days and days and days, where the reason won't be assiduously searched out, where people who kill innocents won't be said to need more services, where it won't be said that we finally must ensure that these people no longer have access to such weapons; I can't help but imagine that to those parents, to those families, to those communities, those deaths aren't just as heart and soul-numbingly inexplicable.

So perhaps, for a moment, maybe now, we acknowledge that they matter, all of them.  All of them matter.

Over the River and Through the Woods

The refrigerator is still a refugee camp, Thanksgiving leftovers awkwardly shoved in amongst the native juices, butter and that third a jar of salsa.  John has already left town for another meeting, so I'm left to my own to figure out what will freeze and what won't, whether the neighbors can be counted on to receive all that yogurt and half-loaves of chocolate brioche.

The house was full, from Wednesday through Sunday, one suitcase after another coming in the door, extra toothbrushes adorning the various sinks, different choruses of voices in the kitchen.  What all did we do?  I don't know.  What did we eat?  Pretty constantly is all I remember.  I got up way early and  went to bed a lot later than usual.  The dogs were delirious with all the extra attention.

The house was alive with the energy that comes from all these people in their twenties and thirties that are still hatching their dreams.  Sharing their stories with each other, taking off in jogging pants across this rural neighborhood, gently prodding the old folks about their elementary use of all this technology.

We cooked together, the barista amongst us made us all repeated coffee drinks with designs in the foam. . .amazing!  We played Flinch with my grandmother's cards well beyond bedtime.  We went to the woods to fell a Christmas tree.  We ate dinner in the greenhouse:

And then on Saturday, we packed a picnic with our leftovers and drove to see Mom/Grandma in her new digs.  We found her in the lobby at the assisted living facility where we moved her in September.  She's "in the tank" she calls it, because anytime she is left by herself in her apartment, she tends to try to move herself from wheelchair to wherever and she ends up on the floor.  After repeated versions of this, the staff now has her within sight most of the day.

She seems a lot older, a lot more fragile and a little whupped by all she has been through in the last few months:  two major surgeries, two bouts of rehab and being moved summarily from her home of 54 years into foreign territory.  Wouldn't we all be.  She will be 90 next April.

To have three of her four grandsons there at the same time, two of their girlfriends, and two of her four children and a son-in-law, well. . .she smiled the whole time.  "I just feel so full", she would say, as she would reach for yet another hand, as she would embrace us one more time.

Periodically, despite our trying to veer the conversation elsewhere, she would get this look in her eyes, "I just don't know what I'm doing here, " she would say, looking off into the distance.  My sister would tell her again, that her wheelchair wouldn't work so well in her house, and since she couldn't walk now, well, this was her best option. "Oh," she would say, "all right."

We all know it isn't, "all right", that is.  It isn't all right that she can't be home, that she can't be younger that she can't walk.  It isn't all right.  It isn't all right that she is physically and mentally this far away from us, that we can't hold her when she is lonely and frightened, or when we are, by all that has happened so quickly.

This dear dear woman.  All we can do is love her, deeply, thoroughly and constantly, in this jagged, flawed manner, in a way that can never repay her for all she has done for us, all that she is to us.

Thanksgiving, indeed.

And now. . .

Mom was readmitted to the hospital yesterday, taken from Rehab, which for the last week has been more housing than therapy, back across town to where she had the emergency surgery for her spinal stenosis on Tuesday, July 24th.  Her pain was unbearable by the Saturday before, which so happened to be the 9th anniversary of my father’s death, although I have no evidence that she consciously remembered this.  Since then, she has been to two of the three hospitals that he was in during his final ordeal.

By last night, through a series of MRI’s, she was on a morphine drip for a slipped disc, for which they have decided no additional surgery, and the plan as I understand it is for her to go back to Quillen Rehab for another try at therapy, this time with a different pain relief cocktail.

I am not calm about this.  I want to be.  I want to just let it go, let it go, let it go, create spaciousness around it and be nonreactive.  However, it makes me crazy.  I feel wild.  Underneath this calm exterior, I am screaming.  And, at this point, I’m not even sure why; not sure I can articulate it.

Except.

Here she is, in this body that is deconstructing, one piece at a time, and I want somebody to do  something.  Since the beginning of this particular episode (where was the beginning?  What do we count as the beginning?) this has felt like a cascade, and that has proven to be the case, and it feels to me that it is accelerating, that there will be no relief, that we are headed diagonally and jaggedly South, that our lives, those of the people who love this woman,  are going to be ragged for quite some time, long or short, it doesn’t matter, it is going to feel like an agonizing eternity.

That is what happens in these cases.  Or at least that is my experience.  I remember going to the hospital day after day when my father was “in care” as they say in British novels.  I may have told you this but I remember driving to “Cow and Coffee” the little locally owned shop that I clung to as my home away from home, where I ordered my afternoon mocha and sat with my journal and my newly acquired Power of Now. I remember driving away from my father’s room where he lay silent on that ventilator, in a state of deep. . .something.  I would look out the driver’s side window at all those people going about their “regular” business.  And I would look in my own window at myself, and hear “there is a woman whose father is dying who is driving to coffee.”  Or when I would be eating lunch, “there is a woman whose father is dying who is chewing tomato,” and on and on.

The center of the Universe had collapsed to the black hole that was my father’s hospital room.  And now?  Now it has done it again, and is centered on my mother, as she oscillates back and forth between hospital rooms at Quillen and at Johnson City Memorial and back again, hooked to machines and to pharmaceutical concoctions, tended the best we know how by people who know her and people who don’t, in concert.

Her personality shifts, as do her pain levels, and we can’t see inside - really - to see if any curing is happening.  Meanwhile, her past disappears.  Any tentative hold she may have had on family memories evaporates with the drugs.  She can’t conceive of, much less hold on to any notion of the future and what that might hold if she can just muster up enough faith to get there; faith that there is a place where she might not be in pain, as she has been for years, where she could go on trips with her church, recognize and enjoy her children and grandchildren, walk down the few steps on her back deck to feed her birds.

Maybe this will change.  Maybe there will be the magical combination of drugs and clarity and a miraculous injection of oom-pah-pah that she will engage a gear that we are all desperately trying to set in place as a possibility.

It doesn’t feel like it right now.  It feels like she is on her way out, inexorably.  And maybe that is why I feel like a wet dishrag.  A screaming, wild wet dishrag.  I want to reach across that mountain and shake her and beg her to take hold.  And yet, there is part of my body that shares her deep, deep fatigue.

What is wrong with leaving? I have advocated it for years, for myself, electively.  I have said out loud to the consternation of dear ones nearby, “If there is any way to achieve it, I want to have the means to leave, early on, while I still have full faculties, when I have the intuition that my work is done.”

A common cry these days.  Like most who think about it at all, I don’t want this messy, incredibly expensive, technologically impeded, horrific departure.  It isn’t necessary.  It isn’t desirable.  It isn’t respectful. It isn’t moral.

I hope I’m wrong.  I hope that is not where we are.  But it feels like it.  It feels like we want emergence from this into a brighter future more than Mom does.  We have more energy than she does.  To us, in different encasements, not 89 years old, not having just had surgery, and now with a slipped disc, and not in that kind of pain and drugged and and and, the future inherently feels bigger, more hopeful, more real. The future here, I mean, embodied.

. . .Oh, my goodness.

. . .I just reread that paragraph. . .Maybe that's the answer.  Maybe that's what I need to let go of.

Maybe Mom wants emergence from this into a brighter future just like we do. . .

Maybe that is where I can rest.

We'll see. . .

While we were gone. . .

you and I, zeroed in on a hospital room in Tennessee, Life at Briarpatch continued. . .

The Malabar spinach twined up its supports:

The grapevine hugged its trellis:

The pears swelled and began to blush:

And the rudbeckia gave its all:

It doesn't seem possible, really, as you head to the same elevator, to go up to the same room, wondering/dreading what you'll encounter this time, as you push through molasses to get dressed and do it again.  It doesn't seem possible that that spinach could so easily continue its journey, those grapevines continue to reach so effortlessly for the sun, those pears to just be so pear-like, kissed and blushing, the flowers to offer themselves so fully; all of it unhinged from, unaffected by this drama that seems to require so much more than  one has to give.

I come home to heal, to stand in the garden and marvel, to cut back some of the growth that just went on and on, while I spent the week struggling, from one moment to the next to just let go let go let go. Where periodically I would be surprised to feel the blood in my veins, to feel genuine hunger instead of just a need for more energy.

There was a baby hawk on the front feeder while I was gone, John told me, still wet, uncertain of how to stand there, undecided as to what to do next. John kept the hummingbird feeders cleaned and refilled, and now there is a new batch of these magical creatures, even tinier than their tiny parents, zipping and unzipping the air as they speed toward each other, unseating whomever is on the perch.

All this life, while Mom lies in the bed.  What does she want?  Does she want to be here, meaning alive at all?  Is she too tired at 89 to make the effort? We don't yet know.  When the anesthesia wears off, in a few weeks, when her surgical pain is diminished, maybe she will know, maybe then we will,  Meanwhile we wait.

What a grand waiting room. . .

Sunday the 29th - we're headed home. Mama isn't.

I don't know how to describe yesterday.  Words fail me.  That is fine, really, as we are leaving this morning. (Thank you Laura for really having to be in the office tomorrow and for Mom believing her, at least temporarily).  

I called early to get Mom's schedule for the day, so we could get there while she wasn't occupied with occupational or physical therapy.  Overnight caregiver Sandy told me she had slept well, good to hear, as that had been a problem. We got ourselves together, slowly, as by now we are moving through molasses, and got there late morning.  She was sound asleep, so asleep that when the OT Sweet Thang Adam came to get her, he said he would reschedule her for later in the day, just let her rest.

We waited around for awhile, catching up, watching her sleep like I remember doing with my son, rather in wonder at the Universes contained in that body.  We learned that she didn't have the clothes she needed, and there were other things that needed doing at her house in Greeneville, 45 minutes away.  Leaving the day sitter right there in the chair beside her, we left to get lunch and do the external chores.

The external chores took a little longer than we thought, as we decided to put one of her lights on a random timer, not knowing how long she will be completely gone from her house.  That meant a trip to the hardware store and then figuring out how to adapt the plug in her 50-plus year old house. We also figured out the day would be immeasurably improved if we stopped at a little gourmet chocolate shop in Jonesboro, and we could bring her some too.  We kept the caregiver informed and worked our way down the list, filling her birdfeeders, hiding her checkbook (not very well - burglary may not be a career choice for either of us), gathering up mail and newspapers. By the time we walked in with Starbuck's coffee for everyone, clothes, chocolates, books, magazines, papers, mail and an uncanny sense of foreboding, it was around 4 p.m.

She was livid.

"I hope nobody ever does you the way you have done me," she said, her eyes flashing and her face set in stone. Her daytime caregiver yesterday, the meekest of the rotation, shrunk back into her chair.  I knew immediately what she meant, but also knew I knew more than Mom did why she was so furious.  And because of that I also knew her feelings were completely unjustified, in my world.  They made complete sense in a world that has no past nor future connected to it, no context.  

We had abandoned her, after all she had done for us.  This was unforgivable, obviously.  She refused to talk about it; chose glaring instead, no matter our telling her, calmly and quietly, more than once, where we had been, as we unloaded bag after bag of the evidence.  

"I hope you never have to go through what you have put me through," she said, again, and again, after what I suppose were suitable pauses for emphasis. "To just leave me like that, just because I was asleep!. . ."

"That's fine," I finally said, after the third round of explanation was not melting the glacier stuck in that bed. Smiling (wearily I'm sure), I simply said, "we don't have to stay.  We can get all this unloaded and just go on.  That's OK too."  

That helped the tiniest bit, then lo and behold she was hit with leg cramps, which she needed somebody to massage. Laura had somehow slid further into favor already so when she offered to rub her legs, she was given permission and started in.  The Goddess was with me and when it was determined that bananas would help, I immediately grabbed the car keys.

I took the long route to the grocery, driving in complete wonderment at all this.  Perhaps I was and am delirious, but I realized her state of mind in receiving all this doesn't alter one whit what we are doing for her or our willingness to do it.  This is all rooted in something far deeper than gratitude or frustration or god-knows-what. . .

By the time I got back, with bananas and another meal for the caretaker, my sister had worked wonders, or the pain medication had, or time.  Mom smiled at me as I came in, and immediately said no to the bananas.  She said she was "overwhelmed with bananas."  

OK, that's fine. . .Lordy. . .

She had to go to the bathroom (I promise I'll make this part short).  The orderly that came to help her was a bit of a hunk and she was quite impressed although we didn't know that until later.  The drill is that she puts her arms around his neck and he leans in and puts his arms around her middle and hoists her up and into the wheelchair, takes her into the bathroom and when she's done, we do all this in reverse.

After she was back in bed and he had left, she said, "there sure are some good-looking men around here. I don't know what the protocol is.  I don't suppose it would do to kiss them while they are lifting you off the commode. . ."

We leave Johnson City for home this morning.  I'm already partially packed.  I can't thank you all enough for taking this journey with me.  We aren't done by any means, but it has helped so much to have this means of reaching you, and it has helped far more than I can express to have you reach back. . .a sustaining web for sure. . .

All blessings all around. . .

Mama News on Saturday the 28th. . .

Well, it wasn't pretty, but its done.  It took two large policeman and an afternoon of rerouting her worldview, but we got Mama moved yesterday from the Big Hospital to what she has already decided is the first circle of Hell. She is now in a shared room at the James H.and Cecile C. Quillen Rehabilitation Hospital parked on a knoll just above, it turns out, Laura's and my favorite Escape Restaurant.  We were there last night, PTSD, and when they didn't have a table, we fell into cushy leather seats at the bar.  They felt sorry for us and fed us. We took our shoes off and balanced our plates on our laps.

Yesterday afternoon was our second try at figuring out why when the rehab representatives came by her room at the Big Hospital Mom was determined they were not going to sell her a car.  

"What are they trying to sucker you into now?" she would say in a loud voice, each time she found out it was a Quillen representative in the room.  She would refuse to answer any of their questions, turn them over unilaterally to me or to Laura, then afterwards, every time, there would be at least thirty minutes of her telling us nobody was on her side, everybody was making decisions for her, and that we were essentially fools for buying what these people were pushing on her.  "If you don't want the car they are selling, you don't have to buy it," she would say.  The analogy worked for her far better than it worked for us, but we finally got it.

She didn't quite understand (or didn't want to accept) that rehab (translation:  exercise) was the next stage in All This.  Part of the problem is that All This is not one reality, as one might hope, but rather a collection of realities, varying according to when she had her last pain med and how recently we have both sat by her bed, one on each side, holding her hand. Regardless of how she is constructing How Things Are in the moment, what she unilaterally has yet to remember is that she was in excruciating, uncontrollable pain for weeks before this emergency spine surgery was scheduled.  She doesn't remember the years of back pain before that.  She told us day before yesterday that she was just a "little fatigued" and then they came and made her do this surgery, without her permission, that no one has consulted her, and that now she was in pain.

Bless her.  It must feel out of control, this life of hers.  It is, in a way.  Periodically, after we have been talking for awhile, she will admit that Dad made all her decisions (true) and that maybe she just got out of practice (also true).  This is after Laura has pointed out (again) that she turned over the decisions to one of us, and that we were just doing what she asked.  She can't drive anymore, she can't hear, she hasn't even been able to step down the few steps to her back patio to feed the birds she so loves.  She hasn't been able to go to the library or to church.  (Abby, the Minister for Seniors let it slip the other day when she came to visit that the Senior Minister, the Big Kahuna, is a little scared of Mom, so Abby comes instead .My guess is that she has told him one too many times, that no thanks, she didn't really want to pray with him.)

What we are finally getting is that all this is about choice, somehow, and about having some control over basic parts of life that are slipping inexorably away.  Quillen is not about choice.  Quillen is about getting her better so she doesn't have to spend the rest of her life in a nursing home.  That piece of the whole thing, regardless of how many languages we've used to try to translate it to her, is not sinking in.

We are all scared.  She is allergic to exercise and Quillen is all about exercise.  They are positively perky about exercise.  Mom is a Taurus; a 183-pound, 5 foot 2 Taurus with an attitude.  

I have already called over there to talk with her overnight sitter.  It is now 8:30 a.m.and supposedly my mother, who doesn't get out of bed - ever - before 9 a.m., is supposed to already be thirty minutes into occupational therapy, followed by physical therapy, followed by occupational therapy. . .you get the picture.  

Well, I guess I better quit being such a chicken and get my clothes on and get over there.  Maybe with all the dear prayers you have been sending, Laura and I will discover the Other Mother, the one who joked with the big policemen who came to get her yesterday, who waved like the queen as they were wheeling her out of her room on the transport stretcher. Mama Number Two who charmed the intake nurses at Quillen and agreed with them that yes, this was going to be a very nice experience indeed, that she had been looking forward to it. . .

Lordy. . .

We come home tomorrow and one of my brothers takes over, while we sit and stare into space for awhile.  I'll keep you posted. Thank you so much for doing the same.  I have appreciated the groundwire. . .

July 26th and Mama. . .

I don't know how Mama is this morning, as I have yet to get my act together and get over there.  As of last night, when Laura and I left her, she was mad.

It is not a matter of reading between the lines to figure out why, because there are not straight lines.  It is more a matter of discerning potholes through a shifting fog.  I think mostly she is mad because she is 89, although Laura said she said, while I was out of the room trying to negotiate getting her house cleaned, that she perked up when she realized her skin didn't look so bad for somebody that had been using it for "almost 100 years." 

She's right.  Perhaps a steady diet of Fig Newtons is the way to good color.

Before I left home, before the emergency part of this jerked me across the mountain, I ordered three books from Amazon to help me deal with the latest Mama chapter.  As I recall, they have titles something like: 1) There's Really No Way to Prepare; 2) This is Going to Be You Someday, No Matter How Many Supplements You Take:  and 3) Just Get Through It.  I don't remember what they are called, and they were delivered to my house probably just after I roared out of the driveway, cellphone tuned to the surgeon's office, prepared to beg.

I didn't have to.  The compassionate man, when he heard her latest symptoms, moved whatever it is you move around and "worked her in."  This was because the day before, she had lost the ability to walk, was in pain which could not be controlled, and had lost control of her bladder.  

She doesn't remember any of this, is mad because "people" made decisions for her without consulting her and if she wanted to die, well that was her business.  

Where do you start?

I started with a long, deep breath, because what I really wanted to do was clobber her.  I was sitting on the side of her bed, propped up with a quadruple Americano and Visine, holding her hand.  This was at the end of the third full day of this customized version of General Hospital.  I had just gotten off the phone after dealing with caregiver politics, had cleaned up some family politics that insulted the doctor, and I was ready for, let's just say, a change of planets.

I looked at her and smiled, which helped me not say what immediately came to mind.  Another deep breath.  She is so dear.  She really is, and I may have still said it a little strongly, but I just reminded her of Sunday and Sunday night and Monday and the trip to the ER for pain, and not being able to use her legs. And it was OK if she didn't remember, and it was OK if she wanted to just ease on out of here.  Understandable.  Sweet sister Laura, on the other side, chimed in with her side of the chorus, that she had had major surgery less than 24 hours before, that this pain was different than the pain she had when terrorist bone growth zeroed in on her spinal cord.  That we needed to just take this a little at a time.  It was OK.  It was really OK.  This was progress.  She was safe.

We all breathed a little more deeply. Laura asked Mom if she wanted a clean gown as her dinner coffee had gone awry.  "We're going to get you dressed up," I told her.  Smiling, she asked if she could have some perfume.  The nurses were able to find a lone bottle of Johnson's Baby Lotion that someone had left, a treasure.  We massaged her hands, her arms, her legs, her shoulders.

We had all come back to a less chaotic orbit.  A good time for us to leave.  Well, there is no good time, let's say opportune time, a time when we would be in marginally less trouble than other times.  Laura and I have done this tag teaming before, and we know one of the first orders of business in whatever town holds the hospital that holds the reason you are there is to search out the good restaurants.  The really good restaurants.  

Over a lovely meal, in a darkened room with white tablecloths and a perky waitress that wants to move to Asheville to pursue her dreams, urgencies receded.  By the time we shared the rosemary caramel truffles and speculated whether the gay date at the next table had gone well, there was a bigger life than Room 6408.  

Thank all of you for being part of that Bigger Life, for sending me news from that Life, for just hearing your voices in all the dear forms in which they have arrived.  Mama is better for it, honestly, and I know I am. . .

Much love. . .

July 25th and Mama. . .

The synopsis:  Mom made it through the surgery, is in a hospital bed about a block from this Hampton Inn, being circled by nurses I'm guessing. The surgeon described two of her vertebrae as being occluded with extra bone, pressing on her spinal cord.  She had been in accelerating pain, and as of Monday morning, all agreed she couldn't wait until the 31st, when her back surgery was originally scheduled.  So all over the place, plans were moved around, suitcases packed, OR's booked and here we are,  Johnson City, Tennessee, about 30 miles from her house.

I won't go into the details of my sweet mama throwing things at the caregivers, or that she asked me who I was when waking up from the surgery.  Or that we are at one of same hospitals, during the same time period when we said goodbye to my father nine years ago.  I won't try to describe the fashion scene, where evidently in Johnson City, Tennessee, it is de rigueur to wear one hospital gown forwards, another backwards and your flip flops as you escape to the parking lot with your cigarettes. My Mama quit some time ago, thank goodness. 

We will know more as time goes by.  Right now, it looks as though she will be in this hospital for another couple of days, then transfer to a rehab facility close by for maybe a couple of weeks.  Not sure when I'll be home, I need to be upfitted with more vegetables already, fewer power bars.  

I would be so grateful for prayers for Mama and notes to me of a part of the world that doesn't revolve simultaneously cherishing and letting go.  Well, maybe it all does, but I'd appreciate notes all the same. 

Love, blessings, and appreciation all around for your sweet caring about this,

On the way to Mama's. . .

We went ballooning. . .

Looking up:

Looking out:

Looking down:

When we got there, my mother was in her chair, with an ice pack on her lower back, hydrocodone and Ibuprofen doing their best.  The surgery for her spinal stenosis was cancelled when they discovered her heart had probably had an attack and something else.  So she goes to the cardiologist tomorrow.

"I don't know how I got here," she said, "I was going along just fine and then I was old."Her body is heavy from the sweets that seem to give her a bit of relief, but now there is the diabetes.  Her spirit is heavy too now.  During my last three visits, she has worried that she wasn't there for her mother when her Dad left them for another woman, more than sixty years ago.  She has a book that she bought that is supposed to help record memories.  Page after page asks questions and then holds open the space.  It is meant to be a gift from a grandparent to a child.  In the front of the book, she has stuck pictures of children I don't know.  The book is all blank.  I asked her several times if I could ask her some of the questions and maybe she could talk to me and I would write down the answers, but she just stared at me.  "I was supposed to do this," she said, "a long time ago." Four times she showed me a picture that she took off the refrigerator, telling me that these were my cousin's grandchildren.  Four times I said, "Well, isn't that something?"

There are foods in the freezer downstairs whose "best by" date is two years ago, but she wouldn't let me waste them by throwing them away.  The caretaker that was there is named Anna and is in her late seventies.  She showed me how to crochet and I showed her my knitting.  The last time we were there Mom called me afterwards to say she was mad at the caretakers because they took all my time.; how rude it was that they kept talking to me and that they talked more to me than they ever had to her.  My sister was with me that time and we both told Mom that yes, we talked to them because it was important that we got to know the people that were now so important in her care.  We didn't say what a gift it was to have a little new conversation and some relief from the weight of her decline.

As we left this time, Mom saying as usual with that look in her eyes that she didn't want us to go, and we as usual wanting desperately both to leave and to not leave her, Anna asked us where we lived. "Near Charlotte," we said, already taking some relief from having bags in the car. We all pretended that Anna was going to come and bring Mom, that they were going to pack bags in Greeneville and drive over the mountain this way, instead of the number of times, who knows how many, we will instead pack here and do the traveling.

My brothers arrive today, and will go tomorrow to the cardiologist with Mom and St. Sonja,  the main caretaker.  The doctor may or may not clear her for the surgery on her back.  If he doesn't the prognosis is increasing pain and decreasing control over her bladder and bowels.  "Who's going to want to take care of me then?" Mom asked, looking off into the distance.

What we could learn. . .

A friend who was sexually tortured by her parents tells me a story.

She has been watching a goose couple who have moved into her pond.  She has born witness as they have laid eggs, and started to raise a brood of six.

"The Mommy and Daddy and six children," she calls them.  A little family.

She tells me how the parents protect the little ones, how the father stays awake all night, vigilant on behalf of his wife and the babies, on the lookout for predators.  My friend turns on her outside lights to help.

She tells me how when they head to the pond for swimming lessons, the Daddy leads and the Mommy brings up the rear; how when they gather on the bank, the Mommy is at one end of the row of little ones, the Daddy on the other.

She tells me that she talks to the Daddy, "You are the best father, you take such good care of your little family," she says.

"I wish I'd had a Daddy like you."

What to do about Mama. . .

So my cousin called, the one who first broke the astonishing news about periods, the one whose Mama is my Mama's sister.  Evidently my mama who can't hear had called her Mama who has difficulty speaking and trouble began to brew.  According to my cousin who heard it from her Mama, my Mama said we were "trying to put her in a home." And my cousin, who kept saying it was none of her business, was calling to change our minds.

Oh dear.

The problem is that this is ever so slightly true.  In the past three months, our dear Mom has turned 89 and happy birthday has developed diabetes, spinal stenosis and two bulging disks.  This is in addition to the rheumatoid arthritis, hypertension, depression, osteoporosis, etcetera.  She is now on heavy pain medication, bless her, in addition to the rest of her prescriptions.  This very morning she is meeting with (what we hope is a highly competent, but how do you know) neurosurgeon whom we hope will agree to fix her back, however that is done.

Meanwhile, the neighborhood where she has lived for fifty-odd years seems to be headed South; the west side of the house needs painting, she can't drive or handle her checkbook anymore and the laundry is located down some perilous stairs.  Each of lives at least guilt+300 miles away. Until recently, although it is hard to imagine now, she was taking herself to the grocery and had a caretaker a couple of afternoons a week.  Now with the back pain and the diabetes, we are up to 24-hour shifts, and occasional no-shows which give Mom the chance to eat cookies for breakfast.  I know, if you can't eat cookies when you are 89 when are you going to get to do it?  


Well, this is kind of like the other morning.  Evidently it was pretty rough, the back pain and all, and no one had showed, again, so Mom called Sonja the Saintly (her primary caretaker who is the Number One reason for her being alive today) and asked if it would be all right if she had a glass of wine with her pain pill.  Sonja, who lives all the way down in Mosheim, whose next-door-neighbor-good-for-nothing-son-in-law had just been taken to the hospital for what turned out to be a unfortunately short period, said she didn't see any harm in a small glass.  Sonja is Baptist, so this may have hurt her, but everybody means well and Mom is still with us and was a happy camper when I called her later that day. On the what-are-you-doing-to-your-body scale, it probably ranked right up there with the chicken McNuggets she had for lunch yesterday.  Better living through chemistry.

But I digress.

Mom has the brochure for The Home, and has actually been out there and thought it was pretty nice.  Plus, according to my brother, my second-grade teacher is there (how can that be?  She was a thousand years old when I was seven) and my sixth-grade teacher is there too, (who was a thousand and four). And rumor has it there are a couple of people from The Church.  Periodically when we are talking, Mom will talk about how hard it is to keep up with everything, and perhaps unfortunately, we children are raised to go into action and fix whatever we can.  It helps with the guilt.

The seesaw of going or not going, evidently, had Mom having panic attacks, which manifested in her having trouble breathing while simultaneously wanting to "go and do," our old neighbor's euphemism for getting out and about.  Decision-making is not my mother's best thing, which she knows, under the best of circumstances, and when you add the pain and the pain medication, well, everything gets a little screwy.

Decision-making really it isn't our best thing either, the Committee of Four, her supposedly grown children.  So until we get this back thing figured out, Going or Not Going to The Home is on hold.  I told my cousin this, and that it is ultimately up to Mom.

What we want, of course, the Committee of Four, plus Mom, is for her to be happy and to be safe.  What we really want is for her to be thirty or even forty years younger and in perfect health. What we really want, just to the left of our wracking love for this woman,  is to not be looking in the mirror.

Something borrowed. . .

I don't normally do this, and may never do it again, but this spoke to me so clearly and was said so beautifully, I wanted to pass it along. . .(P.S.  The New York Times, June 1, 2012)

Are We Living in Sensory Overload or Sensory Poverty?

By DIANE ACKERMAN

Diane Ackermanon the natural world, the world of human endeavor and connections between the two.

TAGS:

CELL PHONES,ENVIRONMENT, SOCIAL NETWORKS, TECHNOLOGY

IT was a spring morning in upstate New York, one so cold the ground squeaked loudly underfoot as sharp-finned ice crystals rubbed together. The trees looked like gloved hands, fingers frozen open. A crow veered overhead, then landed. As snow flurries began, it leapt into the air, wings aslant, catching the flakes to drink. Or maybe just for fun, since crows can be mighty playful.

Another life form curved into sight down the street: a girl laughing down at her gloveless fingers which were texting on some hand-held device.

This sight is so common that it no longer surprises me, though strolling in a large park one day I was startled by how many people were walking without looking up, or walking in a myopic daze while talking on their “cells,” as we say in shorthand, as if spoken words were paddling through the body from one saltwater lagoon to another.

As a species, we’ve somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we’ll survive our own ingenuity. At first glance, it seems as if we may be living in sensory overload. The new technology, for all its boons, also bedevils us with alluring distractors, cyberbullies, thought-nabbers, calm-frayers, and a spiky wad of miscellaneous news. Some days it feels like we’re drowning in a twittering bog of information.

But, at exactly the same time, we’re living in sensory poverty, learning about the world without experiencing it up close, right here, right now, in all its messy, majestic, riotous detail. The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature’s precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature.

Strip the brain of too much feedback from the senses and life not only feels poorer, but learning grows less reliable.

I’m certainly not opposed to digital technology, whose graces I daily enjoy and rely on in so many ways. But I worry about our virtual blinders. We’re losing track of our senses, and spending less and less time experiencing the world firsthand. At some medical schools, it’s even possible for future doctors to attend virtual anatomy classes, in which they can dissect a body by computer — minus that whole smelly, fleshy, disturbing human element.

When all is said and done, we exist only in relation to the world, and our senses evolved as scouts who bridge that divide and provide volumes of information, warnings and rewards. But they don’t report everything. Or even most things. We’d collapse from sheer exhaustion. They filter experience, so that the brain isn’t swamped by so many stimuli that it can’t focus on what may be lifesaving. Some of their expertise comes with the genetic suit, but most of it must be learned, updated and refined, through the fine art of focusing deeply, in the present, through the senses. Once you’ve held a ball, turning it in your hands, you need only see another ball to remember the feel of roundness. Strip the brain of too much feedback from the senses and life not only feels poorer, but learning grows less reliable. Subtract the subtle physical sensations, and you lose a wealth of problem-solving and lifesaving details.

As an antidote I wish schools would teach the value of cultivating presence. As people complain more and more these days, attention spans are growing shorter, and we’ve begun living in attention blinks. More social than ever before, we’re spending less time alone with our thoughts, and even less relating to other animals and nature. Too often we’re missing in action, brain busy, working or playing indoors, while completely unaware of the world around us.

One solution is to spend a few minutes every day just paying close attention to some facet of nature. A bonus is that the process will be refreshing. When a sense of presence steals up the bones, one enters a mental state where needling worries soften, careers slow their cantering, and the imaginary line between us and the rest of nature dissolves. Then for whole moments one may see nothing but the flaky trunk of a paper-birch tree with its papyrus-like bark. Or, indoors, watch how a vase full of tulips, whose genes have traveled eons and silk roads, arch their spumoni-colored ruffles and nod gently by an open window.

On the periodic table of the heart, somewhere between wonderon and unattainium, lies presence, which one doesn’t so much take as engage in, like a romance, and without which one can live just fine, but not thrive.

Remember?

From a dear acquaintance, I have just received an email,  long and embittered. In it, she details how she continues to be betrayed, how she continues to bear up, despite the abuse, heaped and heaped and heaped, how she continues to be the heroine of her story, replete with villains.


I want to say to her, don’t you see?  Don’t you see that you are the director, the scriptwriter, the costume warden, the composer, don’t you hear?  Those people are but phantoms, perhaps not even that until you give them a role to play, hand them a script, take them into the closet to pick out their clothes, play them music to direct their limbs.  Don’t you see all of your power, flowing out out out to inflate this world of enemies? 


You are loved beyond your wildest imagination, I want to say.  You are safe, from everything.  


Take a deep breath, I would say, if she could hear me. I will hold your hand.


Here’s a pin.

Just checking. . .

So, in the wake of what has become known as the Holidaze around here, I granted myself some quiet time.  It took a good two weeks for the 2011 train to slow down.  The weather didn’t cooperate, pretending for the first five weeks of 2012 to be March.  But by the third week in January, resigned to 60 degree daytimes and therefore no mesmerizing fires into which to stare, no quietly drifting snows to help blank out all the unecessaries, I got quieter anyway.  The calendar cleared for a week, the partner willing to bring home groceries at the end of the day, the car firmly parked, I began to more deeply exhale.

It didn’t take long for me to realize I wasn’t alone.  I was being followed.  From the moment I woke until I drifted off at night, I had company. He was male, definitely.  He had a tight little mouth, was about my height, my weight, my shoe size, short hair and glasses.  Always with him he had a clipboard, always.  On it were a series of forms that he seemed to consulting.  Periodically, he would mark things off and when  page was finished, that one would get tucked under the others, edges perfectly aligned and a new form poised for completion.

I never got a good look at the categories, or the questions, but from what he kept saying to me, perhaps we can guess.  He wanted to know, rather constantly:

1. Are you sure this is a good use of your time?
2. Are you sure this is the most efficient way to do this?
3. Other people are going to jobs they absolutely hate, right now, how do you justify this laziness?
4. Is there not something more productive you could be doing right now?
5. What are you going to have to say for yourself at the end of this day?
6. Etcetera.
7. Etcetera

Hmmm.  Once I realized he was there, and that I had employed him, I was able to at least get him to turn down the volume a bit by the end of that week.  I tried to fire him but he insisted that wasn’t the way it worked, that the only way he could leave would be for me to realize something that I hadn’t yet acknowledged.

Hmmm.  What I’d like is not have him be in charge.  He’s worked a long time, deserves a retirement.   I’d like to have the freedom to move through these gifts of coming days without what feels like such harsh measurement.  I’ve asked him to move to the sidelines, allow me more room to maneuver, more space to breathe.  Right now, he’s willing to be flexible.  But I know him, if I get too busy, he gets more insistent.

We’ll see.  Wish me luck.

Winter. . .?

It is pretend winter in North Carolina.  We have worked outside in shirt sleeves for the last several days, clearing out the asparagus patch, pruning fruit trees, getting the big garden ready for greenhouse construction.  The old maple with its gnarled bark is budding out, now, in the last breaths of January, a herald of Spring.  There are daffodils blooming down next to the creek.

We all keep waiting, mittens and earmuffs by the door.  Where is the snow? The ice?  The chance to have to stay home?  

I have built fires anyway, even though the nights barely dip below freezing.  Because you are supposed to be able to build fires in December and January, and go in there after dinner and read and pet the dog with your feet.  It is one of my favorite parts of living this far north.  

But evidently the heat is blooming.  The USDA just redid their maps, and we are officially 7b instead of just 7, and there are parts of our land that are definitely 8’s, maybe southern slopes that would even be warmer.  For those of you who don’t plant, those numbers simply signify the number of nights per year that the temperature drops below freezing.

It means a lot more than whether you need your gloves on for a late run to the grocery.  Plants choose where they thrive based on temperature ranges and they don’t pick up and move easily.  Our local agricultural extension agent has already predicted gloom for the fruit growers around here as it takes a certain number of freezing nights to set both foliage and flower for fruit trees and we ain’t had ‘em.  For those of us who don’t sell peaches or plums to send our kids to college, its no big deal.  For those who do, if this is a trend, it could be a life changer.

In my family psychology, if this is a trend, the blame can be laid squarely at the feet of Al Gore.  In my family, you simply don’t talk about problems.  If you do, they exist.  If you don’t, they don’t.  That Al Gore insisted on bringing it up, over and over, well clearly, this is what you get, daffodils in January which we are using as code for what is happening to the polar bears which is too heartbreaking to discuss.

Daffodils in January is code for a lot of big fat unpleasantness.  Suddenly we are the mercy of erratic, intense weather patterns.  The rain seems to simply stop for big areas of the world, and deluge somewhere else.  The thermostat got stuck in Texas last summer and fall, only resetting when the sun itself moved its gaze to the Southern Hemisphere.  

I’m trying to enjoy the unusual pleasure of January sun on my skin, of being able to get a head start on clearing out the gardens, on getting ready for Spring.  I’m trying to pretend its early March, which is what these mid-sixty degree days would tell me.  I’m trying not to listen to my inner Debbie Downer who keeps whispering, if it is this warm now, what is it going to be in July?

Perhaps a positive part of this is that we are being reminded of Nature’s power, in no uncertain terms.  We can do what we can now, driving less, racing to develop more sustainable technologies, conserving energy, recycling, but Nature is already responding to our decades of wanton abuse.  It is on. 

We are being brought to our knees.  Once again, which is where we started, we humans, on our knees in reverential respect to the Rain Gods, the Thunder Gods, the Sun Gods.  All powerful, unpredictable.  Nature, the ultimate Decider.  

So maybe the beauty of those daffodils, the startling yellow, the deep green, the first shoots of the daylilies coming back, maybe if I just settle into the awe, maybe that’s the place from which to watch what is unfolding, whatever it is.