Update. . .

I have been waiting until I had something to say, but since December and the last blog post, evidently nothing in my world has wanted to become story.  That hasn’t changed, really,  I am just getting a little worn out by the drought, by the lack of communication, the lack of digging down deep for the right word.  So this might be a little choppy as I wiggle down into a groove. I think the camera is down there somewhere, so stay tuned for visual aids. . .

And it isn’t really true that nothing has happened.  The rose-breasted grosbeaks flew through last week, the Paris Fashion Week of birds;  their black and white bodies splashed with a chest blaze of deepest pink.  How is that possible?  True to their couture nature, there are only a few, and they stay only briefly, on their way to more elegant climates.

There were three baby bunnies born under the back deck, and somehow, so far, the hawks have been distracted with other dinners.  Periodically, at dusk or in the early early morning, we will see gradually bigger rabbits under the bird feeders.

A couple of weeks ago, the goldfinches came through in a rush, emptying thistle feeders in a single day, here long enough to change from winter dull to startling yellow.  All three bluebird houses, right now, have parents slithering through the hole to feed little grey furballs of birds-to-be.  And just for our amusement, there is a house sparrow nest in the mouth of a giant metal chicken on the front porch.  

The old-fashioned irises have come and gone, the lavender ones under the maple and the cream and taupe ones in the big garden that break your heart with their scent of a grandmother’s perfume.  The winter kale is reaching to the skies with thick stalks and sweet yellow flowers.  I’m letting that garden go for awhile just for the bees.  The spring kale in the two cold frames is starting to realize the weather is too warm for its liking and I’ll need to finish harvesting in the next few days.  We ended up with continuous kale both because we like it and because I don’t do the kind of meticulous planning that a real farmer would.

I’m always kind of surprised by the garden.  It is always doing something unexpected and it doesn’t wait for me.  It doesn’t wait for me to realize it is time to plant this or harvest that.  It just goes on, independently, growing the seeds that happen to show up, without prejudice.

I could learn from that.  Whatever comes through, in its time, is fine.

I haven’t been so accommodating.  I didn’t want to go to Tennessee when my mother ended up in the hospital recently. I say “ended up” because it still isn’t exactly clear whether she engineered the little sidetrip away from her assisted living home, against which she seems to be constantly rebelling.  She just  turned ninety, and to celebrate the occasion she has started to use the “N” word, and had to be forcibly wheeled out of the dining room because she started yelling. The director pushed Mom in her wheelchair back to her apartment and got her into her recliner.  She had to leave for a moment and when she returned, Mom was sitting in the floor, claiming she had fallen, sitting in a position curiously like someone would be who had scooted herself into the floor.

Mom ended up in the hospital this last time because when her afternoon caregiver arrived on this particular day, Mom was breathing heavily and the caregiver couldn’t get her attention.  They both went to the emergency room, but the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong, but at ninety, they admit you anyway.  She was there for a week, with all manner of tests, meals brought to her in bed, a bevy of nurses commenting on her sweet smile.

When my sister Laura and I got there the morning after admission she told us she had gin in her hospital water carafe and that she had been on a ride in a casket.  I don’t know where the gin came from for as far as I know, since my Dad died, my mother has a decided preference for Kendall Jackson Chardonnay.  It was Kendall Jackson they took away from her about a month after she got to assisted living.  Evidently she was coming back from breakfast and drinking and dialing, going through her address book, calling people to come get her.

That may have been when her minister decided to stop coming to see her.  We’re not sure.  All we know is that it is now the assistant minister’s job and her visits seem to have slacked off as well. Anyway, at the close of last week’s Hospital Spa Vacation, the doctor said Mom had the beginnings of both congestive heart failure and “mild dementia.”

“Ha!” said the director of the assisted living place.  “Ha!” said their director of nursing.  “She knows exactly what she is doing.”  I guess the story of the casket ride convinced the doctor, and it couldn’t have helped that Mom’s hearing aids went completely dead, even with new batteries, so all the information she had to comment upon started out in her own head. True for me too sometimes.

So we are all along for the ride it seems.  Us, Mom, the kale, the new birds and bunnies.

It really has been a glorious Spring.  And now that I’ve broken the ice, maybe I can tell you about it more often.

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. . .