The Bright Side of Death

It's the end of another year and I'm still around, although sadly, my husband did not make it to his 77th birthday which would have happened on December 31.  Since my mother died at age 63 in 1982, this is the first time I have had to face the death of a loved one.  Trying to make sense of his dying makes no sense.  A year and a half ago he was walking three miles a day, healthy and happy, and then the kind of back pain that at 76 one assumes is just that turned out to be cancer, and the cancer turned out to be bigger than all the powers that medicine could bring to him.  And that, my friends, is life. 

I have learned over the past year and a half that I am not alone in my obsession with death.  The evidence is everywhere.  For example, the weather forecast for today's Onion reads:  "75 -- Sunny -- still one day closer to death, though."

I'm currently reading Smoke Gets In Your Eyes : And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty.  She is a young woman who has decided to tackle her lifelong fear of death by going to work at a crematory.  She is expecting that facing the death of others -- and actually participating in the postmortem ritual -- will allow death to become just another part of her life.

That's a bit of what I have been doing lately, but without the ashes.  Here is some of what I have come up with:

A quick death -- a massive heart attack, a fall from a tall building, a fatal crash -- happens so quickly that a person cannot possibly register enough pain to think, "This is unbearable."  That would be a good thing.

A long, painful death, as with the evil beast cancer, I believe is a game of "Let's Make a Deal" that doesn't end until, well, it ends.  We weigh the amount of pain caused by both the cancer and the treatments with the amount of hope we have for the time we have left.  Those of us who are so inclined pray and try to look forward to a pain-free afterlife.

I find the whole idea of afterlife fraught with confusion and contradictions.  Like, I'm assuming that most who believe in life after death think in terms of being reunited with those they love.  How about those they don't love?  How about those they love who don't love them?  Maybe when you leave your body behind your soul also sheds all those petty aggravations.  But then what happens?  Are you and all your wives and exes just friends?  Do you hang out with the boss you couldn't stand?  And does he (or she) treat you well, or just the same as everybody else up there?

What about the things you loved here on earth?  Good food, football, the beach, spy novels:  if these are the things that define you, when you get to heaven do you get to have them all, or do you no longer need them, and in that case, then, who the heck are you?  That would pretty much make us all one spiritual blob, or maybe millions of singular blobs, indistinguishable one from another, wouldn't it?

Lots of authors have tried to visualize heaven, some of them narcissistic enough to publish their work as non-fiction.  Some talk to a voice they claim is God, and who basically tells them everything they want to hear about life after death.  Hard to find someone who says, "You know, God contacted me the other day and said I was totally wrong about the afterlife."  The exception to that is all those people who weren't worried about dying until they were, and then they suddenly "found" God, who astonishingly did not tell them shame on you, you are going to hell, but instead was so happy they had stumbled upon Him that he gave him a pass into heaven.

I realize I am ruminating here, but, hey, that's what this blog is supposed to be about, okay?  I had hoped to write a funny piece about death and dying, because humor has helped me with all kinds of trauma and tragedy in my life.  But it's not easy.  Maybe because death is THE irrational thing about life.  I could be sitting here writing this thing on death and then....  nothing.

Seems to me Terry Pratchett has nailed the concept of Death.  Death, the character in Discworld who is responsible for collecting us when it's time, speaks in all capital letters.  Death wears the traditional garb, and at the time where you may or may not be dying, you just might have a conversation with Death.  In The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, Maurice bargains away one of his lives so that a rat can live.  That is probably about as believable about any entering heaven story you might come up with.

Because living and dying are such baffling concepts, and we are persistent in our attempts to find meaning in our being here, we continue to make up stories that allow us to go on as though our existence makes sense.  But the fact is: we are here and then we are not, except for the compostable material.  Neil DeGrasse Tyson is just delighted by how huge is space and how infinitesimal and insignificant are we.  I suppose that is the quintessence of the defense mechanism of reaction formation, converting your terror into delight at an inevitable horror.  I have to admit, I like it.  It matters not that Neil DeGrasse Tyson is brilliant and will be remembered in history as long as people exist and think and that I have, well, this blog.  It is still a perspective that makes more sense than we are all going up to this place where nobody will have any negative feelings about anybody and for that matter will no longer have positive feelings about earthly stuff.

This is what I think about death.  Death is sleep at the end of a continuum.  When we go to sleep, we don't consciously fall asleep.  And we all think the best sleep is the dreamless sleep.  So when I go I like to think that it will be just like falling asleep.  And then there will be nothing left of me except all the stuff I have that my family will be stuck getting rid of.  And I won't be around to feel bad about it.

What could be wrong with that?

Cigar Memories

Stephan was a cigar smoker, after his dad.  From a young age, and unapologetically.

Shortly after we met, on our first actual date, we were in Baltimore.  We had dinner at Fell's Point, and I remember an old building, like a courthouse, with stairs, and Stephan doing a Gene Kelly-esque dance down the stairs.  With cigar in hand.  That may have been the night that he told me that if he had to choose between cigars and me, well, he liked me, but....

A couple of years later, we were visiting a very dear friend of Stephan's in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania.  At the time Herman was a confirmed bachelor, living with his father, who was into his 80's.  Two single men enjoying the good life, Herman a great cook who could do gourmet meals but was happiest making sauerbraten and spatzle, and both dedicated to good cigars.  Stephan brought dozens of fancy cigars and Herman had cigars he had selected to share, and that's what they did the entire weekend.  By Sunday evening I was craving air that was not laden with cigar smoke, but as we drove away, Stephan could think of nothing to prolong the weekend better than lighting up.  I opened the car window and hung my head out, much as a dog enjoying the fresh air.

There was the time I was visiting my best friend in New York.  I had gotten off the train and was walking uptown on 8th Avenue.  I suddenly got a strong, urgent sense of missing Stephan.  It was a warm and loving feeling.  Then I realized there was a dirty old guy walking alongside me, smoking an old stogie.

His sister drew a sketch of Stephan that ended up on the wall in his townhouse.  At some point, I came upon a picture of a cigar and realized what the portrait lacked:

And that was how it remained, until we moved from Columbia to Long Island.

When I left Maryland to begin graduate school on Long Island, Stephan came up with me to help me get settled.  He had happened upon a great smoke shop in a neighboring town and wanted to stop there on the way home, which meant he had to leave early.  We fought and he left to get his cigars.  Three weeks later, our letters apologizing to each other crossed in the mail.

Stephan's speech, cigar firmly planted, was a variant on the English language.  Friends and family mimicked him; my sisters and I once had a Stephan look-alike/sound-alike contest.  We borrowed a cigar and passed it around, each taking a turn to propound on some topic in those melodious but incomprehensible tones.  He was good-natured about it, but he didn't seem to get what all the hilarity was about.

I think most of us have left pots on the stove and forgotten about them.  We know that smoking in bed is dangerous.  But Stephan with a cigar was always an exciting experience.  Of course, all his shirts and coats had cigar burns.  And there was the time when he was visiting for Easter and went to Ambrose Farm to pick some asparagus.  I wasn't there for the occasion, but my son reports that he lit a cigar, tossed the match and a minute later, there was a small fire developing in the field.  Fortunately, my son yelled out in time and the fire was stomped out.

Another time, as he walked into the house in his heavy white winter coat, I noticed smoke coming out of a pocket.  He didn't seem unduly upset; apparently this was just one of those things that happen when you are Stephan. 

When he had surgery for pancreatic cancer a year and a half ago, Stephan stopped smoking.  He was worried that he would be unable to quit, but he went cold turkey.  The first few times he called me I didn't recognize his voice, and once I even asked if it was him.  Stephan without the cigar was truly new and different.

When he visited us in Charleston, Stephan had always spent hours upon hours sitting on my porch, reading and smoking.  He would come inside from time to time, for a meal or a movie, but would have to take a break to go out for a smoke throughout.  When I wanted to go sit outside with him for awhile I would say, "Let's go have a smoke."  Because regardless of where we sat, the smoke always blew my way.  There were times when it was too much and I would get annoyed.  It wasn't till he stopped smoking that I realized he had also been keeping away the mosquitoes.

He seemed not to have cravings after he stopped smoking, but when he visited me that November, a year ago, Stephan was worried.  He was afraid that if he went out on the porch and sat and read, the craving would return and he would give in to his old habit.  And of course, insanely, or because he just wouldn't have felt right not carrying them here, he had brought a few cigars.  But that never happened.  He had been having a hard time reading since the surgery, which was a far greater tragedy than not smoking, as he was a voracious reader.  But during that visit, he sat on the porch and read a book or two.  Happily, a Terry Pratchett Discworld book that I was about to read, that he had somehow, amazingly missed got him back on the road to reading.  And he did it sans cigar.

It was the cruelest gift, then, when his doctor told him he could smoke again.  It was a few weeks before his death, after a year and a half of prodding and poisoning, that his comfort took precedence over finding a cure.

We talked about the smoking and the cancer.  He knew the correlation.  But we never talked about whether he wished he had never smoked.  Smoking was his identity; it was what identified him with his father, who he loved and lost when he was in his thirties.  Maybe it isn't relevant that his father died of cancer, because the quality of Stephan's life so much involved the culture of cigars and smoking.  Some medical researchers say that we are genetically predisposed to when we are going to die, and some say that if that evil cancer lurks in us there may be little we can do to thwart it.

I know the pleasure Stephan got from his cigars, from the ritual of pursuing the best smokes to that of actually lighting up.  I don't think he regretted his life of smoking, and I don't begrudge him that choice.  And I know that anytime I ever smell the smoke of a cigar, I will imagine Stephan close by.

   

Lost Parents, Lost Children

My husband died a week ago.  We haven't lived together for fifteen years, but he was a friend.  Or a brother.  Like a big brother, he and I fought at times like cats and dogs, but when I needed someone to talk to, his was the number I called.  And with the miles, there were no fights.

When the cancer was diagnosed, it seemed that my daughter and I got closer, then began to grow farther apart.  The curtness, the distance between calls, the less we talked about what was personal, I attributed to stress at work, her father's illness, academic pressures.  Then I decided that because of all the above, she had just become annoyed with me, the way we sometimes are annoyed by those we love.

When he died, my daughter and son came together, but they kept me apart.  This past week, I have been here, they have been there.  When they changed plans to be together at Thanksgiving but away from me, my world crumbled a bit more.  It feels as though I have lost, not just my husband -- my best friend -- but my two children.  This feeling that I have today is about as alone a feeling as I have ever had.

In the wee hours of the morning, I went to the internet to look for clues, and maybe some solace.  It seems that when children become adults, even if they have grown up with love and the usual number of parental mistakes, some take paths that we would never have thought possible.

So it is with my daughter.  It was with some relief that I found stories of adult children who for no clear reason became estranged from their parents.  I, the psychologist, joined ranks with physicians and teachers, we who are supposed to know how to raise children and end up clueless as to what went wrong.  Assumptions of normalcy and dreams of closeness, out of our control.

It seems that all I can do is try to be there, and hope that some day she will take a tentative step back to trusting me, liking me, caring what I think, wanting me to be there.

So this will be a Thanksgiving of grieving for me.  For my husband, friend, brother, Stephan.  And also for my children who are (thankfully) together, but far from me.

On the Street Where I Live

Out here in the boonies, in my neighborhood, we have an odd assortment of crackpots, oddballs and individual thinkers.  I believe I fit right in.  We mostly ignore each other, which works well for me.  When I first moved here, I had heard about plenty of strange fights, some involving the calling of police, others involving alcohol and absconding with money collected from neighbors to repair our dirt road.  It was inevitable that at some point I would join in the merry fracas, but thought that keeping to myself would either make it less likely or at least less frequent.   I have wondered if I sometimes overreact, and if we country folk aren't that bizarre, despite Sunday morning target practice.  I would like to offer some proof to the contrary.

Yesterday I had a couple of friends out to enjoy the beautiful fall day.  Neither had been here before, and one of my friends got lost.  She was on the longish dirt road, and having a hard time making out the 4 digit numbers on the mailboxes, which is not at all uncommon.  At one point, my friend pulled into the wrong yard, and apparently, instead of backing out pulled around on the "grassy" "lawn" (I use both terms loosely when referring to the green stuff that grows on the ground in my neighborhood) and drove out.

Hours later, we were enjoying a glass of wine on my porch when a big SUV began to drive by, backed up, and then pulled into my "driveway."  It was the only car that we had seen in the hour or so that we had been out front.

"I wonder who that could be," said one of my friends.

"Doesn't look like Jehovah's Witnesses," I remarked as a white-haired, bearded white guy got out and slowly approached.

"What can I do for you?"  I asked.

He was looking for the driver of the little car that had pulled into his yard.  He wanted to let her know that he did not appreciate it, and wanted to make sure it did not happen again.

My friend, struggling to not look appalled, explained that she had been lost, apologized, and assured him that she would not repeat the indiscretion.  To her credit (and our great loss), she did not say that she was disappointed, because she had been planning on driving through later on her way out.  As it was, the trespassee looked somewhat taken aback at not having any way to further the fight, and awkwardly made his way back to his SUV

Okay, let's take a look at this.

These two guys were driving around looking for the car that had driven into their yard by mistake over an hour ago.  Since we hadn't seen them drive by before, I can only imagine that they had been sitting somewhere about their property, maybe the owner of the property getting increasingly peeved at the nerve of some people to drive into his yard.  Maybe he then went to the fridge and realized he had just drunk his last beer.  So he enlisted his companion to come out with him to drive around the neighborhood as a spotter in order to locate the miscreant.  Let me add that these are big front yards, her car was parked near the house and away from the street, in between our two other cars.  It took some effort to locate.

Imagine the psychic -- and physical -- energy this whole endeavor took, not to mention the paranoid thought processes and the gas consumption.

My friend appeared to be rattled by this, I much less so.  I have long held that if my neighbors were going to gun for me, with the fights we've had over loud and persistent racing of dirt bikes, and loud and persistent barking dogs, it would have happened by now.

Also, shortly before my friends got to my house, a quite large black snake made its way onto my porch, and after it quickly slithered away, came up a second time.

So I am no stranger to danger.

But as I thought about it later, given all the possible things that could be wrong in this dude's life, focusing on finding the person that drove into his yard to turn around could have reasonably been perceived as a red flag.  And I do mean red.  My friend suggested that part of his motivation may have been the Obama bumper sticker on her car.  I wondered how someone of my age could have made out the words on the bumper sticker from that distance, but years of country living just may have blessed him with better eyesight than me.

I had been disappointed that during their visit my friends had not been entertained by a reappearance of the black snake, nor a peek at my cat who hid under the bed until minutes after they drove away.  But they did get to witness an even more entertaining type of rural critter:  the paranoid, angry redneck.

Mortal Thoughts

My cat is stretched out somewhere, taking a nap.  When I settle down to read this afternoon, she will join me on the arm of the chair and settle down... for a nap.  She is luxurious in her ability to stretch out and luxuriate.  What she has that I don't have is essential in its absence:  she lacks awareness of her mortality.  I admire that.  Whether she is chasing down a catnip mouse or berating me for being gone too long or snacking on her dry food, she is always in the moment.

Our curse is pretty much our awareness of our mortality.  Whether we make good or evil, use or waste it, it shadows us everywhere.

When Robin Williams died, it saddened me and everyone else but Rush Limbaugh, but as people were talking about the cause, it seemed that they missed the point.  We all treasured his sweetness and his insanity, but what we all remembered in his passing was brilliance long past.  From Mork to Good Morning, Vietnam, his energy was palpable.  In later years he had moments of brilliance in smaller roles, like in August Rush (2007).  As we all reminisced, though, we did not come up with anything of late that embodied the great Robin Williams.  It surely must have been hard to be him.

I imagine that both fueled and self-medicated in his younger days, the genius was far more spontaneous, after all he hadn't yet had to strive to outdo himself.  As he fought and won the battle against his addictions, I also imagine he had to learn to not be so spontaneous, to analyze and censor his impulses.  While we were all waiting for another flash of the insane improvisations of the young Robin Williams, he also must have expected no less of himself, and yet knew the older man just wasn't the same person.

When we remember and regret the loss of Robin Williams, we don't think of his role in The Crazy Ones, where he looked like he wanted more than anything to break out and be insane again.  We don't think of those later mediocre comedies where he played a disgruntled dad and recited lines.  We think of him bouncing off the wall with Jonathan Winters; we remember Johnny Carson seeming to have to try to get him off the ceiling so the show could go on, all the while wiping away tears of laughter.  We also remember that he could play someone quirky, odd, imperfect, one of us, only better.

And there we are.  Humanity, mortality, aren't we all trying to be us, only better?  Our goals may be confused, but when we fail it's because we are frustrated that we can't do better.  We do crazy things trying to reach that end, everyone from the evil head of ISIS to Robin Williams.  I am in there somewhere and so are you.  Because we are basically all in a race to what turns out to be mortality.

As I wrestle with my mortality and my awareness of same, I think of Neil deGrasse Tyson, who seems to be absolutely tickled to be a teensy tiny part of the amazing universe even for the smallest amount of time.  Then I think, yeah, but he's brilliant and famous and changing the world, and I'm not.  And then I think of my cat, and that maybe I don't have to be remembered when I'm gone.  That maybe I can sometimes just be alive and in the moment and that's good enough.

It's tricky, though.  Robin Williams couldn't do it any longer.  Maybe it will be easier for me because I am smaller.

Another Neil, Neil Diamond, wrote a song about it that was a compilation of famous names and ended,

And each one there

Has one thing shared:

They have sweated beneath the same sun,

Looked up in wonder at the same moon,

And wept when it was all done

For being done, too soon,

For being done too soon.

Robin Williams was born two days after me, on July 21, 1951.

 

The Perfect Relationship

It seems a lot of the reading I've been doing lately has had to do with mother-daughter relationships.  Not on purpose; it's just happened that way.  But it's true that I am also going through my own personal mother-daughter crisis, so I wonder just how incidental it really is.

For example, on top of one of my stacks of books was one called, "Please Excuse My Daughter," by Julie Klam.  It's been sitting in that stack, being moved up and down in it, for a number of years.  I own it because it was a book that I was forced to discard when I worked at the library because it had not circulated in awhile.  I didn't take every book I discarded, just the ones that I thought I might regret not reading when they were gone.  Lately I've been sick of political and serious reading and have been aiming for lighter fare, and of course there was the mother-daughter thing.

Julie Klam is very funny.  She began her reluctant working career as a David Letterman intern.  She is not at all like me, or my daughter; her mother is not at all like me, or my mother.  However, at one point her mother comments on Rod Stewart as being, "'nice-looking but no Rudolph Valentino.'"  About which Klam writes, "I remember feeling that fierce irritation only a daughter can feel for her mother."

Here's another book I read just last week:  Roz Chast's new graphic memoir is entitled, "Can't we talk about something more PLEASANT?"  The New York Times reviewer calls it, "by turns grim and absurd, deeply poignant and laugh-out-loud funny."  Well, I'm here to tell you that I didn't laugh out loud that much.  My guess is that the reviewer was relating as the adult child, and not as the parent of an adult child.  The thing is, the child being annoyed at the parent thing comes across loud and clear.  Which, given my current personal crisis, was a little too close to home to want to laugh out loud.

Anyway, while I am trying not to overinterpret, I have to admit that I am becoming more aware through my reading that daughters are critical of their mothers.  Yes, it's unnecessary, and it's also cruel, but it seems that when I was a teen and young adult, as justified as I was, I did not invent the wheel.  And neither has my daughter.

As a psychologist and a new mother, I truly believed that love -- in psychobabble, "unconditional positive regard" -- would get a mother and daughter through all hurtles.  I did pretty much the opposite of everything my parents had done and I became one of those awful parents who think their children are the sun around which we move.  As it turns out, my kids are both pretty okay, so I was probably half right.  My daughter seems to have made it through the hurtles, but as far as I'm concerned, the jury is still out.  On the other hand, if you asked her, she might say that I ruined her for life.

While one of the few things I had been absolutely sure of was my parenting, I am now second-guessing pretty much everything I ever did or said to or for my kids.  And I wonder just how my mother dealt with those years in my twenties when I needed to prove to myself that I didn't need her.  I have to give it to her, though.  Without a degree in psychology, without the depth of reading that I have available, she was able to sum up the mother-daughter thing in one sentence:

"Someday your daughter will do to you what you've done to me."

Up until now I thought it had been a threat.  I now realize that she was merely stating a fact of life.

Beach Snob

You probably wouldn't be surprised to learn that I hate crowds.  Always have.  And especially so at the beach.  I am the person that sits as far away from people as possible, and then minutes later is joined by a family with kids slinging mud and frisbies and has a very loud radio supplying the unwanted beat for the day.

My dream when I was in my teens was to own a house on the beach.  Of course, it would be a private beach.  I'm also the person who, after I've moved into an area, thinks there should be a ban on building.  I've thought about getting a "welcome" mat that says, "Leave Me Alone," but decided it would be reasonable to wait for someone to give me one as a gift.

When I was in my thirties, and had given up on owning a beach front home, I bought a couple of timeshare weeks, one at Gurney's Inn on Montauk Beach and the other at Peppertree, Atlantic Beach.  Timeshares have less resale value than cars, so when I moved south, I gave back my Long Island week to the management company, who appeared to be going bankrupt anyway.  I continued to use, or exchange, or rent out, my North Carolina week.  When I discovered I could occasionally find really affordable timeshare week rentals right on the beach I was in heaven.  I've learned to shop cautiously, and with the internet it's pretty easy to get a good idea of what you're signing up for.

I've been wanting to get back to the Gulf Coast of Florida for years.  Mostly it's unaffordable.  So when I saw a week for $600 I did my research, agonized for a couple of hours, and then went for it.  Had I thought a few minutes longer, I would have asked myself if I really wanted to go to Fort Myers Beach in August.

It's hot.  But it's a small resort, not too fancy but with anything I might need (except cell service), and it's right on the beach.  I'm told I have the best unit in the place, and I believe it.  It's a one-bedroom apartment apart from the main building, with a deck, that overlooks a beautiful and quiet piece of beach.  And the waters of the Gulf Coast are beautiful.  Perfect for a coward like me, no waves.  This time of year, the water is slightly cooler than the 90 degree air temp.  The sand is blindingly white and ground fine.  And it's always possible to find tiny, perfectly formed shells.

Yesterday, I took a ten-minute walk on the beach to the main part of town, where there is public beach access.  It was Labor Day, and people were pretty packed in.  I am not proud to say I was horrified.  But it did occur to me that the problem was too little beach for too many people.  The kids were having a blast.  Dogs had been pretty much kept away during regular beach hours.  And there was actually very little garbage strewn around.

The worst thing about people using beaches is what goes on in the water.  As in water "sports."  While it's quieter today, the day after Labor Day, I still watched in horrified amazement as a progression of a dozen or more of what I guess are called jet skis or waverunners raced across the water.  Larger boats speed past, oblivious to anyone's need for pleasure but their own.  Noise and fuel pollute air and water for an afternoon's cheap thrills.

I thought a bit about Carl Hiaasen over this Labor Day weekend, when this small beach town was overrun by tourists.  There is the overdevelopment.  Then there is the willingness to let anyone willing to pay for the pleasure out to tear up the waters and the birds and sea creatures trying to live peacefully within.  How far should we be allowed to go to have fun?  Apparently it is as far as we are willing to pay.

Today in front of my space it is relatively quiet.  I bitched about the smallish motorboat that had to park itself right in front of "my" private beach.  The parade of waverunner thingies was far more upsetting.  But I'm happy that the weekend is over and the summer is over and it's early yet for winter adventurers.  Right now it's just a handful of us older folk and a few couples with pre-school age children.  The mornings are wonderful.

I have been so thrilled to be able to walk into the water, and swim about without fear of being hit by a wave.  But then I went out to cool down a little and swim around, and felt these small slippery things swimming around with me.  Of course they were probably just a school of those tiny fish.  And I wasn't going to let my fears force me out of the water.

When I did go back to the chair I had sitting right at the water's edge I noticed a jellyfish.  And a few feet away, another jellyfish.  Hmm.  I don't plan on being scared out of the water, but as I watch from my apartment today, I will take note of anybody who runs screaming out of the water.  So far, the only noises are coming from the motorcraft.

When the Rage Doesn't Fall Far from the Tree

Somewhere when I was about twenty-seven, I stopped speaking to my mother.  I had moved away from Rhode Island to Maryland a year or so earlier, and had a visit from my two sisters, but now I wanted my youngest sister to visit and my mother said no.

We did that in my family.  My father was the model for not-speaking.  He tended to only speak to one of my mother's many brothers and sisters at a time, for what I understood to be some very strange reasons.  From about the time I turned, oh, thirteen, we would "have a fight," meaning that my father would yell at me for something, and we would not speak to each other for several months, sometimes up to six, which would correlate to the time between my birthday and Christmas.  We tended to start speaking again around events.  Again, this is my recollection, which is faulty.  Ask my daughter.

Because she has carried on the tradition, and in a most noble way.  And I have fought it, and fought it, and fought it.  Since she was about thirteen, I think, shortly after we moved from Long Island to Charleston, leaving her father and her friends behind, she began to fly into rages at me.  Much like I would do to my mother when I was her age.  Unlike my father, my mother would not fight back; I wasn't scared of her.  So I would let my temper fly.  I had reason to be angry, my father was rigid and cruel, my mother refused to stand up to him.  This left me isolated from friends, and depressed.

My daughter's rage came from, well, apparently I still don't have a handle on it, because she rages on.  We've had what I thought were years when we were getting closer, dotted with periods when she would get distant.  I would try to ignore what was obviously going on, get angry when she would not come home, be hurt when she was able to effortlessly go months without talking to me, try to talk to her about what was going on.  And all the while ignoring her crazy, insane rage that was on fire against me.

Recently the coldness has become so obvious, she has been ignoring me to the point that I could no longer pretend nothing was going on, and I decided I was so miserable I had to confront it.  What I ended up confronting, to my amazement, was that same rage from her teenage years.  That rage I felt toward my mother when I was my daughter's age.  And it's left me stunned.

Back when I began writing "Ruminations..." I was letting it all hang out.  Not so much ranting against my kids, but ranting against being abandoned by my kids.  Then a few people began to read it, and I decided it wasn't right to be so personal, not fair to the readers, nor to my family.  I am writing this now (to be published at a later time and after a period of consideration) because this is the reality of my life, maybe the most important thing that is happening to me.

The loss of a child is an unspeakable loss.  And yet that is what I am wrestling with right now.  Her rage is unapproachable, unstoppable.  Other than no longer being me, I wouldn't have any idea how to change it.  And I have over the years even tried to not be me, to not speak my mind, to pretend everything was fine.  It was a fear of those teenage years (mine and hers), of the awful, untrue things that were said in those rages.

But to ignore her anger at this point is to ignore my own existence, and I couldn't do that.  She couldn't ignore it either, it was seeping into our "normal" conversations.  Neither of us are capable of resolving it, not from this distance, any better than we could when we lived together.

I don't remember how long I went without speaking to my mother.  It seemed like years, but couldn't have been.  Because when she was sixty and I was not that much more than twenty-seven, I got a call from my youngest sister saying that my mother was in the hospital, having a triple bypass.  Of course we reconciled, and I was able to be closer to her for three years, until she died.  When she was sixty-three, which happens to be the age I just turned.

You can't make someone aware of how near we all are to losing each other forever.  For me I was able to come to that awareness before it was too late.  Which makes what we are going through now, me and my daughter, all that more poignant.

The loss of a child is an unspeakable loss.  This is a loss I just can't accept, and so I will speak about it, and hope it isn't so.

Resorting to Vacation

I have a bad attitude about being home these days.  Being home means taking care of stuff.  It means mowing the damned lawn, which in a season with plenty of rain and just enough sweltering heat and sun like we have this year you can pretty much watch it grow.  And then mow it again.  And to boot, I ran my mower over a bit of concrete early in the season and have had to deal with whatever it is that has made my blade come loose.  It's been fine for awhile, but still, it's my job to anticipate it coming loose again and to worry about it until it does, or until November, whichever comes first.

And then there are the damned trees.  I am no fan of trees, unless they are ornamental and I have chosen to share my yard with them.  So sue me.  But the ornamentals get diseases and either die or continue to live but taunt me with their fungal growth.  I grew mimosas from seeds that I had taken from the bridge at Wadmalaw Island when I first moved here, because I think flowering mimosas are the most glorious sight ever, even better than the drink.  I was tickled that they grew so abundantly here in the south, and watched the tree that I had apparently planted in the perfect spot as it grew and flowered and grew and flowered for years, until one year it died.  It made me watch it die, as one branch wilted, and I cut it off, and then another wilted and I cut that one off, until finally I realized it was always going to be one step ahead of me, and I just let it go, which I imagine it did with a sigh of relief.  It was heartbreaking.

But the oaks are just another whole damn matter.  I don't care what kind of oak it is, I'm disgusted with all of them, even the one they worship down here, the "live" oak (as opposed to what, the "dead" oak?).  They do die, every year, and at the time of year that things are supposed to be coming alive.  And when they do this dastardly transition from life to death to life again, they spit all kinds of crap onto the earth, which includes my car and my pool.

And don't get me started on the "water oak."  I would say they are the worst of the weeds, but there is so much competition down here.  I have a few ornamentals by the road that are trying hard to survive, but water oaks come up right in the same spot, and I have to cut them back twice a year, which of course I don't, because I refuse to be "Yardwork 'R' Us" in whatever years I have left.

The alternative being to sit on my porch with a good book and get aggravated because I should be:  weeding, cutting, mowing.  And cleaning the algae off the sides of my house, vacuuming my pool, sealing the deck, painting the porch... and I haven't even gotten to housecleaning yet.

I just noticed yesterday that my car, with 174,000 miles on it, appears to be peeling, like the dead skin off a sunburn.  I'd been hoping to settle for just maintaining the working parts of it; as with my philosophy about myself, I'm more concerned with function than cosmetics.

Outside my window, right now, there is a thunderstorm.  But I'm not at home, so I don't have to worry about losing power.  The resort has wifi and cell reception, so for a week anyway I don't have to deal with AT&T.  The biggest crisis I have had this week is that last night I didn't feel like going out to get dinner and I hadn't bought anything to cook, so I popped a bag of popcorn -- provided by the resort -- and ate some shrimp I had bought and boiled on Monday.  I was proud of the way I handled the crisis, but believe me, that's not happening again soon.  I made a run for cheese, olives and crackers this afternoon (no, still not going to cook).

This was an unexpected vacation, as I was unable to rent out my August timeshare this year.  So this vacation week was sandwiched between my annual Rhode Island family birthday reunion / beach fest (one person can make a fest) and an impulsive redweek.com purchase of a very reasonably priced week at Fort Myers Beach at the end of August.

It felt excessive.  Not only do I tend to feel guilty about going away too much, I have a very dear friend who responds to my informing her that I am going on vacation by asking, "Vacation from what?"

But it's worked out so well that I might even do it again next summer.  And I'm thinking about actually taking two weeks to meander up the coast to Rhode Island in the winter, for Christmas, because I am feeling so adventurous.

I worry about what fires I will have to put out when I get home.  Fortunately, there have not as yet been fires, but there are occasionally things that have broken that need tending.  And the grass needs mowing.  Again.  But at least I haven't had to watch it.

My Wild Kingdom

This is the way we mow our lawns out here in the boonies:  we wait until the grass gets high, then goes to seed, and then we wait to see who blinks first.  After one lawn gets mowed, a day or two goes by and another victim gives in, until we all have somewhat newly mowed lawns.  Except for my neighbor who lives across the street and mows the lawn every week.  We mostly ignore him.

I mowed my front lawn four or five weeks ago.  For a couple of weeks I felt pretty good because it had been mowed.  Then for a week or so I just ignored it.  Then it got to bothering me, so I've been trying to work myself up to the two-hour task for a few days.  Yesterday I was relieved to see that it really, really looked like rain, so I decided not to mow.  I am going away for ten days in the middle of July, and if I put off mowing just a little longer, I won't have to do it again till I get back.  So I was at the point where I'd like to get it over with, but I could wait.  Then, around noon, the sun came out smiling.

I don't have a drink till five, and I don't do yard work after noon.  This makes for a fairly stress-free retirement.

So today I planned on mowing.  Even though the morning came up cloudy.  I figured it had to be a ruse, like yesterday.

Around ten, I went out to the shed and opened the door.

I've lived out here in the rural south for over fifteen years now.  I'm more scared of things breaking down and having to fix them than of running into critters.  I've run the lawn mower over a nest of ground-wasps and was covered in stings:

This is what it looked like, except
I have more hair.

Currently, there is a spider that persists in building an elaborate web that attaches to my blueberry bushes.  Every day or two when I go out to pick berries, I take a twig and tear off the web.  I usually leaves webs intact, respecting the amount of labor involved, but not if it interferes with something essential, like berry-picking.  Undaunted the little critter gets right back to work, and I end up destroying yet another web a couple of days' later.  It may be my imagination, but lately the effort has seemed just a bit less enthusiastic.  I hope when berry-picking is over my friend will not have given up and will make one last and more lasting attempt.

Given that, I don't just stick my hand in dark corners of my shed.

My favorite critter story is the afternoon that a pack of dogs chased a bobcat onto my porch, where it sat and watched me watch it for five hours, until Animal Control came.  After sending the bobcat off for parts unknown:

Fairly relieved Animal Control Officer:  "So, if you have any more trouble, if it, uh, comes back, just give us a call."

 Me:  "And you'll come out and toss another glass of water at it?"

To continue.  I opened the shed and there lying on top of the door was a snake.

I considered carefully closing the door and returning to the house.  Then I thought about the very long grass.  And then I decided that if I just walked away, I would never want to open that door again, just in case that snake was still lying there, waiting.

  

I walked carefully around the door to the side of the shed, carefully got hold of the hose, turned off the nozzle, turned on the faucet, and went round to the door, never taking my eyes off the snake, lest it take off and leave me not knowing where it might be hiding.  But it was still there, obviously quite comfortable.

I opened the nozzle and then pointed it at the snake.  For several seconds it barely moved, and then I realized that it had opened its mouth so that it could get the full stream.  I imagined it must be thirsty.  Or was just enjoying a long unexpected shower.  After a surprisingly long time, it began to move toward the shed, and I stopped it with the water.  Then it wound around itself, so that it looked like it might have been two snakes.  Then it went back to position #1.  This went on for quite a few minutes.  As long as it didn't seem interested in leaping the few feet it would take to reach me, I was okay with that.

Finally it decided to escape via the roof.

I'm not used to snakes that are not at ground level.  There are bunches of new cats in the neighborhood lately, and I'm thinking the snakes have had to find places that are a bit more challenging to the feline stalker.  We've all heard stories about snakes that hide in trees and fall onto people as they walk past.  So I would have been happier if my friend had slithered down the door of the shed and away into the shrubbery.  But I figured that this was probably the best it was going to get.  Unlikely that it would come back for me.  And the damned lawn was not going to mow itself.

So I cautiously got the mower out of the shed.  And now I have a nicely mowed lawn that I can enjoy for a couple of weeks, ignore for a couple more, and then eventually get around to mowing again.  I'm hoping the snake will have found a new home by then.

Raging Against the Dark -- and the Clumsy

There is an old Peanuts cartoon that I have carried with me since I was a kid:

It has stood me in good stead all these years. I especially enjoy pulling it out when I am being lectured on my negative attitude. Call it the “half-empty” philosophy, but it's still just a bit more accurate than those “half-full” optimists.

I've been reading book two in an inevitable mystery series by Daniel Friedman, a young man who has created an 88-year-old crotchety detective in a way that I know he knows this old guy. A Jewish detective in the 60's in Tennessee, during the battles of the civil rights era. And now he's in an assisted living facility driving everybody crazy, barely able to stand up but still wielding his .357 against the bad guys.

I can really relate to that. I want to go out bitching about getting old; I want to do it loud enough that all those young folk can't ignore it.  And this past week has really been about cursing the darkness, and this time it's not my usual rant about politics and stupidity.

A week ago, on Monday, on a beautiful day, I walked outside and picked up a partially filled water bucket so my tomatoes wouldn't go from hardy to dead in this damned drought. Before it was even off the ground, I felt a pain shoot up from my calf to my thigh and seemed to be en route to my back when in that split second I dropped the bucket.

Something similar had happened before, some 8-10 years ago, on the tennis court, where I was doing absolutely nothing strenuous. Just like this time. It was so painful that I was barely able to walk to the car and then into the house after a painful 10-minute drive from the courts. It was a Friday; I know because I did something I never did, and called in sick for Saturday, on a day we were at half-staff. I also called the Blue Cross hotline, which I had done about every five years, and mostly for my kids. I was assured it was probably a pulled muscle, and sure enough after a couple of days I was back at work.

Back then I had my son to act as a reluctant gopher so I could stay off my injured leg. He was also there to listen to me gripe, which I tend to do when I'm pissed off about not feeling well.

But it's some ten years later, and I'm not just pissed off that I hurt myself doing something that shouldn't have hurt, but I'm here alone and reliving the moment when I thought I felt the pain start to move to my back, and thinking about what I would have done if I had fallen to the deck and not been able to get up. So I have an active imagination. It could happen.

I called Blue Cross, which hotline has gotten more lame as the years since its inception have grown. They have some minimum wage twinkie answering the phone these days, screening before you get to talk to a real nurse. I was in pretty excruciating pain, but I knew I wasn't going to get any help till I had gone through twenty questions. But after I had already identified myself, she – very slowly – informed me that she was going to have to ask me some questions. I took a shallow breath and with astonishing politeness said, “I'm in a lot of pain here, so could you please get on with it?”

For people who answer the phone these days, the emphasis is not getting the caller what they need. It is on being friendly. This is because more often than not, when a customer calls, they are not happy, and chances are pretty good that they are not going to get what they want. So businesses have changed their customer contact model to accommodate this, not by giving people what they want, but by making those poor slobs on the front line be more maddeningly polite, and making their jobs hinge on it. So this young lady who knew her calls were being monitored was going to be upbeat and polite no matter what, and had absolutely no clue about the pain and worry I was trying to convey.

But she kept on. She asked me for my birthdate. I told her it was 7-19-1951, and she said,

“Wow, a summer birthday – that's great!”

I wish I were making that up.

She was also excited about the fact that I lived in South Carolina; I think she either commented on the weather or how pretty it must be, but to be honest, I had stopped listening.

Finally she was done performing and had gotten all the details that she already actually had sitting on the computer in front of her the whole time. She promised me that a registered nurse would call me back in ten minutes.

The registered nurse was certainly an improvement, but after saying she had never heard of my leg pain doing what I claimed it was doing, and ruling out anything BCBS might be sued for if they didn't advise me to go to the ER, I had to ask her if it was okay to take ibuprofen with my other medications and whether I should put ice on it. To be honest, I was just happy to have what I was doing confirmed. I figured the purpose of this hotline was to save BC the cost of hospital care, but if it came down to getting sued for bad advice, they would have recommended the ER.

There was a time when I would have gotten a call back in 24 hours, but this wasn't it.

So when the pain hadn't gone away by Tuesday morning, I called my orthopedist. The last time I saw her was in January and she was getting back from a few days off for the holidays, and she was too busy to talk to me about my concerns about my six-month knee treatments no longer working. I know she has a couple of little kids, and her practice is booming, and I felt concern that she wasn't able to be as good a doctor as she was when she first joined the practice. Not angry, just concern.  And ready to think about finding a new doc.

But I hadn't done it yet, and this time, when I asked for an appointment for the next day, Wednesday, I was told that she had just gotten back from vacation and was booked up. I should wait till the next day and if I was still in pain, I should call my family doctor. Hmmph.

Well, on Wednesday morning, that's what I did. But I didn't want to really believe I was still in that much pain, so I asked for an appointment for Thursday or Friday, and was given 10 a.m. Friday. About an hour later, reality hit and I called back and said that if she couldn't see me right away I would go to the ER. And being the wonderful person that she is, she fit me in that day. And even though she couldn't understand why I was feeling the kind of pain I was feeling, she gave me four different prescriptions, which I was happy to take with me.

I am (she said protesting way too much) not the kind of person that readily takes drugs. This doctor had to frighten me nearly to death (or actual cardiac palpitations) in order to convince me I needed to take Diovan for my blood pressure. And then I had reached a point a year ago where arthritis had flared up so badly in my hands that I couldn't open a water bottle before I was persuaded to go to a rheumatologist. I am now taking Plaquanil, which is this scary stuff that is prescribed for malaria, they don't know why it works for rheumatoid arthritis, and for which I need to see an ophthalmologist once a year just in case the drug begins to make me go blind a rare but actual side effect.

When I had surgery for a torn rotator cuff some six years ago, I took so few oxycodone that I had a bit of a stockpile. Other times when I was in some pain, I considered taking an oxy, but given how evil they are, I had always talked myself out of it.

Not this time. This time I had started taking one-half pill to help me sleep, then moved right along to a whole pill. And when my doctor asked me how many I had left, I lied and told her fewer so she would give me a bigger prescription, just so I didn't run the risk of having to feel that kind of pain at night.

On Friday, when I was still in pain despite all the meds, I called my orthopedist again, and this time asked for an appointment for the following week. Nope. Too busy. And all the partners were too busy as well. But they did agree to put my name up on a sticky note in case there was a cancellation.

Fortunately, by Sunday, I was for the first time feeling like I was definitely on the path to wellness.

I climbed off my porch, three stairs that I have handled cautiously since my knees and I have stopped getting along, and pulled a few weeds. For the first time all week, my little adventure did not cause hours of pain. So I decided to load my car with the recyclables that were going to the dump on Monday. And as I took the second step I missed my footing and didn't fall – I tumbled – off the stairs. You have all probably experienced a fall, and even if it is only a few inches to the ground, you feel like Alice in Wonderland falling through the rabbit hole. My legs both banged up on the brick stairs and my back seemed to hit and then slide along the same edges, and in that especially well-choreographed move, I stopped the fall with my hand.

In those few seconds, I did manage to yell, “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.”

So there I was trying to heal one stupid injury and giving myself another one.

And that is what I am raging about.

The really stupid thing about this whole adventure, besides the fact that I seem to have survived it, is that 1) after injuring myself in an attempt to water my plants, it frigging rained that afternoon, for the first time in weeks; and 2) I'm thinking that it could have been a lot worse and I'm actually lucky; and 3) things happen in threes, so I'm just waiting for the next hit.

So today I'm not going to rage against stupid politics and politicians. I will just settle for being pissed off at getting older and having a body that will routinely and unpredictably remind me of that, and and of course the fact that I will continue to make it worse by doing those stupid human things like falling down a couple of stairs.

I very carefully stood up and checked various parts of my body for injury.  I ascertained that all those body parts that had made contact were scratched and sore but still functioning.  Then I said “fuck it” and I went down those stairs one more time, and this time I hauled up that 25 pound bag of cat litter that was in the car, that is so much cheaper than the ten pound bag.

Cursing the darkness makes it all possible, getting back up and doing it again, and probably surviving once more.  

The Son My Father Never Had

My father could figure out how anything worked.  He could take things apart and put them back together.  He could fix anything.  In other words, he was a man.

To his disappointment I was his firstborn, and a girl.  And then he had another girl.  He didn't think he was disappointed when I came along.  I was pleasant enough, and I didn't give him a hard time till I was a teenager.  My sister doubled down in the rebellion thing.  So eleven years after I was born, he admitted failure and tried again, ending up with a third daughter.

But I was the first.  And my father dealt with it as best he could, but when it came to passing down his talents, I was out of the loop.  I will take some responsibility for that; I can't even imagine trying to learn how to use a lathe, or watch him repair a car.  In my defense, he would typically make my mother stand by him as he worked on the car, so she could listen to him curse when he couldn't get the damned thing loose.  This is probably where I got inspired to join the women's liberation movement.

I was pretty good at things like gardening, and learned to put wallpaper up in my first house, but whenever something broke, I wimped out and called for my husband.  And then, when I was into my forties, and decided to leave my husband, with my two kids, and relocated to a place far, far away, I decided I wanted to buy a "fixer-upper" and then fix it up.  Fortunately, someone talked some sense into me, and I ended up with a pretty, fairly new and modest double-wide.

I did go at learning how to do man-stuff the first year or two.  My husband, good-hearted soul that he is, bought me a drill, a tool-box, and a bunch of other things so I could learn to be a handy-person.  There's a toilet paper holder next to the toilet that wobbles, but damn it, I did it.  I try to avoid using most of those tools these days, because it tends to take me longer to remember how they work than it would take for a guy to fix whatever is broke.  And I have better things to do with whatever time I have left.

Yes indeed, by virtue of age and accompanying wisdom, I'm aware that I have that fear of mechanical objects that women of my generation have.  I'll find someone to do the work if I can, but if I have to do it myself -- and I'm assured by all that I can do it -- it takes a lot of stamina, determination, and internet research before I tackle a project.

My latest adventure in the work of home repair was in the fall, when flames were shooting up from my old grill far beyond what I thought was acceptable.  I bought new briquets.  When I went to replace the briquets I found that what's called the "drip vaporRISER bar" (I may not be handy, but I do compulsively save user manuals) was rusted and needed to be replaced.  When I bought the part I needed and eventually attempted to replace the old one, I discovered that the part underneath it was rusted.  So before I ended up taking a couple of years rebuilding the grill piece by piece, I decided I needed a new one.

When I first moved out here, I was terrified to light the grill, but I really enjoy eating grilled food, so I forced myself to learn.  I wasn't going to let my fear of putting together new shiny objects keep me from getting a grill.  So I shopped and discovered that there are these neat portable grills that people use for picnics and tailgating.  Then I researched those little teensy gas canisters.  Did you know it's cheaper to just refill those little bottles from a 20 lb. tank?

That part of the adventure ended when I learned that all you have to do is turn the big tank upside down to refill the little one.

Then I went to Lowe's and looked at the little grills, and I asked all the right questions.  Like, can I just set this on the concrete porch?  And can I really just use a 20 lb. tank?  And, is there anything else I need to know?

Men will always give you the answer you want.  Which often means they don't know much more than you do.  But I was happy enough and bought the neat little grill.

I left it sitting in the box for quite a few days, and observed it. After I had gotten used to it, I took it out of the box.  After a couple more hours, I looked at the instruction manual. These are all written by men, and often translated from another language.  Even if they aren't they are written by men who have always been better at mechanics than English.

But I did ascertain that the grill needed to be elevated, no more than 36 inches, from the ground.  I thought about calling Lowe's and yelling at the guy that told me I could put it right on the concrete, but determined that I could work this problem out.  It never said how low it could be, and I was not going to go out and buy a table.  So I ruminated about it, strolled around the house, and found a piece of furniture that was made of fairly sturdy wood in my son's room.  Since he doesn't live here anymore, I figured he wouldn't miss it. It was kind of a narrow book case that would be perfect on its side.  I emptied it out, and then took a couple more days to consult with people about whether this would actually work.  And then I got around to actually assembling the grill.  And I set it on the sideways bookcase.  In the house.  Because I still wasn't sure it would work.

It looked pretty good.  I took some pictures:

Then I let a few more days go by.  Now I was worrying about transferring the propane tank from my old grill to the new one.  Yesterday I took some lamb chops out of the freezer.  And today I took the canister off the old grill and with very little difficulty attached it to the new one.

I was told in no uncertain terms, by the manual and by my sister, that I needed to run a soapy solution around the connection to make sure there were no leaks.  Apparently I should have been doing that every year.  Oh, well.  Even though I was assured this was easy, I went to YouTube and found a video.  The first video said I needed to check all the connections.  The second one said I only needed to check the connection at the propane tank.  So I went with that one.  No leaks.

Then it got cloudy, and cold, and windy.

Having reached the limits of even my ability to procrastinate, I thought to myself, hell, the worst that could happen is it could all blow up.  And then I went to my more reasonable fallback philosophy:  There are a lot stupider people than me that do this all the time.  That thought has helped me face a lot of man-stuff hurdles.

So, with the wind whipping up, I fired up my new grill.  I wasn't sure it lit, because I am always convinced that any appliance I try to get to work will not work.  That hasn't been true a lot of the time, it just feels true.  But I turned it off, walked around for a bit, and then came back to it and tried again.  Newfangled thing, I couldn't see a flame.  But I didn't turn it off immediately, and actually sniffed for gas, and found there was no gas smell, and put my hand near the grill and felt heat.  This just might mean success.

But I had to wait 30 minutes before I could grill the first time.  And I watched the wind whip up, sure that the fire would blow out, or the grill would topple over the bench, or some other unforeseen stupid thing would happen.

But it didn't.  I actually cooked my lamb chops.  They were quite nice.

I don't think my father would have been proud of me, because to him it was nothing.  But, having been raised a girl in the 60's, let me tell you it was a damned big deal.