Lost in 2018 - A Friend

We're both short, but Penny was tiny and slender whereas I am quite a bit more well-rounded.  When we went out to eat, I would finish my plate and she would take a few bites and offer me the leftovers.  Sort of an odd couple.  Initially we had reading in common, political and mystery, mostly.  I don't think of her as gregarious, but she was welcoming, whereas I make friends cautiously.  She is the reason I know pretty nearly all the the women I know and love here in Charleston.

She loved learning, as do I, but in really different ways.  She tried to nudge me into taking college courses with her and reading beyond my mystery-escape-fiction tendencies.  She got her doctorate in I'll say some kind of chemistry when she was in her sixties and was deservedly proud of it.  After that she began to learn Pashto, and got so involved in the history and culture of Afghanistan that she spent a year there teaching.  Then she had a book published about her experiences there.

Whereas I took beach vacations in Florida, and I began to play tennis again.

Penny was my closest friend for a dozen years or so.  She was my support system, and for someone like me who can be insecure and at times thin-skinned, I never EVER felt judged by her.  As I sit here, I remember her cynical half-grin, sitting at Seanachie with her bottle of beer or glass of pinot grigio, sometimes sharing but mostly listening.  Because she was the only drinking buddy I have had since college.

We got together almost like clockwork, every two or three weeks, for drinks and often dinner, although the dinner part appealed to me more than to Penny.  She told me she had no sense of smell and that was why food had little attraction for her.  Ironically, she liked to cook and talk about food, and try new things -- more so than I did.  She would sometimes find a food at a restaurant that she liked so much she would go back over and over again until she suddenly tired of it and never wanted to go there again.  If she had a meal she didn't like the first time she went to a restaurant, it was likely she would refuse to go there ever again, despite reviews and raves from friends.

Penny was comfortable meeting and getting to know people of all kinds in all settings.  She enjoyed sitting at a bar and casually chatting with people she didn't know.  When she made what we all considered a disastrous move from the lively Folly Beach to isolated rural Meggett, she found the one bar, where possibly no liberal had ever set foot, and became a regular.  She told hilarious stories about debates at the bar, not unlike the crew at Donald E. Westlake's fictional O.J. Bar and Grill, where John Dortmunder and his unlikely gang of thieves met to plan their heists.  I bugged her to put the stories in writing, but sadly, she did not.  We worried about her safety, but apparently she held her own.

I, on the other hand, will go into a restaurant or bar and hide behind a book until my food came, or my friend showed up.

I could tell Penny anything.  Anything.  Over the years, she opened up to me about her life, although rarely about her health, which was a source of frustration and sadness as her problems worsened.  We talked about our families, each extraordinarily dysfunctional in their own special ways, as dysfunctional families tend to be.

She was the person I could share anything with.  I write that with amazement.  One time over drinks I told her the worst thing I ever did, a secret that had been skulking in my mind for decades.  I don't remember what she said, but what she conveyed wasn't "no big deal" anymore than "wow - you did that?"  It was more like "okay, that happened."  And with that, I was able to move on.

Penny could certainly register a criticism.  She complained about me putting up with my long-distance husband when he had his fits of rage, and couldn't comprehend that from a distance he was my best friend.  When I agonized over my relationship with my daughter -- before I knew her son -- she told me I was too involved, again, with the cynical half-grin.  And then I saw her with her son, whom she totally doted on.  And worried about at least as passionately as I worried about my daughter.

As easy as it was for Penny to talk to others, she was a private person.  There were places she would not go with you.  She only openly admitted her age to me months before she died.  Her health problems were completely off limits.  And she absolutely hated when people tried to take pictures of her.

That tiny woman could terrify people.  You DID NOT want to refer to her as Miss, Mrs., or certainly, "hon."  She quickly and in no uncertain terms informed the individual, whether it was a server at a restaurant or a doctor's receptionist, that "I am NOT 'hon'; I am Doctor Travis."  While I cringed for the poor young man or woman taking our order, I was proud of her for insisting that others know she had status.

She never terrified me, because despite her sharp tongue, she was extraordinarily gentle.  She worried over hurting people's feelings, for example, when our little lunch group was bursting its seams and she had to let people know not to invite all their friends.  She was gentle with me.  And there whenever I needed her.

And so, as I was losing her to whatever poorly defined illnesses were incapacitating her, I was aware that I was losing my best friend.  She died one short month after my sister, in August.  I had lunched with her when I came home from the funeral, told her the sad stories and the funny ones.  She wasn't feeling very good, and barely touched her food.  She had pretty much stopped drinking, which was even sadder to watch, because she enjoyed her glass of wine and wouldn't have considered a meal without one.

But she still listened.

In very different ways, losing my sister (two years younger than me) and my closest friend (ten years older) has shaken me where I am most mortal.  I have learned over my life not to get too close, not to share too much, not to be too vulnerable.  I imagine I will not have another close friendship.  I am amazed that I was lucky enough to have this one, that grew so easily over the years.

By the way, she would have killed me if she knew I had taken this picture.  It turns out it was a risk worth taking.

Lost Before Dying

After Stephan's surgery for pancreatic cancer, for a year and a half, he was constantly, visibly, trying not to die.  Thick shakes with weird ingredients became the focus of his day, twice a day.  He tried to pick up his three-mile fast walk routine where he left it off, but ironically, removing the tumor didn't remove the pain of walking, but only changed it.  But he tried, daily.

He gave up his beloved cigars the day of the surgery, and when his doctor finally gave him the kiss of death by telling him he could go ahead and smoke again, he wasn't even tempted.

Our lives together centered around food, home cooking, Greek and Italian, food from the amazing garden we worked together.  He loved food, and lost his taste for it.  He would find something that at best tasted good and at worst didn't make him nauseated, and try to eat it on a regular basis, like a certain sliced turkey breast from Costco, and then take a couple of bites and put it aside.

After his surgery, he was no longer able to read.  When he visited Charleston in the past, it gave me great pleasure to bring a stack of books home from the library that I thought he would enjoy, and he would spend three weeks sitting on the porch, smoking cigars and reading.  During his last visit, he only read one book, a Discworld book that he found on my shelf that he thought he had missed.  I was so happy he found it and enjoyed it, but his desire and ability to focus never extended beyond that.

He tried to stay on top of politics, but damn, in his place I can't see him giving a shit what was going on.  He continued till near the end to try to be there for me when I needed to vent about problems, but his attention wavered, and I felt awful bothering him, so our telephone conversations were mostly about his health, and they were short and unhappy.  When I had lost his attention, he ended the call.

He lived with his daughter, and she cared for him in a way few could have done.  But she would send us all emails filled with really personal medical details, which angered me because they seemed to suck away his independence, his adulthood.  In the last couple of weeks, she answered his phone and spoke for him.  For all I know, he may well have been sitting there, shaking his head "no" when I asked to speak to him.  Or he may have been barely conscious.  Or she may have just wanted to take over the whole thing.

That was four years ago.  Less than a year ago, someone I had only just begun to know was diagnosed with cancer, and days after a successful surgery died from a massive heart failure.  We were stunned that a woman who had been so vibrant could so quickly be gone.

And then a woman who I had recently begun playing tennis with told me this story:

She had been at the courts the weekend before, watching a match, and a woman who was playing dropped onto the court and died instantly of a heart attack.  She was in her fifties.  When I reacted with shock, she said, "No, no, no, that's the way I want to go.  She was doing what she loved, and she never had any pain."

I remembered this when my sister died suddenly last month.  Jennie had just taken early retirement and as soon as the weather permitted, she began to do what she has always -- ALWAYS -- done: sit in the sun.  I imagine six or eight hours a day, minimum, she sat in the sun.  She didn't drink alcohol and assured us that she stayed hydrated.  We didn't know why, but we knew she was loving it.  Until one day she came into the house, went to bed, and never woke up.

Yesterday, my good friend Penny died.  She had been fighting for her life for two years and through three hospitalizations.  She was obstinately private about her health, so all we could do as she became more frail and obviously unwell was worry among ourselves.  We only knew things were bad when she would not show up at a luncheon she had scheduled and we learned she was in the hospital.  This last time, she instructed her son not to tell us which hospital she was in, although I don't believe a one of us would have showed up without an express invitation.

Anyway, it is a tremendous loss.  It is for another day to write about all the things Penny did to support me in her own brusque way, and how she brought so many of us together.  I will say that, after the awful 2016 election, Penny was determined to make a difference, and formed another group, which we ended up calling SWAT -- Smart Women Against Tyranny.  At one of the first formative meetings, I recall her barely being able to attend to what was being said.  This group was so important to her, and she had to work so hard to stay with it that day.  And then she had the first of the hospitalizations.

Over the next two years, my heart broke as my good friend became more confused, lost more weight, worried and suffered her health problems, and tried so hard to stay with us.

With Penny in the hospital, I organized the bi-weekly luncheon for yesterday.  None of us knew what was going on with her, so as we ate, one of us texted her son.  He replied immediately, that Penny had died that morning.  As we talked about what she meant to us, I realized that we were sitting in the restaurant where we had met, when I joined the group she was leading, Reading Liberally.  I pointed to the table we sat at, and remembered that I was the second one there that night, walking in to see her tiny figure sitting at that round table.

I have been mourning Penny for awhile now.  While I have been hoping for her to find that magic cure, I have missed the Penny that, when she was my age (67) went to Afghanistan to teach and wrote about it, and later went to Jordan, and rode a camel.  She continued to write and as far as I know was working on a novel.  She continued to organize our group, and donate her time to her favorite political candidate.  She continued to passionately hate what was happening to our country.

So as time passes, I will remember the Penny who had the health and the energy to do things that were daring, and to get us all involved.  I will miss the times we met for drinks and dinners, and the confidences about our past that we shared.

As I ruminate with others that are wrestling with our mortality, we have talked about going suddenly or lingering with an illness.   I am hoping that I have the courage -- and the choice -- to not linger before I am more of a worry than a companion.  At this point, with only one sister left and my first granddaughter on the way, I just want to shout STOP.  I don't want to do this.  But the other part of me that has been working on death and dying since I watched my husband do it four years ago says that I need to just live for the day, to appreciate what I have now.  I remind myself that everybody dies, and in the end, in the context of all the universes there are, my dying is truly no big deal.

But meanwhile, because we have the gift/curse of consciousness, we will experience the loss of friends and family as losing part of ourselves.  So cry today, and keep the memory, not of how they died, but how they lived.

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?

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 Death and Living

I've always been afraid of death, since I was a kid.  As I have gotten older, and then "old," I have recently tried to adapt in the least painful way possible to the fact that, hey, we all gotta go.  Albert Ellis, who had to go as well, would have been proud that I am thinking rationally about the fact that people die, and life goes on, and it's okay.  I especially like the way Richard Dawkins copes -- you weren't here before you were born and it was fine not to exist; when you die and no longer exist it will be the same thing.  And here is Dr. Dawkins, saying it far better himself:

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?” 
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

Since my husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in April, there has been a new urgency to my need to accept the fact of dying.  In the wonderful movie Cloudburst, Olympia Dukakis' character says, "I'm 80, nothing lasts forever."  And according to Walter Isaacson, in Albert Einstein's last days at age 76, he consoled others, at one point saying, "I have to pass on sometime, and it doesn't really matter when."  He wrote formulas and bemoaned his lack of adequate mathematics to his last day.

I tackled with some dread Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, and have basically come away from it thinking, "Well, all right then."  A bit impatient with her that she was so blind to the fact that her husband would die, where I have lived knowing loved ones would die and leave me, and that I would die and leave others, who would inevitably get along fine without me.  And yet, who am I who have not had to deal with the death of a loved one since my mother's death just thirty years ago to offer a critique her experience?

So where does this leave me?  It is a process, and one we go through like it or not.  As I write that I am aware of its triteness, and yet the fact that it is 100 percent true.

For right now, each of these has helped place me in the context of the world in which we all die.  I am trying to allow myself to feel sadness at the inevitable ending, and also to appreciate each day that I and my loved ones are here.

On Death and Avoidance

I was visiting my mother a year or so before she died, after she had had the triple-bypass that brought me back into the fold.  She asked me if she could wear a dress of mine that I had left at home when she died.


Of course, I was appalled.  Now that I am approaching 61, and I have a daughter of my own who is happily living her own life, I think back on that question, and my reaction.  There I was, a damned psychology graduate student, and I didn't know enough to just listen.  My mother knew she was dying, and instead of being scared, or maybe a realistic way of dealing with being scared, she was trying to plan for it.  And maybe, just maybe, she wanted to let me know she knew it was going to happen.


And I couldn't deal with it.


I am two years younger now than my mother when she died.  I am so lucky to be in so much better health than she was.  I had the good fortune of a better life, with more options, and more education, so I knew a little bit about how to live healthy, and I could make choices that allowed me that better life.  Yet I too am afraid of dying, always have been.  And now that I am at that point, I deal with it by talking about it with the loved ones who will listen:  my husband and my sister.  It helps, because we are really all in this together, and we all leave at some undetermined point.


I wish I could talk to my daughter about the fact that I am going to die.  Not to inspire guilt, or denial, but just to get it out there.  It helps when I talk to Stephan or Jennie about it because, hey, that's the reality.  And I think it would mean a lot -- to both of us, me now and her later -- if we could just talk about death and leaving and loss.


But we are destined, aren't we, to continue to repeat the mistakes of those who came before us.  No one who is young and trying to make sense of their own lives is ready to deal with the fact of parents dying.


And then, years later, we all wish we had done it differently.