Courage at Twilight: I Do

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The gurgling in my intestines sounded underwater like wall hangings clanging to the floor and wandering off wounded. Lying sick in the tiny tub, my legs stood straight up against the tiled wall.  Only half of my body fits in the tub at one time.  My head underwater but for my nose, I relaxed into the soft heat of the Epsom water cradling my face and head, awash in the experiences of yesterday.  Dad wanted to attend the wedding, and I agreed: the three of us should go.  I have avoided taking Dad anywhere, for the strain on us both, but loading him into the high front seat of the Mighty V8 proved a simple execution of our detailed loading routine.  I guess we could do this more often, after all, I mused.  Turning the key brought only the click click click of a failed starter.  “Not to worry!” I preempted Mom’s panic.  “I’ll have us jumped and on the way in five minutes!”  And it was so.  But I did not tell Mom and Dad how when I jump start a car battery I am terrified of blowing up the cars and killing everyone within a city block.  Perhaps with good reason: I read the instructions three times and still connected the cables backwards.  A lurking dyslexia?  We rejoiced to see my cousin David and his wonderful family at his son McKay’s wedding.  The officiator was a tall slender fetching tatted woman in a sleeveless summer dress, her hair a pleasing mess of multi-colored dreads running four feet down her back.  The men read their vows, both sweet, and the colorful woman pronounced them “Husband and Husband,” words I had not heard before.  I always feel happy and wistful when two people find love and each other in this vast complicated world.  It is quite a miracle, really.  May their loving union long endure.  Leaving the venue, I helped raise Dad from his wheelchair.  Weak and shaky after three hours in his chair, he grasped the handholds and struggled to straighten.  But his left foot was positioned under the running board, and his right foot too close to the left, and his feet stuck to the asphalt as if with buckets of cured epoxy.  He could not lift his legs to shift his feet, and hung grunting from the handholds, his whole body trembling.  I could not move his feet either: all my effort was devoted to keeping him from collapsing to the parking lot.  Dad surprised me with a move he had never made before: “Help me lift my right leg!”  I capitulated, to tired to argue, but his right foot on the running board created an impossible tangle of legs and feet and hanging arms and belly and arthritic artificial knees that wouldn’t bend but were bending anyway to his howls.  In a last desperate move with my remaining ounce of energy, I pulled the chair to him with my left hand and yanked him backwards by the waistband with my right.  With some luck, backside and seat met squarely.  Parched and panting and sick, I pulled David and Jason from the wedding lunch with a plea for help, and with four strong arms and legs they hoisted Dad handily into his seat like he were a feather duster.  Relieved to be on our way to the sanctuary of home, I turned the key and heard only a click click click.

(Image by MasterTux from Pixabay.)

Courage at Twilight: Spring Rolls

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“Will I see you tomorrow?” Mom asked as I turned toward the stairs and bed.  I stared at her, uncomprehending.  “You see me—every day—after work,” I finally stammered out, and she could tell from my tone I thought she had done something bad, though she could not fathom what and muttered I’m sorry, and I felt bad that she felt bad that I might be annoyed, and assured her I would see her tomorrow.  When I brought vegetable spring rolls home from Costco, she cheered with both arms raised, “Spring Rolls!” and Dad quipped pleasantly, “Spring rolls is her middle name.”  Dorothy Lucille Spring Roll Baker, I thought with a chuckle, and then said the name aloud: “Dorothy Lucille Spring Roll Baker.  Has a nice ring.”  She laughed nervously, not sure if I were making fun, but hoping I wasn’t, and thinking I probably wasn’t, because I never do.  After displaying the various prepared meals I had purchased for those days I do not feel like cooking, I stacked the boxes and headed for the basement stairs and fridge.  “Don’t fall down the stairs,” Dad called after me, and I stopped in my tracks, uncomprehending.  Not wanting to challenge or enjoin or even demure, I called back cheerfully, “Thanks Dad.  I won’t fall down the stairs.”  My reaction was less humoring when, attending an out-of-town conference, I received an email from Mom, “Hi dear Roger, Your dad wanted me to email you that he is afraid for you to go hiking somewhere where you could fall over the edge of the trail.  He wants you to be careful to not go where the trail might be high up and too close to the edge of a cliff where you might fall.  He was worried about you and wanted me to tell you that immediately!”  I scowled at the computer screen and email after a long walk on a flat paved urban trail, uncomprehending.  And I sighed.  Like I often do when dinner is almost cooked after an hour in the kitchen: a long loud sigh.  Dad’s hearing is deteriorating.  I visited Erek the audiologist to have Dad’s hearing aids checked—they were working fine—and he offered kindly to come to the house to clean Dad’s ears and check his hearing.  I gawked, astonished and uncomprehending, as Erek slowly pulled a three-inch string of wax from one ear, certain what I was seeing was impossible.  No wonder Dad could not hear.  The hearing test confirmed that Dad had “severe hearing loss,” no doubt due to his early unprotected years working the house-size ore tumblers at the Utah Copper smelter.  Erek offered to purchase a pair of high-quality hearing aids for a reasonable price, through his physician’s group manufacturer discount.  “You will hear lightyears better,” Erek promised, and my brain strained at applying a photonic analogy to ears and hearing.  I decided “lightyears” simply meant “lots and lots,” and let the teaser go.  Though Dad cannot hear me from three feet away, he can hear me sighing from thirty feet away, and without fail calls out to me, in a kindly tone, “How are you doing, Rog?”  And he praises the meal as a “once in a lifetime best in the universe dinner.”  I will keep shouting until his AGX Omnia 7s arrive, after which Dad should hear my conversational tone.  I hope so.  “Good-night Mom and Dad,” I yelled.  “Knock if you need anything.  See you tomorrow.”

(Pictured above, a view of Snow Canyon, Utah, one of my favorite beautiful places in the world.)

Courage at Twilight: What a Reunion

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Fifty years.  These men and women, all in their 70s now, graying and wrinkling, limping and slowing, still loving and laughing, traveled in their 20s to Brazil, sent by their Church to be proselyting missionaries, to share a gospel message of love and spirit and Christ, of pure living and eternal families and love of God, with the people of 1970s Brazil.  Dad began his three-year unpaid tour of duty as their 36-year-old leader, mentor, and president, Mom by his side, their oldest child (me) only eight, with Sarah’s infant arrival imminent.  Now these mature men and women gathered at Mom’s and Dad’s house, sixty of them, seated in tight rows and listening, and Dad did not disappoint them.  I sat in the back with Megan, with my head in my hands, weary from the day’s setting-up, listening to all his old stories for the three-dozenth time, and looked up to see his audience enrapt, admiring, joyful, reliving the old stories, which are true, after all: the story of Maria who during World War II kept her tithing in a glass jar buried in her back yard, delivering the coins to Dad, himself a young missionary in 1957, and receiving from him a receipt for her widow’s mites; the story of Dad translating for a living prophet of God who greeted, became acquainted with, prayed for, laid his hands gently upon, and quietly healed each of the twenty sick and distressed Church members, one at a time, who awaited with faith his blessing; the story of Dad’s impression that all persons he contacted on this particular street would answer, “Yes—please come back and share your message with my family,” and they did; the story of priests who had Dad arrested in 1958, and through the iron bars his cell Dad told the prison guard he had arrested a minister of Christ, and the guard growled, “Prove it,” and Dad replied, “Pull up a chair,” and preached of Christ and his ancient Church restored in our day, with living prophets and apostles, preached for three hours until the prison guard had to confess Dad was, indeed, a minister, and released him from his cell, and committed to reading holy modern scripture; another story of Maria, who cooked in an outdoor oven made of loose bricks and sheet metal, feeding the fire with straw, her thermometer the back of her hand, Maria who baked a cake for the missionaries on the first day of every month, and invited them to visit on that first day if they wanted a fresh cake, or later in the month if freshness was not a priority; the story of a second arrest, Dad again behind bars, the prisoner in the adjoining cell screaming as the guard wacked him with a rubber hose, and the voice of God whispering to Dad, Do and say exactly as I instruct, and you will be safe and let go. This is not a joke, and Dad followed that voice and demanded to see the warden and instructed the warden on the doctrine of Christ and on his calling as a missionary ambassador of Jesus, instructed further on unlawful imprisonment and bad press and police duty until the warden relented and released him and promised him the police would not harass the young missionaries again; and the story of persons who dreamt of church buildings they had never seen until accompanying Dad and his missionaries to Sunday services in the very church buildings of their dreams, be they a rented room or a remodeled house or a regular Church meetinghouse; the story of Arthur, an Italian giant, whose hard heart softened from flint to flesh over Dad’s fifteen years of gentle shepherding until Arthur finally went grudgingly to a Church meeting and cried like a baby and demanded baptism, now, not in two weeks—tomorrow—and who remained a meek and faithful Jesus disciple to the last of his long days.  Though I had heard these stories many times, Dad’s retelling was expert and touching, compelling even, as if this mission reunion might be his last, his final tender testimony of God’s miracles and of Christ growing his latter-day Church and changing hearts and lives.  Sixty sets of eyes moist with memories and the love of God and the love of sisterhood and brotherhood and Christ community.  I led the group in Dorival Caymmi’s classic 1956 swinging hit “Maracangalha” ending with “…eu vou só, eu vou só, sem Anália, mas eu vou…”  The reunion ended with plates of coxinha chicken croquettes and kibe beef croquettes  and pão de queijo cheesy bread balls and bom-bom candies and cups of cold guaraná soda and catching up on grandchildren and jobs and health and passings away and sufferings and joys and handshakes and backclaps, visiting until near midnight, the happiest of gatherings.

 

(Yours truly with my dear sister Megan)

Courage at Twilight: The Standard Four

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Just before midnight came Mom’s anxious rapping at my bedroom door. “Can you help us?  The lift won’t work, and Dad’s stuck downstairs in the chair.”  Worry dripped from her sagging face.  I knew instantly the trouble.  Little Owen, 18 months, carries around an irresistible curiosity about buttons and switches and the wondrous things that happen when he pushes them.  His favorite is the light button on my Aero Garden: he taps it rapidly and repeatedly to make the bright multi-colored LEDs flicker off and on and off and on and off and on.  A toddler’s delight!  A close second is the illuminated cherry red switch on the back of the stair lift chair, installed at perfect toddler height and with just the right color to attract his attention.  Owen and Lila, his four-and-a-half-year-old big sister, two of my six prodigious precocious grandchildren (number seven arrives in May!), had joined Mom and Dad and me for an Easter Eve dinner of traditional Polish pirogi, homemade potato cheese dumplings, expertly fashioned by their generous mother.  Lila’s first and familiar impulse was to pull out the old wooden blocks Mom and Dad brought back from Brazil, dump out the box of dominoes, lay out Connect Four, and spill the enormous tote of Legos, the standard four go-to great-grandchildren games, which she invited me irresistibly to play with her.  Dinner segued into the hunt for plastic eggs filled with chocolate eggs and jelly bean eggs and malt ball eggs.  At age four, Lila knew exactly what to do, and chased out the not-so-inconspicuous bright ovals.  Owen, at just one, gripped one colorful egg in each hand, dancing thrilled and contended with his prizes.  Mom and Dad watched on from their respective arm chair and wheelchair, wearing the peaceful smiles of the gentle joy of young posterity.  “We just love having you here, Brian,” Dad called as the little family bundled out the door at evening’s end for the long drive to Stockton.  And sure enough, Owen’s last curious-child deed was to switch the red toggle to “off.”  Mom had completely forgotten her panic of a month ago when the lift would not work, from precisely the same guileless cause.  I flipped the red switch, and, with Mom feeling much relieved, up Dad rode to his bed.

Courage at Twilight: Lithium-ion

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As I walked through the front door after work, Mom approached me with a written list of five things she needed help with. 1a) Dad’s printer would not work.  She was right.  I unplugged it and re-plugged it in, and it worked, but she had clicked the “Print” icon so many times that the resulting print jobs drained the ink dry.  1b) Replace the ink in Dad’s printer.  2) Dad’s gabapentin was about to run out, with no refills, so would I call the prescribing doctor to renew the prescription.  I texted the hospice nurse, who had the medicine delivered to the house.  3) Dad’s glucometer stopped working, so would I go to Walgreens or somewhere and buy him another one—suddenly, after years of not testing his blood glucose levels, he wants to start testing his blood glucose levels, at age 88.  I plugged the glucometer into my computer to recharge the battery as I wrote, and announced heroically that we would not need to buy a new one.  “It has rechargeable batteries!  Isn’t that amazing?”  4) Review the list of distributees for Sarah’s tribute book, which at 52 pages, including 12 color pages, would cost $12.25 a book to copy and bind.  We cut the list of essential persons “who would still want to have the book in 50 years” (I suggested to him that no one would still want the book, or perhaps even be alive, in 50 years) from 60 copies to 40 copies, with the reassurance we could print more, if needed.  5) Write on the calendar the coming weekend’s activities.    As Mom confronted me with the list, I asked a bit testily if I could pee first, because I had drunk too much passion-fruit-flavored ice water before leaving the office, and peeing was my first priority.  Relieved, I set about the tasks, still in my hat and tie.  Mom invited me to look in Dad’s office at how she had rearranged Dad’s power tool batteries and their chargers.  Dad had kept her awake the night before repeating suddenly anxious expressions about the lithium-ion batteries shelved in his office closet—shelved by me, already responding to his anxieties about the batteries touching each other or their chargers and starting a 1200-degree F fire that would burn the house down, shelved by me alternating the chargers and the batteries, nothing touching anything else, with the tools far away in the garage.  But he had forgotten, and had begun to panic again about lithium-ion infernos, and after midnight had sent Mom downstairs in her nightgown to redistribute the chargers and batteries more safely, so there was no chance they would touch.  My completed or in motion, I examine with some confusion the closet shelf, now bare of batteries, and looked toward Dad’s L-shaped desks to see the chargers and batteries spaced there at distances of three feet each from the other.  “Looks great, Mom.  They’re certainly not touching each other.  Nothing to worry about.”

Courage at Twilight: Welcome Home, Roger

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Though Dad often cannot hear me shouting to him across the living room, he manages to hear the key turn the dead bolt, and before I have finished latching and locking the door, he is calling out to me, so cheerfully, “Rog! Welcome home, Roger!  It’s good to have you home!”  I’m not the brightest bulb in the box, but I’m pretty good at the light going on and showing me patterns and changes.  Dad has always welcomed me pleasantly home, but his greetings have cheered and lengthened noticeable almost three years into this caregiving experience.  And it is just like me to worry about the cause, and the meaning.  Might he be sensing the nearing of his end, and be making an extra effort to be kind and close and grateful?  Or is that just my mild paranoia?  On a Saturday morning, ratchet set in hand, I set about checking all the stair lift bolts for tightness; the bolts securing the brackets to the lift structure were tight, but the bolts anchoring the same brackets to the stairs were appallingly loose, and the sound of my ratchet doubling them down reached Dad’s ears.  What reached my ears was his worried complaint, “I hope he doesn’t break the lift.”  Poor Mom walked into the trap as she tottered over to me and reported, “Your dad wants you to know he’s worried you’re going to break the lift,” and I barked back at her, “I don’t care.  I know exactly what I’m doing.”  In tears she returned to Dad and ordered him to shut up, reminding him that I was a “big boy” and knew exactly what I was doing.  Of course, I soon apologized to her for barking at her, gnashing at the guileless messenger.  She smiled and teared and invited me to bark at her anytime I pleased (sweet thing), to which I retorted, “Never!  You deserve better.”  During dinner I explained to Dad what I had done to the lift, and he smiled weakly and seemed unconcerned, and he thanked me for dinner: “Roger, we are so lucky to have you make us such beautiful, delicious food for our dinners.”  All smoothed over, I guess.  My New Jersey friend Bruce was his mother’s caregiver for the better part of a decade, running up the stairs at her beckoning or at the slightest unusual sound.  He knows the life of sleeping with one eye and one ear open for anything out of the ordinary that might signal a need or a fall or a crisis or…  My eyes feel particularly tired this evening, and I think I’ll shut them early, though part of me will be on the alert until Mom and Dad are safely in their bed after midnight.  I am not a skilled caregiver, but I do live here with them and do cook and clean and fix and answer to their needful beckonings as best I can, and enjoy being welcomed home by my old mom and dad: “I’m sure glad you’re home, Roger.”

Courage at Twilight: Cousin Party

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Jeanette has come to visit.  She came to lighten my load.  She came to visit and to love and to talk with her beloved ancient parents.  She came to lift and be lifted.  Before she came, she organized a cousins party.  “Come on Friday March 15 for pizza and brownies and lots and lots of games!”  And they came: the autistic, the trans, the straight, the atheist and the priest, the gluten-free and the vegan and the red-meaters, the married and the single and the living-together—they all came, and demolished five extra-large Costco pizzas and devoured an enormous platter of raw vegetables and cleaned off three heaping plates of frosted brownies, and they told stories and played a game matching clever memes with ridiculous photos and laughed and laughed and laughed, red-faced and crying and together, a group of cousins with several things in common, like the presence of their aunt Jeanette, and the absence of their aunt Sarah, and their love for one another.  One hermit-like cousin commented for only me to hear, “It’s so nice to be with people I actually like.”  Jeanette’s energy was electrically ebullient and conductively contagious, at the center of the circle, catalyzing their inertia into uproarious fun.  As the older uncle, I stood back and observed and rejoiced quietly in the transpiring of this knitting together of this grief-split generation.  I felt keenly the sting-throb of Sarah’s violent departure.  I saw no defect in the power of Jeanette’s presence, but merely the soft hole of Sarah’s absence.  The gathering, happy and healthy and hilarious, nonetheless occupied the crystalline comet-tail haze of Sarah’s gone-ness.  Dad motored into the room to bask in his posterity’s energy and mirth, but could not hear or understand the pop-culture drollery, and retreated to his recliner to rest and create his own quiet humor with Rumple of the Bailey and the Reign of Terror.  I followed, to help his rise and pivot and point and fall, hearing loud echoes of hilarity from across the house.  I felt sad for him, and I think he felt sad and lonely and resigned, but family is to him life’s great mandate, and I knew he felt mostly joy at the loving laughter of twenty cousins.  Mom accompanied Jeanette to pick up the pizzas, giving directions as she had done (without need) a hundred times, but this time Mom could not remember how to get there, and led Jeanette the wrong way, and the Costco was no longer in its tried and true location, and Jeanette showed her the map, and Mom looked up and cried because she could remember no longer that which she always has known, and she knew she was old and she knew she was losing her faculties, and there was nothing she could do about it.  We did find Sarah’s grave, though, and left in a crease of winter grass a brilliant bejeweled owlet with a poem inside, declaring “Do not look for me here.  I am not dead.”  Yes, actually she is.  But her essence, indeed, is not there buried under nine feet of dirt, but in my heart and my hope and my faith, and I will believe—tell me, why shouldn’t I?—that she sees and hears and cares and will welcome me that day when my turn comes.

Courage at Twilight: Reframing Life

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Across 30 months, and through 445 chapters in this memoir, I have been laboring to express the nature of my experience living with dying parents, how they have loved and irritated and blessed and taxed me, and how I have worked to keep them in their home and to care for them as they wane.  Sarah’s death was the most suddenly catastrophic and painful event of my 60-year life.  She looks at me kindly from her pastel blue-gray frame sitting on my desk, from behind the glass, always soft, always beautiful, always kind, to me.  Her traumatic passing has caused me to reevaluate my approach to love and family relationships, not in the shallow patronizing Western platitudes like “It must have been her time,” as if there were anything divinely ordained in her snow-blindness and bashing her helmeted head against a tree, or “You will grow from this, and become a better person,” implying I wasn’t a good enough person already, and somehow her death was for me.  Sorry—I don’t buy it.  What I do buy into is the pain and the sorrow and the memories and the dogged desire to be everything she believed I was and could be.  Something about sudden bone-crushing flat-smashing breath-sucking loss has a way of revealing stupidity and error, pointing me to a truer reflection of my life and myself.  And the notion occurred to me that I have travelled across 30 months and through 445 chapters in this memoir with perspectives that beg for reexamination.  And the thought distilled upon me that my purpose here is not to care for my parents until they die, a shuddering inevitability filled with extended anticipatory griefs, but instead to care for my parents so they can live, live everyday with comfort and companionship and compassion, even joy.  So, I am reframing the narrative.  Sarah’s family came over for Sunday dinner today, our first without her, and we sat around our pot roast and potatoes and told stories and related challenges and laughed and loved, and forgave, and it was a happy day for Mom and Dad to be with their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, all beloved and beloving.  We will do it again, and again, and again, not dreading a death but celebrating a life, and it will be hard and wonderful.

(Pictured above: my snow-filled trail in Bell Canyon, Sandy, Utah, where I pondered the concept of reframing.)

Courage at Twilight: A Pat on the Butt

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Dad is mildly delighted, in the way only a crippled 88-year-old former marathoner could be, with his new used walker, painted racing red. Leaving work early to hunt for a walker, I mentioned my mission to my legal secretaries, and one reported her family had a walker they weren’t using and didn’t need, and within the hour I was driving home with the walker in my Outback hatch.  With the walker cleaned and sanitized, and with the handles raised to their full height, I introduce it to Dad.  “What a great-looking walker!” he chortled.  “It’s a miracle!” Mom exclaimed.  Well, if not a miracle, certainly a convenience and a grace.  Past midnight, I stumbled to the toilet and heard Dad droning uninterrupted in his gravelly aged monotone.  He seems to talk like this past midnight every night (as I stumble to the toilet), and I wondered whether he kept Mom awake or whether she simply slept through it, acclimatized by decades of droning.  Back in bed for only a moment, I heard Mom utter a strange squeal, and I jumped out of bed to investigate.  I stood in the dark hallway in my undergarments, poked only my head through the doorway into their bedroom, and piped up, loud enough to be heard, “Is everything okay in there?”  “Oh yes,” they both called back, and Mom explained that Dad had just finished praying for them, and it was such a marvelous prayer, and show he reached over and “patted him on the butt.”  She giggled over having squealed.  Well, I chuckled to myself, good for you for praying and praising and being cute and cuddly and coquettish.  At 4:00 a.m. when I stumbled yet again to the toilet, I looked in on Mom and Dad, lying under their blankets, back to back and softly snoring.  And I remembered what kind, generous, loving, devoted people and parents they are, and how I am blessed to be theirs.

Courage at Twilight: The Bad Guy

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On his way to help me peel potatoes for our dinner, Dad crashed his tank of a power wheelchair into his walker and snapped a walker leg. First came subdued cursing.  Then came open self-deprecating laughter.  “I crashed into my walker!” he grumble-chuckled, then began peeling.  With only three people, we needed only five small potatoes.  Back in his recliner for a dinner of Costco meatballs, mashed potatoes, and steamed broccoli, he pointed to the framed 8×10 of Sarah surrounded by her nieces and nephews, his grandchildren.  “I love this photo, Rog,” he explained.  “I find it quite comforting.”  I felt relieved, since I had given him the photo, and I felt a glimmer of enlightenment about his turning the portrait of Sarah and him face down on the table: perhaps he simply does not like looking at his 88-year-old self; or, just as likely, perhaps he does not like seeing Sarah with only himself, being reminded of the “giant hole” he still feels and likely will always feel.  Sarah stays with me, at least, in the sense of having her portrait on my desks at work and at home.  Still, the family feels smaller to me.  We were six sibling and now we are five.  I had four sisters and now I have three.  We were two Brazilian-born babies and now we are one.  Sarah is simply irreplaceable.  But I can say the same about my four living siblings: each is unique and remarkable in their own ways.  Munching on meatballs, we watched the tenth episode in an animated science-fiction series rated TV-Y7.  “Is he the bad guy?” Dad asked, and I said simply, “Yep,” but continued soto voce: and he’s the same bad guy we’ve seen in every episode.  As the 24-minute episode ended, Mom queried, “Explain to me what happened?” so I elucidated the plot and character basics.  After understanding the show, they asked to see another episode.  “Is he the bad guy?”  “What happened?”

 

(Photo used under the Fair Use Doctrine.)

Courage at Twilight: Bad Dreams

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Mom phoned me from the first floor to where I worked on the second floor: she was too dizzy to get up and prepare lunch for herself and Dad, and would I please help. It was 4:30 p.m.  Dad complained at 7:00 p.m. that the bratwurst I served for dinner had upset his stomach.  I gave him an antacid.  Aide Jenifer texted me a photo of the bed sore on Dad’s bottom, and aide Diana texted that he almost fell getting out of the shower.  Nurse Chantelle brought calmoseptine cream for the sore and ordered a corrugated cushion.  Dad forgot aide Gloria’s name, and his head-crushing spells have returned.  Mom cries at his complaints.  And I can no longer seek Sarah’s counsel and support with a quick text or call.  Every day seems to bring compounding ailments, none of them small to my elderly parents, Dad 88 years old, and Mom 84.  It is what it is, and my job is simply to address the moments as they come.  “I still have a huge hole inside,” he laments.  To these griefs and ailments, add Dad’s worsening dreams.  Last night in his dream he was with Sarah as she snowmobiled along the obscured trail, her visor snow-streaked, was with her as she left the trail and crested the berm, was with her as she hit her head against the tree, saw her lying dead in the snow, watching and feeling and being present as the terrible event unfolded and finished, helpless and bereft.  He awoke and struggled to sit on the edge of his bed, where he sat until the full light of morning, afraid to lie down and go back to sleep for fear the very real dream would return.  Knowing what happened is bad enough.  Watching it happen is one-hundred-fold worse.  Experiencing it with her was infinitely more painful.  How awful, I thought, and served him with all the compassion and tenderness of which I am capable.

 

(Pictured above: my office credenza, with law books and portrait of Sarah.)

Courage at Twilight: Dearest Brother

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Hospice nurse Chelsea conducted her weekly visit with precision timing, arriving as Dad sat uncharacteristically pale and panting and nauseated. The e-kit furnished a dose of promethazine, and he stretched out in his recliner, covered in a fleece throw, and settled in for a long sleep.  I left work early so I could be nearby, in my home office, should he need help, should he collapse.  My hair was too long, about a quarter-inch, so I clipped on the No. 1 comb and set about my buzz.  But the chord caught on the countertop and tore the clippers from my hand, and they bounced hard on the toilet lid and into the (dry) enamel bathtub.  I cursed.  Sliding the switch, the normally buzzing clippers sounded like a chainsaw, and I was afraid to put the thing to my head.  Instead, I cursed again and yanked the plug and threw the clippers disgustedly into the garbage can, combs and chord and all.  During dinner, Mom asked me to help Dad organize his tax papers, then started to cry.  “I’m worried about your father,” she choked.  His undiagnosed spells have returned despite the historically-and-mysteriously-effective regimen of gabapentin, and the hospice doctor authorized a significant dosage increase.  Which should help.  Mom and Dad still have their portraits of Sarah lying flat, print-side down.  I don’t blame them.  I have two framed 8×10 prints on my desks at work and at home.  Sometimes I can look at them, appreciate her smile, see her eyes look into mine from every angle, and sometimes I cannot look at them.  The prints seem decidedly too large, almost life-size.  Sometimes I demand of her: “God damn it, Sarah!  Why did you have to go?”  Sometimes I ask her to help me sort things out.  Mostly I look into her eyes, soak up her smile, admire the attractive tilt of her head, and remind myself that she loved me and called me “dearest brother.”

Pictured above: one of dozens of a variety of potted plants sent by caring friends in our grief, this one by Solange and Ana.

Courage at Twilight: Our Shattered Hearts

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Mom and Dad are suffering.  Quietly.  Since Sarah’s death, Mom whimpers and swallows a red-faced sob whenever Dad complains that his vision is blurry today or that he is weaker than ever today or when he calls her to help him hike his trousers (I spare her when I’m home).  Her anxiety is severe and pent up, seeping out in little choked up whimpers.  She buries herself in her needlepoint: brightly multi-colored tulips in a baby blue background: working it day and night.  Dad reported to me that his two weeks of nightly terror dreams had stopped harassing him for the last two nights—I had known nothing of his nightmares until he told me they had stopped.  He would not tell me what they were, though he remembers them in disturbing detail.  He has boasted for years that he has no idea what pills he takes because Mom sets them out and fills his pill boxes—and he just takes them.  And Mom confessed to me with a worried grin that she had slipped a melatonin tablet into his p.m. pills for the last two nights, no doubt contributing to his less fitful sleep.  And me, I’m just numb, and weary, and worried about many matters large and small, and I try to control what is within my control, and to release what is not, accompanied by my hope and faith and prayers, and labor, for good outcomes.  Whispering “yes” instead of screaming “no” as grace slowly seeps into the spaces of my shattered heart.  (See It’s OK that You’re Not OK, at p.106.)

Courage at Twilight: Keeping Time

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My calendar proceeds from Wednesday to Wednesday: City Council meeting day. Sometimes I wish for Friday-to-Friday weeks, marked by rom-com pizza-and-salad nights; or restful Sunday-to-Sunday Sabbaths.  Today, I am thinking, Her funeral was last Saturday, and for a while, at least, I will measure my weeks from Saturday to Saturday.  Wednesdays, however, will continue to dominate, for news of Sarah’s death clobbered me just as City Council meeting began, and I bolted before the pledge of allegiance without offering explanation or excuse.  Now I face the long heavy haul of life without her.  I have moved from feeling sad and tender and loved and lifted by a million prayers to feeling plain pissed off.  “You might as well know,” I told them, “I am so angry she is gone!”  “Me too!” chimed in Mom.  Sarah was my cheerleader!  (She was everyone’s cheerleader.)  She left us!  Anger, too, is part of grief.  For the first time, Dad put his own grief into words: a huge hole; a void; an emptiness; a great longing and loss.  Neither he nor Mom can look at her picture.  Mom begged me to take her for a drive “around the block,” and when we drove out into the sun, she said “Thank you!” and cried.  “I really needed to see the sun!”  After, I hiked five fast miles in icy Dimple Dell, trying to work off my anger and anxiety.  The depth of my grief may be an expression of the depth of my love, but I was just fine loving her here!  Dad has been hopping from one consuming anxiety to another.  We need more flowers for the funeral.  We need to make room for anyone that wants to stay at our house.  We need to send the funeral details to everyone that doesn’t have a Facebook, because not everyone has a Facebook, you know.  We need to make a menu, like spaghetti, or chili, or meatballs, and go shopping for all the family coming.  Roger, you must speak at the funeral.  How will they pay the mortgage, the tuition, the grocery bills, the premiums?  We need to know if there is a will.  We need….  We have reasoned and to reassured, and have tried to preempt his worries with solutions, or at least diligent efforts to find solutions.  Still, he perseverates about everything outside his control, precisely because everything is outside his control.  He has always been the great family patriarch, the fixer, the benefactor, the provider, the safety net.  Now, his physical world has shrunk to a brown corduroy recliner from which he cannot fix anything, and his brain bounces from worry to worry, increasingly muddled by dementia.  The other night he awoke with a great searing pain racing across his brain, left to right: “It felt like a spear had been thrown through my head!”  Since Sarah’s death, and since the great pain, his memory has worsened—even he notices—and he is weaker than ever.

Courage at Twilight: The Long Slog

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The Richter 8 that crushed me has stilled, and I have clawed my way back to the dust, just.  The Tsunami that broke me against the rocks has receded, and the dripping blood has dried.  The funeral has passed—she is buried nine feet down.  The bouquets and casseroles and cards have ended, and the hugs and I’m so sorrys, though the looks of concern linger.  Life in this house again is back to just Mom and Dad and me and the occasional visitor.  Now begins the long hard slog through ankle-deep pitch, dragging my feet exhaustedly through my returned routines of emails and deadlines and insoluble problems, and cooking and paying the bills and spending just enough time and energy with people so they know I care for them still, ever hiking with the pack of preemptive grief for losses yet to come.  And all I want is to sleep, to rest my eyes and ears from the blare.  I have entered the stage of grief characterized by an uncontrollable strangling desire to scream.  I am too old and injured to hit the weights or the jogging trail, and movies bring a drug-high that drops abruptly with the credits.  On Death and Dying.  The stages of grief.  Denial—Anger—Bargaining—Depression—Acceptance.  Did you know that Dr. Kubler-Ross did not intend to prescribe a sequential series of steps for normal grieving?  Her studies of grieving people discovered five realms of grief emotion: people grieving death experience denial, anger, and depression, and eventually, one hopes, an integrating acceptance.  Any grieving person may experience any one or more of these emotional realms, sometimes overlapping, or all at once, in comings and goings of degree.  American pop psych culture has twisted her sets of discreet grief emotions into a linear progression of mandatory stages, imposing on 500 million people a “correct” way to grieve.  Bull shit.  Horse hockey.  How absurd to cram the human heart, big as a galaxy, into a soda straw of grief normalcy.  That ain’t how grief works.  And so, Mom and Dad and I muddle through our days of grief, with years still to come, clashing the impossibility with the actuality of what happened, chuckling at life’s banalities while choking on screams of rage at the dirty dish in the sink, laying my exhausted head on my desk at 2 p.m., caring about nothing, throwing a go-to-hell look at the first person who dares to suggest I get to work, looking at Sarah’s smile framed, impossibly, inexorably, on my desk.  I will grieve how I must, not knowing beforehand what it will look like or how it will feel, and I will be kind to myself in grief’s non-formulaic messiness.  In random steps here and there down the road of time, I will find ways to integrate into myself the experience of death and loss, for they are, inseparably, part of my being.

Courage at Twilight: An Enormity of Love

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Dad insisted I speak at my sister’s funeral. Logical, of course, but impossible.  I had met her husband at the funeral home, at his invitation, where we spent three numbing hours making impossible decisions about vaults and caskets and flowers, payment plans and printed programs and Zoom links, fingernail polish and lipstick and hairstyle, rings or no rings, makeup to cover her wounds.  Feeling dead ourselves, we wandered through the casket showroom, and slowed before the Virginia Rose maple-wood casket, gently grained and softly carved in roses, lined with Easter pink fabric embroidered with a flower spray.  Tracy looked at me and choked, This is where she wants to rest, and I turned my face to the corner and sobbed and knew he was right.  The viewing became a bizarre reunion of a corpse and family and friends, with hundreds of hugs and thousands of tears.  “How’s Nelson holding up?” an uncle asked Mom.  Pierced.  That is the word she used.  Dad was crushed and broken and pale—and pierced through.  He has whispered revelations of his agony every day: I may not survive this.  I thought I might just go with her.  And he told us all of loved ones he looks forward to meeting on “the other side,” his grandmother Natalia Brighamina, a sweet-hearted Swedish beauty who infused the little boy with love and worth, his grandfather and namesake Nelson who rescued the mine’s company town when he detected the odor of almond in the water, his grandpa William T who lived in an unheated unplumbed shack and taught him to snag trout barehanded from the brook—and Sarah, who beat him there.  Every morning I wonder if Dad has survived the night.  The viewing room was hot and crowded and happy-sad, and I could not face my sister, meaning, I could not go to her and gaze at her and hold her hands or even glimpse her unliving body.  One little boy felt like I did, avoiding her “creepy” “plastic” visage.  I averted my eyes and said good-bye a million times in my heart, resolute on remembering her living laugh and her tight embrace, and her I love you dearest brother.  And the inevitable moment came when they closed the lid and clicked it shut, and I sank clear to the earth’s core.  The utter finality of that muffled click…  Her casket came rolling by, and I touched it, and I turned to the corner and sobbed.  Do I really have to speak?  Can I?  In my terror of the task to talk, a lovely friend eight states away softly suggested: Just speak to her.  And that is what I did: “Sarah, you are beautiful to me.  You share normal human imperfections, but to me you are a perfectly delightful, forgiving, super fun, uber smart, good, kind, hard-working, lovely, and loving woman.  You are one in a billion.  I adore you.  And I will miss you sorely for a long, long time.”  Standing at the congregational pulpit, there was no corner to weep in, but I wept anyway.  And I cannot deny that, in that fiery crucible of grief, I felt an enormity of love, and a universe of prayer, wrapping me warmly and holding me aloft and carrying me gently forward to tomorrow.  I love you dearest sister.

 

The maple-wood Virginia Rose.

Courage at Twilight: Tending to Grief

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Her story was not supposed to end this way. She was supposed to win, to vanquish her adversities, to ride the rising tide of her professional and personal success.  She was not supposed to be taken out by some random tree.  But here we are.  Supposed-to-bes are not realities.  Sarah’s last text to me asked for my reassurance that she was strong enough and brave enough.  I called her and told her she was the strongest bravest woman I know.  My last text to Sarah told her I loved her and wished her a happy birthday, and included a photo of my brother and I hiking in Bell Canyon’s deep snow.  She answered with a red heart emoji.  Sarah’s last words in this life came astride a snowmobile on a mountain top, where she declared, “This is one of the best days of my life!”  Just minutes later, she was gone.  But it was, in fact, one of the best days of her life, perched high upon the planet with the cold clean air on her face and God’s beauty all around.  She loved her work at Draper Rehab, and she loved her coworkers and patients.  She helped lift her facility to be one of the company’s top performers.  It took her months to win over the most reluctant, but she came to be adored and respected for her outsized strength and intelligence and tenacity, and her love.  Her gift was to look into any person and to understand what she saw deep inside, and then to love them.  These people included her sad and lonely big brother, her Black friends struggling in a white-slanted culture, her gay and queer and trans family whom she saw as beautiful champions of love and courage and integrity, her children whom she rightly bragged about for their intelligence and their insistence upon truth and their lovingkindness, her elderly and disabled patients who could not swallow or speak or use their faces or hands to communicate, but she heard them and understood them anyway.  In my kitchen on Saturday January 14, Sarah and Steven and I talked for an hour about the complexities of life, and she declared to us how happy she was.  After wading through 50 years of adversity, she had arrived at the point where she had no fear of the consequences of honesty, truth, accountability, and love.  She would say her truth, come what may.  She had arrived at a point where she had no tolerance for manipulation, anger, dysfunction, lies and half-truths, pride and territoriality.  She had come to the point where her mind and spirit were perfectly aligned with her sense of truth and virtue, and nothing could move her from it.  She had arrived.  And then she was taken.  And we are left broken and grieving.  I have learned that “the way we deal with grief in our culture is broken…”  We see grief “as a kind of malady,” something to get over, to put behind us, something broken to be fixed, a sickness to be healed.  But grief is none of these.  Grief simply reveals the part of me that is hurting and wants to be tended and nurtured, to be held, showing me the new episode of life experience to be integrated into my being.  “All that we love deeply becomes a part of us” (Helen Keller).  Our culture says that “the goal of grief support…is to get out of grief, to stop feeling pain.”  But “there is nothing wrong with grief.”  Grief “is a natural extension of love.  It’s a healthy and sane response to loss.  Grief is part of love.  Love for life, love for self, love for others.”  Love for Sarah.

(Other quotes from It’s OK that You’re Not OK by Megan Devine.)

(Pictured: Yours truly with Sarah and little Gabe camping in June 2023 in the Uinta mountains of Utah.)

Courage at Twilight: Good-bye, Love

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The texts tumbled in just as City Council meeting began. “911!  Please call right away!”  “It’s an emergency!”  “Can you excuse yourself?”  I needed to know more before I walked out on the City Council and Mayor, but I got more than I bargained for: “Sarah just died in a snowmobile accident.”    My sister.  My beautiful, energetic, ambitious, kind, and loving sister.  My sister who saw me and loved me just as I am.  “What the hell is going on?” I barked when he answered the phone, barked out of terror, not anger.  Indeed, his wife, my sister, had passed away after a freak accident.  In the previous months, she had led her teams of nursing directors and therapy directors to new levels excellence, surpassing company aspirations, and the boss had treated them to a mountain lodge retreat where, after the celebratory gathering, the twentyish directors chose between three company-provided activities: snowmobiling, four-wheeling, or massaging.  Sarah chose a massage, then ran to join her boss and co-workers on snowmobiles: why settle for one fun activity when you can cram in two?  She zoomed across snowy trails with her boss and five colleagues.  She missed a turn and flew over an embankment.  She hit a tree.  Her helmet broke open.  She died on impact.  My sister.  Sarah.  My sweet, accepting, no-nonsense, intensely fun, forgiving, and loving sister.  And the bottom of my world abruptly dropped away and I began a freefall of terror and panic and deadening dread.  This could not be!  This was not possible!  Never a crier, I sat at my desk and sobbed.  As the older brother, I knew what I had to do.  I rushed home, had Mom and Dad sit together, and began the impossible: Something terrible has happened.  Something terrible has happened to Sarah.  Through heaving sobs, I related what little I knew.  To my stunned parents.  To my only brother.  To my three weeping sisters.  To my seven adoring children.  To my far-flung nieces and nephews.  One by one.  And with each telling I bawled anew.  I am not a crier, but I cried more during that night than I had in my previous 59 years combined.  This simply could not be!  But it was.  She was gone.  Everyone experiences grief differently, in their own ways and times, and every grieving is genuine.  To Mom (so far), the tragedy seemed like just another random fact, like running out of milk.  Dad moaned for hours: “I don’t if I can survive this.  Truly.  I’m 88 years old!  I’m already frail, and I can feel what little strength I have left breaking and melting away.”  But with visitors and talking through his shocked incredulity again and again and again he survived the evening and the night and the next day.  I retreated to a dark room and cried in convulsing waves.  Not Sarah!  Her story was not supposed to end this way.

Courage at Twilight: Turn Up the Heat

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“Is it cold in here?” Dad lobbed the question into the middle of the family room.  Mom and I looked at each other and shrugged.  Dad pulled his favorite soft burgundy fleece up around his neck.  I moved to Mom’s kitchen desk to affix a return label to their quarterly tax return envelope, leaving the kitchen can lights in the non-blaring off position.  Mom, bless her, struggled to her feet and tottered over to the kitchen, switching on the blare: “Don’t you want more light?”  This is what I heard: “I know better, son, and I love you, so I’m turning on the lights you don’t think you need.”  And I decided to try drawing a teeny-tiny itty-bitty boundary: “Thank you, Mom, but please don’t hover.  I know how to turn the lights on, and if I wanted more light, I would turn the lights on.”  “Alright, dear,” she bit, her face shrouding, and she tottered back to her chair with that arthritic hip-knee-ankle stagger.  I know she had acted from a place of love, but perhaps love could have observed that I was happy in the daytime dim and trust that I will act in my own best interest, and let me be.  “I’m cold.  Should we turn on the fireplace?” Dad ventured from his chair.  Brother-in-law Mike had come to repair the wound to the bathroom tile resulting from installing a wider door, prompting me to get in gear and calk around the door molding and frame and fill the nail holes.  After two months, the project is nearly finished.  “I think maybe I’ll turn on the fireplace,” said Dad, the hint growing more apparent.  The night before snow fell and the temperature dipped.  Dad had emailed me at work: “Roger, the weather report says a strong storm will come through this afternoon.  Snow, wind, white-out conditions.  They recommend persons leave work early.  Dad.”  It’s nice to be loved and cared for and worried over.  But I am 59 years old, and am always cautious driving in snow.  And, yes, when snow is coming, I leave work early.  “Yep, I’m going turn on the fireplace,” and I finally took the hint and flipped the switch to ignite the gas so he could warm up.  Before he had ridden down the stair lift that morning, I had heard him scream, “Owieow!!” from his shower.  Mom had started the dishwasher, which diverted alternatingly scalding and freezing water from his shower stream.  “I’m scalded,” he complained an hour later.  “My skin is still red and sore.”  And mom promised not to run the dishwasher in the mornings anymore.  Sometimes it can be hard to get the temperature of things just right.  The fireplace burned with yellow flame, and the fan coursed hot air into the family room.  “Is it hot in here?” Dad lobbed.

Courage at Twilight: Comfort Kit

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“How was traffic?” Heavy.  “How were the roads?”  Dry.  “Was it hard to drive in the snow?”  There was no snow, Mom—the roads were dry.  “Did you get to see Paul today?”  Yep—every day.  I work with my close friend the City Engineer every day.  For dinner, I served mini pizzas made from toasted English muffins topped with spaghetti sauce, chopped ham, and shredded Mexican blend cheese—a passable dinner—I have come a long way from my fine French entrees.  Dad has stopped taking the diuretic medicine because he grew tired of having to pee every hour (with the benefit of increased exercise), but his legs look like fleshy tree trunks and his feet like hot water bottles with stubby toes.  Nurse Chanetelle convinced him to wear his calf-length compression socks (he will not even talk about wearing the hip-length ones), and I dug them out of his sock drawer and laid then over the back of his bedroom sofa, where remain two days later.  The Christmas tree came down on New Years Day, leaving a green mess of fake needles, so the vacuum cleaner came out and sucked up the needles and the bits of dried food from Christmas Eve, leaving the food and foot stains behind, so the spot cleaner squirted and the carpet shampooer roared and roamed and sucked up dark water.  I take pride in my work, and left the dining and living rooms with beautiful rows of long triangular shapes, each width equal to the others.  Looks so much better, I thought with tired satisfaction, and while I was stowing the vacuum and shampooer and bottles of carpet soap Mom tottered across the wet carpet with her new dig-your-toes-in gait to put the crystal candlesticks away.  I suppose I am being silly, but I felt like someone had left prints in my new smoothed cement or dragged their fingers across my finished canvas.  No harm done, actually—none to justify my irritation.  Mom dug into the garbage to remove the mug I had thrown away, because the microwaved chocolate cake mix was gross and would take three gallons of water to wash out, and we don’t need another nondescript mug in the cupboards anyway—you see, I did have my justifying reasons for throwing the mug away, and then there are my used Ziploc bags which she pulls out of the garbage to wash with a gallon of water each and to dry over wooden spoon handles lined on the countertop, for recycling, even where they had contained raw chicken or fish—They don’t want our soiled baggies, I wanted to scream.  She has been such a dedicated recycler.  She has been such a dedicated mother.  Her dementia is worsening.  The pharmacy delivered a hospice Comfort Kit (also known as an emergency kit) and nurse Jonathan spread the contents out on the table and explained that the dozen blue oral-solution morphine micro-dose syringes are for pain or distress or discomfort or difficulty breathing (from congestive heart failure) and the dozen green oral-solution lorazepam syringes are for anxiety and distress, and they could be used together.  “I prefer not to take anything habit-forming,” Dad rebuffed, smiling righteously.  I want a Comfort Kit!! I felt like shouting.  I could use a little morphine now and again!  Another form of comfort came in Gaylen the hospice chaplain, who found Dad in great spirits and relatively great shape considering most of the people Gaylen counsels and comforts are days from death and cannot speak and do not know who anyone is and are wasted and broken and ready to go, so he assures them the afterlife is real and they have nothing to fear on the other side, where they will be free of their pains and troubles.  I wouldn’t mind a little of that comfort, too.

(Pictured above: Crossing over the suspension bridge on the Bonneville Shoreline Trail in Draper, Utah.)

Voices from Rabbit Lane

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Yes, I drank homemade cream soda from these blue bottles, and built that brick wall from century-old brick, my children with trowel and cement slurry at my side.  The wall anchored a corner of my enormous pallet-framed chicken coop, my to-be writing corner, my studio, where I would write poems and books and otherwise get away from the world.  That dream fled.  But others arrived.  And I am pleased to display this photo as the cover for my newest collection of poems.  Written between 1975 and 2017, these poems touch on many topics, including nature, family, marriage and love, joy and grief, death and life, and memories of tender times.  I am not actively marketing the book, but for those who may be interested, the paperback and kindle editions can be found on Amazon.   I wish all my acquaintances a happy and prosperous new year 2024.

Courage at Twilight: The Paint Has Faded

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On the otherwise ivory-cream walls, rough white splotches of dried spackle have glared at me for a year as I have climbed the stairs several times a day, easily a thousand trips, with the chaotic white patches accusing me of not sanding them out and painting them over to blend with the smooth cream, not helping them fit it, bringing them into pleasing uniformity.   I don’t care.  Sitting on the toilet seat lid, Dad spread spackle on the screw-head holes and sheetrock seam, in the bathroom with the new (and unpainted) door.  He had asked me for the spackle and a puddy knife and sanding blocks: “this is something I can do.”  I knew he could do it, and I also knew I would have to redo it, not because I am better than he is at plastering walls, but because his unsteady hands and blurred eyes could not help but leave the job needing to be finished or repaired, or both.  But who am I to tell my father not to do something he wants to do and believes he can do and probably can do quite well?  He asked me to bring in the shop vac so he could vacuum the dried spackle dust after he sanded.  I brought in the vacuum and sanded and cleaned up.  He asked to me bring in the paint, and a roller pan, and new roller, so he could roll paint on the wall.  “I think we might need to plaster a bit more,” I suggested, in the third person, carefully, but he agreed and smeared on a second application, “and that maybe before we roll the walls, we brush on some paint over the plaster, as a primer.”  Okay, he said.  The first and second paint cans I opened found hardened, cracked paint.  “It’s probably been sitting there for 25 years,” Dad chuckled.  In the third can, the paint was as thick as buttery mashed potatoes, and much heavier, but uncongealed and stirrable.  The splotches on the walls above the stair lift have now been sanded smooth and painted over, and the wall above the stair lift is again its harmonious creamy self, without blemish.  And the bathroom is painted, or at least primed.  Another coat may hide the scars in the bathroom wall, without rolling, and I hope Dad will not, in fact, try to roll paint on the walls.  He believes the old paint has faded, and the new paint will not match.  I am not looking forward to cleaning up after that paint job.  But he wants to do that job, and this is his house, and who am I to tell him no?

Courage at Twilight: Gift Dispenser

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“The doctor wants to see him in person,” the receptionist asserted, and this after Sarah, and then I, more than once each, had explained how delivering Dad to the doctor’s office was not only an impossible physical feat, but also an unsafe one, both for Dad and for me, for the sheer physical strain, and how leaving the doctor’s office after an in-person visit would find Dad worse off than when he arrived, and how is that in the patient’s best interest. She said, again, that she would talk with the doctor, who on the day of the video appointment commented on how well the five-minute visit had gone, and let’s do it again in two weeks to check on the diuretic.  A nurse had come to the house to take Dad’s vital signs (based upon which he is healthier than I am) the mornings of the video appointments.  My goodness—so much happening today.  Cecilia helped Dad for the last time, said she wished we could have worked things out with Arosa, said she might leave Arosa because the new rates are driving patients away and reducing her hours and her pay, said good-bye and said good luck and drove away.  Chantelle and Liz, the hospice nurse and social worker, came for Dad’s hospice intake interview and paperwork.  Dad got stuck on the “blue sheet” and what mechanical measures he did and did not want taken to unnaturally prolong his life if he had a stroke or a heart attack or a bad fall—he wants to live, damn it, not be given up on.  But doctors have explained to him how cardio-pulmonary resuscitation on his 88-year-old frame would leave him crushed and bruised and brain damaged and with a quality of life reduced to an oxymoronic noun (like “shit”) that “quality” would not describe.  Q: How are you feeling?  A: Like great shit.  We will come back to the blue sheet another day.  And we will come back another day to the long medications list, and the question of which prescription drugs he might dispense with in light of the hospice goal to maintain comfort rather than artificially extend life.  Mom and Dad each sat in their recliners during the long interview, and I sat in between them, moderating questions and answers, careful to let them answer what they could before jumping in, careful to quietly correct dementia’s inaccuracies, and a few downright lies, as to dates and weights and numbers and names.  I sat between them, just as I did on Christmas day when they opened the gifts their children had delivered, from where I dispensed one gift to Mom on my right and one gift to Dad on my left, from their respective gift piles, identifying whom the gifts were from, keeping a written list, and moving the unwrapped gifts to new respective piles, gathering and crumpling the wrapping paper after each unveiling.  (Wrapping paper is recyclable, I researched, so long as it stays compressed and crumpled when compressed and crumpled, meaning it is really paper instead of mixed with plastic or metal or cloth fibers.)  Fuzzy slippers, fuzzy socks, biographies of the Fonz and Captain Picard, pounds of chocolates, word puzzle books, Horatio Hornblower DVDs, needlepoint kits, and signed cards.  Mom held up her hands for her gifts, as she does with her dinner plates, like an eager chick.  As the hospice women left, instant new friends, Mom announced they would each receive an Afton hug, a full-bodied arm-wrapping embrace with dancing left and dancing right, named after a beloved granddaughter.  I felt mortified and turned away from the tender bizarre scene, all my inhibitions overwhelmed, but Chantelle and Liz laughed and joined heartily in.

Courage at Twilight: A Voice in the Dark

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Unlike most days when he complains of having lain awake all night (despite prolonged periods of snoring), Dad reported he had slept like a baby in “the longest sleep of my life,” his birthday slumber.  We did not schedule a CNA for in-home care for Christmas Eve, giving Nick the day off instead.  We like Nick.  He told Dad he has a felony conviction from his younger days (he’s only 25).  And we liked him the more for his industry and cheer and for making a new life for him and his wife.  So, despite Dad’s protestation that “I don’t think I will shower today,” the privilege was mine to help him shower and dry and dress and have breakfast (leftover rice transformed into rice pudding with cardamom and vanilla and raisins and milk) and get settled in his recliner with Sunday’s New York Times.  He talked incessantly as he showered, asking occasionally from inside the glassed stall, “Are you there, Rog?” and as I chopped vegetables for Sunday’s crock pot chicken.  He told me, again, about spending day after day at Sandy’s house decades, tearing out overgrown shrubs and relandscaping, painting the house inside and out, jacking up the tilting front steps to pour concrete underneath.  “I was full of energy and strength in those days,” he remembered, the days when he was also the bishop (lay minister) of our church.  “I also think I was a little crazy.”  Okay, this is new, I thought.  “Why do you say that,” I asked, more than curious.  “Because,” he answered, “every day I spent working at her house was a day I did not spend at my house.”  And with your family, I wanted him to say.  Dad was God’s gift to New Jersey, the entire congregation felt.  And he was.  He was full of generous service.  I have lived much of my life blinded and exhausted by the light and force of his being, feeling my own a dull weakness in comparison.  But I cooked for the family who gathered for our Christmas Eve party, where he recounted a story from 1967, when he was gathered with his little family on Christmas Eve, and suddenly his world went dark, and he could see nothing, but he could hear the Voice, the voice that said to him, I am going to show you.  I want you to see her the way I see her.  And in his mind he could see in the blackness a little dark house, with no lights on, and a little old woman sitting crushingly alone and sad in her dark room.  Emerging from this vision, Dad bundled Mom and me (3) and Megan (1) into the car and drove us from East Brunswick to Edison, where we knocked and knocked on the door of the cottage with no lights on until a little old woman came to the door and let us in.  We turned on some lights, pulled out boxes of Christmas decorations from storage, set up and decorated her tree, and talked and sang hymns and carols, and gladdened her sad heart.  I was too young to remember, but Dad’s story is memory enough.  And he said to us, “This might be my last Christmas with you.  Who knows?  But I want you to hear, from me, that I love the Savior, and I know his voice.”

Courage at Twilight: For the Love of Clementine

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Dad turned eighty-eight years old today, and for his birthday gift I fixed his toilet. It was not a job I had done before, but how hard could it be to turn off water, drain the tank, remove the old bolts and washers and tank-to-bowl gasket?  How hard?  Three hours later I finished the job.  I had told him he could use the bathroom at any time—this toilet could not be taken fully off-line—but that he had only one flush.  But I forgot I had removed the tank, with the flushing mechanism, silly me.  A gallon pitcher from the kitchen sink flushed everything down, and then I replaced the tank, after driving to three national chain hardware stores that did not stock the right Toto part.  I made due, and toilet no longer leaks.  And I gave him my new book of poems, including six poems about Clementine, with whom I made friends during the ordeal of my separation exactly ten years ago, when I lived in a friend’s construction zone remodel project after his drug-dealing non-rent-paying tenants destroyed the house.  Clementine was a spindly-legged spider in one shower-ceiling corner, and she greeted me every morning and every evening, and I talked to her and told her my troubles.  She could not respond, but she quietly listened: she was my only constant, always there for me, not judging me, not scowling her contempt, not sending me away, not caring about my flaws or my brokenness or my heart-trauma.  Dad thanked me for both gifts—said he would get to reading my book right away—and  the family all came over for dinner and carol-singing and sweet token gifts and homemade chocolate peanut-butter coconut-caramel cashew-coconut-raisin gooey bars which every loved, and they listened to me read the story of the birth of Jesus, and the feeding trough, and the announcing angel and skies of singing warriors, the wise men from the east, and the light of that singular star.

Courage at Twilight: Tasting Sweetness

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Grinch Candy Cane Hunt - KC Parent Magazine

Dare I dip my toe again into the dark eddies, and launch into the currents of this memoir of living with the dying?  My resolve to navigate these waters began before I embarked, and the eight hundred and seventy-fourth day is no time to beach.  Arosa raised Dad’s in-home care rates by 75%, charging a “premium” for clients who receive less than four hours of care per day—Dad receives two—but I perceive the premium as a penalty, and the company as preying on the most vulnerable. Continue reading →

Courage at Twilight: Powers of Attorney

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The air has cleared, and the energy has calmed, at home, and we have moved on to other matters weighty and light. Light like what’s for dinner.  Weighty like powers of attorney.  Dinner is hot deli roast beef slices left over from a family party, with mashed potatoes and gravy and steamed asparagus on the side.  On the weightier end, new powers of attorney are signed and notarized.  Mom’s and Dad’s “springing” powers of attorney from 1999 each named the other an attorney-in-fact, an agent, effective only upon the disability or incapacity or incompetence of either one.  I was named as substitute attorney upon the incapacity of them both.  These documents have fulfilled their 24-year function well, and I rested peacefully on them, that is, until my very smart brother explained their potential effect-in-fact at this point in time.  To trigger either POA, I would have to transport my incapacitated father or mother to one or more “disinterested” physicians (not their own), explain to those physicians, in my father’s and mother’s presence, the ways in which they are no longer competent, and obtain physician affidavits to that effect.  Only then could I act on my parents’ behalf in making decisions and managing affairs.  This, say the experts, is a process “destined to destroy” even the most loving and supportive of families.  With sibling support, I discussed this concern carefully and fully with Mom and Dad, and received their blessing to prepare “durable” powers of attorney, which will allow me to help them with their decisions and affairs irrespective of their competence.  Of course, I will consult first with them, and with my wonderful siblings, in so doing.  A notary came to our house to notarize Mom’s and Dad’s signatures on the new POAs.  Mom and Dad feel relieved, and I feel so relieved.  In additional to protecting them and their assets, I hope to have avoided unnecessary and uncharacteristic stress in the family.  We can focus more on caring for Mom and Dad, and each other.

Courage at Twilight: Closing and Opening Doors

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On Dad’s first day home from a month of hospitalization and rehabilitation, he poked me with two questions.  First, whether I had bought any whole wheat English muffins for his diabetic breakfast diet.  Second (after I motioned to the muffins in their habitual spot on the kitchen counter), whether they had or had not been sitting there for two months.  I ignored the slight, the suggestion that even if I had remembered his whole wheat muffins, I had not managed them properly.  The rebuff after dinner, however, flamed my already roiling magma.  Sarah and I were explaining to him how, while he was away, we had studied the house in light of his challenges, and saw that we needed to replace the 28-inch bathroom door with a 36-inch door, opening into the hallway instead of into the tiny bathroom, and how our cousin David was bringing his tools the next day to do the job.  I thought he would be happy with our ideas and efforts on his behalf.  He was not.  He walked us through every minute detail of his maneuvering around the bathroom, like a hundred-point K-turn, including using the doorknob as a handhold before hand-surfing heavily across the sink counter toward the grab bars and toilet.  I promise you I was patient and calm as I explained: “I know that has worked for you in the past, Dad, but relying on a round rotating nob is not safe anymore.  Don’t worry, we’ll install new grab bars.  You will be able to follow a similar but safer transferring routine.  I promise, it will be better.”  And he looked at me with that omniscient omnipotent head-tilted smolder of his and demanded, “When you are making plans for my future, you will speak to me first,” tapping his chest.  And this long dormant volcano, which has seethed and smoked for decades, suddenly spewed out its lava heat.  “You weren’t here!  You’ve been hospitalized.  And we had to move fast when we found out you were coming home so you could move around as safely as possible.  Dad, I have given my whole life to taking care of you and keeping you safe and healthy for more than two years, and you have criticized and fought me since the day I moved in!”  As I hollered at him, I pounded the granite countertop with my fist, “since the day [pound] I moved [pound] IN (pound)!”  (Have I broken my hand? I wondered vaguely as it began to tingle.)  I abandoned the beginnings of my Christmas party chocolate mousse and fled to the dark living room, sitting in the glow of the Christmas tree lights, trying to calm myself.  I had never ever erupted, boiled over, blown up, confronted like that, not in all my life, not with my dad, not with my mom, not with my wife, not with my siblings, not with my children, not with anyone, ever.  I was not proud of myself for what had just happened, but neither did I feel ashamed or guilt-ridden.  I could hear Dad complaining to Mom in the next room, “Why is Roger so furious with me?”  “Because you don’t listen,” she responded.  “Why can’t you just be quiet and listen.  And be grateful.”  I cherished her firm meek support.  “And I don’t want to talk about it anymore!”  He complained again: “The older I get, the more everyone just tells me what to do.  Why is everyone ordering me around?”  “Just listen to people and be grateful for what everyone is trying to do for you!” she countered.  “And I said I don’t want to talk about it anymore!”  Dad pouted, “Well, I guess I’ll just add you to the list of people who won’t speak to me.  It’s a long list.”  My heat rose again, but more controlled and focused, and I approached him and challenged, “Do you really think this is about me wanting to tell you what to do?  To control you?  Really?”  He covered his eyes with his hand: “I can’t listen to you when you’re angry.  I can’t take it.”  “Oh, that’s rich: everyone has to listen to you, but you don’t listen to the people who are trying to care for you and keep you alive.  You just complain that they’re bossy and telling you what to do.”  (Eyes still covered): “I just can’t listen to people who are angry.”  Me: “I’m not angry, but I am very frustrated, because I can’t listen to people who are ungrateful and disrespectful.”  Dad: “Is that what you think I am?”  Me: “Absolutely.  Everything I do here I do to help you and Mom be safe and comfortable.  I’m not interested in telling you what to do.  But instead of appreciating it, you judge it.”  A full Ambien, twice my typical one-half, got me through the night.  David and I worked all the next day to install the new door, a 36-inch-wide left-hinged door turned inside out to be a right-hinged door opening into the hallway.  The bathroom looks twice the size and is so much easier to get into and move around in.  A grab bar has replaced the rickety doorknob.  Dad enjoyed keeping tabs on the construction, chatting amiably with David.  In the end, he enjoyed the bathroom’s inaugural visit, emerging to remark on how nice the new bathroom was.

Courage at Twilight: Long Ago Letters

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For months Mom has approached me in the kitchen or in my home office to read to me snippets of her old letters recounting my birth in Brazil in 1964.  “…they laid him on my stomach…he sure has a big cry…he has very long fingers and feet…he does not have poky-out ears…he is very funny looking (as all newborns are)…he is beautiful to me.”  Then follows the historical material for their favorite family stories about me, which Dad delights to tell the assembled family on my birthdays: “We seem to be living in a jungle of diapers.  We have no laundry facilities [and] do all our laundry by hand.  We hang [diapers] in the kitchen, bathroom, over chairs and tables…we iron them dry and put them away.”  How can I divert her attention to something else, I wondered.  And I recalled having a stack of a hundred letters she wrote to me from 1983-85 when I served my Church as a volunteer missionary in Portugal, letters which I saved but which no one has read in 40 years.  With Dad in a hospital and care facility for a month, I have taken to reading aloud one of her 1980s letters each evening after dinner.  She chuckles at the busyness of life as a mother of young children, the piano lessons, allergy shots, band concerts, basketball games, school snow days, choir rehearsals, prom disappointments, bouts with the flu, reading Newberry books, Sunday church meetings, and watching the bats at dusk.  On October 25, 1983, Mom recounted how she bought a tie for my then three-year-old brother Steven.  “He wears it to church every Sunday.  He looks very grown up.  He said…last night, ‘When I was a little boy, I was big!’  After church he went around the house singing ‘Jesus wants me for a Sun Bean!’”  On March 6, 1984, she sympathized with my homesickness and discouragement, wishing she could “make things easier” for me, and reassuring me that “everything here at home is fine.  We get tired and discouraged just like everyone else, but we keep going, we bounce back.  I’m always at it.  I have to make sure that I create the right feeling here at home with EACH child as much of the time as possible.  That is really not easy.  I never give up, though.  I have to keep trying.”  She was 44 years old.  On November 15, 1983, she reminisced, “There are so many things a mother feels for her children.  They are just very dear to her.  She remembers nursing them as tiny infants, carrying them around as little children, making cakes and going on walks with them as they get bigger, taking care of their things, helping them in school, etc.  Then, when the children leave, it is hard for her.  The empty bedroom, the missing place at the table, all the little things that were fixed or made better [by the child].  At the same time, it is right that children leave.  They grow and become independent and contributing adults.  That’s the way of it.  It’s right.”  And she ended that now 40-year-old letter with the sweetest of sentiments: “You will always be a part of me and I will always love you without limit.”  At age 59, as I again live with her and help care for her, her feelings for me (and my five siblings) are just as tender, and she looks at me still as her little boy.  I cannot be that little boy, that infant.  I am a grown man with my own life and children, and grandchildren.  But I am still her son, and she deserves in return the same sweetness she has given to me all of my life.

Courage at Twilight: Pushing Buttons

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Mom greeted me as I walked through the door, anxious because the stair lift would not work. She checked the chair and receiver power chords, replaced the remote batteries, and still the chair would not move for her.  As I suspected, my curious grandchildren had pushed the red power button to the off position during our Thanksgiving festivities.  Turning the power button to the on position brought the lift back to life, and embarrassed Mom a bit.  “I’m so dense,” she whispered.  I reassured her she was not at all dense.  We grabbed our coats and keys and left for the rehabilitation center.  She had promised to give Dad a break from rehab food with a “treat,” code for a combo meal of hamburger, large fries, and Diet Coke.  Indeed, he was pleased, though still full from his rehab dinner.  For our big family Thanksgiving turkey and smoked ham dinner, Sarah was allowed to bring Dad home for three hours—the most United Health Care would allow without jeopardizing his coverage (i.e., if UHC thought he were well enough to be home all day, UHC might think he didn’t need in-patient rehab).  He sat hunched in his wheelchair, smiling weakly, introducing his old standard stories with, “That reminds me…,” and sad for the too-short stay.  At three hours’ end, he again had to leave his wife and family and home and comfort and return to his hated rehab room.  Seeing that he was still unable to care for himself, I shuddered with terror at the thought of him returning home in just one week.  I hoped he would be strong enough, but knew that if he were not strong enough, the burden would fall to Mom and me to make up the difference, to fetch this and that, to launder and mop and shampoo, to winch him up with a gate belt, to sit stiffly on my mental seat’s anxious edge.  Where is this big bitterness of anger coming from? I quizzed myself, and quickly perceived that the anger did not mean I did not love him and admire him and want to care for him.  Instead, my anger derived from my fear of the coming all-but-certain burdens, and of wishing they were not mine to carry.  With this realization, I turned to face my realities, and the anger left.  But the anxiety and the fear did not.  They remained, obstinately entrenched.  Time for more diaphragmatic breathing.

Courage at Twilight: I Know What I’m Doing

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Now remember.  Butt in.  Chest out.  I know how to do it!  Stand up straight, as straight as you can.  I am!  Actually, you’re not standing straight enough to be safe.  I’ll do it my way!  Your way will get you killed, Nelson: you’re too hunched over, and the walker will walk out from under you, and you will fall, and fall hard.  I do it this way all the time!  That’s part of the problem.  You can’t go home until you can get to the bathroom and back without help.  Well, I’ve done that a hundred times since I’ve been here!  Maybe six times.  But I need to be home for Lucille’s birthday on the 14th…for Thanksgiving on the 23rd…next Wednesday the 29th!  You can have a three-hour pass on Thanksgiving.  Just three hours!  Only because you’re not strong enough yet to stay longer.  I’m not staying here until next Friday! That’s December already!  Friday would be best: you’ll have a few more days of therapy, and you’ll be stronger when you go home.  Wednesday!  You really must be able to get around without help: Lucille can’t help you if you fall, and neither can Roger, and they shouldn’t have to.  Now pull your butt in, straighten your knees, and push your chest out.  You’re so bossy!  (“Nelson tells all the staff how bossy you are.”)  If you did what they told you to do, and got safe and strong, I wouldn’t have to be so bossy.  I don’t need anyone’s help!  Oh, yes, you do, you definitely do.  I hate it here!  I’m sure you do.  I can’t stand staring at this ceiling and these walls for another week!  I’m sure it’s lonely and bleak and no fun at all, so work hard and do what they tell you to do so you can leave here and won’t have to come back again.  I guess I’ll just bite my tongue and come home next Friday!  That would be best—it won’t cost you a thing, and you’ll be that much stronger when you get home.  And you won’t be as much of a worry to Roger and Mom—Mom’s too old and frail to take care of you, and Roger works full time and anyway shouldn’t have the stress of picking you up off the floor and changing your soaked and messed clothing and shampooing the carpets every day (sorry to be blunt).  He won’t have to do that!  Wonderful—glad to hear it—Friday it is.  You have to leave already?  So soon?  ***  (Dad sat in his wheelchair before the wide windowpanes, looking out at the parking lot, the new snow covering all of November, the white-dusted mountains rearing up so stupendously high, sat in his wheelchair looking small and sad and far away, and I made sure Mom turned to wave before we drove away.)

Courage at Twilight: Kiss Me, Dear

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Columnist David Brooks posits in his Second Mountain that conversation is critically foundational to successful marriage.  If so, I am doomed.  Conversation has always come hard: I expend so much energy measuring my audience and tailoring my comments for self-safety that talking is exhausting.  I did not chat much in marriage, and after eight years living alone, I sometimes wonder if I can converse at all.  Draper Rehab held a resident Thanksgiving dinner. Mom and I were Dad’s guest quota, and we sat quietly at our table watching all the other residents with their respective disabilities and guests, waiting for more than 150 people to be served their turkey and potatoes and stuffing and yams and green beans and gravy, all meted with ice cream scoops.  We had little to say to one another.  Dad drooped and seemed so old.  But we were there, giving quiet loving support.  As I knew he would, Dad eyed my cranberry-sprite cocktail and wondered if he could have some.  Too much sugar, Dad.  But when José brought the cart around, Dad motioned for a cup.  I said nothing.  Various residents rolled by: Mark the mechanic who loves all things cars; Mitch from Brooklyn with whom we felt an affinity as an east coaster; others who could not speak or could not move and had daughters feed them and grandchildren wipe their mouths with white towels.  “The food is wonderful,” I ventured, and I might as well have commented on the weather: rain was in the forecast.  The next day, Mom and I asked Dad for a report on his physical therapy—he had walked “a hundred feet” to the exercise room and practiced standing up and sitting down six times, and was thoroughly wasted.  I showed him how to operate the television remote—hold the remote in your left hand and push the channel up or down button with your right index finger, like this.  We talked about springing powers of attorney and how they needed durable powers of attorney because I did not want to have to testify in Mom’s and Dad’s presence to a doctor about their future incompetence to make decisions for themselves—they agreed.  And I had Dad sign a letter I wrote to Bank of America asking to reverse late fees and interest charged on the same day his payment posted.  “We’ll see you tomorrow, Dad,” I reassured him.  That is the hardest part of living in a rehabilitation center: not the briefs and bed pans, not the food you don’t like, not the lack of interesting television, but the utter loneliness of living alone in viewless room away from your beloved home and sweetheart.  “I’m not leaving without a kiss!” Mom exclaimed, juggling a smile from his smooched face.

Courage at Twilight: Greetings and Good-byes

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The needling traumas of covid and ambulance and hospital and worry and the prolonged proximity of death have sapped away my strength.  I mope around feeling weak and muddy, freeze dried and vacuum packed.  The numbing emptiness is syncopated with gun shots of rage, often over nothing, like a spot of greasy mayonnaise oozing from the jar rim to the butter knife to my clean fingers.  When I spilled a tall glass of chocolate milk on the shag, the explosion lasted more than a mere moment, but there was nothing for it but to fill the tank with soap and hot water and shampoo the spot 613 times until it was cleaner than clean.  Mom watched me from her recliner, mute, helpless to comfort.  Dad has phoned her several times a day from his rehab room the next town over.  “Hello, good lookin’!” she cheers.  He complains to her about his lumpy hot cereal, the maddening miserable itching from his Grover’s disease, how he simply can’t do what the physical therapists are working with him to do—knees straight! butt in! chest out! you can do it! one more step!—what we keep telling him he must be able to do if he is to return home.  He tells her how lonely and bored he is, with little to do and no one to see, and how badly he just wants to come home.  At 87, he is again the neglected little boy wanting to be comforted, by his 63-year sweetheart, his darling girl.  “Well, you just have to do it,” she chastened.  There is little comfort in chastening, and little progress in coddling.  I have nothing for him, no words of compassion or encouragement, no enthusiasm, no “You can do it!”  Dad wants more than anything to be independent, and he wants to be tended and nursed.  He is desperate to go where he feels safe and loved, to go home, but he knows he cannot go to that blessed place in his condition—and changing his condition may require more strength of mind and body than he can muster.  We brought a bit of home to him, in his room, with yellow balloons, with vases of flowers, with wrapped gifts from her children, with pizza and salad and fruit and German chocolate cake, celebrating Mom’s 84th birthday with him, and we ate and sang and opened gifts and cheered and took pictures.  And then we said good-bye and left, because that is how life goes.  Every party ends, and every good-bye looks forward to the next getting-together.

Courage at Twilight: I Hid My Face

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Mom and I munched on Chicago-style deep-dish pepperoni pizza (which my miracle children had delivered from a Costoco freezer) while the two of us watched Field of Dreams, because I started a new book about baseball ballparks as fundamental features in the community fabric of American cities over nearly two centuries, and I wept at the transcendently beautiful James Horner soundtrack (not available on Spotify!) that carries me up and out fretfulness, and I bawled and bawled at Ray asking to play catch with his distant departed dad, but hiding my face from Mom for wanting to sob privately and unseen and for not wanting her to see me as her little baby boy anymore, wondering about the things we say or don’t say to our dads over the long decades and the things our dads say or don’t say to us, to me, and how some things wanting to be said cannot be said because the other’s ears have never learned to hear what I need to say and so I don’t speak or we speak in cryptic codes and we slap each other’s shoulders discuss safe subjects and we end up not saying anything at all, but wondering if we should have, and wishing we could have, in time, but understanding that no one, I think, ever says everything they wanted to say before the hearer is dead and cannot hear ever again until some goofball mystic plows under his corn and builds a ballpark in Iowa, and I’m asking him if he wants to play catch, so we play catch, tossing the ball back and forth with silly smiles, finding that, in this heaven, we don’t need to say anything at all.

Courage at Twilight: Each Other’s Heroes

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After days of dissolved fiber and a suppository, the hospital cleared Dad for discharge to the rehabilitation facility.  Sarah was pulled into the strange world of his hospital room for five days and nights, never leaving.  She supplemented excellent hospital care with all the little things an immobile old person in a hospital bed needs in order to not suffer too terribly: brushing his teeth, slathering his back with anti-itch cream and his bum with anti-bed-sore cream, alerting the nurses when his oxygen dipped, adjusting him so he could pee into the urinal, applying lip balm, shaving his sparse whiskers, adjusting the bed angles, changing the TV channels, ordering his meals, replacing the cannulas he kept pulling out, pulling up his compression leggings (he shed ten pounds of water, from each leg, in five days), listening to him prattle past midnight.  She hugged pillows over her face to block out the light and beeping instruments and snoring, not completely successfully, rising to his calls for help every 45 minutes of the night.  This list of little services yanked me back to the other hospital room, 14 months ago, and the other rehab, 13 months ago, and the other homecoming, 12 months ago, when I rushed to build the ramps.  “I’ll be out of here in three days!” he enthused to Sarah today with typical optimism and sudden delusion.  And just today he complained he could not do it, he could not stand up from the toilet or the bed or the shower chair or to dress, could not shuffle with a walker ten feet.  “It’s too hard.”  Well, that’s not an option, Daddio.  That’s a terminal philosophy you can’t afford.  You simply have to.  If you can’t do this, you can’t go home.  You can’t go home and burden Mom and Roger with all this because they can’t do it for you, and shouldn’t have to—you have to be able to do it for yourself.  So do it, so you can go home.  Receiving these necessary reports from Sarah, memories of 2022 began to seep in, along with their tension and terror and trauma, memories morphing into anticipations, along with new stresses and trepidations and traumas, of what awaits, of the care he will need, knowing his needs may often outpace my abilities and availabilities and resilience.  So, now, I am slowing my in-breathing and my out-breathing and reminding myself that memories are just that, impressions of things past, and that the future will take care of itself, day by day, and that Dad will work hard at rehab.  He will be ready for home, and I will be ready for him.  And we all will resume our routines to our utmost.  My lovely friend Liddy from the east shores of England, counseled me sweetly: When were babies, so small and helpless, we worried our parents.  As our parents enter their winter years, they worry us.  It turns full circle.  The feeling of exhaustion and defeat is at times unbearable.  But we find the strength because we have to.  We have to put our exhaustion to one side, if you will.  Something inside us will still fight, and we become protectors.  We do for our parents what they did for us in our time of helplessness.  We become our parents’ parents.  The experience your family is going through, and the feelings that go with it, allow you to be human.  You become each other’s heroes.  You develop a greater understanding of each other, and become wiser.  You are not, and never will be, alone.

Courage at Twilight: Sorry, But You Can’t Go

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Calendar appointment: November 8: Wednesday: 2:45 p.m.: Alta View Hospital Radiology: Mammogram. “I’m looking forward to my breast squish,” Mom texted her daughters, to whom she once likened a mammogram to lying on a concrete floor and having a semi park on her breast.  Pat was to pick her up at 2:00.  Though she was symptomless, I had given her my last KN95 for the trip.  She put it on right away.  “You don’t need to wear it in the house,” I explained—I was isolating.  “I like it,” she answered, never having worn a KN95, “I think it’s sexy!”  But on the morning of: a little cough and a small sniffle and a rasp in her voice and a bit more tired than usual.  With Dad and me positive for Covid, what else could it be?  “Mom, I think you probably have Covid.  You can’t go to the hospital for your mammogram if you have Covid—you’ll infect the whole place!  You need to test before you go, and if you test negative, you can go with your sexy mask.”  “I do not have Covid!  I feel just fine.  Just a little tired.”  “Well, you can’t go unless you test negative first.”  “I’m going!  I can’t cancel on the day of!  I’ll test when I get home!”  (You’ll test after you expose everyone?)  “Believe me, Mom, they don’t want you there if you’re sick—they’ll be glad you called to let them know.”  “I’m not sick, just tired.”  (“Sarah, I need your help.  Mom won’t test and won’t let me reschedule.  Can you give me some support?”)  “Mom, you are not going unless you test negative!  ”  Sarah did not enjoy the call, but she’s good at being the bad guy, so she says.  As they talked, I prepared the testing kit.  Our two-flanked approach got her tested: Covid positive.  I rescheduled the mammogram and called off Pat and informed a disappointed Mom, who deflated into her chair, wrapped in her orange fleece sweater and blue fleece throw.  Her doctor sent in a Paxlovid prescription to our regular Walgreen’s, and we waited for the “ready to pick up” text.  During each call I made, the automated system reported the prescription had been received, and I would receive a text when it was ready to pick up.  I did not receive the text, so we drove to the store a half-hour before closing.  The drive-through was card-boarded up—“We are short staffed”—so I had no choice but to mask up and go in.  “We’ve been out of Paxlovid for a week,” said the tech, and he sent us racing to a store 20 minutes away that had some.  This drive-through was open, and at 8:58 Mom got her medicine.  The fact that my prescription never made it into the system did not matter: Mom’s was the store’s last box.  I spent the next day in bed, except to warm chicken broth, when Mom announced, “I want you to help me do some things: I need to go to the post office to mail my election ballot, and I need to fill the gas tank, and I want you to drive me past the rehab center where your dad will be.”  Saying NO to my sweet 83-year-old mother is not easy, but I needed a boundary.  “I’m sorry, Mom, I’m not up for an outing today.”  “Well then I guess I’ll go by myself,” her disappointment dripped, but, in the end, she did not feel well enough either, with now a deeper cough and a stronger sniffle and deeper fatigue.  But she’s taking her Paxlovid, and resting, and eating, and word puzzling, and needlepointing, and news and Jeopardy and N.C.I.S. and Incredible Dr. Pol watching.  On the father front, Sarah reports that Cora, a 22-year veteran CNA from Mexico City, resembles Zsa Zsa Gabor as she coos her daily “My daaaling” greetings to Dad.  With his blood glucose elevated, she gently chides, “Oh, you are just too sweet, my daaaling.”

Courage at Twilight: Round Two

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Last week I worried about sucking up leaves and maple seeds with the riding mower, and the orange cup overflowing with red ketchup packets from Burger King, and why we keep it, with a half-gallon ketchup bottle in the fridge, and the shrimp I skimped on because they were cheaper but Dad could not pull the shells off with his stalling fingers and gave up on his dinner. Last week I listened to Diana sing, “There is sunshine in my soul today!” as she bathed and dried and dressed Dad and brought him downstairs for his breakfast and got him settled in.  She is always singing, bless her.  But now I lie, for the second time, shivering under my blankets with the body pains of Covid while my father suffers worse Covid pains and debilitations in the hospital where my sister Sarah stays with him round the clock 24/7 to help him shave and pee and bathe and eat his unusually delicious hospital meals and change the TV channels and brush his teeth, and to not let him grow lonely, bless her, snatching sleep in one-hour increments on the hospital room couch.  On the Sunday the ambulance drove Dad away, I sent and received hundreds of texts and emails, whole hours of messaging, keeping loved ones and friends up to date and reassured, fending off premature requests to visit for fear they would overtax the exhausted patient and infect the visitor, and I would have sent more messages but for an aunt and a daughter keeping their respective siblings informed.  Now I wait, weary and aching, for the virus to leave me, so I can resume my duties.  And in the meantime, I am isolating from Mom and at the same time watching over her, wearing a KN-95, hovering with hourly inquiries about how she is feeling, fearing she, too, will succumb.  And in the meantime, my children have delivered a week’s worth of delicious prepared meals, to ease my mind about cooking, and tonight Mom and I enjoyed chicken burrito bowls with rice and beans, a salad on the side, and are looking forward to tomorrow’s chicken alfredo, or maybe deep dish pepperoni pizza, bless them.

Courage at Twilight: One More Ride

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New sounds of distress sent me running in my bathrobe to Dad’s room at 2:00 a.m., where he struggled in vain to sit up on the edge of his bed (hoping to pee). I pulled on his shoulders to sit him up, and held him there for twenty minutes (unable to pee).  Mom’s 5:00 a.m. knock on my bedroom, and her cry that Dad needed my help, sent me dashing again.  Dad lay face down on the floor, wedged between the bed frame and the night stand, his face in a gallon-size garbage can.  (I am learning, too slowly, to elder-proof a home.)  He could not move, only grunt.  With difficulty, I lifted his torso enough to free his face from the can.  “Just leave me here,” he begged.  I could do nothing but leave him there, except provide a pillow to protect his face from rough carpet pile.  And I covered him with a quilt.  I stood there watching him breathe, inside me a growing fury that he was so helpless and incontinent and that I was so helpless and impotent, that I could not move his bulk, could not help him relieve himself, could do nothing but watch him struggle and fade.  (At 84, his mother Dora fell out of bed and became wedged between the bed frame and the night stand.  And that is where she died.)  In a rage disoriented by little sleep and much fear and grief and stress and acridity and a traumatized waiting for disaster, I wondered angrily why he didn’t just get it over with and die.  Take him, I demanded—put us both out of our misery.  We can’t do this anymore.  I just could not manage one more night, or one more hour, of death struggle and incontinence.  In that moment, I saw the threshold, with two helpless men on one side, and professional paramedics on the other.  My mind cleared and I saw “911” as the only answer.  But I needed some time to think through the details, and Dad was sleeping comfortably, finally, albeit on the floor, and my leaving him there snoring for thirty minutes while I prepared my mind and my plan would do him no hard.  I buzzed my stubble hair and showered and shaved and ate some Quaker granola with icy milk and packed a bag with the advance directive and the power of attorney, my books, water bottles, cash, an apple, and Dad’s glasses and wallet and insurance card.  Only then was I ready to awaken Mom and explain that I needed to call the paramedics—she did not want to have to—and to awaken Dad and explain that I needed to call the paramedics—he did not want to have to—ready to dial “911.”  Strong young men, they carted him out on a flexible stretcher and drove him away to Alta View, and I followed, convinced this was his life’s end, his final ambulance ride.  I felt grateful he would not die in my arms, that someone else was in charge now.  Eight vials of blood and three hours later, Kirk, a superb nurse, entered ER Room #5 wearing a surgeon’s mask, and announced, “Guess what, Nelson?  You have Covid.”  Covid?  Covid!  How surreal to feel a surge of giddy relief that Dad had Covid.  What Dad and I dreaded was the intractable mystery of his utter undiagnosed debilitation and his slow trajectory toward an unexplained death.  That we could not handle.  But Covid we could get our brains around.  The doctors and nurses knew exactly what to do with Covid.  And the Covid diagnosis explained his symptoms of total exhaustion and chest pain and profound weakness and a slight fever and the beginnings of a cough and cognitive disorientation.  I wanted to cheer, “Eat! Drink! Be merry! For tomorrow he will live!”  The doctor stated with nonchalance: “Yeah, this Covid variant really hammers old people, but Nelson should make a full recovery.”  After a night of anguish and impotence, a new day of hope and of better tomorrows broke open.

(Pictured above: Dad in the hospital with my sister Sarah.)

Courage at Twilight: Just Let Me Rest

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Raspy, distressed breathing, not a loud thump, alerted me to something wrong, and I found Dad lying on the floor quivering with total futility to move.  I verified he was not injured, then rubbed his back and encouraged him to just rest for a few minutes until he regained some strength, code for, relax while I figure out what to do, and draped a blanket over his bare legs and bottom.  Rising from his bed, he had taken two steps with his walker and collapsed, utterly spent.  “I have no strength at all,” he croaked, frightened and suddenly hoarse.  “I wonder if this could be the end?”  After his first fall two years ago, I bought a padded sling to wrap around his big chest and help me lift him, which I did now, hoisting him to his hands and knees, and I held his weight as he crawled to the couch.  More heaving brought his arms onto the couch, and my knee leveraged a hip onto the cushion.  From there I fine-tuned his position with awkward pushings and pullings.  The operation took all my strength.  Nick, the strong young nursing assistant, arrived and bathed Dad with a sponge.  He managed to bring Dad downstairs—Dad insisted on it—but I almost wished he hadn’t, wondering how I would manage to get Dad back upstairs and in bed.  He grew weaker during the day, croaking and coughing.  I served a dinner of baked squash, steamed spinach, and organic apple-wood chicken sausage, sliced for him into single-bite portions, and I watched dismayed as he stabbed his fork eight times into the plate, missing the sausage.  He began sentences only to slip into confused nonsense, and I wondered, Could this be the end?  At bedtime, I did not succeed in transferring him from his recliner to the walker seat, and he sank again to the floor, helpless.  “Just let me rest here,” he whispered, wheezing.  My morning strength failed me, my muscles ached, and I knew absolutely I could not get him up.  Our neighbor Josh is a big man who knows how to hoist big disabled men, and he ran over at my phone call.  Together (mostly Josh), we got him into the walker seat, onto the stair lift, back into the walker seat, and into bed, a pad tucked under him.  Mom is beside herself with worry and fear, and wondered to me whether this were the beginning of the end.  We will see how he fares in the night, and what the morning brings.  In the meantime, I am on call: Mom has instructions to wake me with even the smallest need.  Calm during the day’s crises, my own silent distress compounded during the day’s uneventful hours, and has grown in the quiet and dark of my room.

Courage at Twilight: A Kind Doctor

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“Tell me what’s happening,” Dr. Hawkins asked me over the phone. I was not sure how to express the subtle changes my siblings and I had observed, but I breathed deeply and tried.  Well, first, there’s her memory.  She forgets what I told her just minutes or hours before.  And she’s forgetting the names of familiar people and places.  (Heck, I do that, too.)  Second, she becomes easily confused.  I explain simple things several times before she comprehends, and I interpret for her much of her mail.  Third, anxiety.  When something needs doing, it needs doing right now.  Small things distress her, until I reassure her everything will be fine.  And when go for a drive, she points to cows and clouds and airplanes and exclaims, “Look, a cow!…a cloud!…an airplane!”  “Well, I think you’ve expressed it pretty well,” the doctor confirmed.  “Bring her to my office, and we’ll talk.”  Raising with Mom the subject of a doctor visit to discuss memory and confusion hurt her feelings, though I had tried to gentle and assuring.  “I don’t remember forgetting anything,” she worried.  Hawkins was so kind, entering the examination room with “Hello Lucille!” and pulling her into an embrace.  He thanked her for having the courage and wisdom to have this hard conversation, but assured her she had done the right thing.  “If we catch dementia early, we have ways of slowing it down.  (And don’t worry about the name: dementia is just the medical term for memory loss.)  If you had waited until there was a real problem, there is little we could have done.  Dementia is caused by brain atrophy and is not reversable.  You were right to come in early.”  An MRI two years prior (which Mom remembered but the doctor and I had forgotten) had revealed mild brain atrophy, normal for her age, so the doctor moved right into Mom’s treatment plan, which included taking a new once-a-day pill and doing lots of word puzzles and needlepoints.  “Thank you so much for coming in to talk with me about this difficult subject,” he said.  “You’re doing great.”  Mom left the doctor’s office feeling good about herself and her future, and I left feeling grateful for a kind doctor.

Courage at Twilight: You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To

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A blogger commented about our souvlaki and fries: “Interesting perspective on family dynamics and meal choices.” I wonder what he would quip about our incongruous hodge-podge of jam on French toast, Korean dumplings, and buttered peas.  “What a wonderful looking meal!” Dad kindly commented, and blew his wet nose into his dish towel/napkin/food catcher/bib.  “There were no buggers,” he rationalized when I brought him a new box of tissues.  Previous to this week, all the little personal items he needed for his daily comfort had accumulated on a small end table and on the floor—everything must be within his reach.  Eight dollars bought me a handy sturdy thrift-store shelf that vastly increased the items he can have with reach—books, Bible, gum, flosser-picks, tissues, hearing aid batteries, nail clippers, yellow legal pad, pens, reading glasses, check book, wallet—and reduce clutter.  Conversation turned to the lawn and yard.  Victor came with his air compressor, turned off the irrigation system, and blew out the lines.  This week will be the last mowing, mostly to vacuum up maple and sweetgum leaves.  “I almost went out to suck up all the leaves, but Lucille wouldn’t let me,” he pouted.  “I would have just ridden in my wheel chair and transferred to the mower.”  I was incredulous, and I asked, carefully, if he remembered the nearly impossible effort of getting him on and off the mower last spring, how I had to hoist and heave and shove and pull, how I hurt my back.  He did not remember.  But he remembers the distant past.  Struggling behind his walker, he announced to our company, “I have a vision Roger as an infant standing in his crib and gumming on the top rail.  You must have been teething.”  Not again, I reddened.  At least it wasn’t the washing-the-cloth-diapers and ironing-the-diapers-dry story again.  Mom diverted attention by inviting me to inspect the drawer full of new towels—church sister Marla had taken her to Kohls—the old towels were stained and worn thin.  Last week, church sister Barbara took Mom to a music store, and brought home a 1940s song book.  She bought the book of 104 songs for fondness of song #104, Cole Porter’s “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home to,” and wanted to show me the moment I walked in the door from work.

It’s not that you’re fairer than a lot of girls just as pleasin’,
That I doff my hat as a worshipper at your shrine.
It’s not that you’re rarer than asparagus out of season.
No, my darling, this is the reason why you’ve got to be mine.
You’d be so nice to come home to.
You’d be so nice by the fire, while the breeze on high sang a lullaby.
You’d be all that I could desire.
Under stars, chilled by the winter, under an August moon, burning above,
You’d be so nice, you’d be paradise, to come home to and love.

 

Dad’s new organizational setup.

Courage at Twilight: French Fries for Dinner

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Mom worried the “meat” would upset Dad’s stomach, and I wondered, since when does meat upset Dad’s stomach? Not with last Sunday’s post roast or the hamburgers from Jeanette’s visit or….  The “meat” was four small chicken chunks on a kebob—Greek souvlaki—with a mountain of fries on the side, and a spot of salad and a dry pita.  I had arrived home late from the NOMÁS free immigration clinic, which, after two years of nightly cooking, I now use as an excuse to order out on Thursdays.  Look at these French fries, Rog!  Dad had been hoping for French fries, had been craving French Fries, all day, but Mom had not felt up to driving alone to McDonald’s or Arby’s or Arctic Circle.  These are such wonderful French fries, Rog!  Mom took a swallow from her glass of Juicy Juicy mango juice, and the swallow sounded wrong, and she sputtered and choked and her face turned red then purple and she coughed and coughed with her lap towel to her face.  As with so many of their hardships, I could only watch and worry.  But she recovered, and chuckled with an embarrassed squeaky rasp that things sometimes go down the wrong pipe.  As I well know, from my own frequent experience.  One of my siblings drinks only from a straw to avoid certain aspiration otherwise.  Is it genetic?  Dad choked through his own mis-swallow: I just love [cough] these French fries [cough], Rog! [cough cough].  I’m glad, Dad, because apparently you are having a mess of French fries for dinner, since you are worried about the chicken and pick at your salad and nibble at your pita.  I spent the whoooole day wanting French fries, Rog, and here you just walked through the door with the best French fries ever!  Thank you, Crown Burger, I think.  Cough cough cough.

Courage at Twilight: Partial Eclipse of the Sun

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That morning I worked like the careful assassin who leaves no trace at the bloody crime scene, with the walls and floors scrubbed and sanitized, the clothing rinsed and washed (and sometimes thrown away), the washing machine sterilized with hot bleachy soapy water, the trash deposited in a distant dumpster, a squirt of Febreze.  No one would ever know the bathroom was anything more than a bathroom and not a crime scene.  Back in his recliner, Dad lamented his nighttime desperation for his children and grandchildren—he had prayed all night for their protection and triumph over tragedy.  What can he do, he asked, but trust in the God he loves?  Desperation for the same children, my children, worries me at night, too, and during the day, too, and what can I do but toil and trust?  But last night I worried about the deer plucking my mum blossoms and nibling at the arborvitae, and I braced myself, shivering, for the stink of putrescent eggs sprayed liberally.  In the kitchen, the warm slimy aroma of raw onions rises in moist billows, roiling the contents of my stomach, which never sees raw onions.  Another trip to the trash.  I shiver again in the quick darkness and chill of the moon crossing before the sun, the fusion globe a mere crescent in my eclipse glasses—but even ten percent of the sun’s surface blinds without the dark plastic.  How fascinating that the rocky moon can be precisely the size and the arc to neatly eclipse the giant gaseous sun to reveal the coronal “ring of fire.”  Home from work, I found Dad in his chair with only his red velvet throw over his legs.  “Your dad had an unfortunate accident,” Mom announced, matter-of-fact, and I braced for a crime scene cleaning.  But the “accident” was merely that he had fallen asleep with his icy glass of Coke Zero in his hand, which had slowly tipped in his slumber until it spilled fully into his lap and soaked his pants and his undergarments and his sitting pillow and his chair and his No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books, now drying wrinkled in a row.  “He was so upset!” Mom grinned.  Yes, an unfortunate accident, but one we can handle, anytime.

 

Photo by Brian Baker, October 14, 2023

Courage at Twilight: English Ivy

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English Ivy clad the three-story brick wall hemming in the Edgewater playground, and Chicago’s breezy updrafts lifted every leaf in unison, looking like thousands of tiny green baffles rising and falling with each caprice of the wind. My fearless garrulous year-and-a-half-old grandson William worried his mamma by walking on the low walls and climbing the rain-slicked stairs, and he soaked his pants sliding into the pool gathered at the foot of the slide.  (Why do playground designers always make slides that gather pools of water at the bottom?)  Admiring the ivy, sticky with after-rain humidity, I called Mom and Dad to let them know I had traveled well and arrived safely and was enjoying William and his mamma and papa and their third-floor brownstone apartment and Lex the coy Maine Coon cat.  (I know he likes me, or at least tolerates me, because he deigns to touch my offered nose to his, sometimes.)  How nice to get away from the duties of home and caregiving for a week, and to visit a beloved daughter.  The week passed in a happy instant, with long urban walks and bagels at the kosher deli and the farmers market and the annual Andersonville yard sale day, but especially reading to William and playing with William and chasing William screaming and running down the creaky hardwood hall.  Sarah had looked after Mom and Dad in my absence, and when Dad had lamented over how hard it was to transport himself to the bathroom to brush his teeth after meals, she had told him about flosser-picks, and he asked Mom to ask me to get some from the store, but I had some already and could quickly deliver a bag when I returned to Utah.  Flosser-picks and Mentos gum keep his teeth clean until he can take the stair lift at night to his master bath water pick.  The flossers delivered, I drove away to meet some people I did not know at a local park, under a pavilion.  At a friend’s suggestion, I signed up for MeetUp notices from groups that interested me, like kayaking and hiking, painting and mountain biking, and another group caught my eye, and I swallowed hard and headed into the unknown to meet people I do not know, with whom I may or may not have anything in common, to play Apples to Apples and to laugh and be pleasant and to try to remember all their names—Sally and Julie and Johnny and Greg—the names of people who, like me, had joined a MeetUp group named Introverts Who Are Not Total Hermits.  Yeah, that fits.  And I actually enjoyed being there with them, these people I did not know.

A Chicago wall in winter with defoliated English Ivy.

Courage at Twilight: How Does Your Garden Grow?

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The man died fully four years ago, at just 28, and yet she keeps coming every day to his grave, where the flat headstone bears only a first name, but does contain a carved silhouette of him holding two named children by the hand.  Remember: there is no wrong way to grieve.  Mourn loud and long if you wish, or quick and quiet, mourn until the love and the loss and the anguish seep into your soul as you stagger on.  On Sundays, Dad and I sing the hymns with the televised congregation, holding our hymnals, and he is either ahead or behind the tempo, finishing the words too early or quite late, and often on the wrong verse.  But he is singing, and I with him, and he still reads the bass part well.  On Wednesdays, Mom has gone with the Church sisters on little outings, to Trader Joe’s grocery store, to Deseret Industries thrift store, to Pirate O’s import store, to Hobby Lobby craft store, for nothing in particular, but some little thing always catches her fancy and comes home with her, like secondhand colorful plastic cups, like O’Henry bars from Canada, like the round artist sponges she likes in the shower, like two small terra cotta pots to replace the ones I gifted to Solange with volunteer blue junipers to transplant to her yard, if she wants.  What could I do for the young woman grieving daily at her dead lover’s grave—what could I do that would not be frightening or unwelcome or weird?  And on Sundays while Mom sits with her friends at church, I pronounce the prayers upon the morsel of bread and the swallow of water, sacred emblems of sacrifice and hope, and stretch them out to my father, and he accepts them with quaking hands.  As customary in my Church, he received the priesthood and was ordained a priest at the age of 16, in 1951, a priest who is not a pastor or a reverend but a youth who pronounces the prayers upon the bread and the water and reaches them out to the covenanting congregants, promising to mourn with those who mourn, to comfort those who need comfort, and to always remember Him.  Dad always found his priesthood participation meaningful, as have I, being part of something holy and transforming.  His mentor, the Bishop (who in my Church is the unpaid pastor or reverend), passed him a scrap of a note that read, “that is exactly how the sacrament should be blessed,” which praise never did leave his heart, from years 16 to 88.  The simple note I wrote to the woman at the grave, tucked under her windshield unnoticed while she slept wrapped in a blanket on the dewy grass, read “a gift for you in your grief,” and in a bag Megan’s book about grieving for as long and however is right for you as you pull the anguish into you and hold it and sit with it and rock it until it becomes forever part of who you are.  Then I knew I had done enough and should leave her be.  Dad asks me often about my pumpkins, needing me to be his eyes, and I answer I don’t know because I have not checked them in weeks and do not seem to want to check them, preferring they grow or wither without me knowing, but I tell him one plant seems to be very happy and climbs each day a bit higher up the chain link fence, and today reached the top, and perhaps in some weeks some little pumpkins will have turned from green to orange and be plucked from dead vines to sit squatly on the porch for the neighbors and us to enjoy.

Courage at Twilight: Pulling Teeth

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A young woman has been sitting by a grave every morning at 8:00 as I commute past, and I cannot help wondering about her story, and her grief, and her devotion.  Fresh flowers appear weekly in the vase, this week white and passion purple.  The bright warm colors of the mums I planted have brought me happiness each morning and evening I leave from and return to my parents’ home, which they keep telling me is my home, too.  Color is happiness, I think.  Fushcia.  Yellow cream.  Tangerine.  Scarlet blending to barn red.  Dad effused as I maneuvered his wheelchair for him to see them.  Color is happiness.  And color is grief, and color is comfort.  The hardest aspect of having the basal cell cancer scraped from Dad’s left nasal fold was the effort of the trip with its great strainings into and out of the Faithful Suburban.  Every aspect of the next day’s visit to the dentist, or should I say the oral maxillofacial surgeon, who pulled and yanked and twisted at the infected tooth which finally came forth with it enormous roots half again the size of the tooth, proved arduous.  Mom asked for the tooth.  “I don’t want to see it,” I announced, but at home she wanted to show me anyway.  “Why would I possibly want to see that bloody tooth!” I retorted.  I quease at blood and everything else that belongs on the body’s inside.  Sarah, though, will find it fascinating: she has a strong stomach and an eager medical mind.  Poor Dad had to deal with a bleeding mouth and an anesthetized face and bloody gauze and salt water rinses and feeling beat up.  Waiting for the surgeon, Dad told me had been in lots of fights in high school, but his fights involved stepping in to stop other fights and to rescue the bullied, and his toughness intimidated the tough guys, even though one punch did break his nose, and the doctor rammed two rods up his nostrils and lifted the broken bones and set them back where they belonged.  Despite the tooth extraction trauma, the pain never came, which astonished me for the depth of the abscess and the size of the gape left behind.  Grandpa Wallace had lost all but his front teeth before Mom outgrew girlhood.  She remembers his slightly sunken cheeks, and she remembers standing by his side as the dentist pulled what teeth he had left—she had insisted on being there, a little girl defending her dad.  Dentures followed healing, and Wally was so happy with his full cheeks and full mouth of teeth, for now he could eat everything he loved but had been denied him for years, including apples, carrots, and corn on the cob.  And Mom was happy for his happiness.  The family, as it grew, had no money for dentists.  “Thank God for Harvey!” Mom sighed.  Uncle Harvey had married into the family and become a dentist, and forever after gave the children free dental care, including many fillings.  His jolly laughter resounds in my memory these decades after his death.  This morning the young woman lay in the wet grass wrapped in a blanket against the cold and slept on the grave, and I felt a blend of admiration for her great love and of sadness for her great loss.

Courage at Twilight: Pulling Puncturevine

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I lamented to mom that now she had eight sets of sheets and eight towels and eight pillowcases to launder, and I offered to help.  But she enthused, “That’s okay.  I love doing laundry!  I have always loved doing laundry!”  The bathroom in the Bawden house sported above the tub a small hinged door, behind which descended into the darkness of the basement a laundry shoot.  As a little boy I felt tempted to slide down the shoot, but I never did—a good thing, I am sure.  And I remember the old washing machine and wringer and tanks, long disused, and the drying lines still spotted with clothespins like wooden birds below the open joists of the seven-foot-tall basement, perpetually dark.  As a small girl and then a grown-up girl, Mom used these machines to wash the family laundry.  The washing machine churned noisily back and forth.  But there was no spin cycle.  Mom slopped the soapy wet clothes into a tank of clean water for a rinse, then passed them through the electric-motor wringer, pressing the clothes between two tight rolling pins made of wood.  The launderer needed to be very careful not to let the wringer grab her fingers or hair shirt sleeves: serious injury could result.  A second rinse in a second clean water tank, a second wringing, and the clothes were ready to be hung on the lines, either outside during spring through fall, or in the basement in winter.  “I’ll do it a little at a time,” Mom reassured me, not at all put out.  In fact, the thought that our company had been comfortable and dry with these bed clothes and towels gave her a sort of familial connecting comfort.  She finished on this National Day of Service, the 22nd anniversary of the shocking and traumatic destruction of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and so much incinerated life by a new kind of terrorism.  The service I chose lacked glamor, and I wondered guiltily if it were worthy of the trauma and sacrifice that produced this special day.  Millions of people in thousands of places doing all manner of service.  Me?  I chose to pick weeds.  Not just any weeds, mind you, but puncturevine weeds growing along the Jordan River Parkway trail, with their two-pronged “goat head” seeds that puncture all passing tires and ruin many a bike ride.  I joined Jordan River Commission staffers, and other volunteers, and after four hours, my heavy-duty black plastic bag was full and heavy, weighing perhaps sixty pounds.  It must have contained ten thousand goat head seeds, which I was happy to equate to ten thousand saved bicycle tires.  One monster had creeped to a diameter of six feet and bragged hundreds of noxious seeds.  At a convention for city officials this week, I spent my networking breaks tying quilts for Stitching Hearts, quilts which will be given to foster and homeless children, a warm, soft, comforting homemade possession all their own that they can take with them from home to home or camp to camp—for some kids, the quilt will be their only possession in this world.  Stitching and cutting and tying with these silver-haired ladies in their seventies and eighties, my loneliness ebbed a bit.  While not the love I have searched for—a kind, intimate, whispering partner love—I felt happy in this new relationship, joining good people in service, small service, like pulling puncturevine, filling out immigration forms, tying quilts, washing sheets—I felt happy in this other kind of companionship and love, that comes with the giving of oneself, no matter how small the service.  For me, smaller is better, because big always overwhelms.  I can do the little things.  Stitching and chatting and chuckling, I wondered if this is the type of love and companionship which will temper my sadness and loneliness, which will bring me a measure of happiness and joy, which will carry me through my future days.  It just might be.

(Pictured above: a three-foot radius puncturevine spotted with hundreds of goat head seeds and flowers, hanging from a Russian Olive tree.)

Courage at Twilight: Veils Black and White

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Eight family guests flew in Friday night for the next morning’s wedding, the beds set up and clothed with sheets and blankets and the towels stacked and the groceries bought. And the water heater broke, so the wedding day brought cold showers all around, and no one grumbled and everyone smiled and looked beautiful at the temple, radiant and soft as the light through the stained glass and the zinnias and roses on the grounds.  The officiator instructed the groom and bride after vows to cleave to each other and to labor together in love, and that the groom may now communicate his love with a kiss, and the bride quipped grinning that he was a good communicator.  Soft laughter rolling through the temple.  My predominant emotion at weddings is doom, for marriage has brought so much sadness and pain and grief to me and to so many I love, the termination of built hopes and the loss of future memories the absence of whispers and touch, and I struggle to want to celebrate.  I wished them luck and congratulations, wanting to believe theirs could work.  My children have chosen well, and I encourage them often to just keep talking and giving, come what may.  This white-veiled wedding has brought the family together in hope and love, at least, and that is a good thing.  I have noticed a young woman sitting graveside in the green expanse of Larkin cemetery, morning after morning.  Sometimes she is lying on the patch of new sod, a white bouquet in the vase, and I sense her black veil of mourning.  You know you have a gift for her, came the thought, and I slid Megan Devine’s book into a zip loc bag with a note: A gift for you in your grief… to leave by the bouquet for her to find, but she lay there again, sleeping wrapped in her blanket against Fall’s chill, so I secreted my gift under the windshield wiper of her blue Jetta and tiptoed away, glad for the anonymity that might ease the gift-giving and avoid the awkwardness of a stranger’s strange approach.  The man had died at 28, leaving behind two children and, presumably, this grieving young woman.  I wonder if I will see her again sitting graveside.  Not today, as I returned from the happy wedding, stuffed with Brick Oven pizza, returning to do what I do best, eradicating weeds and pruning dead wood, the blooming geraniums belying my aching arthritic hands.  Their infirmities did not allow Mom and Dad to attend the wedding festivities, but Mom called and pleaded and Scott came on this Labor Day Saturday and brought a new water heater when he could have not cared and made us wait until Tuesday, but he came, and the water heater was under warranty, saving us $2,200, so he said.  And $900 later everyone is happily but tiredly home, enjoying sprays of warm water, languid on the couch, munching Oreos, the couple married off, off on their adventure, having stepped into the mystery of marriage.