Tag Archives: Essay

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.)

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: 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.

Courage at Twilight: Christmas in August

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“Freeze them all!” Dad commanded. “They don’t belong on my body.”  Indeed, all the moles and tags and bumps offended his dignity and threatened his pride.  Kirk the PA said he would be happy to freeze Dad’s little lesions to the extend he could tolerate the pain.  “Freeze them all!” Dad repeated, grimacing at each squirt of the liquid nitrogen.  Thirty minutes later I wheeled Dad out of the dermatologist’s office with his chest, neck, face, and head boasting more thirty red polka dots.  Back at the car, he realized all the freezing and pain had triggered a bladder response, so back into the building we went to look for a bathroom, a building with no automatic doors for the disabled.  The men’s room at least was ostensibly wheelchair friendly, but we soon entered into pathetic gymnastics with doors and wheelchair and multi-point k-turns and misplaced grab bars—this bathroom might be legal, but it definitely was not wheelchair friendly, in fact it was wheelchair nearly-impossible.  We barely managed, as a team.  Having visited the restroom, the drive home was much more comfortable, despite his painful polka dots.  Two incognito spots had hidden in the wrinkles above his mouth, one on each side of his face, symmetrical.  “A little poke,” lied the friendly Kirk, injecting lidocaine in each spot ahead of the biopsy.  Dad fretted immediately about the possibility of two surgeries on his face, above his lips, a horrifying prospect.  I could not help thinking briefly of the Joker, but banished the thought unuttered.  With dinner Dad had Coke Zero in one glass and apple juice in another, and drank neither.  I cannot get him to drink during the day, and I am tempted to remonstrate.  But then I remember that each trip to the bathroom is a life-or-death struggle, and, as he tells me frequently, his paralysis worsens every day.  No wonder he avoids hydrating.  On the front porch lay a package decorated in floral wrapping.  I had ordered the needlepoints in November last year for Mom’s Christmas gift, but they never came.  I entered into the longest email string of my life: can you check on my order? one item is out of stock, we can’t order the other item in, no that replacement choice is also out of stock, can you check my order? yes we have that one, they will be mailed soon, can you check my order? so sorry, we’ll get right on it, can you check my order? and they never came.  Exasperated, I mailed a letter to the owner about my terrible customer service experience, adding that they had my money, inviting them to make things right, and then I let the issue go, certain I would never see my order.  But today, August 28, against the odds, the package finally came: “Merry Christmas, Mom!” I finally got to say.

Courage at Twilight: Such Nice Neighbors

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Mom fussed over Dad as she and I left for Smith’s. “I will miss you,” she cooed, patting his hand.  “Will you be alright until we get back?”  At the grocery store, she pulled a sandwich from a bank of coolers, and whispered her excitement: “I’m getting this for your father.  He is going to love it!”  The sandwich looked unremarkable, but her whisper conveyed the pride and power of a simple choice and purchase, when so much has fled her influence.  She delivered the sandwich to Dad immediately upon our return, and looked chagrined at his request to add slices of sweet onion and slathers of mayonnaise and mustard, requests she perhaps thought challenged her whimsical magnanimity, rained on her pride, and poo-pooed her power.  But, in the end, they both happy munched on their lunch, with Special Agent Gibbs on the screen.  For the first time in a year, Dad successfully watched our neighborhood church services online.  Zoom has failed him consistently, with bad microphones making the speakers unintelligible with their underwater garble.  Frustrated week after week, he merely fell asleep, later receiving Mom’s report.  With polite urging from several congregants, including me, the three local congregations pooled their budgets and purchased the equipment to connect directly to the Church’s broadcasting system, with a dedicated camera and hard-wired mic.  “I loved seeing church today, Rog!  Weren’t the talks great!”    I stayed home with him so I could refresh the link when the screen froze from low bandwidth.  There are always things to improve.  But he sang from his hymn book, and appreciated the emblems of sacramental bread and water.  Walking down our street that evening, Mom relished the fresh air, and Dad admired the gold-tinged clouds, and a distant airplane flew by the moon, bright silver from the western sun, and Steve and Marla emerged from their house “to wave to the parade” of two wheelchairs, one pushed and the other motorized, and to say hello.  Nice neighbors.  But I cannot take my parents for walks often enough, and Mom aches to get out of the house.  I asked the Church’s women of the Relief Society if they could assign “sisters” to take turns picking up Mom every Wednesday for half-hour outings.  The “sisters” were delighted—“we just love your mom”—and texted the next day with September’s schedule.  Such nice neighbors.  I will report her adventures.

 

(Pictured above: a mere four hours’ effort to extirpate weeds and shape shrubs in the back yard.)

Courage at Twilight: Dry

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The ink has drained from my Lincoln rollerball, and I lack the means to refill. But the sun never stops its monotonous movement morning till night.  I asked Mom if that day were a good day for me to do laundry, and she exclaimed, “Yes! You can do laundry forever and ever!”  So I began.  The next day I came home from work to find them in Dad’s office, organizing his papers, a team effort, their combined age pushing 175 years, Dad instructing Mom from his coastered office chair: File this. Shred this. Throw this away. Shred this, and this.  File these. No, throw those away—away!  They both beamed their pride at their tidiness.  This week brought hard conversations about fading finances and funerals and planning for the end of life, and after.  They have always managed to afford their generosity, until now, when their spirit of giving exceeds their means to give.  To my great calming relief, they were open, accepting, and grateful for my “thinking logically about things.”  After all, they are one illness or fall away from assisted living and selling the house to pay.  They proposed, and I agreed, that the only practical solution is for them to die in their own home.  Dad has three abscessed teeth, poor guy, to be extracted soon, poor guy.  But he felt inspired as I cast to their sagging television the national steeplechase championships where the BYU runner fell on a hurdle and rolled and rolled and jumped up to rejoin the group and win the race, and he felt happy to see all the dozens of photos I took on my mountain camping trip with Hannah (17) and Brian (33) and Avery and Lila (3 years 11 months) and Owen (10 months) and their smiles and explorations and crawlings in the dirt and splashings in the river pool and paddlings in the kayak on the high mountain lake and their roastings and burnings of marshmallows over the hot cedar fire, and the ripe thimbleberries.  He still says, “I love life.”

Above: about to kayak on Moosehorn Lake, Mirror Lake Highway, Uinta mountains.

Below: peek-a-boo with baby; thimbleberry bushes with ripe sweet berries; the Provo River next campsite #18 at Cobblerest; view of the Uinta mountains from Bald Mountain pass, with two of the hundreds of lakes.

Courage at Twilight Correction: A Plymouth, Not a Buick

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Reposting, with the correct car!  A 1953 Plymouth!

Courage at Twilight: I Really Want To Go

Courage at Twilight: I Really Want To Go

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1953-plymouth-cranbrook

Old patterns seem to reassert themselves without my even noticing.  I had pulled and raked weeds for three hours in 95 degrees.  The gardens looked beautiful, and I definitely did not.  At 3 pm I took Mom to the grocery store to cross off our lists.  At 4 pm we put the groceries away in various pantries, cupboards, refrigerators, and freezers.  At 5 pm began the peeling and slicing of vegetables for roasting: yams, carrots, onions, potatoes, mushrooms (plus sliced Kielbasa).  At 7 pm dinner was served to grateful parents who cannot cook their own.  At 8 pm came the washing of dishes and cleaning of kitchen.  And I was so glad to be done with my work for the day.  But at 8 pm Mom asked if we could go for a walk now, and, in fairness to her, I had hinted earlier in the day a willingness to take them on an evening walk.  Now, I complained about having been on my feet the last five hours and about wanting my day’s labors to be done.  “I really want to go,” she persisted sweetly, and I felt my weak attempt to draw boundaries and wind down my Saturday giving way to a kindly old lady’s pining to get out of the house, to feel the evening air on her face, to see trees in their multitudinous shades of green, to wave to the waving neighbors, to revel in freedom and calm and beauty with her arms raised exultantly to the sky.  So, out the door we trundled.  Nick drove by in his vintage Mustang, waiving, and smiled at our “We love your car!” and said he’d be back with something she would really enjoy seeing.  Every night I sigh wearily, wanting my day’s labors to end, and there is always more work to be done.  I am remembering back to Saturday mornings pulling weeds for three hours in 95 degrees, to the days of two decades of raising my seven children, when I often fell asleep comforting a crying child who himself soon slept sprawled and drooling on my chest, when I would seethe over dirty greasy soapy dishes at midnight, when the next day’s unbearable stresses already came crushing.  “I love it!” Mom exclaimed after passing an enormous blue spruce twenty feet across and forty tall.  I confessed to enjoying our walk, too, and heard her relieving sigh.  Boundaries feel selfish to me.  Every boundary I draw limits another’s needs and my service to those needs.  Trying to draw lines leaves me feeling guilt for others’ disappointments.  But a life without boundaries, as I well know, will leave me empty and dry and weary and resentful and depressed—all used up.    I am getting a little better at saying, “That will have to wait until tomorrow,” Mom or Dad.  Our walk finished at 9 pm.  The doorbell rang at 9:10, just as I sat down to rest.  Nick had come back, this time with his 1949 Plymouth (blue).  “What do you think of her!” he asked.  His gray mustache grew from his lip down his cheeks to well below his jawline.  “It’s a Plymouth!” she impressed him, hanging on my arm as we walked slowly to the rumbling car at the curb in the dark.  She told him the story of how she and Dad as newlyweds had driven their 1953 Plymouth (green) for five days from Salt Lake City to New York City, in 1963, at a top speed of 40 miles per hour, on local and state roads before interstates.  The city had alternate side of the street parking rules, and Dad sleepily descended the apartment stairs at 5 every morning to move the car to the other side of the street to avoid tickets and towing.  After three days of that, they decided they didn’t need a car in Greenwich Village, put a “For Sale $50” sign in the window, and sold the big rounded old Plymouth to a clerk at the corner grocery, who waxed it up and proudly cruised the Big Apple in his new Plymouth.  I shook Nick’s hand.  I became so weary raising my family, my love for them notwithstanding, and I am weary again now, my love for Mom and Dad notwithstanding.  My work feels never done.  That is the human experience: the work to be done always outpaces the time and energy to do it, and we tire despite ennobling lives.  The thermometer reached 102 that day, the same day an email came from the company that hangs our Christmas lights on the house, asking for a deposit.  How strange to think about Christmas in 102 degrees in July, waiting for parts to repair the air conditioning, grateful for refrigerators and freezers and ice and little water cooler fans bedside.  We will forego the house lights this year.  Is there irony in my hanging three August calendars on my bedroom wall, one for Push-ups, one for Planks, and one for Prayer?  They can wait for August, I decided, and dropped into bed before 10.

(Picture of 1953 Plymouth from Dragers.com, used under the fair use doctrine.)

Courage at Twilight: Waiting for Miracles

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Dad talked with me for 63 minutes about bedding and food and shampoo and vehicles for the wedding guests coming in a month, and about Cecilia’s food poisoning and the country’s ammunition shortage and increasing road rage and the weeks of 100-degree days.  Climbing the stairs to change after work, I felt the temperature rise with every step.  My west-facing home office had turned sauna: 90 degrees and rising.  (In Phoenix, Jeanette’s house rose to 109 when their AC quit.)  Our air conditioner hummed but pushed only warm air through the vents.  Dad complained about not sleeping at night and instead lying awake sweating and sticky and stuck.  I escaped to the basement, perpetually cool, but he and Mom have no escape.  A “bang” in their room startled them in the dark of night three.  “Lucille, get up and see what that was!” Dad instructed; he would have done it himself in earlier years, when he could move.  Mom found that the ceiling fan I had turned on the move the air had flung the metal trim off a glass blade into a wall, thankfully not hitting a mirror or a window, or them, so the fan had to be turned off.  Another thing for me to fix.  The floor fan I borrowed from Terry only transformed the sultry night into a hot hurricane.  Across the region, Home Depot and Lowes and other stores had sold out their indoor air conditioners, except for the models $400 and up, exceeding my budget, but I found at Target two tiny seven-inch-cube coolers that blow air over cold water, and I set them up for us bedside.  The repair technician will save us in two days.  The lack of air conditioning is a first-world problem, I know, but high temperatures can be deadly to 88-year-olds in any country, and I felt oppressed by both the heat and the responsibility of Dad’s well-being as I scurried to provide some relief, a bit of which the little water boxes brought by gently blowing cooler air on him all night, helping him sleep.  He has asked me to bring him a scraper, a pallet knife, a sanding block, and the spackle—he had resolved to fill the old banister holes in the wall above the chair lift, and I resolved to let him do what he could do before jumping in to do it myself.  The chair, unhappy at being stopped mid-rise, chirped continually at him as he worked.  But he succeeded, and thanked me for giving him a job he could do.  Dripping with sweat in my own chair, nervous about tonight’s pain and tomorrow’s root canal, I whined to Liddy about our woes, and she listened and affirmed and told me she was, at that moment, lying on her bed an ocean and a continent away listening to the waves lap the surf, and I asked her how she has been, and she said about the same, waiting for miracles but counting blessings.

(Pictured above: dried spackle ready to be sanded and painted, which Dad wants to do himself.)

(Pictured below: the ceiling fan glass blade metal trim.)

Courage at Twilight: Apron Strings

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When I moved out in 1982 and drove 2,200 miles from New Jersey to Utah and to Brigham Young University, her first child to leave home, Mom walked the house for weeks feeling an aching emptiness, looked in my room to find me gone, missed my voice and my laugh and my presence at the dinner table and in the church pew and at Sunday afternoon games of raucous Pit. “Where Roger?” two-year-old Steven queried, lacking the experience with space and time and life to understand Mom’s answers about me being “at school.”  I was simply and suddenly gone, and she experienced a mourning like for the dead.  We had no internet, no mobile phones, no unlimited data plans, no email, no texting, no Facetime or Zoom or Messenger or WhatsApp for video calling, no Snapchat or Instagram or Marco Polo.  We had hand-written letters that took a week or two each to cross the country.  And we had exorbitantly expensive long-distance calls on chorded telephones.  That old apron string had been cut clean through.  And I did not give it any thought, had no awareness of her grief, did nothing to fill the hole.  And now at age 60 I am home again, and Mom sees me in the hall and finds me in my room, and hears me practice piano, and waves good-bye from the porch when I drive away, and like a relieved chick she raises her hands and her chin and her expectations for her dinner.  I am learning that apron strings come in myriad colors, patterns, hefts, lengths, and strengths.  And they are never fully cut, but merely injured and stretched and tearing.  Some mend.  Others strangle.  All scar.  On Friday night at 8, after another late dinner, Mom asked if I would please take them for a walk in their wheelchairs, and we loaded up and rode down the ramps and rolled up the street, jogging out into the road around the neighbor’s big blue spruce.  A sprinkler caught us, and Mom reveled in cool wetness with a squeal and her arms stretched to the sky.  I announced at 9, with bedtime at 10, that my day was done and that I needed to wrap things up and move toward bed.  Disappointment showed on her face, exhaustion dragged at mine, and she squeezed out, “Just know that I will miss you!”

 

(Pictured above: Yours Truly about to drive away from home.)

Courage at Twilight: “R” Mountain

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Sweat trickled down my arms and dripped from my fingertips, and my growing girth stretched my shirt against its buttons. I shall be thin(ner) again: I have signed onto the galactic S.U.G.A.R. treaty (I cannot remember what the acronym represents) and have foresworn all things donut-cake-cookie-candy.  Ice cream once a week is an important negotiated exception.  Breaking for breath, the trumpeted cackles of sandhill cranes float up from the Snake to where I stand on the rim of the world’s largest tuff cones, the Menan Buttes, ancient volcanos formed by magma boiling upward through groundwater.  A pair of red-tailed hawks screech overhead, circling each other on warm currents, the same screech TV commercials ascribe to the mighty magisterial bald eagle because it sounds cooler and more mighty and magisterial than the eagle’s pinched laughter.  On this high Idaho desert my four sons have struggled at university, jogged in fifteen below zero Fahrenheit wrapped and bundled, set climbing routes at the gym, served smokey sauced meat at Blisters BBQ, rafted class 4s on the Salmon, discovered the spirituality of a stone labyrinth laid out in the sagebrush, found dear wives and seen babies birthed, and graduated.  They make me proud, because I love them, come what will. And when I walk through the front door to shouts of “Welcome Home!!” Mom and Dad have me sit right down to tell them about it all.  They will not remember what I tell them.  Dad commented to Mom last week, “I’m having trouble remembering peoples’ names,” and she answered, “Whose name?”  “Nobody’s name!” he retorted: “I can’t re-mem-ber….”  They won’t remember what I told them, but they will remember my pride in my sons’ personalities and my happiness in my sons’ successes and how beautiful were the photos of the high Idaho desert and the Snake River and the alfalfa pivots and the views from “R” Mountain.

The core of the volcanic tuff cone.

Views of the Snake River to the North and South

Courage at Twilight: Is Today Tuesday?

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“Is today Tuesday?” Dad suddenly asked. “No,” I responded carefully, “today is Sunday.”  “Oh, right,” and he observed how the days melt together, for during all of these days he sits in his recliner reading bestseller books, except for the compulsory state and national news and political commentaries.  But I suspected this was more than the melting together of days.  He is forgetting, losing his bearings.  For my part, having made a study of grief and empathy in recent months, my word for the week is integration, by which I mean the perpetual process of welcoming into myself all of myselves: my fearful child and anxious adolescent, my flaws and brilliance, my wounded divorcé and bursting-with-proud father, all of my joyful wounded grieving giggling selves, the Me’s of every day and year and hour, with every cruelty and kindness meted out and swallowed—all of me, every bit, every moment—they are all here in a single whole Me, and I am working to love and to welcome even the unlovable and unbelonging pieces of my fractured whole.  Integration eddied and swam in my thoughts as I sat in the 100-degree sun ridding the grassy strip between street and sidewalk of tentacled clover choking the grass, for hours, my hands aching and my head pulsing with heat.  But I could not stop weeding.  Was I trying to impress Mom and Dad, or the neighbors?  Was my fealty working out a good son’s guilt?  Was I aching for praise, or craving perfection?  Dad cannot do it, so I will, and we will enjoy the results together.  On that hot afternoon, their bedroom registered 85 degrees Fahrenheit; my room climbed to 90.  So, I slept in the basement where the air always flows cool.  For reasons he cannot fathom, Dad stuck his gym on the armrest of his recliner, then stuck himself to his gum, which promptly stretched and gooed in his fingers.  Mom pulled out the trusty old (banned) bottle of Thoro and cotton-balled it onto his fingertips and forearm and the armrest and quickly dissolved the gum.  The room reeked of naphtha, and Dad complained of the chemical taste on his tongue even though Mom and I both washed and scrubbed the armrest with various detergents and covered it with towels.  “Thoro: The All-Purpose Spot Remover Since 1902!” the bottle title boasted, with the small-print subtitle, “Fatal If Swallowed.”  We really did try to be careful.  At least the gum is gone.

Courage at Twilight: To Show Myself I Could

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Dad whispered to Steven that he didn’t think I could fix it.  But I did not know that.  The last three heads on the long line of high-pressure heads gave no water but sat dry and unproductive.  What in the world is happening between the last spraying sprinkler and the first dead one? a mere eight feet apart.  I wondered day after day as the old junipers crackled with drought.  I had conceded to myself that I might not be able to diagnosis the cause, much less to repair it.  The fallen blue spruce is gone but left behind a complicated carpet of crisscrossing roots impossible to shovel-dig.  Dad’s ax, freshly sharpened with a finely-grooved file, cut a spade-wide trench I could shovel.  Dad had been ruminating over his long and productive life, and lamented to Mom and me that “I worked too hard for too long.  I wasn’t home enough with Lucille or you children.  She raised our family almost alone.”  And Mom and I reassured him we were all fine, better for it in fact, and reminded him of the great legal work he had done and the greater soul-saving labor that enriched thousands of lives over thirty years.  And here I was on my knees slashing and digging and swearing to discover, hopefully, and repair, improbably, the unseen sprinkler pipe problem while family visited indoors.  Four hours was too high a price to pay for the project: “We could call Victor to come fix it,” Dad had offered.  Not worth the return given lost time for other projects.  But I wanted to prove to myself (and to him?) that I was smart enough and persistent enough and strong enough to solve the mystery and repair the break.  Even with the pipe exposed, no visible problem revealed itself, but cutting into the black funny pipe and unscrewing the elbow from the white PVC, I found a dense round ball of fine roots entwined with pebbles, and could instantly discern how each pressurization of the line pressed the ball into the too-small funny-pipe, creating a very effective plug.  Terry contributed spare funny part connectors—a “T” and two elbows—and Dad some dust funny pipe scraps.  Repairing the pipe ended up being the simplest part of the entire project.  I cast the pipe repair photo onto Dad’s TV and explained the process, the problem, and the repair.  “You did it!” he praised, genuinely grateful and unsurprised, not knowing that I now knew of his earlier doubts.  I had proven to myself (and to him?) that I could do it, and for that outcome four hours was an excellent investment.  Resting with Dad in the living room that evening, he conveyed the increasing feeling of urgency he has been feeling to prove to himself and to God that he could change, that he could abandon old idiocies, could phase out his foolishness, could align himself more completely with truth and orient his mind and heart more exactly to his God.  The Son of that God had explained to his faithful that the Father that sent him is true.  And that is the truth Dad trusts, now and forever.

Courage at Twilight: Looking Him in the Eye

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“Mom, I need to explain something to you,” I ventured. When I tell you something—Dinner will be in ten minutes—and you respond Excuse me, dear? and I raise my voice—DIN-NER WILL BE IN TEN MIN-UTES!—and you answer, I’m sorry, dear, like you think I’m shouting at you, and I am shouting because I am trying to be heard this second time around, but I am not angry (maybe a little frustrated because you can’t hear me and don’t wear your hearing aids), I’m just trying to be heard.  “I know,” Mom sighs, “but I HATE them!” and around we go.  She came to me meekly and asked if I could possibly find time to take them for a wheelchair walk to the end of their street and back sometime that evening, and we commented on each neighbor and their house and trees and shrubs and the perfect blue sky and the day’s 100 degrees cooling a bit in the dusk and how happy we are Mark and Julie are back in their home after remodeling it for their disabled grandchild and how pleasant the fresh evening breeze feels.  Dad had called Steven earlier, and I listened vaguely from my kitchen coq au vin alchemy as they reminisced about scout camps old and new, old when he was 12 (and when I was 12) and Dad manned the waterfront and checked out the sailboats and swam the mile swim with us in Lake Seneca at Camp Liahona summer after summer—he always came and stayed the week—and now Steve is taking his sons to camp and manning the waterfront and wrestling and scrapping with boys on the dock and in the water and breaking his toe.  Dad laughed at the old memories and grimaced at the paining toe, and did not want the talk to end, and waiting a bit too long, and sent me upstairs for fresh clothing.  And he said to me that he didn’t think about dying, but rather about passing over into his next life, and when he gets there and sees his Savior he is not going to fall blubbering at His feet but will stand straight and look Him in the eye and say, “I love You, and I did my very best.”

Courage at Twilight: Making Some Sense of the World

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The law firm had changed names four times in the decade-and-a-half since Mom and Dad retained a friend of a friend to prepare their estate planning documents. But I tracked down the firm and the lawyer, and scheduled to meet.  I have felt unprepared to be the personal representative of Mom’s and Dad’s small estate, and had many questions, such as, Do they need to update their documents? How do I handle the cars? Is the deed correct? What is an estate tax credit? Do I need to understand QTIP? (No.)  What is the first call I make when the time comes? What is your hourly rate?  He told me not to worry, that I was well-prepared, even “light years” ahead of 95% of his clients.  I breathed deeply and reassured myself, Maybe I can do this after all.  Then I was off to NOMAS’ Thursday evening clinic to help with a U crime-victim visa for a humble hard-working woman whose paramour turned perpetrator, who refused to work or contribute to business and household expenses and who screamed and threatened and hammered, whose trump card in oppressing her with power and control was the threat of deportation if she called the police.  But the U visa helps people be in America legally and shelters victims of crime from the further victimization and trauma of deportation for their mere victimhood.  I knew how to find the court dockets and case numbers and protective orders that would corroborate her truthfulness and his abuse, and printed them for the file.  Driving away from the clinic, I saw some clients walking down the street, laden with foodstuffs from the community pantry, laboring to the bus stop with their sacs and their children, because they cannot afford cars or cannot afford to fix their cars, and thought of my neighbors with their several Porsches and BMWs, and still cannot make sense of the world.  I stopped at NY Pizza Patrol for a Brazilian Bahaiana pizza with calabresa sausage and kalamata olives and sliced eggs: I just could not face the kitchen for a 9:00 dinner.  The pizza was a rare treat, which Mom and Dad (and I) loved.  On Friday evenings in June, I have been trying to make sense of the world, searching for calm and beauty on the calm brown waters of the Jordan River.  Dozens of homeless encampments lined the banks of one urban section.  A beaver and birds greeted me downstream: black cormorants, Bullock’s orioles, Clark’s grebes, coots, Canada geese, Mallard ducks, avocets, black-necked stilts, Wilson’s phalaropes.  I missed seeing my territorial friend the belted kingfisher, and hoped he had not fallen prey to a Swainson’s hawk.  With my new and first-ever drybag clipped to the kayak, and my phone hanging safely in its clear pouch around my neck, I lounged in the shade under a willow bush, smelling sweet Russian olive blossoms and arousing yellow iris blooms, when the Messenger alert rang and rang and rang while I fumbled to answer, knowing who it likely was, and, yes, it was William calling me from his high chair where he sat munching on pineapple chunks, with his smiling adoring amazing mother beside, telling me about her day as I floated and rocked on the river, making some sense of the world.

Yours Truly on the Jordan River.

Courage at Twilight: It All Comes Down to Empathy

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Among the green blades of Japanese Iris I found a scattering of soft-gray Mountain Chickadee feathers, the chitting chiding black-striped bird who came and went from her birdhouse in spite of my irksome gardening presence.  Her house is empty now.  But the Wilson’s Warbler hops and pecks through the shrubs and flits up to the birdhouse Gabe painted last year.  I hated to trim the shrubs, but several had grown to engulf sprinkler heads, hogging water.  Mom looked askance when I came to dinner in shorts and flip-flops, and I answered her unasked question over cheesy tuna-noodle-green-pea casserole that I had resolved to audit the automatic sprinkler system, ten stations, perhaps a hundred heads, after dinner.  I adjusted the angles and flows and station times and arcs and entered the house completely soaked and dripping and wanting fresh-brewed cacao on the nearly-July night.  Dad rolled down the ramps the next night, still anxious he might tip off the side and crash for his unsteady hands on the controls, and followed me as I cut back the shrubs.  I stopped frequently to ask if I was shaping the bushes how he wanted.  “Just cut off the spikes” of new growth, he instructed, then “use your own best judgment.”  Several times I looked over at him, to receive his smiling thumbs up.  The trimmings filled a 50-gallon can.  Neighbors comment that I must like yard work as much as Dad, which may be true, but my main motivation is not the yard’s beauty so much as his happiness with the beauty of the yards and beds he can no longer garden.  I offered him the hedge trimmer, but he observed what we both already knew: “I can’t do it.”  In his momentary grief, I let myself be his hands and feet and strength, and together we did the job, and together we were proud.  My recent commuter reading has included books on parenting styles, marriage relationships, emotion coaching, community race culture, shame resilience, vulnerability, wholeheartedness, forgiveness, grief and grieving, outward mindset and outward inclusion, active bystandership, American history, mass incarceration and justice equity, the Bible, and I think I detect a common thread: empathy, the act of sitting with someone in their pain, without judgment—empathy, the boiled-down essence of human happiness and success.  “Empathy isn’t about fixing” anything, Brené declares.  Empathy is “the brave choice to be with someone in their darkness [and] not to race to turn on the light so we feel better.”  Empathy is “using our own experiences to understand others’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors from their perspectives without judgment” (quotes from Brené Brown).  I believe what Megan and Brené and others say, but to be honest, I need lots of practice.  I’m an old student on his first day at their school, and I am striving at my homework, wanting to pass the tests, hoping to earn my degree.

Courage at Twilight: Thank God for Megan

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Left unchecked, dandelions can proliferate and kill the grass with their broad, flat leaves anchored to thick stems.  But Dad has the best tool for purging the lawn of dandelions, and I pluck the weeds mostly for the pleasure of utilizing the tool: a forked steel poker on the end of a long wooden stick.  A thrust into the turf cuts the weed at the root, and a flick tosses the severed plants away to die and dry.  I don’t even have to bend over.  I almost feel sad when I cannot find anymore dandelions, and have to stow the forked tool in the garage.  As I wander the yards, I sometimes slide into the sadness of mistakes made and opportunities lost: taking a week to patch a child’s bike tire; grumbling at the boys wanting new wooden swords because last week’s have already broken; not knowing my child was hurting inside, or knowing but not knowing what to do or say; being stretched and stressed and overwhelmed and unpresent when she wrecked my car and wanted reassurance but I was empty and numb and could not come out of my darkness, and she silently walked away.  And I anxiously foresee losses yet to come, portended by deteriorating strength and health and means and memory.  And I slip into seeing life as a series of sadnesses strung together.  Of course, I could choose to see my life as a collection of connected joys—but while I live for these joyful moments, I tend to gravitate toward grief, to swirl in the emotional eddies of mourning.  Megan, however, is teaching me that grief is not an illness to be cured, not a problem to be solved, not a process to be rushed through, not an incident to put behind me, but a natural human pain, a pain that is an inseparable part of love and loss, a human pain to be tended with tenderness and carried with compassion.  Thank you for teaching me.  So, now, I want to sit with my grieving neighbor dying of cancer, and to sit with her grieving spouse; I want to sit with my children in their sicknesses and joblessnesses and injustices and lonelinesses; and I will sit with my mother and my father as they approach the end of this phase of their life-existence.  I will sit with myself in my own pain, tending to it gently and patiently.  And as I wandered the yard, Sarah hugged me and praised me for the beauty of the dandelion-free turf and bragged to Dad about how hard I had worked in the yard and how beautiful the landscaping looked, and insisted he come and see, right now.  And he motored around the yard in his wheelchair, looking at everything, studying the yellow and orange marigolds, the red geraniums, the reviving arborvitae with new poking green, the weedless beds, and thanked me with, “Everything looks really nice, Rog: just perfect.”

(Pictured above: Mom’s and Dad’s back yard with the backdrop of the Wasatch mountains.  Notice the wheelchair tracks in the lawn.)

Courage at Twilight: Oh, That Bird!

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“Lucille!” I thought perhaps I might have heard from under my cool-morning covers the calling of Mom’s name, but I could not deny even in my profound grogginess the second “Lucille!!” with clearly Nelson-like tones, and I jumped from my bed fully alert and threw on my bathrobe and bolted to Dad’s room.  Mom, alerted from downstairs, whence she heard his bellowing even without her hearing aids and even with her ever-present morning music plucking away—this time a harp concerto—raced upstairs, a slow sprint across the house and up on the stair lift in time to hear me call: “Is everything okay, Dad?”   Of course, everything is okay, he said, oblivious of our cause for alarm.  “When you go to Harmons,” he said cheerily, “if they have fresh cherries, open the bag and squeeze one to make sure they are ripe and not rotten or green, and get two bags, no, three, because John likes them, too, and tap on the watermelon like I showed you to make sure it’s ripe and not overripe or green—of course, you can’t tell the taste by tapping.”  Mom sat on her cedar chest crying quietly from fright and relief and frustration, and I could not help remonstrating that I have been sitting on the edge of my metaphorical bed for two years waiting to hear him shout “Lucille!!!” so I could run to his rescue, save him from some crisis, lift him off the floor, and he’s shouting “Lucille!!!!” to make sure we check the ripeness of the cherries at Harmon’s?  “Why, yes,” because company was coming, and everything had to be just right, including the tomato bisque, including two loaves of gluten-free bread, and sliced mild cheese, but no meat for the vegetarian melts, and guacamole and salsa and humus and two bags of corn chips, and gluten-free cakes, and just-right cherries and watermelon.  “I told you we were shopping at 10!” Mom burst out, “and it’s only 8!” and “why would you shout for me throughout the whole house to tell me to squeeze the cherries!” and she stumbled back to the slow lift down the stairs to her harp music and her soggy breakfast, and I could not be angry because of how comical the whole scene struck and because everything was okay, because he was not dead or on the floor but was okay.  “I’m sorry I shouted for Lucille to come,” Dad lamented as I yawned, for my body so ached in the night that I could not sleep and had taken naproxen sodium and half a fluoxetine hydrochloride at one in the morning and had a lovely sleep until I heard “Lucille!!!!!” because 13 miles on the Jordan River down rapids through eddies and mysterious invisible cross currents and from long portages around the dams and with the awkward ins and outs from my kayak on the muddy banks had pulled and twisted and tired me out, but that bird we saw, oh, that bird, that black-crowned night heron that watched me float within ten feet before it flew a hundred feet downstream and watched me again approach until I could see his crimson eye and the long white head feathers streaking loosely down his black back and the hint of yellow on his neck, stretch after hundred-foot stretch, mile after mile, until he flew back up stream back to his territorial stretch to stalk for ducklings and fish.  “You can go back to sleep if you want—it’s only 8 o’clock.”

Courage at Twilight: Solar Winds

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The sun spews huge masses of atomic particles in loops and flares and flashes a million miles above its seething four-million-degree (F) surface into a stellar corona. And the sun shoots immense volumes of cosmic rays and subatomic particles at nearly the speed of light, a solar wind that picks apart human DNA when given the change.  But the earth’s molten iron-and-nickel core sloshes spherically around inside, generating a massive magnetic field that deflects most of the solar wind.  What this all means, Dad explained to Cecilia, is that we can live, here, safely on earth.  “Without the magnetic field….”  His cosmology lesson came from volume “C” of the encyclopedia: corona; core; cosmology: this morning’s reading.  Cecilia reminded Dad about his shower, and his breakfast of a whole wheat English muffin and two slices of pre-cooked bacon and a tall glass of cold milk (and 19 pills).  The chair lift shook and boomed at the bottom of the stairs, and I worried he or Mom would tumble onto the tile.  Accessible Systems came the next morning to repair it, under warranty, so now I need not worry, as much.  “Do you think we might cut the grass today?” Dad asked me after work, and I felt sad that he felt he needed my permission, though certainly he needed my help.  6:00 p.m.  I reminded him about how frightening and difficult it was for him to mount the mower last time, but could not say “no.”  Don’t rob him of what little he has left, I thought.  But this time we managed impressive transfers to and from the mower, and he motored around the yard, sun hat askew, all the jogging neighbors waiving and smiling their astonishment.  Pull weeds and trim bushes.  7:00 p.m.  Cook dinner and serve.  8:00 p.m.  Clean up kitchen.  9:00.  Listen to thoughts and stories.  10:00 p.m.  I am just too tired to read or to pray or to clean my teeth (though I do the latter anyway).  No time for TV, for 6:00 a.m. comes early, and I am too old to go without sleep.  And I self-assess: Why am I so irritable?  Mom thinks of me wistfully as her little boy, her first baby pulling pots out of cupboards and crawling, cloth-diapered, across the floor, smiling and untroubled.  When, troubled, I say good-night: “I will miss you.”  When, troubled, I arrive at home: “I’m so glad you’re back.”  But I am almost 60, too prickly, less cuddly and cute.  It would be better for them if I visited here rather than lived here: the visits would be more joyful and less chore-full.  But they need me, and a visiting life cannot be the agenda.  As I said good-night, I wondered aloud to Dad: How is it that the moon is just the right shape and size and distance and orbit to just block out the sun and reveal its beautiful chaotic million-mile hot hot corona?  And he shrugged with like wonder.

Courage at Twilight: Valeu a Pena

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Three hundred ninety-two. An arbitrary number, I suppose, but a number representing at least three hundred ninety-two hours, hours I spent thinking about and writing and revising and revising these short creative non-fiction essays—is that what they are?—pieces of the story of a nearly-sixty-year-old divorced nearly-retired still-commuting lawyer living with his aged parents to help them keep living in their own home, living with their books and needlepoints and (mostly) healthy delicious food and television programs and recliners and all the familiarities of a long life together: 61 years and counting.  I was neither prepared nor worthy to be their caregiver.  What family member is, I wonder?  But I was available, and my lack simply does not matter: here we are, together.  Valeu a pena.  (Continental Portuguese: It was worth it.)  The New York Times delivery lady in the squeaky broken Durango has just tossed the newspaper onto the sidewalk.  Dad is sitting on his bedroom sofa reading volume “T” of the World Book Encyclopedia (1998) waiting for his CNA, his naked legs covered with a crocheted afghan throw.  Merilee no-showed last Sunday, so I had the privilege of a son learning the routine of getting a father safety to the shower, then drying and dressing him, while Mom went off to choir practice.  I will conduct the church choir today—“Precious Savior”—and am terribly anxious about being so visibly expressive and expressively visible, two-hundred congregants watching my waiving arms.  My pumpkin seeds have sprouted, and the deer seem to be leaving the landscaping alone, whether from the cannisters of dried blood, or the putrescent egg spray, or the dangling bars of Irish Spring.  I have placed little rings of stones around the volunteer juniper saplings to connote their belonging and because they look cute that way, cared for, embraced.  Dad has been wondering about the bottle of honey that claims to come from Uruguay, India, and Argentina, and suggests I next purchase a Utah brand.  Within minutes of the desert downpour last week the lawn care company mowed the lawn and left a rotting mess for me to clean up the next day: it was either rake for two hours or watch a thousand patches of turf suffocate under wet steaming clumps.  Three days later, Dad came motoring down the ramps, wanting himself to mow the lawn mid-week, and I helped him transfer from the wheelchair to the riding mower, surely a never-intended transfer, impossible of grace, but with shovings and heavings and unspoken curses and doubts I muscled him awkwardly onto the mower and watched him tool around the yard, utterly happy.  Transferring back to the wheelchair was even more ungainly and frightening: I doubt he will want to try again soon.  And last night the thick smell of skunk jolted me from sleep, a smell far beyond a smell, a noxious choking vapor that penetrates and lingers and reminds me of my former family-raising life in the country.

Courage at Twilight: Keeping Both Legs

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Zoe on Zoom taught me that an “access point” is a moment in space-time when I feel sufficiently safe to risk human connection, and I found myself musing after sundown that every moment of my lifetime of space-time is either an access point or the absence of an access point: I am either seeking or avoiding connection.  Dad felt safe enough to tell Cecilia his leg felt “off.”  Cecilia felt safe enough to tell Mom that Dad’s leg was alarmingly swollen and red, and Mom told Jeanette, and Jeanette told her siblings, and announced to Mom and Dad: “We are going to the doctor, now.”  And fear entered my heart, and I wondered, what does this mean? and I thought he might lose his leg to diabetes and infection and gangrene and amputation, altering his life and our lives horribly, this story’s end sprinting too-fast forward.  But the doctor diagnosed cellulitis, a skin infection, and sent Mom and me to Walgreen’s for antibiotics while Jeanette trundled Dad home.  A mere skin infection—nothing serious—a relief.  Sarah sobered us with facts: cellulitis can lead to sepsis and to septic shock and to death, and she was soooooo glad Jeanette acted quickly.  My sisters are heroines, aren’t they?  They regularly save the day.  Dad became downright chipper, perhaps from the relief of realizing he would keep his leg, and he tooled around the yard in his power chair with his electric hedge trimmers giving each of the many bushes a mullet cut: he could not reach the bush backs.  When Dad was six, he used that leg to climb the neighbor’s old cherry tree, high into its branches, and the neighbor groused, “Get down from that tree!” but the boy only climbed higher.  The neighbor threatened to squirt him with water from the garden hose, but the weak stream reached only part way up.  And the neighbor sighed and pulled a nickel from his pocket and offered it to the boy if would climb down from the branches of the old cherry tree.  That day in 1941, a six-year-old boy skipped home five cents richer.  On another day in another tree, Dora grumbled for the boy to come down at once, and he did, with a “Yes, Mother,” because he loved her.  Zoe told me over Zoom that our first and deepest question as human infants is this: Are my needs in life going to be met? and I found myself reflecting that I have asked this question long past my infancy, across my childhood and over my adolescence and into my marriage and my mid-life and will ask this question still in my old age.  And with the asking I also answer: Yes, I will give myself to you, to you, and to you, and to you….

Courage at Twilight: Someone Else to Push the Chair

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Jeanette has come, and I have left her with the work and fled to my upstairs office to read Brian Doyle’s humorous penetrating moving essays, and have escaped to the yards to trim low shrub runners and pluck crab grass and spray the arborvitae with putrescent eggs spiced with clove oil that mule deer despise, and I beg off from the evening walk to the end of the street and back, my feet aching from a bloody self-pedicure and the day’s hike, content that someone else has come to push the wheelchair. I want to heave at the odor of commercialized rot—I am desperate to deter the deer—and decide to follow a neighbor’s suggestion to cut in half bars of Irish Spring soap, drill a hole in each half, and drape a green perfumed necklace to each faltering arborvitae tree.  Nearly half of the trees’ greenery was eaten by deer, and nearly the other half froze and dried and sluffed away, but new green, darker than the soap, richer, is peaking out from what I thought were dead twig ends.  A new day, and Sarah has come, and she has rousted Dad from his reading lethargy to come watch the cousins play cards and to coax the cousins out the front door and down the homemade ramps, and Jeanette and Sarah have struck off to the end of the street, Amy aahing at divinely gorgeous flowers.  I had followed, too, and waived at Greg, the thirty-three-year veteran retired police officer whose garage walls are speckled with five thousand police agency shoulder patches from all over the U.S. and the world, though he used to have six thousand patches and has sold one-thousand on e-Bay to self-fund a missing dental plan.  I shoved off and caught up, and we ended the walk in the back yard on Memorial Day and encouraged Mom and Dad to tell stories of their long lives.  Dad’s first memory of his mother came when he shut his finger in the screen door and sprouted tears and a purple blood blister, and Dora cooed and chortled over him and kissed his finger and comforted and promised he would be okay, and Dad decided at that moment in his life that he would be okay.  Dad’s first memory of his father came from working outside in the yard, where Owen had a bucket of dirty transmission oil, and where Owen and Owen Jr., the latter only three, each dipped a paint brush in the black oil and slathered it darkly onto the thirsty sun-bleached wood-fence slats, an inexpensive waterproofing stain.  Dad’s first memory of Mom was of the church dance when he was 25 and she was 21 and they met and he asked her for her phone number and she willingly gave him her number, and over the coming months he gazed at her often and thought how kind and smart and beautiful she was, and how nice it would be to live a long life together.  They have moved inside for ice cream, and I have watered my pumpkin-seed mounds, waiting for sprouts to emerge, upon which I will shave flakes of green soap against the deer.

Yours Truly with sweet sisters Jeanette and Sarah.

Courage at Twilight: Hike to Donut Falls

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Snow covered the trail, in huge slush-packed mounds—unexpectedly.  Yet I should have expected all this snow, this high in the mountains, this early in the year, three days before June.  My pack carried water and food, and deet, though I could see mosquitoes were yet weeks away.  And I had my hiking poles, but not the Kahtoola-spikes and boots I really needed.  Pines and aspens lay across the obscured trail, and I lost myself for a while, sandal-numbed feet falling through warmer patches past my knees.  I learned quickly to stay in the still-frozen shade.  Simply put, I was not prepared, and fear chemicals began to ooze through my blood.  But I need to be prepared.  “Something’s changing,” Dad observed through the flaccidity of his smile.  “I can feel it.”  Still a fighter, yet resignation is percolating.  I can feel it, the squishy ooze of my fear, and I must prepare.  The lawyer is retained, and the CPA.  The policies and accounts and trusts and burial plans are in order and understood.  The stories are written and archived.  I still do not know whom to call first.  Yet in the warmth of late spring, Cecilia helps him transfer into his power wheelchair for a ten-minute sortie into the yard with the dandelion picker before returning to his recliner.  The sun and fresh air and bird song (and dead dandelions) do him unaccountable good.  My mending pile has sat staring at me for a year, the Tongan turtle tapa shirt still missing a button, my cycling shorts still torn.  But I finally pick it up and thread the needles and sew on the button and stitch up the rip and close the hole in the pocket my glasses kept slipping through.  Somehow today I am ready to repair them.  And with my turtle shirt on, perhaps I am more ready.

(Pictured above: Donut Falls, where the cascade disappears momentarily through a hole in the rock before again emerging.)

(Pictured below: the snow-covored Donut Falls trail; the view downstream toward Big Cottonwood Canyon; Yours Truly.)

Courage at Twilight: Fleeting Greeting

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The sub-sonic motor of the stair lift rumbled almost beneath hearing—Mom was slowly being carried down the stairs—and a loud double-beep signaled her arrival.  She clump-clumped around the corner into the kitchen.  “Hi Mom,” I greeted her.  “Good morning, my boy!” she smiled.  “I’m running off for a bike ride on the Jordan River Trail.  See you soon,” and I was out the door.  I always feel happy on the broad paved trail by the river, and today hundreds of other people also felt happy to be on the trail.  I always find humorous the greeting rituals of trail users.  A nodding up of the head, or down—never both.  A raise of an index finger, or four fingers, or eight, just over the handlebars.  A smile or a non-smiling pursing-of-lips smile.  Most cohorts, from older women to middle-aged men in full cycling gear to young couples with young children—they all offer some sort of fleeting greeting.  Many wait for me to initiate the ritual, responding eagerly when I do.  A small minority works hard to pretend I do not exist in order to avoid having to offer any greeting at all.  Some who do this may be afraid, others absorbed, others seeking solitary quiet and not wanting to engage.  One young woman stood straddling her bicycle at the crest of a high hill, looking out over the winding river and broad marshlands, glancing at me several times as I labored up the hill in low gear.  When I arrived, puffing, she smiled and cheered, “You made it!”  I did not flatter myself that she flirted with a man three times her age—she was simply a kind, cheerful, observant soul, encourage a fellow cyclist.  Careering down the hill, I screeched to a stop before a baby garter snake sunning itself on the trail.  He coiled like a cobra when I approached.  My snake holding days are over, even with harmless serpents, so with a twig I tenderly tossed the critter into high grass ten feet away.  Within seconds, had I not stopped, he would have been smashed several times over.  Above the marsh grass, a rust-backed kestrel hovered then dove for a flying insect.  Older men and women passed by me on their fat-tired e-bikes, making nary an effort, as did the youngsters on motorized scooters.  I tend to judge others by own standard: I was out there to push myself at speed down the trail, and to enjoy the wind in my face and the springtime nature flashing by, and I judged others for their lazily allowing the motors to do all the work.  I knew my judgment was misguided, of course: these good people all had their own motives for being on the trail: enjoyment; relaxation; nature; sociality; enjoying the wind in their faces.  And then there were those perfectly-physiqued specimens jogging completely under their own power, next to whom, with my wheels and gears and sprockets, I was the loafer.  I decided to admire them all for knowing what they wanted and doing it with a nod or a smile or a wave.  Seventy-eight city blocks and one hour later, my thigh muscles burning, I returned to my car, still unconnected despite hundreds of subtle salutations.  I felt disappointingly unaltered.  But the river-front ride had indeed changed me, especially through gratitude—for the pretty young woman who lauded me on—and through saving the life of a brave little snake.  Dad wanted to hear all about the birds and snakes and turtles, and even the people.  He loves that trail, and remembers nostalgically the days and years when he rode in his retirement, his long-career labors ended, instead enjoying the birds and snakes and turtles, the winding narrow river, the wood-planked foot bridges, the feel of speed as he pushed at his pedals, and even the people, to whom he nodded and smiled and waved.  “I’m off with Mom to the grocery store,” I called to him, and he asked me not to forget the pre-cooked bacon, and said to please bring home some red geraniums for the front corner garden.

On the Jordan River Trail, monuments to Utah’s eight native tribes.

 

Yours Truly at the block 39 turning point.

Courage at Twilight: Looking for Books and Blessings

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Dad has read all the various books his various children have given him in the last year, and he wished for more books to read.  I scoured my shelves and brought him an eclectic stack: political leadership; environmental activism; third-world memoir; history; biography.  I was not sure he would be interested in the selection, but he exclaimed, “I’m going to read them all!” as he started in on the first.  Reading: that is what he can do, and he does it well.  His enthusiasm faded as he labored in quaking pain to rise from his chair and stagger to the restroom, unable to straighten, hunched dangerously over his walker.  Mom and I helped him redress that day, for ne needed all his arm and leg strength merely not to collapse.  “Today was a hard day,” Dad lamented.  Mom looked uncharacteristically drawn and worried, and she suggested I call Brad and ask him to come help me with a religious enactment we call a Priesthood Blessing.  But I did not want to call Brad: the time was after 9:00; and, I did not want to have to summon the emotional energy to approach the Almighty God to seek a blessing from Him; and, I lacked confidence in my worthiness and strength to draw upon Divine power.  But after breathing deep for a few minutes, I called Brad, and he said “Yes!” and walked over.  Brad and I did as the Apostle James instructed two thousand years ago in answer to his own question, “Is any sick among you?” then “let him call for the elders of the church” to “pray over him,” “anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.”  And it was our privilege, Brad and I, ordained Elders in our Church, to anoint Dad’s head with a drop of consecrated olive oil, to place our hands lightly on his head, to invoke the name and priesthood authority of Jesus, and to prayer over this father and neighbor of ours.  Brad proclaimed the infinite love the Father and the Son each have for Dad, that they know him and are mindful of him and his sufferings.  Brad reminded Dad of the love and admiration all his family have for him, and praised his goodness and sacrifice.  Brad pronounced a blessing upon him, both of deep peace and of a body sufficiently strong to control and perform its functions.  And we all said “Amen.”  I marveled at how in my Church we presume to access the priesthood power of God to pronounce blessings of healing, or comfort, or counsel, or release, how we often feel God’s unfathomable love for the afflicted person, and how these blessing experiences bring comfort and peace, hope and love, to all involved.  Lying in bed, I yielded to the ritual of checking my social media accounts for updates, and realized I was not seeking information but rather affirmation.  Upon waking every morning, I check Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, Marco Polo, Gmail, and texts, hoping for a shot of external affirmation, and again at bedside at night, and again several times during the day, and I never find it, or I find some but want more, always more.  Lying in bed, I resolved to set aside the compulsion, knowing suddenly the truth that the only real affirmation comes from within oneself.  Lying in bed, resolving to be better and stronger, I thanked God for once in a while allowing me to be the weakest of His servants in blessing the lives of others, the lives of His children, in blessing Mom and Dad.  And I slipped into sleep.