Object Lessons

When I moved into the nest so much of what I had dragged from SF looked better. There's no logic to that but it was true. Things that I'd barely looked at found primary places on walls and shelves. Everything seemed new. Then the Mommie moved to the Hood and brought so many things from our shared past. I wrote about a few of them, the Grandmom's chair specifically. There was furniture, photos, bric-a-brac from the Grandma's home and the Mommie's home. It felt like my entire life was represented. There are things that transport me back in memory. This Christmas has been overwhelming in terms of objects of memory. 
DeAnna decorated the nest. I might have done 5% of the decorating. She did the things I couldn't do physically, which is most of it. Last year I wrote About the Mommie's Christmas village. It is now sitting on the shelf about my desk.

I remember watching the Mommie arranging it on the buffet in her dining room. She took so much pride and pleasure in it. I wanted her to have it out in her room at the assisted living facility. DeAnna helped me with that as well. I knew the Mommie would worry about leaving the lights on all night so I talked it over with her but she said it was OK to leave it them on. That night after dinner some of the ladies came back to her room to see it. She told me on the phone when I called to say goodnight. A short time later they called to tell me that she had fallen. She was trying to turn off the lights and her feet got tangled in the cords. She looked like someone had beaten her. My entire being hurts when I think about it. I planned to put it where it is now so she could see it on the weekends but she was gone before the next Christmas. So I look up at it and am swarmed with memory and feeling.
I was always adamant about having a tree. Usually small. Even in New York where I had none of my ornaments and the really small and raggedy tree I got blocked the narrow space, I had a tree. Two years ago I couldn't find a tree that would fit into the really small space I have for one. I did find a live tree in a pot that was perfect. After Christmas I planted it in Gayle's back yard where it is reported to be very happy. It's a spendy way to have a tree but it feels better than dragging the tree corpse out the door. So...I have another tree in a pot this year.
Many of the ornaments were gifts. Many are from the Mommie's trees. I stare at it and remember.
There's a lot of chatter about the value of downsizing. I know it's a good thing. I feel like I've been doing it for the last five years. But these objects have sentience. I'm not interested in blank walls and empty shelves. I like color and texture and things that are held together with glue.
I was just reading about a Zen master's satori. Everything (including him) went transparent. We live in shimmering illusion. Beauty is a dream. I may not be a candidate for Satori. I'll be enjoying the shimmer to much. 

One Year

I don't like euphemisms. I say I'm fat because I am and I don't need to back away from that fact. It's a simple descriptive word. But talking about death has been a study in euphemisms. I find myself squirming away from the most simple word: dead.
Today marks a year from when the mommie ... died. When I've seen people who I haven't seen for awhile and they ask about her I say she's gone. It feels like the simplest way to say it. But gone? Where did she go? I've said she passed. Also seems like way not to say dead.
I was thinking about how we say birthday but not deathday. Birthday is about a beginning. Death is about an ending. We celebrate beginnings. Deathday feels morbid. I'm just not sure it should.
I heard Neil deGrasse Tyson being interviewed by Larry King talking about death. He talked about what happens with the body. So very science like. He wants to be buried instead of cremated because he likes the idea that his body will be consumed by the earth and become part of what keeps biological life growing. He has no evidence that anything happens to his -soul(?). Might not be the word he used.There may be no evidence. It's just never made sense to me that what ever it is that animates us (soul, spirit, personality) is just gone when we die. Nature doesn't waste anything so why would that energy be wasted? It's so vital and diverse.
In my life I've had many beliefs about what happens after death but now I have none. I told the mommie a story about her husband going to heaven early so he could build her a geodesic dome and plant a garden, which would have been his idea of heaven. I told her a story about her family coming to visit and welcoming her. And I hope she had that experience, even if it was only in the last flickers of brain waves. My only wish is that there be moment of revelation. A moment when it all makes sense. But even that is really a limit. What happens next might just be beyond our imagination.
The mommie is with me in so many objects, needlepoint pillows, cross stitch pictures, photos and (of course) frogs. Memories, good and bad. Songs. But she is ... gone.
Friends get tired of sadness. I've been trying not to talk about it too much. But today I am sad. I was sad a year ago but sadness changes shape. Last year it felt dense and heavy, like concrete. Over the year I've been knocked down by waves of sadness. Sometimes it's more like a breeze. Superficial and brief. Today it's like an ache. But it feels normal, in a way. Of course I'm sad. I don't feel like I need to work too hard to feel anything else.
It's grey and rainy. Perfect sadness weather. My plan is nothing special. I'm going to make soup and read and let the tears fall when they come. I'm going to feel through it. 

Horripilation

I love dictionaries. I said that to David Meltzer once and he asked - which one? It never occurred to me there was a difference. I longed for my own OED but now they don't print them anymore. It's all on line.
There were years when I mostly read in bed during whatever amount of time I had before sleep took me. If I came across a word I didn't know I'd get up, go to the living room and look it up. Sometimes. I couldn't always push the covers away.
I just finished a book by John McPhee. His writing makes everything interesting for me. A whole book about Oranges! In the new book he writes about writing in terms of his career, editing, reasons for a given topic. He started thinking about oranges because he stopped at a fresh squeezed orange juice machine regularly and noticed changes in the color. I love that. In a sentence describing his reaction to a certain fellow he used the word horripilation. These days I reach for my phone and am always a bit surprised when the word appears after a few letters. It's one reason I might like a Kindle. You just click on the word. You stay under the covers in any case. McPhee has been gifting me new words for years.
I just watched the new documentary about Joan Didion. She's gifted me new words, specifically meliorative. After looking up the word there is the effort to use it in your life. I remember walking around with that word in my head waiting for a reason to use it. After a while the word is there whether I use it or not.
When I was in college I spent a lot of time with two young women. They made fun of my 'big words'. I didn't really know what they meant. I wasn't doing anything on purpose. Even worse was the time in my MFA program when a young man asked me why I used so many SAT words. Somehow I thought people who were trying to be writers might share my love of new (to me) words. Another person in the program felt that words that were too obscure made things too hard for the reader. Imagine the expletives that came to mind. 
Chiaroscuro was the last word that caught me. I think it must have been in something by Ferrante. I made a sticky and hung it on my desk. It's not a word that I can imagine using but it does come to mind when I look at Kristina's photos. It stuck with me because it's just so beautiful. I'm not sure horripilation will stick with me. I don't have the experience.

#metoo

Years ago a friend read a draft of my book and noticed that I hadn't written any of my abuse story. There were a few reasons. One of which was it would have hurt the mommie. I wasn't just protecting her. I was protecting me from her reaction. She was not great with emotional complexity. And when I told a favorite aunt, she didn't believe me. It ruined our relationship.
There are so many repercussions from abuse. For me there was the bolt to my nervous system when the physical act occurred. And the mad scramble in my mind trying to understand what had happened and trying to deny it. It messed with my sense of my ability to understand experience. It gifted me a nagging inner drone of self doubt. And then there was wondering why the people around me didn't know. I know my behavior changed. My doubt was augmented by the sense that I wouldn't be believed. I never regretted not telling the mommie. I paid a price for not telling but I feel like I might have paid a different kind of price if I had.
For so many years I told people moments after I met them. My feeling was that it was obvious there was something wrong with me and if they knew they would understand. I didn't have the money to do therapy but I read books. So many books. Trying to understand myself. Trying to free myself.
We're in the 'me too' moment. I think it is powerful and important but I also am not sure that it will create change. There are so many moving parts to any abuse story. Stories in the news currently focus on the work place in which it's really always about power. In my story it was about a profound lack of understanding. There may have been elements of power but it was really someone who just thought he was being playful and loving. I'm not trying to minimize what he did, or rationalize. I do not forgive him. I am however very clear that he cared about me. The way he expressed that care was confusing and harmful and wrong.
I worked in restaurants and hung around rock and roll bands. The double entendres flew and I was better at them then many of the men. The line between an inappropriately sexualized environment and an Eros playground should be drawn with care. Even in those worlds we all sensed when things had crossed the line and we often blanched together.   
It's not like there was just one abuse story in my life. There are always a million stories in most women's lives. And there was another reason I didn't write about it. I'm fat. My book is a memoir about growing up fat in the particular time in history. It was a time full of pop psychology and quick fix solutions. There is an idea that abuse and weight gain are connected. And maybe they are sometimes. But it's not useful except in very individual and personal ways. In my case I was fat before the abuse. I was fat after the abuse.
I will say that I thought someone wanting to be with me romantically would be a function of something miraculous and that was about my weight. For years I thought that if someone did want me the weight would magically fall off my body. There is an intersection of abuse stories and internalized weight oppression. But, again, it's very individual and very personal and so often overly underlined.
In some ways being fat gave me a way to pass through the world of men with out fear. I wasn't sexually important so they didn't act out around me. They confessed and confided and trusted the way I made it all OK. I didn't always make it OK but looking back I sometimes wonder if I slipped into a need to make things easy for them. And that most certainly comes from the struggle to accept the abuse.
I often feel that life is about holding conflict in a way that doesn't minimize offence and doesn't allow erasure of the offender. We have to understand each other. However, it isn't my job to do the work for my offender. The abuse had a terrible impact on my sense of self and my relationships. It's my job to hold what happened to me. At 64 I feel like I have things in a good place but I'm not really sure if that's true or if I somehow believe it doesn't matter any more.
I've been annoyed by men wanting to add their abuse stories. They need their own #. The process needs to be specific before it can be universal. And I wish I'd see some kind of # from men trying to understand how they are complicate.
For me, #metoo is about breaking silence. Would I be breaking my silence if the mommie were still here? Probably not.
As I am writing this I feel I am being too cerebral. I don't actually feel cerebral but I save my rage and grief and confusion for the spaces in which I feel entirely safe. There aren't many of them.

My Heart

The first time I saw him he was sitting behind the desk in the poetry office of my small college. He was back-lit by a window that was not exactly stained glass but had some kind of filter or color. His head was turned and he was looking up. He had an aquiline nose and soft brown curls around his shoulders. It was like a pre-raphaelite portrait. My heart stopped. It's a moment I will never forget.
He taught a class at the college, which I took. It was interesting. There was never any energy between us. He didn't even seem to want to be my friend which was not something I experienced very often at that time. I wasn't exactly in love. I was ... I dunno. Compelled. I wanted to connect.

We walked out of a restaurant in SF and my friend pointed out that he was standing a few feet away. His hair was longer and white but otherwise he looked the same. Just. Beautiful. I said his name. I said, you don't recognize me do you? He didn't but he smiled.
Right before all of that I'd heard the story of a friend who had an aneurysm a few feet from where we stood. Her partner's eyes filled with tears as she told me. Waves of memory shook me on that corner.

I don't really claim anywhere as home.  I grew up in my grandparents house being told the mommie and I were lucky to live there. We were always going to move when the mommie could afford it. We had a small apartment for a few years and then moved to a house in Maryland when the mommie married K. When I graduated from high school I rambled around. Landed in Colorado for a long time. And then New York and SF. Everywhere felt temporary. But in SF I felt home. I felt congruous and right. I didn't leave because I wanted to and ... you know. Like the song says. I left my heart.
He didn't turn out to be the love of my life. San Francisco is not my home no matter how it feels. I can't even imagine how I could be there again.
So. I'm back in my nest. I do love my nest. Baring unforeseen circumstance I should be here for what's left of my life. It feels like my home. I've made it my home. To the extent that I am able to feel at home. It just doesn't come naturally.
But my heart ...
I've always given my heart too easily. To men who didn't really want it. To organizations and beliefs in which it never fit. To jobs that barely noticed when I left. I was always willing to lay it down.
I often refer back to that conversation between Moyers and Parker Palmer. You can watch it here. It feels relevant all these years later. In it he articulates a notion of the tragic gap.

"The tragic gap, and I call it tragic not because it's sad. It is. But more fundamentally because it's an inevitable part of the human condition.

Tragic in the sense that the Greeks talked about it. Tragic in the sense that Shakespeare talked about it. The tragic gap is the gap between what's really going on around us, the hard conditions in which our lives are currently immersed, and what we know to be possible from our own experience."

He talked about it especially in the context of middle age and depression.

"I was living by oughts that weren't mine to act out. I mean, there are a million oughts in the world. There's a million ways in which I ought to be serving the world. But the ways I'm gifted to serve and the opportunities that come to me to serve are not a million. They're more like one, two, three, four dozen over the course of a 70-year journey."

We drove back into the Gorge through a cloud of smoke from the fires that were still raging. It was unnerving. I never felt at risk but it's unnerving to be so close to so much damage. We had a few days of rain and things seem to have calmed down. But now there are worries about landslides.

Two moments now. Two that organize around a man who doesn't remember me. I don't even mind. It's just my heart. It's on a corner in North Beach.
I mean. I'm here in my nest. In the chair by the window with a book. The sun making me woozy. The nest smells like peaches and tomatoes. There are dahlias and marigolds on the counter. I'm fine.
But my heart...

"Because if you don't have a capacity to hold the tension in your heart between reality and possibility then you're just going to give up eventually."

Care

The bulk of this post is the one I mentioned having finished a few weeks ago. I don't really try to match my writing with current events but this one is a personal dump and had nothing to do with what felt like very important events of the day. Ironically this week because of the flooding in Houston there is more news that connects to my post. There was on photo in particular that felt like a gut punch. In it a group of older women in what looks like night gowns are sitting wast deep in flood water. There is reporting about their eventual rescue but that photo haunts me. They look so alone and vulnerable. It was always one of my biggest fears. The mommie and I being stranded in some kind of disaster. Me not being able to take care of her.  


I think a lot about care giving. Both in terms of individual care givers and care facilities. I've been saying that I feel like my grieving process for the mommie is relatively normal. It's cyclical. Rises and falls. Sometimes a tight circle that keeps me on the verge of tears for days. Sometimes wide. Days go by. But my feelings about so many things that happened during her last few years always feel like they're right under the surface.
The first "senior village" the mommie moved into seemed really nice. She was still in great shape. Active, alert. Her husband was at first but there was evidence that he had a few mini stokes and he was slowing down. They lived in a sort of town house. Small in comparison to how they had been living but a nice size. There was a dining room in a building a short walk from their place and a hair salon. Handy men. Grounds keepers. There was an assisted living section with limited medical care but nothing for dementia or Alzheimer's. It worked quite well for a few years but I knew she was worried about what would happen to him if she passed first. That combined with boredom and a love of change caused her to move to the next senior community.
Senior communities may have assisted living and memory care but many are just enclaves for older people who are still independent. The second place was extremely expensive to enter but promised levels of care that should have carried the resident all the way through any aging process. They were new and developing. Mom's cottage wasn't quite finished when they first moved in. She loved it. She was still active and alert. Her husband's decline continued and one night, after they'd returned home from a day of doctor visits and dining out, he fell down and never got back up.
She was there another two or three years and her decline began. She made the choice to leave but not happily. As we drove away she stared at her little home and I knew she was afraid and sad. I held her hand but I couldn't really comfort her. She had to let go of so much. Furniture. Memories. Friends.
The big problem with the second place was that even though they had the facilities to care for her they didn't have a system to track her decline. She was neither willing nor able to make choices about her care needs and they weren't watching. I was but I lived on the other side of the country.
I managed to get her to stop driving by having temper tantrums when she did. I interviewed home health care so I would have them at the ready and tried to set some systems in place but that last year was nerve wracking. And when I arrived for what I thought was a visit I saw that things were not good. By then she'd made the choice to leave but I still cringe when I think of that last year on her own.
I chose the first assisted living place in Hood River in too much of a rush but I feel like I might have chosen it even if I hadn't been in a rush because the apartments were bigger. It was horrible. The second was wonderful by comparison but fraught with the same problems of all the other places. Under-staffing. Not great food. In many ways all these placed say here's a facility, here's your options. But they don't handle the transitions from one level of decline to the next very well.
To be fair, it's hard. The mommie was independent and stubborn. Determined to do things her way and not really able to see what she could no longer do. As much as I wanted her to do the things I needed her to do I hated messing with her autonomy. And institutions are rightly not permitted to mess with someone's autonomy.
Most of the individual care givers were great but there were problems. We were very lucky to have Mandy as her main care giver other than me. But she was in a facility. And by the end Mandy and I did all the care. We had very little help from the facility.
You understand from the beginning that if the care needed is more than the facility can provide you will need to move. My mother was (essentially) evicted from the last two places she called home. She was very sick both times. That is one of the things I cannot let go off. The meanness of that fact. The first place was actually mean. The second was not. I feel they just panicked. But the fact is she had no where to go except for the nest. The nest is a perfect size for me. Not as much for both of us. Twice I had to turn my small sanctuary into a nursing home. Several times I looked for a larger place we could move into. But I couldn't care for her alone and the cost of home health care is off the chart.
Most of these places are well intended but they are all a bit of a scam. It's really hard to predict the ageing process. Sudden decline is unexpected and often confusing. I always felt like I was playing catch up with the mommie in terms of my understanding of where she was at. I was there enough to notice subtle changes but caregivers who aren't supposed to spend much time with any given person may miss things. Even physical changes sneak up on you. If Mandy hadn't been with the mommie five days a week and had such familiarity with her body things would have been missed.
In the example of the second place the mommie chose they offered so much but didn't really have the resources to fulfill those promises. Despite the huge amount of money she paid to get in and the huge amount she paid every month the more she needed the longer her bill got. Five dollars for the nurse to stop by and check a bandage. Twenty for the guy who did her shopping. On and on. If you're in good shape when you go in and die before you get too sick (in mind or body) then it's all good. But the more care you need the more you pay. Which is why I will always think of assisted living as a scam.
There was one extremely difficult event when the mommie was still in her house in NC. She had fallen in the bathroom and there was a huge mess. I called for help and two of the snottiest girls I've ever met came. They did the bare minimum and left me to try and get her settled, clean up the mess and we had just returned from shopping. The car door was open and there were bags strewn through the kitchen. I remember thinking that if I had walked past that situation as a stranger I would have tried to help. The lack of kindness was infuriating. I have a long list of moments of kindness in my experience of trying to take care of her but the moments when a "it's not my job" attitude prevailed were so shocking that they haunt me.


I don't know why this gets stirred up in me. I wrote most of this before I saw the picture of the women in the water so it wasn't that. Today is just a bad day.

Words. No words.

I had finished a post a few weeks ago and was about to post when Charlottesville happened. I never listen to the president. He's never said anything useful or interesting. I also know the news I watch will pull stuff and replay it if I ever miss anything of any import. But I listened to the repulsive news conference in which he talked about "both sides." Dumbstruck. Not surprised but dumbstruck. Twitter and Facebook exploded. I retweeted and shared but I couldn't form my own words.
There are times when I am wary of being part of the noise. Opinion is the new opiate of the masses. People talk about silence being consent. I'm not sure about that. I think there are always people doing great work quietly in the background. I'm not doing anything really. I'm just always wanting to find the most useful conversations.
And. Sometimes ya just got to vent. If you come to my nest I will vent. I will prattle and sputter and spit and tirade. But I can't always form a thought that feels useful. There's so much (understandable) rage. It knocks me back. Makes me feel hyper-vigilant and wary. A few weeks went by and the storm did not abet. It just got wilder. It's hard to say it got worse because it's such a sustained horror. A dull ache.
The eclipse seemed to lighted things up. People were upbeat. And then he said something stupid. I don't even remember what. This weekend is (and should be) about hurricane watch and he drops a few bombs into the fray. It's. Just. So. Wrong.
I don't know how you stay grounded with this much fury always being stirred up.
I'm reading a novel set in the Nigerian civil war and the birth of Biafra. The stories are about individuals but the politics are always hovering. The radio is always on waiting for news. But life keeps chugging along. People get married. Babies are born. Anniversaries and birthdays are celebrated. The school year starts. Someone quits a job. Someone finds a job.  Someone gets a new car. People lose loved ones. Funerals and graduations and life just chugs along. But always hovering are the politics of the time.
Every morning I hope for the turn around. Articles of impeachment have been filed and are ignored. In Houston today nobody has time to think about pardons and rights and outrage.
I keep trying to find usefulness.