The Deathwatch Diary (Four)

Posted on by
2

Atheist though I am, I still marvel at the awesomeness of synchronicities.

All afternoon today, as I cried and blogged and cursed, and my brother argued, and my mother lay still and panting in her hospital bed, the fat gull flew and strutted around the roof outside my mother’s window, screeching, The sound was like fingernails on a blackboard. There was no ignoring it.
So, I googled “seagull totem” and found this, which I share here:

Spiritual Messengers

Sea Gulls are messengers from the gods, especially ancient Celtic deities.

They bridge the gap between the living world and the spirit world.

Opening yourself to their energy enables you to communicate with the other side.

Sea Gull can also give you the ability to soar above your problems

and see things from above. Seeing all the different viewpoints.

Better than any fortune cookie.

And then, went I went outside to get another book from my car, I found the item in the photo below in my book bag, and I hung it on the rack on my mother’s bed that is supposed to hold IV bags.

It’s the talking stick that I and my five women friends jointly and ritually made from a root, stones, feathers, ribbon, yarn, thread, spangles, and even a golf tee. Crone magic of a very special kind.

My daughter chants to set my mother’s spirit free. And I embrace roots and wings for my own spiritual sustenance.

Such everyday magic, these synchronicities.

The Deathwatch Diary (Three)

Posted on by
3

Go here for Deathwatch Diary (One)
Go here for Deathwatch Diary (Two)

I should have known that it would be a bad omen to take the book, above, to read while sitting through the deathwatch.

Bad things did happen. My brother bullied his way into making me the obstructionist in reaching an agreement on the care my mother will get in her final hours. With pressure on me from more than a half-dozen hospital staff, he had her taken off the morphine drip. I finally gave in, provided that the nurses can put her back on if she demonstrates distress. The problem is that my brother interprets her distress as “feistiness.” I can only hope that she is so far gone that her brain is dead and will not relay pain messages to her nerves.

It remains to be seen whether the nurses will, indeed, put her back on if she looks like she needs it. Or will my brother bully them into folding to his interpretations.

Let this be a lesson to all who delegate health care proxies and power of attorneys. Choose carefully. Choose someone who doesn’t have his/her own agenda for how your long life ends — which should be neither bang nor whimper, but rather a peaceful slide into oblivion. Or wherever.

Yes, I’m pissed at the staff here, who let him do the wrong thing for the wrong reason. I’m pissed at myself that, with little sleep for 48 hours, I folded under pressure.

This is about me, and I’m not done yet.

The Deathwatch Diary (Two)

Posted on by
Reply

Go here to read Deathwatch Diary (One)

Every day, a fat seagull spends the afternoon sitting on the roof outside my mother’s hospital window. A nurse told me that, several years ago, a woman staying in the room next to my mother’s would leave some of her food outside her window for the birds. This last one is still hoping.

My brother thinks that my mother could beat the odds and become aware and pain-free enough to go home to live out the rest of her hours (or days). He wants a miracle.

This morning her blood pressure dropped and her pulse quickened. By her bedside, I sit and watch the read-outs for the meds that are keeping her comfortable and pain-free. It’s all about the numbers.

It’s all about numbers.

“You can never know for sure,” the doctor tells me this morning when I ask him how long she might have. The turbaned doctor is very kind, compassionate. Even his handshake is gentle. He is angelically patient as he answers the endless questions that my brother has in hopes of being able to have my mother wake up and see him one last time — see him so that he can say goodbye. When I am not angry at him I see that his constant arguing is a way to keep himself from feeling overwhelming grief.

I tell my brother about an “Allie McBeal” episode I remember in which an elderly dying woman on a sedative wakes up and asks to be put back on the sedative — because, while sedated, she is having an extended dream that she is living her young life, that she is young and alive instead of old and dying.

I ask my brother if it might be that my sedated mother is dreaming she is young again instead of old and dying. His answer is that maybe she’s not.

In reverie or not, I don’t want her disturbed. He wants a miracle.

It’s all about numbers: 94, 88/55, 1mm, one or two days. I watch the second hand move around the clock. I count her breaths — 18 a minute.

The Deathwatch Diary (One)

Posted on by
2

My mother’s room looks out over a roof with the HVAC and other protuberances. But over the left corner of it all, I can see the Hudson River and the Palisades. I can see it, but my 94 year-old mother can’t.

Day by day, she grows smaller in the hospital bed on the oncology floor with the patients who are at the point at which “Comfort Care” is their last best option. My mother doesn’t have cancer, but, with advanced dementia (can’t swallow) and renal failure, “Comfort Care” is her last option as well, and this is the best place for her in this hospital. (At least I think so; my brother doesn’t agree.)

I have blogged about my mother’s condition before, and you can read those posts by searching this blog for “dementia” and/or “caregiving.”

For the past ten years (which, not coincidentally, is when I began this blog) my brother and I have disagreed about the effects on my mother of her journey into dementia. What he insisted was her usual stubbornness and feistiness, I believed, from my own research, was that insidious deterioration that had begun in her brain and would end just where it is ending. I had read The 36-Hour Day, I logged onto online forums on the subject of symptoms and care. I subscribed to Care ADvantage magazine to get tips on what to look for and how to help her manage the changes I could see in her behavior and her perceptions of what was going on around her.

My brother and I brought our mother to the emergency room last Sunday, after she had refused to eat or drink for several days, was obviously dehydrated, and had begun to tune out the world. In retrospect, perhaps we should have let nature take its course, and she might have simply gone to sleep at some point and never woke up. But she seemed in severe distress — couldn’t find a comfortable position to lie or sit in, and finally, unsuccessfully, tried to sleep sitting up. She had stopped communicating and kept rubbing her legs. We couldn’t tell if she were suffering, and so we took her to the hospital,

She is sedated, now, as “comfortable” as possible during this time when her body is shutting down. Her awareness already has, except for brief and seldom moments when she is physically disturbed and then responds with wide-open, red-rimmed eyes and an unearthly howl that resonates with a primal fear.

I have slept in her hospital room every night since she was admitted last Monday, listening to her labored breaths and getting up to check her when her breathing stops for several seconds at a time. When my brother comes to stay with her during the day, I take some time and slip away to shower, change my clothes, eat something other than hospital cafeteria food, walk in the crisp fall sunshine. The time drags while I am sitting in that room with a partial view, and so I knit, read, play games on my iphone, check in with FaceBook and my son’s Twitter, check my email.

But this isn’t about me.

Or is it?

liberals understand learning:
Rally to Restore Sanity

Posted on by
2

“Where Have All the Liberals Gone?” asks this site and answers that they’ve renamed themselves “progressives” and are doomed.

I still call myself a “liberal,” and, if the televised Rally to Restore Sanity were any indication, there are a lot of concerned people like me out there (“CBS, which hired professional crowd-counters, put the number at 215,000“), despite the efforts of some to write the event off as mere “entertainment.” Every good teacher knows that education works best when it’s “entertaining” — as the MythBusters specifically demonstrated.

Liberals seem more likely to understand how real learning takes place, and even my 8 year old grandson got the message when he commented, as Ozzy and Yusef walked off the stage arm-in-arm: “Finally, they agree on something.”

I wonder how many of us liberals couldn’t make it to the rally but were watching on television. Lots of us, I’ll bet. Even though the event probably wound up teaching to the choir, it nevertheless, through technology, will stay out there in the internets for anyone curious enough and open enough to learn something new.

Meanwhile, we liberals will go out and vote tomorrow. We will teach our kids and grandkids by example and shared experience. Some, like my daughter, home school and share their successes with others. Some, like me, blog. Most of us just live our lives by the values we hold dear: tolerance, equality, free speech, peace, accountability, transparency AND most important, education: learning that takes place every day because we encourage curiosity, creativity, and active participation.

If it turns out that reactionaries win this election, we will still be out here, “teaching” our values in ways that are most effective and meaningful.

I hereby officially quit Catholicism

Posted on by
5

According to this site, it is possible to officially quit being a Catholic, despite the fact that Catholics believe there is an indelible mark put on your soul at baptism that identifies you forever as such so that the hereafter knows what to do with you when you get there. Apparently, you just need to make a formal and official statement, called the Actus Formalis Defectionis Ab Ecclesia Catholica, and you will be taken off the list of identified Catholics kept by — hmm. Whom, I wonder?

I just found out about that statement from here, which led me to the official wording of the document here.

I have to admit that it’s hard to totally shake the programming of 13 years of a Catholic education. For example, although I shed the confines of Catholic doctrine decades ago, I still won’t allow myself to put that wafer in my mouth, even though I have since been to many wedding and funeral masses (that’s the only time I go; and only for relatives). I was indoctrinated (through horrific stories of the wafer oozing blood into the recipient’s heathen mouth) with the fundamental feeling that it is a terrible sacrilege for a non-Catholic to receive communion. I don’t know if I sit out the communion line because I refuse to be a hypocrite or because it just doesn’t feel right to go against that old rote rule.

However, having come upon an official way to sever that denominational tie (if not erase that indelible soul mark), I feel that it is time to do just that. So here is my Actus Formalis Defectionis Ab Ecclesia Catholica:

DECLARATION OF DEFECTION FROM THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH

I ___Elaine of Kalilily__, do hereby give formal notice of my defection from the Roman Catholic Church. I want it to be known that I no longer wish to be regarded as a member of the Roman Catholic Church.

I further declare that I am aware of the consequences of this act regarding the reception of the sacraments of the Church, including the sacraments of the Eucharist, marriage and the sick and also with regard to burial.

I undertake to make this decision known to my next of kin and to ensure that they are aware of these circumstances in the case of my being incapacitated.

I acknowledge that I make this declaration under solemn oath, being of sound mind and body, and in the presence of a witness who can testify as to the validity of this document.

Signed:___Elaine of Kalilily______________________ Address:___www.kalilily.net______________________

Witness:____the readers of kalilily.net_____________
Address:____the world-wide web___________________________

Date:____October 23, 2010______________

Now, the instructions say that:

With the above Form, you should include a letter with the following PRINTED information:
Your name,
Your full address,
The name under which you were baptised if married since,
The date of your baptism,
The parish Church of your baptism,
Your date of birth,
The name of your parents, and
The name of your godparents.

Of course I’m not going to put all that information out in public here, but if the ecclesiastic official who needs that information emails me (link to above “About” for address), I will be glad to send him those specifics. (I can use the male pronoun without question here, since we know that, in Catholicism, only males can be ecclesiastic officials.)

While I probably should have been excommunicated a long time ago, given I never got married in a church and then got divorced anyway — and I have proclaimed heresy any number of times and ways — somehow making it official makes it feel like it’s finally official.

Hear Ye! Hear Ye! I am vocally and officially coming out as a big
atheist

Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning.
— Albert Einstein

What have been [Christianity’s] fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.
— James Madison

The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes; fools and hypocrites. To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.
— Thomas Jefferson

Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society.
— George Washington, letter to Edward Newenham, October 20, 1792; from George Seldes, ed., The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1983, p. 726]

(go here for some of the above quotes and more that show the intent of the founding fathers to ensure both freedom of religion and freedom from religion.)

ADDENDUM: Somehow it seems even more appropriate to post this today, Creation Day!

…the date that James Ussher, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, determined to be the very first day of creation in 4004 BCE. That makes the world 6013 years old today, in his chronology (if you’re adding it up at home, remember that there is no year 0).

Keep in mind that you now have excuses to party almost all week. Tomorrow, you should celebrate the creation of heaven and Space Water. You knew the earth was a floaty in a watery universe, right? I think the appropriate celebration is to drink.

Monday, you can celebrate Oceans and Plants day. Garden or go to the shore. And drink.

Tuesday is Moon Day. It’s also Sun Day. It took god a few days, but he finally got around to creating the celestial bodies. This should be a day sacred to werewolves and anathema to vampires. Celebrate by voting for Team Jacob. And drinking.

Wednesday is birds and fish day. This is a day of sorrow, because all the cephalopods will be weeping at their neglect — they don’t even get a mention in the book, except for a later declaration that they are generically unclean. Either that or the clueless idjits who wrote the book considered squid to be fish, which is highly offensive. Celebrate by contemplating cephalopods and raising many toasts to them.

Read more here.

compost

Posted on by
16

This is my response to the visual writing prompt at Magpie Tales. You can read the responses of other writers at Magpie 35.

Compost
It is the season’s leavings
that root me to this spaded place —
bent twigs, loosed leaves,
the year’s used ends and endings
storm-swept in sheltered corners.

Barren fields and desert reaches
free the weed to tumble in its time,
but the clutter of the season’s leavings
frees the roots from hidden seeds
of other spaces, other times.

the lesson of comic books: The 99

Posted on by
Reply

I got interested in reading and in mythology by reading comic books. Particularly Wonder Woman. And that was back in the 1940s, before the whole superhero thing really took off. My two kids grew up with comics. In the 1970s, my son had the expected monumental comic book collection, which I made him sell off when he went off to college. (Argh. Not very smart of me, since he had some first printing editions which became very valuable to collectors.)

Comic book heroes like Superman touted good ol’ American values: “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” Other cultures have similar values, however, and the time has come to create heroes that can demonstrate values that are common to all humane cultures.

And someone just did.

The 99 is the brainchild of Naif al-Mutawa, and he recently gave a talk at TED about the origin of the idea. The gist of it is that he was inspired by the positive values imparted by the heroes of Marvel and DC comics. He wanted to create a more multicultural team of heroes who would extend those positive messages to people outside of the U.S., and expose American audiences to a more culturally diverse team of heroes. So here is a New Yorker—inspired by an American art form, who sees no difference between his Muslim and his American values—being vilified by the conservative noise machine for wanting to export those values around the world.

President Obama made a special mention about THE 99 superheroes and its creator, Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa, in his speech given recently at the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship held in Washington. The President commended THE 99 for capturing the imaginations of young people through the message of tolerance. Entrepreneurs from all over the globe are attending the summit, including Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa, creator of THE 99 superheroes.

Go to the The 99 website to see an animated preview of the series and learn about the diverse group of 99 heroes whose combined adventures just might do more for multicultural tolerance and understanding among young people than any textbook on the subject.

You can also download a comic book that tells of their origins. How cool is that!

well, whaddya know: I’m rich

Posted on by
Reply

It turns out that I’m in the top 3.17% richest people in the world, according to The Global Rich List. You can plug in your income here and find out where you stand.

I’m loaded.
It’s official.
I’m the 190,434,783 richest person on earth!


How rich are you? >>

Of course, that’s the global perspective, and just to remind us of how poor people in other parts of the world are, the site posted this:

$8 could buy you 15 organic apples OR 25 fruit trees for farmers in Honduras to grow and sell fruit at their local market.

$30 could buy you an ER DVD Boxset OR a First Aid kit for a village in Haiti.

$73 could buy you a new mobile phone OR a new mobile health clinic to care for AIDS orphans in Uganda.

$2400 could buy you a second generation High Definition TV OR schooling for an entire generation of school children in an Angolan village

In terms of national statistics, my profile would come out much differently. According to here, three years ago

1.93% of all households had annual incomes exceeding $250,000.[6] 12.3% fell below the federal poverty threshold[7] and the bottom 20% earned less than $19,178.[8] The aggregate income distribution is highly concentrated towards the top, with the top 6.37% earning roughly one third of all income, and those with upper-middle incomes control a large, though declining, share of the total earned income.

I guess, nationally, I fall somewhere in the lower middle.

It’s all relative.

.