he can’t go home again

Posted on by
Reply

Myrln fidgets in the hospital bed in the emergency room, where they have him hooked up to various machines that beep and chime and whir.
“I just wanted a few more days. I needed a few more days. I needed time to think….” He looks at me with eyes angry and sad at the same time. He is back in the hospital after only two days at home from a week-long stay for tests and such. I have been with him for the past 36 hours, including this morning when we had to call a Rescue Ambulance because he couldn’t breathe, even with an oxygen tank.
We have been divorced now for twice as many years as we were married. But time had healed our wounds and we had developed a friendly relationship.
“I will be eternally grateful,” he wheezes, “for all you are doing for me now.”
My eyes fill with tears. “No problem,” I say.
“I have to tell you something,” he says. “Even through it all, there was always a little love left.”
“Yes,” I say. “Me too.”
And I’m crying and we are holding hands the way we once did long before I begged him to stop smoking.
Tonight he is temporarily hooked up to a respirator. b!X arrived from Oregon, and his sister and family from Massachusetts. He has not yet been awake for b!X and him to have a little time together. I hope he wakes, for both their sakes.
Meanwhile, I am back on the mountain with my mother, but I suspect will be be leaving again in a day or so.
They will take him off the respirator. He will either breathe or not. Either way, he won’t be going home again.
Myrln, who once blogged here on Mondays, is my former spouse, the father of my children. He has inoperable lung cancer, which has spread to just about every vital organ.

going….going…..

Posted on by
Reply

While my mom fades slowly away, we are dealing with another crisis in the family, and that’s why I haven’t been blogging. I haven’t been here; I’ve been in Albany with my daughter as she struggles her way through the health care systems to get support for her dad when he leaves the hospital.
My role was moral support, source of experiential information, and entertainer of my grandson, who had to come with her from Massachusetts. There was no one with whom to leave him for four full days while his own dad went to work and also monitored the construction process on their house addition.
Other patients came and went throughout those four days that we sat in and out of his hospital room. We watched them being taken to surgery, watched them come back and get going again.
But my offspring’s dad didn’t get up and didn’t go anywhere. His lungs are waging war against hope. We are waiting to hear where he will be going.
And now I’m back here with my mother, and my daughter is back in her home as well. I am worried about her own health, as her commitment and persistence kick in and she continues her long distance struggle to manage her dad’s care (with crucial help from a close friend of his who lives nearby).
I help from here as best I can — checking out a county program that provides financial assistance with home care for eligible elders, local home care agencies, walkers, tub chairs, recliner lift chairs…..
Whatever the outcome of his final tests today, he will need an awful lot of help. And our small family is scattered, each with his/her own responsibilities. But we are doing all we can from where we are, knowing there will come a time, too soon, when we will all be gathering for the final going.

just a clot of nirvana

Posted on by
Reply

I got linked to this from a newsletter I get, and I’m sharing it here because it is a description, by a brain scientist, of the kind of experience she had that others might attribute to sensing “god.”
Still others, back in the days of “dropping acid,” often described something similar.
And others, yet, tried to achieve it through Transcendental Meditation.
It’s not in the mind; it’s in the brain.
Listen in as brain scientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor tells of the spiritual experience she had during her own stroke. This euphoric experience transcends all formal religions and has been pointed to by quantum physics for years. Watch the video.
from here:

….she was conscious as she lost the left half of her brain. She remembers the day clearly, when she eventually curled up into a ball and expected to die. “I was shocked when I awoke later,” said Taylor,… [snip] “I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t understand language. I lost all recollection of my life and lost all perception of my physical presence — I was at one with the universe.

we tabled it

Posted on by
Reply

My mom and I eat in front of the television set in her little sitting room. She sits in her soft recliner in front of a tray table. I balance it all on my lap.
The kitchen table is littered with boxes of her favorite cookies, her can of fake coffee, glasses half-filled with water, a water jug (we have a really stinky well), her container of pills for the day, a sugar bowl, salt and pepper shakers, and other assorted objects, including a pair of my reading glasses.
For the more than a quarter of a century during which I lived alone before this, I rarely sat and ate at my table unless I was reading while I was eating. I don’t think we are very different from many people these days. For the most part, we’ve tabled the table.
Oh there are exceptions, even for me. I have a chance to sit with a family and have dinner when I’m visiting my daughter. We even have conversations — this is when we can get a word in among the energetic chatter of my 5 year old grandson.
And one of my greatest pleasures these days is getting together around a table with my women friends, which I can’t do very often because they live too far away. But when we meet, it’s always around a table where we spend hours eating and laughing, talking politics and movies, and men.
And so when the following poem from Jim Culleny appeared in my in-box, I couldn’t help but be moved by it.

Perhaps the World Ends Here
Joy Harjo
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.


Soon enough, I will have time again at the table.

in good company

Posted on by
Reply

Deborah Harry (that’s Debbie Harry of Blondie), now 62 years old, proudly sports a swath of gray hair.
And, according to Ronni at Time Goes By, a bunch of gray-haireds who are my kind of people are rocking Northampton Massachusetts:

YouTube has the movie trailer and a whole lot more music video clips. These will get you up and moving, and reminded that you’re never too old to rock ‘n’ roll.

Just watch them offer their rendition of Donna Summer’s “I Will Survive.”

is that the way it was done?

Posted on by
3

Is that the way it was done before nursing homes and hospices, before miracle drugs and transplants, when old folks died slowly at home, their sons and daughters and grandchildren and cousins all taking turns taking care? The frail old ones, dying only from the final stresses of age and gravity, moved slowly and silently, sleeping through most of those last months, last weeks, last days. Relatives came and went, stayed and shared, while the old ones slept and dreamed and waited, and that was the way it was finally done.
But there are only two of us here to keep watch, to take care. Each day she is more tired, asks to sleep more and more often. Awake, she sits sad and silent, eating slowly in front of the television that she can barely hear anyway. I sometimes still hold her and dance with her late at night, when she’s afraid and won’t sleep. Sometimes I sleep with her to make her feel safe. Sometimes, no matter what we do, she’s up and down all night, wants to eat, wants to go home. “Please, please,” she mutters, unable to tell me what exactly would please her.
Someone cracked my rear passenger side bumper, and I have to go and get an estimate so that I can get it fixed. But then what. My brother would have to get my mother in his car and come with me to drop off (and then pick up) my car from the body shop. It is hard to believe that we know no one around here who can help with that chore so that we wouldn’t have to put my mother through that. I don’t even think that there are taxis in this little town. At least I’ve never seen any. I think I’d better start checking that out.
This is not the way it’s supposed to be done — without friends, without extended family, without a support system. But this is the way my brother insists, and I am too tired to argue any more.
I’d better check the phone book for taxi services.
And I’m still purging and packing and planning. While I cook, and feed, and clean, and sit, and hold, and hope.
ADDENDUM:
Whaddya know. There IS a taxi service right in town! Family or friends would be better, but I’ll settle for a taxi when it comes to getting my car fixed.

star child

Posted on by
1

No other work of my childhood, and to a very large degree almost entirely at an unconscious level, likely did as much not just to steer me to an eventual appreciation of science fiction, but to an almost innate understanding of how deeply art in general, whether words or pictures or sounds, could implant itself into a person.


So nearly ends a beautifully written memoir by b!X about the death of Arthur C. Clarke and the influence that the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey had on his childhood aspirations and imagination. You should click here and read the whole Star Child post.
Like my son (and, actually, the whole of our family — my daughter’s wedding cake was topped with Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia), I, too, am a lover of the kind of science fiction that not only opens up possible new worlds, but also explores the kind of human spirit that will be necessary to make the best of those worlds.
My first exposure to sci fi was C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra, upon which I stumbled by accident in my Catholic high school’s library. As far as I was ever able to tell, it was the only sci-fi book on the library shelves.
I don’t remember the sequence of my growing love of sci-fi, but I do remember watching Clarke’s movie when it first came out — a night out with my then-husband and another sci-fi fan couple. Our daughter would have been about 5 at that time; I don’t remember her being with us.
But I do still remember the sounds, the visuals, the bone flung into the air that became a space ship, the appearance of the megalith, that last breath-stopping image of the Star Child.
starchild.jpg

going gray

Posted on by
2

Soon after every birthday, I take a photo of myself. My 68th birthday was last Tuesday, and here I am, way past the time when I would normally touch up my hair color. I’ve begun to go gray:
68.jpg
I took this photo with a new webcam that I just hooked up so that I can video conference with my grandson, who will soon get, from me, one of those indestructible XO laptops that are no longer available for private purchase. It comes equipped with a webcam. In order to buy one for him, I had to buy one for a child in a 3rd world country.
I went to visit my kindergartener grandson and family last Sunday, and I’m sure that, as a result, I have a few more gray hairs. By the time I left on Tuesday, both my daughter and grandson were seriously sick with sinus infections and the construction of a second floor had begun on their home. After I left, the workers had accidentally put two sizable holes in their first floor ceiling, letting the cold in and further endangering their health. You can read about the fiasco on my daughter’s blog.
I wish I could have stayed to help out. My son-in-law has his hands full. He even had to take time off from work because my daughter now has laryngitis and can’t talk at all. Just imagine how that works out with a chatty 5-year old.
Ah, if only there were such a thing as a Star Trek Transporter.