Category: Family

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David Baird Coursin, MD

David Baird Coursin, MD, loving husband of Elizabeth (Betty), father of David (Grace), Daniel Flynn (Kitty), Douglas, and Robb (deceased), father-in-law of Laura (deceased), Marti, and Laurie, and grandfather of Melia, Drew, Mackenzie, and Owen, passed away on July 22, with his family at his bedside. He was an extraordinary man, role model, and scholar.

Baird married the love of his life, Betty, while training as a pediatrician. They came to Lancaster to raise their family as Baird established the Pediatrics department and Research Institute at St. Joseph’s Hospital. His lifetime passions were family and the care and development of infants and children. He performed leading research of his generation on brain development, and published countless scholarly works. He traveled worldwide to advance child welfare and consult for the WHO, UN, NIH, and leading universities.

Baird loved being near the ocean whenever possible. The family cottage in Stone Harbor, NJ, provided a rejuvenating respite. He will be missed greatly and remembered always. His extraordinary life is summarized best in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest citizens and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give of one’s self; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived – this is to have succeeded.”

A private service was held in his memory.

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High Pressure

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Scattered rain showers moved through last night as we ate take-out Mexican food in Adrienne’s back yard on Long Island.  Those dark clouds must have been riding the edge of a high pressure system, because today was clear and dry, with hot sun and cool wind.

That high pressure wasn’t inside me, though.  I’ve been thinking I have nothing to say yet about what it’s like post-job, post-Coalition ED, post-high pressure busyness.  But I do.

We came to Long Island yesterday to take a baby break on our way back to New Hampshire — we needed some time on the early life side of the life=death equation.  This morning we went to Sagamore Hill, the estate of Theodore Roosevelt on Cold Spring Harbor on the north shore of Long Island.  We walked through a small forest with enormous oaks and tulip poplar trees out to a boardwalk over Eel Creek to the small beach along the harbor shore.  Back on the estate grounds, we walked through the fields up to the house.  By the front door was a grand old copper beech tree, planted by the Roosevelts in the late 1800’s, with a trunk like a leathery animal and a towering crown.

Once we got back to Adrienne’s house, we got to be on Emilio duty.  I gave him pear and zucchini pieces to gnaw on, fed him a bottle, let him play in his crib and on the floor, and did some dinner preparation.  The afternoon hummed along as if on a smooth track.  At one point late in the day, Emilio was on my hip, sleepy and a bit dazed, while David lifted his hand out towards him opening and closing his fist, to see if Emilio would mimic him.  Emilio lifted his arm slightly and opened his hand.

At that moment I realized I didn’t feel any pressure or any need to be anywhere else, doing any other thing.  I’d gone for a beautiful morning walk on a crystal summer day and spent the afternoon taking care of a baby.  “Ah yes,” I thought, “this is different.”

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One Drawer A Day

This is the second night in a row I haven’t been able to fall asleep, in spite of exhaustion that seems to be melting my body into a puddle. And my usual trick of taking extra vitamin K and eating cereal and/or corn chips didn’t work, so I’m up again, trying writing, though the extra meds are making me woozy and distractable and getting the corn chips into my mouth seems more important than getting the words on the screen.

A friend asked me recently what it feels like to write. I couldn’t really answer, other than to say that there’s a release as all that’s been built up in the writing channel gets let go. But I don’t feel it, it just is. I asked some writer friends, and they were as stumped as me by the question. None of us feels as if we write. We are instruments for expressions that are just there. Not that we don’t work hard at our writing. The will involved in shaping words into their most coherent, lively, exact and punchy shape takes attention and revision, but it’s still just there, waiting for us to find it.

And perhaps my insomnia is because I’m not writing about the enormity of what David and I are in the midst of. Again, it’s late, I’m up while David sleeps and no one else is here in this big house. David can’t remember ever being alone in this house before. There is a hoarded, piled mess to be sorted through where his mother has sat for the last several years, mostly lost in her wanderings through magazines and calatalogues and books and bags.

Today we found 19 boxes of tissues that had been lost among the stacks of magazines and newspapers and books. I haven’t counted the Vera Bradley bags but there must be a dozen at least, all stuffed with further bags and newspaper plastic sleeves folded and paperclipped then wrapped with papertowel and tucked in an inside pocket. In one bag I found a tissue box cut into different size squares and held together by a clip. I’m using a piece as a book marker.

There are 22 caes of Coke Classic in cans in the garage, 19 gallons of windshield washer fluid and two cases of tissue paper. There is a case of Cheezits on the porch and 10 jars of instant coffee. 69 cans of soup. And these are just the big, visible things. We opened one drawer last night and found such a wide and varied assortment of items we thought of starting a blog – One Drawer A Day.  Each day we’ll open another drawer and recount the contents.

So tomorrow, the contents of one drawer. And there must be 100 drawers in this house.

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What to Say

I am rarely speechless.  There is a constant language motor in my brain, translating all of my experiences into essay openings, blog posts, poems, any collection of words that conveys what’s churning in that channel.

But the last four days have left me mute, except to say, I’m mute.  Tonight David’s parents’ house is quiet.  His father is in the rehab unit of the hospital, recovering from his stroke.  His mother is at County Meadows, in the Connections Memory Support program. What bland words to describe a facility that can handle what we couldn’t — a despairing, delusional, depressed women with dementia, yet enough spirit and understanding left to know on some level what was happening  and to temper escalations that could have made the transition so much worse.   The last four days of everything we had to do to make this happen are still too fresh for me to sort out in any meaningful order of language.

But I can say this.  As an advocate for over 30 years saying no one ever has any right to hit someone else, when David’s mother whacked me on the leg with her cane (it didn’t hurt at all) as we were leaving her at Country Meadows I thought, “Good for her.”

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Details

It’s been a trying day, frosted with more bad news.  In spite of the difficulties, I noticed that the Japanese maple tree in the yard of David’s parents’ house is dripping with red seed pods, like a pink petticoat peeking out from under the maroon leaves.

Advice from David’s mother today.  “Oh, don’t get old, it’s really irritating.”

David’s mother is laughing and just brought me a photo of Rihanna from the current issue of People magazine — she has hot pink boots with lime green high heels on, matching her heavily-beaded two-piece bathing suit, and fishnet stockings.  “Just in case you were looking for something to wear this summer,” she said, still laughing.

 

 

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If I Could Move My Mind Backwards

“People are living too long,” my mother said to me when I called her this weekend, to tell her about David’s father’s stroke, and that we were heading to Lancaster to help.  My parents have lost many friends over the past decade, and watched many more slide into increasing incapacitation.

But is it that people are living too long, or are we keeping people alive too long, or is it just that life is essentially hard, and aging is a difficult process with inevitable loss at the end?

When we arrived in Lancaster yesterday, David’s mother looked up at us from her chair with red, tearful eyes.  She’s bewildered and scared, the knowledge of the fundamental change coming in her life lying like a hard weight at the bottom of the sea she swims in, bits of reality floating by that she’s able to hang on to.

“If I could move my mind backwards I’d be able to understand how I got here,” she said, revealing the magical thinking that some different turn somewhere could have made a difference, alongside the awareness that there is no going back, and we’re only here.   Now.

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Summer Flowers

It’s quiet on the back deck this morning.  I’m the first one up and enjoying the extra moments of ease and the brilliant fuchsia flowers in the big pot.  Potted summer flowers on my deck and porch are among my favorite parts of summers, and this pot is self-watering so I can leave it where it is, even when I’m away.

The real marker of what’s going on for me right now is that all the potted flowers for the front of the house and the two lobelia I keep on tables on the back deck have stayed tucked into a corner of the porch all weekend.  They make a lovely mass of pinks and purples and white, but ideally they’d be spread on tables and the steps and front entrance, welcoming people to the house.

When we got home from the shore a week and a half ago, I moved all the potted petunias and begonias and coleus and lobelia out into the sun.  I’d put them back in a corner of the porch when I went away, because otherwise they need to be watered every day.  Three days later, I was carrying them all back into the shaded corner, getting ready to go to Puerto Rico for a meeting of the National Sexual Violence Resource Center Advisory Council, one of the boards I’m staying on.

When I got home from Puerto Rico on Friday, I knew I’d be leaving again in a few days, and decided to skip the spreading of the flowers, knowing I’d just be gathering them all into the corner again, and I have enough to do as it is.  David and I are headed to Lancaster, to help pick up the pieces of the wreck from his family “falling off a cliff” as he describes it.  It’s no worse than what many friends of ours have managed with aging parents, but now that’s it’s here for us to manage, it feels like a lot.

So for now the flowers will continue to bloom, face out towards the west where the late sun angles in under the porch roof to reach them.  Not enough to dry out the pots, but enough to keep the blossoms bright.

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Man Plans, God Laughs

Among the laughable plans of man are airline schedules.  This is not the first post I’ve written on this blog while waiting for a late plane at the Philadelphia airport.  But this Yiddish proverb is reverberating much more deeply than the late plane level.

David got off our plane from San Juan here and ran to catch a train to the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, to get a train to Lancaster.  Wednesday night, after a delightful night swim in the lit pool at the hotel in San Juan, a tiny bit of playing for me in a week heavy with meetings, David got a call from a name he didn’t recognize.  “Who’s Donna?” he asked.   Who would be calling him at 9:30 at night?

“Donna is the name of the woman who helps your parents,” I answered, so he called her back, and got enough information to conclude his father was having a stroke.  He was right.  So now our plans to go to Lancaster the week after next, to help his father arrange additional care for David’s mother whose worsening health is becoming too difficult for him to manage on his own, have changed to taking each day as it comes.  Today, David getting to Lancaster and me going home was as far as we could plan.  David’s father is in the hospital and stable and there are enough family members and friends there to make sure his mother is okay, so I don’t need to be there right now.  Better for me to be home — there are house and garden chores and Adrienne and Matt and Emilio are coming.

On the plane from San Juan we started trying to figure out the next couple of weeks — thinking through the plans we have, when David’s brother will need to leave, when it would make sense for us both to be in Lancaster, for how long, what will we be doing, what’s going to happen. . . .  We gave up.  I’m going home and David is on a train.

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Sweet Day

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Yesterday I met a number of cousins (first cousins, once and twice removed) — the children (and their children) of my first cousins, who are the children of my aunt, Margaret Kirkwood Ferris, one of my mother’s sisters.  We were all at Aunt Peg’s memorial service, at the stunningly serene and spacious Peacham Congregational Church.  Set in the small, June-lush hill town of Peacham, with a grand steeple and enormous windows looking out on a quintessential Vermont landscape, the church is reportedly the most photographed in the state.

There was a small knot of family gathered in the front few of the many curving pews, to remember and celebrate and honor my aunt.  David and I drove up to Vermont with my parents.  Peg was my mother’s last living sibling; now there is only my mother of the five.  Sitting in the sanctuary, singing the hymns, listening to the memories of cooking and knitting and sewing and days on the beaches of Cape Cod, I could feel a deep peacefulness unfolding.  David and I are both still churning at the work speed we’ve been maintaining for decades, and the family situations and obligations we’ve faced since leaving our jobs close to two weeks ago, has not done anything to lighten the churn.  But all that was gone yesterday afternoon.  We were just there.

After the service, we gathered downstairs for refreshments.  I went to look over the old photographs my cousin Peg had laid out.  One of my grandparents, and my mother with all her siblings and their husbands and wives, was particularly sweet, everyone young and smiling, whole lives ahead of them, just a few of the next generation yet born.  My first cousin, once removed, Lucy, has been researching family history, and she knew as well as me who everyone was in the photograph.

As we left, David showed me how to ring the church bell, pulling on the thick jute rope hanging from a hole in the ceiling of the foyer.  I had to pull down with all my weight, let the rope float back up, then pull again with the fall of the rope and then the bell sounded, deep and clear, floating out across the first blue sky in days.  The young boys, first cousins, twice removed, made a game of holding the rope as it pulled back up with the weight of the bell, letting it lift them off the floor, swinging into the chiming. Bell song rang out across the summer afternoon.