Category: Life Changes

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More Roses

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There are two beds of roses in the court yard of the Hospice House in Lancaster.  The roses are an island of color and reliably circular form in the blazing heat and sunlight outside.  Inside the Hospice House it’s cool and lovely with tasteful art on the walls, a fountain in the hallway off the lobby and heavy wooden doors on the rooms.  “It’s like a resort spa in New Mexico,” David said, and when I emailed that to Marsie she said, “It’s too bad that we finally get to go to a resort when we are about to go to the biggest resort there is.  Live life now!”

True that, Marsie.  See the roses, appreciate the roses, smell the roses, even if it is too hot to be outside and get to the scent.

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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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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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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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What Happened to “After Grace?”

Over a year ago I started my original blog, intending to document my final year in my job. Having done a lot of reading about succession planning, I thought a blog providing insight into a succession planning process in progress would fill a gap.  So, I started writing. But I followed my instinct, confirmed by other coalition director friends, not to make the blog public.  There was too much current content about people’s reactions to my plans to leave the Coalition after 30 years.

My plan then was to keep writing “After Grace” (the name I gave the blog), and wait to make the posts public during this year, my year after leaving.  I’d write about what I was going through having made, or being in the midst of making, a huge transition, and then also post whatever I’d written the year before.

But by March I was hardly writing any posts for After Grace, and then I finally stopped.  There wasn’t just too much current content about other people, there was too much content about other people period.  That’s an issue I think any personal blogger has to pay attention to, the boundary between one’s own story and others’.  What are my stories to tell, and what stories do I have no right to make public?

So for now, After Grace will be a private record.  In the weeks to come, I’ll review the posts and see if there’s anything that would be appropriate and worthwhile to post.

In terms of my own story post-Coalition, I’m too busy right now to comment.

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The Spin Cycle

I wrote about the spin cycle in March, while reading Margaret Roach’s book and I shall have some peace there.  In Roach’s book, which chronicles her time after stepping out of a super-busy, mega-Manhattan career life, she talks about the spin cycle in washing machines.  Once that drum is spinning, it doesn’t matter if you turn the washing machine off.  It doesn’t matter if you unplug the machine, the momentum keeps that heavy drum spinning and spinning.

I’m 8 days into my post NHCADSV-ED life, and the drum is spinning.  It’s making me feel dizzy and sloshy and a bit unbalanced.  But I got a sweet reminder last night that I wasn’t always on this cycle.

David and I went to see Greg Brown — excellent show, including an opening set by Jason Wilbur, who deserves mention and recognition.  He was great on his own, and then playing with Greg Brown, double delight.  At the show, I saw an old friend, Tim, who I hadn’t seen for at least a decade.  Probably more like 15 years.

“I heard about Eric,” he said, and held his hands to his heart.  “How are you?  How’s your writing going?”  I told him I’d just left my job and my plan was to start writing more again.  “Did you choose to leave?  What happened?”  I realized he knew a more balanced me, the me who had being a writer as a central identity, the me who was raising children and who gardened and hung out with groups of friends and worked part-time.  He had no sense of me as the Executive Director of the Coalition, no idea of how big my job had gotten, how much of me it was taking up, how it had crowded out other identities.

“Every time I go into Gibson’s book store I look to see if there are any books by you,” he said.  I’m keeping that idea of me in mind today, watching it spinning by on the drum.

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June 15, 2011

It’s a sunny morning, the first one for a week.  We’re on the back deck drinking our cappuccino, the sun working its way up through the trees along the brook, leaf filtered rays of light shining on the grass.

I find the period after every word that I see used in writing overly bloggish (see it a lot in blogs) and lazy.  Why not find grammatically correct and accurate language to express what it is that needs to be described? But this morning I can’t resist.

One.  More.  Day.

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The Last Tuesday

“Good morning, sweetheart,” David said as he got up to make our cappuccino.  “Last Tuesday.”  He walked out of the room.  He’s been saying that since last week — our last Thursday, last Friday, last Monday, now our last Tuesday at our jobs.

Tomorrow is June 15, the countdown date, the day that’s been drawing near just about here, the last day of our jobs for both of us.  For David, it’s been a little over 10 years, for me, it will be exactly 30.  I started at the Coalition on June 16, 1981.

When I decided a little over a year ago to announce my departure from my job, I’d thought of leaving in March.  “Are you kidding?” Adrienne said.  “Three months short of 30 years?  Just do the 30 years.”

So I decided I’d leave in June, but couldn’t decide the date.  “Look in the records at the Coalition,” a friend suggested.  “Find out what date you started and make it 30 years exactly.”  So that’s what I did, except I looked in my journals to find my start date, not in Coalition records.  As I’ve said many times, maybe even here in this blog, I have a well documented life.  Two shelves of the book cases in my study are lined with journals and diaries, in chronological order mostly, dating back to 3rd grade.

It was easy to find the day I started at the Coalition.  Adrienne was six months old and I was heading back to work after being home as a new mother.  Now Adrienne is the new mother and I’m a grandmother.  After today, my life as the Executive Director of the NH Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence will be one day from being over.  Stay tuned.