You Just Never Know

I really didn't want to go visit my mother today.  With my new job as Bereavement Coordinator for Heartland Hospice, every moment of my weekends is precious time to catch up on my life.  And lately my visits to my mother have been even less fun than usual.  She's more withdrawn, less communicative, more easily provoked.  But I went, because it's the right thing to do.  That's it, that's why I went.  I didn't go resentfully, because I gave myself the choice to not go.  I chose to go.

I was surprised to find her in bed at 2:30 in the afternoon.  Apparently there's a new policy that if residents fall asleep in their chairs after lunch, they are transferred to bed so they can have a better nap.  She wasn't asleep so I just went to the side of the bed she was facing and squatted down.  She gave me a sweet smile when she saw me.  I said hello, it's so good to see you, and then right away I told her I've been thinking about how much she did for us, what a good mother she was, how well she took care of us and loved us.  She was pleased and nodded and said, "that's good."  I asked her if she was comfortable, and she said she was.  I stroked her forehead and her hair, and her shoulder and back.  She had a very soft blanket on so it felt good to me to rub it.  I checked with her, did she like this little back rub?  "Yes, but not too long."  Thirty seconds later, "Should I stop now?"  "Yes. You did it right."  "Did I do good?" I asked, laughing.  "Yes," she replied. 

She was so serene, and beautiful, her blue eyes and her silver hair and her smooth skin and red lips.  I held her hand.  She commented, "Holding your hand.  Delicious."  Then she asked me what I ate, and I told her vegetable soup.  "That's good."  It was like a dream unfolding, in which we were in sync, just in a place of love, with none of the exasperation of life, at the moment. 

When life is stripped down, like it is at the end, sometimes there's nothing but love left.  Like it was with my father.  And in this moment, in this grace-filled visit, with my mother.  You just never know.

George Kalter's Hat

My father's wife, Donna Kalter, is a youthful 76 year old woman who is a graphic artist and a fine artist, and was a wonderful companion to my father for the last 34 years of his life.  She called me this morning to tell me she is almost done scanning the pictures she has of my father and making prints for me.  She knows how to do all that, even make the fuzzy ones sharper--she has all kinds of graphic equipment, lucky me.

She also wanted to tell me she had been Googling "George Kalter" (something it never occurred to me to do) and found a blog post called George Kalter's Hat, with a picture of the pith helmet he used to wear.  Let us now sing praises to the beauty of the internet!  A little piece of my father memorialized in a blog post by a stranger who never knew him.  Thank you, Kelly Dauterman. 

In this altered state, through these last months with my father and since his death, everything is meaningful.  In that world, Kelly's last name is no coincidence.

In Memory of My Father

George Allan Kalter

February 23, 1924 - November 8, 2011

A Veteran

The Eternal Question

Sunday afternoon, sitting at the table in the activities room, looking through the 90th birthday cards again with my mother while the residents watch a video of Silk Stockings with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse.  On my left is a sweet woman with significant dementia, whose speech is soft and mumbly, and I usually can't understand much of what she says.  But this time she gets my attention and perfectly clearly (though still softly) says, "Do you think this outfit makes me look fat?"

17th Anniversary

My sister Lois died October 20, 1994.  She was 39.  Every year since she died I get really crabby around the end of September, and can’t figure out why, until it comes to me, “Oh yeah, it’s almost October.”  It wasn’t quite as bad this year, and Lois’s daughter Helen said the same was true for her.  We were speculating that it might have something to do with the fact that we interred Lois’s ashes when I was in Florida this summer with my daughter Sarah, who was born a year after Lois died, and carries her name.  (Sarah Lois, April 2011)

Helen is very special to me.  I promised Lois before she died that I would be there for her daughter, since she was only 11 at the time.  There are so many echoes of Lois in Helen that it’s “wow, what a gift” to have her in my life, especially now that she’s an adult and we can talk about everything.  And we do talk and talk and talk, because that’s the Kalter way, and she seems to have gotten that DNA in big doses.  She’s analytical like I am, like Lois was, and there isn’t anyone else in my family who thinks in quite that same way.  That’s just one of the things I love about her. 

Lois's husband is remarried to a gifted fabric artist who couldn't be a better partner for him.  They came down from Tallahassee and rented a room at the Bellaire Beach resort, where we hung out in the heat of the day, played cards and had ourselves a great time, like we always do.  In the evening we drifted in the warm Gulf water and lounged on the white sand beach, gazing at fabulous sunsets.  It was Paradise.  But the absence of Lois is always with us when we are together.  So it’s a mix – lots of hilarity with that crew, and then in certain moments, the poignancy of our loss. 

Helen and her dad had decided that it was finally time to inter Lois’s ashes in the niche in the mausoleum she had chosen before she died, in a beautiful rambling cemetery near a pond where otters frolic and great flocks of giant Wood Storks roost.  For the last 16 years, Helen had kept the urn with her wherever she lived.  She realized the time had come “for the cemetery to not be in my house,” as she put it.  The whole experience was full of tears, but full of grace too; the sweetness of remembering Lois together, feeling our closeness to each other, taking one more step toward being at peace with her being gone.

As I write that, a protest erupts:  I REFUSE to be “at peace” with her being gone.  She was too important.  She was my little sister, and we went through everything together.  I won’t “let go,” not yet.  I don’t know if I ever will, or should. 

But it was good to give her a “resting place.”  The bronze plaque wasn’t ready when we were there, so Helen took a picture when she went to visit on the 20th, and texted it to me.  It made me cry, seeing those dates, so absolute, so factual.  No changing it.  Seventeen years later, my reaction to seeing the plaque:  I still don’t want it to be true.

A friend shared a quote recently, by Leon Weiseltier:

Though we encounter it as suffering, grief is in fact an affirmation. The indifferent do not grieve, the uncommitted do not grieve, the loveless do not grieve. We mourn only the loss of what we have loved and what we have valued, and in this way mourning darkly refreshes our knowledge of the causes of our loves and the reasons for our values. Our sorrow restores us to the splendors of our connectedness to people and to principles. It is the yes of a broken heart. In our bereavement we discover how much was ruptured by death, and also how much was not ruptured.

Thank you for your life, Lois.  I still miss you, too much.

Reading the End First

One of the quirks of my incomparable friend Rexie was that she would go straight to the back of a book she was about to start and read the last pages, just to make sure she could bear to read the book.  We’d try to talk her out of it.  “You’re going to spoil it, Rexie!” we’d say.  But she’d had enough trauma in her life, and wanted to know everything came out ok before she got involved.  Just one of the ways she drove us crazy and why we loved her – she was so stubbornly Rexie.

With my father so close to the end of his life, I am thinking more than ever about beginnings and endings and the stories in between.  I’ve been sorting my mother’s collection of snapshots – pictures my sisters and I have sent her over the years, so she could see how her grandchildren were growing between visits; pictures from her early life, of her parents, her sisters, and a few from her college years.  At the same time, I am inheriting the few artifacts my father saved.  I have a whole table covered with stacks of pictures sorted into Martha, Jeanie, Ruthie, Lois, Mother, other relatives, and Daddy.  I have the beautiful 8x10s of my parents’ wedding, which no one but me is left to treasure.  There they are, with my Grandpa and Grandma – before I was conceived, younger than I ever knew them – in the story that was going on before my story began.

There’s a well-known Graham Greene quote, from The End of the Affair:  "A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead."  I’m looking back from the last chapter of my father’s life to the beginning of mine, and retelling our story to myself, with the end in mind.  Like Rexie, now that I know “it ends good,” I can bear to go back and look at my father closely, without feeling the sick fear I used to feel whenever I thought about him.

And I’m looking ahead from the beginning of my life into the story I was going to live through, and playing with “What if I could have known?”  If I could have somehow sneaked a peek at these last pages when I was living through the first chapters, it would have been unfathomable to me that it could turn out this way.  It was overwhelmingly depressing to be his child.  So much shame and fear.  But if I could have seen how beautifully we would be connected now, how much I could love him here at the end, I might have been less frightened of life in general, and more curious and excited to see how it all played out. 

Now I call him every day right after his lunch.  We have our little ritual.  I always tell him I love him, and he says, “I love you, Ruth.”  Some days he can’t talk much, so I tell him I know he loves me too, so he can just say “Yes.”  I thank the nurses who hold the phone for him for taking good care of him.  Today’s nurse said, “Oh sure, he’s a doll.”  And he is a very sweet man.  But I sure did not know that at the beginning.

Whoever is writing this story I’m in has been throwing me some interesting plot twists.  I’m in awe, and very grateful, and humbled.  How many people get to have this kind of an ending to a relationship that had that kind of a beginning?  It’s teaching me to keep opening my heart, to let the good stuff in.

The Black Hole Closes

My father is the only one left alive, besides me, who remembers what it was like at 824 Elizabeth Street. 

Maybe he remembers.  He’s very close to the end, and I’m not sure what he is still holding in his mind.  If he does remember, his memories must have a very different quality than mine.  He was on the opposite end of it all.  He was the black hole of my childhood.  His mental illness caused a lot of emotional suffering, and his inability to work added poverty to the list.  When he wasn’t in one of his paranoid rages, he was closed in on himself, sitting in a dark, brooding state, which we didn’t want to be anywhere near.  He was terrifying when he was raging, and scary when he was quiet.  I hated him. 

That kind of daily tension and intermittent terror leaves its mark. But everyone else who was there is either dead, or 90 years old with no memory of having once been married to that person.  And he’s not that person anymore.  So the other night I suddenly realized I am completely in charge of that story, and I can just release it.  If any of my sisters were still alive, it would still be important, because they would still be suffering some of the effects of all that craziness, and I’d still want to discuss it sometimes.  But I’m the only one left, and I’m letting it go.  Sure I have a little PTSD, and all kinds of unconscious patterns are still operating, but when the beauty of my father’s true nature is right there right now, and the love is so uninhibited, and we are saying goodbye for good, I just have no need to hold onto it.  I understand it enough.  That awful world we lived in is way in the past.

I am not one to be dismissive of the past.  Humans are designed for learning, so what happens to us matters.  We construct beliefs about what the world is like, who we are, and what to expect from life, out of our early (and later) experiences.  And we usually have to work pretty hard to change those entrenched beliefs even when the evidence is in.  But I think I’ve mined that vein of my history far enough.  Maybe more will reveal itself, but that will just be grace on top of grace.

Being with my father this last month has been so pure, so unguarded, so full of love...I have to use the word ecstatic.  A taste of what it might be like on the other side, when our egos have fallen away and all that’s left is our essence.  If it’s a healing, it’s gone pretty deep.  I’d guess that’s why I can suddenly just let it go.

90

My mother turned 90 on September 30, and we threw a festive little event in her honor in the Activities room at the nursing home.  Her sister had emailed every relative and friend we could think of and asked them to send her cards with pictures of themselves, so she had a big stack waiting for us to go through together. 

I wanted to do it right.  I wanted to please her.  I’ve come to realize these two things are the essence of her effect on me.  I had in mind to get her a mylar balloon, because they stay up forever and are a nice reminder for someone who has no memory.  I found the perfect design in the display at the local Party City, but they had just sold their last one the night before.  Are there any other Party City stores on the way to Berkeley? I ask the cashier.  Well, there’s one in Richmond.  OK, call them, do they have it?  Yes, they have six.  So I go off, way out of my way, it turns out, with a GPS which is outdated enough that it eventually gives up on trying to get me there.  I pull into a strip mall and get directions.  I finally find the store and ask for the balloon, and – the design has been changed!  It’s still “Happy Birthday Mom” but not colorful tulips anymore, just spindly little line drawings of flowers.  I’m trying to get this right and please her.  I settle for a plain old “Happy Birthday” balloon, and buy little letters I can stick on that spell “MOM” and “90^TH.”

I arrive with my balloon, a present wrapped in tulip paper with cards from my family, and a cake with “Happy 90^th Birthday Mother” with a frosting design that includes tulips, of course.  We have a lovely time.  We read all the cards.  Everyone eats cake, including the staff.  My mother smiles her biggest smile for the balloon.  “Cute,” she says.  She likes the shirt I chose for her!  I pleased her!

When it’s all over and I’m saying goodbye, I ask her, “Did you have a good birthday?”  At first she nods and smiles, but then she says, “No, I did not.”  I ask her what made it not a good birthday.  “You weren’t there.”  I laugh to myself, and come up with “It sounds like you really like it when I’m here.”  No response.  I don’t correct her; I just start describing the party, the present, the cards, the cake… ”Cake!” she says with a big smile. 

A Different Kind of Ending

My father beat the game.  Everything that could have killed him up to now didn’t.  He survived a brain aneurysm 10 years ago with minimal impairment.  At age 87 he is conscious and aware and can understand and communicate, although very slowly, and in short phrases. 

But he is dying nonetheless. 

He doesn’t even have a terminal disease.  His systems have just been slowly shutting down for the last year.  His biggest problem is he can’t swallow very well anymore so he is aspirating some of his food, which will almost certainly lead to pneumonia.  A feeding tube would not improve his quality of life.  He’s ready to go. 

All the significant losses I’ve experienced up to now have been from cancer.  A disease takes root in the body and brings an end to a life.  You “battle” cancer.  You lose.  It wins, and you die.  But you might have won.  Some people do.  My mother has survived two cancers and is now 90 years old.  So there’s always hope, until there isn’t.

Of course I know everyone dies – it’s happened to everyone else who has lived, up to now, evidently.  But I don’t think I really got it, until being with the old, old man my father has become, that you can’t beat the game.  Even if you beat all the levels, the way my parents have, death comes.  Our bodies do just wear out.  At the end, there’s no battle to be waged.

I thought he would always be there.  I couldn’t conceive of him dying.  Some of that is because of the strangeness of our relationship.  Mostly it’s because he’s my father.

I dreamed I was at his bedside, crying, “I don’t want you to go, I don’t want you to go!”  And knowing there was no stopping it.  In the dream, I was relieved to be pouring out the real stuff, with all the intensity of how I feel about losing him.  He didn’t say anything, but I felt him thinking, “I have to go…I don’t want to hurt you…this is hard for me…I have to go.” 

There’s nothing but love between us anymore.  I can tell him the truth, and he can handle it.  But I don’t want to make it harder for him.

I call him every morning and tell him I love him and I’m thinking of him all the time.  He always says, “I love you, Ruth.”   It gives me such joy to have these simple exchanges.  Some days he sounds stronger, and I’m happier all day because I got to hear him sounding more like himself again.  A little reprieve before I have to say goodbye for good.

I don’t want to lose him.  I barely got to have him.  But I am very grateful for the ending we are having.

The Mosh

In which I stray from my usual themes of sister loss and mother care into the realm of aging and role reversal

My daughter, who is 15, loves the nu-metal band System of a Down.  She started liking them when she was six and her older brother listened to them.  I liked them too, to everyone’s surprise.  The band broke up, sad to say, so when my daughter found out they were getting back together to do a one-time tour, she had to get tickets.  She’d need a ride to the Shoreline Ampitheatre, so she asked if I wanted to go with her.  We thought some of her other friends would get tickets, but that didn’t happen, so when the day came, off we went, the teenager and her mom to a heavy metal concert on a Sunday night in Mountain View. 

It was a beautiful spring evening.  We got there early and set up our blanket in a choice spot on the grassy hill while other people arrived with their blankets and their blunts, and set up around us.  Watching the droves pour into the amphitheatre, I realized I was quite possibly the oldest person attending the concert, with only a handful of others anywhere near my age category.  I knew I was an anomaly in that setting, but I don’t think I have yet adjusted to how differently younger people see me than I see myself.  I’m still strong and full of aliveness, I still feel young.  I don’t get it that they don’t think I am. 

I’d been warned that everyone would stand up and move forward when the band started to play.  That turned out to be less than full disclosure of what I was in for, but at this point, it was a chill scene.  Except for when the 20-something girl in front of us passed out and collapsed, with her eyes open.  My daughter thought she was dead.  I’ve seen a few dead people so I knew she wasn’t, but it was a little freaky for a moment. 

My daughter ran into some friends when the opening band started playing, and let me know that I didn’t need to be right next to them.  I understood; I complied.  It seemed ok at the time.  Then System came on stage, and the crowd jammed up even more, and it was getting dark, and I realized it could be harder for us to find each other afterwards than I had thought, even with texting.   I started moving as best I could through the crowd in the direction she had gone, and suddenly found myself sucked into the mosh. 

Well, not actually into the mosh.  I was at the edge of the mosh and couldn’t get away, so I kept getting slammed into as the wild bodies came flying off the spinning circle with centrifugal force.  I checked my cell phone and saw a message from my daughter:  “Where are you?”  As I was texting her back, she appeared in front of me with a worried expression on her face.  “Are you ok?”  She didn’t want me out of her sight.  A minute later, one of her friends came back from the mosh, limping. 

All night, kids that weren’t even my daughter’s friends kept asking if I was ok.  It took me the rest of the concert to grasp that to them I was a frail old lady who needed looking after.  I’d heard some bad stories of mosh injuries and even deaths from trampling, but I was more nervous than actually afraid.  I’d been doing Pilates for a few months so I felt strong and balanced and could push back – just like a kid. 

On the way home she told me that her friends had asked why I was there.  “She loves System of a Down,” she told them.  “Cool,” they said.  They must have thought I went along to make sure my daughter was safe, which would have been very un-cool.  Instead, I was the remarkable (or misguided) old woman who ventured into their world for a night, and needed their protection.  An unexpected ending, you might say.

I'm Sorry You're Leaving

Last week I sat in the hallway at Berkeley Pines with my mother and a few other residents, waiting for her turn to eat lunch in the dining room.  While we were waiting, she kept reading out loud the empty carton of the vanilla shake food supplement she had in her hand.  Over and over.  

I tried several times to engage her in something else, but she ignored me.  Her attention kept going back to the carton and what was printed on it.  I decided to honor that it was the most interesting thing in her world right then, and stopped trying to talk to her about anything slightly more meaningful, from my perspective. 

After about 20 minutes of this, feeling useless and unconnected to her, I said, “I need to go home now and eat my own lunch.”  She looked at me and said, plain as day*, “I’m sorry you are leaving.”  “Well, I can stay a few more minutes,” I instantly replied, and was rewarded with the biggest and longest-lasting smile I’ve seen on her face since she first arrived in California.  So I stayed, about 10 more minutes, while she continued to read and reread the vanilla shake carton.  

I went home feeling good.  It mattered to her that I was there.

*I find myself using her expressions, like "plain as day," now that she doesn't generate much speech on her own.  I guess it's my way of saying, "I'm sorry you are leaving."

The Lost Sister

When I finished my doctorate – finally – I started reading nothing but crime thrillers.  For a few years, I couldn’t bear to read non-fiction.  Mysteries and thrillers became an addiction.  “It’s my only vice,” I used to say (I’ve added others since then).  I need them because when I wake up during the night, if I have the pleasure of reading my novel, I don’t get upset about not being able to fall right back to sleep.  They also get me through migraines.  So I get nervous when my stash is low, and I have to make a run to the library for more.  More than once I’ve been forced to go buy a paperback at Safeway late at night, when I ran out.

I have my favorite authors, but they can’t write them as fast as I can read them, so I have to peruse the “New Fiction” shelf at the local branch to see what else might do the job.  You won’t be surprised that the title The Lost Sister caught my eye.  The writer, Russel D. McLean, was new to me.  It said right on the front “a novel,” but it felt risky, so I made good and sure it was crime fiction before I took it out. 

I was innocently reading along last night, the detective was going around detecting, and then he stopped at the cemetery to visit the grave of his fiancée.

I closed my eyes, tried to remember her face.  Little by little, she was escaping me.  Getting so I could only remember how she looked when I came across old photographs.

Some days, I thought I was betraying her by starting to heal…

I crouched in front of the headstone, traced the dates that marked Elaine’s life with my index finger.  Closed my eyes.

Tried to conjure up her face.

Wished she was here with me.  To answer my questions.  Offer reassurance.  Remind me what it was to be in love with life again.

Here was the reality: she wasn’t coming back.

I was alone.

In the end, that was the one inescapable truth of my life.

No fair.  This was supposed to be my escape!  But, while I felt an ache in my chest at this suddenly appearing in my safe zone of crime fiction, I have to say it was also satisfying to hear the experience described so simply and so well, in the middle of a book that wasn’t about grief. 

Many of my grieving clients could relate to his words.  They struggle with the conflict between their desire to heal and the sense that to move on and feel good means the person who died wasn’t that important.  Or that they didn’t really love them if they can go on without them.  So we do our best to make room for everything: all the ambivalence, all the longing, all the resentment, guilt, disappointment, anger, numbness, just plain sadness.  Grief is complex and idiosyncratic, and accepting whatever shows up seems to be the best way to move it through. 

And then we let ourselves discover that life still has joy in it, and we can still appreciate those simple pleasures that make life worth living – like good crime fiction.

Marvelous Menagerie

Last Saturday my husband and I went to see a Roman mosaic from Lod, Israel that takes up most of the floor of Gallery 1 at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.  I didn’t want to miss it since the Legion is one of only four museums where it will be shown before it ends up on permanent display in Israel.  They’re calling it “Marvelous Menagerie” because the gorgeous mosaic images are of ordinary and exotic animals and mythological beasts.

The people who laid each little tessera in place have been dead for one thousand seven hundred years.  I stood at the edge, admiring the artistry and craftsmanship, imagining the laborers who made it, the artists who designed it, the owners of the villa and their guests and servants walking on it, the villa around it… and then l pondered the fact that I was thinking intensely about and honoring the work of people who have been dead for 1700 years.  I thought maybe they might like to know they were being thought of and appreciated.  And how absolutely certain it seems that they do not know, could not know.  That even if somehow individual consciousness remains after death, eventually after a few centuries of hanging around checking it out, they’d probably stop being invested in the ongoing story of what happened on earth after they died.  Or caring whether anyone ever thought of them and their work, some 2000 years in the future.  They’re just gone.

Even with three sisters already on “The Other Side,” and even though it’s certainly more real to me than ever before, I’m still trying to grasp the fact that I, too, am going to die.  This consciousness I am in possession of seems so immortal.  Maybe it is.  But I also have a very hard time imagining now, as my family religion taught, that my personal identity as Ruth Kalter is going to live eternally in some form.  Or care about how things turn out on earth.  It just doesn’t make sense.

Part of my problem believing in my own death is that I don’t really believe in my sisters’.  I know it as a fact that they are dead, but this also doesn’t make sense.  They were here, they were each a whole world; how can they be gone forever?  It may simply be denial saving me from the devastation of that unbearable truth.  It’s unacceptable, therefore it can’t be true.  Or, it must not be true because I can’t grasp it.  And this is how belief in the immortality of the individual persists.  I think this is called Emotional Reasoning (I feel this way, therefore it’s true) in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.  It’s one of the 10 Distortions in Thinking that we are better off questioning when we catch ourselves at them. 

OK, none of this death stuff makes any sense.  And we can’t know what happens after.  We can only marvel.  We are marvelous animals, and we die.  But while I’m still alive, I’m wishing I could see how it all turns out, a few centuries from now.

Mother's Days

A year ago on Mothers Day I was in Illinois visiting my mother at Arden Courts Alzheimers Assisted Living.  She had moved there from her independent living apartment just two weeks after her husband Will had died.  They married when she was 70 and he was 75, hoping to have a few good years together.  They had 18.

Back in February, I had gone to Illinois for the funeral and to arrange for the care she would need now that he was gone.  My last sister Martha, who lived nearby, had died in August, just six months before, and I was now the only daughter left.  Will’s daughter Linda and her husband had been managing many aspects of my mother’s life as well as Will’s, with amazing devotion and generosity.   Once Martha was gone and I realized how badly my mother’s memory was failing, I stepped in and did all that I could from California and during a visit in November.

And then Will died, at age 93, on February 6, 2010.

So there I was, frantically trying to make arrangements to keep her in her home with round-the-clock care.  It wasn’t working.  It would be double the price of assisted living and I would have to manage it all from California.  I wanted so badly to do the best thing for her.  One night, leaning on her walker in her living room, she looked at me and said, “You are doing a really good job, Ruth.”  I will never forget the look on her face as she stood there or the quality of her voice when she said the words I’d been waiting 57 years to hear.

I was proud of the way she accepted the necessity of moving to assisted living.  This was when I most appreciated her matter-of-fact, practical, down-to-earth nature, which otherwise had left me stranded in the more complex and creative parts of my personality.  Before dementia really set in, she was the kind of person that just wanted the facts and then let’s get on with it, if that’s how it has to be.  I didn’t feel guilty that I was moving her, just a heavy sadness that her life was shutting down towards its last chapters.

She also felt it, and made another unforgettable statement as we sat down to dinner at the round oak table in her kitchen, the very table from my childhood. 

“I’ve lost my husband, and now I’m losing my home, and I’ll never have another one.” 

My mother didn’t often express her personal feelings; I felt honored to be entrusted with this intimate disclosure from her heart.  But I almost couldn’t bear the poignancy of those words.

Arden Courts turned out to be a lovely place with exceptionally wonderful staff, where she felt at home and content for four months until she broke her hip, had surgery, and went to a nursing home for rehab.  From there I moved her, for the last time, to Berkeley Pines Care Center, here in California.  

Where I visited her yesterday, Mothers Day 2011, with a card, flowers, a new shirt, and a Happy Mothers Day balloon which will last at least a week, reminding her that I think of her, and visit her, and love her.  She still has a daughter.

Tales from Berkeley Pines

Last night I went to the Family Support Group at Berkeley Pines Care Center, the nursing home where my mother is living.  It’s a once-a-month opportunity to talk with other people who are going through the same kinds of things I am.  For example, one woman told a sweet story of looking with her mother at a double-framed picture of her dad in a suit in one photo and in his fishing outfit in the other.  “Those are my husbands,” said her mother. 

Before the meeting I visited with my mother.  It was one of her good days, or at least one of our good visits.  Since we were communicating better than usual, on an impulse I asked her, “Do you like it when I visit you?”  “Oh, yes,” she said, with a smile.  “You’re my special sister.”  I let it go, of course, and didn’t make the connection until my husband pointed out, “That’s like your thing with Lois and Sarah.”

Among the six family members who attended the meeting, two were sisters.  I realized afterwards that I had been watching how they interacted.  They are very different in looks, style and personality, but they appear to have a relationship I could envy.  I might be seeing them through the proverbial rose-tinted glasses, I know, because another woman talked about how some of her siblings were helpful and some were very problematic.  Apparently, when you are caring for an elderly parent, having siblings is not always a benefit.

One of the two sisters comes to visit her mother once or twice a week, and the other one only once a month, because she lives farther away.  “That’s my excuse,” she admitted.  She was quite frank about why she doesn’t like to visit even though she has a nice time with her mother, joking around with her and making her laugh.  She feels her mother doesn’t want to be there, and she understands, because she wouldn’t want to be there herself.  “Who would choose to live in a place where it’s noisy, you room with a stranger, you can’t get away from other people to be by yourself, and you’re woken up to be asked if you want to use the bathroom?”

This woman told us that her mother, who is 95, barely remembers her husband who died 30 years ago.  She has a hard time recognizing people in the family who look different from her image of them because they have grown up since her series of strokes some years ago.  She can’t recognize herself in pictures, because she thinks she is 87 and imagines herself the way she was in her 60s.  “When I dream, I’m never old,” she says. 

On my way out I stopped to say hello to Juanita.  Every time I visit her now, she starts out nice and friendly, and then she gets all squinty-eyed and says in a challenging tone, “Are you the one who wouldn’t tell me your name?”  I admit I am, I apologize again.  “I was stupid that day, I didn’t understand,” I said last night.  “I don’t understand things a lot of days,” was her response.  “Of course I forgive you.”

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

I was reading a light-hearted book yesterday that had some silly characters opening a disinterred casket, which (surprise!) didn’t have the body in it.  It sent me off into a not so light-hearted memory of Jeanie’s funeral. 

I had forgotten, until the phrase “closed casket” showed up in this book, how excruciating it was to watch the casket wheeled into the room from the left for the service, and then at the close of the service, wheeled out of the room to the right.  It was gravely poetic, and unbearably poignant, almost cruel, to have the finality of her passage out of our lives enacted by that slow, gentle movement in from the left, and out to the right.  Here:  We bring her to you one last time, but we’ve taken her one more step away from you because now we’ve closed the casket so you can’t see her, ever again.  You can have her with you a little while longer, for these few minutes of her funeral.  And then we are taking her away forever. 

She was 57.  Her funeral was also the last time I saw my other remaining sister, Martha, until she herself was very close to death, a year and a half later, at age 60.  Lois had already died 13 years earlier, at age 39.  Very soon, if nothing happens to me, I will be older than all three of them ever got to be.  This is probably why I live without the comfortable expectation that I have years of life ahead of me, even though I am only 58.  Statistics don’t matter; the people I am most identified with died by the time they were around my age.  Right about now is the end of the line. 

It’s a strange way to live.  The gift in it is the immediacy of each moment and the aliveness I feel; the way I cherish my ordinary experiences, which I’ve written about in previous posts.  What I struggle with is the continuous sense of uncertainty about my future.  That is, of course, the reality for all of us, but it’s concretely real for me in a way that it would not be if my sisters were still alive. 

What would that be like, to have them all alive?  My life would have another dimension to it – the “Sisters” dimension that includes their stories, our relationships, childhood memories, and so much more.  I would feel more in the middle of living, instead of feeling like I am at the teetering edge of life all the time, where anything can happen, and death is always at the door.  Having my sisters still around would buffer me.  I’m living a full, normal life, but there’s a chasm right over there, that appeared rather suddenly when the last one died.  The finality of the end of their personal stories is what has left me stranded and unprotected.  I realize the feeling of buffering and protection is an illusion, but I would love to be able to fall happily into that illusion.

All this reflection on how their early deaths have increased my awareness of the uncertainty of my life.  But what I really want to say is this:  I miss Lois.  I miss Jeanie.  I miss Martha.  Goddamn it.

Sarah Lois

I had a little sister named Lois, and I have a daughter named Sarah.  The two of them are so intertwined in my psyche that I often transpose their names.  I call Sarah “Lois”, both when referring to her and when speaking to her.  Sometimes when I’m thinking of one of them I’ll go back and forth a few times with the names until I figure out which one I’m really thinking of.  I wonder what it means that they are so connected inside of me.

In that last week when we knew Lois was dying, I thought I might be pregnant.  I asked her, “If I have a baby and it’s a girl, would you like me to give her Lois for a middle name?”  She said yes.

Lois and I were very close; since childhood we had created a world of our own, and we belonged to each other in a special way that the whole family recognized.  She said to me, when she knew she was dying, “You paved a way through life for me, now I’m paving a way through death for you.”  Lois died on October 20, 1994, six days before her 40^th birthday.  I was 41.

I wasn’t pregnant after all, and I went into full-blown grieving.  I set up a place in my room with candles and mementos and Lois’s picture, where I sat and cried and wailed and told her how much I missed her, how I couldn’t imagine my life without her.  I grieved and grieved, very actively; I couldn’t do it any other way.  The ground had been ripped out from beneath, a gaping sinkhole had appeared, and I had to somehow navigate the world with a big chunk missing.

A lot of the grieving was my longing and trying to reach her on the other side.  So I talked to her a lot.  I asked her, if she had any influence on these things wherever she was, to get them to send me a baby girl.  I begged for a girl, I prayed to all and sundry gods and spirits and ancestors – “All Those Who Wish to Help” – to send me a girl.

In February I got pregnant.  When I told my mother the due date, November 2, she said, “Oh! That was Lois’s due date—but she was born early because I was pulling carrots in the garden.”  About a month into the pregnancy, the nausea started, and I couldn’t grieve so actively anymore.  I resented the baby for preventing me from being with Lois.  The nausea was miserable.  But eventually it let up and I began to turn towards this new life that was coming.  I reluctantly pulled one foot back from the other side and returned to the rest of my life without Lois.

The ultrasound technician for the amniocentesis, famous for predicting the sex accurately, told me it was a boy and showed me the penis.  I was confused, because I felt so strongly it was a girl.  I had to work at being open to having another boy when I wanted a girl so badly. 

Meanwhile, I was still hoping Lois had sent me a girl.  One day when I was driving the back roads home to Point Reyes, I asked her, “Is this you, Lois?”  “It’s not me, but I sent you a good one,” was her reply.  Later, I had a dream of my daughter at many different ages, and knew her name had to be Sarah, a name we weren’t even considering.  When the genetic counselor told me that the amnio results showed it was a girl, I couldn’t speak.  I wanted to believe, but the error rate is one in five thousand, and I could be that one!  So I didn’t count on it.

Of course I was ecstatic when the baby was born a year after Lois died, and it was a girl!  Every time I changed her diaper, she was still a girl!  This baby girl brought me back to Life, and Joy.  As she was growing up, we played some of the same made up games Lois and I used to play when we were little.  But mostly she is her own person—like Lois in some ways, but very different in others.  As it should be.

I imagine when I’m old and demented in the nursing home, Sarah will come to visit me. I’ll say, “Thank you for coming to see me, Lois,” and she won’t correct me.

Three Years Older than God

The last time I went to the nursing home, on my way to find my mother in the dining room, I stopped to visit Juanita.  It went like this:

Me:  Juanita, what are you doing in bed?

Juanita:  Oh I’m very, very sick.

Me: I’m so sorry, Juanita.

J:  I’ll be better the day after tomorrow.

Me:  OK today is Monday, so Wednesday you’ll be better?

J:  Is it Monday?

Me: Yes.

J:  Yes, the day after tomorrow, I’ll be better.

Me:  Well good, then I won’t worry about you.

J:  Well that’s very sweet, thank you for visiting me, I love you.

Me:  That’s the 2^nd time someone has told me they love me since I walked in the door a couple of minutes ago.

J:  Well, that’s not surprising, you are a lovely, lovable person.

Me:  Thank you, Juanita.

J:  What’s your name?  You can’t expect me to remember, I’m three years older than God, and I can’t remember anything anymore.

Me:  It’s Ruth.

J:  (getting angry) What?

Me:  (louder)  RUTH

J:  WHAT?

Me:  RUTH

J:  (clawing at me)  Get out of here, if you won’t tell me your name, just GET OUT!!

Me: (calmly) I’m trying to tell you my name, it’s Ruth.

J:  GET OUT if you won’t tell me your name!!

Me:  (waiting, wondering what she wants)

J:  WHAT IS YOUR LAST NAME?!

Me:  Oh, that’s what you want – Ruth Kalter.

J:  (all calm and nice again)  Ruth Kalter, well thank you for visiting, Ruth Kalter.  You won’t forget that now, will you?

Me:  (laughing)  No Juanita, you really taught me something today that I won’t forget!

J:  (sweetly) Thank you for stopping by.

Me:  You’re welcome, I’ll come see you again.  I’m going to go find my mother now.

It's always an adventure.

Appreciating One's Husband (Part II of The Preciousness of Time, sort of)

The little things that bug me – like how he leaves empty bags and cartons and cans on the kitchen counter instead of throwing them away as soon as he empties them – this morning I decided to look at this detritus as proof that he’s still here with me.  So instead of feeling put out each time, I get to feel grateful for having him in my life.  Why didn’t I think of this sooner? 

I remember when my kids were small and I was complaining to my sister Jeanie about some damage my son had caused to something in the house (which I don’t even remember now), she told me that her son had scratched his name into the side of a raised bed in their garden and how irritated she was at the time, but now that he was out of the house, she treasured it.  I never forgot that.  Just didn’t think of applying the principle to husbands and their annoying ways. 

Room for more love and appreciation.  Always a good thing.

The Preciousness of Time

Knowing that time is running out makes life really sweet.  This knowledge is something that young people generally don’t have, and may be part of what makes older people the happiest age group (surprise—it’s true, it’s been researched*). 

When I was young, my life was a burden.  I was in so much psychic pain it was hard to be alive a lot of the time.  So I wasn’t cherishing my time here on earth, plus I had no idea that I would ever actually die, or that any of the people that mattered to me would die.  Furthermore, I was taught that what really mattered was eternal life in Heaven, not this worldly life here on earth.  So life stretched out as an infinite burden to suffer through, trying to figure out how to feel better somehow.  Since I’m so much happier now, I guess along the way I figured out a few things about that. 

Now the hourglass is more full on the bottom than the top.  I know that much.  But the truth is none of us knows how much sand remains in the top, so I try to notice and treasure each grain as it falls through and lands in the past.

My daughter is 15.  She’s doing such a great job of being a teenager.  Whenever she does something really classic, like dishes out something sarcastic in a disgusted tone, or rolls her eyes, or tells us she can’t wait to get out of the house and away from us, I laugh, and tell her how delightful she is—and then she laughs because she gets it.  It’s a snapshot, and I’m in it right now, and it’s precious.  Because she’s not going to be a teenager much longer.  (I only know this because my son was a teenager once, and now he’s not.)  It helps that she’s a really good and basically happy kid and these typical teenage behaviors are not ominous symptoms of something serious.  I think.

I do the same thing with my husband as much as I can, because now I know that husbands can die and leave you alone.  It happened to my best friend, and I listened to her deep regret that she had taken Daryl for granted while he was alive.  He was gone in three short weeks.  So I listened and decided to appreciate my husband as much as I can while he’s still here, to look for and thank him for all the ways he adds to my life by his presence in it.  We’ve been married for 24 years and our lives are pretty intertwined, so it’s been a bit of a practice to step back and even perceive some of what he gives me, beyond the most obvious things.  But I’ve done it, and our marriage has gotten sweeter since Judy’s husband, Daryl Schmidt, died 5 years ago today.

I do wish it didn’t take other people dying for me to wake up to being alive.  But I’m very grateful for what they are teaching me, as they go.

* From Sonja Lyubomirsky The How of Happiness  pp. 63-64  Our happiness peaks at age 65. A 22-year study of about 2,000 healthy veterans of World War II and the Korean War revealed that life satisfaction increased over the course of these men's lives, peaked at age 65, and didn't start significantly declining until age 75.

The Well, Part II

Last night I dreamed I was grieving over losing my mother, as her dementia takes her away from me.  At some point in the dream I remembered that I had also lost all of my sisters, and I just couldn’t take it.  It woke me up.  I guess in my dream state I don’t have enough defenses to protect me from what that really means to me—what they really mean to me.  In the dream I thought, No wonder I don’t go there.  The sadness is really too painful.  The system shuts down. 

But every time I feel it that fully, I also am glad to have touched into it.  I’m glad to know how I really feel.  I wish I could stay there longer and let myself remember my sisters more clearly, the way I do then.  In those moments I cherish them so much.  But that’s what’s so painful; then I know what I’m missing.  Maybe little by little as I survive these electric shocks of grief, I’ll be able to choose to touch that live wire, and hold on, and be with them. 

What’s it like to read this, I wonder?  I don’t write this heart-wrenching stuff to elicit sympathy.  I have enough inside myself and can always get more from my friends if I need it.  But something pulls at me to put words to it.  Grief tends to feel unique to each person, because of its intensity.  We feel alone, as if no one can know how we feel.  And that’s true.  But of course it is both unique and universal.  Should I just be writing this in a journal, or is it meaningful to anyone else?

The Well

Every so often my husband can’t do anything right.  After a few days of berating him for every move he makes and everything he says or fails to say, I finally remember that he probably isn’t really any worse than usual and it’s more likely that I am back in that state of profound insecurity that is part of grief for me.  I don’t know I’m feeling it until I start finding fault with everything, which I guess is my misguided attempt to set the cosmos back on its axis where it belongs.  Eventually I have to go to the well of grief I’ve looked away from and pull up a bucket of whatever’s in there. 

So it was that Steve once again became impossible to live with around the 3^rd anniversary of Jeanie’s death in January.  Ironically, I was stressing over preparing for a Compassion Stress workshop I was offering at the Marin Humane Society for their Animal Care Department.  These are the people whose job includes euthanizing animals they have been working so hard to rescue from that very fate.  You have no idea, until you give them a chance to tell you, what this is like for them and what a toll it takes on their well-being.  It’s another form of “disenfranchised grief.”

I woke up the day of the first workshop with a migraine, so I took some Tylenol and ibuprofen, put some Leonard Cohen on, and lay down.  I wasn’t expecting it in the least, but two songs in I was sobbing, and Jeanie was there, and Martha and Lois, and all of them together, breaking my heart.  The spell of irritability melted away.  Leonard Cohen’s voice is as deep as his songs and I rode them down to where I needed to go.

You wouldn’t think someone in my line of work would be shocked each time at how intense the feelings of grief are when I let myself go there or they break through on their own.  I’m not afraid of those feelings – the nature of them or the intensity of them – but they aren’t fun and they do take your full attention.  So I think I just live along not bothering with them too much unless they demand my attention.  I should know better.

The migraine abated and I spent the afternoon with those beautiful, amazing people who love animals so much they are willing to do the hardest job there is.  I bow to them.

I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life.  Who would have thought?  And yet – there it lies, just a few feet below the surface. 

Who'da Thunk It?

Last Friday I made myself go visit my mother at her nursing home in Berkeley, because I am determined to get over there twice a week.  It seems so minimal to me, given that she is 89, and there are a countable number of times I am going to get to be with her before that story is over.  Her story.  And my story of having her in my life.  I’m finally getting it that all the stories do end.  And it’s shocking every time, even when you know it’s coming.

I do kind of have to push myself to visit my mother, because it’s not particularly rewarding for me, most of the time.  She isn’t very communicative, and she’s often displeased with me for encouraging her to eat, or not straightening the tablecloth properly, or not understanding what she is trying to say when she does speak. 

This time she smiled and greeted me with “Oh Ruthie!  How did you get here?” I gave her the March issue of Our Daily Bread, a publication that has been around since I was a child – daily devotional thoughts that I used to think were insipid.  Now I love reading it with her because it’s nostalgic for me, it’s her world, and it makes her feel good.  It reinforces all her beliefs.  At this point, she can’t do any more damage with them, so all that’s left for them to do is comfort her, which is something I want very much.

This visit was not like most.  Nathalie, the Nursing Director, asked me if I wouldn’t mind doing the BE-ACTIV questionnaire with my mother.  She enjoyed being asked which activities she likes and dislikes. One item was “Getting or sending cards, letters,” and I prompted her with “You like getting cards from your sisters, don’t you?”  She looked frustrated and irritated and said, “But is it either/or?”  I laughed, and said, “You’re right, you might like getting them but not sending them.”  “Oh, I’m not like THAT!” she responded.  I was amazed at her astute assessment of the difficulty of answering that question the way it was posed, and her ability to communicate it to me.  She was having a good day.

The very things that used to drive me so crazy about her – like her absolute impenetrable certainty about whatever she believes to be true – I now find charming, because they are so characteristic of her, and I’m losing what there is left of her little by little.  She was a 4^th grade teacher for 32 years; she’s known for correcting anyone and everyone about everything.  At her husband Will’s graveside service last February, the pastor accidentally referred to him as “William,” and she piped up, “It’s Wilford!”  This could have happened even before she got dementia.  My step-sister Linda added her own comment: “Mary gotcha, pastor!”  

Of course she can still trigger a reaction in me when I am angrily corrected, but I’ve become really good at staying completely calm when she gets upset.  I just love her unconditionally.  You’d have to know her and know me to know how remarkable that is.

“Who’da thunk it?” as she would say.  Her expressions now seem so colorful and entertaining.  You can imagine what I used to think of them.

One Thing Leads to Another

Yesterday's inbox included this email from my friend Vivien Arnold: 

The picture of you and your sisters reminds me of this photo of my mom and her sisters, from back in the days when girls were sent to tap-dancing school! My mother is the youngest, perhaps 5 or 6 here. She lost both her sisters to cancer too - one in her 40s (back in the 1960s). It broke her heart. But of course their lives were not all about cancer - as with your sisters too!  There was so much that is hilarious in her memories of them.

Thanks for opportunity to share this.  I dig the blog! 

Vivien

Disenfranchised Grief

At Martha’s funeral, many people said to me, “Your poor mother!  Losing three children!”  Only one or two actually thought to venture anything about how it must be hard losing all my sisters.  It was as if I was there just to support my mother.

Sibling grief, I’ve learned, is considered “disenfranchised grief.”  Mostly this refers to young children losing siblings and being more or less ignored while everyone attends to the distraught mother, and of course, the father.  The brother or sister’s grief is often invisible.

I’m a big girl now and I had plenty of loving support from my friends back home, so I didn’t crave the acknowledgment from old acquaintances in Illinois who I hadn’t seen in, oh, 30 or 40 years.  But I was surprised.  I admit the phrase “What about me?” came to my mind.  Those well-intentioned people weren’t present when I walked into the funeral home for the family viewing, and saw yet another sister in a casket across the room.  I grabbed onto Jeanie’s husband Rod, who had so kindly come up from Atlanta to offer whatever support we needed. “Too many sisters in caskets!” burst out of my mouth.  It had only been a year and a half since I had stood gazing at Jeanie’s body in Georgia.  Fifteen years before that, it was Lois.

A month or so later, back at home, I suddenly started laughing and told my daughter I had just realized something good about the last one being gone:  “No more sisters in caskets!”

Now you know how good I am at finding a silver lining.

 

One Mushroom

I just started this blog, and new reasons to feel sad are popping up like mushrooms.  Here’s one:  I can write anything I want about what it was like in our family when I was a little girl, and there’s no one left to say it wasn’t so. 

The Podium

When we moved into our loft in San Francisco, we scoured craigslist for free stuff constantly, and found an ad by Zocalo, a company that was moving and giving away just what we were looking for – room dividers.  My husband called me as he was rummaging through the Zocalo giveaways and said, “Ruth, they have a podium, do you want a podium?”  “Do I want a podium?  YES, I want a podium!”

When I was a little girl, I used to get up on a chair in the attic bedroom I shared with my little sister Lois, and rant.  She was my dutiful audience.  I wish I had a recording so I could know what I’d get so worked up trying to straighten the world out about.  If Lois were still around, I’d ask her.

Our 4,000 square foot loft is liberating for me because the possibilities for what to do with the space are almost endless.  It invites play.  All kinds of sides of me that haven’t had their day in the sun for a long time are coming out here.  The podium stands on a rug facing the main big space, and a few weeks ago I was seized by a need to address the gathered throngs, whoever they might be.  I started writing things down that I felt compelled to say.  This went on for days, weeks, me scribbling urgent messages on old notebook paper left over from my kids’ binders.  Most of it was driven by my sense of gratitude for the things I used to take for granted.  Losing so much has ripped away my automatic sense of entitlement, as a member of the middle class, to a more or less comfortable life.

I had some friends over one night, and before I could stop myself I grabbed the podium and started speaking.  I thanked the space we live in.  I talked about how the fact that it is going to be demolished – we don’t know when – makes us hyperaware of how precious each day is that we get to be here.  I said this was The Year of the Mother for me, and acknowledged three of the people in the room who had lost their mothers in the last year.  My husband chimed in with how we have right here in this room the bones of his mother in a box sent from Greece, waiting to be buried next to her husband.  I wasn’t going to bring that up if he didn’t.  Nobody batted an eye, a testament to what kind of friends I have.  I spoke about being a mother and how proud I am that my kids had both recently given me compliments about understanding them. “I can die happy now,” I said.  “That has been my big goal in life, for my kids to feel I get who they are.”  I didn’t say much more than that – my friends were spared – but if you keep reading this blog, you won’t be.

This is my podium.