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.