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.