Tuesday, April 19, 2011

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.”

Saturday, April 16, 2011

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.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

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 40th 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.