Three Cardboard Boxes

That's all that was left of my mother in law's life today.  Three cardboard boxes. She slipped into a coma on Thursday night, and died peacefully Saturday morning. Today Jim and I went over to pack up her personal belongings.  It was the third time in six years that we'd packed for her, downsizing a bit more each time...the move from apartment to assisted living in 2002, from assisted living to memory care in 2005. 

In the cardboard boxes today we brought home mostly pictures - snapshots of Jim at various ages and stages, and of Brian at similar ages and stages, and photos of Magic and Molly, whom she adored.  Until recently, one of her favorite pastimes was re-arranging the photographs on her entertainment center.  Each time I went to visit her, they would be arrayed differently, and often she would take them all down whie I was there, tapping on the glass and laughing..."Isn't he the cutest thing?" she often said about one photo of Brian (age 6 or 7, seated at his desk and typing away).  "Awwww..." she'd sigh over the close up of Magic and Molly. 

Lastly, she would take up the framed photo of her mother and kiss it.  "That's my mother," she'd tell me each time.

But in the last six months, her facility for speech was all but gone.  Probably the toxins from her failing kidneys had destroyed the last bits of her communication center.  Words came out occasionally, but they made no sense.  And the pictures have remained in their final resting places for months now.

One of her favorite caregivers is taking all her furniture.  Lucy is about 40 years old, one of the dearest women I've ever met, who took great care of my mother in law despite the fact that she was often cursed, kicked, and once even thrown against the wall.  Lucy's husband left her for a 25 year old he met on the internet.  She "lost everything she owned," as she put it, and is starting all over.  Lucy also happens to be raising her five grandchildren and undergoing radiation treatments for breast cancer.  (As my mother put it  - "that man should be lined up against the wall and shot.")  Anyway, Lucy was ecstatic to have a sofa, chair, bed, dresser, entertainment center, television, lamps, and even some paintings to hang on her walls. 

"And I'll especially love having some things to remember Chris by," she said, hugging me with tears in her eyes.  "She was such a sweetheart."

I glance over at Jim who is sitting on the couch while Lucy and I discuss all this.  A sweetheart?  he's thinking.  His mother?  He wasn't at all surprised to hear about the scratching and kicking parts.  The sweetheart parts...well, he's probably not buying that.

It's interesting isn't it, how people's perceptions of others are so different, and so dependent on their personal relationships.  Lucy (and Chris's other caregivers, who all echo her sentiments) were able to look past her angry outbursts and violent moments, and find some affection for her. 

But her very sensitive son, who was subjected to that side of her personality throughout his life,  was unable to see past it.  It left a lasting impression on him, and he could never love her because of it.

So I'm glad she had Lucy (and Eva, and Deb, and Denise) in these last years of her life. 

I'm glad I was able to be with her on that last night of her life, to sit on the side of her bed and talk quietly to her about moving on into the next world. 

And I'm glad I have the three cardboard boxes.

Out of the Darkness (sticky post)

             In working with high school students for the past 15 years, I've had the privelege of meeting some incredibly special young people, and have remained friends with many of them, watching them grow into productive and talented adults.   Sadly, one of the best and brightest of these was lost to suicide on January 31, 2006.  I've written about Jeff before  -  his intelligence, warmth, humor and caring for others made such a deep impression on me.  His death was an immeasurable loss to his family, his friends, and the world. 

On October 5, 2008, I'll be honoring Jeff's memory by joining with thousands of others in a community walk sponsored by the American Society for Suicide Prevention.  AFSP is a non-profit organization exclusively dedicated to understanding and preventing suicide through research and education, and to reaching out to people with mood disorders and those impacted by suicide.  Please consider making a tax deductible donation in any amount to support this worthy endeavor. 

For more information, click here. 

Comforters

We were almost home from our walk last night, enjoying the cool breeze and the last remaining bits of sunlight.  The dogs stopped to leave one final "calling card" on their favorite bush. "Did I ever tell you how I got this scar on my elbow?" Jim said, looking off into the backyard of the house in front of us. 

"I don't think so," I answered, although he has, and several times in fact, but I thought he might need to tell it again.

"Well, it was right here," he said, "before this house was built of course, this was all a huge field of grass and tall weeds, but there was a dirt path worn through from bikers.  I was riding across, fell off my bike, and landed on some jagged piece of glass which cut my arm."

"So, what did you do?" I asked.

"Got back on my bike and rode home - really fast!, because it was bleeding a lot," he answered.  "I remember my buddy Fred calling out to me, but I didn't even answer."

"Did you get stitches?"

He laughed dryly.  "No. I didn't even tell anybody.  I just got some band aids and went into my room and fixed it up myself."

"Gee," I replied.  "I was always falling off my bike when I was a kid, and I'd be screaming and crying for my mom all the way home.  My mother said she could hear me coming for blocks."

"Well, that was you," he answered.  "I just had to comfort myself."

My husband's been telling me a lot of those stories lately, and I suppose it's part of coming to terms with his mother's imminent death.  If you read here at all regularly, you'll know that their relationship was not particularly close or loving, was in fact characterized by a lot of unrealized expectations (on her part) and guilt (on his).  When her dementia progressed to the point that she no longer recognized him or remembered his existence, I think he felt freer than he ever felt in his life. 

But as I look at her now, hovering near the end of a life that never seemed quite what she wanted it to be, I can only feel empathy for her.  After all, no one sets out to be a bad mother, no one aims to drive their children crazy, or purposefully withholds the love and nurturing they need. (Well, I suppose some people do, but they're simply psychopathic).  I honestly believed she loved Jim with all her heart...she simply didn't know how to express it in a way that was meaningful to him.

Sometimes people can only love as much as they've been loved.  The stories I've heard about her father revolved around his rules - for behavior at the dinner table, for keeping strict curfews.  She's often told the tale of being locked outside for the entire night because she was five minutes late getting home. And then she married a man twenty years her senior, a man whom she addressed in their early correspondence as "Pop," a man who was neither affectionate, nor humorous, nor given to indulgence or enjoyment.  Their marriage was always fractious and contentious - I never once heard them exchange a kind word.  

A chilly childhood and a loveless, bitter marriage are probably not the best ingredients for good mothering.

Nevertheless, sitting by her bedside I'm always moved to tears, mostly for her and for the happiness she couldn't seem to find.  She has lingered with this wretched illness for so long... six years now of drifting farther out to sea every day...and I wonder what divine plan this could possibly be part of. 

So I come home and hug my own mother, whose love has comforted me so well all my life, and hug my husband, who has lots of overdue comfort coming to him.

And I wish I could hug my son.  But I hope that I've comforted him well when he needed it.

Hanging in the Balance

The scales of my life are quite weighty at the moment, with more and more things piling into them on a daily basis it seems.  Over the past several days, my mother in law (who has been suffering from progressive dementia for the past six years) slipped into renal failure and is now in hospice care.  In the process of making all these arrangements, checking on her daily, trying to complete the car repairs from the minor accident I was involved in a couple of weeks ago, and also deal with an ever increasing work load at the office, it's been a bit difficult to achieve any kind of balance in my life.  And although my husband is the Libra in the family, I'm the one who really craves things to be on an even keel and to have my ducks in a row at all times. I've been thinking about the balance in relationships, especially in marriage, for I think a natural division of labor and responsibility usually develops between a couple, often unspoken, but simply mutually agreed upon by experience and preference.  This week I've been handling the medical details, since I'm more comfortable in that arena and speak that language, while Jim has been in charge of the car repair since he's the most experienced in that realm.  We fell into those activities quite naturally, it seemed, without discussion.  He knows I hate making phone calls, so he's done all the talking with insurance adjusters and mechanics.  I know he's uncomfortable with illness, so I've spent the most time with his mother, talking to the hospice staff and trying to make sure she was comfortable.

Of course, inequities will occur, even in the best of systems.  Housework is usually one of them, isn't it?  Men seem to be missing the gene that causes anxiety when the laundy piles up, the dishes aren't done, and cobwebs hang from all the corners.   Alternatively, I can't muster much enthusiasm for watching auto racing in stereo surround sound.  So, occasionally even the most evenly matched couples become out of balance. Perhaps a new circumstance comes into play, one that neither party has ever dealt with before. 

Sometimes, adjustments must be made. 

Through it all, keeping a good balance is key - in relationships, and in life in general.

So wish me luck, as I keep working to even the scales.

In a Writer's State of Mind

Even though my week has been topsy turvy, filled to the brim with family obligations, car repairs, the beginning of fall musical activities, and of course, regular work responsibilities, I've felt the urge to write quite often during the middle of these hectic days.  You know what I mean - ideas popping into your head unbidden, like gifts you can't wait to open, tickling your brain and leaving your fingers itching to pick up a pencil.  Yet even when you get in the mood to write, circumstances aren't always conducive to actually writing.  Wouldn't it be nice if we could stop everything when the ideas start coming, and write until we're exhausted?  Sadly, that usually isn't the case, and writing all too often goes on the back burner of life.  So we must learn how to rekindle that urge to write, get ourselves mentally and emotionally back into the place where the imagination is free to roam.

The writer's state of mind, says Jack Heffron, is a state of "alert passivity, a state of mind that allows us to trust our instincts and frees us to take risks."  (The Writer's Idea Book)   The writing state of mind occurs when our brains are alert, yet not aggressively pursuing a train of thought.  The phrase my yoga instructor uses is "willful determination without putting pressure on yourself to be perfect." 

Have you ever noticed that your best ideas usually come when you're doing something completely unrelated to writing?  For me, it's usually when I'm driving to work in the morning...my brain is fresh, I'm anticipating the tasks ahead of me, and then it suddenly occurs to me that the character in my story should already be having an affair when the story starts, or that I could write an interesting essay about that one old home still standing amidst all the new office buildings along Haggerty road. 

In her book Becoming A Writer, Dorothea Brande talks about "the mysterious faculty," which produces "the flashes of insight, the penetrating intuitions, the imagination which combines and transmutes ordinary experience into the illusion of higher reality."  Each person has their own "individual endowment of genius," she says.  We must only learn to "release" it.   Often, she advises, it is some totally unrelated activity - walking, driving, cutting grass or scrubbing floors - that puts the writer into a "state of hypnosis" where the unconscious thoughts are allowed to play.

The writing state of mind also occurs when you relax your brain and let your instincts take over.  One of the greatest lessons I learned as a performing musician was to let my instincts take over when I stepped on stage - to stop concentrating all my attention on each note and passage, to relax and let all the practice and preparation do the work for me.  As writers, we prepare for our writing "performances" by reading good literature, studying the way other writers work, and mostly by keeping our writer's mind open to life experiences and the world around us, which will bring us all the ideas we could ever need.

There is undoubtedly a lot of hard work involved in good writing.  But I think there's also something a bit mystical about the writing state of mind.  Perhaps it's similar to what athletes call "the zone"...that place in your mind and body when you become one with the activity, when nothing else in the world matters - not hunger or pain, not ringing telephones or barking dogs -except the work in front of you.  For writers, it's the point where you've tapped into that state of mind where the ideas flow freely from the deepest well of your imagination, and your fingers can barely keep pace. 

How about you?  What's your writing state of mind these days?  How do you access that "mysterious faculty" where insight and imagination are nurtured?   How do your instincts about your writing ability help you?  What's your experience of being in "the writing zone"?