T.G.I.O.

Thank God it's over. November, the month of great suckage. People died. Memories arrived and churned and therapy was skipped. Friends announced divorces. Lights dimmed, I got lost, we moved house and spent money. Exciting projects began, then sputtered as their parts were too hard to find among the many boxes. I managed to blog EVERY DAY this month and thus fulfill NaBloPoMo, but I think I broke every other promise I had outstanding.

Yes, thank you, I do expect a trophy. Polly Pocket scotch-taped to a maraca will do nicely.

NaBloPoMo wasn't easy, but I learned stuff. Posting daily greases your wheels, forces you to think different, to reach a bit. Mostly? I just really don't want to talk about it anymore. I read the victory posts of other bloggers today and I hear the same word-fatigue, senseless quiet, silly satisfaction everywhere.

I'll admit I made many new friends and cemented my interest in some important topics, gained a wee bit of traction on my next life, but I'm too tired to think about it, and my back is starting to go again.

Upcoming posts: lots of dark true tales, a few bright insights, and a review of a movie that stars cute little fuzzy toys with weapons.

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Echoes: Another Husband Sent Home

I don’t know how people survive in this world without a church. When Gavin was ill, we got so much out of the personal announcements at the beginning of services. It was a great comfort to be reminded in human scale and real time of the great circle of life: not only were other people fighting disease, busy being born, and learning to appreciate the world around them, but smaller things happened too: kids would announce that they’d adopted puppies, seniors might share that they’d found tango lessons alleviate Seasonal Affective Disorder.

As we faced the worst, we felt part of a rich and wonderful world, one in which everybody hurts sometimes. As time went on I felt grateful to share good news many times with those whose eyes had met mine over and over when things were sad.

Today, nearly five years later, one of those announcements hit me just right. It had two parts and the whomp snuck up on me.

“We’ve just heard from Sue that Freddie Sampson will be sent home tomorrow... for hospice care.”

Freddie is a sweet fellow in his 80s who’d been hit by a car a few weeks ago. We’d been spared most of the updates but I know from my friends’ stories that multiple operations after a major impact like the one he suffered don’t mean that he’s expected to come out of it.

His wife, Sue, is one of those grandmas who always has a twinkle to spare: she’s Miss November, lifting a champagne flute in a soaking tub full of bubbles, in the calendar of nude church ladies we’re doing for 2010.

Yes, I advocate for hospice. I talk about end-of-life decisions and bandy cancer statistics about at cocktail parties (and yes, I do sometimes get invited). But it doesn’t get any easier to hear that this lovely woman will be joining our club.

Closing in on the longest night of the year, with flu season’s worst still ahead of us, waiting for our mortgage to be approved in the worst economy of a generation, all I can feel is very, very sad to share in this loss.

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A Clean Slate

Maybe I’ll never unwrap the memories? We have art by many of Gavin’s friends, some of whom I never met, a few I actively disliked. But we hung what was framed, mostly his choices, and had two or three times as much as we could use. I kind of like having them here, in the new house, still wrapped up like ghosts.

To me, this looks like a spoof on the Pottery Barn catalog: maybe there are people who are afraid to unwrap their art, the same ones who cover their couches in clear vinyl? With decorator shades of white, as long as they’re wrapped, this platter of artwork counts as neutral.

It’s rather exciting to see how all my stuff looks in this house. (Olivia’s furniture looks far better in my old house, with the dark wood trim: she likes things overstuffed and antiquey. This house suits my mid-century and later aesthetic.) I’m lucky to have tons of art, most of it with personal connections, and of course we’ll hang a few of Gavin’s pieces (it doesn’t count as tacky now that he’s gone). It’s as if I have fresh eyes for the same pieces.

This scene on the mantel is something Gavin would have delighted in painting: the subtle colors, layers of meaning, hint of sentiment, room for personal interpretation.

The greatest irony is that this new house is a split-level and Gavin would have really loved it. He did a few drawings of this house model, sourced, I’m sure, from this same neighborhood. I’ve at least one left, perhaps that will hang in the space next to this mantel soon?


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Full Circle

I cherish a snapshot* of Gavin with his long thin arms loosely around me outside a hip brunch place in the college town next door. It’s a sunny day and I’m wearing the flowing skirt and fuchsia top I’d worn to graduate from college a few years before. My arms are toned from sword work, pushups, and youth. That photo, transferred to silk, is in a pillowed cartouche on the front of our wedding album and preserves one of the happiest smiles we had.

I remember always the feeling of his arms around me. I felt encircled, sealed tight but comfortable, binding me loosely inside a pure shape and close to his body. Gavin was a calm man and that state was contagious when he held me this way. I felt safe and energized.

From the start, nearly two years ago, Mr. Fresh has loved to hold me, join his strong arms around me when we’re lying in bed, my back to his front. Our hooks and crooks find each other and go soft. I feel nestled and nuzzled. I know I’m safe because he’s so strong and he means it.

It’s comfortable for me, but deeply, richly comforting for him. He needs this peace, it doesn’t follow him otherwise. If you look into his pool it’s roiling, even when he’s happy. He’s restless.

I love that I can do for him what Gavin did for me, even though I have no idea what it is, because I know how delicious it is and how necessary.


* The picture above is of the same hug but in 2005, with Short Stack in the huddle.

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Wordless Wednesday, Holiday Schedule

National Day of Listening

This may not work.

But I am going to try to talk to my damn mother for the Story Corps project, the National Day of Listening, on Friday. Maybe you can do it, too. It's a great legacy to leave, to include in the history of our real country, and a fantastic opportunity to connect with a loved one in a different way. The website offers tips as well as starting questions for your "interview."

There are a million ways and reasons I love what storytelling has become: a significant method that we use to frame our lives and our history. I never thought I'd see the day that ordinary people were recognized for their experiences and perspectives. I always thought that was the job of the Great American Novel, not reality TV, not computer networks, but things have changed. Thank God.

I love that I spent an hour on Monday selling a corporate client on how we'd help put faces to their "story," which they already value as a central part of their brand. I love that I have a chance to sell without lying, and use my skills to accomplish something rewarding while getting paid.

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The day after Thanksgiving, if I follow through on my National Day of Listening pledge, I'm supposed to listen to my mother for a full hour. We have a difficult relationship, but she is here for the holiday anyway.

Why don't I turn away when opportunity knocks like this? Maybe I'm strong enough to plunge right in to a challenging learning experience, perhaps flowers will pour from her mouth in a surprise fit of something-or-other. Could be that this process is just part of some rebellion I'm having against being healed, maybe this is my way to insist on banging my head against a familiar wall one more time.

I know part of my mother's annoying behavior is caused by illness, but after 43 years I still have trouble being around it and making room for my real live self.

Around her I feel like the child I was, the one who was constantly asked to be different; at other times I'm in the shoes of her parent, whose job it was to take care. The one who failed so miserably. If I saw my mother as a child who needed only love and empathy, I'd probably accept her and feel more sad than angry.

The sadness is like a well. I don't want to shine a light down there.

But an hour? With my ears? I'll try. Wish me luck.

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Engage With Grace: Your End-of-Life Wishes

I'm participating with many other bloggers in a blog rally for Engage With Grace – a movement aimed at having all of us understand and communicate our end-of-life wishes. At the heart of Engage With Grace are five questions, often shown as a single Powerpoint slide, designed to get the conversation started. We’ve included them at the end of this post. They’re not easy questions, but they are important.

Engage with Grace targets a time of year when most of us are with the very people with whom we should be having these tough conversations -- our closest friends and family. To help ease us into these tough questions, and in the spirit of the season, this year's Engage With Grace conversation might open with five parallel questions that ARE pretty easy to answer:



Silly? Maybe. But it underscores how having a template like this -- just five questions in plain, simple language -- can deflate some of the complexity, formality and even misnomers that have sometimes surrounded the end-of-life discussion.

So with that, we’ve included the five questions from Engage With Grace below. Think about them, document them, share them.




To learn more please go to www.engagewithgrace.org. This post is based on text written by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace team. If you want to reproduce this post on your blog (or anywhere) you can download a ready-made html version here.

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Jumbled Former Shrine, #3

At one time this Virgin by the Aguilar sisters of Oaxaca was working on Gavin's cancer, along with some favorite fabric bits, milagros, pictures, a candle, and other souvenirs. Over 3+ years it's been joined by my perfume, lost toys, and jewelry I don't bother to put away. The candle was lit for every night of nookie with The First, sometimes Mr. Fresh and I bother to light it, too. And then a pile of Mr. Fresh's old receipts, discarded drawings by Short Stack are all piled on top.

This is one of my last pictures from the old house.

I look at this prominent chaotic neglect in my bedroom and think of Robert Venturi's oft-quoted statement:

"I am for messy vitality over obvious unity. I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning; for the implicit meaning as well as the explicit function..."

and I wonder if it's that, or if I'm just lazy. Or whether I didn't want the prayers to work, because the shrine didn't look a whole lot better for very long even when it was supposed to be on duty. (Your deity expects a clear view of what you'd like. I'm sure an old toilet paper roll, as great an art supply as it is, isn't something devoutly to be wished).

It's a fragment, archaeology of five years' accretion between dreams that transcended and stuff that got done. A little taste of life in that place, at that time. Nothing big.


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