Holding Out, Seeing It Through

Although the summer has been long and hot by our local standards, apparently it will not last forever. Already I can see the maple leaves getting tinges of brown and yellow. When I walk out any door of my house in the morning, I have to brush cobwebs away. I do feel a certain regret that I may have ruined the spider’s day. I imagine the spider sighing, and beginning again. If spiders sigh. I sigh a lot, and I am beginning again. My husband died last year, and this year is all about starting over. The web of my life was torn down, you might say, and now I’m sighing, and grieving, and starting over. His name was Rick and he was a good guy, he was the best, and I miss him terribly. We were married for a long time, and while I’m certain he sometimes found me as irritating as I sometimes found him because that is married life, we were best friends and he was my most ardent advocate. I took care of him through five long years of illness, so when he was gone I suddenly had lost my purpose, my work, and my friend. Fortunately we are wired to be stunned with shock when someone we love dies. There is a numbness and disbelief – this isn’t really happening, is it? – that carries us through the first days and weeks. The numbness does wear off, gradually, as you come to accept your loss. I did not know if I was sad or depressed those first months. In retrospect, a little of both. Thinking about it helped me sort out the difference between sadness and depression. Sadness is an active emotion caused by some event, like, say, the death of a spouse. Depression is like having a decaying dead animal on a string around your neck, and you don’t know how long you will have to wear it, or why it got there in the first place. In talking with other widows, we agree that this grieving process sucks, and oh, it sucks for a long time, persisting long after the initial sympathy and kindness fade and life goes on. The dreams, the grief bursts (like a cloudburst but of emotion), the stupid things well-meaning people say to you, the sudden punches to the gut that you don’t see coming. The night before I left on a trip for California, I realized I couldn’t call Rick from the road like I always did. Pow. All the little milestones, like the day of the month on which he died coming around again. He died on the 29th, so I tell myself that in February I’ll only be reminded every four years. I ran across this quote from Dietrich Bonheoffer the other day: “Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through.” (thanks and a tip o’ the hat to Terry Hershey for passing this along) Yep. So that’s what we do. We hold out. We see it through. I have good friends who have been a support and a blessing through these early months. I have my faith, and that sustains me. I have come to a greater appreciation of people who show up. I have picked up my guitar again, and I am singing and writing. These are the things which have supported me throughout my life, and they do not fail me now. I have felt Rick’s love in my heart. Occasionally some legal document will arrive in the mail that tells me another piece of the official paperwork that has to be done and recorded when someone dies has been completed. The last one came a few weeks ago. I read it and said, “Well, Rick, I guess now you’re really dead.” He doesn’t talk back to me, but occasionally funny things happen. Last week I found a piece of dialysis equipment on the floor on his side of the bed. The dialysis machine has been gone these eight months, and I thought I had cleaned up on that side of the bed thoroughly, under the bed, under the nightstand, around the mattress. So where was that piece of plastic hiding all this time, and how did it leap out into the middle of the floor? I don’t know, but seeing it made me feel like Rick was saying hello, and I am learning to be easy on myself about perceptions that might seem a little woo-woo to some people. It’s a great adventure, going on alone after your partner has passed. It can be done, I’ve learned. It’s not something I would have chosen, given the option, but there was no choice, so I’m building a new life. I’m holding out, and seeing it through. That’s what we do.

The Joys of Later Life

I knew a couple, both in their seventies, who lost a son to suicide. When the mother replied to my sympathy card, she said that she was sad that her son would not come to know the joys of later life. At the time I did not know about such joys, but a few decades have rolled by since and I’m beginning to get it. For one thing, by the time you’re in your late sixties, you’ve had pretty much every kneejerk reaction a person can have, and you understand that drama is best left on the stage, because in real life drama is a waste of time and energy. For another thing, you begin to make peace with mortality, your own and that of other people. Remember the first time you grasped the fact of your own expiration? What a bummer. You may have felt terror. You may have wept. You may have shivered and shuddered alone in your bed in the dark. Different people are bound to have different feelings about death, but in general I’d say they’re against it. I once worked as a chore assistant for a 100-year-old woman, whom I shall call Mildred (not her name). She was in a wheelchair, but her mind was working fine, thank you. About all she could do anymore was crochet baby blankets and tell me I’d missed a spot on the carpet while vacuuming, but she was alive and lively for all that. Her 97-year-old cousin, Gertrude (not her name) came to visit one week, and while Mildred napped Gertrude told me that some people, like Mildred, wanted to live forever. Gertrude said, “I’m 97 and I’m ready to go any time, but Mildred just wants to go on and on.” She shook her head with an air of irritation, as if to say, honestly, doesn’t she know when it is time to quit? So apparently the realization of your own mortality and your feelings about it evolve as you re-visit the prospect over the years. Perhaps as time goes on you realize, like Gertrude, that there might come a time when you are ready to rest. As you watch friends and family slip into their eternal rest, you grieve deeply, but you realize that your time is coming, and that if all the people you knew and loved and who knew and loved you are gone, well, heck, who is left to remember those dances at the Spanish Castle (or Avalon Ballroom) with you? Even in age, even in grief, even in physical infirmity, even knowing that there will be a last dance and you’ll have to go home, you can feel the joy of being alive. My husband passed away last year after many years of illness that ground him down. I am gradually getting used to his being gone, though I miss him terribly. He was the best company, and we shared forty years of history. I don’t think the wedding vows are supposed to be a check list – you know, richer, check; poorer, check; sickness, yeah, dammit; health – it was nice while it lasted, and so on – but I think we hit most of those conditions at one time or another during our life together. When you’re getting married, you’re hearing the vows and saying, yeah, yeah, whatever, I will. You don’t realize that those vows are covering all the things that are really going to happen in a lifetime. But I digress. So I’m a widow now, and I’m getting old, and I don’t have much in the way of worldly fortune. And yet – when I got up this morning the sun was shining. I went out in the yard and pulled up a few feverfew plants – don’t worry, they’ll be back. Feverfew is a tenacious plant – and the exercise made me feel good, as well as the new unobstructed view of the flower bed. I made a cup of coffee, gave the dog her morning biscuits, and sat on the kitchen porch watching the chestnut-backed chickadees pulling seed out of the bird feeder, and I sang: “My life goes on in endless song, above earth’s lamentation…” Turns out that there are joys in old age. Turns out that grace rains down, and life bubbles up, and it’s good to be alive, just because, even if you’re lonely and grieving and walk with a limp and have high cholesterol and life seems too hard sometimes. So stick around, friends. You wouldn’t want to miss the joys of later life.

Mother, Music, Memory, Cookies

Juanita, in an undated picture. Probably early 1940s. Her name was Juanita. She grew up in a Salvation Army orphanage in El Paso, Texas. It was not a kind and gentle place. She and the other children were beaten sometimes. “Those people were ignorant,” she once said to me. She had a gift for playing piano, and started out as a child playing for all the orphanage and school shows. In her early teens she was singing songs and playing the mandolin for the Salvation Army on the street in El Paso. The last time I heard her play piano was three weeks before she died at age 86. She was playing and I was singing old songs we both knew. Actually, it was a perfect way for us to say good-bye, going out on the best aspect of our relationship. I got the music genes from that side, not to mention my mother’s mandolin and my aunt’s guitar. My mother was angry all the time when I was growing up, but if you’ve been a parent yourself, you understand that. When I was the age she was when I was a teenager and had teenagers of my own, I thought: my mother went through this without therapy or antidepressants. Most parents in the 1950s thought it was okay to hit children. That’s the way it was. My parents hit. Maybe when you’ve been beaten bloody in the orphanage when you were a child, merely hitting or slapping your child doesn’t seem that serious to you. Most parents believe it is wrong to hit children now. Oh, I know it still happens, but it’s not as accepted. My mother must have had at least a qualm or two about her parenting. Sometime in her later years she asked me, “Was there anything I could have done better as a parent?” I thought for a minute, and said, “It would have been nice not to have been hit so much.” “I never hit you!” she exclaimed. “And I only hit your brother once!” I was stunned into silence by this revisionist history, but it turned out that wasn’t all – when I listened to her reminisce about my brother and me, she said how fortunate she’d been because we were such good kids and never got into trouble. I decided then that selective memory wasn’t so bad. I assume it gave her a more peaceful old age than she might have had if she remembered what I remembered. In my case, all the smart mouthing, marijuana smoking, hitchhiking up and down the coast, folk singing, and hanging out with men, Socialists, Catholics, and Jews. So much for my Baptist Republican upbringing. I will not mention exactly how my brother, the present Republican business owner and family patriarch, got into trouble in his youth. I will only say I was surprised to hear her talking about how we never got into trouble. When my mother was in her 80s and I was in my 50s, we would have long telephone calls about things that were happening, or about family members. Everyone agreed that one particular aunt was a piece of work, for example, so that was always common ground. Those phone calls were some of the best times I had with my mother. Perhaps we had both accepted that we would never accept each other as we were, and we accepted that. The night she died, after I got the phone call, I woke Rick and told him she was gone. “She gave me music,” I said sadly. “She gave you hell,” he said sternly. Well, yeah. It’s tempting for some of us to make excuses for people who hurt us. But she did give me music. And hell. She also gave me the recipe for oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. If there’s anything I’d like to pass along to you from my mother, it’s this recipe, as she typed it on the index card I still have in my recipe box: Juanita’s Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies 1/2 cup shortening 1/2 cup brown sugar 1/2 cup granulated sugar 1 egg 1 tablespoon water 1/2 teaspoon vanilla 3/4 cup sifted enriched flour 1/2 teaspoon soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 1-1/2 cups quick rolled oats, uncooked 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips 1/4 cup chopped walnuts (optional) Cream shortening. Add sugars gradually & cream well. Beat in egg until fluffy. Stir in water & vanilla. Sift together flour, soda & salt and add to creamed mixture. Add rolled oats, chocolate chips, & nutmeats. Drop from a teaspoon onto greased baking sheet and bake in a moderate over (375°) for 12 minutes. Number of cookies depends on how big you make them. Baking time can vary widely! Start checking at 8 minutes to avoid burnt cookies. Enjoy.

Foggy Widow Breakdown

On Sunday the 29th of June I stopped for a bowl of clam chowder at the Ivar’s Seafood Bar in Burien. It was a pleasant sunny afternoon, and the dozens of multi-colored petunias planted around the restaurant lit it up in a cheerful summery way. As I got out of the car I remembered the petunias being there last year. My husband, Rick, had a monthly medical appointment in Renton, and on the way home we often stopped at this Ivar’s so he could get fish and chips. He loved fish and chips, and he especially loved them drenched in malt vinegar. Looking at those petunias I realized that the last time I’d stopped there was with Rick. I was swamped in memories. I pulled out my notebook and wrote, among other things: “Looking backward and knowing it is time to turn my gaze forward.” It is easy to forget, when remembering those who are gone, that there are people still here who love and need us. My granddaughter brought me up short on that point one night when I was whining about losing Rick and Cousin Nancy. “There are other people who love you,” she said in a stern, what-am-I-chopped-liver? voice. Oh yeah. It was later that Sunday that I realized that when I was having my chowder at Ivar’s it was six months pretty much to the minute since Rick died, and that realization hit like a punch in the stomach, and left me a little unbalanced for several days. Widowed friends have been sympathetic to me about these milestones and first times. Thanks to Anne, Marcia, Crystal, and others for sparing a little grace for a sister. Making the transition from being one of a couple to being one person alone means inevitable passages through shaky and sometimes plain sorrowful times. Because I was feeling vulnerable and insecure, I found myself wanting to do something which I thought I’d left behind: I wanted to write letters to turnips. By “turnips” I mean people who have no love to give, as in, “You can’t squeeze blood out of a...” People who, as the saying goes, just weren’t that into me. People I would write to hoping I’d change their minds and they’d finally love me. Turnips. I thought I’d outgrown that exercise in futility and discouragement, but suddenly the compulsion was back. It’s about trying to win my mother’s love, you see. Looking back I’d say she loved me instinctively, but she simply did not feel enough inner abundance to be a generous, nurturing person, or even to be nice a lot of the time. She did have it in her to be critical, always ready to tear me down (or anyone – you know, it wasn’t entirely personal. I happened to be the most convenient target). How I strained for her approval and praise, or even a little damned civility, but she simply did not have it in her. At various times of my life I have tried to persuade people to love me and be nice to me, trying to make the childhood drama have a happy ending, I suppose. Wow, what a waste of time and effort. You’d think I’d learn. I thought I had learned. Ah, the mighty rational mind! So clever, and so on top of things! But the dumb heart still goes running out of the house and down the street without its pants on. I broke down and wrote a letter to one of the turnips. Annoyed with myself, I addressed the envelope and put a stamp on it and tossed it on the kitchen table. Got up the next morning and looked at it. Then I picked it up and walked it in to my office and put it through the shredder, singing, ♪ AIN’T IT A GRAND AND GLORIOUS FEELING! TYAH-TYAH-TI-DAH! ♪ * The experience gave me a dose of humility. When you’re vulnerable it’s easy to fall into the old ways that never worked in the first place. The feeling passed, as feelings do. Six months after Rick’s passing I am starting to look forward, and I am starting to be more alive in the present, and I am more aware of how his love lives on for me, healing me and holding me, making me more whole so I can go on without him. Like everything else about grieving, it is a blessed surprise. *(Thanks and a tip o’ the hat to Clare Briggs, great American cartoonist.)

Geezerette Walks Down Memory Lane. Again.

Photo caption: Concert audience at Monterey Pop Festival. Photo by Chuck Blair appeared in the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian on June 20, 1967. A few weeks ago Sam Andrew of Big Brother and the Holding Company posted a video of Big Brother at the Monterey Pop Festival in June, 1967, on Facebook. It is a clip taken from the movie “Monterey Pop,” and it is of Janis Joplin singing, “Ball and Chain.” I watched it again with some fascination, because, children, I was there. Toward the end of the song when she sang, “Buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-BAYBEE!” it felt like our heads exploded. By the way, I have never heard a recording of Janis Joplin, or seen a movie, including this clip of her performance at Monterey, that captured the electricity of her live performances. This clip may come the closest. How often do you witness a moment in time that changes everything for a person? When Janis Joplin sang, “Ball and Chain” at Monterey, she was seen and taken seriously for the first time by all the music industry people who were there, and suddenly they were interested in her. It was the beginning of her career in the music world beyond San Francisco. At the time I was thrilled that the world was finding out about her, because I believed she was the most exciting singer in the world. It didn’t occur to me that becoming famous could ruin, and prematurely end, her life. Another performer who was already subject to the tender mercies of the recording industry but exploded into popular consciousness at Monterey was Jimi Hendrix, coming back from a stay in England to conquer America. He had been working as a guitarist for most of his young life, including a gig in Little Richard’s band, where he must have studied the master, because Hendrix knew how to manipulate an audience. Unlike many of the musicians who played at the festival, he was the whole package – innovative guitarist and consummate entertainer. He had a sly sense of humor that allowed him to play with the audience. Yes, I was there to see him, but I missed the legendary burning of his guitar because at that point the audience stood on their chairs so they could see what was happening, and I didn’t jump up on a chair fast enough. All I saw was the backs of all these people standing on chairs in front of me. When the guy on the chair next to me finally got back down I asked what happened, and he shrugged and said, “Oh, he burned his guitar. Same old thing.” Joplin and Hendrix went on from that weekend and those performances to rock the world. They burned through the cultural atmosphere like the shooting stars they were for a little over three years. They were born about six weeks apart, and died about two weeks apart. Hendrix died on September 18, 1970, and Janis died on October 4, 1970. They were 27 years old. People are still talking about them and buying their music. I was a student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo that spring, and hitchhiked up through Big Sur to get to the festival, catching a ride in a hearse that was driven by another Cal Poly student. I was lucky enough to get a spot to stay in the volunteers’ building on the fairgrounds, and when Janis and her friends showed up there to celebrate after the concert on Sunday night, I went up to her and jabbered about how great she was and how much I loved her singing while she looked at me as if wondering how dangerous I really was. I picked up on that and left her alone after that. I did not meet Jimi Hendrix. On Monday morning I caught a ride with some hippies heading north and they dropped me off in my home town, where I got into another fight with my parents and headed back to San Francisco to spend a second summer living between Berkeley and the Haight-Ashbury. In retrospect I’d judge that there is a lot to be said for not being famous. Famous people tend to die young. Having seen and met some famous people in my youth, however, gives me some fun reminiscences of an evening. Did I ever tell you about the time…oh. I did? Well, never mind.

Spam, Social Security, Purpose, and Gypsy Rose Lee

Got an email in my junk box in which the subject line announced I had won a UK lottery. It was awfully good news. This living on Social Security is not a piece of cake. I can barely afford cake. The subject line made me smile once, a little, before I deleted the email unread. Living on Social Security you can budget. You can designate where every penny is going, but life doesn’t change that much simply because you’re living on a fixed income. There are always those little surprises, like that emergency room bill that wasn’t quite covered by insurance. There are the occasional expected expenses, but so seldom expected that you forget to budget for them, like the new tires I need to get for my car before next winter. Plus the 140,000 mile major vehicle maintenance, which I really ought to schedule soon seeing as how the Honda is up to about 144,000 miles. Shoes. You have to have shoes around here. My shoes are sandals, usually, and I hadn’t looked at my sandals for a long time. They were my best pair, in my mind, so I was shocked when I looked at them to see that the heels were worn right down to the leather uppers, and the leather was fraying. Those poor babies were beyond repair. So now I have a new best pair. That took care of any wiggle room in the budget for this month, and that was before the ER bill. It really is extraordinary how many things I’m noticing as I return to the land of the living. When you begin to recover awareness of the life that’s been going on without you while you were immersed in your personal drama, you find that there is a lot of catching up to do, and you might feel a little lost without the intense sense of purpose and direction that propelled you through those years of your spouse’s illness. On the one hand you are deeply relieved that those hard years are behind you. On the other hand, doing the dishes and laundry and vacuuming and other household chores, while gratifying in its own way, does not give you a feeling of worth and purpose. Plus, there is now nothing to distract you from the dishes, laundry, and vacuuming. So I was pleased when my granddaughter auditioned for and was cast in Drama Dock’s summer production, the 1959 musical “Gypsy.” I am now a stage grandmother for my granddaughter while she’s in a play about a stage mother, Rose Hovick, and her two daughters, June and Louise. The family lived in West Seattle. Rose found West Seattle boring, and decided she would make her talented daughter June into a vaudeville star with Louise as a supporting performer, and the three of them would live the exciting lives of touring vaudevillians. Both of Rose’s daughters would grow up to find success in show business – June as actress June Havoc, and Louise as Gypsy Rose Lee, the classiest stripper ever to remove a glove. The true story of Rose Hovick’s life would have been a little too out there for America in the late 1950s, so the play is a fictionalized version of how Louise became Gypsy Rose Lee. It’s a good show, well written, with some great laughs and great songs, some of which became hits back in the day. My granddaughter and everyone else working on the show is enjoying the community that is forming among the cast and crew. The show is about to kick into high gear with nightly rehearsals. It opens in July. You’ll be hearing about it in coming weeks. It’s nice to have something new to think about, and work on. It’s especially nice to say at rehearsal time, “Oop, can’t do the chores. Gotta go.” Like all denial, it only goes so far. Guess I’ll go work on the budget, or else fold the laundry. Have you ever noticed that having to work on a budget makes folding laundry attractive?

Beautiful Cousin Nancy Moves On

Cousin Nancy died on my birthday. You might think that feels bad, but it feels bittersweet. She is at peace now. No more pain, no more drugs, no more cancer. She’s with the angels, no doubt telling them how they can do their jobs better. She could always tell you a better way to do something. It could be annoying, but it was the basis for her working career, streamlining manufacturing processes and organizing warehouses. She was born in 1947, the second of two daughters. After Nancy’s birth her mother, Chick, began to notice symptoms which were diagnosed as multiple sclerosis. Chick raised the girls and ran the home from her wheelchair as long as she could, and then the girls had to take over. Nancy would come home from school and do whatever needed to be done to take care of her mother, and then make dinner for the family. Some days Nancy would come home and find her mother had fallen out of her chair. She described rolling her mother onto a blanket and dragging her down the hall to the bedroom, cleaning her mother up, getting her into bed in a fresh nightie and jacket. Chick died in April, 1964, when we were juniors in high school. Nancy’s older sister Charlotte married soon after, and Nancy lived with her dad until she turned 18, at which point he told her she was on her own. He refused to pay for any further education for either of the girls, or to support them. Nancy got a job as a bank teller and found a place to live. She enjoyed the single life, and then she met Jerry. They moved in together and later married. They were happy the first few years, and in 1976 had a son, Jeff. Unfortunately Jerry started to drink. When he lost his job in Oakland, he found another in Long Beach and they relocated. Jerry’s alcoholism progressed, and one morning Nancy got up and dressed herself and Jeff in several layers of clothes. She said good-bye to Jerry as if she was going to work and taking Jeff to school, got in her car with Jeff, and drove up 101 as fast as she could, back to the Bay Area. Jerry spent the rest of his life harassing her and Jeff and not paying child support. Jerry died in 1994. Nancy settled in Benicia, a lovely little town on the Carquinez Straits, to raise her son. She got a job and stayed with it for over 20 years, until the company downsized her. She also got a job cleaning up and closing a laundromat seven nights week. When Jeff spent weekends with his dad, she did housecleaning jobs. During those years, when I went to visit Nancy, she’d go to sleep mid-conversation. She had a couple more manufacturing jobs. One moved the factory to China. One she was pushed out of by a guy who was later arrested for his double dealing in his work. After that she had a series of jobs that were unsatisfactory. As she reached her late 50s she discovered that it was pretty hard to find a job if you were an older, plus-sized woman. In 2010, she was diagnosed with colon cancer. She had surgery followed by six months of chemo, and was pronounced cured. She went to her son’s wedding in Hawaii in November of 2011, which was the happiest day of her life if her expressions in the pictures are anything to go by. The cancer came back in February, 2012. Nancy lived on chemo from then until this spring, gradually becoming more disabled. This winter she went blind in one eye. That was her last straw. She turned to her sister Charlotte one day and said, “I don’t want to suffer.” Pause. “I’m suffering.” She went into hospice at the end of April. I drove to California to say good-bye. After I got back, I talked to her on the phone a couple of times. She was on heavy painkillers and I could hardly understand her slurred speech. She was barely here anymore. Her friend Anne called me last Monday night to tell me that Nancy was gone. Those are the bare and by no means complete facts of Nancy’s life. They don’t tell you how much fun she was, how upbeat in face of the adversity, how generous, with how little complaint she lived through three years of chemotherapy, and indeed her whole hard knock life. She loved her family, her friends, gambling, and staring at the ocean, which she called, “Renewing my staring certificate.” That, she said, was her church. Rest in peace, my sweet beautiful cousin.