I Am Oldkay

My dad, John Litchfield, contemplating a large red delicious, autumn 1962. He passed away in 1975 from heart disease. My son JD called this morning to see how I was and I meant to say I was okay, but my tongue slipped and I said, “I am old … kay.” Then I laughed because “oldkay” seemed like a pretty good word to describe my current condition. Old, and okay. In our last episode, I had been told I had a blockage in an artery, and was scheduled to go in for an angiogram. I was thinking it was my turn to get a stent, or if things were bad enough, have surgery. Whatever needed to be done, I was up for it, because I find I have a lot of dedication to sticking around to see what happens next. Heart disease runs in the family. My father was not quite 63 when he had his final heart attack. That was in 1975. Bypass surgery was being done, but not widely, and not for my dad in our little town. My brother had a heart attack at age 55. He was given a stent, and now at 70 he is going strong. My mom died at 86 of heart disease. She was taking nostrums for upset stomach when what she really had was upset heart. By the time we figured out what the real problem was, it was too late for her. I figured between my notoriously bad diet and my genetics, my number was up. I was having terrible angina. So off I went to the hospital for an angiogram. Here’s how it went: First, my sister-from-another-mother, Becky, drove me in for the procedure. She presented me with a new teddy bear, Chauncey, to keep me company in the hospital. You may laugh, but I love to have a teddy bear to cling to when I’m in the hospital. For those of you with delicate stomachs, you might want to skip ahead to the results paragraph, because I’m now going to describe an angiogram. You wait around for a few hours in the day surgery pod. You gripe about the wait to Becky, who gets annoyed with you for your griping. You get one wrist shaved, because the wire (!) for the angiogram goes in through your wrist artery. You also get your nether regions (if you catch my drift) shaved because if you need a stent, it goes in through your femoral artery. The lady who did that was heavy handed, so I felt like I was on fire, and not in the fun way, for a couple of hours. The itching was terrific. I looked like I was starring in a Michael Jackson video. You are wheeled into the cath lab. It’s cold in there, so they wrap you in those warm hospital blankets, ah. That is the last pleasant sensation you’ll have for a while. Your wrist is swabbed down with blue anti-bacterial soap, placed into operating position, and then the doc and his team go to work. If you think having dye injected into your arm and a wire being inserted into the artery and up your arm hurts a little, you are correct. The pain quickly subsides and your heart is on television and everyone is looking at your arteries, except you. Your view is of the underside of the camera that is taking the pictures. RESULTS PARAGRAPH: What the medical team saw in my case was: pretty clear arteries. The doc decided to stress out the particular artery which was the most clogged, and it worked okay. The stress test, which is done with a drug, was not pleasant, but it was only for a minute or two. The angiogram was finished, all the gear pulled out of my arm. As they began to wheel me away I looked over at the image of my heart on the screen – the artery was a nice thick line with a little curl, kind of like the one Superman has on his forehead, and the artery did not look blocked. So that was that. No stent. No surgery. I was stunned. Really? My second thought was, “Prayer works.” The cardiologist came by to see me before I left the hospital and told me I did not have “more than 30% blockage,” which is acceptable and does not qualify for interference or repair. Then he said, “You are in no danger of having a heart attack.” After walking around with severe chest pain for weeks, that’s pretty sweet news. Becky drove me home. I went to bed and slept for fourteen hours. I have microvascular angina. It is caused by the smallest coronary blood vessels going into spasm and cutting off blood to the heart muscle. It is brought on by activity, or by mental stress. Do I have stress? When medical people have asked me that this year, I have answered, “Well, my husband died … “ and then I don’t really have to go down the list, because that is considered stress enough. So that’s the story, folks. Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. I am in pretty good shape for my age and condition. I am, in short, oldkay.

Nine Months Along

Me and Marley, keeping going It has been nine months since my husband died, and every day I adjust a little more to the new normal. It is not lost on me that nine months is the length of a human pregnancy. Maybe it is a length of time in which we are able to fundamentally change. Sometimes now I’ll have three or four hours in a row when I’m cheerful and life feels good. Grief is a predictably unpredictable ride, though – as is life, but more so. I was watching “The Vicar of Dibley” the other night, and Geraldine (played by Dawn French, one of my favorite British actresses) was walking down a peaceful country lane minding her own business, when she stepped into a hidden hole and disappeared straight down into a pool of water that was over her head. Sploosh. Disappeared, just like that. She came up sputtering, of course. Grief can be like that. You think you’re doing fine, and then, sploosh, you step into one of those holes. It isn’t always that dramatic, but my point is that you don’t see it before you’re in it. And what do you do? You climb out as well as you can, and you keep on walking. You do what you need to do – get the kid to school, wash the dishes, do the laundry, go to the grocery store. You talk to kind people who care enough to listen. You see your therapist, if that’s how you roll. You pray. You think about your departed loved one. Sometimes you sob until your ribs are sore. You write in your notebook if that’s your thing. You sing or draw or pursue whatever your art or craft is, because there is heart’s ease in creation and using your hands. You watch the feelings and days go by, and sometimes you ask, how long, Lord? Life does not stop for you. It goes on and it takes you with it, and sometimes you realize something inside has changed. Then you feel like you are betraying your departed loved one by feeling better. Here I am, laughing again, enjoying other people and myself. A couple of years before Rick passed, he said he wished that we could both die at the same time – go out together after living together for so long. At that time I thought, speak for yourself, pal. I think he thought it was romantic, or maybe he thought I could not survive his death, or not survive it well. After he died there were times when I felt the wisdom of his wish. It was, it is, awful not having him here anymore. I miss him so much. Sometimes I find myself thinking, well, I didn’t go with him, but I wouldn’t mind joining him. It’s so hard going on without him. I would not kill myself – that has never been a choice for me – but as I age there are encroachments, physical things that go wrong with me. For example, a blocked artery in my heart, I found out this week. Yikes, huh? A few months before Rick died, his social worker called me in for a little chat. She asked if I had noticed that his health seemed to be in a decline, as the staff at the kidney center had noticed. I said yes, I had noticed. I was relieved to hear her say it because I was frightened. Knowing that his medical team was aware somehow made me feel less scared, or at least less alone. We talked a little about what the future might hold. I told her that I knew I could survive Rick’s dying. I figured I would be a little ape crap haywire (cleaned that up for publication) for a couple of years, but I thought I could live through it. That was my intellectual take on the subject. Having an intellectual belief about an experience is not the same as living through it. Our culture puts a lot of energy into finding true love, doesn’t it? The idea is to find that person, get together, get married, maybe raise a family, and live happily ever after. What our culture does not do is prepare people for the fact that even in the best relationships where both of you stay committed, “ever after” has an expiration date. I asked myself in the first few months after Rick’s passing, well, now what do I do, now that I’ve outlived happily ever after? I don’t expect to get over losing Rick, or to have “closure,” which I think is a myth. I have been given the gift of a little more time to be myself. And who is that, without my dear companion next to me to reflect me? I’m going to find out, but first I have to have this clogged artery in my heart opened up. See, when I’m actually confronted with the possibility of my own demise, I say, whoa, Nelly! I want to live! I want to be an annoying old lady for as long as I can! Nuts to that following Rick to the other side. It’ll happen soon enough. Stay tuned, folks. There will be more to come, I swear it.

Chewing Creatures

Marley having a nice lie down in my kitchen porch chair this summer, before she tore that screen down The deer ate my nasturtiums this summer. They kept my apple tree’s leaves trimmed at an even height across the bottom, chomped on my columbines, stripped the leaves and buds from the roses, ate the potato plants back to nubs, consumed the cosmos, and even munched the mallow that my mother once was pleased to tell me is a weed. A tasty weed to a deer, apparently. Deer will be deer. This is the first time since I moved here in 1977 that they have been so bold as to graze inside the fenced yard. As far as they are concerned, the fence is nothing. I don’t like their chewy depredations, and may have said a few unkind words about them. My flowers make me happy, and losing them to the deer makes me sad. I’ve always had a “live and let live” attitude toward the deer, but they are not letting my plants live now, and it is causing some hard feelings. But the plants will grow back, mostly, if the deer stay away for a while, which they seem to do. They come in and feast, then go away for a few weeks. Today I have a different kind of chewing situation. I didn’t sleep well last night, and had to get up early this morning, so was looking forward to having a nap this afternoon. When I got home, I let the dog out and went into the bedroom to lie down. A couple of hours later when I woke up I went into the kitchen to let the dog in. Now, here’s the thing about my dog. Marley has separation anxiety. Perhaps it is because she was abandoned more than once before VIPP rescued her, or perhaps it is simply her anxious nature. A couple of times in the past when she was on what she considered the wrong side of a door, she tried to chew her way through it, leaving a splintery patch in the door jamb. Today she freaked out because I left her outside, and because I was asleep I didn’t hear her trying to get in. She had shredded the screen I had hanging in the doorway. It was one of those screens you see on TV, that is two pieces with magnets that hold it together in the middle. It was an ideal solution to the problem of the dog wanting in and out in good weather. Once she learned to go through it, she could go in and out as she wished, and the screen kept out the usual plague of flying insects that get in the house in the summer. No mosquitoes or mosquito hawks, no big slow buzzing flies, no regular house flies, no moths. I really enjoyed not having them. Well, that screen is history now, and I’m sorry for that, but she also tried to chew her way through the door again. The small chewed patch in the door jamb is now a big chewed patch, with large splinters sticking out, and more large splinters lying on the porch, plus a little blood from where she hurt herself on the splinters. A close inspection of the interior of her mouth with a flashlight showed me the abrasions on her gums. No splinters there, thank goodness. It is gratifying to have a dog who wants to be with me; however, it would be nice if Marley didn’t freak out in such a destructive way to herself and the house when she has an anxiety attack. Some of you will say it was my fault for leaving her outside and going to sleep. I can’t deny it, as usually I would not do that, but I was so tired. So now the flying bugs are with me – those big buzzing bombers, and tiny little gnats or whatever they are. At least there is more food for the indoor spiders (always trying to look on the bright side). Oh well. The dog will heal. It is autumn now, and the door will be closed more than open. I can get a new screen next summer. When I got up this morning and went out to have coffee on the porch, I saw one small, pale lavender cosmos flower blooming amidst the chewed off stumps of the rest of the cosmos, and it made me feel better somehow. The deer didn’t get them all. Life will keep trying. Good to know. Addendum: A few days after I wrote this, I noticed a white crab spider living on that single cosmos bloom. It's been there now for about a week.

Kvick-Kvick

The happiest part of my day is spent sitting on the kitchen porch after I shoo the dog out of my chair (it gets warm in the morning sun and she likes to lie in it). I sit there drinking my morning coffee and watching the birds at the bird feeder. They are endlessly amusing. Right now there are a lot of Red-breasted Nuthatches coming by. The Chestnut-backed Chickadees still show up, but the Grosbeaks haven’t been by lately. I saw a Hairy Woodpecker the other day – my first one. I haven’t paid close enough attention to recognize individual Chickadees or Nuthatches, and unlike serious birders I do not know one bird song from another. Oh, I know when I hear a crow or a Stellar’s Jay. Those calls are pretty unmistakable, but the little birds all blend together for me. I think it’s the Black-capped Chickadees that remind me of my aunt’s canaries. My aunt had an outdoor cage with two canaries in it for years. This was in balmy central California, and if the weather was harsh, my aunt would lower canvas covers over the screens, so they survived fine out there. At least I think they did. Now I’m wondering for the first time if my aunt was making regular trips to the canary store to get replacements over the years. Another one of those questions I wish I’d thought of when she was still alive. I guess she kept them to listen to their singing, and I remember them tweeting up a storm. There is one chirp the Black-capped Chickadee makes that takes me right back to my aunt’s back yard, and I can see the cage and the canaries again. Oh, and the lemon tree behind the cage. The bird books I consult try to describe the calls and songs of birds on the written page, and honestly, I don’t know why they even bother. If you already know what the bird sounds like, you might read the description and say, why, yes, that is that bird’s song. But if you don’t know it, the descriptions aren’t much help. One bird’s voice description said it went, “Yank yank yank.” I have never heard a bird say, sing, or call anything that sounded to me like “yank yank yank.” Same goes for most of the other written approximations of bird song. For example: the Barn Swallow “utters continuous zip-zip-zip twittering chatter and a kvick-kvick call.” (p. 270, “Birds of Washington State,” Lone Pine Publishing, by Brian H. Bell and Gregory Kennedy) Again, I’ve never heard a bird say kvick-kvick. Sounds like a Yiddish bird to me. So, you want I shouldn’t build my mud nest in the eave over your front door? Kvick you, alta kaka.

I’ll wait here while you google it. When I was young I wanted to be the best singer in the world. As I got older and developed a more rational sense of my own talent, I wanted to be a good enough singer/songwriter that I was respected by other singer/songwriters, which is still a lot to want. Songwriting is a tough row to hoe (I see you songwriters are nodding your heads). It’s not easy because even if you are good, people would rather hear you sing a Johnny Cash song, or anything familiar, than your own precious original creations. Yeah, all songs start out as someone’s precious original creation, but if someone recorded it and had a hit with it, an audience is going to be a lot happier hearing that familiar ditty than your impeccably crafted, but unfamiliar, original song. That’s the way people are. The familiar is more comfortable. That’s why there are so many cover bands that work regularly in bars and cocktail lounges. I also wanted when I was younger to become a better person. I read the self-help books, I went to therapy, I did support groups. Then sometime around my forty-third year I had this epiphany: I’m not going to live long enough to fix myself. Now, in my sixties, I found myself writing to a friend, “Live and learn. Well, actually, I don’t care anymore if I learn anything as long as I keep on living.” My standards and expectations have relaxed, you see. Maybe all I really need to do now is sit in the morning light and drink my coffee and watch the birds and enjoy their songs, and teach the dog new tricks. She learned “spin around” last week, and it was surprisingly gratifying. Maybe that Facebook quiz that said I was best suited to be an animal trainer was right.

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.