Barnmaven

They grow on you

Maybe it's because I'm tired. I've been involved in a project at work that has been, to say the least, consuming. We are undergoing a major systems upgrade and I'm one of the team leads. The conversion starts tonight, and I think as the upgrade part of the project wraps up and the actual launch of the new system has become imminent, I find myself feeling a lot of big emotions. Pride in my work and in the team I've been honored to work with; concern for the people I manage whose workdays will be tough for a while because such a big change makes accomplishing your daily workload pretty tough; anticipation of the period of time beyond those post-launch difficulties, when I'll have less on my plate and more time to be there for my team, more time to listen, more time to engage in my usual activities. 

Considering all of this, it shouldn't be a surprise to find myself overwhelmed by tears this morning as I was driving to work. I'd been idly thinking about the kids' upcoming fall birthdays. My daughter will turn sweet sixteen. My son will become a teenager. They are far past the halfway point in their evolution towards being independent young adults. Sooner than I am ready for, my daughter will learn to drive. The leap of growth that will naturally follow this new independence is going to be the start of her transition into being not my child, but my adult daughter. She will learn what it means to make big decisions, she will learn what it means to have more responsibility, what it means to take care of herself not as a child in her parents' households, but eventually as a young adult in her own living space. All of this big change, it occurred to me, is just a few short years away, far closer on the timeline of being her mother than the years where she still needed help tying her shoes. My thoughts went into overdrive, and I imagined her going off to college somewhere, or moving into her own apartment someday not very far off, and I burst into tears.

I know my job is to turn her into an independent adult. I have always known that someday she would leave my care and go out into the world. I understand that's the deal we make when we bring them into this world. It's just that there was never any point, until now, that I realized just how little time I have left with her. How could anyone ever be ready to see their baby take those first steps out into the world? Even so, I couldn't be prouder of who she is and who she is becoming.  I just have to figure out how to navigate that change without being overprotective while at the same time being just protective enough. You can't let go and cling at the same time; you have to let them know that you're OK with them growing up and that their job was never to take care of you. You have to trust them, trust yourself to let them enter a world that is going to be hard and beautiful and terrifying and exciting. You have to let them experience failure, and make sure they hear you cheering when they have success. I want, more than anything, adult children who need only a minimal amount of therapy to tell their friends, "I have a really good relationship with my mom."

I know all of this, and still, I get to feel my feelings and be sad that my babies are growing up. That's how it works.

 

Healing, finally

In the last twelve months I've published three posts.  Three.  I've written nine. Six posts sit in my drafts folder, unfinished. While I fail at blogging, I succeed majestically at the art of staring at a computer screen, failing to find words. 

It's hard to find the words around big stuff sometimes. If I write about something that's more theoretical or reflective, words come easy. If I try to write while my heart is full, not so much. My heart is full. My words won't flow. Don't ask me how many times I've edited this post.

I wrote in February about going back to physical therapy. I predicted that 2016 would be the year I ride again, and I was right, although I haven't written much about why. I wrote in January that my father passed away, but didn't write much about the last years and months of his life. There's a lot I tend to leave out which in retrospect I shouldn't because these two things might seem disparate, but they are deeply connected.

My dad spent the last several years of his life doing little more than sitting in a chair by the window. He was a diabetic and developed congestive heart failure, a result of which was severe swelling in his feet and ankles. He took a diuretic medication to help with the water retention, but diabetes and CHF are not terrifically friendly to your kidneys, and I think it's a delicate balancing act to get the body to shed enough water to keep the patient breathing but not enough to shut down the kidneys. Eventually the swelling was a permanent condition for him, and he had some loss of feeling in his feet as well. 

He had a terrible time walking, but he was so damned stubborn he'd refuse to use a cane or a walker, instead holding on to furniture and counter tops to make it from his chair to the bathroom or the table or to bed. Occasionally he'd fall, and since he was a large man and my mother a small woman, she could not get him up on her own. At first she called me, but the two of us could not do it. Next she called SG, but he couldn't manage it either, so she ended up being reliant on the local Fire Department to come help. 

After Dad decided to stop taking his medication just before the holidays last year, he had a fall, and when the firefighters came once more to offer assistance, he told one of them that he had decided to stop taking his medication and that he wanted to die. Because of that, the decision was made to take him to the ER and admit him into the hospital for some evaluation. At that time it was determined that he was eligible for hospice care.

After Dad was accepted into hospice and his dementia increased, he was put on an anti-anxiety medication to help keep his mood more stable. This helped a lot with his irritability, but had an even further detrimental effect on his mobility. He finally was willing to use the walker, but needed more and more help getting up and down, getting dressed, using the bathroom. He fell more frequently. Eventually he went to hospice house for a respite stay so that Mom could have time to arrange some help for herself at home, but as it turned out he never came back home, passing away five days later.

Watching how hard this was for my mother was simultaneously heartbreaking and enlightening.

I had reached a point in my own pain and mobility issues where depression and fatigue had fairly well stripped me of the idea that I could or would eventually get better. Any optimism I may have held about being well enough to ride again had exited the building. For the sake of others I often pretended that I still felt I would improve, but my internal dialogue went more along the lines of "You will never get better. NEVER." I understand how unhealthy a place this was for me to be, particularly considering my parenting and work obligations, but I didn't really  have the motivation to change it.

As I witnessed the last months with my father, helping Mom with things like getting him in to bed, getting to and from the table, going to the bathroom, it finally dawned on me that if I wasn't going to do anything to change my own circumstances, I was essentially watching my own future.It wouldn't be much fun for me, but even more importantly, my family was going to suffer for it. In good conscience I needed to find a way to get better.  I just felt like I'd run into so many damn walls with doctors that I was hesitant to go to them for more help. At some point in researching ilipsoas and piriformis inflammation, I came across an article about Graston therapy which sounded promising. I researched local physical therapists and found an office that offered the technique. I gritted my teeth and  made an appointment.

While therapy seemed to be helping in keeping my pain from getting worse, I also wasn't getting any better. I'd have better range of motion and a bit less pain after a session, but if I overdid it between sessions or went too long between, I'd regress.  Finally, after three months, my, PT suggested I visit my pain doctor for another steroid injection to help us get on top of things.

The doctor who performed my stem cell and PRP injections was no longer providing services at the practice I'd gone to, so I decided to try a different orthopedic group. I scheduled a consult with their pain specialist, who decided an updated set of x-rays would be useful. He took one look at them and refused to touch me. He referred me instead for an MRI and a visit to the orthopedic surgeon.

The 8th of August I had my right hip completely replaced.

I AM BIONIC. I also set off metal detectors, which is a great way to get felt up at airports.

All joking aside, I am not sure I can adequately describe the change this has made not just in terms of fixing my busted old body but in the way of curing my soul.

Let me ask you this: do you have a hobby or activity that you engage in that brings you joy, peace, sanity, wholeness, or any combination of these things? If you could no longer engage in that activity, would you be able to easily replace it? What would you do if it was taken away? How would you feel, in general, and how would your self-perception change?

You know, I hesitate to diminish what my horses are to me by calling them a "hobby" or an "interest." They are indescribably more. From the first moment I beheld that first horse - a fat old paint named "Ginger," it's like I was injected with a virus (benevolent or otherwise, hard to say) that wound itself around my DNA. To lose that for such a length of time; to contemplate that horses were perhaps out of my life forever - kind of took away the incentive to do anything beyond remember to breathe in and out once in a while.   It isn't just that what was happening with my body prevented me from being able to ride - it ultimately prevented me from doing much of anything with my horses. Occasionally I'd hobble out to the barn or put a chair in the pasture just to be around them. Even doing groundwork was too painful to be worth it.  In short, I've spent the last couple of years wanting to be with my horses, hoping that someday soon I might be able to ride, but most of the time being very afraid that I would never ride again. 

8 weeks post-surgery I rode my horse for an hour. We walked, trotted, cantered. Nothing hurt. NOTHING HURT. 

The time frame between surgery and being released to ride was short, I think partly because I'm relatively young for a hip replacement patient, but mostly because I was so incredibly motivated to return to my life, to get back in the game. I've since managed three or four good rides, at least two of them better than two hours long. I still feel good. 

SG and I have started going on a morning walk most days, and I feel my stamina improving right along with my mental state. 

I'm so much better. I've been gone from this space for too long. I hope this finds you all well.

Lowering the bar

Its been about three and a half years since I wrote this post, which included some of my birthfamily history and my thoughts about finally putting the past behind me and reaching out to speak to my birthmother.

I never got as far as picking up the phone.  I did make contact via Facebook, and we exchanged a few PM's.  It never got beyond that. I decided that I didn't want it to.

I thought about going to visit her.  I thought about introducing her to my kids.  I thought long and hard, considered my feelings, motivations, intuition and, mostly I just asked myself the question "Why?  Why would I do this?"  I felt that if I was considering introducing my children to someone I had previously considered so emotionally toxic that I wanted nothing to do with her, I would have to come up with some sort of logical reason that it made sense to do so.  Know what?  It didn't. Not whatsoever.  Even if I wasn't going to involve my children, I still couldn't manage to fan the flames of any desire to spend the time and money to make the trip. I never went.  I don't regret it.

Thinking about my birthmother and her relatively recent admission regarding her part in the systematic abuse of her children in the context of my very normal human pondering about my existence and purpose, I realized that forgiving was not the same thing as wanting to have a relationship.  There were so very few potential good things that could come from opening that door, and quite a lot of potentially not-good things. 

I started to write "It's not her fault," but then I had to take that back.  It is not entirely her fault. She wasn't the only abuser of the children she kept, but she did abuse them and she sat back and let others abuse them in especially horrific ways while she spent her time getting drunk and high. When my older sister left home at the age of fourteen, she was a child who had experienced things most adults have never experienced. She left to save herself, but in doing so she had to leave behind her four other siblings.  We've had so many long, tortuous conversations about the knife's edge she walked.  She was homeless, she was just a kid, and she could barely take care of herself much less four children between the ages of five and twelve.  But she was, in many respects, the only mother they'd really had.  When their mom was absent or too busy drinking and drugging, my sister fed them and changed their diapers, tried as best she could to protect them, though she couldn't, not really, nor could she protect herself. She left.  She had to.

She ended up as far away as she could have gotten geographically and still be on the same continent.  She spent 24 years on the opposite coastline, trying to heal, trying to both distance herself from the situation and at the same time trying to figure out how to get her family to be normal.

Normal they have never been, and the resulting fractures from so much dysfunction have created a situation so toxic, so filled with narcissistic, passive-agressive, unrealistic drama that I've made the conscious decision to just not be a part of it.  Periodic exposure has done nothing but solidify that resolve.

I think it is normal for most families to experience a fair bit of sturm und drang when a family member passes, even when they have functional, healthy relationships.  Our ties with those we love get interwoven with material things, and unless someone has made a very complete and detailed will (and sometimes even when they have), relationships are strained when two or more people have a strong emotional attachment to a particular item, or when children feel they are competing for their fair share of what is left behind.  When the family is deeply dysfunctional to begin with, these situations quickly begin to make even characters in shows like Dallas look benign. 

I saw a bit of this when my grandmother passed.  I had no attachment nor sense of entitlement to anything; I was beyond grateful when I found out that she had left a little bit of something for me and also for my children in her will.  My birthmother and the rest of her grandchildren most certainly did feel they had a stake in who got what, and there are those who still speak to certain others with barely repressed rage over certain prized items that ended up in one or the other's possession.

Now, sadly, my birthmother is dying.  She has been given a very short window of time and will be entering hospice care.  I feel bad for her, of course.  No matter how awful a person has been, no matter what they've done, I would never want them to have to suffer through what will most likely be a pretty horrific end-of-life experience.  I even thought, for a brief moment, that it would probably be a good thing to make a short visit to make peace with her.  It felt like it might be the right thing to do, for her, for me.  Almost before that impulse could begin to take shape, however, the infighting and absolute dumbfuckery of this extraordinarily damaged family made it completely out of the question.

I'm not angry, I'm not hurt.  But my sister surely is, and although I'm here for her and she has my shoulder and my ears and my heart, nothing can take away the sting of being unable to go say her last goodbyes to the woman who, while not a mother, was certainly the crucible that shaped the woman she eventually became.  If I didn't love my sister I'd be content to just wish them all well from a distance and let them tear one another apart, piece by piece.  You'd think a dying parent wouldn't be the source of so much angst, but somehow they manage to make this an opportunity to draw lines in the sand, to knock each others' chess pieces off the board, to try and get something, though I'm not sure they even know what it is they want.  I believe, watching them, that  the prospect of watching a pit full of hyenas tearing apart a screaming antelope would be more peaceful.

Distance is a thing of beauty, no doubt about it.

If you need me, I'll be with my mom, hugging her so tightly she can't breathe, thanking her repeatedly for just being my mom.  I'm only sorry Dad's not here so I can thank him too.  There's no substitute for them.  As mildly dysfunctional as we might have been, they were in all the ways that count exactly the kind of parents a person should have. 

Without them? I'd just be another hyena picking antelope carcass out of my teeth.

 

 

 

PT, Redux

 

I started physical therapy. Again. Third time’s the charm, right?

I am trying a different provider this time, and I have to say I’m seeing better results. I chose this after doing some research on a newer technique for connective tissue injuries. It’s called the GrastonTechnique, and it’s sort of like Rolfing, except the practitioner uses a series of stainless steel instruments, which allow them to really get into the muscle and break any adhesions to the fascia, increase heat and blood flow to the affected area, and according to the literature, increase cellular activity (whatever that means).

So far I can tell you two things:

1. It’s working.
2. It HURTS

They do other things in conjunction with the Graston. They usually hurt too. Plus they make me do exercises every day. In short, I’m paying them to torture me, and this is apparently good because I’m getting results. Lots of improvement over a few short weeks. It's a bit of a dark bargain, but worth it if the end results net out the way I'm hoping.

I did have a little setback last weekend when I brought Lala home (finally!). I strung quite a bit of hotwire and cross-fenced the pasture so that I could keep her safe and separate from the other horses. This of course did not stop them from being complete assholes and chasing her through the fence at every opportunity. At one point she ran through fence to get away from Bugs and ended up in the section with Z and Penny, and both of them went after her. I ran after them before remembering I can’t actually run yet and really put a hurting on my hip flexors.

The next week at PT I was so disheartened, but my PTA counseled me not to lose hope, that I’d be surprised how much more quickly I bounced back, and he was right.

This is going to be the year I ride again.  I'm sure of it.

 

 

End of the line

 

My dad passed away last month.

Everyone’s been so kind, asking how Mom is doing. She is doing as well as you might expect. Spend 57 years married to someone, even though caring for him the last few years took up nearly all of her time and energy, even though at the end his dementia made him agitated and angry and often hard to be around, even though all of those things, when that person is no longer there, they leave an enormous void. It takes a fair bit of time to figure out how to fill that void.

It takes some time to figure out who you are when you were someone’s wife and now you are someone’s widow.

I look at all of the things Mom did for Dad, especially in the last months of his life, and then I look at SG, and I hope like hell he will be happy in a care facility.

I’m kidding. I’m sure he will like the candy striper I hire to change his pants and help him with the shower.

I don’t know, maybe it is inappropriate to joke about these things, but you know Dad always injected humor into even the most awful of situations, and so it is something of a reflex. I get in trouble a lot for injecting humor at inappropriate times, so I suppose you could say I got my inheritance early.

It is not a light thing, even though it was expected, to lose a father like mine. He was bigger than life, bigger than mountains to me. He was often very difficult to absorb, he could be extremely difficult and temperamental and he had little tolerance for your feelings. He was also wickedly funny and had the biggest, best laugh. He loved his family more than anything and I have so many wonderful memories from my growing years. Dad gave me the gift of his time and attention, over and over again. He wasn’t just teaching me how to change the oil, steer out of a spin on ice, hitch up the horse trailer and back up my rig. He was giving me the best of himself. We bonded over horses and sports. He never missed a basketball game, not once that I can remember, though I would have appreciated him not telling me to jump higher so often. (I'm TALL, Dad, I don't HAVE to.)

He was in hospice for the last month, first with a home care team and then, at the end, at Hospice House.  They were wonderful.  His propensity to drop the F bomb on a regular basis (also my inheritance, apparently) didn't faze them one bit. 

He lived a good, long life. He loved and he was loved. He was boundless. We will miss him, and come spring we will take his ashes to the salt water and we will raise a glass (or three) in his honor and we will tell stories. Some of them will even be true.

 

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Larger than Life

Larger than Life

I've not written much about my dad here.  Our relationship has been, for as long as I can remember, complicated by our similar natures - emotional, prickly, invested.   Most of my memories of my dad from my late teens through my early twenties involve yelling and tears.  Neither of us seemed able to stop trying to be "right" louder than the other long enough to listen to what the other was saying.

Dad is larger than life in a million different ways.  People don't meet him without being impacted by his huge personality.  I like to think I take after him in that way, but for both of us this is often as detrimental as helpful.  He is deeply emotional, and most of his words and actions bear testimony to it. 

Dad grew up dirt poor.  The youngest of six, he was born to working class parents in Ononta, MI on the Upper Peninsula in 1927,  just before the onset of the Great Depression.  Dad recalls never having new clothes, only hand-me-downs, and when the weather was warm they went barefoot.  When dad was still very young, his family left Michigan on a train bound for Idaho.  Like many depression-era families, his parents hoped to find work, and a better life. 

After the family settled in Post Falls, Idaho, my grandfather did find work, on the CCC and WPA government projects.  He drowned while working on a WPA project on the river in Post Falls .  My father was only 12 years old.

Loss, poverty, hard work - these things shape a person.  Dad is one of the hardest working men I have ever known.  He dropped out of high school at 16 to start earning a living wage in order to help out his family.  He served one tour as an enlisted marine.  He worked on Foss tugs in Alaska, earning his captain's license.  When he met and married my mom he already had a decade behind him as a fireboat captain for the Seattle Fire Department.  In those days, firemen didn't make a terrific living, and so he worked weekends too, taking carpentry and painting jobs to supplement his income so my mother could stay home with my brother and I. 

 

Before he retired from the SPD he and mom bought some acreage on Marrowstone Island.  He built a house there, working on it on his days off.  Retirement didn't last long, however, and it was not long before he started a second career, working on the decks of the Washington ferry system. 

Whenever I recall my dad during the years of my childhood, I picture him working constantly. If he wasn't at his job, he was fixing a car, putting up fence, building a barn.

I will never in my life hear the phrase "Hard Working Man" without picturing my dad.

I spent most of my childhood thinking that my dad was angry.  It is only with the perspective of a working adult that I realize he was probably more tired than anything.  He was also a man of strong conviction about how people ought to treat other people, about doing the right thing, and those beliefs drove almost everything about him - and to others, often translated into orneriness.  He had no patience for cheaters or people who took the easy way out. 

There's another word that comes to mind when I think of my father:  Love. 

My dad has loved me unwaveringly for my whole life.  Even though I can think of only a handful of times he has said so in words, he has spent my lifetime showing me his love by giving of himself.  Anyone who knows my father knows that his family is the most precious thing to his heart.  He gave me endless hours of his time, teaching me to drive, teaching me to change my oil, driving me to horse shows and basketball camps, coming to my musicals and plays and games to cheer me on.  He valued education, particularly because he had to interrupt his own, and he and my mother put a priority on making sure my brother and I would have a college education available to us.  

Dad has always seemed larger than life to me, and in retrospect maybe I argued with him so much because if I could convince my Dad that I was right about something, nothing else would ever again seem difficult or impossible.  He was that stubborn.  Earning his approval has driven me for nearly all of my life.  It wasn't until I was in my forties that I realized I didn't need it.  Having his love was always more important, and his love was always unconditional.

Dad's in the early stages of dementia now, but he's still larger than life and his love for his family is undiminished.  He's difficult, to be sure, but then again, he always has been - another trait he so generously passed on to his daughter.  Living with his difficulty was the worthwhile price for being one of the people he loves.  

The relationship between a father and his daughter is the relationship by which she will judge all other men.  If our relationship was somewhat codependent, it was also resilient.  I could always, always trust that my father would love me and that he would be there for me, and that trust has been the rock solid foundation I could rest on.  No matter what goes wrong in my life, my Dad still loves me.  That is a priceless gift to give your child.

I owe him far more than I could ever repay.  Happy Father's Day, to the first and best man in my life.

 

People of the internet, I love you.

My first thought for an opening sentence:  Life has sure changed a lot.  Then I step back, read that, and think to myself, "Well, duh."  This is not news, nor is it particularly stirring as an opening sentence.  Change is a given. 

My life's path is littered with the detritus of discarded hobbies:  knitting/crocheting/embroidery, painting, drawing, crafts, gardening, making jewelry.  At least once a week some new idea will spring to life.  (One fortunate side effect of aging is that thec tendency to empty my wallet buying all the accoutrements of my new favorite thing has lessened.  I am more likely to dip my toe into something to see if it will stick.  If nothing else being physically limited has taught me quite a lot about the limits of my energy and my attention.)  Over the years, three interests have endured:  Books, horses, music.  Oh, and YOU.  The people.

For many months through the winter and early part of this year, the minute elements of just making it to work and home and getting in and out of bed  became monumental tasks, eliminating my ability and freedom to pursue much of anything.  At one time it would have created the opening for a lot of writing, but I was in such pain and crippling depression that I could not think of anything to write about that didn't carry a great likelihood of my family and friends having the suicide hotline number tattooed on my forehead.  Then in the beginning of the year, after many agonizing conversations with doctors and therapists, we took the scary and difficult step of having my youngest placed into a residential treatment setting.  (He's since come back home, and as huge and scary as it seemed at the time, it ended up being very good for him and for all of us.  )

Even though I couldn't write much about it, during that time of long dark days,  the interactions I had with my friends and acquaintances on social media were small beacons of light.

While there's no substitute for being face to face with the people you know and love, the internet has opened up the world in new ways for all of us.  During those months when my ability to get out and about was so limited, Facebook was just a screen away, and it was filled with very real people.  When I was struggling, even if I couldn't find the words to reach out, I could still be in touch with people, and with a few notable exceptions, I found that it helped to see everyone's thoughts and lives filling up my screen.  When I did manage to reach out, people reached back and they offered care and comfort.

At the same time, seeing others go through struggles of their own helped me to put my own into perspective, and gave me reasons to get out of my own way.   Boil down most anyone's life to the bare bones and you will find that we all struggle.  We all have pain, physical or emotional.  We all have shit that goes wrong and upside down and we all have days where the bottom of the barrel is a lot closer than the top. 

 

Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors - Ain't Nobody Got it Easy

 I think we're on the uphill climb now, though at times it didn't often seem like things would ever get better.    In the meantime - thanks for allowing me to share my struggles with you and for letting me share in yours. 

Some holiday cheer. Not really.

The long list of phrases going through my head these days are simple variations on a theme:  “This has been a really hard year.”

Even with glimmers of things looking up, there are plenty of days still where I’m not sure I’ve made it out of – or will make it out of – the basement of my soul.  Staying positive is an often hourly battle, and I’m not ashamed to say one I lose more often than win. 

Oh, there’ve been high points.   SG coming home for visits.  Meeting SG in Vegas.  Good times with my family and the kindness of friends.  Farm-sitting back when I could still walk. 

Right now I’m stringing along moment by moment, trying not to feel selfish for feeling so shitty.  After all, there are lots of people who have it worse than I, of course there are.  I’ll just keep reminding myself off that while silent tears drip off the end of my nose into this giant vat of holiday booze I plan on drowning my sorrows in.

I miss my brother.  I will always miss my brother.  December, the month he died and the time of year we always planned to spend time together, is really fucking hard.  In Ken I lost someone I knew in such a unique way.  A sibling knows your childhood, unlike a spouse, and knows many aspects of your teen and adult years you haven’t necessarily wanted to share with your parents.  Not only do they know your best and worst, they know the evolution of your best and worst, all of your incarnations.  Ken was one of the few people I was never afraid to have witness a really ugly cry, the person I could count on to be mad right along with me when I felt hurt by someone else, the person I could call any time day or night for solace, advice, or a ride home.  In fact, I can’t remember a time when I called him in the middle of some personal crisis when he didn’t immediately offer to come over.  Since he’s been gone and the many ways he touched my life become more apparent I can only hope that I was that person for him too.  If life without him is lonely, Christmas without him is a giant sucking hole of loss.  My kids miss him most especially at Christmas too.  He never lost that sense of being a kid, and every Christmas he was on a mission to find *the* gift for my kids, the one that would be their favorite gift of all.  The excitement and joy they felt when opening their gifts was a reflection of what he himself was experiencing.  Though it isn’t hard to reach “favored uncle” status when you’re the only uncle, I think he would have been at the top of the list even if we’d had other brothers and sisters to grow up with.

I miss my husband.  The thought of waking up to an empty house Christmas morning is getting to me in a way that I’m not terribly proud of.  I know I’m being selfish.  I know I’m not the only person to have ever been alone on Christmas.  Unlike SG, at least I can go hang out with my parents, and the kids’ dad has even generously offered a spot for me at his Christmas celebration.  SG, on the other hand, will be hanging around a nuke plant on the far eastern end of Nebraska, which I imagine will probably feel a lot like being alone on the moon except with cows and corn and soybeans.  The fact that I’m not the only person who will be alone and lonely at Christmas does not make me feel better, no matter how many times I tell myself it ought to.  It feels especially rotten when I rub the salt over him also missing my birthday into the wound.  As it turns out, even if you protest to everyone how stupid it is to have birthdays when you’re my age, the moment SG isn’t here to bake me a cake it suddenly becomes the most super special thing in the world to turn 49.

All sarcasm aside, the hardest thing of all has been coping with my stupid treasonous aging body and days upon days upon days of pain and the inability to walk or ride or lift anything.  I had to send my horses to Michelle’s until SG comes home; I was no longer able to care for them.  I’ve had more injections in my spine and hip, and I’m back in physical therapy – but after a couple of rounds of being so let down after I thought I was doing better I’m hesitant to believe or even hope that my worst days are behind me.   I’d like to go back in time and deliver a stinging smack to my own face for every occasion I’ve arrogantly stated “I wouldn’t change a thing about my life!”  OH HELL YES I WOULD.  I would have taken better care of myself.  I would have listened to the people who cautioned me to eat better, exercise more, be less reckless, not play or ride injured.  I’d have bought a better mattress, better shoes and engaged in better self-care.  Maybe I would still have had some arthritis and some degeneration in my spine regardless – its not like my anatomy didn’t have the best building blocks to begin with.  But if I’d done a better job taking care of myself I’d be a lot closer to better than I am right now.  Having only myself to blame makes me feel not one whit better.

When midnight finally strikes on the first day of 2015 I for one will kick 2014 in the ass with savage vengeance.   With my luck, it will kick me back.

 

 

 

Acts of love, acts of cruelty

When my friend Jackie announced her son Alyx's admission to the hospital, his aunt quickly put up a Go Fund Me page here..  It was anticipated that Alyx would have an extensive recovery and lots of medical bills the family would need help with.  By Wednesday afternoon hopes of recovery were gone; Alyx's brain had been without oxygen for too long.  He would be kept on life support until his organs could be donated.  Eventually, even that hope was dashed as the tumor in his airway that ultimately caused his death was found to be cancerous. 

But oh, my heart, the love.  Folks had immediately begun sending donations to the fund.  After Alyx passed, the family announced that the fund would be used to help dear friends and family members from around the country attend his memorial.  The remaining balance would be donated to Ronald McDonald charities, who had been such a refuge for his mom when he was hospitalized and diagnosed with Crohn's several years ago.  For days now - even up until this weekend - lovely, kind-hearted friends and friends of friends and strangers too have sent funds.  Alyx's GoFundMe has now raised over $16,000 and as of two days ago donations were still coming in.

His employer, Kingfisher restaurant of Tucson, not only hosted a charity event to raise money for Ronald McDonald house, employees of Kingfisher also handed his mother an additional envelope full of cash that the employees themselves had put into to donate as well.  Then they went ahead and donated the excellent catering for his memorial party on Saturday.

The memorial itself was so wonderful.  So many people, all of whom knew and loved Alyx.  Over and over I heard stories that started just like this:  "I was new to [school, work, neighborhood] and didn't fit in/didn't know anybody, and Alyx came right up to me and became my friend and helped me feel at home."  Alyx's girlfriend Hayley, despite her heartbreak, was gracious and managed to hug and thank every person there at least twice.  It was easy to see why Alyx loved her.  Her parents donated their lovely home for the party and not once - even after it was full dark and the stars high in the sky - did they even hint that people should start gathering their things and go home. 

Alyx was a person full of love, full of joy and full of delight in the world he inhabited, his photography is clear evidence of that.  He wanted everyone to be their best self possible, and he loved people despite their oh-so-human faults.  The time leading up to the memorial, the event itself, and every day that has followed has reminded me of the infinite capacity of humans to show love for one another.

Doesn't it always seem, though, that for every good thing that ever was, there's a not-so-good thing waiting in the wings?  This is no exception.

In direct contrast to the profound expressions of love and caring I witnessed, I've sadly also seen a few too many examples of the ways people treat others unkindly, and those examples have come from the most unlikely places.  I don't often use this space to call out corporations, but I'm doing it today, not for my personal benefit, but in hopes that I can help right some very wrong wrongs.

Alyx's sister Hailee was one of the many family members who immediately boarded trains, planes and automobiles when she found out he was in the ICU.  After his passing, as she boarded a US Airways flight home, she held in her hands her carryon bag and a framed picture of her beloved brother.  Let me rephrase that - her beloved brother who had just died.  As she approached the gate at the terminal, the gate attendant told her she could not bring both her carryon and the framed picture.  Hailee tearfully explained that she did not want to check the picture of the brother she had just lost.  I only wish I was exaggerating the gate attendant's response:  "Boo hoo."

Its hard to say whether Alyx's grandmother's experience with US Airways was better or worse than the treatment his sister received.  She was also going back home after standing watch at the ICU when he passed away.  She was running late to her flight.  When she arrived at the gate, the flight attendant was still there, the door open.  As she approached, the attendant asked, "Are you the Riggs party?" to which she responded "Yes."  The attendant then closed the door, saying "Too late."  She started to cry, explaining that her grandson had just passed away, then asked if she could have a tissue as she saw a box on the ticket counter.  He refused to give her one.

Alyx's Aunt Dorie had her United Flight to the memorial service cancelled while she was at the terminal because for some unexplained reason they no longer had a flight crew.  United offered Dorie and her husband a different flight that would depart 4 hours from then - at an airport that was a 6 hour drive away.  They refused to offer any further assistance or options so that she could attend the memorial of her nephew, to whom she had been more of a second mother than an aunt.  Instead she had to make her own arrangements, drive to another airport, get a few hours of sleep, then take a flight that got her to Tucson a half hour before the memorial started.  Now she's playing "navigate the labyrinth of United's Customer Service Refund Process" to get the money back which she had already paid for her cancelled flight, as well as her husband's return ticket which was unused because he had to go to the other airport they had driven to in order to bring their car home.

 Hilton corporation's Hampton Inn, convenient to the site of the memorial and recommended by a family friend, was where several rooms were booked ahead of time for arriving family and friends.  One friend, arriving on a late flight, called ahead to the hotel to advise she would have a late arrival and check-in and to arrange her room to be held.  When she did arrive, she found the hotel had given her room away.   Not only that, the hotel told one of the other memorial attendees that they were so overbooked they were considering moving the whole block of rooms of the people there for the memorial to another hotel.  After everyone had already checked in.  (Alyx's mom:  "DEAR HAMPTON:  You don't displace the funeral group.")

Maybe I'm living in the past, but it used to be that when someone died, travel companies would bend over backwards to accomodate family members.  There used to be a time when customer service was an important priority for these companies. 

Of all of these service providers, only Hilton, which owns Hampton Inns, has offered to do anything at all to provide reparation for the errors.  American Airlines, which owns US Airways, is deleting any comments the family has left on their Facebook page.  Alyx's mom has been in constant contact with their customer service department, who keeps suggesting she take steps she's already taken more than once or to provide information that she's already provided more than once.  They refuse to give her any other way to contact them outside of their web form, which generously allows her 140 characters to explain all of the things that went so wrong.

The behavior of these travel providers, particularly those employees of US Airways/American Airlines, was beyond outrageous.  It was deliberately cruel and caused these already grieving family members much more pain.

I don't expect you to do anything, say anything or change the places you stay or the airlines you fly on.  And as much as this is a sincere effort to shame these companies into making reparation to the  people they've hurt, it is a pointed statement about how badly customer service has deteriorated since the recession began.  I can't imagine that corporations think that being disgusting and inhumane to their customers is going to somehow save them money.  Do they think that it is no longer important to train their ground-level personnel to treat customers with dignity and respect?  Do they think that ignoring heartfelt complaints or making it impossible for the customer to even reach them with an issue builds their customer base?

To Alyx's friends and family and all the people who gave materially or in spirit to help, thank you from the bottom of this grinchy heart.  You are all, every single one of you, everything that Alyx would have wanted you to be.

Screaming at the walls

A much-loved friend is coping with the unimaginable horror of saying goodbye to her 23 year old son this week, which provides very necessary perspective to my own life.

I would lose all faith in God except that I never believed he was some Santa Claus in the sky waiting to give us things we ask for and who keeps us safe if we behave ourselves and keep to the script.  I suppose that's what people who do not believe imagine that those of faith think, which makes the scoffing entirely understandable.

How do you tell someone things will be all right when you have no grounds whatsoever for believing that to be true?  Nothing is ever entirely all right, not ever, not in this sea of humanity where fate is often cruel and people do both terrible and wonderful things to one another.  I only know that if there are answers, I do not have them and therefore I have to simply muddle along like everyone else, hoping to make sense out of the things I can see and touch.  The magic, I suppose, comes from the the inexplicable within me, whatever place that is that generates my thoughts and dreams. Soul or subconscious, it is the source of my best and worst moments and I suppose for all of us, it is what makes us each unique.  I choose to believe that is the creation of the Divine, and that it is both the place where the best things and the worst things we do spring from,which is what makes God such a mystery.

I want answers, but I know I'll not get them. and so I just stand in the shower and scream at the walls and hope a little bit of the grief and horror of witnessing my friends loss from afar swirl down the drain along with my tears and the last of the suds from the shampoo.

The cliche comes easily.  Far from trite, it bristles with truth:  Life is short.  

Too short.  

I watched Alyx grow up from afar, through pictures and stories his mom shared in a small  group of mothers I met when I was still pregnant with my son, over a decade ago.  We were - and are - a tight little band and we have always been there for one another.  We've shared things with each other that even our partners and our families don't know.  We've been there for one another through medical crises, marriages, breakups, job successes and job losses, births, lost pregnancies, family drama.  When my brother died some of the most comforting words came from these friends, along with a box stuffed full of love and concern.  But this - this is the worst imaginable thing ever to happen to one of our own.  We've all lost someone who we held a small part of in our hearts and we're struggling to know what best to do to give our friend some measure of comfort, how to be there for her in the days, weeks, months, years to come and how to say the right things (or not say the wrong things, there's always that).  

Hold your loved ones tight my friends.  They are not yours, they never were, and the profound love you feel for them is no barrier against what life may bring.  Every single day - EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. - you spend with those you love is a fucking GIFT.  Please don't waste it.  Resolve, if you haven't already, to create value in those moments with your children, your family, your partners, your friends.

Goodbye sweet Alyx.  You are one of the best that ever was and you are going to be deeply missed by many.