I took Lil to visit Leo on Friday as he is now enrolled in hospice with pancreatic cancer. He seemed especially glad to see her and she was equally delighted to see him. Leo was in good spirits—although it was clear he was weak and tired easily. His voice was so soft it was hard for Lil to hear him, yet she still seemed to enjoy the visit.
Leo had a book of collected poems by Helmi Kortilla (not sure I have the last name right) that he wanted Lil to see. Some were in English and others in Finnish. I read a Finnish one aloud and he translated line by line as Lil nodded. He gave Lil the book to take home so she could read more of them.
On the way back, Lil commented again how much she enjoys getting out of the house--going for a ride and just enjoying the scenery along the way. We had gone for a drive along Lake Washington a couple days before during my regular Tuesday afternoon visit.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Based on my weekly Tuesday afternoon visits, it appears that Lil is getting stronger and more talkative. This week the sun was out when I arrived. I barely sat down and commented on the gorgeous weather when she suggested that perhaps we could go out for a drive—and so we did. She was quick to be ready to go and off we went touring on Lake Washington Boulevard all the way to Seward Park--enjoying the beautiful glassy lake reflecting a bright blue sky sprinkled with a few white clouds. As we drove, she related stories about her sister Mable and Mable’s disappointment at not being able to have children. I learned more family history that was new to me. Did I mention that she’s become much more talkative again?
She’s also looking forward to the arrival of Tana’s baby—can’t wait to see pictures and hear all the details.
A couple weeks ago, she was ready and waiting for me to give her a hair cut when I arrived. Unfortunately, I had it on my calendar for the following week, so we went for a drive instead—a very popular activity! It was another beautiful day in Seattle and we started our travels going through Volunteer Park. As we approached the Conservatory, she was so interested in the flowers that could be seen through the window that I asked if she wanted to try a brief walk to get a closer look. Again, she was “ready to go” and off we went. We checked out the orchids, azaleas, and the special cactus room on the far right. She was walking easily with only a slight bit of support. We decided that those two rooms were enough and we would plan to go back another day to see the rest. Next, we headed out along Lake Union to Golden Gardens where we parked and enjoyed watching people and boats from the car.
Last week, I gave her a hair cut. We decided that her hair seems to grow so fast that I should just plan to cut it every four weeks instead of five. Perhaps next time I will remember to take a picture to post here...
She’s also looking forward to the arrival of Tana’s baby—can’t wait to see pictures and hear all the details.
A couple weeks ago, she was ready and waiting for me to give her a hair cut when I arrived. Unfortunately, I had it on my calendar for the following week, so we went for a drive instead—a very popular activity! It was another beautiful day in Seattle and we started our travels going through Volunteer Park. As we approached the Conservatory, she was so interested in the flowers that could be seen through the window that I asked if she wanted to try a brief walk to get a closer look. Again, she was “ready to go” and off we went. We checked out the orchids, azaleas, and the special cactus room on the far right. She was walking easily with only a slight bit of support. We decided that those two rooms were enough and we would plan to go back another day to see the rest. Next, we headed out along Lake Union to Golden Gardens where we parked and enjoyed watching people and boats from the car.
Last week, I gave her a hair cut. We decided that her hair seems to grow so fast that I should just plan to cut it every four weeks instead of five. Perhaps next time I will remember to take a picture to post here...
Sunday, November 22, 2009
giving thanks...
It is only when I look at how much writing I am able to generate on this blog when it is not the middle of the quarter that I realize how much I am actually doing during the quarter.
That is to say, I feel a little sad that this blog is so spotty, but I reassure myself that anything is more than you read here is more than you would know otherwise...
So this week I have a few days off from class for Thanksgiving and I am also feeling the need to write to give you all a sense of how things are now...
Mostly I just want you to know that grandma is the same as ever but slower.
She doesn't have new symptoms (in fact she's been so stable that she is off hospice for now--she is enrolled in palliative care instead, which is nearly the same but without the housekeeping and the nurse comes every other week instead of every week), she seems as cheerful as ever, but she is sleeping more and more. She still gets up and makes her breakfast every day but she does it at eight or nine instead of six or seven. And then she goes back to bed and sleeps for several more hours. She is sleeping more and more, really. She goes to bed earlier and naps in her bed instead of her chair. She no longer seems to want to make her bed because she spends a lot more time there. She still loves visitors, but they seem to tire her out more than they used to. When Norma was here visiting a couple of weeks ago, she commented that the most notable difference was how easily grandma seems to tire.
She seems happy and fine, but slower and slower, and although it's hard to tell because we see her every day, it really seems as though things have changed over the last few weeks. In a difficult to define kind of way, she seems to be receding, quieting--herself as much as ever, but in a way that is less automatic. Our focus is to keep her quality of life as good as it can be. I am not worried, but I am beginning to think that it is possible that this is the beginning of the end. On the other hand, she has lived a long, robust, resilient, surprising life, and really, there is just no telling.
We are looking forward to spending sometime on Vashon this weekend for Thanksgiving and to Mike's visit in a couple weeks, and we are really looking forward to everyone coming in January.
Be well.
Ariel
That is to say, I feel a little sad that this blog is so spotty, but I reassure myself that anything is more than you read here is more than you would know otherwise...
So this week I have a few days off from class for Thanksgiving and I am also feeling the need to write to give you all a sense of how things are now...
Mostly I just want you to know that grandma is the same as ever but slower.
She doesn't have new symptoms (in fact she's been so stable that she is off hospice for now--she is enrolled in palliative care instead, which is nearly the same but without the housekeeping and the nurse comes every other week instead of every week), she seems as cheerful as ever, but she is sleeping more and more. She still gets up and makes her breakfast every day but she does it at eight or nine instead of six or seven. And then she goes back to bed and sleeps for several more hours. She is sleeping more and more, really. She goes to bed earlier and naps in her bed instead of her chair. She no longer seems to want to make her bed because she spends a lot more time there. She still loves visitors, but they seem to tire her out more than they used to. When Norma was here visiting a couple of weeks ago, she commented that the most notable difference was how easily grandma seems to tire.
She seems happy and fine, but slower and slower, and although it's hard to tell because we see her every day, it really seems as though things have changed over the last few weeks. In a difficult to define kind of way, she seems to be receding, quieting--herself as much as ever, but in a way that is less automatic. Our focus is to keep her quality of life as good as it can be. I am not worried, but I am beginning to think that it is possible that this is the beginning of the end. On the other hand, she has lived a long, robust, resilient, surprising life, and really, there is just no telling.
We are looking forward to spending sometime on Vashon this weekend for Thanksgiving and to Mike's visit in a couple weeks, and we are really looking forward to everyone coming in January.
Be well.
Ariel
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Video Interview with Grandma Lil
This is an interview that Selena did with Grandma Lil for a school project just before Grandma's 100th birthday party. She videotaped Lil describing her life from when her father immigrated to the US from Finland and homesteaded here, her travels from North Dakota to Seattle and some of her life in Seattle.
The interview is broken up into two parts (as the whole thing is too long to post in one piece).
Please enjoy!
Monday, October 26, 2009
Karunki 1990
This is a poem I wrote while at the Husa Reunion in Finland in 1990. Ariel's lovely post about family history and politics reminded me of it. This is a Very Political Family. It is our heritage. Yep.
*n*
KARUNKI 1990
nurmi husa
outi hätinen, translator
ranta-husa
kolme vuotta sitten
i walk along the track,
my shoes crunching the years
i turn and take a photograph
frozen in wood, it sits in my living room
and the homes of my cousins
i listen to the gentle lapping of the Tornionjoki.
mud covers my shoes
good finnish mud
farmers' mud
sweden glistens across the river
kirje isosänisälleni
you'd like my home, great grandfather
it has forests and rivers and rain (lots of rain)
but its winters are gentle, and its summers are not too warm
we have mountains, great grandfather
great mountains reaching rocky fingers to the sky
volcanos even, which rumble from time to time
and spit out smoke and ash
like an old man determined not to be overlooked on wash day
there are finnish people here and swedes and norwegians
ethopians and vietnamese, mexicans and indians
and many other peoples you could never imagine existed
in america, my cousins and I don't speak your language
(except in dabs and dribbles)
finland is far away and very foreign
you might not know us, in our blue jeans and electronics
we might not recognise you, except in our dreams
it is said, the child carries a piece of the parent
i know this
for i have seen the eyes of my father
peering out at the world from their hiding place in my heart
if i look deeply enough, can i find you in my heart?
can we reach out over the years?
can we reach out over the generations?
can we ever know each other, great grandfather?
i have a cousin here, he doesn't speak my language
i do not speak his
but we smile and nod our heads
we smile and shake hands
i've come home, great grandfather, to meet you
but you are not here anymore - or are you?
are you not in that shaking of hands?
are you not in that nodding of heads?
are you not in that wordless smile?
for it is you who brought us here
and you who have introduced us.
you, who make us one
no niin, isoisänisä, hei!
pikkupojanpojanpoika amerikasta sano
on hauskaa tavata teitä - lopuksi
nurmi husa
outi hätinen, kääntäjä
ranta-husa
three years ago
kuljen polkua pitkin
kenkäni musertaen vuosia
käännyn ja otan valokuvan
jäätynyt puuhun, se on olohuoneessani
ja serkkujeni kodit
kuuntelen tornionjoen hiljaista liplatusta
kenkäni aivan mudassa
hyvää suomalaista mutaa
maanviljelijöden mutaa
ruotsi loistaa joen toisella pudella
a letter to my great grandfather
pitäisit minun kodistani, isoisänisä
siellä on metsiä ja jokia ja sadetta (paljon sadetta)
mutta sen salvet ovat lauhkeita, ja sen kesät eivät ole liian lämpimiä
meillä on vuoria, isoisänisä
mahtavia vuoria kurkottaen kivisiä sormiaan kohti taivasta
jopa tulivuoria, jotka purkautuvat silloin tällöin
ja sylkevät savua ja tuhkaa
kuten vanha mies joka ei haluaa tulla huomatuksi pyykkipäivänä.
täällä on suomalaisia ja ruotsalaisia ja norjalaisia
etiopialaisia ja vietnamilaisia, meksikolaisia ja intiaaneja
ja paljon muita kansoja joita et tiennyt olevankaan
amerikassa, serkkuni ja minä emme puhu kieltänne
(paitsi sana siellä, toinen täällä)
suomi on kaukana ja se on hyvin vieras
et ehkä tunne meitä farkuissamme ja elektroneissamme
me emme ehkä tunnista teitä, paitsi unelmissamme
on sanottu, että lapsi kantaa palasta vanhemmastaan mukanaa
tiedän sen
koska olen nähnyt isäni silmät katsoen
ulos maailmaan sydämeni piilopaikasta
jos katson tarpeeksi syvään, voinko löytää sinut sydämestäni?
voimmeko kurkottaa vuosien yli?
voimmeko kurkottaa sukupolvien yli?
voimmeko koskaan tuntea toisiamme, isoisänisä?
minulla on täällä serkku, hän ei puhu kielläni
minä en puhu hänen kieltään
mutta me hymyilemme ja nyökytämme päitämme
me hymyilemme ja kättelemme
olen tullut kotiin, isoisänisä, tavatakseni sinut
mutta sinä et ole täällä - vai oletko?
etkö ole mukana kättelyssä?
etkö ole mukana pään nyökäytyksessä?
etkö ole siinä sanattomassa hymyssä?
koska se olet sinä, joka toit meidät tänne
ja sinä olet esitellyt meidät
sinä, joka teet meistä yhtä
well, great grandfather, hello!
your grandson from america says
it's nice to meet you - finally
* * * * *
*n*
KARUNKI 1990
nurmi husa
outi hätinen, translator
ranta-husa
kolme vuotta sitten
i walk along the track,
my shoes crunching the years
i turn and take a photograph
frozen in wood, it sits in my living room
and the homes of my cousins
i listen to the gentle lapping of the Tornionjoki.
mud covers my shoes
good finnish mud
farmers' mud
sweden glistens across the river
kirje isosänisälleni
you'd like my home, great grandfather
it has forests and rivers and rain (lots of rain)
but its winters are gentle, and its summers are not too warm
we have mountains, great grandfather
great mountains reaching rocky fingers to the sky
volcanos even, which rumble from time to time
and spit out smoke and ash
like an old man determined not to be overlooked on wash day
there are finnish people here and swedes and norwegians
ethopians and vietnamese, mexicans and indians
and many other peoples you could never imagine existed
in america, my cousins and I don't speak your language
(except in dabs and dribbles)
finland is far away and very foreign
you might not know us, in our blue jeans and electronics
we might not recognise you, except in our dreams
it is said, the child carries a piece of the parent
i know this
for i have seen the eyes of my father
peering out at the world from their hiding place in my heart
if i look deeply enough, can i find you in my heart?
can we reach out over the years?
can we reach out over the generations?
can we ever know each other, great grandfather?
i have a cousin here, he doesn't speak my language
i do not speak his
but we smile and nod our heads
we smile and shake hands
i've come home, great grandfather, to meet you
but you are not here anymore - or are you?
are you not in that shaking of hands?
are you not in that nodding of heads?
are you not in that wordless smile?
for it is you who brought us here
and you who have introduced us.
you, who make us one
no niin, isoisänisä, hei!
pikkupojanpojanpoika amerikasta sano
on hauskaa tavata teitä - lopuksi
nurmi husa
outi hätinen, kääntäjä
ranta-husa
three years ago
kuljen polkua pitkin
kenkäni musertaen vuosia
käännyn ja otan valokuvan
jäätynyt puuhun, se on olohuoneessani
ja serkkujeni kodit
kuuntelen tornionjoen hiljaista liplatusta
kenkäni aivan mudassa
hyvää suomalaista mutaa
maanviljelijöden mutaa
ruotsi loistaa joen toisella pudella
a letter to my great grandfather
pitäisit minun kodistani, isoisänisä
siellä on metsiä ja jokia ja sadetta (paljon sadetta)
mutta sen salvet ovat lauhkeita, ja sen kesät eivät ole liian lämpimiä
meillä on vuoria, isoisänisä
mahtavia vuoria kurkottaen kivisiä sormiaan kohti taivasta
jopa tulivuoria, jotka purkautuvat silloin tällöin
ja sylkevät savua ja tuhkaa
kuten vanha mies joka ei haluaa tulla huomatuksi pyykkipäivänä.
täällä on suomalaisia ja ruotsalaisia ja norjalaisia
etiopialaisia ja vietnamilaisia, meksikolaisia ja intiaaneja
ja paljon muita kansoja joita et tiennyt olevankaan
amerikassa, serkkuni ja minä emme puhu kieltänne
(paitsi sana siellä, toinen täällä)
suomi on kaukana ja se on hyvin vieras
et ehkä tunne meitä farkuissamme ja elektroneissamme
me emme ehkä tunnista teitä, paitsi unelmissamme
on sanottu, että lapsi kantaa palasta vanhemmastaan mukanaa
tiedän sen
koska olen nähnyt isäni silmät katsoen
ulos maailmaan sydämeni piilopaikasta
jos katson tarpeeksi syvään, voinko löytää sinut sydämestäni?
voimmeko kurkottaa vuosien yli?
voimmeko kurkottaa sukupolvien yli?
voimmeko koskaan tuntea toisiamme, isoisänisä?
minulla on täällä serkku, hän ei puhu kielläni
minä en puhu hänen kieltään
mutta me hymyilemme ja nyökytämme päitämme
me hymyilemme ja kättelemme
olen tullut kotiin, isoisänisä, tavatakseni sinut
mutta sinä et ole täällä - vai oletko?
etkö ole mukana kättelyssä?
etkö ole mukana pään nyökäytyksessä?
etkö ole siinä sanattomassa hymyssä?
koska se olet sinä, joka toit meidät tänne
ja sinä olet esitellyt meidät
sinä, joka teet meistä yhtä
well, great grandfather, hello!
your grandson from america says
it's nice to meet you - finally
* * * * *
Lil at Volunteer Park on 20 September 2009
Lil loves Dahlias and so we went to check them out up at Volunteer Park one day.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Splinters of Light
For our wedding, Aunt Patty gave one of her mosaic art pieces to us--a small square mirror surrounded by many fragments of glass, mirror, pottery, metal even small toys and jewelry. Like the colored, variously shaped bits of that mosaic, grandma's stories emerge. Depending on how the lens of memory bends the light that day, like so many sparks of light reflected on the wall, each story is layered into the collage of memory, never quite the same. Lil's memories are different depending not only on how Lil remembers, but on how she wants to remember--what stays with her, what feel significant--not only depending on whom she is talking with, but on the themes that emerge brightest for that listener, each receiver making unique meaning of the exchange.
In this way, the story of Mabel's first husband emerges one day as a young man lost in war, and another day as a suicide. Uncle Karl's death lives brightly in Lil's memory down to details like what he said after dinner and how long he was gone resting before someone went to check if he wanted dessert, when all the rest of the family confirms that Lil was not there the night Karl died.
Memory is a funny thing--that something did not actually happen does not make it any less true to the rememberer. That two people have entirely different experiences of the meaning of the same event does not make either wrong or either right. That where Lil was once passionate about political beliefs which have now become less vivid does not make her passion any less real, that she was not physically present for Karl's death does not take away from the significance she feels around somehow sharing in that experience.
Giving so much attention to the drawing out and recording of Lil's memory over this last year, and especially these last few weeks, has brought into focus for me how much of memory is communal, shared, and interpersonal, existing in the spaces between and among us as a family, as much as within the minds of each member. Not only do our memories make us who we are as individuals, they make us who we are as a family.
When memories are shared among so many, however, the politics of memory become so much more complex. Our deterministic culture all too often seduces us into believing in the fallacy of unitary truth. Embedded in such a concept of truth are all sorts of values and dearly held beliefs, and when our truth is denied, it can be a deeply painful experience--frustrating, invalidating, even abandoning.
The way I experience it, when Mike feels the family is losing hold of the importance of Lil's history in Communist party politics, indeed the history of Mabel, Walt, Lil's mother and others, it is important to him not just that knowledge of facts or events is ebbing away, it is that a whole vision of the family, a whole sense of meaning, a very sense of identity feels denied, rejected, and erased. At the same time, when there is the sense that only one truth can hold sway--that there is only one right way to represent the past--the concerns of other family members--like papa--feel like they may be discounted or ignored.
Questions about how political involvement is represented within the discourse and identity of our family isn't so much about facts, I believe, as it is about sense of family belonging, meaning, and what those ideas represent for each of us. When only one truth, one version of experience is allowed, someone is going to feel excluded or devalued, someone's interests will be shut out, and when I see that happening, I feel scared that whatever we do not deal with now will be much harder and more painful to talk about after Lil's death.
It makes me want to ask hard questions now: What is desire for meaning if not a hunger to belong? So, given that, why is it that we sometimes find the meanings created by others to be difficult to let in, threatening even, to our own sense of self? Is it because a conflicting version of truth threatens our truth, as if in some economy of scarcity, only a certain sum of meaning can exist and conflicting meanings must necessarily squeeze others out? Is it possible to allow the equal validity of competing truths?
I certainly do not deign to try answer that. Conflicts of meaning can be gut level stuff.
As I work with friends on Referendum 71 (the Washington domestic partnership rights act) I feel viscerally the power that the truths of others have to threaten the embattled truth of same-sex partners, striving to have their commitment recognized as equal in a world where the very act of loving their life-partner is so threatening it can get them killed. And though Mike can go to the national AFL-CIO convention two weeks ago and be amazed to see members of the Party openly participating, the same hatred of cultural dissidents which erupts as anti-gay violence on Capitol Hill has loomed large over Communists and other radicals in ways Mike has experienced all too personally and repeatedly. This is real. This is core and lifelong, but it is about far more than politics. It is about who we are as a family and who we will be to each other as we step up to name those difficult dynamics which are far easier left unspoken.
Politics in this family matter not in some theoretical or intellectual way but as core element of family meaning and connection. I see that vividly right now in Mike's connection to Lil and the significance of Lil's life to him and to each of us in our own way. His sense of loss and even betrayal when he encounters ways in which other members of the family do not understand or value the parts of family history which he values most, is not a matter of political disagreement, but rather a rejection of an aspect of our heritage that goes to the very identity and sense of meaning of family.
As grandma's memories of those times fade, Mike has stepped into the role of carrying the family memories of political history, raising a standard woven of his own values, the values he learned from grandma, and the values she represents from the family and in the larger progressive community. It is fascinating to hear all the details Mike remembers which grandma has forgotten or does not think to speak of--how active the members of our family were back in South Dakota, running for office, agitating for progressive politics as far back as they have been in this country. While he was here, Mike pulled out the big History of Montrail County book and showed me references to grandma's grandfather, who was a socialist activist and a Lutheran minister, as well as many other Husa family folks. I don't have that book with me to reference right now, but I promised Mike last night as he was leaving that I would get him copies of the section on our family he pointed out.
I realize, as I write this blog today, that there are so many details I am leaving out (or getting wrong), and it makes me sorry I had so little time to talk with Mike when he was here. He mentioned that he is hoping to come back in November, so I hope to get more from him then, and I warmly invite both Mike and Anne to comment here and fill in more details. Most of all, hearing Mike's stories, and holding at the same time the memories and hopes and concerns of other members of the family (especially papa) it humbles me to think how little I know Lil, coming to know her truly only in these last years of her life.
I know there is deep frustration between Mike and papa around the politics of what would be said at grandma's 100th birthday, but it feels like what is going on here is about so much more than that--it is about hurts and frustrations and erasures which go back years. Hearing the passion and longing and pain in Mike's words as he speaks about grandma's political history and the way he has felt silenced around it, hearing the quieter resignation and hope in papa's as he laments his inability to communicate well with Mike through their mutual hurts, feeling the concern and hope in myself that some of this pain might be aired and eased by naming it only makes me feel more strongly how important it is to talk about these hurts and differences, and to talk about them now with each other and with grandma.
I realized this weekend that one of my deepest fears in all this is that Lil is the main link Mike has to our family and that once that link is gone, I will lose my relationship with Mike, my access to all that he knows, the chance to learn from Mike the rich heritage of the family he so treasures and which I find so inspiring. And that would be a very great loss indeed.
Through all this, I have come to believe more and more strongly that who Lil is now--how she now constructs her understanding of herself--is only one piece of all she has been, not only to herself but to others. None of us can be defined within a singular, delimited truth. Lil is not only Lil as she experiences herself, but as she is experienced by every person with whom her life has intersected. The meaning of her life is not only her own meaning but also the meaning each of us brings to that life.
If I believe anything about Lil's life, it is that there is no one right interpretation, no one truth which pushes out the others, but rather a web of complex meaning filled with richness, multiple meanings, and even with contradiction. Mike's passionate and vivid experience of Lil not only as mother but as progressive role model and political mentor, both within and beyond our family circle, are a critically important piece of that mosaic, and a story I dearly hope he will tell more fully.
In this way, the story of Mabel's first husband emerges one day as a young man lost in war, and another day as a suicide. Uncle Karl's death lives brightly in Lil's memory down to details like what he said after dinner and how long he was gone resting before someone went to check if he wanted dessert, when all the rest of the family confirms that Lil was not there the night Karl died.
Memory is a funny thing--that something did not actually happen does not make it any less true to the rememberer. That two people have entirely different experiences of the meaning of the same event does not make either wrong or either right. That where Lil was once passionate about political beliefs which have now become less vivid does not make her passion any less real, that she was not physically present for Karl's death does not take away from the significance she feels around somehow sharing in that experience.
Giving so much attention to the drawing out and recording of Lil's memory over this last year, and especially these last few weeks, has brought into focus for me how much of memory is communal, shared, and interpersonal, existing in the spaces between and among us as a family, as much as within the minds of each member. Not only do our memories make us who we are as individuals, they make us who we are as a family.
When memories are shared among so many, however, the politics of memory become so much more complex. Our deterministic culture all too often seduces us into believing in the fallacy of unitary truth. Embedded in such a concept of truth are all sorts of values and dearly held beliefs, and when our truth is denied, it can be a deeply painful experience--frustrating, invalidating, even abandoning.
The way I experience it, when Mike feels the family is losing hold of the importance of Lil's history in Communist party politics, indeed the history of Mabel, Walt, Lil's mother and others, it is important to him not just that knowledge of facts or events is ebbing away, it is that a whole vision of the family, a whole sense of meaning, a very sense of identity feels denied, rejected, and erased. At the same time, when there is the sense that only one truth can hold sway--that there is only one right way to represent the past--the concerns of other family members--like papa--feel like they may be discounted or ignored.
Questions about how political involvement is represented within the discourse and identity of our family isn't so much about facts, I believe, as it is about sense of family belonging, meaning, and what those ideas represent for each of us. When only one truth, one version of experience is allowed, someone is going to feel excluded or devalued, someone's interests will be shut out, and when I see that happening, I feel scared that whatever we do not deal with now will be much harder and more painful to talk about after Lil's death.
It makes me want to ask hard questions now: What is desire for meaning if not a hunger to belong? So, given that, why is it that we sometimes find the meanings created by others to be difficult to let in, threatening even, to our own sense of self? Is it because a conflicting version of truth threatens our truth, as if in some economy of scarcity, only a certain sum of meaning can exist and conflicting meanings must necessarily squeeze others out? Is it possible to allow the equal validity of competing truths?
I certainly do not deign to try answer that. Conflicts of meaning can be gut level stuff.
As I work with friends on Referendum 71 (the Washington domestic partnership rights act) I feel viscerally the power that the truths of others have to threaten the embattled truth of same-sex partners, striving to have their commitment recognized as equal in a world where the very act of loving their life-partner is so threatening it can get them killed. And though Mike can go to the national AFL-CIO convention two weeks ago and be amazed to see members of the Party openly participating, the same hatred of cultural dissidents which erupts as anti-gay violence on Capitol Hill has loomed large over Communists and other radicals in ways Mike has experienced all too personally and repeatedly. This is real. This is core and lifelong, but it is about far more than politics. It is about who we are as a family and who we will be to each other as we step up to name those difficult dynamics which are far easier left unspoken.
Politics in this family matter not in some theoretical or intellectual way but as core element of family meaning and connection. I see that vividly right now in Mike's connection to Lil and the significance of Lil's life to him and to each of us in our own way. His sense of loss and even betrayal when he encounters ways in which other members of the family do not understand or value the parts of family history which he values most, is not a matter of political disagreement, but rather a rejection of an aspect of our heritage that goes to the very identity and sense of meaning of family.
As grandma's memories of those times fade, Mike has stepped into the role of carrying the family memories of political history, raising a standard woven of his own values, the values he learned from grandma, and the values she represents from the family and in the larger progressive community. It is fascinating to hear all the details Mike remembers which grandma has forgotten or does not think to speak of--how active the members of our family were back in South Dakota, running for office, agitating for progressive politics as far back as they have been in this country. While he was here, Mike pulled out the big History of Montrail County book and showed me references to grandma's grandfather, who was a socialist activist and a Lutheran minister, as well as many other Husa family folks. I don't have that book with me to reference right now, but I promised Mike last night as he was leaving that I would get him copies of the section on our family he pointed out.
I realize, as I write this blog today, that there are so many details I am leaving out (or getting wrong), and it makes me sorry I had so little time to talk with Mike when he was here. He mentioned that he is hoping to come back in November, so I hope to get more from him then, and I warmly invite both Mike and Anne to comment here and fill in more details. Most of all, hearing Mike's stories, and holding at the same time the memories and hopes and concerns of other members of the family (especially papa) it humbles me to think how little I know Lil, coming to know her truly only in these last years of her life.
I know there is deep frustration between Mike and papa around the politics of what would be said at grandma's 100th birthday, but it feels like what is going on here is about so much more than that--it is about hurts and frustrations and erasures which go back years. Hearing the passion and longing and pain in Mike's words as he speaks about grandma's political history and the way he has felt silenced around it, hearing the quieter resignation and hope in papa's as he laments his inability to communicate well with Mike through their mutual hurts, feeling the concern and hope in myself that some of this pain might be aired and eased by naming it only makes me feel more strongly how important it is to talk about these hurts and differences, and to talk about them now with each other and with grandma.
I realized this weekend that one of my deepest fears in all this is that Lil is the main link Mike has to our family and that once that link is gone, I will lose my relationship with Mike, my access to all that he knows, the chance to learn from Mike the rich heritage of the family he so treasures and which I find so inspiring. And that would be a very great loss indeed.
Through all this, I have come to believe more and more strongly that who Lil is now--how she now constructs her understanding of herself--is only one piece of all she has been, not only to herself but to others. None of us can be defined within a singular, delimited truth. Lil is not only Lil as she experiences herself, but as she is experienced by every person with whom her life has intersected. The meaning of her life is not only her own meaning but also the meaning each of us brings to that life.
If I believe anything about Lil's life, it is that there is no one right interpretation, no one truth which pushes out the others, but rather a web of complex meaning filled with richness, multiple meanings, and even with contradiction. Mike's passionate and vivid experience of Lil not only as mother but as progressive role model and political mentor, both within and beyond our family circle, are a critically important piece of that mosaic, and a story I dearly hope he will tell more fully.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Hello? Hello out there?
Hi folks,
I think I've figured out how to make this blog send email to ten of you every time something is posted. It was hard to pick just ten, but right now I have it set to mom & papa and mike, the six of Lil's grandkids other than me, and then Nurmi and Elaine since they are so involved in Lil's support. That leaves out other very important and interested people but as far as I can tell, the blog software only lets me pick ten. (If there's people you know who want to be included--mom I'm thinking of Aunt Anne and Uncle Eric, for example, you can always forward the email to them.)
Anyway, it would be really great if you could let me know if you got an email notification of this post (by just quickly commenting on this post or by sending me a note on email) and if you can fully access the blog. (If you don't I'll probably try to get a hold of you some other way so that I make sure everyone who wants to be involved is included and I have the right email addresses for everyone). Also, please let me know if I you would rather I use some other email address for you.
Remember, all of you family members have been authorized to be authors on this blog so any of you can post here as well--I'd love to have the reflections and stories of others here as well--it is my hope for this to be a community rather than a monologue even if the kinds of things we are posting are all quite different. (If you want me to resend the invitation to be an author, just let me know).
By the way, for those of you who haven't been reading this blog recently, I've been posting a lot because it is break. In the last week, I've been writing a bunch of self-reflective stuff, and I humbly request that you go back and read the posts in order (at least starting with the Monday) so you get the context.
Thanks, Ariel
Strange attractors
Today is my last Friday of break. In one week, I will be back in the full swing of classes (only three this quarter, instead of four, but on the other hand, I will be beginning my dissertation and preparing presentations for two conferences, so I'll be plenty busy). I feel myself gathering in during this brief time of pause,and pouring my thoughts out in writing because I know that once the quarter starts, I will have much less attention for this blog, so if you feel like I am writing a lot, that is why. (I'm sure it won't last. ;)
I've been thinking about the meaning of this blog for me. I can feel how it takes on the quality almost of a character in this drama we are all living, focusing some of the swirl that touches us all, though it is experienced differently by each. (I heard on the radio yesterday a review which described the camera in the mocumentary "The Office" as a character--snagging the gaze of the viewer on unexpected details and ironically commenting on the reactions of the actors.)
This blog is also taking on the quality of a kind of tribute--a gift of my own struggle as a contribution to this process we as a family are going through, marking the lifecycle events of our members.
Perhaps most importantly, this blog is becomming a place where I explore and begin to understand my own complex feelings around these important issues--being a caretaker, entering the middle of my life, being alive and opening myself to a new kind of understanding of death. I really appreciate those of you who have sent me emails or coments of appreciation and support in this process. I really value knowing you are along for the ride.
Hopsice update:
The "homemaker" worker came today. Her name is Yime (pronounced "yah-MAY") and she was really lovely. Grandma and I were just talking about how many of the women working for hospice just seem like such amazing women. I forgot to ask Yime her nationality, but I'm guessing maybe Somali or Eritrean. I really got such a good feeling from her sense of competence and respectfulness. So much of how I judge how well people will work with Lil is how they speak to her in the first few minutes--if they understand how to talk loudly, and with understanding for memory lapses while still treating her like the very sharp, very intelligent person she is, and Yime did great.
The funny thing about having a house cleaner come is that, of course, you have to clean the house first--well, not too much in this case--living with Lil has us in the habit of keeping it pretty clean already, but at least it got me to sort through the fridge and take out all the old containers of leftovers. I felt bad giving Yime such a yucky job on her first day, but at least, it was a brief one. For the most part, the jobs Yime is doing are the same ones I am doing--she will just make them happen more often (like changing Lil's sheets and washing the kitchen floor and other stuff I have a hard time fitting in). She made two big lasagnas for lunches for the week, and had lunch with Lil. I took the opportunity of Yime being here to go for a walk in the Arboretum with my good friend Kathleen, which was just wonderful, especially on a gorgeous day like this. We tallked therapy technique the whole way like two starving people even though we feast on it all the time! (She is in her first month of practicum with Laura Brown--a famous local psychologist, psychotherapist, and feminist author).
Hospice make a big point about how the support workers are there to give primary caregivers a break, but it is hard to know where the lines are in a funny way (like am I really working hard enough that I need "a break"?)--especially with someone like Lil who does need daily care, but doesn't need it 24/7. Lil's care needs are also a moving target, as she becomes less and less capable of being here alone in some ways. On Tuesday, for instance, after the nurse left, I talked with Elaine on the phone and learned that she was on her way over to visit and cut Lil's hair. I had an errand I had been hoping to do all day but I had waited at home for the home health aide who turned out to be not able to come that day because of a miscommunication. Anyway, it is still fairly frequent that Lil is here by herself for a few hours at a time, and knowing Elaine was coming soon, I told Lil I was going to do my errand and left.
When I got back, I found out that Elaine had arrived, knocked on the door, and heard a loud thump. Turns out Lil had gotten up too quickly to answer the door and had fallen from her chair and was unable to get up. (Falling while getting out of her chair was the way she ended up with a very bad knee bruise which sidelined her with Bursitus for a week at just this time last year.) Luckily Elaine has a key and let herself right in and helped Lil up, but it just leaves me feeling a little shakier about Lil being here by herself. It is hard not to feel guilty when something like that happens, and yet I tell myself that it is not realistic for me to believe I can do everything possible to keep Lil safe--heck, it could just as easily happened if I had been sitting at my computer at the kitchen table.
The unavoidable thing is that something, sometime is going to happen and there will be nothing I can do. It is tempting to want to feel omnipotent, to feel that by trying really hard, I can in some way control events to protect myself from remorse and guilt, but there is another part of me that knows there is no way to avoid those feelings--that no matter what happens, I will feel irrationally guilty, as if doing something other than what I did might have made a difference. It's just that old familiar death anxiety raising its hoary head--somehow we all keep wanting to believe in our own small potency in the face of that yawning gulf of unknowing.
I have to cop to the fact that some of my irrational guilt comes from the conflict between my core longings to be the idealized caregiver I described yesterday, and a very healthy impulse in me to keep living my own life and having my own identity, no matter how much I am wrapped up in managing all these other lives.
Odd as it may sound, it is a guilt that comes from a culturally incongruent but healthy recognition that Lil is at the end of a long rich life and that however she dies, whether it is sooner or not so soon, it will not be unexpected, as well as from the knowlege that death, in this case, is not something to be prevented, but something to anticipate and plan for and usher in as gently and gradually as possible.
Though I recognize these impulses as healthy, I feel at the same time somehow covert about them--as though it is not kosher to think of death as something ok, something allowable, something real. I recognize that when Lil does die, whenever that may be, there is a part of me that will shrink from the fact that I have even considered the possiblity of her death--as though considering it lets it in, makes it wished, makes me the pointer of that long, dark finger. Sometimes the sticky threads of our true powerlessness and our compelled need to be doing to keep those fears of death at bay are difficult to untangle.
And if they are difficult to untangle for me, with my years of philosophical critique about the way our culture distances from death--sanitizes, medicalizes, sentimentalizes and simplifies it--how much harder will they be for my sons, I wonder?
When Marty and I first started considering this move, we weighed very many factors in the balance--our desire to live in Seattle for our own schooling and for the boys, our need to move before the school year started, our questions about whether Lil would be able to tolerate the mess and noise of kids (and the mess and noise of us grownups too), Stefan's long residence in the downstairs apartment and whether he would feel displaced, Lil's need for support (which was less at the time), the very significantly smaller space (and my not insignificant inclination to amass great quantities of Extremely Important Stuff), Marty's questions about moving into such an intimate family relationship with a grandmotheer-in-law he did not know all that well, and many more I'm not thinking of right now.
One of the factors that was most important to me in this move was my values around providing meaningful integenerational family connections for my boys--modeling for them what it means to truly get to know our elders in a way far deeper than holiday visits and construction paper cards. Embedded in this value for me is the values around death that have been modeled for me by mom and papa.
We are a family who takes care of our members throughout life--and at home, if possible. Five of the seven of us grandkids (six out of eight if you count Katie) were born at home. Grandma's mother lived with her for several years here in this house (did you know the front room used to be half as big, and where the TV now is was another bedroom?). Mike and Steve both cared for their father at different times (disaffected and complaining till the end) even when they had no space and barely enough to live on themselves. Grandma Ruth lived first with uncle Eric and Patty and then with us until one week before her death. (I remember how her vocabulary began to erode as the brain tumor grew, so that odd words floated into the place of familiar ones--"Sebalius" for "sherry"). Uncle Karl lived with mom and Papa and Stefan all through Stefan's teen years and then died quietly upstairs (it is one of Lil's ritual stories to tell about the night he died when she happened to be there--as though kneeding over the quality of that death makes her own somehow more pliable).
We are a family who does not hold death at a stiff arm's length. Like all families, we feel the conflicted and irresistible pull of meaning around that ultimate singularity of mortaility, but at least we do not try to drown it out with invalidating platitudes and empty ritual. Part of my reason for wanting to live here with Lil at the end of her life was that I want my boys too to know that death is a natural part of life, that old age is not creepy or foreign, but quiet and familiar and soothing, and that the thing to do in the face of death is to stay connected, and to draw closer if you can.
They will face death, and most likely sooner rather than later, and no matter how well I prepare them, it will be confusing and painful and irrationally guilt inducing (they wouldn't be normal if at least a small part of them isn't just the least relieved to see her go). But still I want them to know that death is something which can be experienced in a way that holds all those conflicting, confusing, terrifying emotions at once, and that most of all, it is something to experience together.
Because as close as they are to Lil's illness, as difficult as it will be to experience and understand their own layered reactions to her death, it is far more difficult to understand Daniel's illness. At the other end of the arc of life, it is far more galling to face off with the terrible unfairness of a terminal diagnosis in the span of a life not yet fully lived, and to tentatively, painfully finger the wound in my own soul born not only of anticipating that Daniel will die at the crescendo of his potential rather than the diminuendo, but of the loss of not having come to fully know that potential even now.
I've been thinking about the meaning of this blog for me. I can feel how it takes on the quality almost of a character in this drama we are all living, focusing some of the swirl that touches us all, though it is experienced differently by each. (I heard on the radio yesterday a review which described the camera in the mocumentary "The Office" as a character--snagging the gaze of the viewer on unexpected details and ironically commenting on the reactions of the actors.)
This blog is also taking on the quality of a kind of tribute--a gift of my own struggle as a contribution to this process we as a family are going through, marking the lifecycle events of our members.
Perhaps most importantly, this blog is becomming a place where I explore and begin to understand my own complex feelings around these important issues--being a caretaker, entering the middle of my life, being alive and opening myself to a new kind of understanding of death. I really appreciate those of you who have sent me emails or coments of appreciation and support in this process. I really value knowing you are along for the ride.
Hopsice update:
The "homemaker" worker came today. Her name is Yime (pronounced "yah-MAY") and she was really lovely. Grandma and I were just talking about how many of the women working for hospice just seem like such amazing women. I forgot to ask Yime her nationality, but I'm guessing maybe Somali or Eritrean. I really got such a good feeling from her sense of competence and respectfulness. So much of how I judge how well people will work with Lil is how they speak to her in the first few minutes--if they understand how to talk loudly, and with understanding for memory lapses while still treating her like the very sharp, very intelligent person she is, and Yime did great.
The funny thing about having a house cleaner come is that, of course, you have to clean the house first--well, not too much in this case--living with Lil has us in the habit of keeping it pretty clean already, but at least it got me to sort through the fridge and take out all the old containers of leftovers. I felt bad giving Yime such a yucky job on her first day, but at least, it was a brief one. For the most part, the jobs Yime is doing are the same ones I am doing--she will just make them happen more often (like changing Lil's sheets and washing the kitchen floor and other stuff I have a hard time fitting in). She made two big lasagnas for lunches for the week, and had lunch with Lil. I took the opportunity of Yime being here to go for a walk in the Arboretum with my good friend Kathleen, which was just wonderful, especially on a gorgeous day like this. We tallked therapy technique the whole way like two starving people even though we feast on it all the time! (She is in her first month of practicum with Laura Brown--a famous local psychologist, psychotherapist, and feminist author).
Hospice make a big point about how the support workers are there to give primary caregivers a break, but it is hard to know where the lines are in a funny way (like am I really working hard enough that I need "a break"?)--especially with someone like Lil who does need daily care, but doesn't need it 24/7. Lil's care needs are also a moving target, as she becomes less and less capable of being here alone in some ways. On Tuesday, for instance, after the nurse left, I talked with Elaine on the phone and learned that she was on her way over to visit and cut Lil's hair. I had an errand I had been hoping to do all day but I had waited at home for the home health aide who turned out to be not able to come that day because of a miscommunication. Anyway, it is still fairly frequent that Lil is here by herself for a few hours at a time, and knowing Elaine was coming soon, I told Lil I was going to do my errand and left.
When I got back, I found out that Elaine had arrived, knocked on the door, and heard a loud thump. Turns out Lil had gotten up too quickly to answer the door and had fallen from her chair and was unable to get up. (Falling while getting out of her chair was the way she ended up with a very bad knee bruise which sidelined her with Bursitus for a week at just this time last year.) Luckily Elaine has a key and let herself right in and helped Lil up, but it just leaves me feeling a little shakier about Lil being here by herself. It is hard not to feel guilty when something like that happens, and yet I tell myself that it is not realistic for me to believe I can do everything possible to keep Lil safe--heck, it could just as easily happened if I had been sitting at my computer at the kitchen table.
The unavoidable thing is that something, sometime is going to happen and there will be nothing I can do. It is tempting to want to feel omnipotent, to feel that by trying really hard, I can in some way control events to protect myself from remorse and guilt, but there is another part of me that knows there is no way to avoid those feelings--that no matter what happens, I will feel irrationally guilty, as if doing something other than what I did might have made a difference. It's just that old familiar death anxiety raising its hoary head--somehow we all keep wanting to believe in our own small potency in the face of that yawning gulf of unknowing.
I have to cop to the fact that some of my irrational guilt comes from the conflict between my core longings to be the idealized caregiver I described yesterday, and a very healthy impulse in me to keep living my own life and having my own identity, no matter how much I am wrapped up in managing all these other lives.
Odd as it may sound, it is a guilt that comes from a culturally incongruent but healthy recognition that Lil is at the end of a long rich life and that however she dies, whether it is sooner or not so soon, it will not be unexpected, as well as from the knowlege that death, in this case, is not something to be prevented, but something to anticipate and plan for and usher in as gently and gradually as possible.
Though I recognize these impulses as healthy, I feel at the same time somehow covert about them--as though it is not kosher to think of death as something ok, something allowable, something real. I recognize that when Lil does die, whenever that may be, there is a part of me that will shrink from the fact that I have even considered the possiblity of her death--as though considering it lets it in, makes it wished, makes me the pointer of that long, dark finger. Sometimes the sticky threads of our true powerlessness and our compelled need to be doing to keep those fears of death at bay are difficult to untangle.
And if they are difficult to untangle for me, with my years of philosophical critique about the way our culture distances from death--sanitizes, medicalizes, sentimentalizes and simplifies it--how much harder will they be for my sons, I wonder?
When Marty and I first started considering this move, we weighed very many factors in the balance--our desire to live in Seattle for our own schooling and for the boys, our need to move before the school year started, our questions about whether Lil would be able to tolerate the mess and noise of kids (and the mess and noise of us grownups too), Stefan's long residence in the downstairs apartment and whether he would feel displaced, Lil's need for support (which was less at the time), the very significantly smaller space (and my not insignificant inclination to amass great quantities of Extremely Important Stuff), Marty's questions about moving into such an intimate family relationship with a grandmotheer-in-law he did not know all that well, and many more I'm not thinking of right now.
One of the factors that was most important to me in this move was my values around providing meaningful integenerational family connections for my boys--modeling for them what it means to truly get to know our elders in a way far deeper than holiday visits and construction paper cards. Embedded in this value for me is the values around death that have been modeled for me by mom and papa.
We are a family who takes care of our members throughout life--and at home, if possible. Five of the seven of us grandkids (six out of eight if you count Katie) were born at home. Grandma's mother lived with her for several years here in this house (did you know the front room used to be half as big, and where the TV now is was another bedroom?). Mike and Steve both cared for their father at different times (disaffected and complaining till the end) even when they had no space and barely enough to live on themselves. Grandma Ruth lived first with uncle Eric and Patty and then with us until one week before her death. (I remember how her vocabulary began to erode as the brain tumor grew, so that odd words floated into the place of familiar ones--"Sebalius" for "sherry"). Uncle Karl lived with mom and Papa and Stefan all through Stefan's teen years and then died quietly upstairs (it is one of Lil's ritual stories to tell about the night he died when she happened to be there--as though kneeding over the quality of that death makes her own somehow more pliable).
We are a family who does not hold death at a stiff arm's length. Like all families, we feel the conflicted and irresistible pull of meaning around that ultimate singularity of mortaility, but at least we do not try to drown it out with invalidating platitudes and empty ritual. Part of my reason for wanting to live here with Lil at the end of her life was that I want my boys too to know that death is a natural part of life, that old age is not creepy or foreign, but quiet and familiar and soothing, and that the thing to do in the face of death is to stay connected, and to draw closer if you can.
They will face death, and most likely sooner rather than later, and no matter how well I prepare them, it will be confusing and painful and irrationally guilt inducing (they wouldn't be normal if at least a small part of them isn't just the least relieved to see her go). But still I want them to know that death is something which can be experienced in a way that holds all those conflicting, confusing, terrifying emotions at once, and that most of all, it is something to experience together.
Because as close as they are to Lil's illness, as difficult as it will be to experience and understand their own layered reactions to her death, it is far more difficult to understand Daniel's illness. At the other end of the arc of life, it is far more galling to face off with the terrible unfairness of a terminal diagnosis in the span of a life not yet fully lived, and to tentatively, painfully finger the wound in my own soul born not only of anticipating that Daniel will die at the crescendo of his potential rather than the diminuendo, but of the loss of not having come to fully know that potential even now.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Hospice update
Just a quick update on hospice status.
I went over to Group Health to refill a bunch of grandma's meds today and everything was free except the OTC calcium (well--not free, covered by taxes through Medicare, but you know what I mean). Yea hospice!
Erika the home care worker came for the first time today. It was just a short, get-to-know-you visit. She gave grandma a footbath and a mani-pedi (not the polish part--but filing her finger and toe nails so they don't dig into the nail beds and bother her) and rubbed with lotion places where her skin is dry. We may work up to a bath from Erika, if Lil wants one, or we may just keep it as another support relationship for if we decide not to keep going with Beza (the caregiver from the private provider.) She seemed very sweet and competent (and young--or is that a sign I am getting old?)
So, at this point the schedule is (and this is as much to help me organize myself as for you all):
Monday early afternoon: Dee the social worker (coordinate other support staff, emotional connection, life review)
Tuesday around two: Leslie the nurse (vitals, meds, general health tracking)
Tuesday afternoon: Cousin Elaine (and sometimes Max)
Wednesday for a couple hours around lunch: Linda the companion volunteer (conversation, lunch, trip to the bakery, maybe a walk or a drive)
Thursday early afternoon: Erika the homecare worker (foot care, lotion, massage, bath if desired, especially on weeks when Beza can't come)
Thursday starting two weeks from last night (probably): Zach comes over to hang with grandma and the kids for dinner while I am at class and Marty is at his study group (yea Zach!)
Friday from 11 to 3: homemaker service (make a dish to last the week for lunch, clean the bathroom, mop the kitchen floor, laundry, etc.)
Saturday from 9-1: Beza (bathing, laundry, light housework, lunch, company)
Having typed this out, I now realize I'd better get to the grocery store early tomorrow so as to have ingredients here for the homemaker.
Sure is nice to be on break!
And Tana and Jason and Mike get here in two days!
I went over to Group Health to refill a bunch of grandma's meds today and everything was free except the OTC calcium (well--not free, covered by taxes through Medicare, but you know what I mean). Yea hospice!
Erika the home care worker came for the first time today. It was just a short, get-to-know-you visit. She gave grandma a footbath and a mani-pedi (not the polish part--but filing her finger and toe nails so they don't dig into the nail beds and bother her) and rubbed with lotion places where her skin is dry. We may work up to a bath from Erika, if Lil wants one, or we may just keep it as another support relationship for if we decide not to keep going with Beza (the caregiver from the private provider.) She seemed very sweet and competent (and young--or is that a sign I am getting old?)
So, at this point the schedule is (and this is as much to help me organize myself as for you all):
Monday early afternoon: Dee the social worker (coordinate other support staff, emotional connection, life review)
Tuesday around two: Leslie the nurse (vitals, meds, general health tracking)
Tuesday afternoon: Cousin Elaine (and sometimes Max)
Wednesday for a couple hours around lunch: Linda the companion volunteer (conversation, lunch, trip to the bakery, maybe a walk or a drive)
Thursday early afternoon: Erika the homecare worker (foot care, lotion, massage, bath if desired, especially on weeks when Beza can't come)
Thursday starting two weeks from last night (probably): Zach comes over to hang with grandma and the kids for dinner while I am at class and Marty is at his study group (yea Zach!)
Friday from 11 to 3: homemaker service (make a dish to last the week for lunch, clean the bathroom, mop the kitchen floor, laundry, etc.)
Saturday from 9-1: Beza (bathing, laundry, light housework, lunch, company)
Having typed this out, I now realize I'd better get to the grocery store early tomorrow so as to have ingredients here for the homemaker.
Sure is nice to be on break!
And Tana and Jason and Mike get here in two days!
Brother Sun, Sister Moon
A note to readers: One of my goals for this blog is to use it not only as a place to celebrate grandma and reflect on my own experience of sharing this last phase of life with Lil, but also as a place to stretch myself as a writer. To do that, I hope to write in a way that is as honest and authentic as possible, which means not always showing myself in the best light. Because I'm taking some risks, unfolding layers as I go along, I would ask that you read these posts in order so these reflections appear in context. Specifically, if you haven't yet read my post from Monday, September 21 ("Days of Awe: A Year on Republican Street"), I'd appreciate if you start there before reading here. Thanks.
* * * * *
Jung says that every experience, every being, has a shadow side, and that more importantly, it is not from our proudest moments that we learn the most, but from our most hidden.
Caring for one another is one of the foundational values of our culture, one of the ways we most profoundly connect with each other, create a sense of meaning--even our very identities--and pass on or receive the wisdom and experience of generations before us. So if these reflect the bright side of being a caregiver, where is the shadow?
For me, the shadow begins with the need to do caring as a way to matter. Like Lil, I am an oldest of many siblings, like Lil, I tend to almost automatically take on the role of offering care to others, and like Lil, I think it is possible that while we both value our siblings dearly, we also experience a perplexing distance from them.
Lil talks proudly and often of her family. She loves to list off her siblings, telling who is still living, and who is related to whom. But I wonder if there is more to her desire to be always listing. Maybe it is partly my own projection, but it seems to me that while there is real love in those accounts, there is something else as well.
Lil was so much older than many of her siblings, and left home so young, that in some ways they seem, in her stories, more like cousins or friends. Even when she talks of Mabel, there is a subtle mix of loving care and the slight pain of a distance born of their very different tracks in life. I think Mabel was a puzzle to grandma--where Lil was bold beyond her years, beyond her gender, beyond her era, Mabel, on the surface anyway, appears to have been the sister who took the more conventional path. Where grandma seems young even at a hundred and one, the Mabel in grandma's narratives seems shaded with age and loss even as a young woman. In recounting those days, grandma seems just a little perplexed at Mabel's reticence--timidity even--while at the same time, warmly fond of her nearest sister and compassionately grieved for Mabel's losses.
She spoke recently of Mabel's death, saying reflectively that she was glad that Mabel had gone first, "because she would have no one left now...she had no children, you know."
Then she began to speak of Mabel's life--how as a teenager, Mabel met a young man, a boy really, and became pregnant. "The boy's mother felt he would never be able to support both a wife and a baby, so she arranged for an abortion. It went all right, Lil recalls, but Mabel bled a lot, and she always felt that it was due to that covert abortion that she could never have children. "Mabel married that boy, but he was killed in war: "there was a war with Spain..." grandma trails off, knitting her brows.
Later Mabel married again. "I liked her husband very much--he was a very nice man" and again, Mabel's husband was killed in war. A coffin-sized flag in a dresser upstairs along with small military medals in velvet boxes bear mute witness to that second great loss.
"Mabel grieved so for that man, for a long time. And I did too--I mean, I was sad for my sister, but I was also sad myself because he was such a nice man and I missed him." With a tiny turn of surprise, I realize it is the first time I have heard grandma ever mention grieving anyone--and it is not her own husband, not even Mabel, but the husband Mabel lost in the Second World War, sweetly recalled more than half a century gone.
Somehow, I think I have the feeling that grandma is so resilient that grief slides right off her, that she can speak of Al's death as a sad event certainly, but not one in which I can detect any hoarded pain or residual loneliness. Simply as a phase, a stage--his time to leave a world from which he had already almost completely withdrawn--a model of the simple, quiet death she herself hopes for.
But here she is, the dusty sun of late summer stripping her legs through the blinds, staring off at a past I cannot see, at a distant remembered grief for a man I hardly remember hearing mentioned before I asked about the flag in the dresser. It seems for Lil to be a grief which has become almost comfortable, like the place in the green carpet by the kitchen door where the wool has worn away to the sissal bones beneath--a familiar, tender loss, worn smooth by time. Grief too, is a gift--a small treasure passed on unknowing. Now when I think of smiling Mabel, baubling a rubber frog to make Daniel and Mimosa laugh (and laugh and laugh...), there is a new edge of longing to her hunger for the bright eyes of children who could never be hers.
I wonder if, like Lil, I am sometimes mistaken for not grieving even when losses hit me deeply. It seems the face I show to Disa and to Daniel is one that, in a kind of overwhelmed retreat, mutes my pain, but reads as indifference to others. I know that like Lil, I have deeply ingrained in me the idea that doing is worthiness--it is not what you show but what you do that matters. But what happens when I don't know what to do? What then?
The center of Lil's meaning is on doing too. The social worker, on her visit last Monday, respectfully put out the question (realizing, I think, that she did not quite have the language for the question she wanted to ask): "What is your legacy? What do you want your family to remember you for?"
Lil seemed uncomfortable with the very question and looked away, casting about vaguely for a few minutes, and then began describing her family, hitting her stride with increasing pride--that she is the oldest and has seven siblings, and their names are...
For Lil, leaving a "legacy" is too grand I think. Even to say that "family" is her legacy is more than she would own, and besides, she wasn't so much describing her family as her role in it--how can "family" be a legacy when it is a verb, rather than a "thing" to leave? Family is not something you are, it is something you do, just like working hard--hard work, a core value to grandma's life if there ever was one, is not a means to an end, it is the end. No need to dig further than that for deeper meanings.
I have been reflecting recently on the way we all become our roles. Perhaps it is part of our very human hunger to belong, to matter; perhaps our individualistic Western culture has swung too far on the pendulum of autonomy at peril of ignoring ways in which we are all deeply interconnected. But while finding meaning in our roles is profoundly important, it has its pitfalls too.
I wonder, for example, how much of my glowing descriptions of life with grandma arise not just from the very best in me, but also from a hidden and silent longing to matter, hoarded in my soul, dusky and wet, like heaps of last year's leaves--a longing which always seeks and is never sated, which lurches either on or back, but rarely listens, burying self doubt in the virtue of constant doing.
Is this current role I fill--this caregiver-mother-wife-student-daughter-granddaughter--the furthest extreme of the "good girl" persona I have so often used to shield myself from projected judgment? Oh, yes, I know rationally that I am not what I produce, what I accomplish, and most of me does know I matter--that I deserve to be loved and included just for who I am. Most of me even believes that.
But there is at least a part of me that seems to believe I can buy off the demons of doubt on the installment plan--small change from the bank of little-m martyrdom. It is the part of me that questions how pure are my intentions really, in this endeavor? That wonders if, beneath all the very honest care, the deep admiration and appreciation I feel for Lil, the shadow side of me hopes I have found at last the foolproof way to win approval and belonging in this family--unassailable even by my own cunning inner critic.
I'd laugh off those uncertainties as overly-dramatic fancies, but on the very day I wrote in this blog about grandma thanking us for living with her, she introduced me to the social worker with these words: "This is my grand daughter--well, I call her my grand daughter--she isn't really."
My fears of not belonging are very real.
And no amount of reasoning from the 40-year-old psychologist-in-training who seems to have written my CV can convince me that hearing that hitch in grandma's introduction doesn't stab through, in an instant, to a naked primal hunger to be wanted, to be seen, to be valid.
I could soothe myself and assure myself I do belong, that I am a "real" grand daughter. That would be the easy answer, the flip response, but the thing is--both are true: I both am and am not Lil's grand daughter. I both belong and do not belong here in this house, in this unexpected intersection of the end of grandma's life and the middle of mine, in this odd convocation of family devotion and personal path: I am not grandma's blood descendant, and though there are many ways I come very legitimately to be living in this place at this time, to ignore the contradictions of belonging does disservice to more than just myself....
It is my sense that every one of us siblings has, in our own way, been gnawed at by this core fear of being not wanted. I think back to being seven and eight years old, to the wrangles I had with Rohina (and less often, Mimosa). As we adjusted to each other as sisters, I tried jealously and spitefully to prove that my absent father was better than their grandmother--attempting impotently to erase my loss and magnify their impostor status in our house. I think about how, despite how well we get along as adult siblings now, we still subtly feel the ways in which others are favored over us (even though as adults, we know we should not care, but we do--that we may see unfairness where it does not exist, but still we feel it--those fears linger).
We all wrestle with this shadow. I think about Stefan, so much at the tail end of our pack, with his very different experience of older parents, striving to follow a creative path so divergent from typical expectations. I think about Daniel, and how I wish I knew how to be closer to him, to connect, to understand, and how I feel always clumsy and halting in that effort, pressured even more now by the unknown deadline of his illness. I think about Davin carving out an identity as a musician--as an adult--very much alone, through a journey of blood, sweat, and tears which I don't think any of us really much realized at the time, let alone understood. I think about Mimosa visiting as always the outsider sister to the houses Rohina and I shared battling our sibling struggles from shared bunk beds to the high school bus, now raising a child far away from his American cousins. And I think about the way Tana has lived always as an only child, seeing our big tribe from even farther outside, so generous in her gifts and hospitality, and I can only imagine that she may have felt a similar longing.
And finally, I think of grandma Lil, and her funny, ambivalent way of speaking of Mabel--both with deep care and slight bafflement--and how, though she has kept in touch with her siblings, they too were far flung and living separate lives. Lil was the first to leave home, one of the most fiercely independent, and the only one single at the time their mother needed a home for her last stage of life.
And it begins to dawn on me--perhaps when grandma qualifies that I am not really her granddaughter, it is she who is wondering if she really belongs here--here in my care, dependent on a younger woman connected only through a convoluted chain of re-marriage and step-relation. Could it be that she wonders why I would want to be here, why it matters to me so much, why I feel a family connection she is not sure I would have reason to feel? Perhaps she too wonders if she is really deserving of inclusion, of care, just as I do.
It may be, I reflect, that the disquieting resonance of the qualifier in grandma's introduction is as much about her wondering as it is about my own.
* * * * *
I am coming to the conclusion, this summer I have turned forty, that though we live our lives under the illusion that we will someday outgrow our fears and longings, we never really do. And, here at the threshold of what Jung calls the second half of life, I begin to wonder why I even hope to.
It is my hope and my longing that keep me reaching out to you all, despite the clumsiness of my words, despite the rawness of the experience, despite my own self-consciousness. It is my hope and my longing that connect me to Lil and Lil to me in our convergent journeys. And it is my hope and my longing that weigh in the balance against my fears in finding the courage to face my shadows and metabolize my past.
* * * * *
Jung says that every experience, every being, has a shadow side, and that more importantly, it is not from our proudest moments that we learn the most, but from our most hidden.
Caring for one another is one of the foundational values of our culture, one of the ways we most profoundly connect with each other, create a sense of meaning--even our very identities--and pass on or receive the wisdom and experience of generations before us. So if these reflect the bright side of being a caregiver, where is the shadow?
For me, the shadow begins with the need to do caring as a way to matter. Like Lil, I am an oldest of many siblings, like Lil, I tend to almost automatically take on the role of offering care to others, and like Lil, I think it is possible that while we both value our siblings dearly, we also experience a perplexing distance from them.
Lil talks proudly and often of her family. She loves to list off her siblings, telling who is still living, and who is related to whom. But I wonder if there is more to her desire to be always listing. Maybe it is partly my own projection, but it seems to me that while there is real love in those accounts, there is something else as well.
Lil was so much older than many of her siblings, and left home so young, that in some ways they seem, in her stories, more like cousins or friends. Even when she talks of Mabel, there is a subtle mix of loving care and the slight pain of a distance born of their very different tracks in life. I think Mabel was a puzzle to grandma--where Lil was bold beyond her years, beyond her gender, beyond her era, Mabel, on the surface anyway, appears to have been the sister who took the more conventional path. Where grandma seems young even at a hundred and one, the Mabel in grandma's narratives seems shaded with age and loss even as a young woman. In recounting those days, grandma seems just a little perplexed at Mabel's reticence--timidity even--while at the same time, warmly fond of her nearest sister and compassionately grieved for Mabel's losses.
She spoke recently of Mabel's death, saying reflectively that she was glad that Mabel had gone first, "because she would have no one left now...she had no children, you know."
Then she began to speak of Mabel's life--how as a teenager, Mabel met a young man, a boy really, and became pregnant. "The boy's mother felt he would never be able to support both a wife and a baby, so she arranged for an abortion. It went all right, Lil recalls, but Mabel bled a lot, and she always felt that it was due to that covert abortion that she could never have children. "Mabel married that boy, but he was killed in war: "there was a war with Spain..." grandma trails off, knitting her brows.
Later Mabel married again. "I liked her husband very much--he was a very nice man" and again, Mabel's husband was killed in war. A coffin-sized flag in a dresser upstairs along with small military medals in velvet boxes bear mute witness to that second great loss.
"Mabel grieved so for that man, for a long time. And I did too--I mean, I was sad for my sister, but I was also sad myself because he was such a nice man and I missed him." With a tiny turn of surprise, I realize it is the first time I have heard grandma ever mention grieving anyone--and it is not her own husband, not even Mabel, but the husband Mabel lost in the Second World War, sweetly recalled more than half a century gone.
Somehow, I think I have the feeling that grandma is so resilient that grief slides right off her, that she can speak of Al's death as a sad event certainly, but not one in which I can detect any hoarded pain or residual loneliness. Simply as a phase, a stage--his time to leave a world from which he had already almost completely withdrawn--a model of the simple, quiet death she herself hopes for.
But here she is, the dusty sun of late summer stripping her legs through the blinds, staring off at a past I cannot see, at a distant remembered grief for a man I hardly remember hearing mentioned before I asked about the flag in the dresser. It seems for Lil to be a grief which has become almost comfortable, like the place in the green carpet by the kitchen door where the wool has worn away to the sissal bones beneath--a familiar, tender loss, worn smooth by time. Grief too, is a gift--a small treasure passed on unknowing. Now when I think of smiling Mabel, baubling a rubber frog to make Daniel and Mimosa laugh (and laugh and laugh...), there is a new edge of longing to her hunger for the bright eyes of children who could never be hers.
I wonder if, like Lil, I am sometimes mistaken for not grieving even when losses hit me deeply. It seems the face I show to Disa and to Daniel is one that, in a kind of overwhelmed retreat, mutes my pain, but reads as indifference to others. I know that like Lil, I have deeply ingrained in me the idea that doing is worthiness--it is not what you show but what you do that matters. But what happens when I don't know what to do? What then?
The center of Lil's meaning is on doing too. The social worker, on her visit last Monday, respectfully put out the question (realizing, I think, that she did not quite have the language for the question she wanted to ask): "What is your legacy? What do you want your family to remember you for?"
Lil seemed uncomfortable with the very question and looked away, casting about vaguely for a few minutes, and then began describing her family, hitting her stride with increasing pride--that she is the oldest and has seven siblings, and their names are...
For Lil, leaving a "legacy" is too grand I think. Even to say that "family" is her legacy is more than she would own, and besides, she wasn't so much describing her family as her role in it--how can "family" be a legacy when it is a verb, rather than a "thing" to leave? Family is not something you are, it is something you do, just like working hard--hard work, a core value to grandma's life if there ever was one, is not a means to an end, it is the end. No need to dig further than that for deeper meanings.
I have been reflecting recently on the way we all become our roles. Perhaps it is part of our very human hunger to belong, to matter; perhaps our individualistic Western culture has swung too far on the pendulum of autonomy at peril of ignoring ways in which we are all deeply interconnected. But while finding meaning in our roles is profoundly important, it has its pitfalls too.
I wonder, for example, how much of my glowing descriptions of life with grandma arise not just from the very best in me, but also from a hidden and silent longing to matter, hoarded in my soul, dusky and wet, like heaps of last year's leaves--a longing which always seeks and is never sated, which lurches either on or back, but rarely listens, burying self doubt in the virtue of constant doing.
Is this current role I fill--this caregiver-mother-wife-student-daughter-granddaughter--the furthest extreme of the "good girl" persona I have so often used to shield myself from projected judgment? Oh, yes, I know rationally that I am not what I produce, what I accomplish, and most of me does know I matter--that I deserve to be loved and included just for who I am. Most of me even believes that.
But there is at least a part of me that seems to believe I can buy off the demons of doubt on the installment plan--small change from the bank of little-m martyrdom. It is the part of me that questions how pure are my intentions really, in this endeavor? That wonders if, beneath all the very honest care, the deep admiration and appreciation I feel for Lil, the shadow side of me hopes I have found at last the foolproof way to win approval and belonging in this family--unassailable even by my own cunning inner critic.
I'd laugh off those uncertainties as overly-dramatic fancies, but on the very day I wrote in this blog about grandma thanking us for living with her, she introduced me to the social worker with these words: "This is my grand daughter--well, I call her my grand daughter--she isn't really."
My fears of not belonging are very real.
And no amount of reasoning from the 40-year-old psychologist-in-training who seems to have written my CV can convince me that hearing that hitch in grandma's introduction doesn't stab through, in an instant, to a naked primal hunger to be wanted, to be seen, to be valid.
I could soothe myself and assure myself I do belong, that I am a "real" grand daughter. That would be the easy answer, the flip response, but the thing is--both are true: I both am and am not Lil's grand daughter. I both belong and do not belong here in this house, in this unexpected intersection of the end of grandma's life and the middle of mine, in this odd convocation of family devotion and personal path: I am not grandma's blood descendant, and though there are many ways I come very legitimately to be living in this place at this time, to ignore the contradictions of belonging does disservice to more than just myself....
It is my sense that every one of us siblings has, in our own way, been gnawed at by this core fear of being not wanted. I think back to being seven and eight years old, to the wrangles I had with Rohina (and less often, Mimosa). As we adjusted to each other as sisters, I tried jealously and spitefully to prove that my absent father was better than their grandmother--attempting impotently to erase my loss and magnify their impostor status in our house. I think about how, despite how well we get along as adult siblings now, we still subtly feel the ways in which others are favored over us (even though as adults, we know we should not care, but we do--that we may see unfairness where it does not exist, but still we feel it--those fears linger).
We all wrestle with this shadow. I think about Stefan, so much at the tail end of our pack, with his very different experience of older parents, striving to follow a creative path so divergent from typical expectations. I think about Daniel, and how I wish I knew how to be closer to him, to connect, to understand, and how I feel always clumsy and halting in that effort, pressured even more now by the unknown deadline of his illness. I think about Davin carving out an identity as a musician--as an adult--very much alone, through a journey of blood, sweat, and tears which I don't think any of us really much realized at the time, let alone understood. I think about Mimosa visiting as always the outsider sister to the houses Rohina and I shared battling our sibling struggles from shared bunk beds to the high school bus, now raising a child far away from his American cousins. And I think about the way Tana has lived always as an only child, seeing our big tribe from even farther outside, so generous in her gifts and hospitality, and I can only imagine that she may have felt a similar longing.
And finally, I think of grandma Lil, and her funny, ambivalent way of speaking of Mabel--both with deep care and slight bafflement--and how, though she has kept in touch with her siblings, they too were far flung and living separate lives. Lil was the first to leave home, one of the most fiercely independent, and the only one single at the time their mother needed a home for her last stage of life.
And it begins to dawn on me--perhaps when grandma qualifies that I am not really her granddaughter, it is she who is wondering if she really belongs here--here in my care, dependent on a younger woman connected only through a convoluted chain of re-marriage and step-relation. Could it be that she wonders why I would want to be here, why it matters to me so much, why I feel a family connection she is not sure I would have reason to feel? Perhaps she too wonders if she is really deserving of inclusion, of care, just as I do.
It may be, I reflect, that the disquieting resonance of the qualifier in grandma's introduction is as much about her wondering as it is about my own.
* * * * *
I am coming to the conclusion, this summer I have turned forty, that though we live our lives under the illusion that we will someday outgrow our fears and longings, we never really do. And, here at the threshold of what Jung calls the second half of life, I begin to wonder why I even hope to.
It is my hope and my longing that keep me reaching out to you all, despite the clumsiness of my words, despite the rawness of the experience, despite my own self-consciousness. It is my hope and my longing that connect me to Lil and Lil to me in our convergent journeys. And it is my hope and my longing that weigh in the balance against my fears in finding the courage to face my shadows and metabolize my past.
Pass it on
Nurmi sent for Lil this morning an article from the 90 year old columnist Lord Weidenfeld of Chelsey on what it meant to him to turn 90.
Lil sure enjoys the articles and letters people send that automatically print for the special email printer Tana got her.
So here is an open invitation to do the opposite of what internet etiquette might sometimes say--did you get something funny forwarded to you? Send it to Lil. See a good article on the Huffington post? Cut and paste and send it to Lil. Got a snap shot or two? Put it in an email and send it on.
You can send email to Lil at:
Lillian624@presto.com
as insurance, you can copy me and then I'll know to ask her if she got it: ariel.caspe.detzer@gmail.com
Lil sure enjoys the articles and letters people send that automatically print for the special email printer Tana got her.
So here is an open invitation to do the opposite of what internet etiquette might sometimes say--did you get something funny forwarded to you? Send it to Lil. See a good article on the Huffington post? Cut and paste and send it to Lil. Got a snap shot or two? Put it in an email and send it on.
You can send email to Lil at:
Lillian624@presto.com
as insurance, you can copy me and then I'll know to ask her if she got it: ariel.caspe.detzer@gmail.com
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Centurion
Last year, on grandma's on hundredth birthday, I was near the end of my 100 poems project (I gave myself a goal of writing 100 poems in 100 days). The entry I wrote here yesterday reminded me of the poem I wrote on June 24, 2008:
I think
when I die,
it will just be like flowers
or flies, you know?
~Just be there and then I won't
and it'll be
fine,
you know?
And
just as much in
the living as
in the dying,
you touch some deeper
part of a current
beyond conceiving,
without any pretense
of wisdom
that is
in itself
wiser
than flowers
or flies.
Who can tell this story?
First of ten families in the Dakotas,
Oldest of eight children
of Finnish immigrants,
mother of two
grandmother of eight
greatgrandmother of four...
The fact that you
hitchhiked as a teenager
across the country
(sacks of rattlesnakes on the floorboards)
at a time when cars were
newer than the internet
(and certainly a more
tectonic shift)...
The balls you had,
to sleep under the sky
in city parks
with Hoover youth
sharing what they had
over an oil barrel fire...
Or crossing over the wilds of mountain
passes in a model-T with no windows
along roads so steep and slow
you might as well have walked
to that foreign city on the Sound,
Seattle...
That you talked your way
into a real job,
at Swedish--
new in town--
depression Seattle...
Married a union organizer
decades older
and then after, left him
in Chehalis,
taking your two boys
to find a better life
at Yesler Terrace--
he was sick
you said, tapping your chest,
sick in the heart,
immobilized and hopeless,
but not you,
never you...
That you and those boys
bought a house
on paper route pay
and cleaning for cash and a handshake,
blacklisted
by McCarthy's bastards
for the transgression
of having been once
married to a Red...
And all the years
of working, learning,
organizing,
and keeping on,
so quietly
that one almost might not know
what kind of miracle
you have wrought.
And that tonight,
all of us,
under that same roof--
the two brothers,
the eight grandchildren and four partners
and most of the great grands
shouting with laughter in the darkening
terraces of garden--a quarter acre
in the heart of the city
you have carved out
and kept carved decade after decade,
in the neighborhood
where respectable people didn't buy then
(and now can't afford)--
all of us drink your health.
Here's to the next one hundred years!
I think
when I die,
it will just be like flowers
or flies, you know?
~Just be there and then I won't
and it'll be
fine,
you know?
And
just as much in
the living as
in the dying,
you touch some deeper
part of a current
beyond conceiving,
without any pretense
of wisdom
that is
in itself
wiser
than flowers
or flies.
Who can tell this story?
First of ten families in the Dakotas,
Oldest of eight children
of Finnish immigrants,
mother of two
grandmother of eight
greatgrandmother of four...
The fact that you
hitchhiked as a teenager
across the country
(sacks of rattlesnakes on the floorboards)
at a time when cars were
newer than the internet
(and certainly a more
tectonic shift)...
The balls you had,
to sleep under the sky
in city parks
with Hoover youth
sharing what they had
over an oil barrel fire...
Or crossing over the wilds of mountain
passes in a model-T with no windows
along roads so steep and slow
you might as well have walked
to that foreign city on the Sound,
Seattle...
That you talked your way
into a real job,
at Swedish--
new in town--
depression Seattle...
Married a union organizer
decades older
and then after, left him
in Chehalis,
taking your two boys
to find a better life
at Yesler Terrace--
he was sick
you said, tapping your chest,
sick in the heart,
immobilized and hopeless,
but not you,
never you...
That you and those boys
bought a house
on paper route pay
and cleaning for cash and a handshake,
blacklisted
by McCarthy's bastards
for the transgression
of having been once
married to a Red...
And all the years
of working, learning,
organizing,
and keeping on,
so quietly
that one almost might not know
what kind of miracle
you have wrought.
And that tonight,
all of us,
under that same roof--
the two brothers,
the eight grandchildren and four partners
and most of the great grands
shouting with laughter in the darkening
terraces of garden--a quarter acre
in the heart of the city
you have carved out
and kept carved decade after decade,
in the neighborhood
where respectable people didn't buy then
(and now can't afford)--
all of us drink your health.
Here's to the next one hundred years!
Monday, September 21, 2009
Days of Awe: A Year on Republican Street
I've been wanting to write a post less about practical things and more about just what it is like to live here with Lil for a while now, but with the end of the quarter and then Rosh Hashona last weekend, I've just had too much going on. I find myself, this Monday however, with a bit of time to take pause.
During the High Holidays--the period in between the new year (Rosh Hashona) and the Day of Repentance (Yom Kippur)--it is customary to reflect on larger meanings, and to take stock of overarching hopes and goals. It is also a time to examine relationships, to reflect upon how we relate to others and to consider if we are living up to the potential of our own best self. In this last year, my relationship with grandma Lil has come to be one of my most important connections.
I am starting to write this post in a few quiet moments between getting Jacob off to school on the middle school bus at seven, and the time to get Avi out the door to his eight thirty bus in an hour. I'm sitting in bed with my laptop, and Avi is lying beside me working on his four-by-four Rubik's Cube, with a notebook full of printed instructions off the web. In a funny way, I think Avi picks such hard things to obsess over as a way to train himself to tolerate greater and greater frustration. It is amazing to watch him develop in confidence and self-awareness as he gets older. Yesterday, he spent nearly four hours working on the cube while Marty and I cleaned and fixed out at the Fall City place (everything is out now. One more trip to spackle, paint, and do yard work and she should be ready for her closeup).
In some ways, living with grandma has hints of a similar kind of mothering, but the process goes ever so slowly in reverse as she finally, reluctantly slows, in this last phase of life. Her memory, once robust, has become lacy--hung now on particular words and images so that it takes the right cue for the experience to flood back. Yesterday at dinner, she was very quiet, (as she is more and more, not being able to follow conversations as hearing wanes). Wanting to draw her out a bit, I asked (knowing the answer) "Did you go to Volunteer Park with Nurmi today?" "No..." she replied, her brows knitted in that familiar way that means either she hasn't heard, or she is trying to remember. I tried again. "Did you see the Dahlias?" "Oh yes!," she brightened, "They have such a nice garden there!"
And like a camera zeroing into focus, she was fully there behind her eyes. We talked more about the day and ruefully I showed her the adhesive residue that I hadn't been able to scrub off my hands from fixing the tile in the tub at the Fall City place; she began to talk about her boys and how good they were at fixing things and how she would always wonder to them how they got so good at things, and they would say, "'Mom, dad takes us along to work, and we watch him'--they got so good by watching their dad," she repeats. She tells this familiar story proudly, her eyebrows rising to emphasize the word "watch" and to demonstrate how earnest little-boy-Mike and little-boy-Steve were in explaining it to her. She has told us this story at least twenty times--sometimes almost more to remember it herself, than for our sake, I think.
This story, like so many others, is almost a ritual she repeats to re-embroider the past where it begins to fray. It is a ritual with parts for each of us to play: grandma begins to speak in a certain cadenced way, Marty or I ask the questions, filling in the details if she forgets and prompting for more when she pauses. The boys instinctively stop their conversations, not quite listening (they've heard it before) but not talking either. There is orderliness to this iteration of memory--a way of naming the past to keep it alive, which at the same time both animates and reifies. These stories have a certain predetermined arrangement to them, like the nick knacks on the mantle which must be placed just so.
This particular story--the story of Mike and Steve watching their father work--is one shaded not only with pride but with a sadness that is never spoken. As I listen, I wonder silently what it was like to be a divorced mother doing the weekend-with-dad dance back in the fifties, when so few families did. When I ask her, grandma only shrugs and smiles. That was just life, her shrug seems to say. No use lamenting. (And there's pretty good research that links anxiety and stress to illness and decline, so perhaps that shrug really is the next best thing to immortality.)
But immunity doesn't erase pain. I know from talks with Mike and Steve (long enough ago now that I can't remember which one said what) that for them, underneath that shrug lies both a pride in their father's skills--renovating apartment buildings, fixing and building--and a frustration at his capricious distance--that as boys, and even as young men, they were never trusted to help, but were constrained to only ever watch him work. "When watching is what you can do," papa grins, "you get pretty good at it." Although he tosses off this reflection with grandma's same sanguinity, the memory seems bittersweet. And some memories of Steve senior which Mike has shared are not even tinged with sweetness. What must it have been like for Lil to negotiate that gulf?
You cannot even wonder that perhaps she is so sanguine because she somehow missed it, that somehow through a deliberate turning away, she perhaps sidestepped the anguish of mothering two boys tangled in frustrated longing for a father who didn't know how to father. But no, she knows--she never sugar-coats these iconic retellings. The truth is never idealized into some prettier picture or shunted aside for a more comfortable view. The bones are all there in the open--she seems simply not to be perturbed.
Maybe it's the distance of years that makes her so implacable, but I don't think that is all it is. Lil is the easiest housemate ever--nothing seems to bother her. Her serenity seems simply part of her nature. The only way I have of guessing that a detail might be not quite to her liking is when she has trouble remembering it (hidden in repeated questions that never seem to get satisfactorily answered for her because the answers don't quite make sense: "Why are you cooking a dinner for people who aren't family?" she asked me several times when I was planning to have a group of friends over, or revealed when, on a day I was working at the clinic, she turned away a Hospice aide she didn't like because she didn't remember her).
Sometimes grandma slyly admits that something passed was not quite kosher, but only after the fact, never to the person's face, and with no rancor. She was quite tickled, once, to get a postcard from Stefan saying he thinks of her often and telling a little about the music scene in New Orleans. She read it over several times, laughing. "Those boys used to play music upstairs all night," she hooted, "--they thought I couldn't hear, but oh, I could!" And then, foggy about the time, she becomes the littlest bit self-righteous: "I was still working then--at the bookstore--and I needed my sleep!"
Living with grandma is a balancing act between respecting her indefatigable independence and knowing where to offer enough support. It is the constant challenge of being near enough to lend a hand, but not so near that I sap her resilience--vigilant but not uptight. I notice how it changes me. As when my boys were babies, some inner ear has become attuned to noises I don't even know I hear, so that grandma's faint moans at six a.m. on the morning of the tachycardia incident brought me out of sleep and half way up the stairs before I was consciously aware of any sound.
I really appreciate about grandma too, that she understands her own limits--she remains tenaciously independent where it makes sense (like making her own breakfast and going out to get the paper and the mail each day), and relies on us graciously where she needs to (like letting us do her laundry, conceding at last to Dr. Terhaar's instruction to stop going up and down the basement stairs because of the risk of falling).
But there is a good side as well, to challenging that life-long habit of independence just a little. I think grandma has always been so much the one in charge--the oldest sister, the single mother, the one who cares for others--that it doesn't even occur to her that she might be the one to deserve receiving care. Every evening, when I start dinner, I turn on NPR, pour myself a glass of wine, and take a small glass out to Lil along with cheese and crackers or a some other starter, if we're having one. She seems surprised anew each evening at this small gesture, breaking into such a broad and genuine smile that her eyes brighten with that particular light that is only hers. It's one of the things that makes her such a pleasure to live with.
Last night, as we shared squares of Trader Joe's milk chocolate truffle bar after the rest of the family had scarfed theirs and left the table, she told me, "I just feel so secure living here with you and Marty." It was the first time I can remember her phrasing it that way--'living here with you and Marty' instead of 'having you and Marty living here with me.'
There is a welcomingness in this construction, as if, after this year together, with all of us feeling this arrangement is working out well, she wants us to know this really is our home too. Every time she tells us how glad she is that we are here, it just wells up in me how glad we are to be here as well. "You are doing us just as much of a favor, if not more," I tell her.
This move to Seattle has been so wonderful for our family in so many ways--the boys schools and arts opportunities in the city...being closer to cello lessons, dance classes, our Temple, my school, Marty's school, Marty's work, Vashon family, just everything...raising our boys in a neighborhood that looks like the real world instead of lily white Fall City...and for me, most of all, being back on these achingly familiar streets where I grew up, where I can take my boys to the restaurants and beaches I knew as a kid, where I know my way around by unremembered instinct, and where I can drive on streets that look and feel and smell right. Just walking in Volunteer Park when fall leaves start collecting on the ground brings such a surge of feeling in my chest I blink back tears.
And living here with Lil, for all the unexpected twists and topsy turvey logic of it, is a pleasure (In our funny little half-apartment, I feel back in college in more ways than one). But it's all been worth it, from the effort of downsizing a three-bedroom house into an attic and a basement (and, well, to be honest, also the garage, my father's mother-in-law apartment, and of course, the ever imposed-upon barn on Vashon), to the funkiness of our basement "living room" where our antique red couch and the one wing back chair we've squeezed in face off less than 20" apart, where paintings on the wall compliment the naked pipes and exposed electrical conduit, and where a freezer is featured where one might expect a fireplace or TV, to the storybook retreat of the boys' attic bedroom, where beds cut into the walls feel almost like ship berths or something out of Hogwarts, where Avi sits in grandma's yellow rocker to play the drum set of
I knew Al only when hearing loss had created a muffled darkness of his world not unlike the tiny cave of a workshop he carved out of that underground corner of the basement. I remember him as a gentle man who loved making things for kids--especially for Daniel (I think maybe he was glad to have a boy around among all us grand daughters)--and I remember he once supervised me putting Rohina's first ten speed bike together, never once telling me I was doing it wrong, or offering to take over--just lending me his tools and watching supportively as I doggedly figured my way by trial-and-error, (though I didn't have the first clue what I was doing).
I know Al now mostly through the legacy of the garden and the almost comical traces of his ingenuity and odd sense of design still lingering after all these years. Some--like the decayed plastic sheeting on the side of the basement porch that used to flap noisily on its rusty staples--I've finally liberated (and replaced with a salvage window from the Restore) or like the homemade utility sink (who makes their own sink? amazing!) which with papa's help, we swapped out last winter for a little stainless steel bar sink. And some, like the mismatched custom-made drawers in the shop, or the way Al integrated old car batteries into a rock wall out back, I just grin helplessly and enjoy.
The garden, of course, is utterly unimpeachable. Grandma always counters visitors' praise with her regrets that it does not look so good as it used to. She does not seem aware of how profoundly impressed every person who sees that garden is, not just at the scope and grandeur of it--defiant almost, to sprawl like that in the middle of the city--but that it should be so well designed as to look absolutely beautiful even after two years with only the most minimal of maintenance. About some things, there's just no arguing with her. Though as I sit here with her now at the kitchen table, editing over this piece before I post it, she is commenting on how beautiful it looks, and how funny it is that here, at the end of the summer, new flowers are coming into bloom so that you can hardly tell if it is spring or fall. Perhaps the garden is grandma's one piece of false modesty, and really can we blame her? If it is false modesty, it is well-earned, and it hardly makes a dent in the great deal of pleasure she gets looking out that window every day.
Though grandma may downplay the garden, she proudly tells visitors (like the hospice social worker) that her grand daughter and family live here with her. "I make my own breakfast, but I always eat dinner with the family--someone who's a hundred and one shouldn't be living alone, you know," she explains, seemingly unaware of the irony around how rare it is for someone a hundred and one to still be living in her own home at all, let alone weighing the relative merits of having housemates. Something in me curls warmly when she says "the family," like a cat burrowing into a cushion. We all know we are here to stay now. For as long as she needs us. And, just perhaps, longer--fate and the family willing.
It would make me so glad for this house, with its amazing garden and legacy of central celebrations, to stay in the family. And whether that means us here or someone else, I very much hope that in some way, our family stays rooted in this place where grandma has staked out not only so much of effort and care, but also so much independence, such staunchness of ethical and political conviction, so many gatherings, and so much quiet joy.
So day to day, we live here together, balancing our oddly intimate, yet separate lives. Grandma brushes her hair herself, though now Beza washes it. I wash the clothes and fold them, but she puts them away. She puts the denture plate in, but I guide her fingers to take it out for cleaning. I gather up the bag of incontinence pads from beside the bed, or occasionally from the bathtub stool (where I think she means to only set them for a moment, and then forgets), but she resolutely changes them herself, preferring at least that small screen of privacy. Every morning and evening I give her her meds, but I never need to remind her to take them.
In the space between intimacy and autonomy, we balance.
Every night before bed, I weigh her, glancing up to check that she is not putting a hand out to steady herself against the dresser (which would throw the reading off), and then, if she is ready for bed, we fold up the quilt together and set it aside, replacing the day pillows with the night ones and turning back the sheet. Then I leave so she can change her own clothes for bed--slowly and sometimes stiffly, but still staunchly on her own.
In the space between doing and being done for, we balance.
In the morning, she gets up at six thirty or seven for her traditional breakfast of farina and berries, and then after going back to bed to nap until nine or ten, she makes the bed herself. Sometimes, when I get up in the morning before she does, to roust Jacob up and out for school, I pass by the open door of her room (she closes it at bedtime, but leaves it open if she gets up in the night, long accustomed to patterns of life alone).
In the space between waking and sleeping, we balance.
Often, walking by her door in my morning rush, I am brought up short, for just a fraction of a second's pause, wondering where she might have gone at that hour, with the kitchen and living room clearly empty, before I realize that the unremarkable folds of the old blue-and-white blanket are all the impression her increasingly thin figure now makes in sleep. Where sleep makes babies into angels (no matter how ornery they may be awake), it grants the old a foreshadowing of their own death, laying a facade of frailty on a form stripped of vigor and will by repose.
In the space between life and death, we balance.
To live with grandma Lil is to live daily with the reality of death and be unafraid.
To live with grandma is to understand the decay of the body, the raveling of memory, the ongoing and inevitable loss of siblings, colleagues, friends, and age-mates undaunted.
To live with grandma is to give sadness its due, without ever verging over into depression, isolation, or self-pity.
To live with grandma is to encounter occasional pain squarely but fleetingly, heavy and large when present, but quickly resolved and released, so that when it has passed, it is almost unremembered.
To live with grandma is to witness a posture toward life which is direct, erect, and absolutely certain of meaning.
To live with grandma is to live.
may we all be blessed with a sweet new year
During the High Holidays--the period in between the new year (Rosh Hashona) and the Day of Repentance (Yom Kippur)--it is customary to reflect on larger meanings, and to take stock of overarching hopes and goals. It is also a time to examine relationships, to reflect upon how we relate to others and to consider if we are living up to the potential of our own best self. In this last year, my relationship with grandma Lil has come to be one of my most important connections.
I am starting to write this post in a few quiet moments between getting Jacob off to school on the middle school bus at seven, and the time to get Avi out the door to his eight thirty bus in an hour. I'm sitting in bed with my laptop, and Avi is lying beside me working on his four-by-four Rubik's Cube, with a notebook full of printed instructions off the web. In a funny way, I think Avi picks such hard things to obsess over as a way to train himself to tolerate greater and greater frustration. It is amazing to watch him develop in confidence and self-awareness as he gets older. Yesterday, he spent nearly four hours working on the cube while Marty and I cleaned and fixed out at the Fall City place (everything is out now. One more trip to spackle, paint, and do yard work and she should be ready for her closeup).
In some ways, living with grandma has hints of a similar kind of mothering, but the process goes ever so slowly in reverse as she finally, reluctantly slows, in this last phase of life. Her memory, once robust, has become lacy--hung now on particular words and images so that it takes the right cue for the experience to flood back. Yesterday at dinner, she was very quiet, (as she is more and more, not being able to follow conversations as hearing wanes). Wanting to draw her out a bit, I asked (knowing the answer) "Did you go to Volunteer Park with Nurmi today?" "No..." she replied, her brows knitted in that familiar way that means either she hasn't heard, or she is trying to remember. I tried again. "Did you see the Dahlias?" "Oh yes!," she brightened, "They have such a nice garden there!"
And like a camera zeroing into focus, she was fully there behind her eyes. We talked more about the day and ruefully I showed her the adhesive residue that I hadn't been able to scrub off my hands from fixing the tile in the tub at the Fall City place; she began to talk about her boys and how good they were at fixing things and how she would always wonder to them how they got so good at things, and they would say, "'Mom, dad takes us along to work, and we watch him'--they got so good by watching their dad," she repeats. She tells this familiar story proudly, her eyebrows rising to emphasize the word "watch" and to demonstrate how earnest little-boy-Mike and little-boy-Steve were in explaining it to her. She has told us this story at least twenty times--sometimes almost more to remember it herself, than for our sake, I think.
This story, like so many others, is almost a ritual she repeats to re-embroider the past where it begins to fray. It is a ritual with parts for each of us to play: grandma begins to speak in a certain cadenced way, Marty or I ask the questions, filling in the details if she forgets and prompting for more when she pauses. The boys instinctively stop their conversations, not quite listening (they've heard it before) but not talking either. There is orderliness to this iteration of memory--a way of naming the past to keep it alive, which at the same time both animates and reifies. These stories have a certain predetermined arrangement to them, like the nick knacks on the mantle which must be placed just so.
This particular story--the story of Mike and Steve watching their father work--is one shaded not only with pride but with a sadness that is never spoken. As I listen, I wonder silently what it was like to be a divorced mother doing the weekend-with-dad dance back in the fifties, when so few families did. When I ask her, grandma only shrugs and smiles. That was just life, her shrug seems to say. No use lamenting. (And there's pretty good research that links anxiety and stress to illness and decline, so perhaps that shrug really is the next best thing to immortality.)
But immunity doesn't erase pain. I know from talks with Mike and Steve (long enough ago now that I can't remember which one said what) that for them, underneath that shrug lies both a pride in their father's skills--renovating apartment buildings, fixing and building--and a frustration at his capricious distance--that as boys, and even as young men, they were never trusted to help, but were constrained to only ever watch him work. "When watching is what you can do," papa grins, "you get pretty good at it." Although he tosses off this reflection with grandma's same sanguinity, the memory seems bittersweet. And some memories of Steve senior which Mike has shared are not even tinged with sweetness. What must it have been like for Lil to negotiate that gulf?
You cannot even wonder that perhaps she is so sanguine because she somehow missed it, that somehow through a deliberate turning away, she perhaps sidestepped the anguish of mothering two boys tangled in frustrated longing for a father who didn't know how to father. But no, she knows--she never sugar-coats these iconic retellings. The truth is never idealized into some prettier picture or shunted aside for a more comfortable view. The bones are all there in the open--she seems simply not to be perturbed.
Maybe it's the distance of years that makes her so implacable, but I don't think that is all it is. Lil is the easiest housemate ever--nothing seems to bother her. Her serenity seems simply part of her nature. The only way I have of guessing that a detail might be not quite to her liking is when she has trouble remembering it (hidden in repeated questions that never seem to get satisfactorily answered for her because the answers don't quite make sense: "Why are you cooking a dinner for people who aren't family?" she asked me several times when I was planning to have a group of friends over, or revealed when, on a day I was working at the clinic, she turned away a Hospice aide she didn't like because she didn't remember her).
Sometimes grandma slyly admits that something passed was not quite kosher, but only after the fact, never to the person's face, and with no rancor. She was quite tickled, once, to get a postcard from Stefan saying he thinks of her often and telling a little about the music scene in New Orleans. She read it over several times, laughing. "Those boys used to play music upstairs all night," she hooted, "--they thought I couldn't hear, but oh, I could!" And then, foggy about the time, she becomes the littlest bit self-righteous: "I was still working then--at the bookstore--and I needed my sleep!"
Living with grandma is a balancing act between respecting her indefatigable independence and knowing where to offer enough support. It is the constant challenge of being near enough to lend a hand, but not so near that I sap her resilience--vigilant but not uptight. I notice how it changes me. As when my boys were babies, some inner ear has become attuned to noises I don't even know I hear, so that grandma's faint moans at six a.m. on the morning of the tachycardia incident brought me out of sleep and half way up the stairs before I was consciously aware of any sound.
I really appreciate about grandma too, that she understands her own limits--she remains tenaciously independent where it makes sense (like making her own breakfast and going out to get the paper and the mail each day), and relies on us graciously where she needs to (like letting us do her laundry, conceding at last to Dr. Terhaar's instruction to stop going up and down the basement stairs because of the risk of falling).
But there is a good side as well, to challenging that life-long habit of independence just a little. I think grandma has always been so much the one in charge--the oldest sister, the single mother, the one who cares for others--that it doesn't even occur to her that she might be the one to deserve receiving care. Every evening, when I start dinner, I turn on NPR, pour myself a glass of wine, and take a small glass out to Lil along with cheese and crackers or a some other starter, if we're having one. She seems surprised anew each evening at this small gesture, breaking into such a broad and genuine smile that her eyes brighten with that particular light that is only hers. It's one of the things that makes her such a pleasure to live with.
Last night, as we shared squares of Trader Joe's milk chocolate truffle bar after the rest of the family had scarfed theirs and left the table, she told me, "I just feel so secure living here with you and Marty." It was the first time I can remember her phrasing it that way--'living here with you and Marty' instead of 'having you and Marty living here with me.'
There is a welcomingness in this construction, as if, after this year together, with all of us feeling this arrangement is working out well, she wants us to know this really is our home too. Every time she tells us how glad she is that we are here, it just wells up in me how glad we are to be here as well. "You are doing us just as much of a favor, if not more," I tell her.
This move to Seattle has been so wonderful for our family in so many ways--the boys schools and arts opportunities in the city...being closer to cello lessons, dance classes, our Temple, my school, Marty's school, Marty's work, Vashon family, just everything...raising our boys in a neighborhood that looks like the real world instead of lily white Fall City...and for me, most of all, being back on these achingly familiar streets where I grew up, where I can take my boys to the restaurants and beaches I knew as a kid, where I know my way around by unremembered instinct, and where I can drive on streets that look and feel and smell right. Just walking in Volunteer Park when fall leaves start collecting on the ground brings such a surge of feeling in my chest I blink back tears.
And living here with Lil, for all the unexpected twists and topsy turvey logic of it, is a pleasure (In our funny little half-apartment, I feel back in college in more ways than one). But it's all been worth it, from the effort of downsizing a three-bedroom house into an attic and a basement (and, well, to be honest, also the garage, my father's mother-in-law apartment, and of course, the ever imposed-upon barn on Vashon), to the funkiness of our basement "living room" where our antique red couch and the one wing back chair we've squeezed in face off less than 20" apart, where paintings on the wall compliment the naked pipes and exposed electrical conduit, and where a freezer is featured where one might expect a fireplace or TV, to the storybook retreat of the boys' attic bedroom, where beds cut into the walls feel almost like ship berths or something out of Hogwarts, where Avi sits in grandma's yellow rocker to play the drum set of
I knew Al only when hearing loss had created a muffled darkness of his world not unlike the tiny cave of a workshop he carved out of that underground corner of the basement. I remember him as a gentle man who loved making things for kids--especially for Daniel (I think maybe he was glad to have a boy around among all us grand daughters)--and I remember he once supervised me putting Rohina's first ten speed bike together, never once telling me I was doing it wrong, or offering to take over--just lending me his tools and watching supportively as I doggedly figured my way by trial-and-error, (though I didn't have the first clue what I was doing).
I know Al now mostly through the legacy of the garden and the almost comical traces of his ingenuity and odd sense of design still lingering after all these years. Some--like the decayed plastic sheeting on the side of the basement porch that used to flap noisily on its rusty staples--I've finally liberated (and replaced with a salvage window from the Restore) or like the homemade utility sink (who makes their own sink? amazing!) which with papa's help, we swapped out last winter for a little stainless steel bar sink. And some, like the mismatched custom-made drawers in the shop, or the way Al integrated old car batteries into a rock wall out back, I just grin helplessly and enjoy.
The garden, of course, is utterly unimpeachable. Grandma always counters visitors' praise with her regrets that it does not look so good as it used to. She does not seem aware of how profoundly impressed every person who sees that garden is, not just at the scope and grandeur of it--defiant almost, to sprawl like that in the middle of the city--but that it should be so well designed as to look absolutely beautiful even after two years with only the most minimal of maintenance. About some things, there's just no arguing with her. Though as I sit here with her now at the kitchen table, editing over this piece before I post it, she is commenting on how beautiful it looks, and how funny it is that here, at the end of the summer, new flowers are coming into bloom so that you can hardly tell if it is spring or fall. Perhaps the garden is grandma's one piece of false modesty, and really can we blame her? If it is false modesty, it is well-earned, and it hardly makes a dent in the great deal of pleasure she gets looking out that window every day.
Though grandma may downplay the garden, she proudly tells visitors (like the hospice social worker) that her grand daughter and family live here with her. "I make my own breakfast, but I always eat dinner with the family--someone who's a hundred and one shouldn't be living alone, you know," she explains, seemingly unaware of the irony around how rare it is for someone a hundred and one to still be living in her own home at all, let alone weighing the relative merits of having housemates. Something in me curls warmly when she says "the family," like a cat burrowing into a cushion. We all know we are here to stay now. For as long as she needs us. And, just perhaps, longer--fate and the family willing.
It would make me so glad for this house, with its amazing garden and legacy of central celebrations, to stay in the family. And whether that means us here or someone else, I very much hope that in some way, our family stays rooted in this place where grandma has staked out not only so much of effort and care, but also so much independence, such staunchness of ethical and political conviction, so many gatherings, and so much quiet joy.
So day to day, we live here together, balancing our oddly intimate, yet separate lives. Grandma brushes her hair herself, though now Beza washes it. I wash the clothes and fold them, but she puts them away. She puts the denture plate in, but I guide her fingers to take it out for cleaning. I gather up the bag of incontinence pads from beside the bed, or occasionally from the bathtub stool (where I think she means to only set them for a moment, and then forgets), but she resolutely changes them herself, preferring at least that small screen of privacy. Every morning and evening I give her her meds, but I never need to remind her to take them.
In the space between intimacy and autonomy, we balance.
Every night before bed, I weigh her, glancing up to check that she is not putting a hand out to steady herself against the dresser (which would throw the reading off), and then, if she is ready for bed, we fold up the quilt together and set it aside, replacing the day pillows with the night ones and turning back the sheet. Then I leave so she can change her own clothes for bed--slowly and sometimes stiffly, but still staunchly on her own.
In the space between doing and being done for, we balance.
In the morning, she gets up at six thirty or seven for her traditional breakfast of farina and berries, and then after going back to bed to nap until nine or ten, she makes the bed herself. Sometimes, when I get up in the morning before she does, to roust Jacob up and out for school, I pass by the open door of her room (she closes it at bedtime, but leaves it open if she gets up in the night, long accustomed to patterns of life alone).
In the space between waking and sleeping, we balance.
Often, walking by her door in my morning rush, I am brought up short, for just a fraction of a second's pause, wondering where she might have gone at that hour, with the kitchen and living room clearly empty, before I realize that the unremarkable folds of the old blue-and-white blanket are all the impression her increasingly thin figure now makes in sleep. Where sleep makes babies into angels (no matter how ornery they may be awake), it grants the old a foreshadowing of their own death, laying a facade of frailty on a form stripped of vigor and will by repose.
In the space between life and death, we balance.
To live with grandma Lil is to live daily with the reality of death and be unafraid.
To live with grandma is to understand the decay of the body, the raveling of memory, the ongoing and inevitable loss of siblings, colleagues, friends, and age-mates undaunted.
To live with grandma is to give sadness its due, without ever verging over into depression, isolation, or self-pity.
To live with grandma is to encounter occasional pain squarely but fleetingly, heavy and large when present, but quickly resolved and released, so that when it has passed, it is almost unremembered.
To live with grandma is to witness a posture toward life which is direct, erect, and absolutely certain of meaning.
To live with grandma is to live.
may we all be blessed with a sweet new year
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