SEE-SAW

June 22 – Realtor Patti calls to say that 83 year old lady is “walking” away from deal. Patti will find out if young couple is still interested.

June 23 – Longest day of year. Notice has been given at work. Movers set up. Diana has arranged her schedule to help us drive across the country. We wait.

June 24 – Bride and groom-to-be will buy. Contract signed. Everyone (including Daisy) exhales.

Our new possible location is Harper’s Ferry W. Va. It’s a one-hour train ride to Rockville (federal building) and is a gorgeous historic town overlooking the convergence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers. Sunday I will visit with Eliza and look at some homes. The house prices and taxes are AMAZINGLY low. I’m picturing long walks, canoe rides on the river, quaint shops and no Starbucks (sigh).

So many months have passed since we imagined ourselves back east, and now it’s beginning to be real.

FATHERS DAY

My memory of him has really faded like an old photo. In fact the pictures I still have are little snaps from the 50’s and 60’s that are candid and off center, frayed at the margins. It’s been over four decades now that he’s been gone.

When I think of him in those years, I remember his calming effect. In a childhood that was not idyllic, where I struggled to connect with my peers and be whatever “normal” was, he always reassured me that “everything will be alright”. I took walks with him -nowhere special, down to Pinault’s drugstore or the A & P. He walked rather slowly because of his bad heart. My mother used to say he had taken the stairs “three at a time” when he was a young man, and I found it incredible. He was in his late 50’s when I was 9 and 10 and we walked and talked, having our uninterrupted time. I remember his large hands and the feel of my right hand in his left and the sense of its protection.

The clearest picture is the one on the piano where he’s in New York and it’s the 1920’s. He wears an overcoat and a serious face – a young Irish immigrant embarking on his big adventure. He stayed in the US, married my mother, and returned to Ireland where we were all born. It was the second emigration in 1953 that broke his heart. His business in Ireland failed and the decision to return to America was the only practical option so that our family of six could start again in my mother’s country.

It was only when I went home to Ireland several years ago that I understood the sadness of his later life and the sacrifice of leaving that beautiful land forever. He was not given to complaint or regret, always looking after our needs and making the effort to pass on the best things that he knew – the history, the ethics, bits of Shakespeare and the poetry of Yeats.

He is with me still and very much present in my sisters and my daughters – some would say in my husband as well and I believe it’s true. He is with me when I’m quiet and when I’m passionate about doing the right thing. He made me feel that everything would be alright and, in fact, everything is.

Paul and Geri's Excellent Adventure

It feels like we have been waiting most of our adult lives for our house to sell. Now it's actually happening. Two different parties put in bids yesterday. One is an elderly woman who looked at it four months ago and was too worried about the economy to act. She is 83 and undaunted by the multiple staircases. The second is a lovely young bride-to-be and her fiancé who LOVE the house and are getting "wonderful, peaceful vibes" when they walk through our rooms. Theirs was the second call and the bride-to-be is crying at the prospect of losing the bid. By the end of today, the realtor will have sorted this out and we will have a contract.

Then what??? Where do we tell the movers to go with our stuff? Which job will open up? How do we cross the country with a poodle? What about driving 2300 miles with bad backs? What will our new home be like? What do we do when it rains???

Tell us our fortune as you imagine it and share your vision ….

SABBATH

This is a day of rest and is actually more restful this week, preceded by having Saturday off. Every other week I work on Saturday and so Sunday is the ONLY day I have to rest. That often makes me panicky because I feel the pressure of having to rest and worrying that if I’m not resting and have to start work again on Monday I am sure to fall apart by Wednesday. Of course it’s hard to rest when your house is for sale and you can’t lounge around in your PJ’s till 3:00 PM . At any moment a realtor could call and say she and her client will be over in ten minutes. It takes a good hour to make the bed, shower, pick up towels and underwear, get the dishes going and examine the carpet for the little bits of leaves and stones brought in on our sneakers. For now, what constitutes Sunday rest is about two hours with an extra coffee, the scrawny Tucson Sunday paper debulked from its ads, and a few interview shows.

When I was growing up, the Sabbath was an entirely different proposition. We couldn’t lounge around in the morning because we had to go to Mass and the rule was: if you don’t go to Mass, you don’t anywhere that day. We usually went at 11:00 because with six of us and one bathroom, it took forever for us all to get ready. You couldn’t just throw anything on either. You had to have a dress or skirt and blouse…and a hat…and white gloves. It was always possible to locate one glove but never two. Someone was always yelling at someone else, accusing them of having moved something that could not now be located. And that was the way we went out the door every Sunday, clothes barely buttoned and zipped, totally stressed out, off to pay homage to the Prince of Peace.



Mass was usually followed by a large breakfast and a prolonged family discussion about the sermon, the dreadful soprano or something in the morning news. I guess that was restful in its own way. We always laughed a lot and lost track of time with no expectation for how the rest of the day would go. My parents would often nap in the afternoon , my older sisters would take off with friends and I would go across the street to play Monopoly or Star Reporter with the neighborhood kids. Sometimes I’d curl up with a book. The day had a special feel to it. Nobody worked. The stores were all closed. It was the 1950’s and the world felt safe (if you didn’t let yourself dwell on the Russians).

It would be nice to have a day when everything stopped. As I get older I find myself wistful about the simplicity of an earlier time that was lighter on the soul. Then I realize I can choose to close the doors and shut out the noise any time I want. Maybe that can happen ... after this transition is over and the Sunday realtors are gone from our life.

THURSDAY

I never knew I was a “sympathy crier” until yesterday when my patient’s wife suggested that. She explained that she was one herself. When she told me about her husband she started sobbing and I sobbed with her. I tried to joke a little and told her my employers say it’s OK if I cry, as long as I don’t cry more than my patient and their family. We sat holding hands in the darkened room where her husband was lying, unresponsive. She told me he had been in perfect health until this year. He did not smoke or drink, ate right, exercised, laughed a lot. In early March he found out he had a deadly, aggressive form of lung cancer and it had migrated into his ribs causing intractable pain. Nothing would relieve the pain and now the doctors were recommending “comfort care”.

We give comfort in what we do, both the medicines and the human comfort. In the hospital there’s plenty of medicine but not much time to be with patients, let alone hold hands and let people cry. In our hospice there is time and lots of space to sit and meditate or sit with a cup of coffee and a social worker or chaplain.

Some days in this work are easy to put aside at 5:00. The last two days there were three families facing end of life and each experience stayed with me. Tom was the old man on Wednesday who had a great attitude despite his lungs filling with blood and the constant suction that bought him a only few breaths at a time. He told me ,matter of factly, that he was waiting to see his great-granddaughter for the first time at the end of the day – she was coming in from the airport. “After I see her, I’m all done.” he said and he smiled. Yesterday I saw him and he had entered that space we call “actively dying”. He will have crossed over by this morning.

The third patient, Frank, had “multi-system failure”, a cascade of internal events that trigger one organ after another to fail, tipping like dominoes. Lungs, kidneys, liver, heart. His wife cried in yet another small room where we filled out papers. There was nothing to be said except, “We will take good care of him…and you.” She was grateful.

At the end of days like these, I don’t listen to Chris Matthews or (God forbid) Keith Olbermann and hear the latest political tiffs and sideshows. No, I look for a Fred Astaire movie on TCM and if that’s not available, one of those arcane history shows that Paul can always find will do just as well as I drift off, hoping to dream of an empty beach somewhere. If I’m lucky, the next few days at work I will be sent to visit only octogenarians with Alzheimer’s , full lives behind them, ready to cross the water.

LA PALOMA

Yesterday I ran over a bird… a dove, I think. It was sitting in the road with its back to me as my car approached. I half noticed it but expected it to fly away in time, but it didn’t. It must have been preoccupied. I felt the slight bump under my wheel and then saw feathers fly up, cartoon-like, in the rear view mirror. I felt bad. It triggered the memory of the time I ran over a rabbit a few years ago and how awful that felt. I made a mental note to tell Paul about it when I got home, but then I forgot to.

Last night I was awake for a while and thought about the bird again and about killing things with your car. I almost hit a large dog once in Glendale – close call – and was shaken for days. What does size and species have to do with our remorse when we kill something? Are the animals that could be someone’s pets in closer relationship to us and of more value? Is it aesthetics? Is a “beautiful” animal more valuable? Here in Tucson we have javelina and they are butt-ugly. I imagine if I hit one of those I would feel bad but not nearly as bad as if I hit a beautiful small wildcat on a foraging trip down from the mountain. And how is size a factor? It’s easy to kill a roach or housefly and actually enjoy a sense of accomplishment. Insects in our living space almost seem meant to die. They’re dirty and gross. Paul has seen packrats in the garage and they are really cute so even though they have destroyed artwork, broken into bags of dog food and hidden things in their secret spaces, killing them is unthinkable.

It’s all very subjective – what , in our largesse, we allow to live, what gets whacked and how we feel about it. I wonder if the dove is missed today by its friends and family or if they even took notice of its passing.

Monday, Monday

Today seemed like a good day to start a blog. Nobody knows it's here so I don't have to worry about an onslaught of responses. I am -we are - moving East and don't know when or where exactly. Today I was invited to apply for a job (in Fredericksburg VA) as a bereavement counseling supervisor. I had never considered doing a job like that but in some way feel prepared. I understand loss... I am a counselor by training.. I have also supervised small numbers of people at a time. I could do this job. I don't know if I would enjoy it but one never knows about new jobs. It only takes one fellow Aquarian or a beautiful drive to work on a country road or an opportunity to innovate and it's all good.

Today I also started physical therapy and found out something I have known for many, many years: my hamstrings are way too tight. I also found out that to loosen them I have to do a funny exercise with a ball between my knees ( the therapist's ball had Spiderman on it) and breathe deeply several times while squeezing muscles various ways.


The last thing that happened today (so far) was an application I submitted to yet another job at a hospital in Rockville, MD. This was a job that I made up a long time ago and, waddyaknow, it actually exists. It is a patient representative (RN) who explains everything to the patient and family that's been thrown at them by the docs and other hospital staff, and gives them a fighting chance to figure out what to do when they go home... what their meds are for, how to stay well, avoid coming back to the hospital, eat right, etc. The hospital is run by the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Their members are extremely healthy as they wait for the second coming.

Diana tells me not to get too far ahead of myself and she's right. That's enough for today.