Posts

Bumpy with Chance of Potholes

/4 Comments/in /by

August 2016

Life is a beach, some say. For me, life is a trail. Change or reorder the vowels, as the situation warrants. The very best thing about my small home town, and being back here as an adult with a car (with 268,000 miles on it), is there are literally hundreds of beautiful places to go—from mountains to sea—and be home for dinner.

When I returned four years ago to care for my mother, I didn’t have to be home for dinner. She heated one of the frozen dinners she insisted on buying or ate leftovers. Now, though, she can’t see what’s in the refrigerator and she can’t read or remember the instructions on a frozen dinner; and she is increasingly particular about food. So now I’m home for dinner unless my sister can be there. I wonder when the day will come that Mama can’t be alone at all. I’m grateful it’s not yet.

Monday I went to Tolmie Peak in Mt. Rainier National Park. As I rattle across the washboard road up the mountain, dodging potholes and sinkholes, I observe their connection with Mama’s life, and mine with her. She is better at avoiding them than I am, as she steers clear of my backtalk. I am apt to challenge her dementia and her woe; but I am getting better at not falling into the holes with her, protecting both her and myself.

Like yesterday when she said she guessed “we” shouldn’t make a pie again because the rhubarb juice burned onto the pie plate and she had scrubbed and scrubbed but it was never coming off. She guessed we could look for another Pyrex pie plate at an antique store. Was she really saying “you ruined a family heirloom”? I apologized and promised to work on cleaning it. “Just leave it,” she sighed. Michelle apparently got it clean, it was back in the drawer last night. I once might have said something about it not being hopeless after all, but now I let it go.

She fell into a sink hole the other day after a session of taping her epic life story. She was almost in tears as she told me at dinner that while she could remember the man she passed in the hall at her job 75 years ago, see his face, and what he said every time they passed, she couldn’t remember that his last name was Burroughs at the moment she was recording the story. “My mind is really going,” she whimpered. “That’s hard,” I said sympathetically, not adding what a minor forgetfulness that was. Not pointing out that she is on her ninth 90-minute tape and is only now at when she met my father, clearly remembering a great deal of detail. Only this one forgetting was important to her right then. She didn’t want to be bothered with facts.

On the other hand, she refused to believe me yesterday that her small cavity was filled in December; that it wasn’t at her February exam that the dentist said she had one; that she doesn’t need to go in before next month’s cleaning appointment, suddenly thinking that it can’t wait another moment. Such a jumble of remembering, not remembering, misremembering. These clear signs of cognitive dysfunction are harder for me to let lie.

As I have gotten moderately better at not challenging her memory when it doesn’t matter, I realize that when I do correct her I feel irritated with her. Don’t you dare lose your mind; I will keep you from it. When I don’t challenge her, even in my head, I feel sad. In the same way that anger is easier than grief, irritation is easier than sadness.

She hasn’t blissfully left the past behind and moved into life in the moment. She knows she is forgetting and she’s frightened. She insists her version of the story is the correct one, and she accuses the forgetting on those who care for her—pushing us into the pothole—because that’s easier than admitting the holes are in her brain. And it surely beats letting us be her memory.

I am doing well stepping between the roots and up and over boulders on my way to Eunice Lake and Tolmie Peak, until I lose my focus and stub my toe hard, going down on one hand on the steep trail. As I navigate the downhill switchbacks that come next, my toe throbbing, I understand the inevitability of imperfection at this job. I will lose focus and double back on myself, relearning what I have forgotten.

As I wind back and forth, down and down, I hear the voices of those above and below me, voices that will quiet on the straight sections, leaving me alone. They might be the voices of those who have gone before, reminding me that this is noble work and that someday I will appreciate having had the experience—a gratitude I’m not feeling right now. Or maybe they are the mentors providing information about why things are the way they are and suggestions for dealing with it. Or maybe it is my own voice, reminding me to let go of my stumble on that last root and keep going.

I grip my trekking poles and propel myself determinedly forward as the trail straightens and climbs back up.

Mama and I are climbing a mountain, and it certainly isn’t an obstruction-free or level trail. But we will get to the top. We will emerge from the trees and into the alpine meadow of wildflowers overlooking the mountains and the heavens. When we reach the summit, I will return alone, re-walking the trail in reverse order. This is grief. This is joy.

I drive home after my hike, sad the day is over, breathing new life for having done it.

The Book of Regrets: A Braided Story

/2 Comments/in /by

On this date, seventy-nine years ago, my parents were married.
In the parlor of the biggest church in Dallas.
It was the only available venue my father could find on short notice.
It was very short notice.

I don’t dwell in the Land of Regret. My mother did, only she called it guilt. “I don’t want you to feel guilty for years like I have,” she would say, referring to not understanding that her grumpy mother’s complaints and inability to be appreciative were because she was old. “I don’t do guilt,” I said, wondering why she didn’t put her efforts into acting less like her mother rather than in shaming me.

Found in a box. Notes on her mother’s transgressions, written perhaps before a doctor or therapist appointment, or for a letter to her far away brothers.

Guilt: Doing something that violates one’s moral compass.

But she didn’t really mean guilt. She meant regret, wishing in the look back she had done it differently. Semantics. But what I meant was that I don’t dwell on it like she did.

Stellajoe had migrated from Tennessee to Spokane, Washington to work on an Army Air Force base.
Neither her job nor her boarding house accommodations were ideal.
George, a newly-trained wartime meteorologist, was in Dallas. 

November 12, 1943. “First I’ll come right out and admit to you that I made a mistake. I should have married you. The fundamental reasons for not getting married haven’t changed. But other things that I foresee have cropped up to at least balance them. I guess I’ve told you enough about Hensley Field for you to realize that we aren’t far from a peacetime organization. And I guess it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that I might hit just such a place overseas, even. If such a thing should come about, I wouldn’t be haunted by the fear that I’d come back to a young wife crippled or disabled. . . . I know your belief that if you love me you’ll never love anyone else. Frankly I don’t believe it.
Time is a great healer and over a period of years I know you could forget me.” 

Regret is typically based on the degree to which your ideal self (what you believe you COULD BE) diverges from your actual self (the person you are in reality).

I knew when angry words left my mouth, I would later wish I had been more compassionate. I also know if I had it to do over, I probably couldn’t have been more understanding in the moment. The words flew out of mouth in frustration, or bubbled up from my own hurt at the way she seemed not to appreciate my efforts; they weren’t from a lack of compassion. Or maybe the angry words were a cover for my own heart-deep pain at watching her decline. What I regret is that I didn’t apologize more. But I would have been apologizing constantly.

“I know I’ve bungled this business very, very badly, and it would be no more than I deserve if you didn’t want  to get married now. I can’t offer you any assurance of a week together even.
But I’m ready to get married.”

It’s been four and a half years since there has been a chance for a do-over or an apology. I am doing exactly what she thought she could spare me: regretting. I knew I would have regrets, I knew it then; but caregiving perfection was not in my grasp any more than it had once been in hers. So what to do with the expanding list? I am discovering that naming them, apologizing in absentia, forgiving myself, forgiving her, makes the vow I did make—not to dwell there—a promise to myself, and to her, that I can keep.

The long, rambling letter was slow to arrive.
On November 16, he sent a telegram, saying he was going to call.
The connection was bad. He proposed on the phone.
She must have told him she would write her response.

As I name them, though, I find a second distinction: not only guilt vs. regret, but regret vs. grief. It’s an emotion I’m still unpacking. Perhaps after the Book of Regrets is written—or at least begun—I will understand it better. I have a feeling grief is not as easily dismissed. Grief is a thing that, over time, we learn to embrace as part of our Self.

The Book of Regrets

❧ Soon after my arrival at my new old home, my mother told me she had asked the yard person to clear out the salal, Oregon grape, and blackberry vines at the landing of the steps to my father’s workshop to create an opening to duck under the vine maples to reach a small wild dogwood tree. She thought I might want to sit there. “Why would I want to do that?” I asked, my voice dripping with dismissal. It was long later that it dawned on me that she knew I was missing my home in North Carolina, and the brick patio I had made under a huge dogwood tree. She was doing what she could to help me find home again.

It’s been ten years as I write this, and the grief of my lack of understanding wallops me anew. I wanted to apologize, to tell her I finally recognized what she was trying to do. But I didn’t do it. In the last days of her life, I remembered again. I knew she was going to be gone and I knew would regret not saying I was sorry, and still the words wouldn’t leave my mouth.

I talk to her now at Staebler Point, in the city’s natural area she so loved. I speak the words into the breeze and hope she knows.

November 19. He sent another telegram saying he hadn’t gotten her letter
and would call when it arrived.

❧ I regret I couldn’t keep her in her beloved home, but the grief doesn’t reach so deeply. I couldn’t, I know that. What I regret is that she didn’t leave the earth before the move became necessary. And I had no control over that. She lived in the house longer because I was here. She lingered in this life longer because I was here. She didn’t die in a hospital, she was in her own bed, I was in the room. I try to let that be enough.

November 22. Another telegram saying he couldn’t get a call through, (after trying for five hours);
but yes, he wanted her to come, the quicker the better. 

❧ I wish I hadn’t asked her tell me how it felt to be old. It was not her responsibility to satisfy my curiosity. I’m glad I didn’t push. It wasn’t really what I was asking anyway. I was asking her for the first time in her life to be in touch with her inner self. I was asking her to share her Self with me. So I could share my Self.

November 23. He writes another letter and is waiting again for her reply, by mail or telegram,
hoping he wasn’t putting her on the spot.
He was sorry he wasn’t clear in the previous letter that he was definite about her coming.
“Maybe I did have too many ‘ifs’ in it.” But he needed for her to decide for herself,
knowing she might arrive and find him gone, deployed.
With no way to let her know. 

❧ A memory: She drove me back to college after some holiday and walked with me from visitor parking to my dorm. She held my hand as we walked. I was uncomfortable and embarrassed. But I didn’t pull away. One thing I saved myself from regretting much later.

November 27. She got her blood test, a wedding dress, and a train ticket. George writes his parents that Stellajoe was leaving Spokane that night, Saturday, and expected to arrive in Dallas at 8am Monday morning, November 29, after some thirty-six hours sitting up on the train. “Probably we’ll get married Tuesday afternoon.”

❧ We gave her Alexa for her last Christmas. She loved Alexa, and astonished us by being able to summon her. Mostly she asked Alexa to tell her jokes. Alexa kept her company, a voice in the silence. I regret not learning to program her to do more than tell bad jokes.

They “tied the knot” at 6pm, November 30, 1943.
With, in spite of rationing, a handful of rice for the four attendants and guests to throw. 

❧ After she died, and I was going through boxes of her notes and partially used journals and unsent letters, I found one in which she wrote her longing to have a different relationship with me. I didn’t know. We never said the words. We couldn’t let each other in. That is what I most regret. And the well is deep. And maybe it was always too late to pull up that bucket, neither of us were raised to bare our souls. I regret something that could not have been different.

Six weeks later, George deployed. He returned April 25, 1946. 

“I thought I’d come back to give my mother another chance.
I’m starting to think it was so she could give me one.”

JODI PICOULT

❧ I wish I’d taken better advantage of this second chance. And I was too tired just trying to get through the days. But maybe just having a second chance was enough, maybe it was everything. Someone said to me had I only stayed the year I expected, I would not have gained what I eventually found.

She told me, years later, he insisted she use birth control, which she didn’t believe in.
“He was afraid he wouldn’t make it back home from Europe
and didn’t want to leave me with a child to raise alone.
If he didn’t come back, I wanted a child.
To keep a piece of him.”

I am one of those pieces. I wasn’t perfect. But I was enough.