I’ve Learned One More Important Lesson

Now I feel like I’ve been a pompous ass whenever I’ve walked beside my friends with cancer. Somehow I thought I could see the karma and dharma of their lives and know the reasons for this wild-growing, crazy disease taking over their bodies.

One friend long ago, I was sure, had brought back her rapid-growing, metastatic breast cancer after beating it for four years because she couldn’t figure any other way to get out of a marriage with a domineering husband. What did I know? I certainly have had no right to second guess another friend’s ovarian cancer as being the result of her holding her emotions in check or another’s for feeling powerless. Who have I thought I was?

Now I realize I’ve been nothing but a mis-informed, mis-quided, well-meaning ego trying to assert some kind of control over my own fear regarding the big “C”.

Why my husband contracted this disease sits on my chest and makes me scream. I can come up with my theories but it serves no purpose now. Even the oncologist said he didn’t think it was because of his 22 years of accumulated smoking. The cell structure was too rounded and contained. He ‘guessed’ it was more a matter of Y having inhaled some piece of something forming an irritated space in his right lung. The irritation allowed a weakness where the mutating organism could begin. What made it begin? No one knows that for sure either. Yes, it could have been because of a depressed immune system, or a lot of stress that reduces the body desire on a cellular level to fight back. There could have been an emotional component. There also could have been a cancer gene in his DNA pool. And it could have been all of the above.

All I can say is that I’m shutting up with my theories. There is no room for them in my heart-felt wish to just be available to someone who’s going through their process of believing they’ll beat back this destroyer of lives.

After having watched Y move through his own stages of denial, negotiation, anger, acceptance and release, I can only hope others will find their peace with this challenge. I hope I can be there and offer support as they make up their minds about what they want to do. I can cry with them if it helps them. I can offer an opinion regarding the long term effects of chemo and radiation and holistic treatments, if they want to ask me. Maybe I can even suggest they make peace with whatever they have become afraid of or wish they could have changed about their lives.

I know for certain I will respect their path with better care and refrain from putting them in some kind of box that serves only one purpose: of making me more comfortable rather than assessing and assisting them with their needs.

A Little Bit on Aging

After so many years of traveling through the various stages of being a kid, a teenager, a young adult, an adult, a middle-ager, I have been inclined to look at an older person and think, “There but for the grace of God…” I don’t see my gray hair or the wrinkled edges to my eyes until I look in the mirror. That’s when I have to wonder who the old woman is. Or, why is that old woman following me around?

Now I’m realizing the ‘age-challenged woman’ isn’t out ‘there’. She’s in ‘here’!

I have the tendency when I set myself to a task like: “Age Well, Earlene,” to jam through the assignment! The fact is: I’ve decided this time that I’d rather not push myself too soon into the next phase beyond this reality, thank you. I decided to take an assessment of what my body, emotions, mind, and spirit might be feeling about this current process, like a personal CAT scan or MRI.

Physically, this process has been on-going due to my 66 years of non-stop use and gravity. I’m short by a little, wider by a lot. I have bald spots, and my hair is not the luxurious mane it once was. The ringing in my ears stops me from hearing certain sound vibrations and soft voices. I have a cataract growing which will require surgery in five years, or so the doctor says. I can still exercise with five pound weights, but I have to be creative in lifting over 20 pounds. Veins are beginning to bulge in my calves instead of muscles. My arms are showing signs that what once was on top is now flapping at the bottom.

Everything is wrinkled: brow, lips, cheeks, chin, neck, arms, and hands. What isn’t wrinkled, sags. Those youthful, perky breasts are flatter with wall-eyed nipples, and I have a little pot belly. I leak urine and fart. Aches and pains let me know which joints I’m using, and my hands fall asleep at the darndest times. So do my feet

Emotionally, I switch between sad and mad, but mostly I’m scared because I’m alone and on my own. Some days I can get out of bed and look forward to the day of possibilities. Others I pull the covers over my head and try to hide.

Mentally, I need much more self-talk to keep me on task, and I need lists to remind me of commitments and what I’ve used up in the refrigerator or shelves. I can figure things out over time, and I continue to have interest in life around me. I can still do basic arithmetic and figure angles when I’m laying the new cedar floor in the closets. I’m getting better at Sudoku, and I thoroughly enjoy many creative interests.

Spiritually, I find I’m talking to them more, the spirits that is. I believe they reside within the living things on the Earth as well as in the ethers. Or at least I think that’s who I’m talking to. I know I’m part of something greater than myself and that the essence of who I am is not my body or mind or emotions. These things are pieces of the expression of me in the world

So the only thing this aging phenomenon doesn’t seem to be hindering is my spirit. It seems to be taking the edge off my mental processes, confusing the heck out of my emotions at times, and majorly affecting my physical presence on this Earth plane. Maybe that’s the best answer, that aging is the dissolving of my human trappings so my Spirit can shine through. To do that well might be a matter of attitude and acceptance.

(Taken from an essay for a recent class on aging.)

A Step in My Shoes

The frost covers more of the meadow this morning than I’ve seen before, clear to the top of the hill instead of cuddled in the lower southeastern half always in winter shadow. I love this place where I’ve been living for 25 years. Rocks and trees, manzanitas and creosote bushes are my friends as well as the quail, wild turkeys, and ravens. Raccoon prints in the snow and bear prints in the spring mud tell me there are as many unseen friends who live here as there are seen. A skunk will make itself known with is passing odor as well as a coyote with its distinctive call. Red fox and hawks also trot and swoop near me.

My family and I weren’t the first to live here. Because of the many unfinished arrow heads discovered near the base of the large rock beside the meadow, history buffs concluded our property was a summer campground for indigenous peoples. South of here is the trail between Covelo (Round Valley) and the ocean where inlanders made their annual trecks for fishing and the gathering of kelp and sea weed. Perhaps ours was an encampment for overnighters. At one time, the underground spring might have sparkled along the surface of the Earth, following a gravity-dictated path toward the valley. Now it’s only a winter creek, swollen and babbling after a heavy rainstorm.

I’ve never lived this long in one place in all my 66 years. So to contemplate moving tightens my chest and leaves a hole in my belly.

Where would I go? What could be more beautiful than here? How could I survive in a ticky-tacky, postage stamp house in suburbia after living in an octagon-shaped house in the middle of 40 acres of forest land? How could I squish myself into a one bedroom apartment after spreading my wings in 1200 square feet of space?

How would I find peaceful quiet in the rush of traffic at all hours of the day or night?

But how can I stay here on my own with all the challenges of wood heat, solar powered electricity, a well, and on and on?

I’m at a total loss to picture an alternative given the state of the current economy. I’m just making it! And should I move I’d have to work to pay the bills. I have to bring in extra money as it is so I don’t dip into savings each month.

I want to stop vacillating every day between staying or going and make some kind of commitment so I can think of other things, and there is no easy answer. In fact, right now there is no answer at all. All I can do is keep my heart open with my head clear so I can form any kind of question about my situation. I want to believe I will be turned in the direction toward my future by paying attention to the steps I take each moment. My best hope is to make my footprints my own.

A New Normal

What’s clear about my focus is that I don’t have one save getting through this first year of widowhood. I seem to be flailing around between all the old possibilities of how to take up my time as a single person and leaving openings in my life for something new to walk in.

I’m not looking for a new partner, a man to save me. I have my doubts there is someone out there in the world who would want to take on the job. That’s not the point.

What I’d like to find is some ease with myself, some semblance of the old reality where I thrilled to wake up in the morning, and I felt a passion for such things as writing, gardening, putting pieces of material together in a planned fashion to form a pattern and eventually a quilt. I want to lose myself in the glory of a morning watching the sun chase the frost across the winter meadow.

Words. I want to enjoy words again. I want to piece them together and watch how they can play against each other and layer themselves against a backdrop to create a precious moment or some kind of tension.

I want to be able to describe a scene again with a new combination of words to inspire a thought or a feeling. Like: frosted silhouettes of oak and pine huddle against a sky webbed with filaments of white and gray clouds in front of a paling blue sky.

Or

The broken nose of the clay face re-hung on the tree trunk closest to the kitchen window smiled its familiar tooth-studded smile as if promising this morning was just like any morning before its mishap with the winter wind.

Richness . . . Beauty . . . Depth. I want it back in all the places of my life. Not this numbness creeping from outside toward my gut or invading my limbs from inside my heart like warriors wiggling out of their Trojan horse.

Yet, every time I turn around, my life’s rhythm is shattered, yet again with another memory another thing to do, or another mishap. I’m frozen in some kind of limbo and, try as I might to create a new norm, I fall back onto old habits and customs of behavior that used to bring me joy but help me dig a deeper hole into myself.

I’m discovering that eating doesn’t bring the same comfort. Pop corn is meant to be shared, tossed at another person, its smell to be enjoyed by two.

Dinners are meant to be prepared in concert with two pairs of hands.

Cookies and cakes are baked to please two sets of palates.

Beds are meant to be slept in and made together.

Sundays are best enjoyed with football and chilly walks holding hands along the frosty driveway to the freeway.

Everything else is second best. And I guess, that’s the new norm.

Showers are now personal rituals of cleansing my chakras rather than a prelude to an afternoon on the bed under the sun’s warmth next to a familiar body.
Meals are creative stir fries for one or small casseroles baked for four dinners.

Writing can be done anytime of the day or night with no one to stop the project in midstream and draw me onto another strand of thought.

Plans can be made on the spur of the moment. The house can be left however it is and returned to when its time.

Every silly little thing I set down stays where I leave it, and I can only blame my memory rather than my favorite, loving scapegoat if I can’t find something.

Silence can reign until I desire the company of music or radio or TV chatter.

I can’t say I’m busily successful with this new norm. I can’t say I like it very much. All I can admit to is that once in a while it’s OK. If I don’t think too hard and get smacked with a memory, I can put one foot in front of the other and walk through each moment, praying the numbness will thaw, and, when it does, my skin and heart will not hurt too much.