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.

Memory Lane

I took a trip down memory lane last week by driving over Hecker Pass from Highway 101 into Watsonville, CA. This town is where my parents first retired after my dad’s time in the military. He went on to work at various jobs until he landed at Cabrillo College in the Community Services Department for the remainder of his working years. I attended my last three years of high school and all of junior college there. I also returned after nursing school in San Francisco for a few months until I got married and moved to Denver. I came home pregnant with my first child and waved goodbye to her father as he headed for Germany then I traveled there with a 10 month old baby. After five years of marriage, I returned a divorcee with two children for four years until I married again.

I’m not sure why I wanted to see all the different houses I’d lived in. Perhaps because there’s this big change in my life, and I wanted to return to a point in my past when I’d been in a similar precarious situation. Watsonville has been my touchstone, my grounding cord. It’s been the place where I’ve gathered myself together and shoved off again in another direction. I’ve been able to re-meet myself and my beginnings, see old friends and familiar places, reorient myself to who I am and where I might want to go for a next try at my life
But, I can’t return after 33 years; there’s nothing left there for me. I barely recognized the streets and the shopping centers. I did find the house I’d purchased on my own which reminded me of a kind of strength and decisiveness I’d forgotten I had at the age of 32. I sat in front of the dream house my mother had built on Pinto Lake, one which she can’t remember now because of her all-consuming dementia. I also found my dad’s grave and stood for a moment asking him to give me some kind of guidance.

What I’ve realized from my side trip is I wasn’t looking for a place all those years ago. I was looking for my roots, and the town wasn’t what I found each time I went back. My parents were what had given me the stability to find myself.
So I let the memory of my first driving expeditions with my mother fill my vision. She’d belt herself in and tell me where we were going and hope I made it. I remember her hands were gripped in her lap, and she’d hiss when I got too close to her side of the road. I can only imagine that sometimes she’d close her eyes to save her nerves.

She actually took me up the windy, switch-backed road of Hecker Pass as one of my driving assignments. Trucks routinely used it, and we faced many of them that first drive. I was moaning and groaning that I couldn’t do it. She must’ve summoned some super-mom strength and wouldn’t let me back down. “Just watch the center line of the road. Mark an imaginary point on the dash board so you can aim the car at that line and stay there. That’s the way you know you’re inside the line. Keep to it. Don’t let those trucks throw you off your aim.”

I remember aiming the first notch of the windshield wiper base at the center line, and I’d stay there. I didn’t have to keep gauging my distance from each of the trucks barreling toward me. I might have held my breath as each one blew past, but I held on, rather like holding to the middle of the road of life, I think.

As I stood by my father’s grave, knowing I haven’t finished grieving my loss of him for so many distorted reasons, I did remember one of his nightly remarks when I’d head for bed. Through the chirping, spring happy birds, I heard him say, “We made good memories today. More chances coming tomorrow.”

So many challenges seem to be heading straight at me. I can get so thrown off balance by bills I wasn’t expecting, downed trees in the driveway, roofing blown off the generator box and battery containers, frozen solar panels, and many more. Too many decisions line up in front of me: Do I move? Do I stay? What to sell? What to save? How do I make money to flesh out the minimal social security? And on and on. Some days, all I want to do is crawl back to bed and pull the covers over my head. I don’t want to think about anything.

I’ve tried screaming and shouting and whining and crying, but nothing changes my situation. Knowing where the center line is seems a better solution to stomping my feet and getting all bent out of shape because life isn't going exactly the way I’d planned. Remembering to make at least one good memory a day seems a bit easier than trying to figure out what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. I did get a bit of the comfort I was seeking,and these memories are things I can carry forward as my life line into my future.

To Dump or not to Dump

Alright, I admit it. After 33 years of marriage, you’d think I’d have realized it was me not him who had the most piles of inconsequential papers. Now my piles are having babies, and all are spilling out of the roll-top desk, covering most of my horizontal surfaces.

How I got to be a scrap saver has to be my next project toward enlightenment so I can stop my piles from growing so tall I‘ll shut out the darn light. And of course I’ll have to make an apology for all the huffy retorts to Y when he’d chide me for buying another file cabinet rather than cleaning out the ones that were overflowing.

Maybe my saving was because I was raised by depression era parents. After all, my father, for a time, was homeless with holes in his shoes and no coat in winter. My mom learned thriftiness to the point of fanaticism. The only influence keeping our home from resembling a hoarders retreat was that my mother actually used every scrap she saved. Between her follow-through and the military (we moved every 18 months to three years and were allowed only 3000 lb of household weight a move) we had a tidy house.

Before one such move, my 1st- Sgt, Marine Corps father took me through my top dresser drawers where I’d squirreled away all my precious bits of childhood paraphernalia. If I hadn’t used it or worn it in six months, out it went: broken necklaces, rocks, unfinished projects, one favorite sock. All had to go into the trash until I could reduce my favorite things into a shoe box.

Now I’ve got a three bedroom house chuck full of his and hers collections from the past with matching unfinished projects and things we might need for the future. I’m overwhelmed and can only console myself with reassurances that it’s not all mine. But I don't know what to do with his without going through it, unlike his promise that if anything ever happened to me he would cheerfully haul the contents of my office to the dump without looking at it. When he told me this, I was crushed, but I can see his point now. Fifty years of writing grows like Alice in Wonderland after biting a ‘grow’ cookie. In comparison, I do have more ‘stuff’ than he does. I’ll have to decide what to do with all the wonderful ideas I’ve saved for future reference, and before I eliminate any of his collections, I’m deciding to practice on my own. Thank goodness for Good Will and local thrift shops. Sending my prizes back into the world for someone else to collect eases the pain, a bit. Now all I have to do, after depositing my treasures at the back door, is stop myself from going in the front door to find other goodies.

Suggestion and Direction

“Take a risk” my horoscope says for today. My heart chatters in my chest like false teeth in a cartoon. “What kind of risk?” I ask myself. What more of a risk is there than me deciding to stay in my mountain home and learn how to survive alone.

“Ooops, reframe, Earlene,” I tell myself. I think: learn how to survive on my own.

I thought I had survived enough risks what with Momma Bear and her two cubs trying to climb onto the deck. Luckily the new railing installed the weekend before Y passed by two of his brothers was strong enough to deter the invasion.

Reglueing the gasket on the refrigerator door after four weeks of waiting for help was daunting. Yet, I managed to keep the gorilla snot recommended to me by a helpful advisor off the floor and myself and to spread it along the gaskets lengths around the door so that sucker would know I meant it to stick.

Going to a community dance and working in the kitchen was risky for me, as was helping out at the community Christmas dinner. I was afraid I would appear disloyal to Y. My attending a wedding reception at a country club was also a step outside my self image of a newly widowed woman.

And then there has been climbing on the roof to clean the stove pipe, driving in Monterey and Bay Area traffic, and bringing out my first novel, The Marriage Bundle.

What other possible risk could the stars be suggesting?

I read the rest of the email that’s arrived this morning and find a forward from a friend. There’s a poetry reading scheduled at the Muse in Willits this Sunday. A local author is being honored and, afterward, anyone else is invited to read some of their work. My body shivers and my heart repeats its chattering in my chest. I have a chap book of poems called, My Family Album.

Interesting how a suggestion and a direction arrived on the same day.