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When my friend’s daughter was dying she asked me “how am I going to get through this?” and I said, when you need them the most, a merry band of angels will descend to help you over this trough. Similarly, when another friend just lost her grown child, she asked someone, “how will I get through this?” and sure enough, a merry band of angels appeared to hold her up as her knees buckled.

Yesterday, my young Croatian visitor asked me if I believe in God and I said, I don’t know about God but I do know that there is a great mystery in the world that has no words or explanation and I believe in that. In reading the Tao te Ching Lao-tzu writes – if you come to the Tao for answers, it will only confuse you. When my father died at 62 of a massive heart attack, I asked Rabbi Gerson why would God kill my father when he had just retired. The rabbi said, “Would you believe in a God you could understand?”

Today is mom’s surgery and here is a photo that was taken around her 50th birthday in December, 1985. My dad had died in August and she had met Sergio, 15 years her junior, and at the time of this photo she had been out dancing with him till 5AM:

Mom entered the hospital because of I believe a carelessness in prescribing her Cymbalta and then further carelessness in abruptly stopping the drug. Granted she’s an alcoholic and smokes heavily and these are all bad, but the Cymbalta took a bad situation and pushed it into critical. If it wasn’t bad enough to stabilize her heart, go through four days of DTs, and then not be able to breathe or swallow, it was worse that on Friday, when it looked like she was on the mend, she got up out of bed in the middle of the night, disoriented, and fell flat on her face smashing her cheek, forehead and nose.

Now in ICU, with a ventilator, and heavily sedated, they have decided she needs plastic surgery to fix the cheek bone tomorrow because it is not healing properly and there are free floating bones in her orbit area. This requires inserting two metal plates. And of course, it requires surgery, anesthesia, and all that that involves.

Since I have medical power of attorney, it’s been left to me to sign the waiver and so I set about calling each of her doctors to speak to them about her condition. You’d think I was asking them to lend me $5,000. Every one of them have reacted arrogantly except for the ahem, female doctor who has been her attending physician since she checked in. Ask me if I give a rat’s batushka who they think they are, I want to know if she is stable enough to endure a four hour surgery, for goodness sakes.

But today, T and I went to see her in the hospital and to stroke her head and to tell her we love her, and really what I’m asking for is for her to have a break because she can’t seem to get one these days.

There is a complete solar eclipse this coming Wednesday and there is lots of speculation about the forces it already has had on good and evil. I’m not here to say the eclipse has caused all this turmoil that we have been experiencing but at this point, I’m ready to get passed anything that smacks of gris gris.

We were supposed to get a huge storm passing through New Orleans this weekend, and instead we got the front without the rain, and with it, the most beautiful fall like weather you can imagine. The weather brought everyone out to the bayou to walk, run, and just frolic in the wonder of a breeze and low humidity.

Meanwhile, under a canoe sits a duck with a bunch of eggs, and the herons which have been idle were in flight in the park, and dogs have a little lift in their step.

Ah wonders of wonders, nothing like a nice day despite all the struggles going on.

I went to the hospital to see mom this evening, she’s heavily sedated with an amnesia like drug so a lot of what happens now is happening in abeyance, but I still think it is important to touch her and tell her I love her. My brother met me there and then followed me to her apartment to help water her plants and pick up her mail and newspapers.

We sat down and got caught up about a myriad of things and in particular some mysteries within the family structure that he wanted some clarity on. When I told him my version of the events – in ’05 my oldest niece got on her soapbox and raked me over the coals for having an affair, citing that it ‘could have been her’ (old Rachel didn’t respond to her because she felt bad for the fear her niece felt); later that same year, on a day when the dark clouds had momentarily lifted and I was enjoying an evening with my family, the same niece’s husband, Mark, under some delusion thought I was coming onto him because I squeezed his arm when I said goodbye (old Rachel didn’t want to tell him that there was a snowball’s chance in hell that I had even noticed him), then in ’06 when her younger sister, my other niece, Lara, had her baby my good friend had hers at the same time, both with the same name, and when I offered to be Aunt Rachel to my great niece and was met with indifference, my friend, meanwhile, needed a lot of help. Her daughter was born with a rare genetic disease, and this little one sadly lived only two years.

My brother said, “Yikes!” and I said, “So I was going through a lot and I never did go back and address any of this with Dana on the soapbox and Mark, the cretin, and I let the distance between me and Lara grow because of the pull towards my friend and her situation.”

He said, “Are you happy?”

And I said, “Thoroughly happy except for the obvious.”

He said, “Then fuck them.”

My niece (aka Miracle Baby) wrote and said she found a CD in her car with a song on it that put her in mind of me because she had just read my blog and caught up on mom’s crisis. The song is a Dar Williams song – I know Dar because she sings that great song All Men Are Liars, but this is a much more touching song, called After All.

After All

Go ahead, push your luck
Find out how much love the world can hold
Once upon a time I had control
And reined my soul in tight
Well the whole truth
It’s like the story of a wave unfurled
But I held the evil of the world
So I stopped the tide
Froze it up from inside
And it felt like a winter machine
That you go through and then
You catch your breath and winter starts again
And everyone else is spring bound

And when I chose to live
There was no joy
It’s just a line I crossed
I wasn’t worth the pain my death would cost
So I was not lost or found

And if I was to sleep
I knew my family had more truth to tell
So I traveled down a whispering well
To know myself through them

Growing up, my mom had a room full of books
and hid away in there
The father raging down a spiral stair
‘Til he found someone
Most days his son
And sometimes I think
My father, too, was a refugee
I know they tried to keep their pain from me
They could not see what it was for

But now I’m sleeping fine
Sometimes the truth is like a second chance
I am the daughter of a great romance
And they are the children of the war

Well the sun rose
So many colors, it nearly broke my heart
It worked me over like a work of art
And I was part of all that

So go ahead, push your luck
Say what it is you gotta say to me
We will push on into that mystery
And it’ll push right back
And there are worse things than that
Cause for every price
And every penance that I could think of
It’s better to have fallen in love
Than never to have fallen at al

‘Cause when you live in a world
Well it gets into who you thought you’d be
And now I laugh at how the world changed me
I think life chose me after all

I watched a movie last night but kept falling asleep but yet I got in bed and tossed and turned with the same thought running over and over, why does she get out of bed and fall flat on her face? Why isn’t she automatically catching herself, bracing herself? She fell with such force on her face that she shattered her cheek and forehead and nose. This is one of many falls she has taken in the last two months – so great is her impact that she looks like someone forcefully hit her with a blunt object.

A few minutes before the church bells started ringing, I woke and decided to go for the 6AM visiting time at ICU. In the groggy clarity of driving to the hospital I realized these answers just might not ever come but I have to ask them in case someone knows. Her nurse through the evening was approachable and had studied her chart. We spoke about all of the issues at hand and what could be causing the falls.

In the darkness of the room, rubbing my mother’s hand, the nurse put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I know how you feel darling. I am going through the exact same issues with my mother.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I told her.

In 2005, I came back to be with my family and found that my life erupted and my family dispersed and so I was left, a shadow of my former family self. My main reason for coming was my mother, whose health had been fragile since she took her first serious downturn back in 2001 – a big year for events if you recall. A black year for me personally – that’s when the bow broke and I let the heart ache in, whose sorry now? (Okay enough Streisand).

As I’ve been here for mom, she’s spun around in a circle that has grown smaller and smaller, making sure that no one gets in except very few.

It has been a full week since I took her into the emergency room and what began as a withdrawal from the abrupt stopping of Cymbalta (her doctor’s orders) and then suddenly became a cardiac emergency (advanced alcoholism, possible Cymbalta, and who knows what else) then grew into “classic DTs” as her profound psychiatrist told me, and from there we have moved into a similar sequence of events that almost mimics 2001 exactly – can’t breathe, fluid fills the lungs, incoherent – and then last night, she fell face down and broke bones in her face and her nose and now is on a ventilator in the ICU.

Until a few days ago I hadn’t called anyone except my sister (her symbiotic twin) and my mother’s siblings (who have always been there for her). But today, I walked into the ICU and saw my sister-in-law leaning over my mother with tears running down her eyes, and I realized that people can love you deeply but at the same time be unable to suffer your self destruction. My nieces stood on the other side, also teary eyed, one of them named for my mother.

My first thought when the family started rallying was where have you been? But as they have filed in one by one, surrounding her bedside, the oceans that divided us have shrunk to a deep well of sadness we all feel for a woman who has had so much love in her heart and yet she has drawn an iron curtain around herself because of the reality she could not suffer.

There is a text book I read a long time ago that says alcoholic parents can never truly love their children because they are so sick with their addiction. I don’t believe that. Today, again as my mother always seems to be able to do, under the sedation and a tube going down her throat to help her breathe, she whispered to me, “I love you.”

I used to distract myself by going to see action movies – I loved Terminator, Alien, Matrix. But today those movies are too harsh for me even though the Matrix pretty much is an interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita. Instead of dipping from the empty well of an action flick with its ballet of violence, I’ve turned to reading the Tao te Ching and have even started the Bhagavad Gita, which I began in the hospital.

My soul needs nourishment, not depletion. My mind needs to be centered, not scattered.

Today’s meditation from the Tao te Ching is #8

The supreme good is like water,
which nourishes all things without trying to.
It is content with the low places that people disdain.
Thus it is like the Tao.

In dwelling, live close to the ground.
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
In governing, don’t try to control.
In work, do what you enjoy.
In family life, be completely present.

When you are content to be simply yourself
and don’t compare or compete,
everybody will respect you.

Went to see Woody Allen’s new movie, Whatever Works and must say I think it is one of his best. Larry David is fantastic and I’m not a huge fan of his, but he did a marvelous job collaborating with Allen. Patricia Clarkson is one of our own – her mother is our councilman at large – and she was her usual terrific self.

Highly recommend.