After three months in the hospital, mom seemed to have found some new store of energy to rally in the past two days. What she keeps telling me over and over is, “I want to go.” Home is what she means.
Last night, I had a nightmare. I had started a new job and got up early and got dressed and showed up at the office. There were three big wide pine plank tables and nothing but inboxes on them. I sat at one and two other women sat at the other. There was no phone. No computer. And all I had was this inbox and a big set of keys – the keys had little name tags on them, one said, inbox, another said “forwarding” and another said “ladies’ bathroom” and one said, “entrance” and the other “exit” – I kept jangling the keys waiting for the inbox to fill up. But there was only one memo in the box and it was a list of the holidays.
This January will be ten years I’ve been with my company and 15 years that I’ve been an investigative reporter. The thought of a job where I have to go to an office and punch the clock and act like I’m busy for eight hours is anathema to me. Even if it means that every day is a new episode in a working environment that sometimes is as relaxed as a scene from “24” – it’s the empty inbox that really unnerves me.
Be there, or be square New Orleans:
Louisiana Stands with President Obama and the Obama Plan!
Description:
President Obama outlined a clear plan, the Obama Plan, to revolutionize the health care system by making health insurance better for those who have it, available and affordable to those who dont, and higher quality and accountable to all. New Orleans stands with President Obama. Please join us for a New Orleans style rally for reform on Sunday, September 13, 2009. We’ll have a good time and hear from great members of the Obama team, as well as local partners who are fighting for reform. Gates open at 3:00 pm. Program starts at 4:00 pm
Time:
Sunday, September 13 from 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM @ 1500 North Claiborne @ Columbus (doors open at 3, starts at 4)
Host:
Steve Walker
Taurus (4/20-5/20)Someone you love is thinking of you, because there’s no one else who can soothe and comfort them quite like you. In fact, your knack for calming even the most troubled waters is famous among your dear ones. And don’t even try to act like you don’t enjoy the position. What could possible make you feel better about yourself than making someone else feel better about their own situation? It’s a powerful gift.
The rain is pouring down now, distracting me from my administrative chore and making me wistful and melancholic. Mom is stable – at a lower level, her vent at a higher level. I’m one foot into the weekend. Today is 9/11.
Flashback to September 11, 2001, I was barely getting out of bed when my then mother-in-law called to tell me to turn on the news – we rose, we watched, we sank into the horror from the television set. I told T last night, America has never been the same since, she said the world has never been the same since.
2001 – September, America is attacked. October, I ran the Portland marathon. November, I opened the door to the devil. December, my mother went into the hospital and was in ICU for ten days.
Every year we mark time – the 8 year anniversary of 9/11, the 4 year anniversary of Katrina – indelible dates on life’s calendar.
A friend writes that after her son-in-law died this past summer, suddenly leaving behind two small children, they have decided to take the 2009 calendar and burn it at the end of this year as if this year didn’t exist. Meanwhile, I refer to this year as the summer of our discontent; it held so much promise but began to lose ground first with the death of my beloved Arlene, then my mother taking ill, and just seemed to go on and on with dead bodies stacking up left and right, and summer’s ending, yet, just in the past day I’ve heard of a new cancer diagnosis, one heart attack, one death of old age. The grave is open, still, even as fall approaches.
A friend writes to me and sends me Rilke:
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Is Loca looking out at the rain falling on the bayou.
I was reading the 36 hours in Zagreb article in the NYT Travel Section the other day and felt that they missed the mark on certain aspects of Zagreb that I now miss. First the article neglected to mention Kras – perhaps the best chocolate manufacturer in the world. Nor did it mention the old cafe in the square’s center that has a curved grand staircase leading up to a second floor – it’s a café olé to be sure. It also didn’t mention that you can conveniently go from one part of town to another by tram. Or did it mention the giant lipa trees that line the parks and are so fragrant with linden flower that you are just instantly in aromatherapy. It missed civapcici – delicious kebobs on pillowy bread that are divine. Well, I really feel it missed a lot even if the author was on a tight schedule of 36 hours to discover and do everything.
But right now looking at the window at the rain pouring down against the window, and I heard from a friend about someone who passed 36 hours after suffering a heart attack and I heard from another friend about a 104 year old who passed in his sleep – and I say please, when it comes to my obit, make it the nanosecond or the 36 hour kind of death. There isn’t a lot you can see and do in 36 hours, but it is enough time to say goodbye to the one(s) who is right beside you and go.
The Swami says there are four paths people take – one is the person who seeks entertainment and another those who seek things – these are people who are trying to overcome pain. The other two are those who have questions and those who love unconditionally.
There is also another type of people and it is those who seek blame. In the American culture of looking for someone to point the finger at it is no wonder that some people are always on track to sue someone or to blame someone for a problem that has no beginning and no end.
Take the text my sister sent me last night – you should have told me mom was so sick. Uh, I did. For two months, I paraded my mother from one doctor to another and one lab test after another all pointing to the indisputable fact that she was very sick and that the road ahead was a slippery slope to a place none of us want to go.
I’ve spent the last five months with my stomach in knots about how to help my mother – always coming back to one conclusion, the one my mother in law offered, I have only one role “to make my mother’s pain less.”
The nurse called late today to say they needed to give mom blood as her red count was low. I asked if they needed me to give them blood and she laughed, and said no they had some.
There is always the mention of well, we are blood, but honestly, I think some people are in your blood and some aren’t and the distinction is not in blood relations.
I’ve met people outside of my family who are in my blood now and forever.
Everything keeps getting blamed on my age. The troubles I’m going through with my mom. The hot flashes. The edginess. The fattening around the middle. The knowing more people who have died than I used to.
But no one is crediting the good things to my age. The fact that I am happier than I have ever been in my life, present situation with my mom excluded. That I have grown into a career that suits me. That even though I’m beyond child bearing age, I hope to have a child. That at the end of my forties while every other single woman is complaining about the lack of potential partners out there, I found my big love.
No one wants to give credit to this part of aging – that we are who we have become and I wouldn’t go so far as to say we are satisfied, but we are certainly grateful for all the years of learning that got us to this level of education – the teachings that could never come from a book or a classroom.
I ran into a fellow walker this morning who said he hadn’t seen me of late. And I told him about travels, about my mom, about all that has been going on. He said, it seems like life is a battle. And I said no, life is for the living.