Tag Archives: love

January 2, 2014 · 9:20 am

The Beach

Santa Cruz

The ocean doesn’t factor much in my memories. If anything, it was a trickster. When I was a child in Hawaii, it would lull me with its disarmingly benign surface, warm and inviting, only to upend me with a sudden swell that turned my world upside down. I emerged gasping and chastened, salt water filling my throat and churning in my stomach. When we crossed the ocean, I looked out from our ocean liner in fear, aware that our vessel was no more than flotsam in the unending sea that stretched from one vista to the other.

This is different.

We spent New Year’s eve and morning with two families we have known since we were young invincibles. Before kids. Back then we sat in tight huddles (the women), punched each other’s shoulders (the men), sat on laps (the couples), drank too much and stayed up late. The talk was salty, silly and sometimes serious. If we talked of the past, it was about our childhoods, our relationships with our siblings, mothers and fathers. If we talked of the future, it drifted toward where we would travel, the possibility of jobs and whether our children would like one another. Through years of three-day weekends spent together, one belly after another swelled with pregnancy. We carried the future in front of us.

Three girls and three boys we had between us. For a time, when the kids were small enough to curl up in sleeping bags on the floor, we crammed into a house together. A house on the beach. We hiked through the cut in the dunes down to the blustery shore where the kids would run up and down, chased by the waves, laughing. I see us adults clustered on the shore, bathed in orange light, watching contentedly. At night, the children dropped into exhausted sleep to adult chatter punctuated with regular bursts of laughter.

Pulled by the demands of jobs and families, we reformed in occasional twos and fours — girls’ weekends, and less often, guys’ weekends. Dinner with two families. Our gatherings became more infrequent.

We planned to gather on December 22 for a long-anticipated reunion, all twelve of us, at the instigation of our young adult children. But instead of twelve, we were eleven. Debbie — Debbie the Loyal, Debbie the Connector, Debbie the Loving — Debbie was suddenly and irrevocably gone forever. A hole had been punched in our universe.

We gathered again on New Year’s Eve in Santa Cruz. Eleven, not twelve. As we walked on the beach, listened to our kids riffing on guitar, poured the wine, gathered over dinner, played a raunchy game, and finally watched 2013 turn into 2014, I kept thinking, “Debbie would have loved this.”

And this: “Where two or three are gathered in my name.” Jesus understood the power of community as a way to bring Him present.

When we gather, I do not feel a void where Debbie should be. I feel her presence. But I ache that she is just beyond my reach, beyond the thin veil that separates her world from ours, that I cannot tell her how much I love her and miss her.

It is our last full day at the beach. My children, now grown, are sleeping downstairs. The ocean laps nearby, seagulls cry and sea lions bark. Of all of us, Debbie loved the beach. I think of this as where Debbie lives now, watching the surfers stream like otters toward the horizon where the swells are biggest, grinning at the children who delight in their wet sand creations, turning to me with love. She is smiling at all of us.

I look for the words that fail me, and find this:

Something there is,
(With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,
I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter
Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.
 
From “On the Beach at Night” by Walt Whitman

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December 26, 2013 · 9:25 am

Love Three Times Over

When my husband asked me to marry him thirty-two years ago, I’d have said yes right away, if I hadn’t missed the proposal.

That Christmas afternoon, I was downstairs, watching TV in my bathrobe, happy for a day off work. The gifting was over, I’d helped Mom get the turkey in the oven, and I was well and properly sated from our big holiday breakfast.

“Bets!” Mom yelled from the top of the stairs, “You should get dressed!”

“Why?” I asked her.

“Your brothers are coming!”

My brothers were not a good reason to vacate my cozy spot by the fire. I could have cared less if my brothers thought I had fallen to ruin.

A little while later, I heard a commotion by the front door, a very quiet commotion. Now a “quiet commotion” may seem like an oxymoron but it’s the only way I can describe it. The doorbell rang, my mother walked rapidly from the kitchen across the entry hall slate floor, and there was a quick squeak of greeting followed immediately by silence. Usually you’d hear greetings exchanged and conversation. The soundproofing between floors wasn’t great and my mother was by no means quiet.

The door at the top of the stairs opened and someone proceeded down the steps, the third from the bottom squeaking as always (left hand side, a dead give away if you were trying to sneak in or out). I leaned to the side of the recliner so I could see who was arriving.

My boyfriend, Todd, was smiling at me from the foot of the stairs. My heart performed a little pirouette and I jumped out of the chair and into his arms. He was supposed to be to be at his folks’ house in Sacramento.

We’d been dating for thirteen months, the last four long distance, while I tried to get a foothold in my chosen career by taking the second opportunity to come my way, an advertising agency in Los Angeles. The first I’d been offered after sending out seventy-five resumes: a plum job in the marketing department of a regional food manufacturer. In New Orleans. Todd had comforted me on the beach in Tahoe while I cried, weighing my decision. Taking that job would most likely lead to the end of “us.” It was just too far — too expensive — to sustain a long-distance relationship.

Commuting to see each other between Los Angeles and Sacramento had proven hard enough. We reserved cheap midnight seats from LAX to Oakland on Trans World Airlines. Back in the day, you could snag cheap seats without paying for them in advance. But even at fifty dollars or so a trip, we could only afford to see each other every three weeks or so.

Just seeing Todd thrilled me. Seeing him for Christmas was even better.

After dinner was over and we’d spent hours talking, it was finally time for bed. Mom directed Todd to sleep in my brother Dean’s former room below the kitchen. My room was on the far side of the recreation room. After long, luxurious kisses goodnight, I followed the house rules and retired to my own bedroom. On my pillow was a final gift, along with an envelope.

I opened the small square package to find a picture of the two of us taken a few weeks prior. We sat smiling beneath Todd’s mother’s flower pots on her front porch. The envelope turned out to contain airline tickets for two to Hawaii.

I ran back to his room and jumped on the bed, thanking him with kisses. We were going to Hawaii!

“Well?” Todd asked.

“Well, what?”

“Well, will you?”

“Will I what?”

“Did you read the back of the picture?”

The blank look on my face was his answer. “Go read the back! And look at the tickets!”

I returned to my room and flipped over the picture. There, on the back, was a proposal. For marriage. And the tickets were made out for Mr. and Mrs. Todd Stone.

My heart thundered. I was thrilled and terrified. This was not my plan. I was a product of the late 70s, when women were told they could have it all. I was fully subscribed to the idea that I would pursue my career full tilt and not have children until I was 35. First I would live my life. Marrying Todd would mean leaving my job and moving to Sacramento. I couldn’t see being a long-distance newlywed.

If I said “not yet” to Todd, I knew he would understand but the moment would be lost, deflated.

I returned to his room, where he waited impatiently. I said yes. We stayed up for hours, taking it in, talking (and not talking). We were engaged. Just like that. The planner’s plan foiled, a new life born.

But that’s not the end of the story. The next scene is what I thought of when I first awakened this morning.

That December 26 was my parents’ fortieth anniversary. Just before dinner that evening, Todd and I asked my mother and father to join us in the dining room. They stopped their preparations for a small cocktail gathering of friends — Mom was finishing some “pupus” and Dad was setting up the bar, fishing liquor bottles out of the small hutch that served as his liquor cabinet.

They broke into smiles when they saw my grandmother’s gold rimmed slipper champagne glasses. “We wanted to toast your anniversary,” Todd began. He popped the cork and filled our glasses. Tiny bubbles danced upward.

All four of us lifted our glasses in unison. Todd interrupted, “And I wanted to ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage.”

That had been part of our discussion in the early morning hours. Should he “ask for my hand” or announce our engagement? We followed tradition.

Forty years before, Mom and Dad had found a minister to marry them the day after Christmas, while Dad was given twelve hours leave for that purpose. It was nineteen days after Pearl Harbor. More attacks on American soil were expected. A submarine could sail right up the Potomoc and attack the nation’s capital. Granting leave for purposes of getting married was not part of the drill in Quantico.

Getting married wasn’t part of Dad’s plan, either.

After Pearl Harbor, Mom had cabled Dad that she was taking the next train east, to be married. Knowing the mortality rate of Marine Corps second lieutenants in war, he didn’t want her to be widowed and therefore had avoided settling on marriage, but it didn’t surprise him that she had ignored his objections and declared victory.

Today is a triple anniversary. Today would have been Mom and Dad’s sixty-second anniversary. Today marks the thirty-second anniversary of my engagement. And today is the first December 26 when neither Mom nor Dad are here to mark the date.

None of those anniversaries are forgotten.

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December 11, 2013 · 6:53 am

The Year-Agos

Figgy Pudding 2012

I started writing this post yesterday, and then I received an email from my brother Bruce about how he was brought up short when he reviewed his holiday card database and realized he would not be sending a card to Dad this year.

Little static-electricity jolts triggered by seemingly meaningless moments constantly zap you the first year after losing someone. Last year, addressing holiday cards was a necessary but unremarkable task. This year, it’s a reminder.

A year ago Friday night, December 6, I dined with two girlfriends friends in Seattle and strolled the Figgy Pudding outdoor caroling event snugly bundled up in matching winter white hats, mufflers and gloves. I felt full of holiday spirit, braced by the cold air, a little buzzed from the cocktails we shared over dinner. I never suspected that Dad’s decline had already begun.

My brother Scott, who was caring for Dad at my house, called the next morning to say that Dad was unable to urinate and in extreme pain. What should he do? At the doctor’s urging, he took Dad to urgent care where they removed over one liter of urine.

When I returned to Sacramento that afternoon, Dad was significantly weaker. He’d had a recent bout of extreme shortness of breath and then pulled a muscle. With the bladder problem, there was no question of him returning back to his assisted living community. By Tuesday, he was in extreme pain again, unable to urinate. He was sent home from the ER with a catheter that we hoped would come out after a week.

I was frantic. The catheter gave him a sensation that felt like urinary urgency, so he tried to rise every 15 minutes or so. If he was not watched at night, he would attempt to get up for the bathroom and fall. 

Ten days later, he stopped being able to walk.

My world had transformed from light to dark. From an evening lit by sparkling decorations, cheeks blushing pink from the cold, lilting carols soaring in harmony, I sat by my father’s bedside, worrying.

Instead of making me sad, that turning point reminds me that a year ago, Dad was still here. A year ago, I had every reason to expect he would recover from this latest health setback. A year ago, I knew Dad would feel better when the winter lifted and spring bloomed again.

Today I leave Seattle, headed for home again. The house is already decorated. Dad’s room will be orderly and quiet. When I walk in the house, I will remember that it was the beginning of Dad’s final decline. The hard part is over. He is worth remembering, worth loving and worth every moment spent comforting him.

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November 28, 2013 · 5:46 am

Trying to See

Bookmark by Tommy StoneAs I finished my last blog post, my daughter was quietly singing Billie Holiday’s hit, “I’ll be seeing you.” She sang the last line as I put the coda on my post.

After my father’s death, my mentor Jim suggested that I focus less on DO-ing and more on BE-ing. Other friends have passed along their systems for appreciating the blessings in our everyday lives including the 21-Day Gratitude Challenge. But I feel like I have to take a step even further back, back to seeing.

My third grade teacher observed that I could read quickly, but didn’t retain what I read. I was too impatient. My bedside table at home looks like a mini-library because I tend to start one book only to become distracted by another. I flit between categories: travel literature, memoir, nonfiction about death and dying, novels and what I like to call “Cheetos” literature for its complete lack of nutritional value and dependence on artificial coloring. Such escapist reading leaves nothing behind except the tell-tale orange ring around one’s lips.

I have to write a critical essay about a book that changed my life. That’s a tall order, one I don’t think I can fulfill. But the first book that came to mind was one I never finished. At the time, I found it beautiful but tedious. The book was Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Since we moved from Davis to Sacramento, I have maintained a discipline about how many books I can keep. I have room for about 150 books, and it’s survival of the fittest. If I add a book that I want to keep, I force myself get rid of others. Otherwise the whole house will start looking like a giant version of my bedside table. I know I am at risk of book hoarding.

Why did Dillard’s book come first to mind when I didn’t even like it?

A handmade bookmark with a scalloped edge and yarn tie extended out of the book. The outlined letters were colored in with crayon, reading, “Happy Mother’s Day! Love Tommy.” On the reverse, Tommy had colored a tulip red and a vase robin’s egg blue.

It marked page 33, where I read this:

“Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it. It is, as Ruskin says, ‘not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen.’ My eyes alone can’t solve analogy tests using figures, the ones which show, with increasing elaborations, a big square, then a small square, then a small square in a big square, then a big triangle, and expect me to find a small triangle in a big triangle. I have to say the words, describe what I’m seeing…. I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present. It’s not that I’m observant; it’s just that I talk too much. Otherwise, especially in a strange place, I’ll never know what’s happening. Like a blind man at the ball game, I need a radio.

When I see this way I analyze and pry…. But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without my camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way, I am an unscrupulous observer.”

When did Tommy make that bookmark for me, I wondered? He might have been five, six or seven — young, anyway. If he was seven, Maddie was 12. And my mother was dying.

I worked for an international public relations firm where I led the firm’s West Coast health care practice. I was at a meeting of the practice in New York City when I got the call that my mother was in the hospital with lungs full of fluid. They confirmed advanced lung cancer, and expected that she had only weeks to live.

My boss told me to take all the time I needed. With the help of hospice, Mom stabilized when we were finally able to get her home. We watched her fade before our eyes for three and a half months.

When I returned to work, my functional boss had to deliver the ultimatum that came down from on-high. Get business up, fast. Mom, he acknowledged, had taken too long to die for the taste of our overseers.

Somewhere during that period, I was trying to read Dillard.

My impatience has caused me to miss a lot, but I find that the images are still there, and I am slowly making my way backward, making sense of my experiences. I am reconnecting with people who have been important to me, but with whom I had lost touch. I am visiting places and imagining them through the eyes of my father, as I did when I visited Marine Barracks last spring and summer. I am retracing my own steps and remembering how I felt when I walked the same path a year ago.

I am trying to see.

I’ll find you in the morning sun/ And when the night is new/ I’ll be looking at the moon/ But I’ll be seeing you.

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November 26, 2013 · 11:03 am

Gratuituous Grace On Thanksgiving

candle

Eighteen days ago, one of my oldest friends was suddenly ripped away from all of us who love her. Five days later, her husband asked me contact a couple of her friends, friends that dated back to our college days. He closed our phone conversation with, “I love you.”

That wasn’t something he normally would have said to me. But a terrible loss like this one is a reminder of how dear people are to us, and how quickly things can change. We are shaken by the shoulders and reminded to notice things that hover just beyond our attention, people for whom we are grateful. Now.

I’ve been re-reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek this week. Yesterday I recorded this quote, “Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it.”

As Thanksgiving approaches, I look around me and see so much beauty. I see you, husband, my personal Mighty Mouse who continually saves (my) day by being so utterly reliable and unfailingly loving and who puts up with my Gemini self. I see you, daughter, not only for your talent, but your wisdom in being able to sense when people are going through difficult periods and your ability to be ready to support them even when they are not yet ready to accept help or support. I see you, son, your burgeoning talents, authenticity, sense of wonder and openness to all kinds of people.

I see you brothers, through our differences, for the loving, honorable and enduring presence that you are in my life. I see you, beloved nieces, nephews, and even great nephews, for the light in your eyes when we meet, which is nowhere near as often as I would wish. I see you, in-laws, for the umbrella of security and acceptance that you have created for my family, and for me. I see you, family who are more than family, Lynn, Louise and Mary, who always seem to reach out at just the right moment.

And I see you, friends. I’ve talked most about my female friends, who have been my pillars, but my guy friends have always been stalwart supports in my life. I see you, Howie, Bill, Pete, Jim and Mario.

And, yes, you female friends who always stand by: Ellen, Sandy, Lisa, Tammy, Cheryl, Collette, Wendi, Tracy, Sharon, Debbie O, Linda, Nancy, Judee, “Babes” (you know who you are) and probably more who I have inadvertently left off.

There is one name missing from that inventory of people I hold dear today, one who is gone from this world but smiling from the next. It is you, Deb, who is reminding me from afar to pay attention. I did not hold you close as I could have — should have — in recent years. Sure, I have decent excuses, but none of them seem good enough right now. I list you last, but not least.

Dillard wrote:

“Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous… (B)eauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”

I am trying to be there and notice you all, you who I love.

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November 11, 2013 · 8:56 am

Dreaming, Again

Pt. White sunset by Betsy C Stone

I dreamt of water again.

Friday afternoon I received the unbelievable news that one of my oldest friends died suddenly; a freak, bolt-of-lightning, one-in-a-million medical event tore her away from us, and in the process, ripped a hole in the universe.

The hours between 3:30 in the afternoon, when I received the call, and 12:30 a.m., when I collapsed in a hotel bed, felt numberless.

I awakened early with the fragmentary memory of floating on water. How did I get there? Slowly I followed bread-crumbs of crazy images backward as far as I could.

I was in the attic of a four-story ramshackle Victorian. Around me were strange but genial characters who resembled figures out of stories: a giant, an old man with a long beard, and a curly-headed individual who resembled Merry Brandybuck but initially seemed neither male nor female.

I was happy to see “Merry” in my dream. As I hugged her in reunion – by then this character was a she — it had the feeling of simultaneous greeting and farewell.

Then the house collapsed. It had been unstable to begin with, with floors no longer square above the other, the attic teetering on top, off balance. We had already taken note of a gash in the wooden floorboards, below which we could see sky.

The attic suddenly gave way, but rather than crashing to earth as we expected, the room transformed into an aircraft. A fuselage of patched boards took shape and the walls tore away, revealing long extensions on both sides: wings.

Immediately, the house-turned-plane dived downward, out of control. Though shocked, Merry and I weren’t afraid. I looked at Merry, smiling and sending a silent message that said, “I love you… I’m grateful you were in my life… we’ll be together again.”

Just before the moment of impact, our craft stabilized into a glide, inches above the water. We floated above a gently meandering river, safe. Then as we rounded a bend, tall trees on both sides sheared off the wings. Now, surely, we would die.

A plume sprayed up on both sides. Miraculously, our craft held. The convex hull buoyed us on the water. We were safe.

After Dad died, I hoped that I would be sent the kind of dream that comforted me after the death of my mother: a vision of her happy and whole, sitting at the kitchen table in her favorite pink satin bathrobe. Instead, I had water dreams. In the first, I heroically forded a cold river to rescue a boat that was to be used in a race. In the second, I returned home to find the ferryman Charon, replete with black swim cap, seated in my living room, waiting to help Dad cross over.

I dreamt of water again. This time, I got to say goodbye and tell her we would meet again.

Source of all blessings, you bless us with dreams-dreams while we sleep and dreams in our most wakeful moments. May I be responsive to both forms of dreams and pass these blessings on by living a life that is faithful to their guidance. — Brother David Steindl-Rast

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October 29, 2013 · 5:24 am

My Parents’ Gifts of Love

With the latest salvos in the Mommy Wars, I’ve been thinking a lot about my parents’ push-me pull-you influence on my professional development.

When my father told me in high school that I had to take typing in case I ever had to support myself, I rolled my eyes. I thought it was stupid. I had no intention of making my living from typing.

By the time I graduated from college, I was ready to pursue the career that was my right. Women could succeed at anything they chose, if they were willing to work hard enough. Marriage or family could wait until my mid 30s — if they came at all. I had too much to do.

My mother was by no means pleased about the prospect of me pursuing a career. Work, yes. Career, no.

Tension between my mother and me surfaced as soon as I launched out on my own, following our usual pattern of escalation: explosion, “disagreeable disagreement” (as my mother put it), letters and rapprochement or at least truce.

On a telephone call home to Tacoma from Davis, California, I told Mom that I wasn’t ready to get married anytime soon although I was dating a great guy (now my husband of 31 years). Mom asserted that I was “throwing away a personal life.” The call did not end well.

I think I wrote first. She wrote a five page letter back. She explained, “There is a big difference in being work-oriented and career-oriented…. Career women were admired by my peers and sometimes even envied – but it was also expected that women would be women first and career women secondly…. But I don’t want you to think for a moment that I believe I did not have a career – I know I did have, and I am grateful to have lived at a time when being a full-time wife and mother, with all that entails, was possible….. Most parents want for their children what they feel they missed or wanted and didn’t get – I am just the opposite – I want my children to have what I have had. I really do believe, Betz, that a better state of affairs would exist in the world if mothers were home with their children…. I really have not meant to sound in any of our conversations as though I did not understand what you wanted – I really do – and I do understand what is happening with your generation. I know it is not possible – or perhaps even desirable – to live the kind of life I have lived. Though I do admit to wishing it were, but only because my own life has been one of satisfaction and fulfillment, and because I am wise enough to know that I have been singularly fortunate in having been on the receiving end of so much love…. I respect your desire for independence – that is certainly one sign of maturity – and in spite of how I may have come across to you, I surely want you to to find a job-career that will be challenging to you and which will utilize the many talents you possess…. What I hope you will find ultimately is a combination of personal and professional life. I really don’t believe you yourself will feel complete or whole unless you can function in life as a professional, but also as a woman…. It won’t be easy, when the time comes, to balance professional obligations with personal relationships – and since I can read, it obviously isn’t easy for any one, but if anyone can do it, I think you can.”

I did marry (at which Mom probably breathed a sigh of relief) and my career in marketing continued to advance.

Several years later, I phoned home on President’s Day weekend to share the good news that I’d been promoted. I stood on one side of the counter that divided our kitchen from the family room while my husband puttered away next to the sink. I could picture my parents hovering over the white speaker phone on the long formica counter in their kitchen, with the Springers, Katie and Beall, curled up underneath. Outside the window, the rhodies would be huddled close to the house as protection from the cool, wet weather. Mom would be wearing one of her thick woolen cardigans – maybe the fisherman’s knit with the Nordic buttons – and Dad would be clad in his usual winter uniform: heavy Pendleton shirt, Filson tin cloth trousers and suspenders (which Mom said made him look like a hick).

Even after four years of marriage and seven years away from Tacoma, I still missed home.

“I have some good news,” I began. Then I explained how my title had been changed from “manager” to “director” reflecting my broadened responsibilities.

My husband watched my face, smiling. Neither of my parents spoke right away. The expectant look slipped off my face as I waited. Finally, Mom blurted out, “That’s all fine, but what I want to know is when are you going to become a real woman?” By which she meant, a mother. My husband left the room when he saw my face tighten just before I started hollering. In Tacoma, I’m fairly certain that Dad did the same.

She wrote the next day: “Now to the nitty-gritty of children. Yours that is. Because I like babies – I hope you will have some, Betz. But that isn’t really any reason you should have one – or some. The only real over-riding reason for having a baby is because a particular moment is so special that there has to be an ultimate result. A moment of love so caring — so intense — that the only possible response of trying to produce a lasting memory of that time is to throw caution to the wind and trust in God and His purpose – and hope that a child of that moment of union and unity of spirit will produce a child of real love.”

Not long after, Mom must have conscripted Dad into a sit-down with me. She told me in no uncertain terms that she feared I would lose Todd if I kept on as I was — which was to say, pursuing a career. I don’t remember Dad saying anything during that conversation. There was simply no way to reconcile the world my mother grew up in with mine. She consequently watched the early years of my marriage with an impending sense of doom.

Eventually, Mom got her wish. Less than six months after the “when-are-you-going-to-become-a-real-woman” confrontation, I was pregnant. It turns out that fertility was an inherited trait.

I can’t say that I knew what I was getting myself into. Not the motherhood part, but the work-home balance part.

While I was pregnant, I was interviewed for local newspaper feature called “Women Trailblazers.” Noting my rather impressive belly (I had pregnancy-induced hypertension and had swelled to the size of an exercise ball), the reporter asked how I thought my career would change after I had the baby. I remember saying I didn’t expect anything to change. I would continue working and be a mother. Easy.

What I didn’t understand then was that attempting to have a career while being a good mother would push and pull me for the next 20 years. And that my career strategy would be to oscillate (or maybe vacillate): drive hard, succeed, cut back (with its commensurate loss of authority and/or influence), accept new challenge. Repeat three times.

Not until the end of my father’s life did I understand how he hoped to protect me from one of the worst things that he felt could befall a woman: being trapped in a marriage without an escape route. As his mother was. My father’s hopes for for me were shaped by his position as the middle child, a vantage point from which he witnessed his father’s verbal harangues and his mother’s suffering as his father departed each night for his mistress Erma’s home.

My grandfather apparently thought that he was marrying into money, knowing that my grandmother’s father was “the grand old man” of Yakima. When he learned that the family fortune had been decimated by investments in my great uncle’s failed ventures, he no longer had a reason to be pleasant. The relationship that my grandmother had been warned about continued after the marriage. At best, it was a loveless marriage. At worst, abusive.

My mother wanted to ensure that I did not lose out on love – either the love of a husband or the love of children, while my father quietly strived to make certain that I could never be trapped in a loveless marriage. What gifts.

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October 23, 2013 · 3:26 pm

Birthdays Remembered

Just now, my fingers hovered over the keyboard, not quite ready to land. If I don’t write about it, if I pretend that tomorrow is just another day, maybe it won’t be real: one year since my Dad’s last birthday.

I have a parade of Dad’s birthdays marching through my head. There was his 87th birthday when he had a speech all prepared beginning with, “Four score and seven years ago….” That was the last time I tried to faithfully match the number of candles to his age.

Five years earlier, Dad’s surgeon had emerged after an eight hour cardiac bypass operation with the good news that the procedure was a success, and the bad news that he expected this one, Dad’s third, would last only five years. When we gathered the family for his 87th, the five year timer had gone off. We faced the possibility, even the likelihood, that Dad would die within the year.

We drank a lot that night, liquid accompaniment to the many toasts, stories and recitations of Dad’s favorite poems. In the midst of it, Dad cocked his head, raised his glass and looked directly into my eyes. I think of the smile in this picture as my smile. He would purse his lips gently, the way I do when I’m about to cry, and the corners of his lips would lift. He held that pose, for one beat, two, three. That gaze remained on his face for as long as I wanted to look back. To me, it said it all.

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Two years later, Dad moved permanently to California. The word went round before every birthday: you should come, it might be his last.

When someone’s death is predicted for nine years running, it starts to become comedic. We began spreading out family visits to provide Dad with something to look forward to. Two years in a row, I turned Dad’s birthday into a road trip, taking him to Monterey to enjoy an ocean front room and a visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

As Dad gazed up at the aquarium’s 28 foot high tank, the pale blue light of the tank washed over him. He seemed to drink in the majesty of the display before him: swaying fronds of kelp, swirling sardines, cruising fish. Its beauty moved him.

Dad and me at the Monterey Aquarium 2010

By his birthday last year, his 96th, much of that joy had slipped away. His rich, brown eyes had faded, and it was harder to rise to the occasion of a party in his honor, even a small one. He was quiet, though he enjoyed his lamb, and of course there was chocolate cake. He always had room for chocolate cake.

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I could not envision celebrating his next birthday with him. And I was right.

This year, there’s no Pendleton shirt wrapped and ready, no bacon-and-eggs breakfast planned, no chocolate cake in the refrigerator. For most of the world, it will be just another day. But for me, it’s the first birthday that wasn’t.

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October 21, 2013 · 11:42 am

Darkened Windows

The windows of the corner room in my house were dark when I pulled in last night, which should have been no surprise. With a few exceptions, they have been dark since January.

I stopped the car in the driveway and thought about what was missing.

The glow of the television through the shutters was usually the thing that caught my attention. Even from the driveway, I could see images from the The Military History Channel strobing from light to dark in the shadowed room. In the foreground, Dad’s face was revealed when brighter images flashed on the screen. I could see him tilted back in his recliner.

He was waiting for me to come home.

As a teenager and young adult, I often returned home late. I’d turn the key in the lock as quietly as I could and take off my shoes so they wouldn’t make a racket on the green slate entry hall floor. At the sliding door that separated the hallway from the kitchen, one of our Springers would be snuffling along the half inch gap below the door. Slowly, I’d slide the pocket door open an inch or two, just enough to pat the soft brown head before closing the door and heading downstairs to my basement bedroom.

A few minutes later, it would start: Dad “buttoning up” the house. The springs of my father’s twin bed would complain and the wood floor creak slightly as he rose for his nightly rounds. Three steps to the end of the bed, another five or six to the doorway. It was quiet for a count of ten as he padded down the carpeted hallway past the bathroom, turning left into the front hall. Then a series of clicks: push-push, push-push. My parents’ 50s era house had buttons instead of switches to operate the lights, and none of us ever managed to remember exactly which switch operated what. So turning off the lights meant pushing the buttons to check whether everything was shut down. Then in reverse: movement down the hall, bathroom stop, bedroom door firmly closed, steps to bed, bed springs sounding their dissonant chord several times before Dad settled down. The house was secure.

This time last year, Dad would have been listening for the sounds of my return. He liked to retire by 10 p.m., but he’d often delay his bedtime if I wasn’t back. The bombs of Iwo Jima had decimated his hearing so much that he didn’t even turn on the television sound, relying instead on the closed captions. But something about the squeal of the garage door springs and the heavy whump of the door where we entered from the garage were within the range of his hearing.

When I peeked in, he’d be watching the door rather than the tv. “There you are, Bets. Did you have a good time?” He’d say he thought he’d retire, and I’d kiss him on the cheek. See you in the morning. “Shut the door, please,” he’d ask, so that the cat wouldn’t visit him during the night.

These days, his corner room is dark. And yet I feel he is still present.

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September 30, 2013 · 8:16 pm

After Time Goes By

It’s now been almost nine months since Dad died. Nine months, enough time for an egg to become a fetus and a fetus to become an infant. Because I am still writing about the experience, some people approach me with concern and ask, “How are you doing? Are you all right?”

I am really, really all right. Maybe better than ever. The experience of caring for my Dad, losing my Dad and grieving my Dad — hard as it was — enriched my life in ways I find difficult to express.

Then came a little blue flyer in the mail from the nice folks at Sutter Hospice, who made such a difference in Dad’s life and mine between December 21 and January 12. I’m sharing it here in the hopes that it may speak to others, as it did to me:

Reflections About Time and Change by Dennis Klass, Ph.D., Webster University, St. Louis, MD

I often wonder what people are thinking when they say, “You’ll get over it.” Sometimes it sounds to me as if they are talking about a case of mumps or my despair at income tax time. But what can they mean when they say it about grief? Maybe they mean that grief is just an interruption in life. Their theory seems to be that life is basically happy — buying stuff, working, watching TV — but that a time of death and grief is an unnatural sad time in that happy life. I can’t agree with that view.

Time can lessen the hurt; the empty place we have can seem smaller as other things and experiences fill our life; we can forget for periods and feel as if our loved one didn’t die; we can find sense in the death and understand that perhaps this death does fit into a bigger design in the world; we can learn to remember the good and hold to that.

But we cannot “get over it,” because to get over it would mean we were not changed by the experience. It would mean we did not grow by the experience. It would mean that the child’s death made no difference in our life.

There is an interesting discussion in the Talmud, an ancient Jewish writing. Jews had the custom of rending their garments – literally tearing their clothes – to symbolize the ripping apart that death brings. But the question was asked, after a period of mourning, could you sew the garment up and use it again? The teachers answered yes, but when you mended it, you should not tuck the edges under so it would look as if it had never been torn. This symbolized the fact that life after grief is not the same as before. The rent will show. The next question was, can you sell that garment? The teachers answered no. The rending and mending of our life is ours and others cannot wear it.

No, we don’t get over it. We change and grow. Our life has a difference which is ours alone. Perhaps we can help each other make that difference — the kind of difference that increases the world’s supply of compassion, love and healing.

 

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