Tag Archives: love

January 7, 2013 · 8:22 pm

“They Were Siblings, Right?”

They Were Siblings

Tonight at the dinner table, as my Dad looked at a picture of my three brothers, he asked, “Scott, Bruce and Dean, they were siblings, right?”

I answered smoothly, “Yes, and they still are,” but my heart skipped a few beats.

That kind of confusion has been accelerating. Awakening earlier than usual yesterday morning, Dad asked me, “Who put me here? Where am I?” And this afternoon he asked, “Whose house is this?” He’s spent hundreds of nights in this house since we moved in six years ago.

He does not seem to be afraid during these periods of disorientation – he sees and recognizes me – but they shock me.

I’ve talked about the physical challenge of Dad’s decline, but I think his cognitive changes are the scariest. I don’t really understand them, and I don’t know what the future holds.

It’s one more thing that I have to find a way to be at peace with, so that Dad can be at peace.

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January 2, 2013 · 7:57 am

I’m Not Alone

morning candles

It’s been almost seven years since I moved my Dad to California, knowing that his cardiac disease was catching up with him. We’ve had quite a few scares since then: a small stroke that temporarily interfered with his ability to speak, a strange seizure, numerous falls and illnesses. During one of those scares, my husband was in Mexico, unreachable, and I was alone at the hospital with Dad, afraid.

I hate being alone when Dad’s life is at risk. I can handle the decisions that need to be made. I can handle the physical challenge of the long hours. I can be strong for Dad so that he is not afraid.

But I want to be able to cry and have someone to hold and comfort me when I am afraid. I just don’t want to be alone.

Yesterday my first morning thought was of all the people who are, as one friend puts it, “holding me in the light.”

In recent days, I have heard from a college friend with whom I have been out of touch in recent years. My spiritual and artistic cousin, Lynn, has become the angel who perches on my shoulder with frequent, loving messages, like this one:

Whenever I read your ardent posts as I did just now.. and look at your exquisitely poignant and palpably tender photographs.. I am reminded again and again of the Rumi stanza..  that I am sure you are familiar with but I can’t help writing:“Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.” –Rumi    

 Mostly, I want you to know this New Year’s eve that even though it may seem I am in the background I am a part of that large net beneath the high wire you are walking– where by the way, you are dazzling in your diamond light.  I am not quite breathing with you, but almost…

My dear friend, Lisa, who spent the day on the 18th hanging out with me and cooking for me, is in Italy with her family where she is lighting a candle in every church she encounters. When traveling, Lisa normally devotes her laser-like focus to something food-related, like tasting lentil soup in Turkey, but on this trip, she says she is thinking of Dad and me. She wrote:

It is making me feel slightly better — but marginally so — wish I could be with you to help you through this important time. Your dad is a great man, and you are the best daughter and friend anyone could hope for. Miss you.

Yesterday I wrote my oldest friend, Ellen, about how she had rescued me when we met as lonely adolescents. She wrote back:

I have loved walking this current path with you. I have felt your sadness and pain. I have cried with you. I have wondered, and asked, and railed with you. I have grown with you. I have deepened and broadened who I am with you. I want to be there with you, but also know that you would be caring for me, and worrying about me, while at the same time you are caring and worrying about everyone else in your life. It’s your nature.

This is a hard path. But it’s far harder on Dad as he struggles. The love and support of family and friends makes all the difference. It holds me up so I can hold him up.

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December 31, 2012 · 12:40 pm

Taking Stock of My Journey with Dad

Henry Campbell Dec. 23 2012

I’m one of those people who likes to take stock and tidy up as the new year approaches. But instead of cleaning my office as I have in years past, my attentions are here on this blog. Looking at the “About” description, I realized how its content has changed as Dad has aged and weakened. It started as a celebration with a few funny bits and occasional bits of advice thrown in. I wrote from the head, thinking, how can I capture useful insights from this experience for me to remember and for others to benefit from?

Last summer, as Dad’s health began to fail, I started writing from the gut. I wrote about my experience, about feeling vigilant, not just about Dad but about everyone in my life. I wrote about not sleeping. I felt a little like a mother hen trying to keep the chicks safe in the nest.

In the process of seeing Dad start to slip, I became more aware of and grateful for family and friends, especially my amazing husband of 30 years. My post on our anniversary, “30 Years of Opposites: Happily Ever After,” became my most-read post of the year, with over 300 views.

In October and November, The Henry Chronicles took on a more somber tone with the loss of my “other mother.” In the last month, my posts have expressed my desperation to turn things around and my anger at God when I could not. Without planning to do so, I find myself writing almost daily in the quiet hour after the night caregiver leaves and my Dad calls out that he is awake and ready to get up. One morning I thought about all of the people who have been supporting Dad or me, and I said thank you to “Team Henry.”

I’m no longer trying to be smart or useful. I’m just trying to get through this time with as much strength for Dad as I can. I keen online because I can’t help it. By releasing the terrible pain and fear that comes with caring for someone in the last months of life, I feel better. Maybe it’s self-therapy, online.

I do draw great comfort from the small company of friends and followers who read my little posts and share their own experiences, or offer a supportive word. I’m kind of amazed that, in this frenetic holiday period, people are willing to read something that isn’t about the fun of the holidays.

I may be hanging on by my fingernails, but I am hanging on.

The “About” page now ends with: These days, this blog is about coming to grips with the impending end of his life, a search for faith and understanding, and a longing for strength so that I might offer him the same unconditional love that he has always given me.

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December 15, 2012 · 10:01 am

Love and Buckwheat Pancakes

Buckwheat pancake on the griddle

My brothers and I all have our ways of demonstrating love for Dad. And right now Dad can use all the TLC he can get.

My brother, Dean, whipped up a batch of one of Dad’s favorite confections this morning: buckwheat pancakes.

My kitchen smells like stale beer the morning after a fraternity party. These grainy pancakes, tasting of yeast and looking like dirt, are an obsession that escapes me. “It’s an acquired taste,” Dean says. I guess.

I may dislike the smell and hate the taste, but I love these little rituals that my brothers bring with them when he visit. Dad eats it up. Literally.

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November 21, 2012 · 11:56 am

Taking Mom for Granted

Although my mother died in 1999, she lives on in my mind. In not a few of my mental pictures, she is busy in the kitchen in her quilted satin pink bathrobe — the one Dad bought her on one of his last minute Christmas Eve shopping expeditions. She’s sweating slightly and occasionally barking orders like the domestic commander that she was.

My brother and I huddle around a giant stainless steel bowl “picking the bread,” a chore that involved plucking slightly stale sandwich bread into suitably-sized increments for the sage and onion stuffing. We cooperated but were none too happy about it. I am sure I had been told – repeatedly – to get out of my luxurious four poster bed in the dark corner basement room where I would easily sleep until noon, given half the chance. But I wasn’t given the chance as (alas) Mom needs help.

The bread picked, my chores continue, or I should say, “chore.” The only other standing task I remember on holidays was setting the table. Holidays, of course, called for the household’s finest: Grandmother’s heavy silver place settings, Mom’s “Golden Wreath” china, Waterford “Lismore” crystal and lots of silver serving dishes that invariably needed polishing. I’m sure I emitted my share of heavy sighs while getting everything up to Mom’s standards, which is to say the standards of a Marine Corps officer’s wife.

In the meantime, my Mom finished the stuffing, got it in the bird, “jounced” the turkey up and down with Dad’s help to maximize room for the stuffing, stitched up the gaping maw of the turkey’s innards, and started the long, slow process of babysitting and basting the turkey to its golden, roasted peak. Somewhere along the line she prepared the side dishes, although turkey, mashed potatoes and stuffing were all anyone ever cared about.

When it came time to gather ’round the table for grace, a toast, and the ceremonial carving of the bird, we thanked Mom. Or at least I think we did. To be honest, I’m not sure.

I took our delicious holiday meals for granted. I took our lovely home and table setting for granted. I took my mother for granted.

And, as strange as it sounds, I am grateful that I could be so oblivious in my security. One of my mother’s greatest gifts was that she was utterly reliable and predictable in her role as mother. I never had to question whether she loved me, or how she would respond if I did something she approved of, or disapproved of. She was the same, day in and day out. An immutable force of nature.

As I look forward to the holiday tomorrow, I expect that I will be taken for granted. I hope those who I love don’t have to think about who I am, what to expect of me, and how I feel about them.

So, go ahead. Take me for granted. It’s one of the nicest compliments you could pay me as a legacy from my mother.

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August 25, 2012 · 2:57 pm

My husband, the unsung hero

(Before you read this post, stop remembering the Andy Kaufman version of the Mighty Mouse theme song. I mean it. Stop. It. Right. Now.)

My husband and I have always had a 50-50 arrangement, if you average it over time. Statistical nerd that I am, I know that the average can mask a labile distribution of responsibility for household and familial duties. Sometimes it’s 75-25, sometimes 25-75, and occasionally even 90-10 (as in the time when we were preparing to move and my husband managed to break his knee on a guys’ trip).

Every time someone says to me that I’m an angel for taking care of my Dad, I remember that the guy holding my halo in place is my husband.

When I stop to take inventory, I realize that it’s a whole bunch of little things he does that accumulate to make a difference. When he comes home from work every evening, he asks if my Dad has his glass of wine. While I scramble to do my “magic” in the kitchen (anyone who knows me knows this is not a joyful experience), he’s contributing the comfortable routine of my Dad’s life. Dad used to have a couple of scotch and waters before dinner that over the years morphed into a glass of red wine. Dad’s almost lost his taste for wine at all, but that pre-dinner libation is a nicety in the not-so-nice world of advanced age.

Sometimes my husband “covers” for me if I have a morning meeting or am entertaining a couple of girlfriends. I’ve never detected a moment of resentment if I ask him to fix Dad’s breakfast or put his dinner on the table.

Taking care of Dad severely limits our flexibility to accept invitations from friends or go out of town for the weekend, things my extrovert husband would enjoy. But he never complains. Ever. I’ve never detected resentment, though he would be well within his rights to feel some.

And he shares his space often, as family members come to visit my Dad.

Perhaps most significantly, he doesn’t try to fix my problems when I feel down or a little worn out. Earlier in our marriage, we learned that my sharing a problem led to him trying to solve it, when sometimes all I wanted was the opportunity to vent. He sits with me and empathizes. I feel held inside even if we are not touching outside.

Next time your mental jukebox plays, “Here I am to save the day!” remember the great men who are out there standing behind the “angels” like me.

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August 7, 2012 · 6:00 am

30 Years of Opposites, Happily Ever After

Today, my husband and I celebrate 30 years of marriage. You know that old saw, “And they said it wouldn’t last”? The Episcopal priest who married us, who’d known me since I was nine, actually expressed his reluctance to read the banns because we were too different. He based this opinion on the results of a psychometric questionnaire that he had both of us complete.

He was right that we were different, and we still are.

  • My husband is a true extrovert who comes home from a party so jazzed up that he can’t go to sleep; I collapse in a heap, worn out from having to be that extroverted.
  • Members of his family, men included, cry easily. Crying was pretty much trained out of us in my family, which faced most hardships and losses with stoicism.
  • My approach to strong disagreement, like my mother’s, was to yell, with the occasional “god dammit” and “hell” thrown in for seasoning. Then we forgot about it. My husband learned to conquer other people’s anger by withdrawing. He prefers to stew a bit before sorting things out.
  • My husband is an ESTJ in Myers-Briggs parlance and, if you’re in to that sort of thing, a Virgo. His world view is pretty black and white – it’s right or it’s wrong. He’ll give people a long leash, but if feels they’re taking advantage of him – bam! – they will get an unambiguous shove back. He likes to know the rules up front, and he likes to follow them. I, on the other hand, am an ENTJ with a healthy dollop of Gemini sauce. Rules, schmules. How I react depends on whether I’m feeling extroverted or introverted at that moment. But always, I tend to put logic before feeling.
  • He likes things neat. I like things clean.
  • He loves to listen to music all day long. I love quiet.
  • He’s definitely conservative, in the sense of can’t-stand-the-idea-of-our-son-getting-a-tattoo. I figured it was inevitable, but I find I actually appreciate the fact that the tattoo honors that interconnectedness of people and the earth (I just didn’t think it needed to be emblazoned on one’s body).

I could go on, but you get the idea. It’s not a marriage made in heaven – I see Fr. Dave’s point – but it wasn’t made in hell, either.

What it has been is interesting – and, for the most part, good. My Dad often says that he views his life in distinct phases that feel discontinuous. Our early marriage years were horny and busy, very much about having fun with each other and fun with other people. The second phase of our marriage, after our children were born, found us fully engaged in demanding careers, squeezing every drop out of our schedule to put into parenting.

Those mid-kid years were tough, so tough that we ended up doing three years of marriage counseling. Where we learned – guess what? – how different we are. We were there because we had grown distant, because we had become great business partners, but weren’t such great lovers. Something had to change.

But the miraculous thing is that things did change. We reassessed, listened, got over our anger, and regrouped. We found better ways of being together that worked for both of us and honored our differences.

The result? I admire my husband’s integrity, his stability, and his rock-solid values, which include commitment to me. He laughs and cries more freely than I do, and both his humor and his empathy have helped me to be a happier, healthier person. Though we have been very angry with each other on occasion, he has never treated me poorly or tried to wound me. I know a lot more about music than I would have, although I am still hard pressed to “name that band,” or remember lyrics. Our kids, now young adults, are better people for having had parents who learned to listen to them and each other through our differences; they could not be more forthright, and they actually continue to seek our counsel. And our house is both neat and clean. Call ours reconcilable differences.

While this particular post honors the differences that have challenged us through the years, we had a lot of commonalities that provided a foundation. Belief in God (shaky at times, but nonetheless there), priority on family, empathy and respect for one another. And love.

It’s 30 years later, and we’re 55. I feel like we’re in phase three of our marriage, and I look forward to the phases to come. I enjoy being with him more than I did 10 years ago, and as much as I did 30 years ago. Having said that, I don’t feel at all like I did in my mid 20s. I’m not the same person. Neither is he. But we’ve found a way to be together.

It’s like getting married all over again.

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