To Klutz, Or Not to Klutz

My friend from high school, Jacque, used to tell me I was a klutz.  It's true.  I have always had a tendency to trip if there is something in the way of my feet.  I spilled a Pepsi on her parents' brand new carpet in their brand new house.  Once, in P.E. I actually made a basket.  Unfortunately, it was on the wrong end of the court, so, even though I was a track girl, and a bat girl (more on that later) I think it's safe to say, I've never been athletic.

In my early thirties, my doctor sent me to the Mayo Clinic to figure out why I had daily migraines, visual disturbances and my own personal earthquakes, etc. We wanted to know why my klutziness seemed to be increasing.

So the uberneurologists did many tests.  They stuck me in a tube that sounded much like being in a washing machine.  I found it strangely relaxing.  They told me to hold completely still, while a thingamabob circled my head making noises I've never heard outside an alien space ship.  They put me in a completely dark room, told me to keep my eyes open and then turned on lights strobing at various frequencies.  Ha!  I'll bet they regretted that one.  I thought that was was going to be my least favorite one, but nooooooooo, there were even less fun tests to come.

They did one absolutely essential test which involved them sticking needles in various muscles and sticking receptors so many inches away from the needle, then they shot electricity through the needle and a machine measured how long it took me to scream.  No kidding!  I couldn't make this stuff up!

And spinal taps.  Yes, plural.  Gotta love those.

Back in those days I had hair on my head.  But somehow or other they stuck somewhere around 127 electrodes to my scalp and then did all sorts of things to me.  Sometimes, they even wanted me to sleep with those wires all over my head and three people staring at me through a window.

By the time I was done answering thousands of questions, demonstrating my walking ability - heal to toe, sideways, backwards, etc., being stuck in tubes, stuck with needles, and generally stuck, I was eager to get the results.

They told me I had neuropathy which is sort of like saying "You have headaches and are a klutz who doesn't see very well."   Oh, and I had several dispersed white spots on my brain indicative of MS.

Well, shit.

Jacque said, "Well, you've always been a klutz."

The treatment options weren't all that fun.  I took steroids for a while which made me look nine months pregnant and evil.  The other available options didn't sound any more fun.

I decided to not mention the diagnosis, because frankly, I didn't like it.

Since then, I've been to a few other neurologists.  They repeated the same tests and strangely came up with varying diagnoses.  Yes you do, no you don't, maybe you do.  "You can take this drug that might slow the course of the disease, but the side effects can be a bit disconcerting. . . . "   They recommended I have my brain scanned now and again again to see how many new spots they can see.  

How ridiculous is that?  Why do I care how many spots or where they are? If they can't make the symptoms go away without replacing them with worse symptoms, I see no reason to frequent their establishments
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But lately the falling swarms seem to come more often and last longer. And falling isn't nearly as funny as it used to be.  My arms jerk about in their own spontaneous dances more often and lately I've been having those visual things that start with a little squiggly that grows until everything is squiggly and you can't see what you're looking at, only stuff on the sides of what you're looking at.  I didn't say it well, but it's a common enough thing.  It's just that it's been happening 3 or so times per week and lasting an hour or so
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Oh, and then there's there is this memory thing.  Mine has big holes.  Year sized holes and little tiny holes.
 
Anyway, I'm to the point where I'm considering actually seeing if there is such a thing as a neurologist with a personality who isn't addicted to cruel and unusual tests.  Maybe.  We'll see.

Circle

Six years ago, a very big old oak tree in my front yard fell over.  I came home from work on Friday and the tree was lying between our house and our next door neighbor's house.  It fell in exactly the place where it would do the least harm.

My husband's new car was parked under the big branches of the tree, and at first glance we figured the car was a goner.  The only damage to things other than the tree itself were the very corner of the overhang of our garage roof and a plastic pond that was awaiting installation.  After taking pictures from every angle and having the insurance agent do the same, some branches were cut and gently lifted off the car, which had not one scratch.  The branches fell and gently kissed the car, but didn't harm it in any way.

I loved that tree. I mourned the shade it had given my house and the homes it gave to gazillions of other lives. I cried for days.  Most people didn't understand, but that tree was a friend of mine.  It was the Eastern corner of my four cornered shade bed.

The tree people came and cleaned up the driveway, surveyed the other minimal damage, and while I sat on the lateral trunk of the tree, crying, I gave these big, emotionless men with chainsaws specific instructions.  I really couldn't have cared any less that they thought I was crazy.

I told them I wanted the trunk and large branches cut into two foot sections, that I wanted the mulch piled on the side of my lot, and that I wanted the rootball left as it was.  It took several tellings.  I considered drawing pictures for them, but eventually they did as I instructed.

The corner of the garage overhang was easily fixed, the pond was replaced, and I actually think the insurance company was happy.  Go figure.

Brian, a friend visiting from England, and I rolled some of the larger bits of trunk down the hill to the back yard to begin building the wall for the pond area.  It was quite a sight, I'm sure watching the two of us "mature" people trying to keep control of big rolling logs.

Some of the smaller logs became Faerie Henge.

Others became a wall to begin to level out a shade bed and the mulch had more uses than pickle jars at Heinz.

I chipped away on several of the biggest pieces - the ones too big for me to move - as they softened with the help of beetles, ants, and weather, using the resulting mulch in various gardens.  I hollowed out a few logs one year and planted petunias in them.  As the logs became lighter and smaller, I moved them around, arranged them in shapes that pleased me (and I think them) and gave the neighbors with green velvet lawns something to discuss over dinner.

But the root ball, which became the Eastern corner of the shade bed stayed in place.  A couple of years it held a birdbath.  It often was home to chipmunks and a favorite perch for squirrels who would sit and stare at my front door demanding that I refill the bird feeders.

This spring I leaned against it and found that it was very soft in places.  I brought out my hatchet and spade, expecting to get some buckets of mulch for my newly created paths.  And I did get lots of mulch.  I also got a huge bonus!  I got buckets of black, fine, moist, fructuous dirt.  It was the most beautiful dirt I've seen since I left Illinois.

All the while I was chopping and digging around the root ball, I was thinking of Shel Silverstein's book The Giving Tree and thinking about what he got wrong - or at least what I had always interpreted wrongly.

This tree, at first glance appears to be down to a knobby bit of root ball and some whittled away, rotten branches making exotic yard art and temporary borders for paths in the gardens.  And if that's all it was, it would be far more than enough.

But this tree has done more to turn this pre-brick, orange clay that passes for dirt here, into something gorgeous to this Illinois transplant.  There is now some dirt in which earthworms thrive and plants grow.  I'm not saying they grow as well as in Illinois dirt, but you know, this tree and I aren't done yet.

I don't look like I did when I was 17. All my cells have been replaced.  And when I "die" I will still be.  Just like the tree.  We really never go away.  We are severed from what we were, but we don't disappear.

  

Adventures, adventures, adventures.  It's turtles all the way down.  I'm so very sad.  And I am grateful.

Amputated

It's been a tough day for me. Easter. Holiday. James made a gorgeous dinner for Jan and I, which he worked on all day. I wish I hadn't had a breakdown in the middle of it.
I worked outside in the front gardens all afternoon, but I really didn't accomplish much. Rearranged some paths, transplanted things.
I had a very short conversation with Bump, who was understandably busy. It hadn't occurred to me to send the kids' Easter cards or Easter gifts or to color any eggs. It didn't even cross my mind. I will not win Nana of the year.
I wish I could get the hang of this holiday thing. To me they seem to be over-commercialized, over-stressed, over-sugared opportunities for disappointment. I thought I was catching on at Christmas, but I was wrong. Disappointment.
I hope I sleep less than 19 hours today as I did last night. One should at least feel energized after that, don't you think?
Less than 19 days until we bury Mom's ashes next to Papa's grave in Carthage, Illinois. We will be grieving not only our parents, grandparents, great grandparents, friends, neighbors, but we will also be grieving the place. Many places, many memories. And between Mom's funerals, Bean died. She was a one of a kind friend/person/talent.
And every death is every death.
As someone wiser than I put it, when close family member dies, it's not as if we lost her. That person didn't just go away. They are amputated from us. We are not who we were.
James doesn't know what's going on with me. I've no way to explain it.
It's taken so long for me to write, which is a bit weird, since I have so much to say. I have emotions like sediment on the bottom of the pond. Every time they start to settle something stirs them all up again and the water gets too murky.
I'm grateful that I'm trying to write now.

Straight Furrows

I have been remembering lately when I was a very small child and I asked my dad what direction "Straight" was.  I wanted him to point it out.  It wasn't so easy, and to tell the truth, I've never been good at directions.

But today, after seven years of enriching the orange, pre-brick soil in my front yard with mulched leaves and wood and compost, I tilled and found brown dirt.  It wasn't the black, magic soil of Central Illinois, but it wasn't orange - not even auburn.  It was fructeous, full of earthworms just waking up.  Into a plot of mostly sunny soil, about 20' X 8',  I tilled a few bushels of mulched leaves and a couple of buckets of fine wood mulch, and a couple of buckets of the magic stuff produced by the upturned root ball of the oak tree that fell over several years back.

Into this amazing mixture, I dropped seeds and transplanted some shrubs.  I only worked two hours, because I'm very aware that too much fun in the gardens one day keeps me from moving the next day.  

I tilled horizontally, then vertically, then diagonally.  I watched the bits of green chickweed and grass combine with the shreds of leaves and wood and clay, becoming even better, richer, more luscious soil.  I had to stop a few times to pick up handfulls of this magical stuff and smell it.  I had to take off my gloves and feel it.  The bits had to die to one life to become the next and it was beautiful.

It is beautiful.

And I realized I had tilled straight, no matter what direction.

I haven't had much of a green thumb since moving here to the South, where everything is supposed to grow happily.  I have tried to make Central Illinois gardens in South Carolina clay.  Earth is a bit wiser than I.  More forgiving and more stubborn.

I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the seeds I planted and the shrubs I transplanted today actually grow and thrive.

I Don't Think I'm Doing This Right

Mom's funeral was Sunday.  Well, the first one, anyway.  We'll have a graveside service mid-April in Illinois.  I think that's a 15 hour drive.  I want to drive to take stuff back for my kids, but who knows how that will all work out.

I'm home now, which is where I've wanted to be for a while.  I have a bunch of stuff from Mom's in my studio.  Everything is packed in here so it won't take up room in the rest of the house.

I'm pretty sure I'm not feeling the way I'm supposed to feel, and even as I say that, the therapist in me is saying something like, "There is no 'right' way to feel grief, blah, blah, blah."  And what I'm mostly hearing is the "Blah, blah, blah."

After the funeral - actually, after my eulogy was delivered - I felt nothing more than relief and eagerness to get the apartment cleaned out and things back to "normal," whatever the heck that is. Now I feel a lot of things.  I feel a fairly strong sadness, but I really can't say why.  I think I'm sad because I don't feel sad enough.  I don't feel sad about the right things.

I don't feel as if I just lost my Mom.  I felt that way the first time my mother asked me my name.  I've had about a year to feel sad about that.

I feel pretty angry.  I'm angry because things didn't go as I thought they would at the very end.  I wasn't there.  I wasn't there in the last days while she was sick, though I could have been.  I didn't know she was sick.  When she didn't answer her phone, I thought she was just gadding about.

I stayed with Mom for a week here, two weeks there, before she moved to the assisted living apartment.  There was a time at which I got pissy with everyone and that was the last of the regular calls and emails from some extended family, and actually that was just fine with me.   I got pissy with Mom's "Special Friend," and that was the end of our friendly relationship.  And that, too, was just fine with me.   I'm angry with those people, with the people who didn't call me when Mom was sick, and, of course, mostly with myself.

And so, of course, I feel guilty.  It's nothing new when it comes to her.  I've felt guilty about her most of my life.  That's honest, and I know it doesn't make me sound particularly nice.  I'm not particularly nice.  I should have called the front desk and asked about Mom after two missed phone calls.

I feel tired.  A soul-deep, weariness.  I want to climb into my bed and stay there for a week or so.  Maybe a year.  Maybe forever.

An Unusual Eulogy for an Unusual Woman.

February 28, 2016

I gave this eulogy at my mother's funeral at her church in Etowah, NC, where she lived the last 15 years of her life. 

     I assume that most of you knew my mother rather well, and will remember that she had an exceptional sense of humor.  She loved to laugh, right up to the end of her life.

     Once, not long ago, when I was staying at her house, she asked me to set up her stereo so that she could play the music she loved so well.  We sang along and danced to her music that night.

     However, the next morning, I guess she thought I was sleeping too late, because she woke me by playing some of Tommy Dorsey's greatest hits playing loudly enough to drown out a jet engine.   She thought that was funny.

     She always loved music, and had great hopes for musical talent in her children.  Unfortunately, Julliard didn't give scholarships for bongo or triangle.  So I think she decided to put a little extra musical boost on me (I was the youngest.)

     All my siblings are named after relatives.  My brother, Paul, is named after our father.  My brother, Wade, is named after an uncle and my sister, Nancy, is named after a grandmother.  I was named after Phyllis McGuire, of the McGuire sisters.  The last time I talked with her, she was still laughing about that.   Real funny, Mom!

     But fair is fair, don't you think?  Mom used her maiden name, Shubert, as her middle name all her married life. However, her real name was LaVon DOZENA!   (Got 'cha!)

     But Mom really did love music.  She always sang to her four children, eight grandchildren, and eleven great grandchildren.  

     Growing up, we often sang and danced to polkas, big band, and funny songs.  She was especially fond of silly songs. 

•   Three little fishes and a momma fishy, too

•   Hot diggety, dog diggety, Boom what you do to me

•   I love you, a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck

•    

     I particularly remember one song that Mom often sang to us in her native tongue. Please feel free to sing along if you know it. 

Marzy dotes and dozy dotes and little lamzee divy, a kiddleeivy too, wooden shoe. 

     Please don’t think I’m being disrespectful of my mother.  I have endless respect for her, and I know that there was little she enjoyed more than humor. 

      I’d like to end this babbling with a song by Phyllis McGuire - I guess she's my Godmother - and her sisters.  

(Phyllis has the solo, of course)

May You Always

First Friend

There are old friends, and then there is a first friend.

I've known Julie since before I can remember. I knew her before I could see her - before I got my first glasses. I guess we were two when I moved into the house catty-cornered from her house. 

She was the middle of five and I was the youngest of four. We vowed at a very young age that anything that was hers was half mine and anything that was mine was half hers. We didn't realize then how strongly that would apply to our mothers. 

Mom and the Bug (Julie's mom's name is June) became besties and remained so even after Mom moved from our central Illinois hometown to North Carolina. The Bug took a plane and a car and a bus to get to Mom's surprise 85th birthday party! I can still see Mom's face when the Bug walked in. Pure joy!

Big Jim, Julie's dad, hugged me after Papa's funeral and told me he was now my Carthage father. In truth, he and the Bug had been my "half" parents all my life. If growing up with one set of parents is good, growing up with Big and the Bug across the street as a second set of parents was great.

I could tell you what they both have meant to me - what the whole fam damily has meant to me - but it would be a very long (though interesting) book. I was only grounded twice in my life. Both times it was the Bug who grounded me. Don't think just because we weren't really related and for the most part lived in separate houses, the grounding didn't stick!

Julie and I spend endless hours - days - in my treehouse or play house, walking on stilts Papa made for us, playing kick the can with the neighborhood and generally tormenting her (our) little brothers. (In case you've wondered, a small boy can fit down a laundry shoot and survive if there are enough dirty clothes on the floor at the bottom.) We used to walk to the Square at the end of every summer and buy our school supplies together. We even bought some supplies together before we went off to separate colleges. 

And then, as often happens, we sort of went our separate ways. There was never a great falling out, we were always glad to see each other. I wouldn't even think of going back to the hometown without seeing Big and the Bug, even though Jul lived elsewhere. Julie and I just had different lives. 

Then, you know how things happen. Big Jim died when I lived in Virginia. It was hard for people to understand the depth of my grief. Mom lived in North Carolina and the Bug back in Illinois. Mom and the Bug both got old, and confused. Then Mom died.

And today Julie and the Bug face-timed me from the Bug's memory care facility. Nothing has meant more to me than them reaching out to me like that. In recent days Julie and I have emailed each other. She has provided me with the support that I have been missing. A sister, yet not a sister. Someone who has always shared the biggest things with me - family. 

The floodgates that I've been so successful at keeping at least mostly closed, opened up while I've been writing this. That's good. I need to get this crying stuff under control so I have at least a chance of giving a eulogy day after tomorrow. 

I'll see the Bug and Julia Marie Christina Burling Kirk in April when I go back to Illinois for Mom's graveside service there. 

Can you know how grateful I am?

Threads to the Life Raft

Grief is a bitch.

The loss of a parent is very difficult, no matter how old, or how sick or how expected the death, it's just hard.

Mom's first of two memorial services will be day after tomorrow in the town where she spent her last 15 years.  I'll know a couple of her friends from there.  There will be a few family members there besides my sister and her husband.  Most of the family will attend the graveside service in Illinois in April.  Oh yeah. . . . we get to do this all again.

It's been a long flippin' six days since Mom died. I've heard from several friends via the magical interweb, stating that they are sorry for my loss, etc.  I appreciate those messages, I really do.  I've one friend at home, whom I sure would stand on one ear to help me if she thought it would do any good.  And I heard from a friend I've had since age two over the past few days and she face-timed with me today.  My college roommate, who is like family, was supportive right away.  And of course, I have my sister and my kids, who are the center pole of this whole tent.  That is amazing. I'm blessed by those people who are like warm blankets in a snow storm.

I'm also grieving, however, because  I've come to realize that some of the friendships I thought I could count on - lean on - are not all that substantial.  I suppose I have imagined relationships that aren't there and it's taken this to get it through my thick head.  Today I've often felt as if I were drowning and a couple of friends who happened to be sailing by anyway tossed me three feet of thread and sailed on.

The loss of the illusion of friendship is also very difficult.  In fact, it sucks.  I feel stupid as well as alone.  What do I want?  What do I need?  Perhaps too much.  I may expect too many warm blankets.   To expect people to have time to talk to me when I'm blubbering and not making any sense may just be too much expectation.  I know well, how uncomfortable it is to be around people who are grieving.  It can be flat out exhausting.  I know.  I did it professionally.

And I have learned from this experience.  I won't change my behavior toward friends who are grieving.  I will be supportive.  I will be willing to stay awake and listen.  I will listen even when they are making no sense.  I won't assume that because they have other, more important, or closer friends they don't need me.  I will remember that grief doesn't last X number of days and is then over.

I want to grow to give more and expect less, and in that way be at peace.

(I also want to punch someone - doesn't really matter whom- right in the face sometimes.  But I'm pretty sure that is not going to happen.   I'm just saying)

Some Things I Will Say

On this day, I was awakened by the absence of sound.  The ubiquitous sssshhhhh that lives in my ears  was undisturbed by any other noise. The sunlight was too exhausted to shine through the stained glass window.  Now and then a bird came to the feeder, but it didn't bother singing.

I was waiting for my sister to call so I could go to her house and plan our mothers' funerals.  There would be two of them - one at her church in North Carolina where she lived the last fifteen of her life, and one back in our hometown in Illinois.

One might think that this was wrapping up the story, but as so often happens, one would be wrong.  I am going to tell the whole dang story, and it's not going to make me look much like a saint.  But I have some freedom now that comes with the death of parents.  Well, a freedom and a responsibility to be flat out honest in the telling.  It's not that I have big juicy secrets to tell about my parents, it's more that I don't feel the onus to look particularly saintly for them anymore.

However, when I saw the beautiful, young Cardinal couple hopping about yesterday, playing, dancing, courting in the grass, and they reminded me of my reunited parents, the thought went through my head that if I ever go to the same type of Heaven I imagine them in, I'm going to get the look from both of them.

People keep asking me how I'm doing.  Mom died Saturday and it's Monday now.  She hasn't even been officially dead two whole days, though it seems like a much longer time.  I began mourning her the first time she asked me what my name was, nearly a year ago.  Forgive me, I'm really bad with time, and this has been a scrambled up year, but I think it was about a year ago.

Because my sister lives closer - about 45 minutes, the way she drives - from Mom's house, but mostly because my sister is just a nicer person than I, Nan, my sister, was the primary caretaker from the family.  As signs of Mom's dementia began to pop up more and more, Mom wanted Nancy to be with her more and more.

Mom lived in her own house by herself then.  She and Papa were married 55 years when he died after a long, disgusting illness that took away his physical ability one tiny bit at a time, while leaving his brain as sharp as ever.  They lived in the same little town in Illinois for 42 of those years.  A couple of years after he died, Mom sold the house and most of the stuff in it and moved to North Carolina, where she knew no one.  Well, she knew that Nan and Chip would be moving to that area soon.

But think of that.  Mom was no spring chicken and had been married since she was a girl, and she just struck out and created a new life.  She bought a house, made new friends, had men in her life, won awards for quilting.  She had another big life as an independent single woman.

Mom died and I'm Fine, Fine, Fine

I talked to Val for a long time today. I was so totally fine, fine, fine, that I didn't even convince myself. But for some reason just couldn't stop being fine, fine, fine.

The state of being fine, fine, fine, is something I learned about in "How to be a psychotherapist school." It means your the body is outwardly saying that all is fine, fine, fine, but it's really being a lying bahstahd. Eventually the inside of your body, as well as emotions, start pointing out the lie and the longer the lie is denied, the more insistent and creative the expression becomes. 
Just off the top of my head I can think of a man who was so fine, fine, fine, when he went back to his less than happy marriage that he got extreme sciatica - literally a pain in the ass. I've worked with a family in which the father couldn't even move without the help of his children. Strangely, it was his admission of sexual abuse to those very children that resolved his mysterious paralysis. Even in my own past, I have broken out into a rash a couple of times, one on my ass, one over my heart. You know, the body has a mind of its own and often quite a sick sense of humor.
The past couple of days, my neck is crook. It's amazing how painful it is. I try to massage it, stretch it, put ice and/or heat on it and the pain just moves about getting more "expressive." It's impossible for me to look around. About the only thing I can do is type at my computer looking straight ahead, ignoring everything else. I know there is a lot of stuff stuffed in me regarding the death of my mother. A lot of it is icky stuff - guilt, anger, frustration, anger, guilt, guilt, surprise, relief, and sadness. There's probably more in there than I even know right now. My tummy is really sort of bloated, my head is fixin' to explode, and my ankles are swollen so I must be stuffed with it. Now, being fine, fine, fine, isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's often just a necessary thing because sometimes you just have to get some things done. You have to find clothes to wear to the funeral, plan the funeral, blah, blah, blah. You have to talk to people you're supposed to know but don't. You have to be civil and appropriate - neither of which I'm very good at.I'll get through it.
Comparatively speaking, we'll have an easy time of it. I'll be with my sister and we'll get 'er done. Maybe we'll take turns having melt downs. It seems like an efficient way to handle this. I have family who are willing to listen to me be a bit nuts and I am willing to listen to them be nuts. It's just a matter of timing and if there's one thing my sister is great at, it's scheduling.
So right now I'm fine, fine, fine, and over all, I'm grateful.