chasing and dodging

after a few attempts to dodge my feelings with chocolate and bunny-shaped graham crackers, i'm making a good dinner (well, defrosting one) and some favorite chai and sitting down with them.

actually, if you could have heard the convo in my head, you might have been surprised to find some familiar players.

me: maybe i'll have a drink... maybe some more chocolate... what's so wrong about numbing out the feelings?

miriam: you know you will have to feel them eventually.

me: oh cmon are you sure? do i have to?

michelle (goblinbox): yup. those are the rules. sorry babe.

so anyway. my aunt died in September and i've managed to ignore that fact. i haven't called my mother more than a couple times since then, because i don't want to be reminded that she's grieving tremendously for her sister. (yes, i beat myself up about that a lot, but i won't here). it's bad enough i get her emails about her sadness, cc'd to me as she writes other friends (a standard m.o. for her).

but now that i'm heading to AZ in less than 72 hours, i can't avoid the fact that i'm going to be immersed in the collective grief of my uncle, their three sons, and the wives and grandchildren - and of course my mom. i'm dreading it. absolutely dreading it. i don't know if it's because my grief is walled off or because i'm afraid theirs will be so much greater than my own that it will be overwhelming or what.

i should look at it as a time to be kind to people i love. but i'm afraid of all those feelings. i'll try to let go of those fears and take on the positive viewpoint. and to remember, as all of you would remind me, to be gentle to myself.

waxing crescent

Saw a king snake, a crescent moon, a giant bat (really, like, pizza size), three Harris hawks, four or five families of quail, endless doves, a squashed 'horny toad,' assorted non-squished lizards, miscellaneous jackrabbits... it's only very recently that jackrabbits have started to look long-eared to me. and "regular" rabbits still look small-eared. heh.

i've treasured my time in the desert, in my grandmother's old house where i came hundreds of times over the years... the house has been gutted but the view out each window is the same, aside from the new houses that have sprouted up all over - but the patio and the sky and the mountains are the same. The windows and doors are in the same places.

Many of my childhood memories are uneasy, but there are some that are utterly content. Being up here, the sweet-smelling wind off the mountains (still smells the same - more creosotey than it does in Tucson), clouds in the sky... very carefree. Heart floating on the breeze, tethered to my wrist... I remember standing on the patio with Petra on New Year's Eve, almost 1985. It was so cold and we were trying to watch the fireworks all around the valley... can't see the valley anymore, there's a house in the way... my grandmother used to love to watch the storms come and go across the wide expanse of flat land ringed by mountains, really much wider than a 'valley'... i don't mind that the house is in the way. things change. i don't mind any of the changes here. but i remember. i remember mornings and breakfasts and evenings and starlight and changing seasons and my grandmother. i remember.

it's also been great to spend time with my cousin and his wife... lots of good discussion, politics, family, life... good food... and love.

i spent the day at the hospital today but... my aunt is basically already gone. she looks up with huge, uncomprehending, infantile eyes when spoken to, or mutters without enough thread to grasp any gist, half in French at times. today my cousins decided to discontinue any further treatment and just provide palliative care (reduce pain).

the mix of emotions that all this engenders is... not impossible to put into words but... i don't really feel like trying.

death is certain, and the timing of death is uncertain, so what is the most important?

Thursday was a very bad day. That "no" post (previous) came out of a slide back into a very difficult place, paranoia, despair, nothing good. But I took my evening meds a few hours early and after a half hour or so I was fine.

I am grateful for the meds and more resigned to my diagnosis.

Last night too was bad. Black despairing loneliness. Up most of the night crying. That turned out to be largely PMS.

Maybe the meds aren't catching everything but most of the time I feel so much better. Not to be depressed after years of being depressed is such a gift.

Anyway, the title of the post refers to two things... the second of the four reminders that I was going to be meditating upon these weeks, and the fact that my aunt's health is failing.

It may seem morbid, but the phrase puts a lot of things in perspective.

And as my aunt gets ready to enter Hospice, I feel that feeling coming over me, the hospice feeling... the end of life, the slowing down, the rasping breath that stops.
Familiar. Very familiar by this time. Makes life seem more awake, more piquant, to know that you will walk on and this person who has come with you this far, they will stop. You'll walk on without them.

When death comes near to someone, it fills me with an odd peace. Death is just so real. It's the real-est thing in the world. It's inescapable and absolute. Everything else is relative, depends on how you look at it, shifting and confused. Death - well you can think different things about it, say different things about it - but it ultimately is incontrovertible, un-interpretable, it's just the end. And it comes to everyone. It could come to me before my aunt.

And... that's the way it is.

fucking gratitude... dammit

i've done a lot of puttering, a lot of putzing, to avoid writing this post, once i decided to write it. i'll get to that at the end. heh.

in recent weeks i've been having trouble "getting to the cushion," i.e. making up my mind to meditate and actually doing it.

when life was shittier i rushed to meditate, taking refuge when there was no ground.

but now that life returns to varying degrees of normal, i convince myself that there is ground and that i'm happy standing on it, and so i don't feel the need to meditate ... (emphasis on "feel").

somehow as a ... well not a substitute but... an urge to do something, i've been reading some of the teachings, and recently have become interested in the "four preliminaries."

the "four preliminaries" are four ideas that one should contemplate to put oneself in the frame of mind to do meditation. we are permitted to use whatever expression of them seems most helpful to us. here is mine, based about 90% on Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's version:

1. This short, free life is so precious.
2. Death is certain: this body will be a corpse.
3. We cannot escape karma: cause and effect.
4. Samsara is unendurable, unbearably intense; all beings suffer.

this morning, as a substitute for any contemplation or calm, i went into some kind of hyperactive four preliminaries tasmanian devil thing... i decided to make them my phone's wallpaper, wrote them a bunch of times, took pix... yeah.

at the end i felt, well, going hyper over something intensely contemplative still has a few shreds of benefit, but let's take more time with these. i came up with the idea (inspired by an iPhone app :-P ) of doing a week's contemplation of/attention to each one in turn. yes! what a great idea!

oh.

fuck.

the first one is on gratitude.

can i just skip it and go for a nice morbid juicy one, like the corpse thing or karma?

nope.

gratitude.

start with fucking gratitude.

dammit.

ok.

forward march (or may)

loopy told me a very corny joke on May 4. "It's Star Wars day," she said. Of course, I said, "What?" and she said, "May the fourth be with you." Uuuuugggghhhh.

Reminds me of how my grandmother and mother always used to call the fourth of March "moving day." You know. "March forth." Aaaaaaaarrrrrgh.

Anyway.

Here is the photo that's been my wallpaper on my phone for two weeks.


I took it on my way to meditation two weeks ago, crying near-hysterically cuz my meds hadn't kicked in and stoned on my meds cuz i hadn't eaten. Still, when I saw this (in some ways unremarkable) image, it somehow got through to me.

I took the pic and put it on my phone to remind me to look forward instead of backward... it would be easy to get mired in cherished memories and drown in them (as I have been for months, to the detriment of myself and others). The future is scary and hard to deal with at the moment.

But the past is not coming back, no matter what the future holds, and dwelling in it "robs [me] of the present moment," to quote one of the teachings I've heard. I have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Here is one of the teachings that's been sustaining me:

Each day, we're given many opportunities to open up or shut down. The most precious opportunity presents itself when we come to the place where we think we can't handle whatever is happening. It's too much. It's gone too far....

Basically, disappointment, embarrassment, and all these places where we just cannot feel good, are a sort of death.... Rather than realizing that it takes death for there to be birth, we just fight against the fear of death.

How do we work with our minds when we meet our match? Rather than indulge or reject our experience, we can somehow let the energy of the emotion, the quality of what we're feeling, pierce us to the heart. This is easier said than done, but it's a noble way to live. It's definitely the path of compassion—the path of cultivating human bravery and kind-heartedness.

~Pema Chödrön

This is a hard teaching, but I've been working with it a lot. Facing the present instead of running away and hiding.... when I can do this, it does seem to deepen both my moment-to-moment connection to the world; it also helps me experience my feelings and then let them go.

And sometimes when I'm present I can accept unexpected gifts, like these beautiful clouds gathering over a car dealership as I hurried to a Chinese restaurant last night:



The world is full of richness and beauty, if I can only slow down and breathe and see and feel, and not be afraid of any of those things. Especially that whole feeling thing. Dangit.

One foot in front of the other.

After work today spent some time w a coworker who just enrolled her husband in hospice... It's taken him 3 years to die... I can't even imagine all she must be feeling as the end draws near.

I remember when Loopy was in the hospital, I used to be struck by how all the faces around me were stripped of social graces and laid bare to the most basic humanity... We all wore the same expression of stunned vulnerability. I remember every time I got into the elevator, I stared dumbly at the floor listings, alphabetical... and read the series, "bone...breast...burn..." thinking of human fragility and all the ways we can be hurt.

You never know where pain will come from, or how you'll survive. But it always does, and you always do.

off

So we're heading off to Germany for the holidays, both to see our dearly beloved German friends and to avoid the ghosts of Christmas past.

Avoiding the past may or may not be the best way to deal with having your dad die during a particular year. I will certainly keep you posted on that - or more likely I won't since, as I mentioned, the goal is to avoid thinking about it. I have been straying from the path of meditation... it doesn't help that, in my mind, I've turned it into something to "stray from," and feel guilty about. We are warned about this when we start trying to practice meditation. "Pshaw!" I said gaily. "I find it uplifting and healing, not something rigid that I use to berate myself." Yeah.

Anyway, it's time to go to the airport, and I'm not done packing, which is why I'm blogging. Avoidance being the theme here, in case my amazingly subtle writing is not conveying that well enough.

I just wanted to point out that I have become addicted to Twitter, thanks to my beloved online buddy Goblinbox. To keep up with me on a moment-by-moment basis (because what could be better than that? a look inside birdfarm's brain! wow!), there are several options. You can

1. visit this page and read the Twitter updates at right, or
2. click the link at right to visit my Twitter home page, or
3. click this link to achieve the same effect.

Have a great holiday if I don't post again before then. But I probably will. I'll be on vacation after all. With Mom. :)

gone

I'll write more later... Dad died this morning... we are ok... sadness feels like tiredness... I couldn't bring myself to talk to him or say goodbye while he was gasping like a fish out of water for the last three days, but once he was still and silent and going cold, I talked to him and told him some things I wished he hadn't done, and some things I was glad he did, and that I understood, and the he was a good dad, and cried a lot.

More later.

Dad

Just an update for anyone who has this on bloglines... seems my Dad is dying... so we are going to Arizona. It's not unexpected, just sad. More another time.

don't fear the reaper

Just watched the Christmas episode of "Six Feet Under" -- the one where it's one year since the dad died, and everyone's remembering the last time they saw him, and meanwhile the bikers have a rip-roaring funeral for the guy who worked as Santa Claus and wiped out in front of the kids. "Don't Fear the Reaper" plays over the closing credits as Nate zooms off on Highway 1 on the dead guy's Harley.

Well, all the memories of the last time they saw the Dad (it occurred to me that that's the only time in the series--I think--after the first episode--where he actually appears as a live person, instead of someone else's imagination of what he might say if he were there) -- anyway -- well, I ended up bawling.

I was supposed to go visit my folks next weekend, but I procrastinated on buying the tickets, kinda using my bad back as an excuse. We didn't see them at Christmas because of Loopy's whole thing, so the last time I saw them was in August when I went for Mom's surgery, which was a really really hard time. And now it's been a long time. There were years when I avoided them for as much as 18 months at a time, but that's in the past, and now I miss them. I think.

I did a lot of "work" in August when I was there (I keep meaning to post excerpts from a long letter I wrote in which I recorded a lot of that) and have felt a lot closer to my Mom since then...

So now recently, Mom hasn't been well, and she periodically talks about how Dad's gone downhill a lot recently, and I've been scared that if I didn't hurry up and go see them that he might die. Which I know is ridiculous -- people "go downhill" for years, decades even...

There's still the reasons I didn't see them for long stretches in the past, those reasons exist--and some other ones too, and they aren't small little trifling things, they're big, but I want those things to stay dead and buried and just not get in the way of trying to enjoy some time with them and, you know, be a grown-up, which I think of as someone who doesn't go around obsessing about the less pleasant aspects of her childhood, someone who has it together.

I just feel death getting closer, closing in. When I was younger and people talked about how when you age there's a "growing consciousness of mortality," I thought that was such a cliché and who isn't aware of mortality? But I get it now.

I was so afraid of losing my Loopy last year... it's a dream now, a fading nightmare that we're waking up from, but there's some kind of shadow that's left, a much deeper awareness of human fragility... And Ricky, and my folks, and everyone. The valley of the shadow of death -- that's where we always are.

It's a cliché, definitely, to point out that this is also the valley of life, it's all we've got. They talk a lot on "Six Feet Under" about making every day count. What does that even mean?

This is what happens when I don't have lunch. I end up bawling over a TV show. At least it's a highly acclaimed special TV show, and not a detergent commercial--that's when I know I'm really 'round the bend.

OK, well, on a slightly lighter note, I love watching the show again (Loopy gave me the box set for Christmas!) because there are so many little tiny details that are just so awesome. In an episode I watched earlier, David is talking to Keith in a coffee shop, and there are all these containers behind David's head labeled "cracker."

In the Christmas episode (it's called "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year"), Nate's last memory of his dad is when he and Claire are sharing a joint after Thanksgiving dinner, and his dad comes round the corner of the house smoking, and Nate & Claire quickly hide their joint, and when the dad sees them, he immediately stomps out what he's smoking and lights a cigarette.

The first time I saw it I just assumed he was chain smoking, but this time I realized, duh, they were all outside getting high and escaping Ruth at the same time.

It's just a little thing but it's so funny. All the episodes have little things like that... ah yes, just as I had hoped, there is a page with all the best quotes on IMDB.com. Enjoy.

Flat Daddy???????

oh... my.... fucking.... god....



If you’re reading this page it’s probably because you’ve heard about Flat Daddy™ and the wonderful way it’s being used to help children stay connected to a deployed parent. He’s also filling the "blank space" in family occasion photos, event and trips. Just look at the pictures to see all the places he’s been! It’s exciting.

--from http://www.imalreadyhome.com/flatdaddy.htm




This is so horrifying to me! Is it really comforting? I guess it must be.... so many people are doing it... but it just makes me want to cry.

It turned up in a link in the sidebar on a letter from my Mom (those google ads are sometimes so bizarre!)... anyway...

In case it's not clear from what I quoted above, people with family members deployed in the armed forces create life-size cutouts of them! To help the children feel like Daddy or Mommy is here with them!

They put them in special occasion photos so it's like the person was really at the wedding or at Disneyworld or whatever!

Apparently this is comforting to them but it is just.... I can't see how that wouldn't just be depressing as hell. "Daddy's not here to kiss you goodnight but you can kiss the cardboard cutout."

I guess it's already depressing as hell to have your family member deployed, possibly in danger. Probably so depressing that it couldn't get any more depressing...

But isn't it creepy to have the flat version sitting around? I mean... what if they were already dead and you didn't know it?

OK, I'm trying to express my feelings about this and be sensitive to the feelings of others at the same time, which is maybe a doomed proposition to begin with. But still. Wow.

powerlessness

Tonight Loopy was in pain again, so, since I had to go to the store anyway, I bought her:

• extra-strength tylenol (we just got the ok from the doc to use it to supplement her other meds)
• the National Enquirer (did you know Kevin was beating Britney??? "The Punching! The Slapping! The Story No One Else Has The Guts To Print!")
• an extension cord so she can plug in her computer and her heating pad at the same time
• our favorite low-cal/low-fat dessert, Klondike Slim-A-Bear ice cream bars

As I hauled them all out of the bag and piled them on the table she said, "oooh, you do love me!" and later, munching on the ice cream, she said, "oh, Lovey, Slim-A-Bear makes everything better!" I felt like the hero and my anxiety calmed down a little.

Yes, I've been feeling anxious. Anxious, guilty, and inadequate. Even though I'm rushing around all day—doing laundry, doing errands, getting things from stores and from home and organizing and setting up the new apartment—some days I literally couldn't do anything more than what I did—I've been feeling as though I'm not doing enough, that I'm screwing up, letting Loopy down.

This isn't total delusion. I've worked hard to be ready for our trip tomorrow, but it's already late and I still have to do the dishes, another load of laundry, take out the garbage, and pack. I'm doing my best and it's not good enough.

When I try to leave the apartment to do something for myself, I feel a thousand times more guilty. How on earth can I be so heartless as to leave Loopy alone, struggling from one room to another on her wobbly legs, stuck and frustrated when she can't make her reachers pick something up from the carpeting, or can't get her wheels over my shoes that I've left in the hall... How can I leave her in this situation just to do something purely selfish???

It should be emphasized that Loopy does nothing to promote this crazy way of thinking. She tells me I'm being silly, that these are just feelings, that she thinks I'm doing a great job, that I should take better care of myself, etc.

In the last 36 hours I've started to really try to take a look at this obsession with guiltiness, and am thinking it's nothing more than a huge struggle to avoid facing the horrifying powerlessness of this situation.

It's the same reasoning that makes children blame themselves for abuse, because the reality that they have NO CONTROL over the abusive situation is much, much scarier.

A random, rare illness with no known cause is also situation of total powerlessness. Sure, we can do our best under the circumstances, and sure it could be much much worse and thank goodness it isn't, but that doesn't change the fact that we've been blindsided by the universe.

Any situation of powerlessness is a reminder of our fragility, our vulnerability, and our ultimate inability to prevent our own death.

No wonder so many people respond to our situation with a dismissive, "I'm sure everything will be fine," and refuse to hear that Loopy may not fully recover. I don't argue with them, but it makes me feel alone.

I mean, maybe it will all be fine, and maybe it won't—and all the spunk and spirit and positive attitude in the world may not make any difference at all to those little nerves struggling to re-grow in Loopy's muscles.

Anyway. We're off to Loopy's sister's tomorrow, so I gotta pack. Hope you have a good Thanksgiving... ours will be memorable, that's for damn sure, thanks to Loopy's unintentional reunion with her estranged-for-decades mother. Maybe the National Enquirer will cover it...

referred pain

so the reason they took so long to find Loopy's "mass" (i.e., tumor) is that it is much higher than her pain. pain often refers downwards... (as more and more of us no doubt are starting to learn as we all get older!). the doctor said it was just barely above the area scanned in the first MRI... just pure bad luck.

---

many years ago i read Daughters, by Paule Marshall, a wonderful wonderful book that I highly recommend. most of her characters are Caribbeans of African descent, but one of the few white characters is a sort of do-gooder who travels all over the world helping people. at the end of the book he turns out to have been abused as a child, and it is explained that he was searching for a vicarious outlet for his own pain. now, of course, people help others for many different reasons, but this really struck a chord in me and started me thinking in many ways that have been very fruitful...

certainly, helping others out of a need to displace my own pain, is not nearly so positive, effective, satisfying and genuine as helping others from genuine empathy, which I've only learned to feel in the last decade or so....

---

tonight as i drove home i thought about the fact that for some reason, after our garbage was emptied yesterday, someone (either the workers or some passer-by) turned the can upside down and left the lid lying nearby. this is weird and i've never seen it before, on my verge or anyone else's. i started wondering if neighbor kids were pulling some kind of prank (these are the kids who kept stealing our mailbox, which is why we now have a P.O. box). suddenly i became convinced that there was something truly awful and horrifying under the garbage can, and became really terrified of lifting it up.

it's been so long since i've had such a stark fear of something so obviously imaginary, that it stopped me in my tracks and seemed very clear that i was really afraid of something else. i asked myself what, precisely, i thought was under that can. some awful thing... some bloodied, broken thing... a dead thing.

i had to smile. not very subtle, eh. ok, so, i'm afraid of death, Loopy's of course, but i put it under the garbage can instead. *sigh*

still i drove past it and left it there. i'll lift it up in the daylight...

anger & fear

If you're not in the mood for this kind of introspection, skip down to the next post for some fun knitting pix

I was thinking this morning that anger can come from fear or it can come from compassion. Anger from fear makes your whole body clench up into a scrunched, hard fist—it makes everything hurt. Anger from compassion is different...or is it? What do you think?

I was also thinking about how fear is the root of so much suffering. Many times if I stop & ask myself, why am I thinking or acting like this? (when I don't like how I'm thinking or acting) it's because I'm acting in fear.

I might be afraid that something will happen that I don't want—that's the kind of fear we're used to thinking about—fear of death (fear of a tornado or plane crash), fear of pain (fear of rejection or disrespect).

But sometimes I'm afraid of things being different from how I think they should be.

I think we're less accustomed to thinking about fear this way. But our set ideas about "how things should be" can seem so important—we take them as seriously as death and pain. It can be small things (I sorted my papers into three piles and if anyone messes them up I'll die) or bigger things (teachers should teach like this, and if I'm near someone who's not teaching that way, I can't stand it, I'll die).

Yes, this is kind of a paraphrase of Pema Chodron's From Fear to Fearlessness, for those of you who have read that. I've been listening to it in the car a lot and I'm just kind of assimilating it into my own language. For those who aren't familiar with it, I recommend it!

That's all for now.

surreal

So, here we are in extremely sunny AZ. Loopy & I both feel like we've been run over by an oven.

Mom has surgery tomorrow to align her neck vertebrae. It seems to be pretty straightforward surgery, no likely complications etc., although the neck is of course a vulnerable area & anything's possible. Anyway, drama queen that she is, she seems to be convinced that she's going to die, and at the same time, determined to be brave for the family. So she alternates between assuring us all that this is no big deal, and then having "slips of the tongue" like "if I come home from the hospital" (instead of "when").

I probably have a lot of mixed feelings about this but I'm not really letting it in that much at the moment. I'm just sorta like, ok, let's just get through this. I'm more worried that Dad is going to have a stroke while I'm alone with him in the apartment.

So anyway, I just put a CD of my grandmother's favorite hymns on the CD player. Mom had it put together by a musician friend from old recordings, including ones from Mom's sister's and brother's and of course mother's funerals (starting with "O Death Where Is Thy Sting," etc.). They're all sung by dear friends from the past, etc.

It's freaking me out a little that I'm so detached about this. I just feel like I'm doing "my job," including doing stuff that Mom might find comforting. I'm like, "oh, good, she's crying and saying random things about what a wonderful life she's had, so that was a good thing to do." But I don't really feel much right now. I'm not even in the same room with her (literally).

But then that's the thing with her. She doesn't connect anyway. So what's the point of me getting emotional. She wouldn't find that comforting, just anxiety-producing, because she'd know she was supposed to respond to me somehow and wouldn't be sure what was the right response. But the CD, that's just right.

This is just really weird.

Did I mention that while she's having surgery, Dad & I have to go to a funeral of one of his best friends? He's a pallbearer.

That's what really puts it over the top into surreal weird freakiness.

Tune in later for more dispatches from surreality....