Postscript

Like living in Cedar Rapids, Thanksgiving was "not that bad." This whole business of not being thankful for a holiday based on gratitude can make irony a full time job. LeRoy's turkey, against all odds, was quite moist (although the composite ham was dry enough to be sliced "paper thin"). The company was friendly enough, although predictably devoid of content, but also devoid of anything patently offensive. LeRoy was glad to have family around him and grateful that Robyn came and helped set up. My brother in law stayed to put up the worlds most complicated artificial tree while I absconded with a large television that LeRoy can no longer use because J.D. moved in with April and already has too many t.v.s and so LeRoy replaced his downstairs t.v. with J.D.'s flat screen one. We got the downstairs t.v. which sits happily in our bedroom in place of the ancient 19 inch television Donna gave us as a wedding present. Are you following this? It's truly an "object" lesson.

I find myself, now, with one more day of a long weekend after a restless night built upon rich food, too much to think about and insufficient exercise. Since I put some money down on a gym membership I'll shortly go try to redeem myself by working out on an elliptical machine. It's low-impact, and since I haven't talked to a trainer yet, I'm trying to be careful. There's a large, hot whirlpool waiting as well.

And what did I think as I lay in bed last night? I thought about money, or the lack thereof. I thought about my mother, whose circle has diminished to almost nil, and wondered how much longer she'll occupy her tiny space. We've cut back on a lot of her medication and her disease will progress more quickly now, it's evident. There's no point in standing with your finger in the dike when the water is up to your chest. I thought about my kids, my marriage, the hole in my ceiling and the leak that made it. I doubted myself in various ways and longed for a large martini, settling in the end for a late night beer.

Today will be about exercise. I'll get my body going. I'll help clean up the house, putting away all the stuff we got out for our guests. I'll go see if my mother can walk any better. I'll go to Iowa City and bother my friends. Doing, to substantiate being, looking for purpose, which is inevitably in my other pants.

Thanksgiving morning

I went to her room and she was sleeping in her big chair. When I woke her, she smiled at me with recognition.

"It's Thanksgiving. Would you like to come over?"

"Yes, I'd like that," Mom answered, blinking. I got her coat and offered to help her stand. Although I held her hand, she couldn't rise from the big chair. I put my hand under her upper arm and lifted her to her feet. While I put her coat on her arm she sat back down.

"Let's put that coat on while you're sitting." With her coat on, I lifted her to her feet again. "Let's walk to the door." She took small unsteady steps, uncertain, shuffling. It took five minutes to walk to the door of her room.

"I think I need to sit down," she said. We turned around and began to walk back into her room.

"We can sit you in your big comfy chair," I suggested.

"That's not my chair."

"You can sit in it anyway," I said.

"That's what I always say, whose-ever it is." We shuffled toward the chair, Mom becoming incrasingly unsteady.

"I don't know if I'll make it."

"A few more steps, Mom."

"Yes, BIG steps. There we go! At last!" I sat her down, back in the big chair. She closed her eyes. Her hands moved and shook with a life of their own. I helped her get her coat off. After a while I got up to go.

"Stay with me. I'm scared," she said. And so I sat a while in the quiet room as she fell soundly asleep again, the sounds of relatives coming to collect other residents coming from outside the room.

It's a long walk down this hall, Mary.

I'll make it.

Whoo! How much farther?

Turkey with a complicated stuffing

I was trying to post something on facebook to capture my feelings about Thanksgiving in a few words and realized that it was going to be a disaster. I navigate these holidays like an explorer looking for the Northwest Passage. It's a journey with great beauty, fraught with peril.

Today I will quite literally be "upright and taking nourishment," and after this summer, that's certainly no small thing. I find that I'm very grateful for Robyn, Caitlin, Walker and the many friends and relatives who helped us in so many ways during the very difficult parts of this year. I'm quite literally grateful that I can stand up straighter and straighter and really can look forward to resuming my regular activities, even (especially) the strenuous ones. All these people who know us well, and love us anyway, have helped the nearly unbearable parts of this year pass. Now we can celebrate.

My summer officially "ended" when we paddled down the Upper Iowa river near Bluffton on an impossibly sunny, warm, November Saturday. I can't tell you how many times I lay on my back in that interminable brace and dreamed of sitting in my boat, scooting down a river. I truly felt I had "arrived." By God, I had.

I'll go and get Mom this morning and bring her over early, so that she can get settled here and not be so overwhelmed by all the people arriving. I'm not sure how long she'll last at the party. Holidays are more painful in Alzheimerland because they mark time. Anniversaries remind us of better times, of who Mom used to be, and feed sadness, the guest who never quite leaves. I remember Mom's inventive, elegant holiday tables and the good times with friends we'd invite who for one reason or another had no family and so joined ours. We argued and laughed and debated and felt very pleased with ourselves.

What we have to offer Mom now is inclusion, which is more and more difficult to manage as her once formidable powers continue to diminish. It's hard to be thankful for this. It's difficult to find a lesson to learn. Entropy is its own lesson, I suppose.

On Saturday we'll go to my father-in-law's and sit in attendance on the other Thanksgiving. Robyn goes out early to help LeRoy get the house together. It's far too much house for him now and in the best of times LeRoy had 12 more projects than he could finish. He, too, is diminishing, and Robyn shows her love in ways he can accept. She helps. Exchanging love with LeRoy is a Northwest Passage of its own.

Robyn's relatives will arrive for second Thanksgiving. Her step-sister and brother-in-law, amazingly uptight, snapping at their kids (who, another relative pointed out, wear slippers to keep their socks from getting dirty), will be there, as will some neighbors of LeRoy's. There is nothing to say to these folks, really. Those of us who gathered today, at our house, will smile at each other knowingly (here we are again). LeRoy finds comfort in relationships that don't involve much intimacy. He is a wonderful, helpful neighbor, a builder of projects. He showed his love for Robyn by helping us rebuild a house and being practical in all kinds of patient ways. Sometimes, working on these projects, just he and I, he would open up and tell me things about himself, his life, and we would feel close. Over time, though, I have found his love to be conditional in ways he can't help. While I can't blame him for being who he is, raised by a callous man who had no time for dreams or feelings, I felt myself withdrawing from him. I think he knows this and I don't think he knows what it means. Once, Robyn and the kids went with him for lunch somewhere and he put Caitlin on the phone to ask me why I was not there. Caitlin was terribly uncomfortable, and it made me angry to think he'd use my daughter that way. I got off the phone as fast as I could and apologized to Caitlin for LeRoy. No eight year old should have to carry water like that. Small wonder Caitlin hates Thanksgiving.

Now we count time and talk small. I have found that blaming people for being who they are is a waste of energy and I try not to do it. LeRoy has been good family to us in lots of ways and so we go help him have another Thanksgiving, his way, at his house. The neighbor with the impossible toupee (think opossum) and the inane wife (valley of the dolls meets dumb and dumber) will prattle on, my step-sister-in-law will tell her kids to stop being kids, and my watch will be on the inside of my wrist so I can look at it less obviously. These are the things we do for each other.

I can take my camera and look for beauty. I can remember that I'm lucky I'm not doing the holidays in a wheelchair (talk about being trapped!). We can find the good. It's there. We are lucky people, Robyn and I. It's just that the wisdom conferred by middle age is fleeting, and my better self has a tough wrestling match with that other guy.

Insomnia

I found a basket filled with odds and ends as Robyn and I cleaned out Mom's closet last weekend. I took it to the car and didn't get around to clearing it out until yesterday. There were all sorts of pictures: an old one of my Grandma Jones standing by my cousins' bunk bed looking quizzical, pictures of my 22 year old Mom holding me as an infant, a picture of Caitlin at about six, leaning her head against my Dad - already gaunt from ALS, pictures of some of the troubled children my mother taught when I was a kid, a picture of Mom at the zoo joyously spreading her arms in front of an eagle exhibit, "prom" pictures of Mom and her friend Ruth at the first old folks home, all dressed up and looking cynical about it. In the basket were years worth of buttons from 15 years of Woman Art/Woman Fair, the exhibition for which Mom worked tirelessly, a set of terrycloth bunny ears, a pin made of a fan-folded dollar bill and plastic flowers, an antique tortoise shell box with unmatched costume jewelry from my Grandmother Thompson, and a good deal of cat hair.

Mom sat and made disjointed small talk with us as we worked our way through the closet, entirely in the moment, one moment at a time. Her last cat, Freckles, went on a one way trip to the vet the week before. One's minutes must be connected to each other for one to notice such things. To Mom the cats are under the bed or in the closet. They'll be out soon.

My mother was a very bright, accomplished woman, immensely generous and understanding and yet proud and aloof, "keeper of secrets," my Aunt says. She raised me with great generosity of spirit and understanding, much forgiveness and a good deal of humor. Now the edifice she occupied is largely untenanted. What remains are manners, the sort of wit that can be captured in thirty seconds, memories strung together at random. She sleeps. She looks out the window, seeing I know not what.

I saw clients this morning and into the early afternoon and the time flew by. It's satisfying work and people are interesting. I came home and found myself exhausted. I took a nap, had supper, and took another nap. Now that everyone else has gone to bed I find myself alone with my thoughts and this keyboard. It's hard to avoid mortality on nights like this. I wonder what will become of us and our busy lives, how we will end up, what will be left of us.

Mom planned for her retirement and had plenty to live on. I fear we have not planned enough or taken enough care to assure security in twenty years. But what good does all this planning do? What good is a hedge against a random future? Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, when all there really is is today. After our fecklessness, we may win the lotto, and my Mother, for all her care saw her well fashioned planning carried away, box by box, down to the last cat, the last basket.

As I sailed over the handlebars of my bicycle this Summer, I didn't consider that I could die. I said "Oh, no!" and didn't have time to put my hands forward to save my face. I thought I had broken my nose (I had not).

A few weeks ago, we paddled the Upper Iowa sipping beers and feeling very lucky on such a lovely day. Each minute connected with another downstream, revealing more November beauty, another gift. I felt very lucky for many reasons. Now I'm thinking of my mother, her long arms spread wide, imitating an eagle and smiling impossibly wide, her long fingers stretching. She is upstream somewhere and I miss her.

. . . other than my physical condition . . .

Chris sent me a great picture from our recent kayak trip down the Upper Iowa the other weekend. I am standing in the yard at the cabin, coffee in hand, in front of my car which carries two boats, looking relaxed and feeling victorious. He also sent a picture he took of me the day my jaw got wired. I was grimacing to great effect, showing my newly reassembled mouth, looking absolutely hideous.

I posted these on Facebook to great effect.

I also noticed something: I'm getting bored with reports on my own physical condition. If I'm getting tired of talking about myself, I can only imagine how others must feel. (I start PT on the 24th and have cautiously resumed a little light, friendly, co-ed basketball at work. I'm not having any pain this week that can't be managed by Tylenol, although we'll see what a longer b-ball skirmish will do today.) See!! Boring.

I think this is good news. What seems like an eternity was actually only four months. When I look at my grimacing visage, I remember how helpless I felt, how much I longed to be where I am now. The other weekend, I worked on our deck, applying the ceiling tin my Mom had left over when she did her kitchen ceiling 20 years ago. I hauled it all over the place and finally used some of it to make a deck surround. It hurt to do the work, but it was great to be doing something interesting and semi-useful. The pain went away soon enough. This week, I feel far better and I find myself not calculating so much what I will pay later for a given activity.

I have longed for this moment. Time has passed, narcotized, second upon second in a slow motion parade past my window. I have stared at myself in the mirror (what else to do?) trying to imagine how I will turn out (in an ironic revisit of adolescence?), praying to my Agnostic God for a future that is not too compromised by condition.

Now, it would be a good idea to remember just how really lucky I am. To take some care. Damn. Let's get on with it.
Aw, hell.

















Couldn't resist.

Spiritual geography

There are places for all of us that for one reason or another take on spiritual significance. For me, and a number of my good friends, one such place is a cabin on Canoe Ridge, north of Decorah, Iowa. Fish and his Dad rebuilt a pioneer cabin on a new concrete foundation. It overlooks a meadow full of wildflowers and an oak-wooded valley that falls toward the Upper Iowa river valley. There is a waterfall on the property and in the summer bluebirds flit casually from tree to tree. For my friends and I, it's a place we visit to remind ourselves that things are simpler than we often make them. Sitting on the porch and gazing down the valley you can feel your heart rate subside and your blood pressure diminish. The noise in our heads and the anxieties in our hearts subside. There's beer and banter and occasional excess and fishing and kayaking and biking and a sense that we're in on a special secret, a privilege, a gift.

When we went to Southern Illinois, on the Ohio River, to scatter my Dad's ashes, we visited another such place. The river makes a big bend and cuts under the bluff it's made during flood after flood over the eons. My grandfather's cabin sits on that bluff, owned by someone else now, as does the ancient Rose Hotel, build in 1812, where we stayed with my mother, already significantly in decline from Alzheimer's disease. We went to the foot of the bluff and Walker and Caitlin (the grandchildren he was amazed to have) scattered his ashes into the river where Dad learned to swim, to curse, to be a boy. His footprints were all over the bluff, the rocks, the river bottom. The July water was as warm as bathwater and the weather became unusually cool, setting of a show of mist and water in the morning that made me speechless.

My feelings about my father's long death were complicated and contradictory. My grieving (for my father and my declining mother) sent me into a long depression fueled by vodka rocks martinis and self-pity. I chart the beginning of my healing from the moment Dad's ashes, rescued from the top of Mom's old Zenith television and cast in his most favorite spot, touched the water he most loved. We sat for hours on the second floor of the porch of the Rose Hotel and watched the river move and change with each minutes and we sighed. That night Mom went to bed and the kids and I lay on our backs in the grass on the bluff and watched a meteor shower. I think my children felt the magic of this place, rinsed by the river of it's tragedy and turmoil.

Today, as is our custom, we make our way to the cabin in Decorah, my friends and I. There have been months recently when I despaired of ever getting out of the house, or even down the block and this trip feels special to me. Over the summer I have learned that I'm more fragile than I thought, more vulnerable to chaos and entropy (and momentum in particular). I've had to be patient and to confront some of the flaws in my character I'd have preferred to continue to ignore. Also, I think I've become a little more patient, perhaps more grateful.

I've been reading e. e. cummings a little:

. . . for life is not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis.