As you may have guessed from the time elapsed since I last wrote, my mom withered away and died. When she passed on August 5, she was 10 days shy of her 82nd birthday. Her illness threw my family into a tizzy. And now, after her death, my family is falling apart. I don’t know if this will last – I hear it’s common for siblings to fight in these situations – but my feeling is that the future has been forever altered. Personality traits and disorders that were hard to take before are now unbearable. Damaging things have been said and done. In circumstances where we should be supporting each other, this is simply too much.
In fact, life really sucks right now. I can usually do the Zen thing, but so much has happened at once that I’m unable to pull it off this go around. In addition to mom’s death, we recently moved. And we did it on our own. Tough, tough work. Then, my employer is undergoing a crisis. I love my job but the company is falling apart, just like my family. Fortunately and hopefully, though, an organizational consultant will help us put things back together. Last, my husband injured his arm and has to stay home on L&I. He may not be able to go back to his job, and since jobs are scarce for us over-fifty folks, and we have no savings, I’m frightened. All the events above have also caused some marital strife. Nothing we can’t handle, but it adds to the statement at the start of this paragraph.
Oh yes, the last thing going on: terrible PMS, made worse by perimenopause and stress. And, the research says, women with depression and anxiety disorders tend to experience an increase in those very things during the menopausal years.
Am I taking care of myself? As best I can, though without money and means to go to what really matters - the ocean, the warm sun, and discovering new places – looking for other outlets like inexpensive yoga classes or streets I haven’t walked feels like band aids for a broken arm. One thing I am greatly looking forward to is starting a printmaking class at Pratt in late September. For eight weeks, each Wednesday from 10-2, I will combine color, texture and paper to create what may be the most meaningful art of my life. It may not be pretty, but it will contain volumes: all the emotion that these last six months have stirred up, from events that haven’t been - and may never be - resolved.
(The photo here is of the tree in my parents' back yard that split in two around the same day mom got her cancer diagnosis. Some symbolism, huh?)
Six weeks ago I dreamed of a long haired woman stirring a cauldron of liquid. She was placing garments in it, swirling them around and taking them out. I asked what she was doing and before she could answer, the word “dyeing” popped into my dreaming brain.
I awoke a bit unnerved by what that dream might signify. Several months ago in my therapist’s office, I began to talk about losing my parents, even though there were no indicators of serious ill health in either of their 81-year-old bodies. We explored my terror of their deaths and of my emotions when that finally did happen. Back then, it was academic.
Over Christmas, an antique clock in my parent's house, stopped for years, stood out sharply on its shelf on one particularly bright winter day. I remember a quiet melancholy about it, wondering how much longer this clock, this house, this family, would stay unchanged after so many years of stability, predictability, and health.
Now I have just returned from a trip to see my mother, who only 2 weeks ago was diagnosed with bronchioloalveolar carcinoma. Some kind of post nasal drip had bothered her throughout the fall and winter, but she dismissed it. A routine chest x-ray in October showed nothing out of the ordinary. But several weeks ago she began to feel worse, and was admitted to the hospital for what was thought to be bacterial pneumonia. Tests and now-clouded x-rays were inconclusive, and were forwarded to Massachusetts General, which responded with a diagnosis of lung cancer.
The doctor told us as Dad, older sister and I had been smiling with mom about how much better she felt since taking steroids for her “pneumonia.” She had just been commenting on how nice it would be to live to 100.
The news now is that mom may have only a handful of weeks to live. She is not strong enough for chemo, mostly due to her age but partly because of her weakened condition. The new drug Tarceva, from a different class of treatment that targets the cancer, may buy her a few months, but it works in only 1 in 3 people. We are all preparing for the inevitable, as is she, and it has been an excruciating time these last couple of weeks coming to know and accept her prognosis. Mom may be 81 but until this winter was as active as ever, with all kind of projects planned – memoirs, living history interviews with the locals, more volunteer work for the library – fingers in lots of community pies. A few years ago, at age 78, she got her college degree. We held a party in her honor; so many people came!
I am so glad we got to spend Christmas with her and Dad at their home in upstate New York. This was a rarity, since they usually flew out to the west coast to spend it here, where three of her four children live. Now, mom says she wants a bench erected in one of the city parks here in Seattle, near all her kids. Talk about heart rending– she always felt sad that we were all so far away.
Although this is what people do – live and die – and none of us gets out alive, it still feels like a bad dream. She will be the first person really close to me who has died. I will finally join the ranks of all those who have lost a parent. Though it makes me feel very alone, I know that I am far from it. I only wish our culture, and our families, better prepared us for it. The taboo and shadow that exists around dealing openly with death is so deep and wide, I am certain it adds immensely, and unnecessarily, to our pain about it.
You know about the Middle Way, right? It's the Buddhist maxim about balance and moderation - a great concept that acknowledges tendencies toward extremes while generally advocating the middle of the road. The problem I have with the Middle Way is staying mentally centered while being exquisitely aware of what’s out of balance. To address that comes another saying: that to get by in this world, you must live in denial. Otherwise, how could you choose those (probable) sweatshop clothes at the department store? How could you justify the carbon footprint of your faraway vacation? Or the fact that you eat well while so many don’t? You need to put these things out of your mind in order to move forward. If you don’t, you are left with rationalizations: well, this is what’s here , it’s on sale, and it’s not my fault I was born into the middle class in a wealthy country during a wealthy era. This is what I have to work with; there’s no use denying that reality.
This happens every time I go into Whole Foods – something about the place makes me happy, even knowing what I know about this world. Recently I realized it’s the sheer profusion of choices - especially in the prepared food section, and especially at Christmas - that creates an undeniably comforting sense of abundance. Never mind that you have to navigate a gauntlet of homeless-newspaper vendors and nonprofit charities (that you’ve already talked to) before making it into the store. (The Girl Scouts at their card tables out front are at least offering us something we want – comfort in the form of cookies.) What I really want to say in this guilt-inducing scenario is "Hey, I know you probably have a worthy cause, but I gave last time, or maybe it was to that other group like yours, but I have only so much money, and I know YOU don’t know all of that, so you have to try, but please don’t ask me for anything."
So I go home and make the donations I can afford to the few charities whose appeals hit me at the right moment. This might be the local environmental or healthcare coalition on the phone, or the battered women’s shelter looking for pantry items at Trader Joe’s. Or, the down and out woman on the corner who recites me a poem in exchange for a couple of bucks. If this were Mexico, we’d also be contending with kids on every corner selling chewing gum and cheap jewelry, and I’d buy some occasionally. (In Mexico, there are no laws prohibiting anyone from selling or busking anywhere they like. Or if there are, nobody in the poorer towns pays attention to them, because everybody is scraping to get by. Even the cops.) It feels pretty useless - a dollar here and a dollar there - but based on my current commitments, my life trajectory, and other hard-to-reverse factors, it’s best I can do right now aside from writing to my representatives and voting consciously.
In the meantime, I walk through the neighborhood, in this city where starter homes cost $400,000, simultaneously appreciating and resenting what I don’t have. These Craftsman bungalows, so beautifully restored and manicured – where do the owners get the wherewithal – the time, money and energy – to pay for and maintain them? And that’s just the exterior. Look, they’ve got nice cars in the driveway too. What is it about me, about us, that we can’t manage to do this? I want a porch to sit on and read my book, or talk to neighbors from. I want to choose furniture because I like it, not because it’s cheap or came from a 2nd hand source. I wouldn’t mind a stone walkway and a mud room, and even a room with a long, cat-free table and lots of light where I can do my artwork.
And yet, to get many of these things I have to work in ways that don’t necessarily match my value system or my energy levels, and buy things that have been made by the sweat of underpaid and mistreated people, or by processes that poison the environment. Here we go back to Zen, and to the quote by John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” If you can’t see the sun, rain, loggers, paper mills, polluted rivers, poets, students, etc., in a single sheet of paper, you aren’t really seeing. Though greener and more socially just alternatives are increasing, there’s no way to avoid contributing to the problem in some measure.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” So said F. Scott Fitzgerald. I‘m not sure about the intelligence part, but I can speak about functioning. Let’s cut to the chase: it ain’t easy for those of us who are extra sensitive. In this way, ignorance is truly bliss. An artist friend recently admitted that he thought about death every day. Not about suicide, but the existential angst about the human dilemma and mystery of being here, of the fact that life is short, confusing, and overwhelming, and it’s hard to know where to turn and what to do sometimes in general. Top that with the never-ending news about humanity’s culpability in "our demise" and you can see why sensitive artist types can go mad. I can relate, because I think about things like how many insects I am stepping on when walking across a lawn - all the time. The bottom line is, we destroy by simply being.
If there is any good news it’s that we also create by simply being. A look at Ode Magazine (tag line: for “intelligent optimists”) brings nothing but reports about good people around the world doing great things. Look around – on a daily, personal, interactive level, most people cooperate most of the time (except for traffic in Bangkok). Lots of people are working on our problems. Look at the outpouring of support for Haiti – it’s a stellar example of how technology acts like neurons transmitting furiously across our global brain/citizenry to rally a sympathetic response.
Another friend, John, would like to extinguish humanity from the earth – he’s that disgusted. Many are. What’s wrong with this plan is that it ends the experiment before the universe has a chance to have its say. If we are truly hitched to the cosmos (and how can we not be), then we are going in exactly the direction we are meant to go. It may not feel very good, but our human, always-changing feelings are irrelevant in the larger scheme of things. Chaos theory tells us that we must endure turmoil and confusion before a new order is established. There’s a lot of positive talk, a lot of good ideas and good projects coming to the fore, in response to the urgent needs we have created. Whether we have passed our tipping point into sure collapse is hard to say, because there is always the chance that an unknown, unanticipated element will suddenly enter and alter the picture.
Back to balance, where we started: the cosmos are built on the workings of yin and yang. There are seeds of light in the darkness. If we continue to get enough people focusing and moving toward that, then walking, breathing and living the Middle Way won’t be so hard to accomplish, and we'll be able to enter upscale supermarkets without a second thought.
thing, but so much has happened at once that I’m unable to pull it off this go around. In addition to mom’s death, we recently moved. And we did it on our own. Tough, tough work. Then, my employer is undergoing a crisis. I love my job but the company is falling apart, just like my family. Fortunately and hopefully, though, an organizational consultant will help us put things back together. Last, my husband injured his arm and has to stay home on L&I. He may not be able to go back to his job, and since jobs are scarce for us over-fifty folks, and we have no savings, I’m frightened. All the events above have also caused some marital strife. Nothing we can’t handle, but it adds to the statement at the start of this paragraph.
