Where she used to sit, what she used to see

Remembering my mom on the anniversary of her passing. She's been gone three years, and she's always with me.

On Joy and Sorrow   Kahlil Gibran

Then a woman said, Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.      And he answered:      Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.      And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.      And how else can it be?      The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.      Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?      And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?      When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.      When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.          Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”      But I say unto you, they are inseparable.      Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.      Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.      Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.      When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.

This Present Chaos

view from the living room window in St. Paul

Once upon a time I was married, and one Sunday afternoon the man I was married to told me the marriage was over and that he would be marrying someone else. Oh, and he and his new wife wanted the house so they could raise their new family there in the house where my husband and I had raised our daughters.

This blog was born out of the chaos that ensued, and in that time this blog had another name, which by a court order, I was required to change. I had another name then too. But my old self had plans in that time of chaos. I would leave California and live in a new place with my new name, and so I bought a condo in St. Paul, Minnesota not too terribly far from the little town in Iowa where I grew up.

Plans. Plans are good. But I fell in love with a man in Los Angeles. Love is better than plans. So I stayed in California, and first one daughter and then the other--and for a brief while both of the daughters and both their partners lived in the condo in St. Paul. Years have passed. The man I fell in love with after a first date on post-card blue sky day in Griffith Park got lung cancer and died four years ago. My mother died nine months later. Sometime in the next year I will leave the house I shared with my mother and where the man who loved me took his final breaths. My budget must shrink to fit my shrinking alimony.

Last week the daughters and their partners  moved into a house of their own. I'm not in my 50s anymore, and I do not want to live in the lovely condo on the 3rd floor of a historic building with no elevator. I am too historic to cross the icy alleyway to garage without falling down. Too historic to trudge up all those stairs with bags of groceries.

In this new chaos there will be painting, and floor sanding, and odd little fix-it tasks, and way too much cleaning. There will be too many books, and what do I keep and what do I sell, and what do I give away conversations inside my head that must eventually translate into some kind of action.

In some months, I'll start a new life somewhere else. I'm envisioning a tall building with an elevator and a view of the Mississippi River.

this present chaos

Feeding Birds

2012, Mom's birthday 

I began feeding the birds for my mother. Housebound by the frailties of age and the attitude that going out was too much trouble, she needed a connection to the outside world, I thought.

My earliest memory is of my mother and her mother wielding garden hoes in an attempt to fend off a snake attacking a nest of baby birds. I'd awakened from a nap and stretched myself taller than the windowsill to watch the drama unfold outside her bedroom. "Get him, Ethel!" my grandmother shrieked at her namesake. "You get him, Ethel," my mom yelled back, addressing her mother by her given name instead of calling her mom. The two Ethels wacked away, and as I recall, emerged victorious although the senior Ethel's askew babushka made her look something like a pirate. My mom probably lit herself a cigarette right there in the bushes while coo-ing over the baby birds before they went on to whatever task they'd meant to do in the first place.

my babushka-wearing, gun-toting grandma (the gun and the old car was staged by one of my uncles)

We lived on the backwater of the Mississippi then in a town known for its lax liquor laws and an easier attitude toward certain recreational pursuits that were frowned upon on in its sister city on the other side of the river. I was too young to know about any of that, but I knew about the birds. Cranes soared over the water and we raced out the back door to watch them, and if flocks of geese were winging and quacking overhead, we tilted our faces skyward until they were out of sight. Cardinals and red-headed wood peckers provided breathtaking displays of scarlet against the dark bark of a big tree where my father had nailed a wooden fruit crate. It was my mother and I who kept it stocked with seeds and nuts and bread crusts.

Indoors we kept a green parakeet named Jerry. "Jerry is a dirty bird" was his only attempt at conversation. Or maybe his line was, "Jerry is a pretty bird," and it was my mother who tried to pressure a confession from him while she cleaned up his messes after a free-flying afternoon. I wonder now about our kitchen hygiene since it was there he was allowed out of his cage, an old bedsheet tacked up in the doorway to the living room to keep him from pooping on the upholstered furniture. But nobody died--except Jerry of course, eventually.

Jerry didn't make it to the next house which was on the more sedate side of the river--a good thing, probably, since we became cat fanciers and often had a half-dozen kittens and cats prowling around. My brother and I found a baby owl on a sidewalk there. My mother couldn't locate the nest it might have fallen from, so she put it in a box padded with an old towel on our back porch. I'm sure she took some measure or another to nurse it back to health, but in the morning, it was dead.

Years later when they were both widows my mother and her twin sister had an apartment with a patio and fed all kinds of birds--including a large vulture that was attracted to a suet cake meant for a pileated woodpecker. I'd had some experience feeding birds by then, but I specialized in finches that I fed from a feeder suction-cupped to my breakfast nook window where my young daughters could enjoy them. Decades later, when my mom moved in with me in a different house, I bought a similar feeder and stuck it to our kitchen window. We remarked on the birds nearly every day. Some red house finches, some orange. We welcomed the sparrows too--the white crowned sparrow, the diva of an underrated species with its flashy striped head, and the house sparrow so dapper in its dark cravat.

One of my daughters lived with us part-time then while going to grad school. She might have been the one to notice the blind finch being fed by a bird with two good eyes. Over the next few days there were more and more blind finches. "Poor things," my mother said. "How do they fly?" Fearing that I'd unwittingly committed this horror of an avian Equus, I examined the feeder and the potted tree next to it for sharp edges only to find nothing. It was the internet that educated me about bird conjunctivitis and proper feeder hygiene. Jerry the parakeet could poop in the kitchen sink with no apparent ill effects on us humans, but I had to wash the bird feeder with soap and a drop of bleach in hot water every week.

My mother and I both took to the new regimen. She could clean anything with the same fervor she employed to dispatch a marauding snake, and over time no new blind finches appeared. Occasionally we spotted a different bird--a towhee, or a warbler, and once we glimpsed a bird such a bright yellow, it might have been an escaped pet canary. The first ring-necked dove appeared some weeks or months after my boyfriend Dan died. It was one of those moments when you think your deceased beloved has re-appeared or at least delivered to you a sign that you should not despair. The bird watched us with its big dark eyes. Friends were here for dinner, as I recall. "Look who wants to come inside," someone said.

Sometime later the dove began bringing a mate, and I'd take a handful of food and lay it atop the wall between my house and the neighbor's since these birds seemed too big for the feeder. If I was upstairs and missed their arrival my mother would call, "Your doves are here!" as if dinner guests had just rung the doorbell. The doves would probably still be enjoying my handouts even though my mom is no longer here to announce them, but a squirrel began terrorizing the bird feeder just after the 2017 presidential inauguration. It was a tumble-down of decline then, as we well know. First one squirrel, then another, and the squirrels could not be dissuaded so I removed the feeder before I went away to a month-long writer's residency. When I returned my flowers were infested with some kind of a worm despite the best efforts of the friend caring for them. Since we all know that the early bird gets the worm, I put the bird feeder up again. The doves, the sparrows, and the finches  came back--but so did a hoard of pigeons, making Jerry's efforts to defile the kitchen look like child's play. While it's true the pigeon poop was outside, on some surfaces it took a putty knife and boiling water to remove it, and the pigeons' constant coital-sounding cooing had me wondering if the neighbors should maybe soundproof their house until I realized this birds and bees thing was really just birds.

Like the squirrels, the pigeons wouldn't be dissuaded either, so with strips of that rubbery stuff that you can use as shelf lining or rug padding and some packing tape, I constructed a barrier around the my bird feeder that allowed only the smaller birds inside. When it came time to wash the feeder, I had to un-tape all the strips, wash them as well, and start over. A few weeks of that led to a splurge on a feeder with a cage around it. The new feeder, though I called it bird jail at first, is working well. The pigeons are feeding at my neighbor's unsecured feeder on the other side of the house and pooping over there. But I feel terrible  about the doves. They can't get into the new feeder either. They still arrive every couple of days, fluttering around the bird jail, confused. I look into their deep black eyes staring into my house full of worldly comforts and think of Dan and my mom and how we all were here just a little more than four years ago. Four years is a long time.

Christmas, 2012

I want to say something political here. About the elapsing of time until the next presidential election. And something about jail. Who belongs inside and who should be let out, but maybe it's best not to stretch the metaphor. I'll just quote my dad when he began to worry during my teenage years. "Birds of a feather flock together," he told me.

bird jail

Drinking with the Saints

We put my mother's ashes in the ground in my hometown in Iowa today. There's something indelibly shocking about seeing both of your parents' names on tombstones.

My brother suggested I read something so I revised a past post that was the product of many dinner conversations with my mom during the years that she lived with me.

My mother’s education only went as far as the 8th grade, and then she went to work. But even before that first paycheck, she remembered get paid a nickel to pick the bugs off the neighbor’s potatoes. She began her first full-time job at the age of fourteen, living with a doctor, his wife, and their newborn. Never leave the mother alone with the baby, she was cautioned. In the middle of one night, my mother awoke to a commotion, and was told that the mother had tried to kill the baby even though the husband had been right there with her. In the morning, the wife was packed off to an asylum, the baby went to live with relatives, and my mother found herself out of a job. 

After that she and her twin sister Millie worked in the cafeteria at Loras College. She remembered how she put the cherry just so in the center of the grapefruit halves for the priests.

Then they were waitresses in Dubuque, Iowa at Diamond’s Bar and Grill and at the Triangle Café. There were no tips in those days. Except from one guy who always tipped a quarter. The waitresses would trip over each other trying to get to him.

There was a stint at Betty Jane Candies, hand-dipping chocolates. Eat as much as you want, she said her boss told her. The eating with abandon only lasted a day or two.

And she sold cigarettes and smoking paraphernalia at Stampfers, a fancy department store in downtown Dubuque.

Then she worked in a club across the river in East Dubuque as a dice girl in the game "twenty-six." Millie spun the roulette wheel. One night their parents walked in, surprised to see their daughters there. My mom told me she and her sister were just as surprised to see their parents.

Millie went out to Baltimore first. They had a girlfriend who could help them get good paying jobs at Glenn L. Martin, a company going full throttle in the manufacture of aircraft for World War II. Mom borrowed money from a friend to send Millie out first in the spring of ’43 and then they both worked to save money, and my mom joined her sister in the fall. Millie was a riveter, and my mom worked for Glenn L. Martin as a file clerk.

Then came the jobs that I envy. If I could go back in time and be my mother for a couple of months, I'd be a hatcheck girl at the Chanticleer, the Band Box, or the Club Charles. I'd live in Baltimore and hear every fabulous band and collect all the autographed headshots of the stars. I'd be the photo girl snapping souvenir pictures, remembering to ask first if the gentleman and his date would like a photo--because you never know, the gorgeous gal on his arm might not be his wife. 

A couple of things happened next. I'm not sure in what order. My mother had a boyfriend, a grocer, who was shot and killed one night when he went back to check on his store. And her sister got married to a guy who didn't especially like her. She went back home.

After my mother returned to Iowa, she worked as a hostess at a bar called The Circle where the bartender introduced her to a snazzy older man with blue eyes so beautiful, you could dive in and never want to come back up. They eloped. 

My father didn't want my mom to work--though she worked in his grocery store for a couple of years until he sold it. But there was a home cooked supper every night, baking to satisfy my father's insatiable sweet tooth, making delicious jams and jellies, canning, filling our back porch with crocks of pickles, and sewing our clothes.

After my father died and she was swindled out of his life insurance, she went back to work. She was 51 years old, had an 8th-grade education, and had been out of the workforce for almost 20 years. She made parts for machinery. She made plastic buckets, getting paid minimum wage. She worked at a factory that had something to do with fabric, and one year there was a small fire and she came home with bolts of salvaged flannel. Nightgowns for everyone! Her big break came after she heard about a union job at the John Deere plant. She drove a fork truck there and worked on the assembly line doing whatever job they asked her to for more than 9 years--until she was laid off just a month or so before she would have qualified for a pension.

Then she took care of an old woman, keeping her company and preparing her food. She worked in a bakery in a town so far away that her wages barely kept pace with the cost of her gas. There was another minimum wage factory job or two. 

When Millie’s husband died, my mother moved back to Baltimore where she worked for the City of Baltimore as a custodian cleaning office buildings.

Now she’s rolling the dice for the angels and making martinis for the saints.

It's a long and winding road. And we are all on the same path.

Welcome Back, Ethel.

Ethel, Sept. 2013

My mother's ashes were returned to my brother's house in our hometown in Iowa last week. Her body spent well over a year at the University of Iowa Medical School, and this past several months I was longing for the end of it all--the end of the end, when we'll put her ashes into the ground next to my father. 

When the mail carrier brought the box to the door, she told my sister-in-law that she'd been traveling around all day "with this nice lady." I think my mom would have enjoyed a day riding around with the mail carrier a lot. She loved to just take things in. She could look out the window or sit on the patio for hours. She might report on the hummingbirds, which boats had been cleaned, and even opine on why a neighbor might have had to sleep on his boat the previous night.

My mom and I, watching the pelicans dive between the sea lions, Feb., 2013

I'm glad she's back where she wanted to be. Of course, really, she'd probably prefer being here among the living, sipping a martini.

June 6, 2017

It just seems impossible that Dan Paik has been gone for 3 years.

One Year Later

It was a year ago today that my mother left this world. I feel her presence inside of me--what she might say or do, how much she enjoyed her life on Earth, how much she loved it when family or friends came to visit us.

Family will be arriving tomorrow for a spring break visit; after that old friends will come from afar for  a visit in April, and after that, another friend. Life keeps delivering its pleasures and I am grateful for every joy, large or small.

I want to thank all of you who left your messages of condolence on my blog, or on Facebook, or by mail or phone a year ago. It meant a lot. We are all on this winding road together, and yet it can be easy to forget that. Thank you for reminding me.

How to Sing Auld Lang Syne With the Dead

My dearly departed number enough to make a chorus. In 2016, the year we've come to revile for its loss of so many beloved celebrities and the loss of hope for a woman president, I also lost my mother. It's a common thing to lose one's parents at this stage of life, but nothing is more unexpected than the expected death of a loved one. We tell can tell everyone about the many trips to death's door and the seemingly incessant knocking there, but once the door swings wide, there's nothing to do but gasp with disbelief. 

What surprises me these many months later is how close I feel to her at times. How I can clearly hear what she might say in a given situation. How the hairdo or the shape of a daughter's lipsticked smile makes me feel as though my mother is just inches from my grasp.

And what surprises me these many months later is how far away she feels. Her clothes are gone, her room repainted, the wheel chair at the dining room table donated. Some days I cannot find her in any room of the house we shared.

It's the same with the man who loved me, my friend Dale, my ex-mother-in-law. I can open my eyes in the deep middle of the night dark of my bedroom and see Dan's bass leaning in a corner, and I can almost hear the strings humming. They are playing George Michael songs on the radio a lot these days, and I'm transported in front of the TV with Dale talking about rock-a-billy. I pick up the pen to write my mother-in-law's name  on the order form for the same box of Christmas oranges  I've sent her for decades. The body has momentary lapses.  

I never look heavenward when searching for the dead. I don't believe in heaven or hell. For me, there is no old man with a beard, standing at a gate. I find neither solace nor fear in those images, though if  I hold fast to those convictions, I must also mourn the loss of  the myth of reunion. How do we all meet again in paradise if there is no paradise? Lately I've come to believe that these stories are translations of a cosmic reality so profound that we mere mortals cannot grasp it. Somehow though, I believe our spirits will merge; we'll be one with love and each other in some indescribable universal song.

New Year's has long been my favorite holiday. I want to start over. I need to start over. But should auld acquaintance be forgot? Do we go forward without the dead? We do and we don't. If it's true that we are stardust (and it is), and if it's true that our carbon atoms were once "part of volcanoes, giant redwoods, Apatosauruses, diamonds, plastic bottles, snakes, snails, lichens, nematodes, photosynthetic algae, the very first cells," as a recent science article in the Washington Post tells us, it's easy to imagine how we are and could become part of each other. "It’s certain that your carbon saw the interior of a star, survived a supernova, sailed through the solar system and splashed down on Earth long before arriving at you," Sarah Kaplan writes. And now for the best part of the article. "Now breathe out. Riding an invisible cloud of carbon dioxide, a carbon atom just left your body, headed for its next great adventure." 

I was holding Dan in my arms when he took his final breath. I was stroking my mom's hair and her hands at her bedside when she breathed out and the next in-breath never came. But I breathed in. I breathed in.

It's fairly certain that if I've ever breathed in the carbon atom of a singer or a musician, it's rendered no effect on me in terms of musical talent. I can't carry a tune. But on New Year's Eve, I'll sing Auld Lang Syne inside my head--or maybe out loud if I've had a third glass of wine.  I'll sing it, arms wrapped around myself, wrapped around cosmic love, while looking up at the stars.  2017 will be a brand new start.

Happy New Year. 

For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we'll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

Monday Beach Report

Yes. It's Tuesday, I know. But this is the way the beach looked yesterday around 9 in the morning. I find the other worldly beauty of a gray day full of magic.

And there was beach glass. Lots of it.

In other news, life just keeps happening. (This is a good thing, mostly, if you leave the current political nightmare out of it.) But I'm going to Chicago for a funeral tomorrow. The holidays are barely registering with me, though I still hope to put up a Christmas tree with my mom's crocheted snowflakes when I return. A dear friend will be staying at my house while I'm away, and will continue to stay on for a bit after my return. Who knows maybe some festive fury will overtake me.

last year's tree

But...so far I'm not really feeling it. Did you know that the Christmas holidays are actually a risk factor for death? According to CNN, "There's a spike in deaths for all age groups on those days with one exception -- children." So maybe we should avoid it like smoking and cholesterol and too much sitting. I'd like to see those studies about Christmas and dying to look more closely into how shopping figures in. I'll bet non-shoppers have a better outcome. That's my story anyway, and I'm sticking to it.

Christmas long ago. I think I was maybe 12.

One thing's for sure, I'm really glad to be among the living.

Dia de Los Muertos: the fiesta in the cemetery

The Santa Maria Cemetery in Atzompa, Oaxaca

I imagined what it would be like. I didn't come close. 

The festive atmosphere began as we walked through the streets at 1:30 in the morning. Food vendors cooking up hot meals. Men with boxes of candy and chewing gum working the crowd. We could hear the music blasting happy tunes. Not ranchero, not banda, but something polka-like. The band was from the neighboring state of Chiapas, I was told. An accordion, a couple of electric guitars, drums, singing. As we passed through the gates of the cemetery, a couple was dancing arm in arm.

Townspeople poured through the entrance, arms full of marigolds, cockscomb, gladiolas, blankets, babies, pots of tamales, tall candles. The graves had been cleaned and readied; some were already completely decked out with flowers in vases or simply mounded over the graves. Candles were everywhere. Fruits and vegetables were laid out for the returning spirits. Drinks were poured for them. Some people were wound into blankets sleeping next to, on even atop the mounds of earth, under which lay their loved ones. Families brought chairs and settled in. Food was passed around. There were smiles and laughter and conversation while the band played on.

It was comfortable enough to be a norte americana there to observe rather than participate. Stepping along the winding narrow paths on uneven terrain between the graves amidst tall lighted  candles and the crowds was challenging. Señora, a woman called, standing up from her little wooden chair to point my way. The people seemed accustomed to visitors, maybe even proud of the beauty and willing to share it.

I've never felt comfortable visiting my father or anyone else in a cemetery. It feels sad. It feels deserted. Pouring out a beer or a shot of scotch and laying out a pack of Chesterfields, I'm sure would be frowned upon. Lighted candles would probably require a permit from the fire marshall, and amplified music would, no doubt, cause nothing short of scandal. But I think that if I lived in my hometown after seeing what I saw last night, it's quite likely that I'd be having martinis in the cemetery after my mother's ashes are returned from the University of Iowa Medical School. There'd be hummingbird feeders, candies, cookies, cake, and orchids. 

Crying on Planes

Alaska. I can't quite remember if I cried on this flight. Maybe not. I was with a good friend.

The first time I cried on a plane was also my very first flight. My grandmother had  a heart attack and lay dying in a hospital in Dubuque, Iowa. I had been on a road trip with an aunt and uncle and when we got the news, the aunt I was traveling with, the aunt we were visiting in Baltimore, and I flew back to Iowa while my two uncles drove the camper through the night and met us there. I was 14 and saved, for maybe a a decade, the individual salt and pepper shakers and the stir stick I'd gotten with the Shirley Temple I'd gulped while swallowing my grief. Whenever I ran across these things in a drawer full of keepsakes they made me sad all over again.

The next time I flew was when my grandfather died. He had a heart attack--and died according to my mother's account--before he hit the floor. By this time I was a freshman in college and hurriedly made the 350-mile trip home, not sure how to negotiate the travel arrangements, thereby arriving at the airport completely rattled.  I remember crying openly on this flight, any effort to swallow the tears impossible.

My father died the next year, and I flew home suddenly once again. There had been a few flights to visit a boyfriend in between, but those trips were emotional minefields too since we'd given up our son for adoption just weeks before we started college. Airplane trips and crying were one and the same to me back then.

Things changed when I flew to France my junior year of college for a semester abroad. Flying was for fun and adventure, but I think I remember laughing so hard that I cried. In the ensuing years of marriage and children, there were more flights that fell into the category of mostly fun, but the motherhood years were when the flying anxiety began in ernest. More crying on airplanes.

With my aunt and my mom aging on the east coast, there were even more reasons to cry on planes. The break-up of my marriage was the watershed (pun intended.) I not only cried copiously on every flight I took anywhere--but I cried while telling my seat mate why I was crying. I have cried--or felt like crying-- for one reason or another on almost every flight I've ever taken.

My flying anxiety is somewhat less these days--but today I found myself crying on a plane once again. Traveling to the Twin Cities to meet my friend Carol who has been on a road trip since May 1 in her 45 ft. RV, I wanted to bring her a gift and found the perfect book: My Life On the Road by Gloria Steinem. I thought I might page through it a bit on the flight. The dedication and the epigraph brought tears to my eyes, and I settled in to read the book, crying over something in nearly every chapter. A history of feminism, told through the lens of Steinem's travels, reading it now when we are on the cusp of electing our first woman president during this era of burgeoning hate and prejudice, is an emotional experience. I'm half-way through the book and wonder what it will be like finishing it on the ground.

Crying on planes, it turns out, is a thing.

You can read about it:  ATLANTIC  BUSTLE
And you can listen to THIS AMERICAN LIFE episode.

People cry on planes.

A Room With a View

This is the view from my motel room in Fremont, Nebraska
That's a soybean field--and there in the distance, the curve of the Earth.

It's flat here and the eye travels easily to the horizon.

I spent the 30 years of my marriage visiting my in-laws here at least once or twice a year. It's surprisingly different from the countryside in Iowa where I grew up. But I've spent most of my life in big cities, so I can see the Nebraska countryside through city-dweller eyes too. It can look mysterious. Even a bit eerie.

It's a great place to contact aliens.
Or imagine animatronic dinosaurs or skeletal insects devouring the earth.

But I didn't come here this trip to write stories. I came to bid final farewell to my ex-mother-in-law. I made a terrible first impression in 1975. Braless and in short-shorts, I was wild girl with even wilder hair cavorting with the son that was meant for the seminary. 

She and I found common ground though and I treasured her. She was one of the most likable people I've ever met. 

Today after her funeral, after witnessing her ashes put into the ground in her husband's grave, I gave myself a tour of her yard. She gardened with both a reverent and a fanciful hand. She loved "garden junk,"especially and I do too, though most of my own treasures now come from the beach. 

 There's a row of towering evergreens that she planted as tiny saplings.

One summer she requested custom stepping stones with the handprints of her grandchildren.

She burned her trash--but only what could not be composted or recycled. 

Her hard work yielded much beauty. And while the yard certainly is not at the pinnacle of its glory years, her hand is still evident. I stood in front of her tool shed for a bit this afternoon, wanting to open it, but I didn't. She put me to work there during my first visit post divorce. I remember the smell of dirt and oil, but I can't remember what it was she had me do, only that I felt safe there in that small dark space that housed the tools she used to create her art.

Mildred was the most fervently religious person I've ever known. I may have been one of the most irreligious people she ever knew. Yet, somehow I believe that she resides now with her God, the angels and the saints. May she rest in peace. 

A Crab Molts Its Shell

I found a spider crab shell on the beach last week. Purplish pink with the horn-like protuberances seen in the video above, it was too weird (and too large--bicycle helmet sized) to pocket. I poked it with a stick and flipped it over. Alas, it was not a shell that had been molted, but a casket for the remains of a creature who perished. Not picking it up was a wise decision. Even after the waves cleaned it out, I didn't want it in my arms.

I feel like I'm molting. Dashing around to distract myself while there are bigger things happening as the second anniversary of Dan's death approaches. Yesterday it was as if I stepped out of bed and into chasm, dropping down into a place airless and dark. I lay on the couch and dozed, too stupefied to read or muster the good sense to go out for a walk, meditate, or do anything.

Today it felt as if the sun was pouring in despite the May-gray skies here, yet there are more dealings with the dead. Another beneficiary form to fill out as we close my mother's last bank account.  And her supplementary insurance continues to send emails (despite my emails announcing her death and the attaching of a jpeg of her death certificate.) They're asking for her to sign the cancellation form, asking if she'd agree to serve on some patient  panel and fill out questionnaires about how they're doing.  While I'd like to impersonate her and participate with scathing commentary, I don't have the heart for it  right now. Darn. I know an opportunity for a heck of a good time when I see one, right?

From the New Yorker

Meanwhile, I continue to tend to my health. Beset with swollen knees, fingers, and hands and in pain since I returned from final visit with my mother in Iowa in March, blood tests show no Lyme disease, no autoimmune diseases. I have paid my thousand dollar bill and have letters from my primary care physician and a rheumatologist proclaiming the good news. A week ago I took my swollen self to a Functional Medicine doctor. Of course he told me to change my diet. No dairy. No gluten. ( I used to be a gluten free vegetarian, but converted back to being a regular omnivore about a year ago.) My cynical self didn't want to believe that I needed to give up dairy and gluten, (I mean, c'mon, it seems like such a knee-jerk alternative thing) but my desperate self was, well, desperate. After two days the swelling in my knees and fingers was pretty much gone. My right hand is still deciding whether or not to go with the miracle. But maybe it's lagging behind because it actually poured the milk and put the toast in the toaster.

And back to the molting--my caregiver skin is nearly shed. Another form/email or two and I am something new. The ex-wife skin, while only able to be gotten rid of when either or both The Someone and myself meet the same fate as the crab I found on the beach, feels like there's been  at least some exfoliation or a nip and a tuck. July holds its own treacherous anniversary. This year it will be nine years since my marriage ended with a three-sentence conversation. I lost my husband, my family, my house, my town. Three decades of personal history became a fraud. Half my life felt like a hallucination.

But I'm all right now. Quite wonderful, in fact. A new person, alive and well. There is that chasm.  But I think I can remember to climb out.

Happy Mother's Day

Jacaranda Trees in Bloom at Grand Park, Los Angeles

I rode the train into downtown L.A. today.
Time travel.
There I was at the Oxnard train station, walking along the platform where two years ago, I would have met Dan as he stepped off the train, coming to see me for the weekend.  
Time travel.
There I was with a ticket marked "senior fare." As if I'd been asleep and awakened to find myself a senior citizen (by Amtrak standards anyway.)
Time travel.
I swear this park didn't exist the last time I was downtown, its wide swath of trees and fountains leading directly to the Music Center.
Time Travel.
It's Mother's Day. Last year I had a mother to celebrate with. This year I do not.
You go along and you go along, and then all of a sudden you are without the people you can't imagine being without. You yourself are old enough to get the senior discount, and a technicolor park emerges from the gray cityscape of the City of Angels.
There's nothing to be done but weep and celebrate, drink champagne, eat escargot and mussels with  the beautiful young woman who was once a baby in your arms and take the train back home.

The Things that Can Go Wrong After You Die

This room used to be my mother's room, so I'm using it to "sort out her affairs." Affairs take quite a bit of sorting out after you're dead and you're not going to be the one doing it.

Things can go wrong in the sorting out of affairs. Checks can still arrive in the mailbox for the dead. If you have not already closed the dead person's account, you might be able to deposit them by endorsing the check as power of attorney (even though power of attorney expires at the moment of death) and just depositing the thing. If you're lucky.

You might assume that you proved everything that needed proving for your beloved dead person when they were still alive and got on Medicaid. You're wrong. You have to prove they have no money again when they're dead. This is harder when the person is dead if you've already closed their checking accounts and saved a million trees by not printing out statements. There is no online access for an account that's closed. That account is dead. Just like the dead person. And the bank might snub you when you ask for a bank statement. That account is closed, they might say. Your power of attorney is expired, they might add. We need a will with the seal of the court showing you as executor might be the last thing they say before you hang up the phone.

You might have some second thoughts about things you did when your person was still alive. Like that free online do-it-yourself will. It seemed great. Your beloved dead person loved free things. Free online wills do not have court seals.

You might assume that if you report the dead person as dead in order to collect her life insurance (an employee benefit) that the other arms of that benefit system will get the word. Push one for pensions, push two for life insurance does not mean these person's desks are next to each other. Things can look different inside your head than in the real world when you're taking care of business for someone who's dead. Because things are always different inside your head.

If your now dead loved one was in a nursing home, you might assume that "funds held in trust" for that person's miscellaneous expenses like hair cuts and pedicures with be returned to you if there is an unspent balance. Even if the state regulations stipulate that's what's to be done with these funds, good luck getting it. Don't trust the trust.

You might not realize that you need this paper and that paper regarding this or that for the dead person. You might think, well, that's done. She's dead. And you're dead wrong. Save everything. Print things. Kill all the trees. Stack up the papers. Spread them out. Photocopy them. File them. Look for them. Lose them. Find them.

They are what you have left.

The Sunday Report

I may have reached my zenith as a caregiver when I created this--whenever that was.

There were many papers spread out on the kitchen island and on the bed in my mom's old room, and somehow, today,  most of these projects are nearing completion. The things that needed mailing have been mailed, other papers are stored for now in a file box until it seems reasonable to shred them. There is a box of treasures to keep, old photos to organize, and a few things to give away. Leaving this world with such a light load of material possessions is not something I would have predicted for my mom decades ago. I am most grateful. 

 Now, f I can get the U.S. Commemorative Gallery to stop sending their "valuable" collector sets of coins. I sent back their "Eisenhower and Kennedy Golden Dollars" and received a note from them that my mom had pre-paid for them. I may take on a battle with them just to see if I can get any of her hard-earned money back. What a bunch of hucksters. Can you even spend these damn things like regular money? How is it that with dozens of consumer complaints against them, we still let a company like this exist to prey upon the elderly?

I'm in the process of my own estate planning now. Letting my adult children know what is what and what is where. I'm now the family matriarch, I guess....And hoping that I will lighten my load of material goods substantially before I leave the planet. It's all just stuff. And it's stuff that our kids or friends will have to sort through when we leave. Then again, who doesn't like pretty things? I can't even walk by a piece of beach glass without pocketing it.

What We Leave Behind

It's windy here again in paradise. Just a few minutes ago I Googled "Least windy place in Ventura County." The palm trees are blown out like windsocks, all their fronds pointed in one direction. It was impossible to walk on the beach this morning, and at least one day last week left me wondering if I'd scratched my corneas by trying. But there was a morning or two wherein I could inspect the wreckage wrought by wind and waves. It looked like this.

Gulls mining the wreckage

There's one of everything on the sand on a day like the one above. One sock. One glove. One shoe. A plastic shovel. A sand toy of some sort. An immense tree trunk. Bungee cord. Pair of glasses. Shorts. A t-shirt. A tire, a towel. And there were quite a few large crabs. Hence, the gulls.

The day I got my eyes full of sand there were petals. Rose petals. There was quite a trail of them, staggering on and on as if Ophelia had wandered there before throwing herself into the deep. I couldn't seem to get a good photo of the big picture of the entire winding road of yellow, pink, peach, white, and red. 

I always wonder about the flower petals I find on the sand. It's a thing. Quite regular, especially on Mondays. Maybe a wedding. Maybe the scattering of someone's ashes. The effect is definitely ceremonial.

I've been doing my own dig through the wreckage. But unlike many people my age, I'm not collapsing under the weight of a parent's probated house stuffed to the rafters with possessions that have lost their meaning. My mom moved around. She broke up housekeeping and then broke it up again and again. By the time she made it to my house in California and then left here for a nursing home in Iowa, all I was left with was a closet shelf of boxes.

It was solemn and joyful and mysterious and surprising to open those boxes. Oh, there were boring parts and maddening parts, but there were beautiful sweet notes in greeting cards, so clearly chosen carefully for her. There were coins saved for no apparent reason, and hundreds of pretty postage stamps torn from letters. Old photos, of course, our baptismal certificates, and trinkets. But this was my favorite thing:

My mom never made it beyond the 8th grade. She began a string of jobs after that--most of them are mentioned HERE.

We all leave a trail behind us when we leave this life. Some of it wreckage, some of it rose petals.

Thank you for your kind words, your sympathy, and your condolences.

I appreciate each and every expression of your love and understanding.

Thank You for all the Birthday Wishes

Tonight's sunset

Some say that the soul leaves the body at the moment of death. That it rises up to heaven. Or that it descends to receive its eternal punishment. Others say that the soul wanders around for a while or that the spirit of the dead person can return for an earthly visit, or that death is simply the end. Having held a person in my arms at the moment of his death, I still cannot say for certain.

It was my birthday today, and how can one help but ponder death on the anniversary of one's birth? Birth and death are life's bookends. So, yes, Happy Birthday to me and someday my soul will go somewhere even if that somewhere turns out to be nowhere. Meanwhile, I'm full of joy and gratitude for this life. For love, friends, family, food, drink, music, theatre, art, my good health, beauty in all of its incarnations--clouds, birds, rocks, a finely crafted sentence, a pretty scarf, and for birthday wishes.

Yesterday I read about Einstein in the New York times. THIS INFO GRAPHIC blew my 63-year-old mind. And there was this quote: "In 1907, Albert Einstein had his “happiest thought” — people in free fall do not feel their own weight. This simple idea laid the foundation for his general theory of relativity, which Einstein presented 100 years ago this month." 

If I woke up in a box, completely weightless, I wouldn't know if I were falling or floating. Maybe that's how the soul feels.

And before the sunset's color drained from the sky, the full moon appeared from behind the clouds.