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.

Report from Pillville: Pills

this was on the wall in the bathroom at the yogurt place where I took my mom after the dentist--which was after the doctor's office for a brief blood pressure check as a follow-up to her new meds

Of all the things I am thankful for, my good health is near the top of the list because it makes it possible for me to participate in many of life's other joys, and to care for those I love. I do a lot of things to care for my 61-year-old self on a regular basis ( yoga, t'ai chi chih, walking 10,000 steps a day, brushing and flossing, putting on sunscreen every morning, eating virtually no prepared or packaged foods), and then, of course, there's just plain luck. There are people who do all of these things and perhaps more, and yet some ill befalls them. When the bad thing strikes, there's always a pill to fix it, or to take away the pain, and then another pill to fix the side effects of the first pill, and then a third pill to fix the side effects of the second pill, etc.

I take no prescription drugs. No over the counter drugs either--except for an occasional couple of Advil. My mom has not been so lucky. I've lost count, but the list that reminds us what she takes hangs in the kitchen next to my drug manufacturing device (espresso maker).

This is just one of the slots in my mom's daily pillbox.

Every now and then, things get changed or the pharmacy fills a prescription with a drug that's the same drug but made by a different manufacturer so it has a different appearance (which alway turns me into an ax murderer for a few seconds)--so we consult my cheat sheet to help sort things out. The Internet is very helpful as well.

I think she'd prefer to just eat one of these every day.

As the man who loves me goes through chemo and radiation, his pills are multiplying, too. When I looked at his list and the pile of pill bottles yesterday, I thought I might need a pill--if they make a pill for anxiety about pills....  would that be pharmaphobia? Did you know that you could get hiccups from chemo? Did you know there's a pill for that?

Walking With Whales and A Bird in the Hand

Having recently found out that my blood pressure continues to be a bit high and that my blood sugar is elevated as well, and that I have a severe vitamine D deficiency, I decided to step up my fitness routine by walking to the gym a couple days a week. I tried this a while back and found it too unpleasant with the 50-mile per hour traffic in my neighborhood, but I think I've now hit on the solution: Drive to the sand and then walk to the gym along the beach. Round trip is probably about two miles, and since I usually walk on the sand after the gym anyway and then have to walk back to my car in the gym parking lot, the new plan only requires that I leave the house 40 minutes earlier. Since I get back home about half an hour earlier, the extra net time that I leave my Mom alone is only 10 minutes.

So yesterday was the first morning of the new fitness plan, and about five  minutes into my walk, I spotted four gray whales swimming parellell to the shore, heading north as I walked south. Long after we passed one another, I could still see their spouts when I turned around to look. Margaritaville continues to astonish me just one year and two weeks since I bought my house here. The birds alone might have sufficed to let me know I'd found paradise. Pelicans still take my breath away. And just recently I've finally sorted the willets from the whimbrels, and the whimbrels from the curlews--and I think I've recently added a type of godwit (marbled?) to the list of shore birds I can identify. The first time I saw dophins during one of my walks, it felt like a miracle. The whales caught me completely off guard. I didn't know they swam that close to shore. For all I know, maybe they don't usually.

A couple of days ago, I came across an injured bird on the beach. Sure that I had entered some kind of bird rescue number in my phone, I began scrolling for it while standing back so as not to alarm the  creature in distress. Not finding the number right away, the big questions began to ask themselves: Would it be better for the bird to remain where it was? What if it got rescued and spent its last moments in some claustrophobic tiled room literally circling the drain? Shouldn't it be allowed to die under the sky next to the sound of the waves? But while I was agonizing and scrolling, a woman strode toward the bird with a long-handled net. Without slowing,she walked just past the bird, got behind it, and dropped the net over the top of it. A few seconds later, she reached under the net and scooped the bird into her arms. She finagled her net then--folded it or shortened the handle somehow--and then placed a cloth  over the bird who was carried off under her arm like a privledged chihuahua.

photo credit: travelocity

Going...going..

I'm having a little get-together tonight, and I've posted this sign on my kitchen wall. My packing efforts have devolved into a ridiculous jumble. There's a box in my car right now with antique bowls, cowboy boots, cleaning stuff, lingerie, sewing supplies, and books. Whatever system I had is gone. I'm sitting here with a beer, digesting my lunch of scrambled eggs and ketchup. I have been eating my way through my pantry and refrigerator since March. This is what it's come to. I have a hug bag of garam masala, some good asagio, and three more eggs. Please somebody stop me.

Tomorrow I'll drive to the new place and empty my car, drive back, and then Sunday I'll drive up again with my friend S. who has volunteered to pack the champagne goblets and whatever else is left in my kitchen. I'm gloating a bit. How many of you have had a Ph.D. pack your kitchen? Joining us will be other members of my personal circle of intelligentsia hauling potted plants from my patio.

And tonight a writer I admire very much is bringing one of her cakes--because she is also a professional pastry chef. Writing that sentence makes me feel like I've wasted my life.

Monday the movers come. I'm using the same company that I used five years ago when my life as a big L.A. lawyer's wife came to an end.  I wonder if the moving company will send the same guys. In any event, I'm picturing this move to be more like a happy-soul-soaring circus with flying acrobats than a Chekovian nightmare.

Here's what I wrote back then about that.

            Moving should not be a complicated affair.  My boxes are packed, stacked and sealed.  Most of the furniture is too big to fit in my new place, and the few things I’m taking, I’ve already tagged with blue painters’ tape.  I’m ready.  But when the movers come on the first Sunday in November, they’re Russian and their accents undo me.  It’s Chekov’s Cherry Orchard here in my living room only its too much money that’s taken my house away.  I think of the character of Lubov weeping as she leaves her estate crying for her youth and her happiness and her trees.  I have pruned, picked and eaten from every fruit tree in my backyard: guava, loquat, lemon, orange, grapefruit, tangelo, plumb, pomegranate, fig. They might as well be chopped to the ground like Chekov’s cherry trees because I know Mr. Ex will neither tend them nor harvest their fruit.  As my great-grandmother’s Victorian rocker and the oak armoire I bought for Mr. Ex's suits right after law school are loaded into the truck, I begin to sob.

 “I need help,” I say when my friend Tom answers the phone.  I’m standing in my front yard barely able to choke out the words; it’s Sunday morning and his voice sounds as if he still has cards in his hand and a cloud of cigarette smoke over his head.  “I’m sorry,” I say picturing him in pajamas. 

            “Sandy and I are just getting up,” he says.  “Give us a little time and then we’ll be over.”  As soon as I hang up, my friend Patricia calls.  She’s getting divorced, too; she might have to move soon herself.

 “I’m coming over,” she says.  I go back in the house, relieved.  But I feel sick and my mid-section is cramping.  My kidneys hurt and when I go to the bathroom, there’s blood in the toilet.  Not a lot of blood, but I’m sure I’m dying.  I go out to the patio and sit by the pond and rock in the glider.  I’m dying. This fucking move and this divorce will kill me.  I call my friends Karen and Sharon who’ve just moved to Portland, and sob on the phone while Karen calls me, “sweetie.”

            “Just talk to me,” I sob, “until they get here.”  I tell her that Tom and Sandy and Patricia are coming.  That I’m sick and might be dying, that C and M will be motherless.  Orphans, really.  The God I don’t believe in is punishing us, I tell her.  Mr. Ex will die of a stroke, and I’ll die right here on my patio, crying.

            “Hold on,” Karen says, “Your friends are coming.”  The movers are loading stacks of boxes onto dollies.  I can see my dining room and living room through the French doors that open to the patio. I can see straight through the emptiness to the bay window past the giant magnolia trees and into the street.  Karen and I talk until Tom and Sandy pull up at the curb. 

Sandy is the sort of person who would never show up for a friend in need without food, and it takes two hands to carry the big pink box she’s holding.  “I brought donuts,” she says in her Kentucky drawl.  Tom hugs me. His beard smells clean like soap, and suddenly I’m hungry. I devour chocolate frosted cream filled pastries, one after the other.  Patricia comes with cheese and crackers, and when the doors of the moving van are slammed shut, our three cars caravan to my new place.

Writing and Healing

I imagined two different ways of killing myself after my husband left me for a woman more than twenty years younger. I would hang myself or jump.

I had the sense to know that I needed help. All three of my children were stunned and grieving. I wanted to stay alive for them. And for my mother. Love kept me alive.

I had already written a memoir by the time my husband left me. I'd penned 85,000 words about giving my son up for adoption after a secret pregnancy--and twenty-one years later reuniting with him with the help of a clandestine adoption underground railroad. I started writing this story by accident. I had another story I was burning to tell then. A story involving teen-age girls, lies, Los Angeles gangsters, and a party gone wrong. I put pen to paper on the spur of the moment one morning after I'd pulled my min-van back into the garage--home from the morning school run. A mug of coffee and the L.A. Times were on my kitchen table, and after reading some article about teen-agers, pagers, and drugs, I grabbed one of my husband's yellow legal pads and a pen. I wrote pages and pages over the next week. Then I spotted a flyer in a local coffee house about a writing group. I folded the flyer in half and stuck it to my bulletin board. When I showed up for the first meeting, I was stunned to learn that the workshop was for writing memoir--true stories.

My story about teenagers and the lies they tell was mostly true anyway, but what came out of my pen that first Saturday morning was about my son. An essay, I thought. I had 35 pages of essays about giving up my son by the time I took my first real writing class at UCLA extension a couple of years later. The essays turned into a book. I got an agent, did a lot of revising, and I like to think  that if I hadn't been turned into a blogaholic by my divorce, I might have a book out in the world by now.

I think that memoir will be published eventually, but meanwhile I've had a lot of time to think about the stories that life delivers to us. I know about what it feels like to open a garden shed where two colorful jump ropes hang on a hook; what it feels like to run my hands over them while my eyes survey the children's climbing structure in my back yard. I know what it's like to find the view of the Mississippi River  from the window of a hotel room unbearable and the relief when a friend not only returns my phone call but shows up at the hotel.

I've altered my brain chemistry with two courses of anti-depressants since my marriage fell apart. I'm on my second therapist. I've had light therapy, dropped Bach Flower remedies onto my tongue, taken a  fine selection of herbal concoctions, and anesthetized myself with gin. I've exercised faithfully to up my endorphin production and devoured a boatload of chocolate. And I've  written so many essays about my divorce that I have another book.  

Writing heals. I'm not the only one claiming this.  Check THIS out. And THIS. Google "writing and healing." Read some more.  Then grab a pen or fire up your laptop.