Let It Rain

The water is a steely gray here in Margaritaville this morning. Like my brain. Or my murderous heart.

My mom's alarm clock went off at a few minutes past midnight. One of those beeping clock radio alarms that sounds like the warning for the end of world. Does the oxygen machine make that sound if someone stops breathing? This was what I wondered as I dashed down the stairs. The possibility for beeping is far too prevalent in modern life. Carbon dioxide alarm? Security system letting me know the power is out? Smoke alarm battery? Freezer door? Fridge door? Even the fucking wine refrigerator beeps if the door is not closed tight. Danger, danger, danger your wine will not be chilled to the proper temperature.

"I didn't touch it," my mom said as we stared at the offending keeper of time.
Whatever.

I did not sleep. Thought about packing for my trip. Thought about my folding travel yoga mat and wondered if it would fit it my back pack and if it could double as a sleeve for my laptop. Now there's a first world problem for you. Or I might be a genius. I thought about flying. I will spare you those thoughts. Thought about gin. Thought about how disorienting travel is for my mom and felt suitably guilty. She keeps saying my brother is going to drive her to Iowa from Maryland. I keep explaining. (while thinking about gin.) I try not to correct my mom about a lot of stuff. Just roll. But sometimes it's necessary to say over and over again, "Nope. We're not leaving tomorrow. Nope. Don't pack your toiletries yet. Nope. You're gonna sleep in your bed TWO more nights." Who wouldn't think about gin.

When my kids were young and we traveled and the Someone would keep me hanging saying he didn't really know if he'd be able to go because of work, I would ask myself if it was really worth it to plan a trip. To go through all the prep and planning and pet sitters and blah, blah, blah..

It was worth it every time.

Tuesday Beach Report

C and I decided to let the thinset on our fabulous beach glass fireplace cure another day before grouting and had an extra long walk on the beach instead. We picked up a little trash (it's a pretty clean beach, really) marveled at all the beauty, picked up more sea glass, and saw a dead jellyfish-- while I told her what I know about snowy plovers and California least terns.

In keeping with the theme of the day we ate sushi for lunch, visited the maritime museum, and did some sea lion watching.

The large male snoozing behind the post may be the largest California sea lion I've seen. The group also included a very geriatric seeming sea lion who kept nodding off near the edge of the dock, jerking awake every time her nose hit the water. That's kind of the way I've been falling asleep at night. Refusing to give in as I scroll though pictures and old emails on my phone or on Dan's iPad until I drop them onto my face. Sleeping on a boat dock is not without hazards, and I'll bet plenty of people have given themselves black eyes by dropping their electronic devices onto their faces.

48 hours

After T'ai Chi Chih/March 3, 2014

I would post something  today at 4:04 p.m., I thought. Some commemoration of Dan's passing at the 48-hour milestone Some update on how things are.

Instead, I slept.

Initially, it was a fake sleep to avoid talking on the phone. While I appreciate the condolence phone calls more than words can express, I simply cannot answer and speak. Chinese medicine would say that the lungs are the seat of grief, but I'm pretty sure that the larynx must be involved as well. My voice is lost except for brief casual conversation. Dinner is ready. Here's how I made the shrimp. Would you like some more bok choy?

I also find that I cannot go out of the house. Not even to my back patio to water the plants. I want to walk on the beach tomorrow, but I would like to do so in some sort of cloak of invisibility. I fear looking into the eyes of a person who does not know what has happened.

But what I want to write about is this:

The night that Dan died, I dreamed of whales swimming in the marina right outside our windows. And there was a giant shell that rose out of the water, its insides shimmering with color as it raced away.

The next day a neighbor I do not know came to the door to express her sympathy at the death of my husband. I did not correct her.

 I like to stand in the spot where the hospital bed was--where last I held him. Holy space.

And because I have shared so much of this experience, I think this final piece belongs here too.

When they come to collect Dan's body, Dusty sits by him and sings. Will stands at his other side and does a last Tuvan throat-singing chant. The men who've come for him lift him from the bed to the gurney. He is under the soft white blanket that he liked when he slept in a single bed we put next to my full-size bed for recuperation after the surgery. Under the blanket, Dan is  dressed in jeans and a favorite t-shirt. He is thin. Emaciated. But the  men struggle to lift him. Dusty and Will help them. Dan is laid on a white cloth on top of the gurney, and they bundle him into it as if they are wrapping an infant, only they cover his face too. Beautiful face. Pain and stress free. They wrap one side then overlap it with the other. After the wrapping in white, they cover him with a black fitted cover and wheel the gurney toward the front door. All of us follow them out. An unplanned procession, single-file, evenly spaced as though we've rehearsed it. We follow the curve of my front pathway to the driveway where the vehicle waits. We  line up in front of my garage in the gloomy colorless evening as they load him, standing there as they drive away, staying until they are out of sight.

Red

heron with rocks and bougainvillea to take your mind off this post

8:30 a.m.

I am 61 years old, and I am wearing red pants. This is mitigated somewhat by the fact that my red pants and I are in a yoga class. But after this hour of serenity, I will drive to the seedy side of Hollywood, check my boyfriend out of a nursing home, and take him back to my house where he will take a break from the chemo and radiation that have been rendering him weaker and weaker. If chemo and radiation were assigned a color, in my mind, it would be red. So the red pants might be appropriate after all.

I do not like to buy clothes. Visiting the mall always propels me toward anxiety. I feel like a greedy consumer when I buy new things and much prefer a thrift store, but mostly, I don't shop anywhere; I just wear what I already have. I bought the red pants for daughter M to take on her 8th grade class trip. She has a master's degree now. When she abandoned the red pants early in her undergraduate days, I claimed them. They still look new, but usually I wear them only when my other two pairs of yoga pants, sedately hued in brown and gray and more than a decade old, are in the laundry. Today the gray pants were folded neatly in my drawer, but I chose the red pants anyway. I don't know why, but it seems important.

1:30 p.m.

We're home. I make fresh juice. Two kinds of kale, celery, carrots, grapefruit, lemon, blood orange. M and the boyfriend and I agree that it's tasty--though I briefly consider dumping some gin into mine. For the rest of the afternoon, it's managed chaos. There are meds to organize and discharge instructions to digest. We need a glucose meter and test trips, so M goes to Rite-Aid. I discover there's stuff, "an appurtenance," the boyfriend calls it, attached to the chemo port and taped to the outside of his chest. Tubes with dried red blood in them, a white clip and a yellow clip. He thinks a nurse in the hospital put it there on Tuesday. He has no idea if this thing needs maintaining. I make him promise he will not try to uninstall it, and I call the nursing home and then the hospital where he spent some time at last week. I call the chemo center and talk to the doctor on call. No one has anything relevant to say, so I Facebook my ex-sister-in-law who's a nurse, and then  I cook dinner. Rib-eyes on the grill, more greens with radishes and onions. Sweet potatoes.

10:00 p.m.

 I'm on the couch with M watching the watching the Clipper game. The boyfriend is in my bed, asleep. The blood in the tubes needs to be flushed, the sister-in-law nurse writes back. I fill my wine class, watch the Clippers win, all the while thinking of blood. Of red wine. My red pants. I might obsess all night over the blood in the tubes taped to boyfriend's chest. I might sleep, oblivious to all this terror, relieved that after two months away, he is finally lying next to me.

Notes from Margaritaville, Pillville, and The Love Shack

the love shack a.k.a. my bedroom

It is big deal to sleep next to someone you love when that someone is in pain. Somehow you are asleep and somehow, simultaneously, you are awake. You hear the moans and winces and whimpers, and you are sorry and disturbed, but you realize until that moment you have been sleeping pain free while the person next to you has not been so fortunate, and you ponder life's big questions until...you don't. You wake long enough after the next moan to wonder if you should wake him and ask if he needs a pain pill or the heating pad or should you try digging your fingers under his shoulder blade, but you think better of it because he's silent now. You hope he realizes how completely happy you are that he's next to you despite the way things are currently because it's pure comfort to know what is going on first-hand and not have to imagine him in his own place alone and guess at how that's going. When he sits up for a second sometime in the middle of the night, knowing you're awake too, and he asks you if you're sleeping okay, you want to try to explain what comfort he's providing you by being there and how it doesn't really matter that you've been waking up between stretches of sleeping quite well, but it might be too long of an explanation and then maybe neither of you will get back to sleep, so you just mutter something positive. But later when you are in the middle of a nightmare in which your mother hands you an bloody apron and a pair of gloves and says, "These are the ones that were used in the murder," and she gives them to you like you are supposed to do something--what, you don't know--wash them? Bury them? You don't know, so you scream and scream. Then he wakes you so your terror can stop. You thank him, and you think about terror and pain and how they're alike and different, and somehow you both sleep again.

Readers, you may feel that you have missed a blog post, but you have not. I have been rendered silent (for about as long as I have ever been silent here on this blog) by the fact that the man who loves me has lung cancer. There will be surgery. There will be chemo. Right now there's pain. And in as much as this man and I have endeavored to maintain our separateness throughout this love affair we've been having for the past 5 years, I cannot say how much I will write about the part of this story that is happening to him. But it is a fact that some small part of it is happening to me. So, I will go back to silence or write about that part.

And as for the regular proceedings of life in Pillville, my mother has a stronger pain pill that required giving up her martini for a few nights. That dream recounted above--well, I think it was probably me she murdered and just to really let me know how much she detested my delivery of the no alcohol tidings, she not only murdered me, but also asked me to clean up the mess. She had terrible back pain after returning home from the hospital, but it has abated and tonight, due to the tapering off of the meds, there will be a martini, she has just informed me. As for me, I think a glass of my favorite cheap red will go nicely with this.

And in Margaritaville today the sky looked like a pile of cotton balls.

The fishing was easy. If you were a heron.

Due to my inept photography, you can't see that the heron has a large fish in its beak. The seagull wants it.

And the guardian of the neighborhood was in her usual place, watching over all of us. Or at least the rodents in the empty lot. Blessings upon all of us is what I hope for. Even for the heron's fish. Even for those rodents as they feel the prick of talons as they are swept skyward.

Report from Pillville: In the revised version of Sleeping Beauty, a MRSA infection travels to her brain

November Sunset

My mother slept for 22 hours. Half of it at home and half after I took her back to the ER yesterday. When she finally was admitted to the hospital, she didn't even notice when they moved her from the gurney to the bed. Last night after I came home I couldn't sleep. The winds had kicked up while I sat next to my mom in a curtained cubicle in the ER, and I felt like I too had been transported somewhere strange and different without my knowledge. All night long trees clawed at the windows as if they were desperate to come inside. Every now and then there was the crash of someone's patio heater or trashcan. My body ached from sitting, and I wanted to be outside walking.

When I did sleep, I woke from dreams in which I was neglecting a houseful of guests. All the women I'd travelled with in Greece had come for a visit. No one had clean sheets or towels, and I'd forgotten to buy coffee, and where was the blowdryer?

And there was the thought of my mother dying. I lay in my bed, dreading the ring of the phone. She had rallied by the time I'd left the hospital, but it seemed unbelieveable that she'd awakened from her Sleeping Beauty spell. Maybe the bacteria had made it to her brain, and that was what had jolted her awake before it pulled her back under.

This morning she was awake and fully herself, though pale. She ate breakfast and lunch sitting up in a chair. This afternoon she told me I shouldn't come back in the evening. She'd be okay, she said. Having  already made two trips to the hospital today, and having spent a total of 15 hours in the ER spread over three separate trips since Thanksgiving, staying home seemed like a fabulous idea. I saw bacteria in the stack of shirts she'd worn once and piled on a chair in her room. Bacteria in the bedding and the sink and the shower. And oh my god, there's got to be a fresh nasal canula for her oxygen around here somewhere.

The sun is setting and I've done a dozen loads of laundry, finally given the floors their first post- Thanksgiving cleaning after nearly jumping out of skin at a dust bunny I thought was a rat. I might walk to bar on the marina and eavesdrop on other people's lives.

Les Plesko 1954-2013

It sinks in slowly-- this thing called death. And it's different somehow, losing a writer who's left behind his books. All those words. His notes on pages of my own writing. Lists of of books to read. His own little booklet of rules and instructions that he handed out in his classes.

The memorial was a writerly comfort. Readings of tributes. Readings of Les's own work. Pictures, stories.

Death frequently carries a suitcase stuffed with regrets. I truly wished that I, with all the money I had to spare in those days, had offered to foot the bill for fixing his teeth. He was beset by health problems--especially this past year, people said. And there were people who did come to his aid.

He was tortured by insomnia, others said. Last night was the first I slept without waking several times in the night since I heard of his death. That waking a small connection to be grateful for. A space to lie in the dark and stretch out a hand.

I am thrilled to have known him.