Slipping Away

The thing about moms is- there aren’t always a lot of pictures of them. They’re usually the one taking the pictures.  It was no different with my mom.  Lots of things were different about my mom- but I know she did love me- very much.

And she loved my sister and my brother.

But perhaps even more, she loved our father.

So, just a month and a day short of four years after his death, she joined him. 

While we had almost a year of saying goodbye to Dad, Mom’s final take-off seemed to collapse into a one, short week.  In a way, we’ve been saying goodbye to her for years, maybe even for all of our lives.  For some people the world is just too much- too loud, too demanding, too busy to nurture a shy, fragile, brilliant girl.

When Dad launched I knew he was happy to be on his way to a new adventure. But with Mom, I’m not so sure.  There weren’t as many signs.  She was gone before we knew it- struggling and laboring for days and then, with a small, quick, exhalation, gone.

Tuesdays in the Nursing Home- Believing

 

He is a small man now, his back bowed by age and the effort it takes draw oxygen in to his failing lungs. Until today, I’d never seen Clyde’s health bother him. On any other day, he is up, smiling and speaking to everyone he passes as he wheels his walker around the nursing home. An oxygen tank sits in the white wire basket attached to the front of his cart.

Nothing gets Clyde down.  He stopped me once and said “You know, if my wife had lived this would’ve been our 70th anniversary.” 

I put my hand on his arm, uncertain what to say- do I congratulate him or offer condolences? I settled for a bit of both. 

He smiled, told me the secret to his long marriage was keeping his mouth shut, and wheeled along down the hallway.

Today he wouldn’t leave his room and hadn’t eaten for over 24 hours.  A clear plastic mask covered his mouth and nose as he fumbled to open a packet of sugar and empty it into his coffee.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he cried.  His frail bones felt hollow as I stroked his back.  “I don’t know where I am. I don’t know what I’m doing. There were 13 of us, now there’s but 3.”  He looked at me for an instant, his eyes searching my face. “My sister died yesterday. Now’s there’s only three.”

His hands shook harder.  Packet after packet of sugar and creamer spilled into the cup and were hastily stirred with his fork.  He tasted, sipping like a tiny bird, in quick, shaky bursts.  More sugar. More creamer.  “I can’t eat,” he said, tearing up pieces of bread and tossing them into his Cream of Chicken soup.  “I just can’t,” he said, spooning the soup into his mouth like a starving man. 

The vanilla wafers were next.  He ate them all, sweeping the crumbs off his tray, into his hand and then tossing them into his mouth.

“Are you afraid of dying?” I asked finally.  No answer.  He dodged me, darting down a dark mental alleyway and putting up a smokescreen.  “We weren’t that close.  She was only two years older than me. Two years!”

But was he afraid of dying?  No answer.

“What will happen if I die? Who will look after everyone?” he asked, his voice breaking.

I am a slow study.  “Are you afraid?” I asked.

Then, “Are you worried?”

“Eh, worried? No, I’m not worried. Well, I might be. But I don’t know what for. If it’s time it’s time.”

“Do you think you’re dying?” I ask.

“No, no.  Couldn’t do anything about it if I were.  When God calls you…” 

The rapid-fire denials suddenly stopped. His eyes filled with tears. A drop of coffee dripped unnoticed from his chin, splashing on the home-sewn, light blue and red-striped bib he had absently thrown across his lap. 

“What if I’ve done something wrong in my life?” he asked, trembling. “What if I said something to someone and they were offended and I didn’t know it? What will God think? What will he say?”

I stroked his arm, circled his bony back with the palm of my hand and tried to reassure him.  The woman in the room across the hallway watched us curiously, her hearing far keener than my patient’s.  When I caught her eye, she waggled three fingers at me in a casual, to-ta-loo salute.

Clyde was trying not to cry by picking up his soup and drinking from the bowl, abandoning any attempt at using his spoon.  He was in a frenzy, panicked by the thought of being snatched by God before he could eat or explain or live enough to be ready.

“Yesterday I got down on my knees and begged him to forgive me if I’ve harmed anyone or done something wrong I didn’t know about.”

I looked around his room at the proudly displayed posters of his cherished Yankees.  I am a Phillies fan.

I held my friend, trying my best to reassure him, wishing I knew a way to soothe without shouting. 

These are the times when I long for a magic pill or a wand or a letter of guarantee from God stating death and the process of dying will not be scary or frightening and that there is indeed a Heaven.  Furthermore, the letter would inform Clyde that he’s definitely “In” and that Heaven is truly much more wonderful than anything he’s been told.

I don’t have that kind of power. 

This time is one of the rare times I walk down the hallway, worried about Clyde’s panic and breathlessness, and tell his nurse to give him the morphine his doctor has ordered for times like these.

A half an hour later, the nurse stops me.  “That rascal!” she says.  “I told him if he had the morphine, he had to promise not to get out of bed or he’d fall.”

My eyes widen.

“Yep,” she says nodding. “I walked in just in time to catch him.  And do you

know what that rascal said?”

I shook my head, too pleased to hear Clyde had been elevated from panicked to rascal status to care.

“He lay back in my arms, smiled up at me and asked ‘Who was that pretty lady come in and talked to me? I sure did like her!’ Pays no mind to the fact he could’ve broken a bone disobeying me.  Just wants to talk about the pretty lady. Can you believe it?!” the nurse demanded.

No, I couldn’t.  But then, it doesn’t matter what I do or don’t believe.

Faith it seems, is very much in the eyes of the beholder. 

 

Technorati Tags: death and dying,aging,nursing home life

Weepy, Raucous, Epiphanies of Grief

 

On Saturday it will be two years since my Dad, the Wisest Man in the Universe, left.

If you've been reading this blog for awhile, you know it all really started around the time we learned he was dying and for the first year, I chronicled our long goodbye.

Really, it was such a blast.  It was one of the best ever times of my life.  In dying, Dad taught me more about living and life than I could ever hope to learn on my own without him.

 

God, I miss him.

If you've been reading my posts for very long, you also know how I struggled with losing him, looking for signs that he was still present, somewhere close at hand, perhaps on the other side of an invisible curtain, just not so far away.

There were a few dreams.  Powerful, intense visits in which he talked about Heaven or once, just hugged me so tight I felt it for days.

Then there were the pennies, mysterious pennies that appeared from nowhere and always when I needed him the most.  Signs, I felt certain, that he was pitching them from behind an invisible chink in Heaven's fence.

It was sometimes just enough to keep me from sinking.

But as this two year mark steadily creeps closer, I have felt nothing but his absence.

I am like Jodi Foster surrounded by a sea of giant listening satellites, listening to the vast, wooshing silence of outer space and hoping for a discernable signal.

The crushing grief is gone for the most part.  I have settled in for the steady, plodding marathon that is life without my mentor and best, true friend.

I know he's gone but I can carry him with me, always.

Still it would've been nice, would be nice, to reach out and hug him.

On one of those bittersweet, joyous days in which I hadn't been swamped with loss and was, in fact, having a blast with my boys, I walked into the kitchen and caught them, red-handed, hiding pennies for me to find.

I was devastated.  All this time.  All those pennies.  It had been my boys, tricking me and laughing behind my gullible back?

I couldn't let them see how awful I felt.

A few days later an epiphany, probably epiphany number 112 since Dad died, hit me.

Although they swore it was the first and only time they'd hidden pennies for me to find, I truly doubt this.  But I realized it was not done out of cruelty. My boys have always been too loving to hurt me like that.  They were doing something their grandfather would've understood completely- the good and the bad.  It was a sort of reverse-generation Santa Claus.

I remembered all their pats on the back and the awkward hugs they'd given me when I'd dissolved into sudden tears at some silly commercial that reminded me of Dad.

I realized, again, my father lives on in my boys.  His goodness, his kindness, his wicked sense of humor- it is in all of us and in that way, Dad is never truly gone.

The last time I saw my sister we were sitting at the dinner table when she suddenly gasped.  Her eyes filled with tears and she reached across the table to touch my fingers.  "You have Dad's hands," she breathed. 

She stared at them for a long moment then smiled.  "That much be such a comfort, to look down and see his hands, always there."

 

I can't look at them now without remembering him.

And on the 27th, I won't visit his grave to pay my respects. I don't have to seek him out and honor a piece of granite.  I am my father's monument.  Each of us who loved, love, him and try to carry some little piece of his wisdom and mercy forward, we are the monuments to his life on this earth.  It's up to us to find him within us and carry his love forward into our own juicy lives.

Doing Battle With Demons

Yesterday I sat for hours with a man who is dying and worried that God won't understand the things he did during World War II.

He has been having flash backs and episodes of panic so intense he seems unreachable.

As I sat beside him, holding his hand and listening, he took me with him through, I believe, every major battle fought during that war, with the exception of those fought in the Pacific Theater.

He was 18.

My eldest boy is 18 and I can't imagine him facing the horrors my patient had to withstand.

He was tapped to be in the 101st Airborne and placed in Intelligence and Reconnaissance. It seems this boy from North Carolina had a gift for spotting tanks and airplanes on aerial maps. He was also fluent in French and German- a by-product of his German heritage. His reward was to be the youngest of 76 men selected to parachute behind enemy lines, to record and scout out enemy activity, to lead men years older into battles that resulted, a lot of the time, in their death.

He was forced to do things that I know many soldiers have to do- but rarely tell upon their return to civilian life.

As I sat beside him, he was there again, the years melting away as he screamed out in flawless German, begging the unseen before him to put down their weapons.

My man is the sole survivor of the 76 men he went to war with and he tells me it will not be long before he joins his brothers. He is terrified that when he dies, their memories will die as well- they will vanish like the men who died in battle, and not be remembered or understood by anyone. He is worried that no one will believe what he is saying is true, that it could have really happened.

I ask him if he would like me to write down their stories.

Wrong move.

"No, those are my stories! Mine alone! No one can have them, do you hear me? No one! You must never tell what I am telling you!"

I soothe him, reassure him that his stories, his memories, are safe, locked away inside me in a place where I keep all the atrocities that my patients need to set free. I am the landfill for trauma so unfathomable sometimes I have to create conscious rituals to cleanse myself before I can return home to my family.

I pretend I have been in an operating theater, gowned, gloved and masked. When I leave, I am soaked in blood, but I strip off my gloves, throw away my gown and toss the mask in the trash on my way to the car.

I will not tell his stories. I want to, oh I really want to, because for every commercial glorifying the Marine Corps or the Army, there are the walking wounded who return, their lives unalterably changed and not for the better. They have been told to put the war out of their minds, not to speak of it to anyone.

My man obeyed the rules but at a terrible price.

We will spend whatever time he has left trying to cut the thick chains that hold him hostage. We will try to let go of these terrors so he can die without feeling so afraid and ashamed.

He is a brave and loving man, a father, a grandfather and a great-grandfather. He loves, no adores, his wife...and none of his family know what he is carrying.

He looked at me before I left, still holding my hand tightly in his own. "You know," he said, his eyes piercing through me. "I studied Psychology. I got to be a fairly good judge of human character and I have learned- there are those you can tell things to and those you know to avoid. I told you things today I have never told anyone."

I squeezed his hand, an unspoken promise for our future talks, and told him I would be back on Thursday.

I didn't want to run out of the nursing home yesterday. Days like yesterday are the reason why I haven't quit yet.