I had a friend during the pandemic. A very close friend. The friendship developed over a year.
It ran into trouble. I got my fourth pneumonia. He said, “I need to return to my real life.” I should have walked away, but he had promised. “We will always be friends.”
The adult part of me knows that always and never are lies. But the small child connection to the Self wants to believe, oh so badly. The adult notes “That is a lie. You are lying to yourself, because I don’t believe always or never.”
The child has eternal hope.
A year later, abandonment. The adult is cynically unsurprised. The small child part weeps.
And my church is melting down. Me too. I wrote a peace poem and promptly got into a fight. Devil’s fall up to angels and then they fall down again. A peace poem sets me up to fail. The ends don’t justify the means and I may resign from the church.
The fallout from the pandemic is only starting. Everyone is grieving, everyone is hair trigger.
Peace you and anything you have lost in this Pandamnit.
This is from Marrowstone Island. Is the island giving birth to these mysterious balls? Some are basketball size. The rocks look like dinosaur bones as well.
I took this last Saturday at the 1:30 pm Blues Fest Concert. This is Jerron Paxton and he just loves the music so much. He started by saying everyone participating in the Blues Fest is tired by the end of the week, it’s so intense! Then he played. Completely delightful.
The good thing about getting deathly ill is that you find out who your friends are. They stay by you. Even if you are misdiagnosed, labelled, ignored.
It is harder to ignore me now that I am on oxygen. It is difficult to chalk oxygen up to a rumored behavioral health diagnosis. When you have pneumonia and are confused, that is called delirium, not mania.
The bad thing about being deathly ill is that you find out who is NOT a friend. They disappear like rats leaving a sinking ship. Actually I like rats better.
I have one person who says, “I like you well, not sick.” Um, I would rather stay well too. But having seen fully 20 specialists, including four pulmonologists since 2012, a cure seems unlikely, doesn’t it? Meanwhile I seem to be getting stronger in pulmonary rehabilitation. Treadmill, classes about the lungs, stretching and weights.
Another person states, “if you get sick again, I am gone for four months.” Not a friend, right? Not a true friend and never ever will be. They do not understand friendship.
A true friend shows up at my house in 2012. I am lying on my bed using my father’s oxygen. She glares at me. “YOU are coming to MY house.” My reply: “OK.” I survive, even when the hospital sends me home with strep A pneumonia and delirium. Helps to be a physician, though I had to just trust myself, even delirious. The true friends help save me. I can’t even say how grateful I am.
I have a new friend. She is ill. It is progressive. Her husband seems so surprised that I come to see her. But I know how terribly lonely it is to be abandoned when you are ill. I have been there four times.
Blessings on the true friends.
Here is my sister’s blog. I remembered this post as “caged”, but her word is “trapped”.
I had cobra from my job in 2009 and the insurance company refused my bills. Not one bill. Not once. EVERY BILL EVERY TIME: 1. my healthcare 2. my son’s healthcare 3. my daughter’s healthcare 4. my daughter’s orthodontia 5. my dentist 6. my son’s dentist. I had to call EVERY TIME to get them to pay. Calling an insurance company takes 25 or 30 minutes, right? Eventually I asked for customer service who first said it was my fault because “you probably paid the bill late”. I said, “No, I was on time every month.” Then customer service wouldn’t call me back. I finally called their COUNSELING HOTLINE, since it said I would be “paid” $30 to get counseled, and said, “MY LITTLE SISTER IS DYING OF BREAST CANCER AND THE THING THAT IS MOST STRESSING ME OUT IS YOUR INSURANCE COMPANY WON’T PAY THE COBRA BILLS AND I HAVE CALLED CUSTOMER SERVICE OVER AND OVER AND THEY WON’T CALL ME BACK. HOW ABOUT YOU COUNSEL ME HOW TO DEAL WITH THAT!” And I cried. I got a call back from the head of customer service saying “Oh, it’s a computer glitch and we had you misfiled. We have fixed it.” They “misfile” people all the time, or drop patients if they get sick, or say the person didn’t pay on time. I HATE INSURANCE COMPANIES. Anyhow, be warned that insurance companies are there to earn money and will try to avoid paying you in all sorts of ways, including ways that are illegal.
We need single payer healthcare, medicare for all. If we all have healthcare, think of how many small businesses would start up. And why don’t we have single payer healthcare? I think the big corporations don’t want it.
Who is the man in the photograph? I don’t know. This is an old tintype. They came from my Great Aunt, Esther White Parr, married to Russel Parr. Perhaps they are Parrs, because my Uncle Rob did not know any of the people in the four tintypes I have. My sister and I used them for portraits in our china doll houses.I hope he is not the CEO of an insurance corporation, but then, all the white collar white men tried to dress that way then.
That’s what makes them angry that I love my liar sister even though she lied even though she hurt me even though she lied to them
That’s what makes them angry that I love my liar sister they want to love her lies they don’t want to know the truth they want to hide from lies
That’s what makes them angry
they are hella jealous
they want to be loved like that
they want to be loved whole
they want to be loved entire
they want to be loved even when they lie
That’s what makes them angry
they are so afraid to be themselves
they are so afraid to tell the truth
they are so afraid to be honest with each other
they are so tired of hiding
That’s what makes them angry one says she will be friends if we only talk about the positive about my mother, father, sister I counter: let’s not mention them at all nor your husband. Not a word. She doesn’t answer. Silence.
That’s what makes them sad
they don’t want to feel the anger
they deny the heartache
they avoid the longing
they bargain with their souls
they refuse to feel the grief
let us feel the anger let us feel the heartache let us feel the longing let us feel our grief let us feel our souls
Beloved, we long for you so
Please, Beloved, love us whole
_____________________
My sister sent me a t-shirt from Wicked. She died of cancer in 2012. The deaths from Covid-19 and every death brings her back to me. And this song sums up our relationship.
Two days ago I wrote to the owner of the website that “separated” me for “not explicitly breaking the rules”.
I have not gotten an answer.
Doesn’t matter, you say. I disagree. I think our ethics matters and it matters on line. Isn’t that part of what we are fighting about?
Let’s drill down. The editors stated on this obscure not to be named site that they were tightening rules and removing write-ups that should be logs or are just not high enough quality, and letting the writers repost them as logs. So far they have removed over 250 of my writeups. Ironically, I was one of the two most prolific writers in the last year. Let’s kill the golden goose because she’s annoying, won’t we? The other writer has not been “separated”.
I note that they have removed my write up called “birth of ——–“. Now, this interests me. This was a well received write up, had up votes, and was the start of a category. The category was people explaining how they chose their on line name.
So: the editors are liars and abusing their power. They have removed a well received and well liked write up because they have personal animosity towards me. I have protested the removal of 250+ writeups and asked that they be reposted as logs. No answer.
The other writeups in the how I chose my name category are still there. So this is PERSONAL and the editors of the site are unethical.
Therefore, I hope the site dies. Or gets rid of those editors. I think I want it to die, even though it has writing by my sister. This does matter. As a species, we will either learn to be fair and human on line as well as off line, or we will end in conflagration. The site will certainly not be there if we start lobbing nuclear bombs at each other. The owner works for the US government. Why is he/she not paying attention to this obscure website that he/she owns?
Whether or not the world burns this month, if the editors are manifestly unfair on the site, the site will die and deserves to die. I wish that I could have my sisterβs drafts before it shuts down.
I ended my email that is not answered with this: Good luck. I hope that ethics matters to both of us.
Thank you.
on line site name
_______________________
I will not name the site here or anywhere again, until and unless those editors are shut down and the site becomes ethical.
We are fighting this fight as a species, as humanity. We have to learn to be as ethical on line as we are in person. Well, you say, some people AREN’T ethical. Yes, that is true. As a rural physician, my goal is to take care of ANYONE WHO COMES IN. The emergency room physician cares for the family of four hit by the drunk and the drunk too, even if there is a dead child in the family of four. We set our judgement aside and do the best for each and every patient, regardless of the story. At least, that is the goal. It is the highest goal I know of.
Blessings and be your ethical self on line. As my children said to me when I threw their father out of the house once, “We don’t care what he does. We want you to be polite to dad no matter what.” And they were RIGHT! We answer to ourselves and to the Beloved and to our children.
Blessings.
The photo is me and my sister, dancing before my wedding in 1989. She died of cancer in 2012.
My sister freaks out once. “Oh, my gosh. Our parents still have boxes from their last move a decade later. What will we do when they die?”
Me: “Get a storage unit and open a box a year at Christmas for the rest of our lives.”
Her: “That could work.”
I tell my sister that we could start a magazine in response to Real Simple. “We will title it Playful Packrat.” We come from an impressive line of Packr– I mean, Collectors. Collector is honorable and respected. Packrat is, well, unfashionable. Perhaps I should title it Circumspect Collector instead. I know someone who seems to be collecting heavy equipment, which is an interesting choice. One needs more property than I have for parking.
My house would make Marie Kondo shudder. The photograph is the basement: the stack is my mother’s larger artworks. I am moving stuff around now that I am home-on-oxygen instead of running around clinic like a crazy rabbit. And like this writer, https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/maximalist-response-marie-kondo-minimalist-mandate, it ALL gives me joy. Well, ok, not the tiny ants. We are at war. My kitchen may be cluttered but by gosh it’s clean clutter because the tiny ants let me know immediately if I screw up.
Anyhow, my mother died in 2000, my sister in 2012, and my father in 2013. My parents left me their stuff and grandparent stuff, some of which I had never seen, and I still get dead people mail. The colleges and universities are the most persistent. They don’t care if someone is dead, they still mail out the Alumni Magazine. I get U of WI, Cornell, Princeton, U of Oregon, Medical College of VA, OHSU and Williston. Holy moly. U of TN and SUNY Binghamptom have lost track of us, thankfully. I wish I had kept my father’s notes on Beowulf and mailed them to Williston for their library. It would be a sort of just revenge. I still have boxes (my excuse is busy physician) so I will bet that I can find something to mail to each one of those places. Something that they want just as much as I want their Alumni Magazine. With a cover letter that says that my contribution is hidden in the documents. One dollar each.
I have too much stuff but I have now turned middle aged, that is, I am over sixty. So I now am on the downward side and decide, there needs to be outflow rather than inflow. I like my stuff but it’s time to start moving it. My mother was a prolific artist and all of the silent auctions in town will now be blessed by her art. And don’t worry, it is not awful! She has art in the Smithsonian, the National Museum of Women Artists, and a bunch of other places. See my April A to Z for details.
For my father it was books and musical instruments. I still have the guitars. I think there were twelve trumpets? A lute, a harp, a cello — the lute is in very bad shape and the others have gone to someone else and the school, respectively. Recorders, gone. I have flutes, my regular flute and then ones made out of clay, cherry, pvc pipe and bamboo, as well as a Native American flute. I am mostly playing the regular flute, Native American flute and guitar.
I am guilty of books, too. I DO want to read them all, but even if I did nothing but read for the next sixty years, I might not finish. The excuse that some are reference does not fly. Some are pure unsullied entertainment and by gosh, I am keeping those! I am not allowed to go to the book sale next week. I do have a library box but the books are not leaving at the rate they have been arriving in the last year. And it’s my fault.
Anyhow, I am enjoying my clutter. After all, we invented tables to put things on. Sometimes we do have to clear the table for the NEXT project, but no worries! There is always the floor!
Discover and re-discover Mexicoβs cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - FlΓΌchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflΓΌchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
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