Category Archives: death is part of life

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Niels Ingwersen: My best professor

My best professor in college was Dr. Niels Ingwersen.

I went to the University of Wisconsin, Madison because it had a Scandinavian Department. I had gone to Denmark as an exchange student during my high school senior year. I had to come back and finish high school. I needed US and Virginia Government and Twelfth grade english. I chose to do them at the Community College instead of returning to high school.

I went to the Danish embassy in Washington DC and asked about colleges where I could continue to learn Danish. They recommended three: U WI Madison, U WA Seattle and Austin, TX. My parents said that Washington was too far away. I thought there was more chance to ski in Wisconsin, so that was the only college I applied to. Good thing I got in, right?

The first class I took in the Scandinavian Department was with Niels Ingwersen, his HC Andersen class. It was packed. It was known as a fun and informative class that would fulfill an english requirement. I was fascinated because Dr. Ingwersen talked about the politics, the economics, the story behind Hans Christian Andersen’s stories.

I begged permission to write stories myself for the required paper and he let me. I moved in to graduate student classes, because I wanted to take anything he would teach.

I took a class on the modern scandinavian novel. We had five students and him. It was on Thursday afternoon from 2 to 5 pm. None of us could stay awake. In the third class Niels said, “How about we move this class to peoples’ houses? We will take turns hosting and bring potluck.” We also brought wine and the class blossomed. Instead of three hours it ended up being 5 or 6. We would stray from literary criticism into politics, world events, economics, biology, whatever. It was fun!

We each had to choose a book to read. I was tired of books about depressed alcoholics and asked him for a recommendation. He said, “How about Livsens Ondskab?” Life’s Malice. Written in the late 1800s, it’s a mocking and dark comedy about the people in a small town and how funny and awful they are. I loved it.

I applied for a summer honors scholarship, to translate Livsens Ondskab. Niels was gone for the summer, to the U of WA. I sent him questions about the translation. “How much were you going to translate?” he asked. “All of it!” I said. I worked out that I needed to do five pages a day. Some days were quick and some were slow, slow, slow.

Niels was my favorite professor because he was not only a wonderful teacher but also a really nice person. Hard to find that delightful combination, but worth it if you do.

http://host.madison.com/news/local/education/former-uw-madison-professor-niels-ingwersen-dies-at/article_1d0fe552-d491-11de-8d48-001cc4c002e0.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Ingwersen

For the daily post prompt We can be taught!

The photo is my sister, about when I started college. I think Niels made me laugh that way.

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My mom loved me

My mom loved me

It’s herself she didn’t love
She didn’t love her anger
She didn’t love her fear
She didn’t love her sorrow
She didn’t love her shadows

She packed all her troubles in her saddlebags
and rode forth singing.

When I was angry
she felt her anger
When I was scared
she felt her fear
When I was sad
she felt her sorrow
When I felt my shadows
she felt hers
I hid my shadows

I hid my shadows for many years
and then my saddlebags were full
They called me

I dove in the sea
I rescued my anger
I rescued my fear
I rescued my sorrow
I rescued my shadows

At first I couldn’t love them
My mom didn’t; how could I?

But I loved my mom
I loved all of her
Her anger
Her fear
Her sorrow
Her shadows
Her singing and courage

I thought if I could love her shadows
I could love my own

It was hard
It took months
I looked in the mirror at my own face
And slowly I was able to have
Compassion for myself

I am sad that my mom is not
where I can touch her warmth
and tell her I love all of her
I tell her anyway

I’m finding many things as I surface from my dive
Sometimes I feel the presence of angels
I was looking for something else
I found a valentine
that she made me
No date
Many hearts cut out and glued
to red paper

I am so surprised

My mom loves me
shadows and all
now and  forever.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child Sweet Honey in the Rock

I took the photo of my mother working at the etching press while I was in college.
This was previously posted on everything2.com in 7/2014 and written before that.

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The future of medicine

we recognize the true embodied mind
we stop the stigma of the many beaten down
the damage done in childhood caught in time
hearts open and lift the broken off the ground

we learn that diagnoses are a crutch
drugs plaster over deep and seeping wounds
mental labels hurt the patients oh so much
we learn to listen: broken hearts sing grieving tunes

cruel medicines and thoughts are shelved for good
gentle boundaries surround hearts to keep them safe
we rise as friends and families and doctors really should
the angry monster revealed as longing waif

damage done in childhood to the brain
lays survival pathways that we no longer call insane

The photo is me and my sister Chris. I do not know who took it, but I think it was at my maternal grandparents. They are deceased, my parents are deceased, my sister is deceased. I don’t know who to credit.

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Painting Angels II

Painting Angels II

After my mother died, I wrote a poem called Painting Angels. It was about my kids’ comments about her death, but also about her being an artist. I wondered whether she was painting the sky or sunsets or clouds. She loved watercolors.

I was driving to the Boiler Room yesterday and came to the hill going down to Water Street and the sunrise was glorious. The leading edge of the front caught fire and there were yellow and orange and pink streaks up into the clouds.

I think my mother and my sister helped paint that sky. I stopped and took photos with my phone until I got too cold and the sun was up.

Thank you, mom. It was a beautiful show in the sky. I lost my mother in 2000, my only sister in 2012 and my father in 2013. I feel that the show has been blessed, and that getting my mother’s artwork out of storage fourteen years after her death and showing it is the right thing to do.

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The Mother Daughter Show II

Over the last two days, I hung the Mother Daughter Show II, at the Boiler Room in Port Townsend, Washington. It will be up for the month of December.

This time it is the joint work my mother and I did in the 1980s. She did etchings to go with nine of my poems. The tenth poem was written for an etching she had already done. I asked my mother if she would do this project with me and she replied, “Only if the poems rhyme. None of that free verse stuff.”

I worked on the poems, I think with my mother’s etching style in mind. She used a zinc plate, with a tar solution on it. She would do a drawing in the tar, usually with a dental tool. The plate was placed in acid, which would etch where the tar had been scraped away. She would etch the plate multiple times, which gave different depths to the etched lines.

When the plate was finished, she would remove the tar and run an artist’s proof. She would heat the plate on a metal hot plate. She would ink it and then gently wipe the ink off until there was a very thin layer on the unetched parts of the plate. This had to be done delicately, so that the ink was not wiped out of the etching lines. She would place the plate on the press, place a piece of wet paper gently over the plate, lower the thick pile of wool pads over the paper and run the press. After the plate had gone through, the paper was peeled up and there was an etching, with the edges of the plate pressed into the paper.

Sometimes she was not satisfied and would return to the tar and change the etching. Sometimes she ran multiple proofs until she had the color right. Then she would run an edition. The print and poems are editions of fifty. Each etching is signed and numbered: 1/50, 2/50, 3/50, and so forth. We had the poems printed first, on a lead type press, and then my mother ran the etchings. We had a show in the late 1980s in Alexandria, Virginia.

My mother died in 2000. My father died in 2013. My mother was a prolific artist, so trying to deal with the estate felt insane. I put the art in a storage unit. When I had The Mother Daughter Show in July, it felt like a remembrance of my mother. And anyhow, I have to do something with the art in that storage unit, don’t I?

I find the etchings easier to show and sell then the watercolors. I want to clutch each watercolor, but eventually I will start to let go of them. I have the etching plates, too, because my mother said she was terrible at finishing editions. I have the box of poems printed on the lead press and the guides for running the edition. I do not have the press. My sister took it to California and it disappeared. That is ok, because there are presses in Port Townsend. There is a big art community, which is part of why my parents moved to this area in 1996. Art, music, gardens and boats.

My mother did many small fantasy etchings, flying elephants, fairies, a mermaid, a merman. The poems I sent her were almost all about animals. I wrote Eating Water Hyacinths and my mother did a charming etching of two manatees. She looked in various books to see what manatees looked like and then drew them. I wrote a blue crab poem and we bought a live crab. I photographed her drawing the crab, which was skittering around unhappily on the dining room floor. I enjoyed the constraint of rhymes. It made it easier to write the poems, though I am not sure why.

I have six of the series hanging in the show. I don’t currently have the other four framed. The Gallery Walk is this Saturday. I hope that people will come and perhaps we will sell one. We are also going to show the Panda Minimum, outside. The Panda Minimum is a mountain bike camping trailer, a bit like a teardrop trailer, designed and built by a local friend. We will have it outside the Boiler Room. I’ve already told the friend that I think the Panda will steal all the thunder and the art on the wall will be ignored, but ah, well. I have a third show scheduled, for June and July, at another venue. It is easier to do shows of my mother’s artwork than my own, because I think she was so good.

Also published on everything2 today.

The Boiler Room: http://www.ptbr.org/

Donate to the Boiler Room! Or come to the auction, also tomorrow!

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Painting Angels

You were an artist
You are an artist
You said that you’d have to live to 120 to finish all your projects
And died at 61
I keep wondering
what the art supplies are like
and if you work on sunsets
or mountains
or lakes

Trey, 9
made a clay fish last summer that I admire.
He said grumpily “It’s too bad Grandma Helen died before I could do clay with her.”
He tells me he’s ready to make raku pots for fire in your ashes as you wished
I ask what he’d make
He considers and says, “What was Grandma Helen’s favorite food?”
I can’t think and say that she liked lots of foods
At the same time wondering squeamishly if maybe
he should make a vase and then being surprised
that I am squeamish and thinking of blood and wine,
too, I wonder if my dad would know. “Maybe guacamole.”
I need to find a potter to apprentice him to.

Camille, 4.
asks how old Grandma Helen was when she died.
I explain that she died at 61 but her mother died at 92.
Camille asks how old I am.
40.
When are you going to die?
I say I don’t know, none of us do, but I hope it’s more towards 90.

Camille studies me and is satisfied for now.
She goes off.
I think of you.

I perpetuate
the Christmas cards you did with us
upon my children
They each draw a card.
We photocopy them and hand paint with watercolors.
Camille wants to draw an angel
and says she can’t.
I draw a simple angel
and have her trace it.
She has your fierce concentration
bent over tracing through the thick paper
She wants it right.
The angel is transformed.

My kids resist the painting after a few cards as I did too.
Each time I paint the angel
to send to someone I love
I think of Camille
and you
and genes
and Heaven
I see you everywhere

published in Mama Stew: An Anthology: Reflections and Observations on Mothering, edited by Elisabeth Rotchford Haight and Sylvia Platt c. 2002

written January 19, 2002

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Fraud in medicine: oxygen

My father died of emphysema in June of 2013. I found him dead on the floor of his house. I expected this because he was nearly a hermit, but it was still hard.

He was on oxygen. It was prescribed to be continuous.

I started cleaning up the house and trying to find his will. I lined up oxygen tanks and called the oxygen company. There were ten tanks.

The oxygen company picked up the tanks.

I found eight more. I was very busy with a large house, a complicated estate, two years of unpaid taxes, he paid bills on line but had not updated the payments when costs increased……

I hired a local estate sale group. They did an excellent job. The house was sold. I picked up the last few things, including the oxygen tanks.

I called the oxygen company. “Why did my father have 18 oxygen tanks?”

They said, “We delivered them as needed.”

I said, “He didn’t need 18 tanks.”

They said, “They are paid for.”

Oh! Medicare paid for the oxygen. No, not medicare. You and he and I paid for it, because we pay taxes to medicare and medicare pays the oxygen company. Well, 80% and then my father paid the other 20% unless he had a medicare secondary insurance, which he also pays for…. Oh, are you under 65 and thought medicare paid for everything once you got it? Sorry to disillusion you…..My father  was supposed to be on oxygen continuously. So the company kept delivering it at the intervals covered by medicare, even though he was not using it all. He sometimes didn’t wear his oxygen and he also had bought his own oxygen concentrator, smaller and easier to move than the one from the oxygen company.

I was furious. “So you kept delivering oxygen even though it was not all being used. And kept charging.”

They said, “We delivered it when it was needed.”

Liars. They delivered more than was needed and I gave some back to them, after medicare had already paid for it.

I still have 8 tanks of oxygen. After all, it’s paid for by medicare, by my taxes and by your taxes. The oxygen is paid for. The tanks belong to the company. I’ll return them when they are empty….. I don’t think the corporation should be able to charge medicare for it twice…..

I should check to see if the company reimbursed medicare and my father for the oxygen when it was returned. If not, I can check into filing a fraud complaint with medicare against the company. But even if they reimbursed medicare and my father’s estate, I am still angry that they kept delivering it when they knew darn well that he had tanks already. Or maybe they don’t even keep track of how many tanks they’ve given out. It’s all about money.

Fight back against corporate greed and fraud. Ask questions. Do not give the oxygen back if it’s been paid for….. give it to someone who needs it instead.

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Humans should behave more like sisters

Humans should behave more like sisters.

My sister and I played together. We’d get angry. We’d fight! We’d sulk! We’d complain to the grown ups! We’d slam doors! We’d ignore each other!

But in the end, there was often no one else to play with. So we would make up. And we loved each other.

I miss my sister so much.

Can’t we learn to love other humans and quit being stupid? Please?

The photo was taken at my wedding by the groom’s uncle in 1989.

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If you have to cry, do it on the boyfriend who wants you to be angry instead of sad

I used to have a temper that could be set off really really easily.

I had a boyfriend right out of college that said that I didn’t get angry “right”. He had a PhD and I was a mere done with undergraduate person, so what did I know? I went into counseling for a year.

Finally I said to him, “The counselor and I have tried presenting anger to you in every possible form and none of it is acceptable. So now she says you need to come to counseling too.”

His response: “What I want is for you to never get angry at me again.”

Mine: “You are dreaming.”

And so he broke up with me. Immediately. And said I was an ogre when I was angry.

I went back to counseling and was depressed for a year. Then I cheered up, met a boyfriend and went to medical school. I worked on my temper, remembering the ogre comment. I did not want to be an ogre. My boyfriend became my husband and he really liked my dark side and my silly side.

My sister was the person who could set me off angry the most easily. She and I fought like pitbulls, like honey badgers. Once we were in Colorado with my husband, her first husband and my parents. The two husbands had an imitation pretend fight acting as me and my sister. They were vicious. It was horribly embarassing and also funny, because they nailed us both.

In residency in Portland, I had a breakthrough. My sister was divorced from the first husband by then, and with the no meat, no dairy, really pain in the butt boyfriend. We were having a big party, lots of people, grilling salmon and cooking in a group. My sister walked in.

“Oh.” I said, “You didn’t RSVP.”

She fired up instantly. “What? Why does that matter? Do you want me to leave?”

I did not fire up. I held my breath and then said, “No. But if you are here with No Meat No Milk, I didn’t make any food for him, because I did not know you were coming. There is lots of food. You are both welcome to stay, but he will have to figure out his own food.” Then I held my breath again.

There was a long pause. My sister had her breath drawn in and held. She looked like she was going to explode. But I had answered quietly. She really had nothing to explode at.

“We will stay then,” she said, grudgingly. And there was No Meat No Milk. I was pretty happy when she ditched him. But I was also happy that I had not exploded back at her.

That was when I really got control of my temper. Not that I never lost it again, but I was no longer an ogre. I could hold it with my sister. My husband could set me off, but when I stepped back and started recording what he said and my responses, I could hold it there too.

After we divorced, I had one boyfriend who moved in. I had joked to a friend that my family had a lot of enablers and enablees, but that the latter lived longer. I said if I had to be one or the other, the latter seemed better for longevity.

And that boyfriend showed up immediately. I had just been “strongly encouraged” by my employer local hospital to open my own private practice. That is, I was not seeing patients. I was writing a business plan. I met him in a bar, salsa dancing. He said I was cute and I said, “No, I’m prickly.” I swear, it was that sentence and my dancing that attracted him. I always grin like a fool when I’m dancing. I love it. It lights me up.

Anyhow, I got mad at him exactly twice before he moved in. Boy did he come down on me for getting mad and punished me very thoroughly. By now you are wondering why I let him move in and frankly I was too. But my intuition was running the show and I just let it.

Well, he had kissed me like crazy at the start of the relationship. He stopped kissing me, almost as he moved in. He had insomnia. He’d fixed up one of the two upstairs bedrooms. He started sleeping with me less and less and sleeping in the other room, on cushions.

I would wake, worry. I started moving too. I moved to the guest room. I moved to the couch. Once I was out of the theoretically shared bed, I could go back to sleep. He protested that I shouldn’t move. Why not? I was getting insomnia from worrying about him leaving more and more.

He said we’d need couples counseling eventually. I said, ok, and scheduled it. He said, “I didn’t mean now!” I said, “Well, seemed like we might as well get it out of the way.”

He told the counselor I needed to either cut my sister off or do what she said, but instead, I was present and disobeidient. My sister had metastatic breast cancer and we came from an alcohol addiction family. Can you say complicated relationship?

I explained to the counselor that I thought many patients with cancer end up in a “cancer bubble”. Everyone tries to do what they say because they have cancer. This isolates them and does damage to the relationship. I was trying to stay present and real. That is, I did not obey. I was getting pressure from other people to obey, because my sister would complain about me. Whatever.

The counselor thought I was reasonable. I brought up the sleep issues. The boyfriend cancelled the counseling, saying that he needed a break.

At six months living together, he was saying that he might need to go back to the city to work. Two hours away. And I still was not doing what he wanted re my sister.

Counseling again. Again my behavior to my sister was examined. Same story. I turned to him. “I hear you saying you may need to return to the city for work. I hear you saying you may need to move there. What I don’t hear you saying is darling, we will get through a long distance relationship. Are you breaking up with me and not telling me?”

Long silence.

The counselor said, “You need to answer her.”

He finally said, “I wasn’t going to tell you until after I moved.”

I cried. We left. I kept crying.

He said, “You are angry and you are going to throw me out on the street.”

“No!” I said, “I am sad! You move out when you are ready! We will remain friends!”

So then I cried buckets. I cried on him, buckets. I cried every time I saw him, I cried daily, I cried about him, about my sister, about alcoholism, about the hospital getting rid of me. I cried about everything. I cried on him daily.

For six months. He kept saying “You are angry. You are throwing me out.” But I didn’t. I just cried more.

He moved out on the weekend I returned from seeing my sister in hospice for the last time. Her birthday was March 23. I saw her last on March 22. My birthday was March 28. She died March 29. He moved out on the 26th and 27th. I was not mad, I just cried and cried and cried.

I think that he was looking for an angry girlfriend. He thought he’d found her when I said I was prickly. He would have been the enabler and I would have been the angry dysfunctional enablee. It turns out that I was not really interested in being an enablee. Now I want a healthy relationship.

So that is my recommendation. If you have to cry, do it on the boyfriend who wants you to be angry instead of sad.