Sol Duc and Elwha study the mystery of the sweat pants cords. Why do they move so intriguingly sometimes and at other times lie on the floor and do nothing?
The mystery
Category Archives: love
wild cluster
The boss
“My kitchen,” says Sol Duc.
how to relax
wearing sunglasses in the rain
Trigger warning: this is about dementia. I wrote this over ten years ago.
wearing sunglasses in the rain
I am weeping for you both
you have cared for her
for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and health
and she has lost her memory
you told me on the phone
that it’s not that bad
you say it again in the room
I knew before I saw her
that it was bad, very bad, much worse
she is only 60
she becomes agitated when we try to weigh her
old style doctor’s scale
frightens her to try to step up.
gentle caregiver that you have hired
pushes her, until I say stop, stop, stop
her weight does not matter
shuffling gait
she is frightened to be in a new place
I ask her questions gently
she does not want to sit in the chair in the exam room
“No!” she says “No!”
I leave the room until she’s calmer
when I return
I give her choices
“Shall I examine you first with my stethoscope
or shall I talk to your husband?”
I choose for her, the latter
she relaxes, a little
later, I tell her each step before I do it
she is slightly tense when I lay the stethoscope
on her thin shoulders, but she doesn’t fight
she tenses as I ask her husband questions
about the memory loss
ten years now, a steady course
I ask him what he understands about the prognosis
he shifts uncomfortably
and I ask her if she would like to wait in the waiting room
while I talk to him
Firm and clear: “Yes, I would.”
She is not in the room now
he says that she is not too bad
the picture comes slowly in to focus
mild memory loss, is what he thinks
there are three stages of memory loss, I say
mild, the short fibers, where short term memory is affected
we forget what someone just said
moderate, the medium axons
we forget the recipe that we’ve know for 50 years
we forget how to do math
we forget names and how to get to the store
we forget how to operate the car
severe, the long axons
executive function
we do not initiate things
we forget to get dressed
we forget how to speak
we forget our potty training
his eyes grow sadder and sadder
at last, we return to being a baby
we forget everything
at last, we remember the womb
we no longer want to eat
is she forgetting to eat?
he is not ready to answer
as we leave the room
he says that she is not sleeping well
she seems to be awake at night
eyes closed
but her fingers are moving, as in play
he doesn’t speak to her
he needs to sleep and thinks she should too
should he give her a sleeping pill?
maybe she is happy, I say
maybe in bed in the dark
you are there and it is safe
no one is making her get dressed
no one is making her bathe
maybe that is where she wants to be awake
I would not give her a sleeping pill
the dogs are in the room
he says
and the tv is on just a little
maybe she is happy
he is wearing sun glasses
as they cajole and help her in to the van
he is wearing sun glasses
though it is overcast, low clouds and raining
sometimes it is so hard
to say what I see
to try to say the truth
sometimes the truth is not gentle
but sometimes the truth is love
I am weeping for you both
written 2010
Rest in the woods
Walking in the woods or on the beach, fear and worry and anger fall away. No headphones because I want to hear the birds and the waves and the other people. I took this a few days ago.
Playlist: Stages of Grief 3
Stages of Grief Playlist 3
All women all the time today. Grieving for their men or our culture. Fighting back.
Denial
Dolly Parton: The Grass is Blue
Bargaining
Ann Peebles: I canβt stand the rain
Anger
Lily Allen: Not Fair
Acting Out/Fighting Back
Sweet Honey in the Rock: Give Your Hands to Struggle
Revenge
Dolly Parton: Silver Dagger
Grief
Tricia Walker: The Heart of Dixie
Acceptance
Bessie Smith: You been a good old wagon
don’t kill your clients
I wrote this in 2016, when at least nine people died of overdoses in Vancouver, BC at Christmas, from fentanyl. I knew fentanyl was hitting my corner of the Washington State too. Warning, this contains a lot of swearing (edited so this does not become a “mature” site). I was in a very bad mood when I wrote it. It is meant to be black humor, to help me deal with grief.
But the news today is STILL talking about fentanyl and overdose: https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/12/us/west-point-cadets-overdose-fentanyl/index.html. When will we ever learn? And also, drug dealers are not actually trustworthy…. your cocaine might contain fentanyl. Don’t do it.
donβt kill your clients
oh, you think I’m talking to physicians….
….no, I’m talking to my fellow dealers.
See, heroin is rather labor intensive to produce, being from the opium poppy and all that. (When people say “I only take natural supplements.” I want to say, “You mean like opium and heroin? You know, plant based.”) Also, Afganistan, those fungkers shoot you as soon as look at you. It turns out that fentanyl is cheaper to make and you can source the ingredients from China.
And then, you can make fake oxycodone tabs and fake hydrocondone pills and sell them for bitcoin on the silk road. But you know, ya gotta mix the sheet right. If you mix it wrong and a buncha people overdose and die, there are complaints. Ya might get some scared clients, like, junkie friends of junkies. And then there are also those chronic pain people who aren’t junkies but been forced onto the streets to treat they habit, I mean, pain. We got a good thing going, the pill thing, because the junkies think that pills is safer than heroin. You might scare the fungkers and then how the fungk will I be able to buy that island with my bitcoin?
So dealers, ya’ll fungkheads, ya messing it up if you don’t get the goddarn mix right. See, fentanyl is not routinely tested for on the blood and urine drug screens. So the person gets labelled as an oxycodone overdose and no one knows that it’s fake pills. But when there are too many deaths, the goddarn feds and doctors get suspicious and start testing the pills.
Same with heroin. Cheapens things to cut it with fentenyl. But you gotta calculate right, because if you kill a whole bunch of clients at once, 1. you cut into profits 2. you make the cops and docs suspicious. You gonna ruin it for everyone, you goddarn morons.
And now I hear we got a new mix. Carfentanil, an elephant tranquilizer. Read the recipes carefully, morons, it’s 10,000 times as strong as morphine, you gotta dilute the sheet 10,000 times. Don’t you know math? Take a goddarn chemistry course.
Don’t fungk things up for the responsible drug dealers. A live client keeps on paying.
Be careful out there.
Stages of Grief Playlist 2
Wait, another? We don’t go through the stages of grief once. We go around and around, like a spiral. Some days we want to lie down in the driveway and just not move. Others it seems like the there might be a tiny bit of sun in the world after all. A mourning handout from the American Academy of Family Practice writes about a culture where one is considered “legitimately crazy” for a year after the death of someone loved. The person is allowed to be emotional, complain, wear their bathrobe all day and call people at 3 am.
Maybe we are all in that stage right now.
Stages of Grief Playlist 2
Denial
The Offspring: Pretty Fly for a White Guy
Bargaining
Kate and Anna McGarrigle: Hard Times Come Again No More
Anger
The Offspring: The opioid diaries
Acting Out
Nathanial Ratcliff and the Night Sweats: SOB
Revenge
Bessie Smith: Young Womanβs Blues
Grief
Over the Rhine: Let it Fall
Acceptance
Sweet Honey in the Rock: Run, Mourner, Run
AtoZ Theme Reveal
My theme for the April AtoZ blog challenge this year is art. I think it will mostly be my mother’s art. She died in 2000 of ovarian cancer. My only sibling died in 2012 of breast cancer and my father in 2013 of emphysema. And I have the art: my parents were both packrats and trying to deal with the house and an out of date will took about three years. Moving stuff around, getting rid of stuff. The art initially went in to a storage unit and then into my house. My mother Helen Burling Ottaway was prolific! And she kept every single piece of art and her diaries back to high school! I found a suitcase with my grandfather’s poetry as well: that will be for another day.
This painting is of my sister. My mother started oils later in her career and Michael Platt, a DC artist, said something like, “Quit doing tiny things. Do something big.” My mother started doing life size and larger than life portraits in chalk pastel and in oils. This painting captures my sister when she was twenty: emotions. I like it but I also think that it is frightening.
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