Tag Archives: grief

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water

For Raynotbradbury’s “my life in percentage” challenge.

I have just returned from a vacation, a trip, a pilgrimage where I was unplugged. No list. No goals. No internet. No outlets. Just a lake and old cabins and meals and weather and quiet. Percentage, I wonder, of what? Happiness? Efficiency? Joy? Gratitude? Percentage genuine? Percentage genuine and present. What percentage is a loon at?Β  Either 0 or 100 percent and they are both the same.

We travel to the lake. It’s hard to get to from my home. We drive to a Seattle hotel for a park and fly. Stay the night. 6:08 flight Seattle to Detroit. Short layover but I know the airport, we make the gate with 120 seconds to spare. Our checked bags make it too. Flight Detroit to Sault St Marie, MI. I did not reserve a rental car soon enough to get one in Michigan, so we have a limo reserved. It’s a van. The van takes us across the border into Canada and to the Sault St Marie, ON airport, where we get a rental car. We drive to a grocery store and get a few groceries. The plane landed at 3:08, and I would like to get to the lake before dark. We drive from Sault St Marie to Blind River, and the 17 miles to the lake. We find the old boat, load in our stuff and get the four stroke started, one hour before sunset. The cabins can be reached by boat, no road. The dock was destroyed by ice so I have to pull the motor up as we come in to the pebble beach. I am just big enough to do yank the motor up. We are here. We unload.

Crazy, right? I have been describing it as “shacks on a lake”. No electricity. Propane stove and refrigerator. We used to use candles, but the fire risk is high this year. LEDs now. One cabin was built by my grandparents somewhere between 1936 and 1938. The other is a log cabin, built in the war years by a pair of French Canadians, logs chinked like tinker toys. Not quite though. It’s the log above chinked to the log below.

We set up tents and are unplugged. I have two phones. My t-mobile won’t work at all. The old I-phone will work sort of sometimes on the front rocks. I have camera batteries and take a lot of photographs.

I open my computer once at the library in two weeks.

We sleep in tents except for the two nights with major thunderstorms. It’s really the outdoors I want. The lake changes color and mood from moment to moment. I swim this year: I am way stronger than in 2015 or it’s warmer or both. We are in the cabin to eat and do dishes, but otherwise we are nearly always outside. The loons call. A family of mergansers comes up on the rock with us, 10 or 11. Otter sliding through the water. A pair of raccoons. A snapping turtle the size of a platter. Three pileated woodpeckers come to check out my flute. Three sandhill cranes by the road on the way into town. My cousins report a moose on the way into town.

The loons answer when my daughter plays violin: every time she plays the E string, they reply.

I’ve been visiting that lake since I was 5 months old. The lake, the rocks, the trees. The lake changes color every moment, changes surface mood, change. But the depths change slowly and are present, a turnover when the lake thaws in the spring and freezes in the fall.

I am the lake and the lake is me. Unplugged and being. Minimal doing. No list. Eat when hungry. Sleep so deep and swim and canoe around the lake.

I canoe and there is a woman, way across the bay. We talk. I know her last name, she knows mine. She remembers playing at our cabin with me and my sister, our long hair, running around while the adults talked about Watergate. About 1970. Her father just died in his upper 80s. He defied the doctors after a stroke a decade before, walked again and she kept bringing him to the lake. Now they are trying to maintain an old cabin, as we are.

Home again.

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My sister’s writing about the lake from 2009: Rain on water.

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Ms Boa signifies

Ms. Boa looks the way I have felt this week. And hearing that Aretha Franklin died, I think this expresses my mood.

This is for the Ragtag Daily Prompt: respect. Respect for loss, grief, and cat knowledge too.

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Princess Mittens, the cat on the left, is gone. One day she was in the living room, sitting under the vent and staring up at it. I finally paid attention and realized why.

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There was a bat in the vent. I could see claws. Ms. Boa became very interested too.

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We did get the bat out, by opening the windows upstairs and the vent. Keeping the cats downstairs.

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Ms. Boa was sad when our other cat was killed by a car.

Thank you so much for the music, Aretha Franklin.

 

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freedom

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt #76: freedom.

Immigrant children separated from parents and placed in “camps”. This is concentration camp, jail. They have not been returned to their parents: https://www.npr.org/2018/06/19/621065383/what-we-know-family-separation-and-zero-tolerance-at-the-border. This is a horror committed by my country. Return the children to their parents.

The deer were in the empty lot across the street from my clinic yesterday. Both fawns went to check in with their parent when I got out of the car with my camera. Imagine the terror of a small child whose parents have been taken away.

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Stages of Grief: anger

I am thinking of the songs that comfort me in grief.

And thinking about the stages of grief. Five, right? Denial, Bargaining, Anger, Grief and Acceptance. My sister said, “They left out Revenge and Acting Out. ” She died of cancer in 2012 at age 49. Six days after her birthday and the day after mine.

Anger songs for grief. But denial is first, right? Not necessarily. These are not stages you move through in a certain order. This is more like a spiral, where you go from one to the next and back to the start, from day to day or even hour to hour.

I’ve already written about My Name is Samuel Hall. That is an angry song, unrepentant, that my sister wanted the last time that I visited her. I knew that she was furious about dying and leaving her husband and daughter. And me and her friends.

My mother sang:

“Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I think I’ll go eat worms. Big fat slimy ones, little tiny wiggly ones, see them wiggle and squirm. Bite their heads off, suck their guts out, throw the skins away. I don’t see how anyone can live on three meals of worms a day… without dessert….”

She also taught us this:

“I don’t want to play in your back yard
I don’t like you any more
You’ll be sorry when you see me
Sliding down my cellar door”

My parents had songs for every mood I can imagine. There were moods they would not speak about but they sang them.

My favorite angry groups are The Devil Makes Three, Hank Williams III, The Offspring, and Sweet Honey in the Rock.

Sweet Honey in the Rock? Yes. They sing about death a lot. This song is not about death: it’s about a “bad” woman, wanted dead or alive. But listen to the song: they are singing about a real event and a woman who fought back against a rape. On the thirty year album of Sweet Honey in the Rock, the group says that their first “hit” was this song, played by news stations. “It was a hint that we were not going to be top 40.” The song is Joanne Little.

So here are three songs by the others:

The Offspring: Why don’t you get a job?

The Devil Makes Three: All Hail

Hank Williams III: My Drinking Problem

And how do families show anger? They fight. They fight with each other. They fight about how someone should die, what should be done about mom, whether dad can live alone any more, about the right way to grieve. They fight about small things or big things and they even sue each other. Before you wade into the fray, step back. Remember, families grieving are always a little bit insane, very stressed and it’s all grief.

Hank Williams III: Country heroes

Blessings on the people I know in hospice right now and on their families and loved ones. Third one today. Sending love.

 

 

 

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separation

This is one of the most beautiful and saddest photographs I have taken. It is my sister, about a month before she died of cancer. And her daughter, who was 13.

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On the last visit to my sister, she was in kidney failure, dying. We had conversations that were surreal. All I wanted was to stay with her.

One day a friend of hers, another mother and I, were working to make her more comfortable.

“I am sad!” my sister said, and started crying.

“Why are you sad?” I said, “What are you sad about?”

“I won’t be there! I won’t be there when she graduates from high school! I won’t be there for her first date! I won’t be there when she gets married! I don’t want to die!”

By now we are all crying. “You will be there!” I say. I am certain. “You won’t be in this form. You will be in another form!”

“I will?” my sister said, crying.

“Yes.” I said, crying too. “You have to go. You have to transform. You can’t stay. But you will be there for her.”

We cried and held her.

And I know for certain that she is there, she is here, she is with her daughter as her daughter graduates from high school, goes on a date, does all the things that daughters do.

Now and forever.

And the living children must be returned to the living parents. We cannot do otherwise and call ourselves humans.

 

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mother and child

I have a collection of parent and children pictures and sculptures. This is one. A mother ox and her baby. I was born in the Chinese Year of the Ox and so was my daughter. This little sculpture is about 3 by 2 inches, but both my daughter and I love it.

I am so proud of everyone who stood up for children yesterday, and for everyone who is saying, if it was MY child, I would want someone to stand up for them and for me.

Blessing and bring the children back to their parents.

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Taking the baby

My daughter is graduating from college. She is not very interested in it, but will go through the ceremony and process, for my sake and the sake of the family.

She and I and my son are going to do a graduation errand, turn in the money for the cap and gown or something like that. There are various errands.

We stop by a daycare. My friend B’s third child is there. A girl, a baby. I make her laugh. I take her with us on the errand.

I don’t tell anyone. I don’t even think of it. My daughter is disapproving, but my children are used to me charming strange babies in restaurants and often getting to hold them. They think that this is weird, but parents are always weird. We get to the van and I realize there is no car seat. That is beyond the pale. I also realize that I have taken this baby, no, kidnapped it, and no one knows where it is. I am horrified. My daughter drives back to the day care, my son in the other seat. “I am the car seat,” I say to the baby, knowing that I am not. It’s a VW van in the dream, with no seats in the back, a high bed to sleep on. I hold the baby and pray.

My kids drop me at the daycare. I go in, immediately bursting into tears of apology and guilt. The baby has been fine through all of this. B has already come and gone, deeply upset. The police have not been called yet, I think they suspected that it was me being an idiot. The woman who runs the daycare takes the baby. I am terrified that B and her family have driven to Eastern Washington and I want to offer to take the baby to them at this instant, but I know that no one will trust me with this baby. Ever again.

And I don’t deserve to be trusted.

A man is there. He says that B is working at a restaurant. I want to go to her, to apologize, but I am crying just thinking about it. I would be disruptive. He will go tell her. He leaves.

I wait, guilty. The baby is changed and tucked into a bassinet, safe.

B comes. She looks grey and worn. I am crying. She sees me and goes down on her knees, covering her face, bent forward. I am crying, “I am sorry, I am so sorry, please forgive me!” I am hugging her, “Please will you still be my friend.” She says nothing.

I wake up.

My daughter has two years to graduation. B does not have a third child. Our van is a Ford, with seven seats. My children are the right ages in the dream, young adults. I have not been in a daycare for years. I don’t know either the woman running the daycare or the man. In the dream they are acquaintances, archetypes, people I know but not specific people from my daytime world.

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Mundane Monday #166: parent and child

My theme for Munday Monday #165 is parent and child.

I have this small statue in my clinic. I have a small collection of parent/child and mother/child art that I have collected for years. I was separated from my mother at birth, from my father and his family at 4 months and back to my mother and father at 9 months. I was sure that adults loved me but I did not trust them: they kept abandoning me.

As an adult I understand that it was because my mother had active tuberculosis and that the first separation saved my life. But…. I can love people, but trust must be earned.

A patient said last week that I had a political statement in my waiting room. “I do?” I said. He was talking about this statue.

If this is a political statement, I stand by it.

Attach your parent child picture, political statement or not. And much love and hope for every parent and child and love.

One entry from last week, Mundane Monday #165: sand:

KL Allendorfer: Sand.

 

 

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The introverted thinker and the giant

My mother tells this story:

“The introverted thinker is three. I tell her to clean up her toys. She has a mat with cardboard houses and cars. I hear her in the other room, talking. First a low voice, then very high voices.

Low voice: “Stomp, stomp, stomp.”

High voices: “No, no, help, help! Run, run!” (small crashing sounds).

Low voice: “I am a giant, stomp, stomp.”

I peek in the room. The introverted thinker is kicking all the houses and cars over, being a giant. Then she cleans up the houses and the cars.”

And my mother laughs, and everyone who listens.

 

And do adults feel like giants to children sometimes? Giants in uniform who take their parents away? And can the child do anything? How helpless they may feel.Β 

My son took this picture of his sister.