Being mortal

When the Fogies were around the age I am now they announced that, when they got too old, they would sail into the Bermuda Triangle and vanish from this dimension. They never actually defined “too old”. Nor did they ever acquire a boat, or learn how to float one. But as far as I can tell that really was pretty much the full extent of their planning for the final stage of their lives.

As it turned out, they downsized a couple times, and eventually moved into a tiny apartment in a senior housing complex. It was more cramped than it needed to be because the Olde Buzzard never actually retired, and although his clients (he was a PR consultant) drifted away one-by-one, he refused to give up his gigantic desk and related paraphernalia. So, to the Marmeee’s enormous frustration, his “office” occupied about half their living room space. But that room opened onto a covered stoep, where the Olde Buzzard spent many hours building the framework for Marmeee’s garden. Beyond their tiny garden there was a common area – green lawn, and trees loud with the birds that used to bum off them when they sat out on the stoep to eat their lunch. A pair of plovers raised a family nearby every year, and toward the end of every afternoon the hadedas would fly overhead, shrieking. And they had lots of friendly human neighbors, too.

It was only after Marmeee died that we had to move the Olde Buzzard into a facility specializing in Alzheimer’s patients. That place was also quite homey, and although his room was small it also opened directly onto a garden. Not that it mattered, really. He didn’t have to be there long; he moved on just a couple months after she did.

Anyway, maybe not having much of a plan wasn’t such a problem for them. I mean, maybe the Bermuda Triangle would have been more interesting … But on the other hand they may have ended up being vivisected by some otherworldly mad scientist … Or even being passed over as unworthy of interest, their little boat eternally becalmed in the middle of the Sargasso Sea. Instead, they got to watch their plover neighbors and grow flowers, and I think, by the time they got there, it was enough.

Between them – supervised and assisted by passing wildlife – Marmeee and the Olde Buzzard created gardens everywhere they lived. And this didn’t change just because they got old and had to downsize.

Sometimes, when I get mad at the Hubbit for glomming down more than his share of pie or ice cream, I threaten to put him in a home the day diabetes eats his legs and dumps him in a wheelchair. I wish this were an empty threat, but realistically he’s too heavy for me to lift. I end the threat with, “And don’t think I’m going to live in some crappy little studio apartment so that you can afford to go to a nice home!” Again realistically, even if he went into a cheaper facility, this is America, the Land Of Fuck-All Is Free, and I’d probably end up sleeping in my car. I’ve always been pretty easy-come, easy-go with money, and the Hubbit refuses to think about it at all … so, yeah, not a lot of late-life-stage planning happening here.

Mind you, sleeping in my car is sort of part of my game plan for after he wanders off into the Great Workshop In The Sky – assuming he does so (a) before I head for the Heavenly Library And Chocolate Shoppe and (b) before I achieve an extreme level of decrepitude. I’ve thought for a while that the best way to see America – which is something I’ve not done enough of in the quarter century I’ve lived here, the Hubbit not really being one for travel – is from the (admittedly questionable and probably over-romanticized) perspective of a van. So … the plan is a van, and then we’ll see. It’s not much of a plan, but it’s what I’ve got. And after all, if there’s one thing I learned last year it’s that you can’t depend on life to follow a plan. So, you know … why get hung up on making any?

I have a friend who’s a bit older than I, and in way better health, frankly, but she’s getting forgetful, and that scares her because her parents both developed quite advanced Alzheimer’s before they popped off. She lives alone – that is, her son inhabits a room in her house but he really lives inside his gaming computer. In any case, he’s not the nurturing type. So her plan is to off herself as soon as she feels she’s seriously lost the plot. She used to have an actual deadline to do this, but then the deadline year came, and she was busy, and her forgettery wasn’t actually interfering with her quality of life. Plus when I mentioned it a little while ago, in a spirit of friendly mockery (because how else does one respond when a friend is chatting about her suicide plan?) she’d forgotten ever having had a deadline – and since I don’t particularly want her to do herself in so long as I’m capable of fixing us a couple of mugs of rooibos tea, I changed the subject.

I really don’t think she’s ever going to get worse than moderately dotty. She’s healthy, active and energetic, involved with friends and volunteer activities, engaged in caring for a huge menagerie – horses, dogs, cats and birds. She’s conscious of the need to take care of herself, and she’s far too bloody-minded to tolerate anyone trying to tell her how to live. Also, she has me to hassle her to Write It Down, and Use Your GPS, and Remember The Last Time You Did That? Yeah – You Have Done It Before And This Is What Happened So Maybe Do Something Different This Time, Okay? But nonetheless there’s a flaw in her plan, in that she’s relying on her brain to tell her when her brain doesn’t work any more.

So I’m her backup plan. In her mind this means I’m named executor in her will. Once she’s “taken care of business” I will be responsible for selling her house, providing for her animals, and handing whatever is left in her estate to her son so he can find some more convenient place to set up his computer. (He doesn’t drive, so if she’s not around to ferry him he needs to move closer to town.) In my mind it also means I get a power of attorney, so that if she wakes up one day and can’t remember how to wipe her own bottom I can sell her house, provide for her animals, set the son free to follow his dreams, and pay for her care in the best place her money can buy. (She’s a good friend, but I’m probably not going to be the one doing any butt-wiping. And I’ve also firmly rejected her suggestion that I remind her that it’s time and hand her the pill bottle, pistol, or whatever.) So that’s her plan, and I think it’s a good plan … provided I outlive her.

It just occurred to me, dear reader, that I might owe you an apology. I really don’t mean for this to be a Grow-Old-And-Die Blog, and I’m sorry that’s been so much a focus here lately. I do think about other things – in fact I mostly think about lots of other things – but what got me writing about this today is a book I’ve just finished reading that’s set me to pondering the Important Stuff. I want to tell you about it, because I cannot recommend it too highly for anyone who expects to get old and/or die, or who is closely involved with anyone who is likely to experience getting old and/or dying.

Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande, is a doctor’s thoughtful discussion about how modern Western medicine has lost its way in terms of meeting the needs of aging and dying patients. And he talks about how we might choose a different way.

For starters, he questions our assumption that doctors are the people we should be turning to for much of this care – because not all aspects of one’s hoary decline are medical. The problem with Western doctors, he says, is that they’re focused on fixing things. And when something can’t be fixed they don’t really know what to do with it, so they get stuck in a cycle of flinging fixes at the unfixable, often to the great detriment of the patient’s quality of life. Even when they want to recommend that a patient pass on further treatment, often they don’t know how – and the patients don’t get it; they think the doctor doesn’t care. Add just a soupcon of scare politics – dire warnings about “Death Panels”, for example – and any suggestion that people should, at some point, be allowed to quietly lie down and, you know, die … well, “cruel and unusual” doesn’t begin to cover the standard American reaction.

Or, when the doctor says a treatment might give them “a little more time”, they don’t understand that the doctor is thinking in terms of months, for which they will likely pay dearly in suffering. So they embark on suffering expecting years, and the end is heartbreak and devastation.

I’m not suggesting that doctors don’t have a role to play in keeping us going, of course. The guy with the scythe tapped me on the shoulder a year and a half ago, as you know, and then again last August, because – according to my doctor – custardy blood is “one of those things that happens as we age”. So, thank you, Western Medicine, that I’m here now and writing this instead of … not. And thank you also for putting the Hubbit back together each of the many times he tried to take himself apart, and for keeping him trundling along despite rusty joints and creaking organs.

But one can think of this kind of care as being on a spectrum – and over on the darker side of the spectrum is the case of my old friend Gummy. He was in a home when I met him – one of the better ones, but it still smelled of shit and boiled vegetables, and the residents spent most of their days scattered about the place in their wheelchairs, staring at the walls. Sometimes they sat in rows, side-by-side, but you never saw them talking. An hour or two before mealtimes they’d start working their way to the dining hall, and they’d sit around tables, staring sometimes at the tablecloth, sometimes at the door to the kitchen, still not talking.

I met Gummy outside church one holiday weekend, when he was slumped in his wheelchair waiting for the facility bus to pick him up. I chirpily asked him, “And what will you be doing tomorrow?” and he dealt me a withering stare and said, “What do you think I’ll be doing?” So I, shamed into being real, started visiting him, and that progressed to occasional outings and invitations to holiday dinners, and for a while he was pretty much part of the family.

He was slow, soooo sloooowww, and as the years passed he got slower. Sometimes, at first, and then later most times, he’d fall asleep mid-conversation when I visited him. We had the same conversations over and over again… I was so sad when, at last, I attended his memorial service and his older friends and colleagues shared their memories of him. I’d known him for years by then, but there was so much I hadn’t known, because we simply didn’t have those conversations.

Anyway, back to the point of this post … I used to accompany him to medical appointments, and one day … I forget the details, but I think he was having difficulty swallowing. The doctor, like most of them, tried to insist on talking to me – because waiting for Gummy to ponder a question and then, sooo sloooowwwly, whisper the answer, cost money, I guess. Or maybe he thought he was stupid as well as slow. In any case, as always, I glared and told him, “Just give him time – he’ll get there. He can speak for himself!”

Only on that occasion he couldn’t. And I quickly realized I was also out of my depth.

Or maybe it was the doctor who didn’t explain his options properly. The doctor, a middle-aged Asian man who kept his firm body packaged inside his smooth skin as neat and tidy as pork sausage in its casing, was clearly uncomfortable with the conversation.

He explained that difficulty swallowing was “one of those things that happen when you get old.” He said Gummy had two options: to continue eating as best he could, or to have a feeding tube surgically inserted into his stomach. He warned that there could be complications with feeding tubes … I don’t remember what the potential complications were. What I do remember is that the doctor really, really didn’t want him to have one. The doctor clearly thought it was time for him to just … let … go. To go gentle into that dark night.

But he couldn’t say that, especially with me glaring at him, so he talked about the feeding tube and potential complications and no longer being able to enjoy food.

Gummy said, “I don’t really enjoy eating any more anyway. My smeller stopped working years ago.” But then he said that he was worried about possibly dying if he kept losing weight. He wasn’t conscious of being hungry, you see, so he wasn’t afraid of starving – but he could read the numbers on the scale. I tried to ask him if he was sure, but ran out of words in the face of his puzzled stare. How could I ask him if he really wanted to keep living? How could I suggest it was time for him to die – that that’s what his body was trying to tell him?

Well, they inserted the feeding tube, and there were issues, and after a few weeks he ended up back in the hospital, where someone inserted the tube at the wrong angle and his food went into his abdominal cavity, and that was that, although it took a few days.

I don’t think he suffered, but really I don’t know, because to my eternal regret and shame I wasn’t there. I visited him only once during the week he was in the hospital. For a few years I had been his closest and most faithful friend – we had fun together, going on outings around town. But then the Hubbit and I moved to our farmlet some distance out of town, and visits were harder and became less frequent (although I still did the necessary stuff, like doctor visits), and one day he’d forgotten my name and I had to write it down in the little notebook he kept in his shirt pocket. So by the time we reached the end I didn’t know what to do about him dying … so I pretended it wasn’t happening until it was too late.

In Being Mortal, Gawande discusses a different, more honest, more accepting way of approaching our mortality. He discusses different ways that seniors might live – alternatives to the typical modern old age home, designed and planned to allow us to have agency right up to the end. He discusses ways that communities might be set up to enable seniors to continue living in their own homes. He describes one place where residents had been like the ones at Gummy’s facility – sitting around waiting to die – until a newly-appointed doctor in charge brought in several cats and dogs and 500 caged birds, as well as a forest-worth of living plants – and all those old folk started living again, invigorated by having something to care for. In other places he describes, seniors have freedoms unheard of in conventional old age homes – specifically, the freedom to make poor choices that might shorten their lives but that make life sweeter (like pie and ice cream for diabetics).

Then, moving on to the subject of care for the terminally ill, he offers an approach free from medical “cures”. The priority, he says – and this is precisely the priority I have for my dogs, so why not also for my two-legged loved ones? – is quality, not quantity of life. Rather than asking, “Do you want this treatment or that treatment or simply to die?” he says we should ask, “What constitutes a good life for you, from the perspective of what you’re capable of right now?” That determined, the question becomes simply how to accomplish that goal. It may be freedom from pain. It may be the ability to enjoy a dish of chocolate ice cream. It may be a clear head and time to spend with the people one loves.

Looked at from that perspective, it will almost certainly not be months of pain and nausea chasing an elusive, all-too-temporary “cure”.

Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash

Since reading his book I find myself looking at my own life from a different perspective. I’m still at the early stage of my slide into decrepitude, and as far as I know I’m not terminal – except in the sense that we all are. But I am creakily, crankily aware that three-score-plus years of poor choices about diet and exercise are demanding a toll. I make plans but not promises; I write to do lists, but I forgive myself if I can’t fulfil (or, some days, even start) them. I’m increasingly conscious of the need to cross things off my bucket list – not because I’ve achieved them, but because I’ve run out of time.

But I still have choices – so many extraordinary choices! I can still make a garden … acquire new skills … save a few more dogs … write stories. I can still pour myself out; I’m not yet reduced to a trickle. I can go to new places and ask questions and find answers. I can read. I can pray. I can love.

It’s not what I thought it would be. But, as it turns out, now that I’m here, it’s enough.

Sudoku

Usually it’s still dark when I wake. And it’s cold – I turn the heat down at night, and crack the window because when you share a bedroom with two large dogs you have to. I burrow under my nest of blankets and ignore my bladder for as long as I can, then I jump out of bed, stumble to the loo, put Argos out (he and his bladder are also getting old), scurry to the kitchen to turn the heat up from 65 to 67 F, let Argos back in and dive back into bed. I promise myself that as soon as I hear the heat exchanger fans stop running I’ll get up, get dressed, do all the morning things, tackle my to do list. I will have a good, productive day. I will write.

Then, while I wait for the house to warm, I play games on my phone. Fishdom is the most addictive. Wordle, of course – does anyone not play Wordle? And the other free games offered by the New York Times – Spelling Bee (I win if I find the bingos) … Letter Boxed (three moves max) … Tiles … the crosswords … Sudoku. I like games because you can solve them. There are no grey areas – either you win, or you lose. Take Sudoku – there’s only one right answer, but you go through the process and the solution emerges and then it’s done. There’s no fallout, no leftover parts, no mess.

Sometimes I use up my lives on Fishdom, then switch to the NYT games, and by the time I’ve done those I have more lives on Fishdom … It’s remarkable how long one can put off getting out of bed just switching back and forth between games. And of course there’s the news, and the advice columnists, and Reddit, and all of YouTube.

So many hungry, jostling people, yawping for attention, love, justification. Relevance. Meaning. Isn’t that what we all want?

Which brings me to the point of this blog post – which I started in October. In fact I pretty much finished it in October … but then I set it aside, as I usually do, because I wanted to add some pictures, and also I like to wait a day before publishing and give one last read – only I every time I tried to do that I pretty much fell apart all over again. I’ll try to do better this time because it needs to be done and posted so I can move forward.

As I was saying regarding the point of this post: I need to yawp. I’ve been needing to yawp for a long time. The problem is, this is not a depression blog, and I don’t want to write misery porn. But this year has sucked so much, just one swipe of the cosmic vacuum cleaner after another. It has sucked the skin right off my body, leaving me flayed. Defenseless. When I leave my bed, my soft nest of blankets, there is no protective barrier between me and … everything else.

But this blog is where I come to figure things out. I take a snapshot of my life that, for some or other reason, feels significant, and I put it into a frame, and I hang it up on a wall and point to it and say, “See? Look at that! What do you think?” Sometimes I indulge in a spot of mindfuckery – I hang it upside down, say, or I point at a different wall and wait to see if you notice the picture. Because you are a crucial part of the process. I don’t journal – I’ve tried; everything I’ve ever read about writing preaches that journaling is a crucial part of Being A Writer, but I cannot commit to writing without at least the hope of a reader. There has to be a dialog, even if it’s imaginary, or there’s no point.

Everything I’ve tried to write this year – both here and in the maddeningly almost-but-still-not-quite-finished book – has been pointless. It’s been coins dropped into an empty well – instead of a splash and a glint if the light is angled just right, there’s a faint, sad thud and a sinking into mud.

It’s been that kind of year.

So. Anyway. Here I am. Yawp.

Just call me Kilroy. (Photo by David Clode on Unsplash)

I am here to draw a line under 2022. It’s nearly over anyway, but I need the line now. Sometimes a line is necessary – you draw it, and then you total up whatever’s above it, and then a kind of magic happens. Everything above the line is captured, encapsulated, contextualized in the solution. It may still not make sense. It may still have the power to make you cry. But still it’s a solution, boxed up, and you can set it aside and it looks tidier than having everything just all over and anyhow.

2022 actually started last December, after I wrecked the pickup and Patchee died. I was discombobulated and needed to take a few days out to take stock, to think, to plan. To pray and prepare my heart for the new year. So I kissed the (only slightly resentful) Hubbit goodbye and checked myself and Argos into a nearby hotel.

I guess I got some praying done, but wifely habits die hard; I checked in with the Hubbit by phone to remind him to feed the chickens, and found him in a snit because he’d stumbled upon an amazing bargain while poking around the internet, and had bought me a laptop, and then – minutes after paying for it – realized he’d been scammed. And no matter how much I reminded, begged and nagged he could not and would not step away long enough to feed and water my feathery ladies. It was bitterly cold – same as the weather we’re having now, actually: weeks at a stretch below freezing, so their water froze and there wasn’t anything growing and the bugs and worms had burrowed deep. They needed care, but the Hubbit was too busy being furious with the bank (which was refusing to stop his online payment) to pay attention.

So I left the hotel and met him at the bank, where a young man was rude and unhelpful, and then I followed him home and found Mr. Roo collapsed and dying, so I dealt with that and went back to the hotel and tried to pray some more.

Meanwhile, although I didn’t know about it until a week or two later, on the other side of the planet my heart-sister Twiglet was fighting for her life in an ICU. She must have told me she was having hip surgery a month or so previously, but we’re so blasé about that kind of thing these days – a joint wears out and we pop into the hospital for a couple days and come out with a new one and it’s just a no-never-mind. Only, she developed an infection that roared through her body and sent her mind spiraling through bizarre landscapes. For months and months we lurched between “Praise God! Her infection markers are way down!” and “Oh no … a new bug has taken hold…”. It was a rollercoaster ride from Hell that went on and on, and on … and through it all I got to speak with her only once, in February. (I managed to make her laugh!) The rest of the time I was told she was too sick to speak. Or too tired. Or not lucid enough. Even when the news (I did get regular updates) seemed good, I was told she didn’t have her phone.

It tore my heart out not to be there – but even if it had made sense to go (it didn’t; she was rarely allowed visitors) how could I leave the Hubbit? In the savage, grey cold of winter he shrank and huddled into himself. I was afraid of what else might die if I left to go even further from home. I was afraid he would sit and eat nothing but junk food and get himself lost somewhere in the interwebs. I was afraid he might fall. His best friend, formerly known as the Cool Dude, lived on the property … but he’s a drunk and unreliable.

January, February, March I distracted myself by picking away at the bank, trying to get them first to cancel, then to reverse the Hubbit’s payment to the scammers. It was stupid to fight so hard for a mere hundred dollars, but rage drove me. The first customer service rep was so disdainful in the way he spoke to the Hubbit, treating him like a foolish old man; the others were ineffectual; the system was designed to be as difficult to navigate as possible. I wrote to the Attorney General, I blasted them on social media and sites like Yelp!, I pleaded and berated and threatened for months – such an appalling waste of time and energy! (And I got nowhere – there was too much else going on and I eventually let it go.)

Meanwhile, in March it was the Hubbit’s turn for had a quick little routine surgery – a simple removal of his gall bladder. It was no big deal – he was in and out in one day. Easy peasy.

They warn you that the gas pains afterwards are dreadful. The procedure involves pumping gas into the abdomen, and it floats around in there, getting stuck in awkward nooks and crannies, until it’s absorbed through the intestinal tissues and ejected in the usual fashion. The best way to get rid of the gas is to get up and move – which hurts, of course, but we were told that you have to tough it out and then it gets better.

The Hubbit wouldn’t move. He said it hurt, and also he felt sick. I summoned the Bitch Wife, who lashed him with her tongue, and he hated me almost as much as I did. And he did not get better. So I called various doctors and he went back to the hospital, where he failed to poop for a record-breaking number of days. When his bowels finally woke themselves up and performed, his nurses and doctor sang the Halleluiah chorus and packed him back home … where he continued to huddle, and shrink, and on the rare occasion that he spoke his speech was slurred and he forgot what he was saying – and usually what he was saying didn’t make a whole lot of sense anyway.

I called doctors again, and they patted me on the head and explained that he was old, until in desperation I summoned my Inner Karen, and she uttered the L word.

If there’s one thing doctors take seriously in this country, it’s lawsuits.

What I actually said was, “You know, I’m starting to wonder just who I’m going to sue when we find out his death was preventable. Should it be the hospital? Or your boss?” (I was speaking to the surgeon’s assistant. He was busy with another patient.) So she trotted off and returned a few minutes later with the surgeon in tow. He looked at the Hubbit, who was slumped in his chair and staring into space, and said, “You’re really worried?”

“Look,” I said. “He’s old. And he’s annoying and cantankerous. But outside of his political opinions there is nothing wrong with his brain!”

“Hmm,” he said. “Well, he doesn’t have any of the usual symptoms of an abscess, but let’s just check it out to set your mind at rest.” So they did, and he had an abscess the size of a fair-sized zucchini, all swollen up with glop from his bowel and less than a day away from erupting. He spent a couple more weeks in the hospital, and then they were about to send him home and he was well enough by then to tell me he wasn’t happy about that, so Karen popped her head out again. Once again they did a “probably unnecessary test” to “set everyone’s mind at rest” and found leakage where no leakage should be. At last in April he came home, fully restored to his annoying, cantankerous self, to my profound relief.

Meanwhile I’d developed a pain in my knee so severe some days I could barely walk. None of my remedies worked – neither ice nor heat, not an anti-inflammatory diet or fasting, not exercises or stretching or rest or powering through. But there was a huge bag of grain that the Hubbit and the Formerly Cool Dude had dumped in a random location, where cattle and horses kept breaking into it every time they bust out of their pasture (which tends to happen a lot when steers get to a certain age. I think it’s Mother Nature’s way of ensuring that we won’t be too sad when we kill and eat them.) So because I was hurting too much to lift it unaided, and the Hubbit was too feeble and floppy to help, I asked the FCD to move it to where they couldn’t get at it, because gorging on grain is a pretty sure way for grass-eaters to kill themselves. Well, somehow that request for help went sideways and the FCD launched into a vicious tirade that comprehensively covered everything he disliked about me – which turned out to be pretty much everything.

In the overall context of the general shittitude of the year, the booze-fueled ravings of a depressed, self-loathing misogynist is a relatively small matter. But … this was someone I’d known for a quarter of a century – since I arrived in this country. Back in the day, if he and the Hubbit went hunting together I never worried about potential accidents. I liked him, respected him, and trusted him. Even as I’d watched him deteriorate during the eight or so years he lived in his motorhome on our property, I’d wished him well and hoped he’d manage to turn himself around. So the implosion of that relationship, the Hubbit’s ambivalent response to his behavior, the FCD’s continued presence for months before he suddenly just up and left without saying goodbye or even leaving a forwarding address, all combined to taint what little peace and happiness the year had to offer. And now I’m sorry the Hubbit has lost his friend and git-her-done partner. But for myself I’m relieved that he’s gone. And that’s all I have to say about that.

My heart sister … I gave her such a hard time for joining the Red Hat Society!

I continued recording messages to send to Twiglet. They weren’t profound … Her husband said she enjoyed news from the Outside World, so mainly I bitched about my sore knee and yattered on about fence-smashing cows and too many dogs and gardenly frustrations. My prayers were also neither profound nor articulate. When you’ve been praying for a long time for something you really desperately want, after a while you run out of words, and all that’s left is an agonized, wordless “Please!” But when the infection flared up for the umpteenth time in June, her doctors were ready to quit fighting it. The only way to save her, they said, was to amputate her leg. “She’s strong enough,” they said, “But she might not be for much longer.”

Of course the people who loved her immediately rallied with intense prayer – not to save the leg, but for the doctors to have wisdom, and for this terrible journey at last to be done. I made up my mind that, come what may, I would go to be with her after she got back home, just for a week or two to help her recover. I imagined the koeksisters we would eat, and the conversations we would have, and how raucously we would laugh, sitting on her stoep overlooking their beautiful garden. I may have sent her a message mocking her for taking such extreme measures to lose weight … Or maybe I saved that joke for when I would see her. I don’t remember.

A few days later the doctors opened up the wound site just to check on the status of the infection. (This was something they had done often. The infection was deep in her bone, so blood tests weren’t reliable.) And in light of all our prayers – because I’ve had experience of miracles, and she had she – it wasn’t all that surprising to learn that the infection was clear. The surgeon who had proposed amputation told her husband, “I can’t justify removing a healthy limb.” At last it was over!

But…

That little surgery was one cut too many. Over the next few days, system by system, her body shut down.

On the Fourth of July I was out – I forget why – and en route home I connected briefly with her husband. He was at the hospital with her, and she wasn’t doing well. I asked if I could talk to her on his phone, since he was right there, but he said she couldn’t speak. He told me to record a message that he could play for her. I wanted to argue, to ask him please just to let me talk to her, even if she couldn’t respond – same as I did with my Marmeee … but he was so tired, and you don’t argue with someone who is sitting at his wife’s deathbed – not even when you both are convinced that she’ll be fine. When I got home I sat on my veranda, and as the fireworks started going off all around me I recorded a series of messages just to tell her I loved her, and that she had done well with her life, and that everything was going to be okay.

The next morning I woke to the news that she was gone. And then I took my knee to the doctor, who diagnosed bursitis and injected a steroid and made it better. Easy peasy.

While I was with the doctor I asked him if I could stop taking the blood thinners I’d been on since my pulmonary embolism last August. He approved, and a few weeks later (it was Twiglet’s birthday – her family gathered on a beach she loved and sent her ashes out to sea) I was back in ER, once again unable to breathe, followed by several days in the hospital, and so now I’m on blood thinners for the rest of my life.

Around about then Cujo moved to Idaho, depriving me of my rescue partner and most reliable venting buddy. We’d already decided – way back in January or February – that it was time to get out of rescue … and I’m almost there. But after she left I contacted the shelter and offered to take an old dog, because they tend not to do well in shelters and Cujo’s and my rescue has always done a pretty good job of finding wonderful homes for seniors. So Chief, a sweet old guy, moved in. After a few days I took him for a vet check, as we always do with seniors, and learned that he had advanced lymphoma, so the Hubbit and I decided he would just spend his last few months here on our little farm. Only not long after, for no clear reason (it’s possible the cancer had metastasized to his brain), he walked under the moving tractor, so he didn’t even get that.

I think that’s the last horrible thing that’s happened this year – except that I’ve been getting slower and sadder and more and more useless, and eventually a few days ago I paid my doctor another visit and it turns out I’m severely anemic. I kind of think that’s good news, though … I mean, it isn’t, of course. But at least this enemy has a face and it’s not the Black Dog, and I have a strategy for getting better. So that’s good, right?

But.

I am so, so tired. I’m sad. I feel old, fat, itchy and achy. Despite my best (currently feeble) efforts to be Holly Homemaker the house won’t stop throwing up all over itself, and – just to help that process along – we have two more dogs that needed somewhere to be and somehow this was the only spot available, and the cold hit before I could finish my end-of-growing-season chores, and there’s frozen snow everywhere just waiting to turn mucky and then freeze again. The pickup is still wrecked. The book is still not written. I’m still breathless.

The best friend I ever had and ever will have is still gone and always will be.

Sometimes I think how much easier it would be if I just stopped. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t actually want to die. In fact, when the doc got a bit vehement because he felt I wasn’t taking the whole anemia thing seriously enough (he wants more tests to figure it out, and that’s fine) I did feel a twinge of ehhh … I hope it’s nothing bad. (I don’t think it is. For quite a long time I’ve been pretty much living on cheese and tomato sandwiches, which aren’t generally a great source of iron.) But my body kind of has a use-by date now, and it would be so easy just to stop taking the dang blood thinners and let my blood do whatever it wants to do. It would be so easy peasy.

It’s time to draw that line – but how to do it?

Life is nothing at all like a game of Sudoku. There is no one perfect solution. There is no single sure way to make the squares in a row line up and act orderly.

It’s nothing like a column of numbers – there’s no way to calculate the sum because the answer keeps changing.

You can’t even draw a line in the sand and say, “Okay, Life, I dare ya – step over that and see what I do to you!” Because sometimes life laughs and runs away, and sometimes it plants you square in the nose, and sometimes a wave billows in from the side and washes the line away.

Sometimes the line isn’t even yours to draw, and the best you can do is take note, and move on.

Photo by Daryl Han on Unsplash

Gaps in the fence

The other day I was driving home when our neighbor’s wife called to say her husband had died. We didn’t know them well. I’d only ever spoken to the wife over the telephone, though I knew him to say hello or wave. He and the Hubbit were friendly; they’d call on each other for help as needed – to borrow tools or equipment, or work together on some or other repair. For a while we took care of their pasture in return for grazing our cattle there. More than once he zipped over in his golf cart to help us chase down a runaway steer.

Somehow I never got around to inviting them over to barbecue, and we had no idea that he’d been diagnosed with throat cancer in February.  When I got home I told the Hubbit the news and he was dismayed. “Well, dang!” he said. “I’ve been thinking I should go over and visit, but…”

A few weeks ago I learned that my Aunt Marietjie had died. She was in her nineties and I knew she’d become frail, but the last time I saw her – just a few years ago at Marmeee’s memorial service – she was as I’d always known her: calm, unfalteringly kind, resolute. We weren’t close; I didn’t see her that often and in the 23 years since I moved to the US we’ve never corresponded … but when I named this blog it was with her in mind, because she was someone I kinda wanted to be like – strong, unflappable, salt-of-the-earth, a woman of strong faith and stronger Scrabble skills, a quiet source of wisdom and comfort food.

My father, the Olde Buzzard, used to refer to her as a soustannie, and it was only after I named this blog that I learned that the word didn’t mean an intelligent, powerful woman with excellent culinary skills. It’s not a compliment. It means someone who is female, fat and bossy. Well, some might say that makes it a fine name for my blog …. Oh well. [Insert shrug emoji here.]

Moment of truth: the Olde Buzzard was intimidated by strong women, and that made him mean. He had uncomplimentary nicknames for me too. He died a few years ago, and … well, all I want to say is, I’m grateful that in the end I was able to do my duty, to treat him with love and kindness, and that everything needing to be said and done between us was indeed said and done.

Getting back to Marietjie … I thought of changing the name of this blog, but decided instead to stay with the image I’d originally had in mind – an image largely inspired by this aunt, whom I am not at all like, yet who was extraordinarily kind to me at random intervals throughout my life. She was the one person I could trust to love my Girl Child when she needed it and wouldn’t accept it from me. I always meant to write to her care of my cousin, but…

Some years ago I wrote a post that won a response from a different cousin, from the other side of the family. I replied, but he never commented again. But from then on, every time I wrote about dogs, a small part of me wrote for him, because I grew up hearing stories about his extraordinary ability to connect with animals.

I grew up loving him.

I have many cousins and I’ve had crushes on several of them, but Michael was special. He was so handsome, tan and blue-eyed and blonde, with ruggedly regular features and a smile that reached out and pulled you in. When he invited me up onto his lap and taught me how to tell the time on his big wristwatch, he made my four-year-old heart flutter. I was convinced I would marry him, and I was devastated when he married someone else.

The Old Buzzard had adored my cousin – they were close in age – and he disliked the wife, and now I realize that she’s probably strong and intelligent as well as being “a damn liberal who thinks we aren’t good enough”. Back then, viewing her through the distorted lens of his resentment, I couldn’t warm to her. But I spent a month with them, while I was a university student with a vacation job in their city, and I remember she was kind, and their home was beautiful, and they seemed happy. (Who wouldn’t be happy with Michael?) I remember that she collected silver, so at the end of the visit I spent almost everything I’d earned on some too large and probably tacky addition to her collection because I needed to prove that I’d been raised right. I remember I fell and sprained my ankle getting off the bus, and Michael – who was a successful vet by then – bound it up. When I complained that he hurt me, he laughed at me for making more fuss than a dog with far worse injuries. But I forgave him because he still made my teenage heart flutter.

After I got that message from him on my long-ago blog post, whenever I wrote about dogs and hoped for another message I thought about making contact. I imagined going to see him on my next trip to South Africa. And then a couple months ago I heard that he’d died. Hoping for more detail I looked at his sister Midge’s Facebook page – and that’s when I learned that her daughter had just died – a beautiful, bright, happy woman that I’d never met, barely knew existed, just gone. There are wedding photos on Midge’s Facebook page, and she shines. I wept over them for several days – I don’t know why the loss felt so agonizing; I didn’t know her! And then I tried to write to Midge, but…

Then I got a message on my last post, from Michael’s wife, reaching out, and that’s when I learned that he’d actually died long before I heard about it – last January, of covid – such a horrible, horrible way to go! And I wanted to write to her, but what to say? Where to send it? We’re not even connected through Facebook – which I rarely visit anyway. It’s not that I can’t figure this out – and I will – but…

But I want a do-over. I want a neighborhood barbecue, and after that maybe conversations and coffee with a few new friends.

I want to talk to Michael and his wife, and see her with my own clear eyes. I don’t know what we’d talk about … dogs, probably, but what else? I want to know!

I want another game of Scrabble with Marietjie, with a plate of koeksisters and big mugs of rooibos tea. And I want to walk on the beach and then loll about comfortably and talk about cats with my cousin, her daughter, who is still this side of the dirt but on the far side of the planet.

I want to hug Midge, and meet her daughter, and maybe be invited to the wedding, or at least send a gift. And I want to meet her niece, my goddaughter, whose parents thought it would be cute to make 12-year-old me a godmother, since they didn’t take such things seriously, only I wish I had. And actually I’d like to see her parents again too.

And then there’s the other cousin who used to look so hot in his SA Airforce uniform, and his brother who was in a quite popular band and then became a DJ. They used to tease me, and one time I played in their mother’s cactus garden and ended up sprawled over my mother’s lap, butt exposed to the sunshine and their gleeful mockery, while I shrieked my outrage and she picked out tiny needles with a pair of tweezers. Those cousins are still alive, as far as I know, round the other side of the planet, and one day it’ll be too late for a do-over, but right now I have no idea what to do about that. We had a friendship – the DJ cousin and I did, anyway – and then it fizzled and we drifted and … truth be told, there’s probably no way back. None on my map, anyway.

I have cousins scattered all over the world, and others – nieces and a nephew, second cousins – so many people that I love or have loved or wish I’d loved. And although I know I don’t have the capacity to reconnect deeply with all of them – or even with more than a very few – being strangers just feels wrong.

And then there are friends. Like Deej. I want to sit with Deej and lay out all my questions about God and ask him how he, one of the finest and fiercest champions of Christ I ever knew, could possibly think well of Donald Trump. I actually tried to ask him that, via WhatsApp, but he didn’t answer, and over time he ghosted me. That stung, because he was my pastor more than anyone else ever was or will be, and I want to look him in the eye and ask why he wounded me. But I can’t, because he’s gone, and there are no do-overs. He died last December, a week shy of his eightieth birthday, leaving me still burdened with so many questions and no one else I’d entrust them to.

I ache every day to go on a road trip with Twiglet, the sister my heart gave me. Talking on WhatsApp doesn’t cut it, especially as her connection is so bad that usually I just listen to her voice; it’s impossible really to follow what she’s saying. I want a cream tea with Luscious. I want to talk about God and poetry with Fair Bianca. I am homesick for the friends of my young womanhood!

I want to kick back and laugh with the Kat, and talk deep talks with the Egg and Homeboy, and argue face-to-face with the Girl Child instead of getting mad and frustrated over WhatsApp. I want to laugh and talk and eat with my foster kids, and watch the granddaughters they gave me grow up, and be there to love them through it when their mothers make them angry, and go to their weddings and cuddle their babies – or not, if they choose a different road. But they’re all, all on the wrong side of the planet.

I want to find a way back to the Stranger, but I don’t think there is one, and the meeting place where I’d hope to find him might not even exist.

I remember my blessings. Here I have friends, a few anyway, some quite elderly, and a Hubbit ditto, that I love as best I can – although never enough. I have neighbors that I may invite to barbecue next summer.

I’ve been thinking that the people we touch are like fenceposts. They enclose the fields where we grow our lives.

I look at my fence, and there are gaps in it. It’s been standing a while and has reached that stage in the life of a fence that gaps form more and more frequently. Some of the timbers are broken, others are weathered and warped and working loose, and many are out of my reach. Beyond the fence I see the wilderness pressing in.

I’m not afraid of the wilderness. Often I’m drawn to it … I stand next to the fence and imagine what it would be like to push through and see what’s out there. Then I remember that I have work still to do on this side and I turn back.

But it troubles me sometimes to think that one day the gate in the fence may open, and it won’t matter because the fence itself will be down. I’ll walk through, as one must, but I wonder who will know.

Photos by Denise Karis and Foto Maak on Unsplash

Breathless

I bitched so much that they hung this on my door, and after that people tiptoed in and apologized for turning on lights even at midday. And, yes, keratoconus does mean sudden bright light hurts my eyes … but actually the spirit of my bitching was more along the lines of Proverbs 27:14 – “He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him.”

Today didn’t start well.

There was a thump at the door, the rattle of a trolley full of sharp implements, a hurting blaze of lights. I yelped and clamped a pillow over my face. With a trill of merry laughter my tormentor took my hand, stuck a needle into it, and plundered my blood, then made her galumphing departure.

I wanted to go back to sleep, but – of course – I needed to pee. I disentangled my legs from clutching sheets, hit the call button, disconnected the wires attached to my chest, and tottered all the way to the bathroom without tripping over my IV drip. I assumed the position. Released the flow into a little plastic stetson-shaped thingummy positioned at the top of the bowl, because they measure my bladderly essence. And woke abruptly to the wet and horrible realization that it hadn’t been emptied after my last visit.

The toilet hat – can you see it? When you’re being pumped full of fluids, they have to make sure what’s going in is finding its way out. But if you have a capacious bladder, you don’t want to use it twice in a row without someone emptying it out first.

By the time I’d swabbed myself down and had been tucked back into a freshly made bed by a sympathetic nurse who managed to control her laughter until after she’d left my room, I was wide awake. And I was irritable and feeling sorry for myself – in short, completely over the sense of euphoria I had been feeling for the previous few days.

I should probably tell you about those days.

They started last Tuesday, when I visited Wonder Woman and caused both of us some perturbation by almost collapsing when I reached the top of the flight of stairs leading from her garden to her living room. “Dang I’m unfit!” I wheezed, mopping my sweaty face. “I have got to quit talking about getting more exercise, and start walking! Just as soon as I buy a Fitbit!” Well, it turned out she had a Fitbit that she’d bought for herself before she realized that setting it up would take at least half an hour of technological tinkering. Wonder Woman is nearly 90; she figured she didn’t want to spend one of her last remaining half hours that way, so she gave it to me. And although that’s somewhat peripheral to this story, if I were writing actual Literature it would count as Dramatic Irony, which proves that sometimes life does indeed imitate art.

Anyway. To get back to my point.

Wednesday I was draggy. I spent it trudging through the bare minimum of chores, yawning over my news feed, and wishing the black dog would just damn well let go and let me breathe. I didn’t feel especially depressed – just so, so tired, and when I thought of all the things I wanted to do -happy things, like gardening and writing and giving the horses a bath and taking Argos to the river for some training time and baking bread and even shining my little house – I felt overwhelmed and weary. I’d felt that way for a while … but on Wednesday just breathing felt hard. And late in the afternoon, when I went outside to feed my chickens, I had to lean quite heavily on my cane, and when I came back inside I was staggering and I had to sit down and just quietly pant for a while.

While I was sitting I consulted Dr. Google about Reasons To Be Short Of Breath. His insights were disturbing.

I told myself to quit being stupid. When you’re lazy and obese, of course you’re gonna be short of breath, I said to me. This isn’t rocket science! No further research is required! I got myself up on my hind legs and moved laundry around and was going to swab down the kitchen counters, but … first I needed to take another little rest. I chatted a bit more with Dr. Google. I decided that if I didn’t feel better by Thursday morning, I should probably call my doctor.

This isn’t something I do lightly. This is America, the Land of Hell-no-it-ain’t-free, and I don’t have health insurance, because the Hubbit and I inhabit that awkward gap between people who qualify for subsidized (and therefore affordable) insurance, and those who can sniff judgmentally at the Affordable Care Act. That is, the Hubbit has Medicare and supplemental insurance, which is just as well given his penchant for dancing with heavy machinery, but I pretty much just keep chugging along and trusting God to keep me going as long as he wants me around. It’s worked for me.

I’d been looking forward to Wednesday night, because we’d been promised a spectacular show by the Perseids – no moon, clearish sky. In 20 years of trying I’ve never actually seen the Perseid shower, and it’s become a bit of an obsession – so this year was definitely going to be The One. I planned to go out into the backyard with a blanket at around 11.00PM and just lie and watch them.

Only, between an increasingly insistent Dr. Google and sheer lack of oxygen to the brain, by 11.00PM it was dawning on me that maybe this shit was real. So I texted the Hubbit from the bedroom (he was in his study) to tell him I was worried … and waited for him to come busting through, brimming over with husbandly concern (and maybe a hug or two), to insist that it was only money and drag me off to the hospital. Only he didn’t, so I sent a couple more texts phrased to make him feel like a heel, and then I went to get dressed so I could drive my own damn self to the hospital, and found his phone lying on the floor of the closet.

He does this. He scatters his phone in his wake like one-at-a-time confetti. It drives me completely insane.

Turns out you can’t stomp and shout very effectively without breathing, but I did my best, and after delivering his phone to him I went and got dressed, stopping as needed to inhale. Then the Hubbit wandered into the bedroom and said that of course he would take me to the hospital because that was his responsibility as my husband. So I came a bit unglued and broke my phone, because it doesn’t take that much breath to thump things.

On the way to the hospital we stopped so I could hang my head out of the car window and look for meteors, but I didn’t see any.

I don’t remember much about the ensuing 20-or-so hours, which is a pity, because the whole time I was blogging about it in my head, and it was hilarious. But I couldn’t write it down because I had to keep my arms straight on account of the IV drips inside my elbows, plus the persistent interruptions by people with machines that needed to interact with me, and other people who kept sticking me with needles and taking more and still more of my sluggish, unwilling blood. I remember snapshots…

Did you know that getting an MRI is almost exactly like going through a wormhole in space? You lie down and someone injects you with a magical substance that uncoils a delicious heat in unmentionable places, and the world moves and you’re inside a giant halo, and lights flicker and the voice of God tells you “Stop breathing” and then, just at the moment you absolutely have to, “You can breathe”.

I asked for water and they told me I was “nothing by mouth” while the doctors decided whether or not to do a procedure to blast the blood clots out of my lung, and I thought that was strange because I’d thought my heart was failing, but it turned out my heart was fine but one of my lungs (I’m not sure which one) was all clotted up and icky, and this was sort of a good thing, relatively speaking, because if caught in time it will heal, whereas a failing heart can only be helped, not healed. And then after a while someone brought me a menu and told me to order lunch, and that’s how I found out that they’d decided the procedure wasn’t necessary, which was also good news, especially as I was hungry enough to eat a doctor by then.

They asked me questions about my family medical history and I did sums in my head and realized that my father was about the age I am now when he had the heart attack that turned his life around, so I decided I could turn my life around too.

The tech who did the echocardiogram helped me look at the screen so I could see inside my own heart, and it was working so, so hard! It didn’t flop helplessly like the sad, sick heart of the transplant patient I told you about, and nor did it rat-a-tat like the young, new heart that patient received. My heart is like the little engine that could, and the sight of it working with such steady determination to take a too-heavy load up a too-steep hill made me weep with gratitude and shame.

Eventually – it was Thursday evening by then – they brought me up to the room where I’m writing this. It’s a spacious private room, and even has a small sitting area with a recliner and a view of the hills. They tucked me into a real bed and fussed around asking what they could do to make me comfortable, and all I could think to ask for was hospital socks.

Hospital socks – conceivably the greatest achievement of medical technology.

At some point during the ensuing days I learned the name of what had happened to me. I had a pulmonary embolism, and it probably happened because I spend too much time sitting and feeling sad instead of getting up on my hind legs and living my life. I let the black dog harry me into the Valley … but I skirted the Shadow, and I’m coming back out into the light, and as God is my witness that dog is going to learn to walk to heel.

I haven’t had much experience of hospitals. Prior to this adventure, the only times I’ve stayed overnight in a hospital were after I was born, and when I was 10 years old and had my tonsils out, and when the Girl Child was born. But I’ve heard enough about hospitals from other people to have learned that they’re dehumanizing places, where one becomes a patient rather than a person, where the food is awful, where a good night’s rest is less important than the staff routines. So my own experience has been surprising.

The fact is, I have felt cherished. Protected. Provided with a refuge where I had one job and one job only: to heal – first my body, but it’s also given me a quiet place to begin healing my soul. Little by little my breath has come easier. On Saturday I had an actual shower. Yesterday – Sunday – they said I could go home, and disconnected the IV and taught me how to inject myself.

Now I’m just waiting for my final visit with the doctor, and then I can peel off the sticky pads that keep me connected to the heart monitor, and they’ll remove my last IV port, and I can take off the hospital gown and put on my real clothes. They’ll wheel me down to the main entrance and the Hubbit will come, and we’ll go buy me a phone and swing by Yokes for a supply of fresh vegetables – because mealtimes in the Took household are getting a radical makeover. And then we’ll pick up Argos from boarding and we’ll go home.

*****

A little over a week has passed since I wrote this post. It took a while to get my computer hooked up again and download the pictures, and I’ve once again been spending way too much time just sitting. I think about getting up and moving … I think about how I’ll die if I don’t – not right away, because I’m on drugs that keep my blood safe and runny, but I’ll come off them in a two or three months, and then if I haven’t changed my habits … Well, I have to change my habits. That is all. I’m putting it in writing. And I have a Fitbit. Surely that will make a difference!

Chasing rainbows

I’ve been mulling over a couple posts I want to write during the past wickedly hot week, but I don’t like to type when I’m sweating. It makes my keyboard icky. And meanwhile I’ve had this epiphany that I want to share – so those posts are going to have to wait.

Here’s the epiphany, brought to you courtesy of my phone news feed: sad people and introverts are more likely to suffer from dementia than chirpy little extroverts.

Now when you google “introverts risk of dementia”, it becomes clear that many of the perpetrators of the articles on this subject are … well … annoyingly jolly types. One that I found equates “introvert” and “neurotic”; another said it wasn’t introversion per se that sent your marbles rolling somewhere over the rainbow so much as a tendency to focus more on rain clouds than rainbows, only (the article added) an attitude of gloom was more common among introverts anyway so …

So here is a public service announcement:

Look, I can’t help that I’m an introvert. More than that, I don’t WANT to help it! I don’t want to go to parties and yodel “Ho Ho Ho” and clap people on the shoulder!

But …

I’m pretty sure I can be more intentional about holding the Black Dog at bay.

I googled “How to be happy” – and no, that’s absolutely not a weird thing to do! If it were, I wouldn’t have found answers – and I did – I found many long lists, drawn up by people who take the question quite seriously, of things one can do to become and be happy.

And I noticed an interesting thing. Right near the top of almost every list was one word: Gratitude.

Oh calm down. This is not going to become one of those 100-days-of-gratitude blogs. But maybe a single post on the subject wouldn’t come amiss. After all, today is Independence Day, and although I’m actively opposed to both fireworks and flag-waving, I’m grateful that we don’t have a flotilla of giant spaceships hovering over earth’s major cities, waiting to suck us all up, or blow us to oblivion, or whatever it was they did in the movie … it’s been awhile since I watched it and I may be confusing the story with V … dang, can you believe Independence Day is 25 years old already? Anyway, my point is, I’m grateful to know the Gubmint wasn’t just softening us all up for the Big Scary Reveal when they confessed to lying to us.

And here are some other things I’m grateful for:

Boudicca lives. Last week the Hubbit detected a Smell in the workshop and we thought she had died, but it turned out merely to be some of Angelo’s garbage. I was worried because I hadn’t seen her for a while – she goes a little feral in the summer – but she visited the Cool Dude the other day and she’s just fine.

Apricots. The first apricots of the summer were ready to be picked yesterday, in time for me to take a couple to Wonder Woman, who is about to have surgery, and who was cheered because she loves them.

Hummingbirds. Some of our regular visitors made it through the California fires last year, and came back for another summer.

People who adopt rescue dogs. I didn’t think I’d ever find a home for Bear, and yet I did, and they send me pictures that tell me, over and over again, that no matter what he does he is loved.

The Hubbit. Not gonna lie, he can be a curmudgeonly old poop. But I’m grateful to have him around.

Five is enough to start with. And you know what? It works! Poking through my messy picture archives in search of illustrations for this little gratitude list made me smile all the way down to my bones. So … feel free to make your own list, and share it if you like. I’ll be around, watching for rainbows and available to smile along with you.

GIFs from Giphy.com