The Journey For Us

Truthfully, I’ve had a confusing holiday season, which makes the traditional end-of-the-year self-assessment more difficult than usual. For most of my adult life I’ve taken some time in the few days before New Year’s Eve to evaluate the year. At times this has been as informal as a scribbled list of pluses and minuses, while at others I’ve written long journal entries.

My father died on November 16, 1996. I vividly recall sitting in a Starbucks adjacent to a bookstore late that December writing in a blank book I’d just purchased. I sat there all afternoon and into the early evening drinking lattes and obsessively filling pages, terrified of forgetting one thing about the man who so shaped who and what I am.

For the past few years on my personal blog I’ve answered a questionnaire, which I will complete again this year, including the question, “Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?” I am honest enough to admit that I struggle with that question every time.

There are a lot of things I’ve been angry about this year, from job upheaval and the filth that is money, to my rage at a disease I fought on behalf of my beloved pet with every resource I could command. For as hard pressed as we may be, I don’t regret one dime I spent. I will never forget that last morning when Dorey, far wiser than his poor, suffering human, lay in my arms purring before he told me it was time for me to help him move on.

That day I was witness to the innocence of life in the moment. He lived ever minute, but more over, he loved.

Since a phone call upended our lives on December 14 with the news that once again I had a degree of security in sight only to lose it, I’ve hurt in some way. The muscular pain of physical labor was better than the mental pain of worry, but neither has let up.

But at the same time, help and understanding has flowed toward me from unexpected quarters. I’ve realized that I was raised not to expect help and when I receive it, it confuses me.

And so, I sit here at the end of what was unquestionably a horrible year, with every right to be angry, to hate some folks I didn’t hate last year — but that’s not how I feel. I’d tell you how I do feel if I could name it, but I can’t.

I am frankly suspicious of hopes. I’ve seen too many dashed against the rocks of 2009. I think I’m entering 2010 in a state I can only describe as still. But I do know that I am turning over lessons of love, presence, and generosity in those still places of my heart that have affected me deeply.

To all of you, I wish all good things in 2010. Happy New Year!

As the activity surrounding the garage and storage house has subsided and Christmas has rolled by for another year, I’ve found myself chafing at the inactivity of this in-between time. Everyone and every thing seems in limbo and thanks to the way the calendar falls, things will remain that way until Monday, January 4.

Yesterday I began to get back on track with personal projects, reviewing my lists, taking up some assignments that are time consuming rather than thought intensive, and in general trying to stave off the worry that seems to be my constant companion these days.

Friends who know me well counsel against this kind of thinking, pointing out it gets me nowhere, but none have the switch that will turn off my overactive brain. I’m in one of those places where I need a sign of positive forward action, preferably a sign with a “$” appended to it, and I’m restless.

Maybe that’s a good way to start 2010, like a nervous horse in the gate anxious for the race to begin. The thing is, you can’t ever tell what a horse will do by the way he stands in the gate. The fastest, most amazing animal on whom I ever laid money, the Flying Dutchman, always looked like he was taking a nap before the bell sounded.

Sometime over the past couple of days my housemate, in what has been an extended black funk, informed me that I should just stop trying so hard. I will never be able to fix our financial situation. I’m too lazy. The general line of her reasoning was that I should just wait for the inevitable and hope my family will support me in the end.

It was one of the more shocking things she’s said to me, so shocking I really didn’t have a retort. When I relayed this conversation to a friend she pointed out how satisfying it will be when I prove my housemate wrong — and it will be — but I think what still has me flummoxed is how she could have said something like that to me when I’m trying so hard and struggling with such avidity to stay in the light.

It’s the equivalent of whispering “you’re headed for the glue factory when this race is over” in the horse’s ear and then asking him to run anyway.

One of my projects for the coming year is an ebook on caregiving. I’ve long resisted writing on the subject, but have finally given in to repeated urgings from friends who insist I have something to contribute to the topic. I’m not planning a process-oriented book, but something specifically for the caregiver trying to cope as a human being.

Today, while chatting with the same friend on Facebook, I said I was having trouble working on that manuscript right now because I really wanted to say, “Old people are pains in the ass, there’s always something wrong, and they’ll suck the very life from your bones.” In theory, I can’t say that — even though I just did — and even though every one of those statements is true on any given day.

My housemate has become the first person in my entire life who ever said to me “don’t bother, you’re going to fail anyway.” My late father’s injunction before any major task was, “Give’em hell, Shorty.” Papa did not require victory, only the best effort I had in me. He liked to win. He liked for me to win. But it was more important for him that I didn’t quit. I don’t intend to, and for all the unpleasant things my housemate has ever said to me, the suggestion that I should is one of the most offensive.

These are the kinds of situations caregiving manuals don’t talk about and are the very things I wish someone had told me. I don’t know if I’m up to the task, but I’m now committed to the project. Many of you have been reading my personal blog for years, others of you are new readers here. If any of you have any suggestions for content, questions you would like to see addressed in a different kind of book on caregiving, or personal stories you’d like to share, please use the comments or email me directly. We’ll call it a New Year’s resolution if you like, but I’m officially acknowledging, there’s a new book in progress.

Friends have long teased me about my ability to give over hours of my life to “bad cable.” Sunday I watched a long marathon of episodes of “LA Ink,” the reality show set in a Los Angeles tattoo shop run by Kat Von D. I actually like Kat and her iconoclastic lifestyle. Her business is home to more drama than any soap opera, but there are also moments with genuine depth that explore the reasons people choose to get body art.

I’m always interested to hear Kat, who is herself a walking canvas of ink, counsel someone not to get a tattoo because she feels they’re doing it for the wrong reasons. There is clear awareness on her part that true collectors of body art are living an alternative lifestyle not for the faint of heart.

I’m sure we’ve all been recipients of the “if your friend jumps off a bridge” parental counsel, if not the “don’t get drunk and have some guy’s name tattooed on your butt” talk. The cautionary conformity message landed solidly with me when I was 17-years old and a friend wrote something in my yearbook I’ve never forgotten. She was a year older and worlds more popular, but she wrote that she admired my individuality and refusal to follow the crowd.

Thirty years later, she’s still my friend. I’ve never specifically mentioned the inscription to her, but I’ve listened as she’s spoken of mistakes in her life that resulted from going with the group or trying to keep up with one particular person. Not only am I not like that, I’m so perverse in my thinking, I will at times head the other direction when going along might well be in everyone’s best interests, my own included.

Make no mistake, on some level you will always pay for your differences. Kat is right. Before you walk out on any limb, it’s best to be prepared for someone behind you to have a saw. Hand-in-hand with my housemate’s assertion that I am a failed academic, we now have the emergence of The Odd Little Hick. She’s fond of saying that certain people who have disappointed or outright wronged her did so because she welcomed this “odd little hick” — that would be me — into her life.

In talking with others who care not just for someone who is elderly, but someone who is both old and bitter, I’ve heard variations on the Odd Little Hick line of attack. When my housemate is in one of her powder keg moods, she has an arsenal of emotional bludgeons and hot-button accusations. The best thing to do is to ignore her, but depending upon my own emotional state, I sometimes fail. Emotions have their own toxicity. When you live in a hazardous waste dump created by someone else’s feelings, there will be those times when you absorb the poison regardless of all your precautions.

As I was listening to Kat talk about the right and wrong reasons to place a permanent mark on your body, I could not help but be struck by the fact that my decision to be a full-time caregiver was tantamount to placing a permanent mark on my soul. When we reach a point of transition, I am the one who will go forward and have to live with the memory of these years. Right now, I’m not in a place where the living would be easy. That will be among my goals for 2010 — forgiving what has been said and what will surely be said in the future.

In my last post I talked about realizing that who you are is not defined by what you do. The first time I heard that I was washing dishes and half-way listening to Suze Orman on Oprah. Suze is one of those guests who always teaches me something, but she’s too intense to sit down and watch without the buffer of hot water and soap suds to take the sting out of her in-your-face, practical, financial advice.

On this show, however, she was talking about her own rise from being a short-order cook to a nationally recognized financial advisor and media personality. When she said that bit about “who you are,” my mind flashed on Rick at the grocery store. Rick is a checker with wavy black hair and a droopy mustache. He’s a friendly sort, and we’ve traded banter for several years.

When my cat was diagnosed with cancer, I was in the store, eyes still red from crying and Rick asked me if I was okay. I blurted out the news I’d just been told and that’s when I learned that Rick is a hard-core ailurophile, not only adoring cats, but showing them. From that day forward, Rick never one time failed to ask how Dorey was doing. He’d lost a cat to cancer and his questions weren’t just casual, but knowledgeable.

Other people might look at me like the crazy cat lady, but for the 5 minutes or so I was in his aisle — or when he’d be on break and would stop to talk to me — a guy in the grocery store whose last name I don’t know to this day, offered me understanding and a sympathetic ear.

Of all the negatives I carried away from my years in academia, I’ve struggled most with the Myth of the Failed Academic. Seriously. Get three letters behind your name and then tell people you’re not teaching at a university. They make sympathetic sounds and treat you like you’re the one who has just been diagnosed with the fatal illness.

My own mother once said to me that out of respect for my late father I should never have left teaching. I snapped at her that my late father would have been in favor of my making a living, which I couldn’t do on a college campus, and pointed out that leaving had not been my choice but rather the effect of not being able to find a tenure-track job. She has wisely left the subject alone since then.

When I was in graduate school working on my master’s, I knew a fellow with a newly minted PhD who came to our institution in what was his fifth or sixth attempt to get the coveted tenure-track position. I remember him telling me once that his father was so proud of his degree that he addressed letters to “Dr. John Smith, PhD.”

Well, John didn’t get that tenure-track job and the last I heard, he went back to being a mailman, the job he’d held to put himself through graduate school. He’s the same person, with the same intellect, but I dare say he’s been made to feel a failure more than once. I have no answers for him, or for myself, or for anyone else being made to carry the weight of the expectations of others.

I don’t know the real definition of success, but I do know it has to come from within ourselves and that it cannot be defined by externals so easily ripped from our grasp.

Standing in an empty storage unit is a liberating feeling. There wasn’t time to divest myself of as many “things” as I would have liked, but I am poised to sort through and move along about 25 boxes of books. When the idea of getting rid of my storage unit was first discussed over the summer, the thought of giving up those books made me cry. It took financial necessity and no small degree of soul searching to move me beyond that point.

There’s a bookcase sitting out in our garage now that I dearly love. It was purchased for me when I was in about the third-grade. For many years, two shelves were more than sufficient to serve as a home for my “library,” every volume carefully chosen and well loved. Now, the vast bulk of my “library” is comprised of electronic files and it’s time for the physical holdings to go back to that status of cherished and well-considered items.

Books, though I love them dearly, are one of those things to which a certain type of folk, and I am one, give themselves over to unchecked acquisitiveness. With a sufficient budget and room to spare, I would happily gaze on walls and walls of books. No “decorative” element makes me feel happier or more at home.

Several years ago a friend of my housemate’s stood in front of my eight-foot oak case gazing at the titles. “Have you actually read all these?” she asked. Somewhat startled, I said, “Of course I have, why?” to which she replied, “Oh, I thought you might have bought them by the yard.” I didn’t even know such a thing was possible and remain horrified that it goes on all the time.

I have predominantly lived in one small room for almost eight years. It’s gone through many permutations. I wish I’d taken photographs of each arrangement, because I’d like to see them side by side. I started life here with possessions jam-packed into the available space and with each passing year, more has made way for less resulting in my greater comfort and satisfaction.

When my housemate is extremely angry, she will often tell me that I take care of her so I don’t have to go out and get a job, the implication being that this life is easier. (I know, if it weren’t so pathetic, it would be laughable.)

She has an incredibly elevated opinion of all things academic. Her second husband was a college English professor and I suspect she was first drawn to me because I was studying for the written and oral exams for my PhD and needed someone to help me review notes. She did that for me night after night, for which I will be forever grateful.

I do not, however, share her cherished illusions about the purity of academia. I make more freelancing online than I ever earned at any institution of higher learning and every tenured professor I ever knew had a job on the side to pay the bills. One fellow I especially liked painted houses during the summer because he said he needed to get his hands dirty to remind himself he was just another guy, not Dr. So-And-So.

Those books sitting out in the garage are the last tie to my academic existence. Keeping them tempts me to buy into the myth that I’m a failed academic, the myth that my housemate would foist off on me in her anger. Refusing to play the game is different than being a failure. I walked away from a world where I didn’t fit. It would have been far, far easier to stay.

It’s been a hard part of my journey to get to the point of accepting that who you are is not defined by what you do. If I am going to own books, they will be those volumes that represent who I am, not the ones that represent who anyone thought I should be.

The woman who lives next door to us is almost 90. Possessed of a hyper-controlling nature and a conflated sense of self built largely on the fact that her long-dead husband was a banker, she seeks to rule over this tiny townhouse complex of six units as if it were a medieval fiefdom. I call her the Empress.

She and her husband and a group of friends built these homes in the early 1960s. As long the Emperor was alive, he served as the homeowners association president. Since his death, with the exception of one year, the Empress has held the mythic reins of power.

My transgressions with her are legion, but most recently the major sin involved refusing to have a new roof put on our home just because everyone else was doing it. She’s slapped me so many times with the “property values” whip, I tend to balk on principle rather than actual consideration of the question at hand.

Sunday, after rubber-necking the Saturday work in the garage, the Empress called to chew me out about not having checked the sprinkler system. It’s true that I said I would and didn’t, which was wrong. I simply had larger things on my mind. But her next comment raised my hackles, “And I have to say something to you about those trash bins. They cannot sit outside the garage.”

Gritting my teeth I told her I was perfectly well aware of that, but that at the moment I had no other place to put them. The conversation actually went rather badly downhill from there. When I’m tired, the acid rises easily to my tongue. I am not my mother’s daughter for nothing.

But, considerations of a petty tyrant aside, let’s think about those trash cans. They had been sitting outside for about six hours at the time and were not visible from the street because our homes sit behind a walled driveway. At most, they would have sat there until Tuesday afternoon when they would have been wheeled to the curb for our regular trash pick up. She had clearly seen that a massive reorganization was under way and surely could reason that such activity generates trash. And yet, she could not help herself. She had to say something.

I’ve often laughingly said that the Empress would be a hanging judge, but the longer I live next door to her, and the more metaphorical rope burns I get on my own neck from dealing with her, the less amusing the joke becomes. “Dispensation” is not in her vocabulary, nor it would seem, in her heart. That’s just a fancy way to say, give a guy a break for God’s sake.

Absolutism of any sort should have passed gracefully with the waning of the 18th century. I picked the name “Empress” for our neighbor in a conscious reference to Catherine the Great, Empress of all the Russians, who was the epitome of the absolutist monarch. There has long been speculation about the truth of the so-called Potemkin villages, picturesque constructs erected in the Crimea in 1787 to spare Catherine the sight of the squalid poverty of the serfs. Never mind actually doing something to better the lives of the people.

My Empress, who has regularly dined at the country club on Sunday and Wednesday for more than 40 years, would be completely on board with such a plan. She is so out of touch with the reality of life, that trash bins in the driveway are a matter of epic import rather than temporary expediency. If she had regiments of Cossacks to unleash on offenders like me, I would have long ago died by the sword.

I labor long and hard to keep things in perspective because I spend the bulk of my time dealing with elderly women who have none. If the problem is so obvious you consider building a fake village to hide it, what you really need to do is look at it. Would we all like to float peacefully down the river of life seeing nothing but lovely vistas? Yes, I suspect we would. But every boat must, at some time, come to shore or it will inevitably sink.

Looking for something to read? Try The Women’s Daily Irony Supplement by Judy Gruen

Saturday during our massive reorganization, the A&E television series “Hoarders” came up time and time again. I’ve watched a couple of episodes, but they are getting increasingly difficult. When A&E does reality, they tend to focus on the “reality” part of the equation. These people are in trouble, living in crumbling, toxic homes, facing divorce or the loss of their children. Their hoarding is an emotional howl of anguish, an expression of everything going on internally and externally with which they cannot deal.

Thank God we’re not in that place. A ridiculous surfeit of “stuff?” Definitely. A statement on the immobilizing, depressing aspects of caregiving? Yes. But we don’t live in squalor (excess fur balls don’t count) and being too lazy to deal with the clutter isn’t the same as being emotionally incapable of doing so.

Still, having known my housemate for as many years as I have, disassembling the dashed hopes represented by some of her possessions that have now found new homes was by turns painful and contemplative for me. The vast majority of her specialized and high-quality kitchen utensils are now gone. When she moved into this house, she envisioned that her life would continue as it had when she worked as a facilitator for a wealthy family. There would be social occasions and gourmet cooking, all staged in the beautiful, impeccable style that was her trademark.

She could not envision the loss of her retirement resources through a series of events that are not my business to discuss. She certainly never foresaw a time when she would be so disabled. She firmly believed that if she had a stroke or some other major health incident, she would simply die.

She’s always maintained a belief in her ability to manipulate the world around her and her own destiny with the force of her thoughts. It was a fiction she held dear even when it proved erroneous time and time again. I suppose we all have to have those little delusions of power that get us through the dark of the night, but standing from my perspective, hers served her quite poorly.

Vestiges of that delusion surfaced in her behavior as we moved through the day on Saturday. She didn’t know what was going on in the garage — thank God — but she did know she had absolutely no control over it. Everyone was kind and attentive, checking on her frequently and helping her to remain comfortable and occupied, but the strain proved overwhelming as evidenced by her cognitive lapses during that day and the next.

I’ve done my best to emphasize the positive nature of the project and its consequences, using the words “better” and “improvement” frequently along with “generous” and “gift” in reference to the help we received. I know that the longer she thinks about it, the more she will ask about certain items; inquiries to which I will respond with gentle lies.

That tactic used to bother me, but I now realize it is reinforcing a delicate fictional construct she needs to preserve a sense of balance. What I see as growth would, on her radar, register as diminishment and the lies are crafted to spare her that. She’s lost enough already. If I can give her nothing else, I can give her the fictions that makes her happier while believing that on whatever scale our actions are ultimately weighed, kindness has greater weight than pointless truths.

Yesterday, with the help of dear friends, the contents of my storage unit moved to our attic and garage, eliminating a costly monthly bill and bringing us a step closer toward recovering from my job setback. Everyone was in a good mood all day and I actually enjoyed it all, but it was hard work. Twelve hours of hard work. Needless to say, I was not thrilled when my housemate called me at 5 o’clock this morning asking for a sleeping pill.

I don’t know if I was just exhausted or if the Universe said, “You need an insight,” but here’s what happened.

I walked into her room and said, “I’m just curious why you’d call me at 5 o’clock in the morning when you know how hard I worked all day yesterday and the last thing I said to you last night was, ‘I’m not setting an alarm?’”

“I can’t have a sleeping pill?”

“Of course you can, but I’m just wondering why, when you can and do sleep at any hour of the day, you’d wake me up? When you do this so close to the time I’d normally get up, I can’t go back to sleep.”

“I’ve been up all night.”

“I understand that, but why is your sleep more important than mine when I was so brutally tired?”

“I should be in a nursing home so I don’t bother you.

“That’s nothing but emotional blackmail and that’s not the conversation we’re having. We’re only talking about this particular morning under these particular circumstances. You have no schedule, you don’t work, you can sleep at any time. Why would you wake me up like this today knowing what I did for 12 hours yesterday?”

“I thought it would be better than calling you at 3.”

And that, ladies and gents, is as far as I got. God love her, her reasoning could not get beyond, “Calling at 5 is better than calling at 3.” Nor do I argue with the math, but 7 would have been so nice.

I retrieved the pill, which she took, and before I left I said, “Good night. I hope you sleep well.”

In retrospect I know it seems snide, but I really wasn’t trying to be. It was just one of those automatic things you say, but it was only then that something clicked and she said, “Oh Rana, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay, just get some sleep,” I said, heading for the kitchen and coffee. (Did I mutter a few invectives under my breath? Yeah, I did. Color me human.)

Infused with caffeine, I’ve had a productive morning and I now understand that we have reached the point where I need to leave a clearly visible sign, probably written on cardboard with a black marker, on those occasions when I don’t want her to call me at dawn — an increasingly prevalent habit. I probably would have been up by 6 and she could have had her pill then and been just fine.

It was illuminating to see that she was genuinely confused about why it wasn’t appropriate to wake me at 5 a.m. so she could sleep — and she wasn’t being difficult on purpose. She did not understand. In her mind 5 was better than 3 and that was it. Equation solved. This is a woman who used to be capable of mental calculus. We’re back at first grade math. Lesson learned.

By the time this post is published, I will be in my garage with two good friends attempting to create sufficient space to eliminate the costly monthly expense of a storage unit. It’s a change I’ve been contemplating for several months, but it took the combination of catastrophic job loss and the offer of their help to get me off square one. As I recently said in conversation, I am coming to detest square one. Square one . . . well, square one sucks . . . and I’ve spent more than enough time there.

Even if we only succeed in getting me into the smallest unit possible for the time being, the financial improvement will be considerable, but the psychological boost is already immeasurable. I have discovered I do far better when I feel like I’m fighting back. I finally get those gallant stands against insurmountable odds that litter the pages of history. You have to give Travis and the boys at the Alamo this, they took a lot of the other side with’em.

This past week’s episode of CSI involved the tale of a fellow who kept trying to kill himself and kept failing. Cocktail of drugs and warm milk? He just got a good nap. Initiate a gun battle among three card-carrying NRA rednecks in a gun store? Guy didn’t get so much as a graze. Jump off a really, really tall casino balcony? Damn cops had a big inflatable mattress in place.

Of course, the bad part about those one-hour stories is that we’ll never know what happened to would-be-suicide guy. I find myself wondering if he pulled it all together, got his life on track. Heck, maybe he started a motivational speaking service called Three Strikes: It Doesn’t Necessarily Mean You’re Out.

I hope he learned a similar lesson to the one my Dad learned in North Africa in 1943 where he piloted a B-25 on 51 bombing missions. After flying through unusually heavy flak, he removed his parachute from beneath his seat only to discover a piece of flak had exploded right under him. The parachute stopped all the fragments from reaching his body. Papa always said that told him the Man Upstairs had more things for him to do. Another 53 years’ worth, in fact.

So today as you’re reading, I’ll be sifting through accumulated stuff, relieving myself of physical baggage that will, in turn, lighten the mental load. I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but I feel in my heart this unburdening may be the most positive thing to come out of these closing days of what has been a really bad 2009.

Did you know that humans are the only animals who cry? It’s true. We cry when we’re tired, when we’re elated, when we’re sad, when we’re frustrated — and during a thousand other complex circumstances. We most likely cry because we need to. We’re getting rid of stress hormones. Yes, chemical analysis of tears show we’re purging ourselves of identifiable chemicals that can damage our brain cells and negatively affect every system in our bodies.

I wonder if we cry because we’re the only animals who worry about the future and regret the past? Certainly other species have memories, but on a more elemental level than ours. The dog may look forward to kibble in the bowl at 5 o’clock, but he won’t question the success of his life as a whole if it doesn’t happen. That kind of restless self assessment is left to we higher life forms, evolved little suckers that we are.

I’ve shed an ocean of tears in the past few days, even waking myself up at night crying. My body is trying really hard to get rid of all this stress and I’m letting it. The tears have helped me to make tough decisions in the wake of my job loss. Our television service will be cut off on the first. I didn’t want to deprive an 80-year-old woman of her primary pleasure in life, but I have no choice.

Many of my possessions are about to be given away so I can empty out my storage unit and erase that monthly bill. I’ve done a great deal of downsizing in the last eight years and while in retrospect it’s all been good, none of it has been easy. It hurts because it moves me farther away from who I’ve always thought I was and toward a new concept of self at odds with my background.

So, rather than apply the pejorative appellations to myself that my mother has historically used about crying, I am letting myself grieve these changes in the midst of acknowledging their necessity and probable long-term good. I think I would worry about myself more if I did not cry. That would indicate a degree of numbness I’m trying to avoid. As long as I’m engaged with this struggle, in my heart, I know I’m not lost.