When I was little I went through a phase when I was obsessed with death. I could not get my head around the fact that we are all just walking around with no idea when we are going to die. For a while I thought my parents must know, like you get the data with all the forms from the hospital: height, weight, time of birth, time of death. I was constantly asking them things like, when am I going to die? Saturday?

No one really knew what to do with that.

Now, I’m obsessed with knowing when my mother is going to die.

Whenever I make plans for a few months down the road I wonder, will mom be dead by then? What if she dies in the middle of ______ . How will that work? What will I do? Just drive home, I guess. Or, cancel the thing.

It would just be nice to know, to have a schedule, like you do for some C-sections or when labor gets induced. When it’s getting really close and there might be complications and the doctor just calls it: let’s get er done! Why can’t we do it on the other end of life too? (We can, sometimes, with MAID, but I don’t think it’s often enough.)

Also, I’ll just say it: I’m really pissed she is not already dead. Why is she still here?

Back when we would all still gather at my parents house, my brother, our spouses, kids, the dog, we collectively rolled our eyes about how long everything took. My mom liked to extend visits, press for more time, guilt us into not leaving just yet. We’d plan to be there for dinner but somehow get sucked into a vortex of words and food and then somehow not make it back to life and land until many lifetimes had passed.

It’s like that. She won’t let go. Has to just keep the party going long after everyone wants to leave. The kids are melting down, the car has been idling in the driveway for an hour, someone is honking the horn, we’re sweating in our coats loaded down with diaper bags and car seats, and she’s still standing at the kitchen counter, dishing out one more giant Ziplock of leftovers. “You didn’t like it? Don’t you want to take any home?”

I think about those stages of grief, even though they have been debunked, proven to be erroneous and even harmful as a model of grieving and healing but in our culture we can’t handle talking about death so that’s the narrative we’re stuck with.

In any case, instead of being angry that she’s dying, I’m mad that she’s alive. Also, I’m bargaining, but I want her death hastened, not forestalled.

I’ve been praying to Saturn, who rules time, thresholds, death, to take her. Make haste, make her ready. Compress the time between now and her due date. Make her time be now.

Please. I beg of thee.

I drape my altar in black, make an offering of lead, onyx, obsidian.

I can’t say I’m not a little uneasy about it. There’s a lot of programming around not wishing people we love to die. Is this really okay? (Yes, it is.)

Also, Saturn is sometimes scary, dark, and heavy. Saturn is consequential. I don’t want to incur any karma for this. Nor do I want my mom to feel scared, for it to feel dark and heavy when she goes, although, obviously, it will be consequential.

So sometimes I include Mercury in my incantations, the psychopomp who can travel between realms, a trixter. Mercury can go get my dad and tell him it’s time.

My dad was charming and charismatic. He was also indecisive. He waffled. Took forever to take action. I feel him hovering sometimes now, and I’m like, dad! Come on! Chop, chop - go get her!

He was also a little afraid of my mom. I mean, we all were. She was a force. (We were scared of my dad, too, but in a different way). He might be unsure if she’s really done. It might make her mad if his timing is off.

But. Finally. He will, with the grace of all the gods, step up.

I used to imagine it like this: he appears beside her bed, says, Hi Patsy.

Her eyes light up and she gasps in delighted surprise. You’re here!

They’ll do their little three kiss ritual - kiss kiss kiss - and then he’ll say. Well? What do you think? Are you ready?

(Which, groan. Wrong approach. You can not give her any leeway!)

She’ll suggest some kind of detour, a way to extend the journey. Maybe stop at the gift shop for some merch on the way out. She’ll rifle through the pile of T-shirts on the sale table until she finds one that says, “Look out Heaven Cuz Here I Come!” She’ll get one in every color and make my dad wear a matching shade, even though he’s already been to heaven and back many times.

Recently, I’ve revised the scenario. My dad’s dead. Maybe he’s gained some wisdom, gotten some skills. So, now it goes like this:

He shows up, holds out his hand, says (firmly, lovingly) “Come. It’s time.” My mother is enraptured by his commanding tone. Hand on heart, says, “Oh, my.” Mouth agape, eyes wide, she takes his hand and follows him. He carries her across the threshold and they float away toward the light.

The end. There. Is that so much to ask?

And so, with the power of Saturn, Mercury, the Sun, the Moon, all the stars and all the gods, I bless, I pray: may it be so, for the highest good of all.

Thank you thank you thank you thank you…..

Amen.

What matters right now:

I am alive. I am here. I am drinking coffee in a coffee shop in a town near a place I love. Flowers are everywhere. The pool is cool. This morning, a bear pawed through the trash and a porcupine slept in the grandmother hemlock tree. I saw a fox. I’m so far away from the rest of my life I can’t even remember what it’s like there, what I’m doing or where I’m headed. This is a moment.

A friend recently noted, in passing, that my life is on fire. It came as a surprise when he said it. But, yes. Now that you mention it, I do feel the warmth at my back. I guess I’ve gotten used to the heat.

I can’t tell whether or not I can feel my body. I can’t tell whether or not I’m inside my own brain.

But: I am alive. I am here. I am drinking coffee in a coffee shop in a town near a place I love. There are so many flowers. There was a bear in the trash and a porcupine in the tree. I saw a fox. This is a moment.

I did not see the bear myself but would like to.

I am putting words on the page to orient myself because that is what I do. I can see the sun reflected in my computer screen through the window behind me. A giant pine tree grows well above the roof of the house across the street. These words are in the tree.

Sometimes I cook at the retreat center. I cooked for the retreat this past weekend and now it’s the in-between time.

Just before the retreat began I hit “send” on the email containing all the discovery documents for the thing I’m in the middle of. 387 documents. Plus a twenty page statement, notarized. I had hoped to have it done earlier, for the ease and peace and flow that might come after. But it was all very crunchy and there was no earlier.

“Discovery” is a word better associated with exploration and wonder than legal disputes and power grabs. I will reclaim it, discovery.

This coming weekend I will get to be a participant in a retreat and I wonder what I will discover.

I have been rage-y, feral. The timing of the document thing and then cooking was not great. Cooking for a retreat is a big responsibility. I want people to feel nourished and loved as they do the deep work they have come here to do.

I wanted to be responsible for my energy, for what I was holding and emitting. I wanted to be contained.

Also: a lot of love is shared in the kitchen.

I woke up one morning in tears, dreams leaking hot and fast into the day. I pulled an apron over my pajamas and started cracking eggs. Even if my brain forgets, my body knows: all of me is welcome here. My fellow chef held me sweetly for a moment and let me go about whisking and chopping while I cried. As others awoke and started the coffee, more love. No one tried to fix anything or make me not cry. By the time the food was on the counter for people to serve themselves, I was lighter, laughing.

So much awaits me when I get back. But for now I am alive. I am here. I am drinking coffee in a coffee shop in a town near a place I love. The flowers are everywhere, a bear, a porcupine, a fox. This is a moment.

Last weekend while cooking I did not know I had cut my finger open on the jagged lip of a can of beans until I saw the blood pooling in the sink. I did not know I had singed my flesh on a pot of steaming rice until someone asked if I needed some aloe and pointed to the florid patch of skin on my forearm. I didn’t know a blood vessel had burst in my eye until someone asked if I was okay and had I looked in a mirror.

I was startled to see the bright red blob of blood in the corner of my eye but it made sense: so many fucking documents that I am bleeding out of my eyes.

My body is erupting. At any moment, hot lava might spout from the top of my head, turning everyone around me to ash.

Consider yourself warned.

Over the course of writing this, I have moved around to the other side of the table so I can look directly at the sun and sky and the giant tree above the roof of the house across the street. The light is the light of high summer, the light of about-to-harvest.

I will head back up the mountain soon, take a dip in the cool pool.

I plan to venture out just before dawn, roll around naked in the compost heap. I want the bear to find me, do what she will with my body. After, I will crawl up the path toward the standing stones, licking each toadstool along the way. Seeds and twigs will catch in my hair. Moss will green my knees.

When the sun peeks above the horizon, I will eat the day, discover everything.

Here’s an image of my ex husband and me, from when we were first together: riding bikes somewhere, maybe we’d gone camping? Paved road but only lush green trees as far as we can see, riding uphill.

We did this thing sometimes, for fun, fake racing. One of us would speed up and then the other one would speed up and then one of us would pull out in front, usually him. And then the other would catch up and we’d be neck and neck for a minute until he broke away and “won.” I’d shout “I’m not racing!” and then we’d laugh. It became a thing, whenever one of us might challenge the other in some sort of competition.

“I’m not racing!”

You can’t win if I’m not playing the game.

The image came to me this morning while I was meditating, and it was a good reminder. A reminder that we once loved each other.

Also, I needed the reminder that he can’t win if I’m not playing his game.

Half an hour ago, an email came through from his legal team with documents attached. I was at the gym, reading on my phone. The document format now so familiar, that century schoolbook font, bold and all caps at the top: CIRCUIT COURT OF COOK COUNTY DOMESTIC RELATIONS DIVISION, “Petitioner,” “Respondent,” case number. I scanned quickly between sets of dumbbell curls. The word “subpoena” stood out.

My heart seized. Now what? What else could they possibly want?

Close the email. Get on the elliptical, race your heart out.

At home, I fed the documents to Claude, well aware by now of the per-chat upload limit, and was informed that the subpoena was for all of my employee files from my last two jobs. Excessive and invasive, but nothing that required any action on my part. I was simply being notified.

Okay okay. Breathe. Fine. so… why? They’ve already requested all of this information from me in discovery. Why this too?

Claude says it’s standard procedure.

Standard procedure is bullshit.

I’ve been struck by how strange it is that this is how things get decided. With these impenetrable documents and an “Impartial” judge. This game is skewed against me in so many ways. I’m relying on a robot, and my ex has a whole team of highly educated and overpaid professionals. He can keep paying them until he gets what he wants. Until I say uncle.

In the past, this would have devastated me, left me feeling powerless and afraid and then ashamed of my powerlessness. I would have been undone by the sheer force of his hostility. This was our divorce. And, at the end, our marriage. He “won” so much. Because he could keep paying for as long as he wanted the game to last.

Poorest fuck always loses. That’s the way it works.

But now: I’m not racing. I’m not playing his game.

He says it’s about money. About fairness. But It’s not about any of that because I have no money for him to take, and he has more than he will ever need.

It’s about power.

In the rules for my game, what matters is how I show up for myself, and in this game, I am a champion. The other night I communed with the moon, which was full and conjunct Pluto. I made black salt and played with fire. I called in my helpers, and they all showed up.

He cannot fuck with me.

It’s true that I have spent hours and hours and hours already collecting the documents and statements that they have demanded. It’s… bananas, the amount of paperwork. But. you know what? I drink a beer while I tend to this bullshit task, have the TV on in the background. Lately it’s “The Closer” because my mom liked that show, and I don’t care enough to follow the drama, but I can look up every once in a while and see what’s her name being a badass in a network tv kind of way. Awesome.

So, fine. Here’s aaalllll the documents. Have fun with that. I would love to see the bill from your highly educated and overpaid team of legal experts after they comb through the details that will yield nothing. I’ll show up to court on the appointed day to hear what the judge will have to say, and then I’ll go about my life.

If I am asked by the court to fork over the handful of coins in my pocket I will, knowing they will bring him no satisfaction. My misery is the real prize he’s after, and I refuse to suffer.

There’s nothing to win or lose or take, nothing he can extract. I’ve got me on my side. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.

They are doing construction north of Lawrence Ave, along the river walkway that I had intended to take. So, instead I cut across to Virginia Ave, to where the streets all dead end along the river, and you can get through on foot but not in a car.

These quiet streets are shaded by big trees. One has a few multi-unit apartment buildings and feels more congested, the others are lined with single family homes, nice but not too fancy.

Across from one of these cul de sacs is the secret park, a playground I came to sometimes with my boys when they were young and we lived in the apartment on Wilson Avenue, where we moved during the divorce. I signed the lease and had it for a month before the three of us moved in at the end of the school year.

That semester I had a long break between a couple of the classes I was teaching, and the apartment was not far from campus. I would go there, to the empty apartment, and lay on the bare wood floor. This place was MINE. I might doze off, or weep, the outpouring a mix of relief and gratitude and terror. Could I really make this work? Hold it all together for the three of us?

I could. I did.

There were several small parks or play areas within walking distance. The secret park was not the closest. It was across the river, over a little hill. It took a bit more planning and effort to get there. It wasn’t special, really, just meant we were in a certain kind of mood.

As I walked around the neighborhood the other day, I meandered through these moments. I was housesitting for my brother and sister in law, who live about two blocks from that apartment. I now live a few blocks from the place they lived before they moved over there. We were in the same neighborhood for about six months, before the boys and I were kicked out and we had to find a new place to live.

I remembered, as I saw these parks and places, how hard it was. Me and the boys. How, even when we were at the park, and they were occupied and happy enough, the weight of it all bore down on me. I felt it, always, the responsibility, but didn’t really notice it. It was the air we breathed.

I don’t think we could have imagined then that we would be as bonded as we are now, that the three of us, and the two of them, would be such close friends.

They used to fight so much, the two of them. Anything might set one or the other off, and then there they’d go and we’d all go stomping back home, back over the little hill and across the river, and someone might be crying and someone else might be running ahead to get away or lagging behind, way back there. Someone, it seemed, was always upset.

As they got bigger, it got scarier for all of us. They hurt each other sometimes and I couldn’t stop them. I could only stand by, helpless, afraid, triggered by my own childhood, the fighting.

There were also ridiculous made up games with rules that changed mid-play that went on forever and made us all laugh. Or cry. There was always that edge.

And there were meals eaten and love shared and homework done or forgotten. There were dates, when the boys were with their dad. A whole other life they knew nothing about. Sex and drugs and fun and some danger.

One March night, I arrived home alone, late, and found that the apartment had been robbed. There were muddy footprints and clods of dirt everywhere and the curtains gently blew in front of the still-open window. I waited outside for the police to come, shivering from cold and fear, unsure whether or not anyone was still in there.

I didn’t want the boys to be afraid. We went to a hotel nearby for a night while things got sorted out. We played a made-up game with ridiculous rules in the pool of the suburban Marriott Courtyard. We had complimentary pancakes in the dining room before school the next morning. It felt special and not at all scary.

We all grew up there, on Wilson avenue. The building still stands, owned by someone else. I can tell because there are flowers in the front yard that was always patchy and a little sad.

Right now, my boys are hanging out together at a bar, watching the world cup with friends. I am here, doing this. We are all about to leave here, this other apartment, and live our lives apart from each other. I don’t know where any of us will be a year from now.

So, I think people have this idea about assisted living facilities (I know I did), that they are like a camp for old folks. Like, you can just drop off your people, wave good-bye, and they will be taken care of. They’ll make new friends and have a good time; they will be well fed and clothed in clean, dry things that belong to them (don’t forget to sew labels into all of their personal items!). Their care will be ample and provided BY OTHER PEOPLE.

In other words, once they are in an assisted living facility, you’re off the hook. (You can probably tell where this is going.)

When my brother and I moved my parents out of their home of over fifty years, we were panicking and desperate. We did not do a ton of research because we didn’t have time, and our needs were pretty specific. I don’t know what difference “research” would have made anyway because there is only so much you can know from the outside, and so many questions you don’t know to ask until it’s too late.

Also, we thought my father was actively dying and would likely not make the move anyway. So, once we found a place that seemed well established and and got good reviews and had an opening for two people with very different needs, we grabbed it.

There are so many things you don’t know until you know. For example: tiered facilities. These are places that you may have noticed seem to be springing up everywhere these days, that have some variation of independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing, memory care. All in one! So convenient!

You only have to move once, and then you mosey your way on down the hallway of doom as you decline, and then you’re dead. The end. Easy-peasy.

All elegantly packaged with glossy brochures and bright chandeliers.

But: there is a TON of fine print and variation about the levels of care within the tiers and what it actually means in terms of hands-on help and how fluidly one might move between tiers when necessary and what the communication about care plans and medications is like and what constitutes “skilled” nursing and who pays for what with insurance and what happens if you need more care than you’re getting in one tier but not as much care and you think they’ll provide in another tier and what happens when you’re actually not getting any care at all but no one will sign the paperwork so that you can be released and get the fuck out of there and back to your regular tier until you show up with a goddam lawyer.

So, you know. Confusion. Obfuscation. Frustration. Rage.

For now, though: let’s go back to assisted living. One of the things often most bragged about in the glossy brochures are the activities. So many activities! Games, happy hour, trips to the mall! Cultural outings! Gardening! Puzzles, pizza, movies! Anything you can think of - they have got it all.

Awesome.

The thing is, if people are not informed about the activities, they will not be able to go. If someone doesn’t know that the activities are happening, or how to find them, or where the sign up sheet is, it’s unlikely that they will show up.

If they are aware of all of the logistical details but they tend to lose track of time, or don’t generally know what day it is, they are not likely to know when to make their way down the hall to the elevator, push the button, go down to the second floor - not the first - and find Activity Room C, the location designated on the Community Calendar, but which on all signage is referred to not as Activity Room C, but as “The Gathering Place.”

It’s great that there is a little bus that will pick folks up and ferry them across the parking lot of the adjacent mall to the Red Lobster for lunch on a random Wednesday. My parents loved seafood! And biscuits! But, these are popular outings - and of course they are! - with limited seats which fill up quickly. Which means that you have to be in the know. You have to know when the activity will be scheduled, which means you have to know where the schedule is and how often to check it.

You also have to know where the sign up sheet is, because sometimes people try to hide it in the mailroom bin beneath the sale flyers from the local grocery store in an effort to ensure their spot on the bus. You have to know that the sign up sheet can usually, but not always, be found inside the notebook with the unwinding wire spiral that could easily get caught on someone’s sweater, or skin, or god forbid, their eye, should people be wrestling over the notebook in order to be first in line to sign up for the Red Lobster lunch. (As far as I know, this wire-in-the-eye thing never actually happened but it’s easy to imagine.)

But don’t worry if you miss out. There are other outings.

The trip to the grocery store is every third Thursday and every other Tuesday. Sometimes at 10:00 and sometimes at 1:00. The sign up sheet for these outings is a piece of paper hanging on the wall outside the mailroom. But good luck finding a pencil because the one that’s supposed to be hanging there is always missing.

We were shocked when, instead of dying, my father slowly started to recover from his “age related metabolic response” when he was taken off of the medication that was supposed to keep his blood sugar in check but instead had wreaked havoc on his system and almost landed him in a diabetic coma. He could walk again, and dress himself, and he was able to speak and think clearly (most of the time).

We didn’t think he would survive the move but now here he was (miraculously!!), looking for a good time.

But a good time is hard to find when everything is new and different and everyone keeps telling you that the information you’re seeking is in the blue folder you got at orientation but it turns out you never got the blue folder because you weren’t told that you had to sign up for the orientation, so you missed it.

I tried to keep track of scheduled activities and outings and kept a copy of the weekly calendar handy so I could call and remind my parents when activities were taking place, but I could not, over the phone, direct them to where they needed to go. In theory, they could press the call button they were supposed to wear on a long chain around their neck at all times and ask for help. But, it takes time to adjust to having a call button around your neck and to remember to use it and to not take it off and hide it in the coffee pot or the medicine cabinet behind the toothpaste, And anyway, that help was never that helpful.

Eventually it was suggested by the staff that we hire additional help to facilitate these things, to have someone come and escort my parents to the outings and help them be ready in time. It’s easy! In fact there is someone right here on the first floor of the building who acts as a dispatch for the extra help. Just give her a call or stop on by.

Right. Eventually, we did that, hired more care for the outings and meals (although, as it turns out, having someone you don’t know come into your room and tell you it’s time to get on a bus or go to chair yoga doesn’t motivate you to participate), and then more care for the dressing and bathing and laundry, and then more care for overnight, just in case someone woke up and tried to leave or was unsteady on their feet getting to the bathroom, and yet it seemed, somehow 35,000 dollars a month later, that my parents were still not actually being cared for all that well.

All that to say: the “assistance” that is included in assisted living is not always sufficient. OR, the window within which the care is sufficient, is quite small, and often, closing quickly by the time someone moves into that type of facility.

But maybe that won’t be your experience or what happens for your loved ones. I hope not. I hope that everyone you know can figure out where to go for Pizza and Puzzles! when the time comes.

My mother liked to be festive for all the holidays and all the seasons. She had stacks of decorative placemats: flowers, pumpkins, bunnies, turkeys, flags, shamrocks, hearts, snowflakes, and don’t even get me started on Christmas. That was its own decorative universe.

Likewise, napkins, candlesticks, throw pillows for the living room and dining rooms sofas, entryway rugs, hand soaps, hand towels, oven mitts, candles, window decorations, wreaths.

From late May (Memorial Day) through mid-July (the 4th), we were in Patriotic Season: all the red, white, and blue everything.

My mom was not political and was never really affiliated with a particular party. In general, she wanted more women elected, but only if she “liked” whoever the women were. You know, if they were charismatic, warm, well-spoken, looked put-together but not overly polished. She was a fan of Michelle Obama. She was proud to be “An American,” but I’m not sure she ever really thought about what that meant, beyond flag-themed tableware.

(This changed in 2016. She said she almost divorced my father when he was going to vote for Trump a second time.)

My parents liked to wear matching shorts that had stars on one leg, stripes on the other. It made them easy to spot at the pre-fireworks picnic.

My father was not really political either, in terms of articulating any ideology, but he was patriotic, especially as he got older. He was a veteran of the Korean War, or Korean Conflict, depending on who you ask. When I was growing up, he never talked about it. I think I only found out he was a veteran because of some project in grade school.

But then, many years ago now, he had a friend who was active with the local VFW post, who invited him to come for a drink at the bar. My father resisted at first, but after a while acquiesced. He eventually became an officer, then Commander of the post.

Still, he talked about the Post, not the War. He had been drafted, something I thought a lot about when my boys turned 18. He helped build a bridge. Much later, we would hear from other family members about how he was “not quite right” when he got back aftwards, about how he woke the house at night, screaming.

When my father was growing up in St. Louis, a child of newly arrived Lithuanian immigrants, his uncle owned a tavern, which later passed through the hands of various cousins. Different constellations of family members lived upstairs, across from, next door to, each other, and to the tavern. There are stories of secret rooms and shady characters, of jail time and hiding out.

The tavern was still in the family when I was little, and when we drove down for a weekend visit, my cousins and I ran around while our parents drank and told stories. We were served Shirly Temples with extra cherries and given quarters to play songs on the juke box. We made up games involving running, hiding, and ducking between bar stools and clouds of cigarette smoke. On New Year’s Eve, we laced filmy scarves through the tips of paper party hats and played I Dream of Genie, arms forming a square out in front of us, blinking each other in and out of existence.

The Chicago suburb where I grew up, where my parents still lived until a few years ago, had a cute downtown, a historic old theater with an art deco marquis, a little square with a fountain in the middle. When my kids were little, we attended the annual Memorial Day Parade to see my father march down the main street in his uniform, carrying a giant flag in his white gloved hands. People in old time-y cars threw candy out of the windows, the high school marching bands played, dance troupes twirled and spun (including performances from the studio where I took classes as a kid!). There were floats that ferried packs of scouting organizations, the town mayor, perhaps the occasional state senator.

The boys and my niece would collect their candy and then fight over it in the sweltering heat or cool drizzle or whatever the weather of late May might bring. My dad and others from the VFW would assemble in front of the fountain in the middle of the square and ceremonially shoot off their rifles, and the kids would hunt for the shells. Someone played taps, and there would be a speech that no one could hear. Then we’d head to the VFW for pitchers of cheap beer and hot dogs.

The VFW was glorious. Swiveling captains chairs at the bar, sunken meeting spaces down or up a few steps, secret rooms, wood paneling. You could still smell the cigarette smoke steeped into the naugahyde, like an olfactory ghost haunting the place, pissed at its exile.

Kids ran around playing hide and seek and made up games.

Bikers revved their engines in the parking lot.

The bathrooms had those countertops with ribbons of sparkly gold woven through the formica pattern, pink and mauve. Small vases of fake flowers that had been there since 1972 held up well beneath the fluorescent lights.

Old women in hairnets reached tongs into vats of water where the hot dogs were boiled. Long tables held paper plates with open buns, bottles of ketchup, mustard, and relish, snack-sized bags of Lays potato chips.

A raffle, bingo. Slot machines. The old kind, where you pull the arm and the images align or they don’t, very tangible wins and losses.

Guys with names like Norm and Bob.

Later, it all changed. The post had to move its operation to a different location and merge with a neighboring town’s members. The new place was in a larger building - ugly and 80’s-ish. A giant chandelier cast its garish light across the carpeted hallway they shared with insurance companies or whatever.

During the period when my brother and I lived with my parents as caregivers, when they were both in crisis, there was a big event taking place at the new VFW. A ceremony having to do with the armistice in Korea. Before his stroke-like “health event,” my father had been in charge of planning the whole thing.

Now it was touch and go, whether he could make it or not, with his wheelchair, the medication side effects, his overwhelming fatigue, the many and urgent bathroom trips. And who would keep an eye on my mother?

During the event, we ended up having to call 911 because my father had an incident. I know that at the time it was scary, terrifying even, but looking back now, it just blurs with all the other incidents.

My boys were there, across the room, high schoolers in dress shirts. They had arrived on their own from our apartment in the city, where they lived alone for the time being while I tended to my parents. I can still see their faces, pale and sweaty and scared, as the ENTs made their way through the sea of people to get to where my father sat, gasping for air.

It all ended up okay. For the moment.

I’m pretty sure that was the last time I was at the VFW. I never liked the new location anyway.

Since today is Saturday, Saturn’s day, I want to give the crabby old man of the zodiac some love.

For those of you not really into astrology, fear not! Most of this will be in plain English.

Saturn gets a bad rap in astrology, and for good reason. The planet represents things like restrictions, limits, and obstacles. Saturn is a cold, distant “no.” Saturn says STOP. We see Saturn coming, and we groan. Here comes a buzzkill.

But, I am here to share a happy Saturn story:

So, a few years ago, I got laid off from my job teaching creative writing at a local state university. My contract was not renewed due to low enrollment.

It was not a shock.

I had been lucky to have had a steady stream of classes - and fun ones to teach! - for as many years (13? 14?) as I did. As an adjunct, contingent faculty, I lived in a constant state of financial insecurity and professional precarity. I had acclimated to being grossly underpaid and overworked, to always needing a side hustle or three (massage, ghost writing, tutoring, etc.).

I have an MFA in creative writing. Academia seemed like the only place that might pay me for what I know how to do. My position kept me so busy trying to survive that there was little time to figure out what other options might be available.

Until I had to.

I did a whole “career pivot” which involved learning a bunch of tech stuff, building a portfolio that showed off things that I had built using the tech stuff I had just learned, figuring how to do all the things I had not had to do for many years, like interviewing for jobs, or ever, like adapting to office culture.

As part of my “rebrand,” I updated my wardrobe, bought myself some new slacks. (They were just pants, but it seemed like people in offices might call them “slacks” so that’s how I referred to them in my head.)

Meanwhile, I was watching Saturn inch its way toward Pisces. In my astrological birth chart, Pisces is in my 10th house, the place of public roles, or the “career house.”

Saturn was finishing up its time in Aquarius, my 9th house, place of philosophy, religion, and higher education. I lost my job in higher ed while Saturn was in that house, and now, as I was starting to send out a million resumes for a job in a field I didn’t fully understand and had no experience to speak of, Saturn was about to spend two and a half years in my career house.

Great.

I thought, welp. There goes that. Good thing I kept the price tag on those pairs of slacks because they’re going back to the store.

But, guess what? The same week that Saturn entered Pisces, I got an offer for the job I would have for the next 2 and a half years.

Did I love it? No.

Was it exactly what I needed at the time? Yes.

I felt Saturn’s pinch even as I was grateful for its gifts.

Saturn rules time. My new job was my first ever 9-5 gig. It was a ROUGH adjustment. M-F, all day, every day with only two weeks off? What? I kept thinking, how do people DO this?

But, I acclimated.

The flipside of all the rules and restrictions Saturn is known for is a sense of stability and structure. You could even say, support.

The 9-5 part was hard, but there was also ZERO expectation that I look at my computer outside of those hours. The work itself was easy and a little creative, and it occupied no space in my brain outside the office. Mind. blown.

The job also gave me my first regular, year-round paycheck and decent insurance. My parents were both dying at the time, so it was nice to not have to be in survival mode, at least financially.

Another first: I was on a team. It was weird! But they were great. (The larger institution? Not so much.) Within our office, there were rules and restrictions but there was clear communication, transparency, and appreciation for work done, none of which I had experienced before.

So, yay for boring, undemanding, predictable jobs when everything else is super chaotic! Thank you, Saturn!

Saturn moved out of Pisces and into Aries for a bit last summer, and then retrograded back into Pisces to finish up its business there. Guess what happened?

The same week that Saturn moved back into my career house, our entire team was dissolved, and I got laid off from my boring, undemanding, stable job.

My tenure at that job was exactly bookended by Saturn’s entrance into my career house, first from Aquarius, and then from Aries.

Both having that job and losing it were incredible gifts. I would have lingered there indefinitely because I had gotten used to the stability, the predictability of time and money. But, I needed to shake things up!

Since Saturn (also Neptune, but that’s another story) left my career house and took with it a bunch of rules and limitations, I started writing again! I launched my astrology website! I am dreaming up all kinds of other offerings including caregiver support and writing workshops.

I have given away every pair of slacks!

It’s all a little wild and chaotic and dreamy and creative. After having been tied up and bound tightly, I am rediscovering my own rhythms and structures. I feel like myself again, in terms of my public roles.

This is what I love about astrology, how it offers a lens through which to interpret events in ways I would not arrive at otherwise. It’s not that I think Saturn “caused” these events, but I can see patterns of repetition and return that feel like they mean something, and I experience deep pleasure in the pattern tracking and meaning-making, the gorgeous poetic structure and rhythm of it all.

I can connect with an energy I might think of as “Saturnian” within myself, as part of life, as an archetype, and I can develop a specific flavor of gratitude with which to hold all of it.

Now, Saturn is in Aries, which is my 11th house, place of friends, groups and allies, and dreams for the future. Saturn in Aries is an outsider and a rebel. It is the home of my natal Saturn, which means next year I will have my second Saturn return. I will let you know how all of that goes, but Saturn and I are friends now, so I am looking forward to it.

If you want to know which house Saturn is currently transiting in your chart, drop your rising sign in the comments, and I’ll fill you in.

Or, if you would like to know what kinds of gifts (or challenges….) Saturn might have in store for you through creative constriction, or in upcoming transits, book a reading with me.

On a different note, I have been hard on Chicago lately, but there is much local beauty behold. Here’s a little video from the day of the solstice:

Thank you for reading!

Two nights ago, someone was shot and killed in front of the condo building across the alley from me. I was out on the deck, enjoying a cool evening among the plants that had finally been potted. Just a few herbs this year, basil, chives, lavender, mint. A small scarlet begonia, for the Grateful Dead. Evan had potted them earlier in the day. He wanted a project, something to do, to be useful, which was sweet and a little confusing but then I realized he was procrastinating writing an essay for an application to the study abroad program he is ambivalent about. He also mopped the kitchen floor.

A few months ago, I got a new mop. It has a refillable canister attached and a washable scrubbing pad. There’s a recipe for the cleaning solution that goes in the canister: water, vinegar, dish soap, essential oils. The recipe hangs on the side of the fridge beneath a Rosie the Riveter magnet. This is probably less exciting than the shooting, though, the mop recipe. I realize that.

It’s hard to know how to talk about it, about people being shot and killed right over there. There were four shots. Did I say that already? They were loud. I was out on the deck with the potted plants, enjoying the evening and I heard the shots. For a second I tried to pretend they were fireworks. Because it’s the season for that. But I knew. I could feel the reverberations. I stayed out there, waiting for what would happen next, wondering if I should call 911. I didn’t.

Others did, which I knew would be the case. Let the others call. I’m enjoying my potted basil. Or, I’m aware of the potted basil, but not really enjoying it now. Still, I’m not dead. I haven’t been shot. There were sirens. The sirens were loud. Police, ambulance, fire trucks. They were too late. After a little while, a helicopter hovered overhead, low. The shooter ran and was eventually shot a block away. I didn’t know this part until later, until today. It’s not like it was breaking news or a big headline. Why would it be? I had to hunt it down, the story of what happened. Because I wanted to know. Because it was right there, right across the alley from me. If I turn my head right now I can look at the building.

It’s hard to know how to talk about it, a shooting, someone dying from being shot. Because it’s not about me, in that it’s not anyone I knew or cared about. It was not the condo board president of the building where I live, who stepped in to stop the person with the active restraining order from trying to enter the building where their ex lived.

I don’t want to glom on to someone else’s trauma. There are people in anguish right now over this shooting that for me was a scary loud sound followed by more loud alarming noise. I just went inside, across the freshly mopped kitchen floor, talking to a friend on a video chat, trying to convey how fucking loud all the sirens were. I didn’t know if she could hear, through the phone, how loud it all was.

I don’t know what else to say. People are dying around me. It’s not the first time.

A few years ago there were the boys in the alley, their mother wailing. The boys who were murdered in front of our garage were 17 and 19. At the time, my boys were 17 and 19.

This is a “nice” neighborhood. Stupid bougie condos all over the place. My building is a holdout, old and beautiful. If I let myself, I could feel very sad about it all. But then what. It’s not my personal loss but it is my community, even if I don’t really know my neighbors or fully understand what “community” means in this context. I don’t want to sensationalize it, the shooting, the violence.

Sometimes I am jaded and like to wear my city-dweller identity like a badge of coolness, like yeah people get shot around me all the time. Big deal. I’m tough. Or something like that. Because you do kind of have to be a little tough. I’m not sure what the alternative is. I was somewhere recently - where was it? - where we were all casually talking about our close encounters with guns. One part of me was there, in the cool exchange of narratives, another part wanted to scream. I have other things I was going to write, works in progress, but this was on my mind today and now it’s on the page, and in your mind. I don’t think we’re meant to hold these things alone, so if you’re still here, thank you. I hope Evan goes abroad. I think it would be really good for him.

*Credit to for the title, which was offered in conversation about this piece of writing, which I shared last night in a membership meeting. Thanks also to , , , and others not taggable here. And, always, thank you to , who heard the sirens and reached out.

I keep trying to write this part of the story, which I alluded to in a recent post, the part about when it all first fell apart, in a way that will make sense. But it’s too big, too messy. There’s no clear entry point. It does not cohere, as a narrative, because the events themselves make no sense. I can only tell it, for now, as a series of scenes and images.

For example: the bright yellow paint in the utility room. When did they paint it that color? There was a space beneath the stairs where my parents once hid Christmas presents, and we would peek at them beforehand and then feel bad because we were still supposed to believe in Santa and because now there would be no surprises. We just couldn’t help wrecking it for ourselves.

When we - my brother and I - sold my parents’ house, my brother would have to put up some drywall down there because something came up in the inspection about the stairs and the furnace and wood and danger.

But, before that, in the moment of disaster, here is my brother, in the utility room, pointing out the cobwebs, saying how the room should be repainted because of the cobwebs. Or at least deep cleaned. I stared blankly at him, a basket of laundry in my hands. I had not noticed the cobwebs. I mean, sure, I’d seen them when I went down there to grab more eggs or whatever out of the basement fridge, or to throw in a load of laundry. There was so much laundry. Because of all the peeing. But the cobwebs hadn’t really registered as something that needed to be dealt with.

My father seemed like he’d had a stroke and could not in any way take care of himself and my mother was rapidly losing her mind. My brother wanted to paint the laundry room. The cobwebs had become a priority.

I blinked.

“No one is going to want to live here,” he said. “We have to clean up the house.”

I didn’t really… I mean. What?

“If we’re going to try to get live-in nursing or anything, we have to clean up around here,” he said. “The place is falling apart. No one will want to come.”

He was on a step ladder, reaching across the sink with a rag-covered broom toward the cobwebby corner, the sink that I now saw was gross. There was an overturned pee bucket on one side and the other side had water running into it from the washing machine through a hose with a slimy, grey-fuzzed lint trap attached.

The room spun a little bit.

This is what made us a good team, my brother and me. Different perspectives. He thought of things I didn’t.

Those many weeks during which my brother and I provided live-in help as we tried desperately and unsuccessfully to procure professional live-in help was a very surreal chunk of time, an off-kilter kind of reality: my family of origin living together. My parents, my brother, and me. The four of us, our original family unit, living in the house where I’d grown up, only now, my brother and I were the parents, and our parents were the children.

Of course our old dynamics kicked in: my brother was in charge. He knew everything. He was, after all, older and smarter and more talented and better at everything and never fucked up and won all the prizes.

Obviously. He had noticed the cobwebs, to which I had been oblivious. What else was I not seeing?

Because I was the one who floated along, in my own world, not paying attention to anything that mattered to everyone else. I was the flaky one, the selfish one. The slutty one. The one who fucked up.

And now here we were.

We’d had to clean out the pantry and fridge because my dad was now officially diabetic, and had heart failure, and my parents had been eating all kinds of things that a diabetic or someone with a failing heart should not eat.

My mom had always been in charge of the food. She had loved to cook, poured over recipes, tried new things – elaborate dishes with multiple ingredients and many steps. She knew all the vendors at the farmer’s markets where she bought way more produce than the two of them could possibly eat and whipped up a cornucopia of flavorful dishes.

She had stopped cooking a while back, saying she was just tired of doing it, that it was a relief to not have to fuss.

Now that we were living in the house we saw so much evidence of my mother’s decline. The truth was that she couldn’t cook. Any produce in the drawer had gone bad long ago. There were giant store-bought muffins, cookies, mini cakes, potato chips, pretzels and other salty snacks.

Had my parents become stoners?

There were off-brand frozen dinners, the box showing something covered in brown gravy, canned soups high in sodium and all kinds of other treacherous ingredients. Every flavor of ice cream, in half-eaten, caved-in tubs, freezer burnt.

It all had to go. My brother shook his head in fury and disgust as he bagged up all the crappy food to take somewhere where someone might eat it, and stored the pantry items temporarily in the basement.

He was a food purist and ate super healthy everything. He intermittently fasted and ran several miles a day.

When I was in high school, after my brother had gone off to college and was not around to notice what I was doing, I would sneak down to the basement at night to smoke cigarettes and drink from the large open jug of red wine my father kept on the bar.

Now, I hid in the basement, rifling through the bags of bad snacks behind the bar, eating handfuls of potato chips, stuffing cheap store brand cookies into my pockets, leaving a trail of muffin crumbs in my wake as I paced around, not noticing the cobwebs. I’d emerge from the basement into the light of day, greasy fingered and glassy eyed, ready to be bossed around some more.

After a little while, we settled in. We somehow calmed down while continuing to panic over the situation. Our adult selves emerged out of the fog. We took turns having ideas and being in charge and making calls and figuring shit out and scrubbing literal shit off all the places it landed. Neither of us could have done what we did alone.

We had no idea what was happening or what was even wrong with my dad or what we were supposed to do about it or if he was going to get better or die soon. We were deep in the deep end of whatever this swamp was. There was no template for getting anyone out of the muck. No clear path or map because we didn’t know what the destination was. We didn’t know if we were supposed to try to keep my parents where they were or go somewhere else or where that place was or if it even existed at all.

All we knew was that there were no clear answers, no help was coming any time soon, and it was up to us to keep our parents alive.

(Note to my brother, in case he ever reads this: HI! I love you. I’m so grateful that we came through to the other side of all of this closer, and that we have each other to remember just how insane it all was and we can laugh about the absurdity. Thank you times a million.)

So, I’m “home,” back in the place where most of my possessions are, where I have a lease on an apartment, for now. I don’t really feel like I belong here anymore, although that sense of displacement could just be from returning after a month away. I might settle back in here, before I leave again. We will see. As a dear friend likes to say, “more will be revealed.”

“Home” is Chicago, on a busy street, a few doors up from a major intersection. The appeal is easy access to all the things: three independent bookstores are within walking distance; my gym and grocery store are three blocks away; every kind of ethnic food is available in my neighborhood. There’s a bus stop across the street, and the train is a seven minute walk. The lake is half a mile east. The only thing I really need my car for is to see my mom.

I’ve been in rural environments for a month.

It’s loud here. And spring, so the windows are open. Sirens, airplanes, traffic, the neighbors’ dogs, the neighbor’s kids playing whatever it is that makes them scream so maniacally on the garage roof deck next door. People yelling, gleefully and angrily. More sirens.

Two doors down is a convenience store, where gas is currently 5.73/gallon. (Almost 7 for diesel). It used to be just a tiny hut of a gas station, with a bullet proof window beneath which you could slide cash for lottery tickets, cigarettes, condoms, or 5-hour energy shots. My boys, younger then, were very excited when they built the 711. Candy! Chips! Soda! Warm cookies! As if we were suddenly going to do all of our shopping there. (The chocolate chunk cookies, warm, are surprisingly delicious.)

The side of the apartment building that borders the gas station is a wide expanse of windowless brick, which is often used as a site for advertisements, like a billboard. The ads change every couple of months, and then I see people in coveralls out there on a scaffolded platform with buckets and a sprayer. It’s kind of cool how they stencil it on and then fill in the colors. It usually takes them a few days to paint the whole thing, and they seem to enjoy themselves. I smell their weed, hear them laughing while they work.

I think before I left it was a Dr. Pepper ad, or maybe a low cost internet provider. I can’t remember. The wall has been white since I’ve been back, in between things. I’m waiting to see what it will be.

I arrived home in peak lilac season. I smelled them everywhere as I meandered through my neighborhood, usually at dusk, on my daily walks. I’d pick a sprig or two to bring home from some of the generous bushes reaching over fence lines into sidewalk spaces.

There are lilac bushes in front of the gas station, and I’m glad they are there, growing in a patch of gravel, doing what they can to beautify the corner. But their blossoms darken from all of the exhaust clouding up the busy intersection. In the past, I might feel a stab of sadness as I walked by, and I’d nod at them apologetically, like, sorry you’re in such a shitty spot there, getting all dirty. This year, I picked some of the gas station lilacs because I wanted them to feel loved. Those are the ones I put on my altar.

In the mornings, I like to write on the sun porch that overlooks the street. Some kind of construction project began while I was away, and today they started to really tear things up out there. They’ve got all kinds of machinery like jackhammers and these trucks with attachments that look like giant meat tenderizers.

Right now, the building is shaking, and at the moment it feels strangely good! I think my body needed the shake up. Or, it’s like my life has been shaken up, and my system is happy with this reflection of my inner state, a homeopathic remedy of sorts. So much is changing within me, as I integrate the past several months of deep inner work, and I’m moving forward in new ways, pattern breaking. The jackhammer resonates.

I can’t stay here on the porch for long because the noise will get to me, and it is a little hard to type away on the keyboard with everything vibrating so intensely. My coffee is splashing around in its mug. I will shift to another space soon.

I’ve lived in the same city for much of my life, and I’m not sure now how long I’ll be anywhere. Home feels like a stopover now. City life is foreign. Lilac season is over. I don’t know what’s next.

For now, I’m just watching the concrete beneath me get blasted into bits.

I hate the word caregiver.

It makes me cringe.

It implies a kind of virtue, a goodness. A long suffering sacrifice. A softness, a whispering tenderness. It implies some kind of inherent skill or calling. A nursemaid. A nurturing nature.

It implies choice.

OR

Exploitation. The billions of dollars worth of labor without which the healthcare system could not function.

It implies bedpans, bodily fluids. Un-solid foods, spoon fed.

The things of the body that repel us, that we would rather not see, know, or ever experience.

OR

A spouse, a beloved. Acts of devotion.

After years of loving a person, their body, of exploring and beholding all the crevices and stretches of smoothness, now this.

It implies an uninterrupted flow of tenderness.

OR

A maiden aunt, a spinster, an otherwise disposable woman who must earn her keep.

OR

So much unseen, unrecognized, unpaid work. The “invisible patient,” social isolation, loss of identity, loss of primary role, loss of time, loss of creativity, loss of pleasure, loss of money.

Loss of self.

I have never wanted to be identified as a caregiver. Ew.

My initiation into the role came shortly after my mother was diagnosed with a quickly-accelerating strain of Alzheimer’s. We were just starting to figure out what that might mean, in terms of long-term plans, care, living, etc.

Then, suddenly, a couple of months later, my father’s entire system went haywire. He let himself be taken to the ER because he was extremely fatigued and felt “off.” He was sent home from the hospital two days later unable to walk, slurring his words, confused, and completely incapable of caring for himself in the most basic ways, none of which was the case when he had been admitted. He seemed to have had a stroke. But tests showed he had not, in fact, had a stroke, and because he had not had a stroke, there was no diagnostic code that would justify sending him to rehab or skilled nursing, which he very much needed.

So, off you go.

They sent him home in an undiagnosable, post-stroke-like condition to a wife with Alzheimer’s, a house with stairs, a gas stove with an open flame, knives, two cars in the garage but no memory of Rules of the Road, sharp corners on the kitchen counters, a pantry full of food but no capacity to prepare it, and an extremely complicated medication regimen.

Left to fend for himself, my father would have died.

Annnnd boom! Now I’m a caregiver.

A quick google search tells me that the ancient origin of the word “care” comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *ǵeh₂r, which meant “to shout or scream.” It was an onomatopoeic root tied to vocalized agony.

The word, or utterance, evolved over the centuries to the Old English caru which meant inward grief or mourning.

The Middle English use of care meant burdensome oversight or protection.

Our Modern English care means both affection and institutional labor.

Which is, huh. Interesting.

The term “caregiver” is pretty new. It seems to have first appeared in the 1960s, in psychological and sociological contexts describing those caring for the elderly or chronically ill. Now, “caregiver” is largely used to describe a role that requires both emotional attachment and physical labor.

Well, now we know.

This semantic investigation came about because I am, in the near future, going to be offering support for caregivers, which I am very excited about, and am working out the language I want to use to describe my services.

I recognize that “caregiver support” might be the most easily identifiable term, but when I hear “caregiver support group,” I picture folding chairs, stained carpeting, fluorescent lights, listless exchanges about IV drips and the best cheap brand of disposable wipes.

OR

On Zoom, a screen full of squares, people telling their stories. A facilitator with a sweet voice replying with a saccharine sort of sympathy, hand pressed to heart, face full of performative sorrow. Vaguely infantilizing. Or patronizing. A reminder that this will pass, that the sun is still shining, that I have so many things in my life to be grateful for.

So, that’s a no. Thanks, though.

But, then again, if we use “caregiver” as in invocation, as an invitation to reconnect with the ancient root of the word, to shout and scream and vocalize our agony, it might make sense.

I will be offering something gritty and raw and real. Practical and present. No fixing or healing. No agenda. I will hold space within a container sturdy enough to bear whatever needs to be released or put down, if only for an hour.

I will witness.

Well. I’m working on it. Stay tuned.

I’ve just always been here, done the things, the things that needed to be done: parent, care, work, carework. Clean the house and give up on keeping the house clean. Maneuver around the obstacles: the giant shoes in the hallway, the makeshift dresser that is both too big and too small, the bathroom light that never works, deep longings that can’t be named. A heart that feels like a ghost limb, like a memory of something that used to be. A shadow of a memory of a part that has but cut off, the wound cauterized.

I have recently sampled many flavors of spaciousness: crisp and effervescent; warm, velvety and lush; curious, colorful, and so young.

I am grateful.

It feels like both a gift and a mandate to have recognized or re-remembered a new way of being. Or, a way of being in a new way with a self that is familiar, resonant and long lost.

So, what now? What. Now. What now what now what now?

Ask me tomorrow. Today is laundry and a long hot bath.

Ask me again next week. In the coming days I will be working some magic, offering the herbs I carried with me as I traveled and returned. I will burn them tonight when the moon is dark, watch their smoke ascend toward the sky, ashes carried on the nighttime wind. I will bury what remains beneath the plum tree in the backyard.

This home has held me well.

My boys and I made a life here together that was beautiful and hard and is beginning to end.

Because it is time.

Ask me “what now?” next month. In the coming weeks, I will be planting seeds I have not yet identified. I will let you know what grows when it emerges from the dark Venusian soil into the light of day. It will be untamed and deeply nourishing.

Ask me a year from now. My voice will be rich and smooth when I answer, the sound rising from a well of deep rest. I will be reclining across the lap of a lover, my gaze soft as I turn toward you, my lips parted and wet, ready for all the words.

I always kind of thought Mother’s Day was a bullshit holiday. Then I became a mother and knew that was true, as I attempted to navigate being a mother while also still very much a daughter of a mother who was always WAY over the top with every holiday and liked to be the center of attention and who was now a GRANDMOTHER and therefore even more extra special and wanted to be treated as such.

I also had a mother-in-law, and my mother and my mother-in-law both lived in the suburbs of the city where I was now a mother.

One year, we tried going to each of their houses for a meal and came home exhausted and crabby and vowed to never do that again.

Then, we started hosting the festivities ourselves, a one-and-done kind of thing, a gathering for both of our moms, which our siblings also attended (because shared moms). Family party! Yay! Mother’s Day!

Afterwards I was always exhausted and crabby and wanted to never do any of it again.

Then I got divorced and realized I would have to train my kids myself to “do Mother’s Day.”

I had moved us out of the house where they’d always lived with their father and me the previous month, and we were acclimating to joint custody, still unpacking boxes in our new apartment. They were in grade school. I told them Mother’s Day was stupid and I didn’t care about it and didn’t want anything but then the day came and I was sad and hurt that they COULDN’T EVEN MAKE ME A CARD?!

Mid-meltdown I tried to explain to my kids that I knew I was giving them all kinds of confusing mixed messages and that I couldn’t help it and that sometimes grown ups are children but that didn’t mean I expected them to be grownups and that, really, I was okay, or I would be, soon, and their confused, sad faces made me cry more so I shut myself in my room, which was a strange little space off the dining area with shuttered doors where I slept on a futon. Later, folded pieces of construction paper with crayoned messages appeared under my door.

That night, I made them watch Dirty Dancing with me while we had ice cream for dinner.

Now my mom has late-stage Alzheimer’s and has no idea what day it is and may not be aware that she is a mother. It’s hard to know what she knows because she is unable to speak. For the last couple of years, I haven’t really wanted to spend the bullshit holiday with my mom because doing so would be painful and sad, but it has also not felt right to not spend time with her because the day had once meant so much to her.

So, deodorant.

The spring after my father died, I was wading through layers of grief for both of my parents, for my dead dad, and all the complications around that, and for my mother, still alive but lost to me in so many ways. My father’s crises had taken up all the space so I had not been able to grieve her as she faded away.

I got an email that April with the subject heading, “Want to opt out of Mother’s day promotions?”

It was from a company that sells deodorant and body wash that I’m sure I had seen on Instagram or something and had recently started a subscription with because they don’t use any plastic and they plant a tree for every product sold and donate to LGBTQ aligned organizations. (Plus you get to choose a cute design for your refillable dispenser).

In the body of the email, it said that they understood that this time of year can be painful for some, and if we would rather not receive marketing emails about mother’s day, click the link below and be unsubscribed.

I DID want to opt out of mother’s day marketing, thank you very much, so I clicked the link. And then, because I was having a moment, I also clicked on Contact Us.

I sent a message thanking them for the option because they were right that it could be painful to be bombarded with mother’s day marketing when your mom is dying of alzheimer’s and may not know you’re her daughter.

Within a couple of hours, I received an email from someone named Jin thanking me for thanking them and saying they were moved by my email and that they had lost their mom last year and were also very sad about the holiday, and to let me know they are thinking of me, that I am not alone in my grief and that they appreciate my sharing because they try to create a space where everyone feels seen and heard and safe.

Which made me cry. So I wrote back to Jin and told them I was moved by their email and that I would be thinking of them and that it’s so nice to know there are actual humans out there and thank you for the support.

And then they wrote me back, again, saying thank you.

So. That’s nice.

This year, my kids are adults, and my mom is fine-ish/ “fine” enough at the moment and will not miss me. I am away from home, attending an Eros retreat, exploring pleasure. It ends on Sunday, on Mother’s Day. I’m writing this ahead of time, and don’t know exactly what all will go on at the Eros retreat, but I’m sure I will feel very full by its end.

It will probably be the best mother’s day ever.

Note: While the arc of this narrative ends on an upswing, this is not meant to be “uplifting” to anyone struggling today. If you’re in any kind of “mom pain,” I’m so sorry. I hope you are able to opt out of any bullshit you don’t want to be a part of and that you are held within whatever you have no choice but to endure.

Thank you so much for reading.

It’s Tuesday. I’m bringing coffee to my mom. In one hand, I carry a cardboard tray that holds three beverages, and in the other hand, treats. Today it’s Munchkins. The cardboard cup holder will get thrown out, again. Each visit, I try to remind myself to carry it back out to my car with me so I can re-use it. But that would mean also remembering to bring it with me back to Dunkin Donuts the next time, and the chances of remembering both of those tasks are minimal.

Yvonne greets me from her seat behind the welcome desk in the lobby of the memory care facility. She thanks me for the iced mocha I’ve brought for her, with extra sugar, the way she likes it. We exchange pleasantries and comment on the weather, and then she buzzes me in.

In her room, my mother is to my right in her wheelchair. I’ve gotten her situated at the little table in front of the window, having fetched her from “Activities” in the TV room, where she was in a row of others, mostly asleep, in their wheelchairs. There might have been a movie on the TV, or a game show, or a grainy video of someone singing an old song.

I take a sip of my coffee and then hold the other cup to my mother’s mouth and tilt it slightly until I see her swallow. I dab at the drips on her chin with a napkin. Having to help her drink is somewhat new, and we’re still figuring out the best vehicle for beverages, lid or open cup or straw. They are all messy in a different way.

“I think Evan and his girlfriend are about to break up,” I say. I speak loudly. We gave up on her hearing aids long ago, after replacing so many. “I was telling you about her last week. I never really liked her but now I really don’t like her.”

I know that she will have no recollection of our previous conversation, but I try to name the boys often when I come. I have a vague hope that hearing their names will activate something in her memory. Not that she will “remember” anything, really, but maybe there will be a momentary resonance, and maybe that momentary resonance will feel familiar, and maybe the familiar feeling will be a comfort.

My face + my voice + grandson’s name = memory/location/self? Something like that.

My mom is looking into my face, her dark brown eyes have some brightness today. Her white hair is longer than I’ve ever seen it, just past her chin, a bit of a wave to it.

There is a salon down the hall, but it has been dark and empty since we moved my parents here almost two years ago. Its glass wall reveals only ghostly hair dryers hovering atop dusty chairs. Every once in a while, I get an email about a potential hair stylist who might come a few days a week, but then it never seems to happen. Which is fine, now. No one cares, really.

In their previous assisted living facility, there was a salon where both of my parents got their hair cut. In theory, an in-house salon is a convenience, a nice perk to include in a glossy brochure. But like most things related to assisted living, the window within which these sorts of conveniences can actually be utilized with ease is, as my brother and I discovered, quite small.

It was not long before scheduling the appointments, and then remembering the appointments, and then paying for the appointments became increasingly complicated and confusing for my parents, even with multiple calls to and from me, and eventually it was suggested that their haircut appointments be facilitated with the help of private caregivers (“private” = additional cost, because it was beyond the scope of the in-house “included” assisted living care). The roster of private caregivers somehow didn’t really help with the scheduling and remembering and paying for appointments without multiple phone calls to and from me.

Eventually, I showed up on appointment days to escort my parents to and from the convenient, brochure-ready salon myself.

I don’t mind that the salon here in the memory care facility remains dark and empty.

Whoever gets my mother up in the morning has been putting her hair in a little top knot, which is sweet. I got a call recently, one of the CNAs asking me to get more scrunchies because they’d all gotten lost. I’ll leave the ones I brought today on the bathroom counter. A very manageable task.

I used to know the names of all the caregivers, the ones here in the memory care facility, and the hospice caregivers, who come here but are not a part of this facility, and the caregivers in the previous assisted living facility, and the private caregivers we had to hire in addition to the regular caregiving staff. We hired caregivers for my father and different caregivers for my mother because they could only ever legally be assigned to one person at a time (something we learned the hard way, when my father fell), and there were also the caregivers who came to the house, back when my parents still lived there. I used to bring treats for the caregivers sometimes, and make sure they knew we appreciated them at the holidays. I used to have much more capacity to care about the caregivers.

Now I can only remember Yvonne, at the front desk.

I reach into the bag and hold up a Munchkin, glazed, her favorite, to show my mom and place it on a brown paper napkin toward the edge of the table. She drags her gaze from my face toward the table. Her hand jerks as some part of her deep brain calls her arm into action. I wait. Her hand starts to rise out of her lap.

“Evan told me she has a real mean streak,” I say. “I can’t say I’m surprised, really. I think once they get back to campus, that will be it for them.” I watch her arm as I speak. It hovers a few inches above her lap. But now she is looking back at me, and I know she has forgotten all about the Munchkins on the table and the reason she had started to engage her arm. Her hand drops back into her lap. I probably should have waited before speaking, to allow her to focus.

My parents were married for over 60 years and did everything together, especially after they both retired.

My brother and I joked - in the way that siblings who have weathered multiple crises together can joke - about how my parents were so codependent that they even had to be admitted into hospice care within a week of each other. That was almost two years ago now.

We thought for sure that my mother would not last long after my father died but it’s been a year and a half and my mom is still here. I don’t know if she knows my father is dead. She no longer has the capacity to speak.

“Do you want a Munchkin?” I ask. She smiles a little, nods almost imperceptibly. I break the glazed one in half and hold it in front of her mouth. She opens. I pop it in.

I say, “They had a big fight the other night, I guess. It’s way too much for Evan.” I make a wide, sweeping hand gesture as I say this, rolling my eyes. Drama. This is the kind of thing she used to love to talk about - drama, gossip, the love lives of her loved ones. She would have loved to hate on Evan’s girlfriend, not because she is hateful but because her love and loyalty were (are?) fierce.

However rocky or distant my relationship with my mom has been through various moments of my life, when I was going through my divorce, which became quite contentious, she had my back in ways I never could have imagined.

I know when she dies, the grief I experience will be different from the grief I experienced when my father died. I just don’t know how it will be different, yet.

I feed her the other half of the Munchkin.

Everyone talks about what Alzheimer’s does to your mind, but I was somehow not really aware, until I was watching it happen, how it affects your body. My mom has been in a wheelchair for a couple of years now, and has lost the ability to speak, not because she can’t remember words, although there is that too, but because she can no longer physiologically form them. She is losing use of her arms. Most people with Alzheimer’s choke to death.

As she chews, now, she looks back toward the table, toward the Munchkins. Her hand spasms back and forth a few times before it falls back into her lap. Her fingers curl around the napkin I had flattened across her thighs and it waves wildly in her jerking grip.

On a shelf across the room stands a framed photo of my parents on their honeymoon, Miami Beach, 1963. They look very glamorous. Next to the photo is an American flag, folded into a tight triangle, presented to my mother at my father’s burial service by a white-gloved cadet who bowed stiffly to place it in her lap.

It’s hard to know what my mom is holding on for, now. In some ways, she’s still pretty sturdy, and it seems like she could be around for a while yet. I’m not sure if I should bring up my dad, or not, if it causes pain to remember him, to remember that she had forgotten him, to perhaps wonder where he is, if he’s coming back. Or if it’s a comfort to have someone talk about the man she loved/s, who has either died or is just gone for the day. It’s impossible to know.

Just after my father died, when she could still speak a little bit, I brought the photos that had been displayed on a poster board at his funeral. I asked if she wanted to look at them and she shook her head and said it hurt too much. We both cried.

I tell her he is waiting for her, she is free to go, to be with him.

I try to let her know we’re all doing well - the boys are fine even with the girlfriend drama. They are thriving in college, enjoying their classes. They are such good young men, I say. And she will nod. She knows. I tell her what a great job she did, what a great grandmother she has been, and thank her for that, and for teaching us to be generous and bold with our love.

Share

One time, in the context of this repeated conversation, I said, “I mean, look at me! I’m amazing!” I gestured up and down my body, as if in demonstration. We both laughed.

She wanted (wants?) me to be loved. Every once in a while, before, in the time between my divorce and my parents’ decline, I might mention having been out at the grocery store or running errands and she’d say, “Were there any handsome men there?” Or, “You never know when you might find a suitor!”

She said this once in front of the boys and they still tease me about finding a suitor, the old fashioned word, the old fashioned concept.

“He doesn’t have to be rich,” she said once. “Or even a man,” she added, since I had reminded her that might not be what I want. “Just someone to be good to you, to put their arms around you at the end of a long day.”

Which is a lovely thought.

I want to release her from the world, for her to know we’re all doing well, that she has nothing to worry about. I want to tie up all of her loose ends.

I think about “borrowing” one of the caregivers from out in the hallway, whose name I don’t know, to pretend to be my partner. I would create a backstory to how we met, watch my mom’s eyes light up, her face break into a broad smile, a vigorous nod.

Just for a moment, to know, before she goes, that I am deeply loved.

I’d like to give her that.

Because it’s true. I am deeply loved, just not in the way she might have imagined for me. But I’d like to give her the image, in a way she can understand. In case that’s what she’s waiting for, to know that I am not alone.

Of course, it’s possible that the timing of her departure from this world, that her “letting go,” has nothing to do with me.

I help her drink more of her coffee, finish mine. We eat more Munchkins. Before I leave, I wheel her to the dining room because it’s almost time for lunch. I kiss her good-bye and tell her I’ll see her soon.

A CNA whose name I don’t know is arranging lunch things, and I say thank you to him as I head out.

Every third or fourth time that I visit I cry when leaving, in the car, or on the elevator, or in the hallway. I don’t know when it will happen. I don’t usually feel it coming. I’m not crying and then I am crying. Sometimes I am not able to say goodbye to Yvonne but can only wave, and then her voice will be tender as she says goodbye to me.

I don’t know yet which kind of day today will be.

Thank you so much for reading.

In December, I take a different route to the retreat center because I am going to Canada first, to Toronto for a night to stay with friends before we travel north, where we will be together with other friends, in a place I’ve never been.

All day, alerts keep popping up on my maps app about the weather and highway closures, but six hours in, I’ve encountered only a few clouds, light flurries. I am making good time.

Until I cross the border.

Lately, I can’t really locate myself inside my life. In September, just a couple of months ago, I had a 9-5 job and a cat and a crush on someone, and my mother was still awake more often than she was asleep when I visit her. Now none of that is true.

In September, it had been years since I had been away from home for more than a few days at a time. Now I spend weeks away, doing . . . whatever this is.

What this is, maybe, is me, coming back to life.

I spent a large chunk of my 20’s hitchhiking up and down the West Coast and felt most at home when I had no base to return to. In recent months, as I have criss-crossed the patch of miles between Chicago and upstate New York, sparks of aliveness, of my essential self, awaken within me as I meander and wander and get lost.

I have been reunited with my old friend, the road.

But now the road is disappearing before my eyes. Everything is snow and darkness and the lights of the truck in front of me. There is nothing else but this: a blizzard, vast nothingness on either side of the highway, and an almost-empty gas tank.

It seems I have forgotten, until this moment, how mercurial my dear friend, the road, can be. How one moment, she offers glorious freedom and the next demands complete surrender. She determines my destination, not me.

I try to ask Siri where I might find a gas station or a town or any sign of civilization but all Siri will say is that they are sorry, they are having trouble connecting at the moment. I can’t really look at the screen because I need to keep my eyes on the very slick highway and on the lights of the truck in front of me. It seems unwise to pull over and stop to figure out where I am.

In the light of day, tomorrow, after backtracking and returning, I will see all the cars in the ditch, the ones that didn’t make it to where they were going, the jackknifed trucks.

I seem to have been here, hunched forward, gripping the steering wheel, inching along, for hours. Music is too distracting. I listen only to the screech of the wipers across the windshield, the wind, my breath.

Up ahead: lights. A police car, maybe, or an ambulance? Has there been an accident?

As I get closer, squinting, trying to make out what it is that I’m looking at through the thick curtain of snow, I see that the lights are flares, forming a broken line across the road. A police car is parked to the side, its lights rotating on top. So, that means . . .

. . . the road forward is . . . closed.

There is nothing to do but follow the truck in front of me down the exit ramp onto a smaller, more slippery, even darker road that leads deeper into nowhere.

When I arrive at the Holiday Inn, there is one room left, and it is mine. The only source of warm food is the Wendy’s across the parking lot. By the time I get back to my room, the chilli I ordered is tepid, the fries soggy. Still, they are sublime. I eat standing up in front of the window, watching the snow whip and swirl, my feet firmly planted on the carpeted floor. There is a long, hot shower in my near future.

I watch from the window as the guy working at the gas station on the other side of the parking lot pulls a half full bag of trash out of the large cylinder that stands on the island between two gas pumps and then wrestles with a replacement bag. The clear, empty trash bag whips around in the wind, and he can not get it to open.

He turns his body in one direction and then another, trying to shield the bag from the wind. Finally, the opening yawns wide as he holds it in two hands until the wind catches it and he loses hold on one side and the bag, now a balloon, almost flies off. He must have had a very firm grip with the other hand because he manages to hold on.

Now the bag won’t go where he needs it to, into the big metal cylinder. He is really trying, and the wind is torrential. The snow blows horizontal, in cyclones, in the glare of the parking lot flood lights. The gas station attendant wears no coat. I’m sure he thought it would be a quick out and back kind of thing, emptying the trash. But the wrestling match with the new bag just goes on and on.

I can’t look away. I admire his dedication. I’m sure if it were me, I would have said, Hell no! There’s a blizzard! The trash can wait!

Not this guy. When he finally gets the bag open and into the cylinder and secures the lid on top of it, I am relieved. I wait for him to grab the half-full bag of trash and run it to the dumpster and then head inside. But he doesn’t. Instead, he stands gazing up at the snow, toward the lights, where you can really see it swirling.

When I get where I am headed, up north, two days from now, the sky will be the palest shade of blue I have ever seen.

Through the mystical portal known as LinkedIn, I am tunneled backwards through the ether, to the last time I was laid off and scanning job posts. It is no less grim now than it was then, and I can’t seem to find it in me to want anything to do with any of it.

Back then, though, I did. I had made a career “pivot,” was “rebranding” myself, “leveraging” my skills and “adding value.” I sent out a ton of resumes, “reaching out,” and “circling back.”

What I’m remembering now, having glanced sideways at a few job listings, is a phone interview I had in the car when I was driving my father home from his radiation appointment. I knew the timing for the interview would be tight, but there weren’t a lot of other slots available, and I figured I could make it work. I did. It turned out that my father was in the passenger seat during the interview, which was not as I had imagined it, and also, fine.

He had to go for radiation every day for 30 days. Sometimes I took him, and sometimes my brother took him. The appointments themselves were maybe 10 minutes. The whole rigamarole, though, would eat up the entire morning and those mornings went something like this:

Arrive at their assisted living facility, watch my dad gather his wallet and keys, which were not necessary for these appointments, but he liked to have them anyway.

In a previous phase of my parents’ illnesses, searching for wallet and keys would take much longer because my mother would often hide these things (and many other items), and more time would be needed for both the finding of the wallet and keys and for the yelling about the hiding of them. At least we were beyond that now.

Then he’d put on his shoes, which involved sitting on the yellow chair in the corner which was way too low and hard for him to get in and out of and stained with blood and would be left behind when we moved them. He would choose from the multiple pairs of shoes lined up in front of the TV stand. (This was a whole thing, the shoes. More on that later.)

Then we would say goodbye to my mother. My father would make his way to wherever my mom was and bend over his walker to meet her lips with his for their three-kiss ritual: kiss kiss kiss. Sometimes she was still in bed, but often she’d be sitting upright on the couch, placidly watching the goings-on around her, among the pee-pads (disposable rectangles of absorbent material, light blue or light green, whichever was on sale). Sometimes my mom would ask where he was going but most of the time she didn’t.

Having already hugged her hello and goodbye, I would wave to my mom from the doorway, with a vague hope that this strategic positioning might save us a bit of time.

One of the many caregivers - hired for extra care, in four-hour increments, in addition to the insufficient care provided by assisted living - would likely be there, folding laundry, waiting for us to leave. In which case, depending on his mood and the caregiver, my father might say goodbye to her too.

I would brace myself before he got to the door. Would he need to “make another stop?”

The day I had my phone interview, my father did, indeed, need to “make another stop” before we left. I squeezed my eyes shut after glancing at my watch, sighed loudly for no one in particular to hear. I had left plenty of time, as I always did, but these “stops” were unpredictable. My father knew about my interview. I had reminded him about it the day before. When I had showed up that morning, he had asked me if I felt ready for it, for the interview, and I had told him yes.

I knew it made no sense to expect that his knowledge about my impending appointment and the delicate timing of the morning’s schedule might in any way impact how often he would need to use the bathroom or how long it might take when he did.

This will come up again and again and will likely be its own post at some point but I might as well say it here: my father had heart failure and was on heavy doses of diuretics and had to pee all. the. time. My mother also peed all the time - hence the pee pads - but for different reasons.

Pee, dealing with pee, avoiding pee, pee products, pee smells, pee-soaked clothes, bedding, furniture, shoes, occupied a lot of bandwidth for everybody.

Also, “making another stop” was never just a quick, five-minute dash in and out of the bathroom. Somehow, incontinence and all of the incontinence-related products - Depends and the additional extra-absorbent inserts - added lots of extra time to any bathroom trip.

I would always factor this in when calculating how much time any visit or appointment might take, and yet, I was still, often, frustrated, impatient and/or shocked by just how long everything took.

Once we got out the door to their apartment, we headed down the hall to the elevator. The elevator was its own complex universe of challenging timing because you could never know how many of the four floors below my parents’ it would stop at or what the mobility levels of anyone getting on or off might be or how much shuffling or re-arranging of bodies and mobility devices might need to take place within the elevator before the doors would close.

Once on the first floor, I, as usual, sped ahead to get the car, cranked up the heat, pulled up to the front door and popped the truck. I ushered my father toward his side of the car, where he pushed his walker aside and grabbed the handle above the door with one hand, and the top of the door with the other. With my hand hovering over his head so he wouldn’t hit it on the doorframe, I held the door open with my hip so it would not close on him as he inched his butt toward the pee-pad covered seat, trying to gauge how close he was, hovering and straining, lowering slowly until finally letting himself fall the final few inches onto the seat with a loud groan and then folding his long, swollen and sore legs into the footwell. Once he was in, I shut the door, collapsed his walker and shoved it into the trunk.

The radiation treatments were for slow growing skin cancer. He was 91, and if the cancer were anywhere other than where it was, we would have ignored it. It was not going to kill him. But the patch of cells was on his ear and presented as a small open wound that would not heal. Since my father was on blood thinners, this meant there was often blood streaming down his neck onto his collar. The wound disturbed his already fragile sleep. All of the pillowcases were bloodstained. The pillows, too. And the sheets. And the blankets.

(With my father, there was so much blood, everywhere, all the time. When we moved my parents out of that facility, faint outlines of his bloody footprints remained in the carpeting, even after several steam cleanings.)

Figuring out what the bloody wound on his ear was and how to treat it had involved five previous appointments with five different practitioners, each of whom operated beneath a different umbrella healthcare system, with its own patient portal, which meant five different logins and passwords were necessary for any information or communication, and each practitioner had a different opinion about what the wound was and what to do about it - leave it alone, cover it with complicated bandages, freeze it, zap it, cut it.

The protocol was thirty days of radiation but we never got that far. We were maybe twenty days in when my father ended up in the ER with acute heart failure, his legs so swollen they seemed in danger of exploding at any moment. He had to be admitted to have them drained. (Remind me to tell you later about the salt shaker incident.) I let the radiation center know we had to suspend treatment indefinitely.

As it turned out, 20 days or however many it was, did the trick. The bleeding had stopped. The office kept calling, though, wanting to know when we were coming back to finish the treatments. At first, my brother and I discussed scheduling the remaining appointments. But my father was weak after the hospital, and there were frigid temperatures outside and icy sidewalks, and we finally realized the appointments were unnecessary. What was the point?

There were so many appointments, treatments, medications that one doctor or another deemed necessary for one of both of them that, as it turned out, was not. We were only just beginning to recognize this.

My brother had found a podcast about the advertising industry, back in the day, that my father enjoyed, and we would sometimes tune in to that on the 30-45 minute (each way) drive to the appointments. As we listened, my father would often add his own commentary as he remembered some of the names, the agencies, the accounts he had worked on. My father loved that work.

Today, though, I wasn’t really listening. I was distracted, thinking about the interview, wondering if we’d be out of the appointment in time, wondering if I would make it to the next level of interviews, if I wanted that, or not. It had taken a lot of effort and determination to make this career pivot. I needed a job and felt a mix of curiosity and dread about starting down an entirely new career path (even if I hated the word “career” and cringed at the phrase “career path”).

(It was around this point that I began to wonder if I could even have a job because of all the appointments, all the attention my parents needed. The myth that assisted living provided anywhere near enough assistance had been dispelled. I was still doing massage part time, which was somewhat flexible, and I was spending a lot of time sending resumes and interviewing for jobs, but even that was hard to manage. I could not imagine having a full time, 9-5 position and doing all the elder care. My career “pivot,” it seemed, was being “derailed.”)

The waiting room for the radiation patients was small and dark, a converted closet maybe, with room for three chairs. Only once was anyone other than my father and me in the room. A dusty shelf leaned against one wall and on it were pamphlets about how to deal with grief and a ceramic snowman that had a small light bulb inside it. The snowman’s carrot nose was broken off, his broom bristles splintered. Its light cast odd shadows across the close walls. On the shelf below, a small Leprechaun made out of felt lay on its side.

The day of my interview, as we waited, my father, having been reminded by the podcast on the way here, was telling me about when he worked at an agency in New York early in his career, how down the street there was a diner where he would go for lunch sometimes, how sometimes he wanted breakfast for lunch, and at the diner you could get two eggs, bacon, toast and coffee for a dollar twenty-five.

He had told me some of his New York stories before, but never like this, never in this dark closet, my father’s face glowing in the dim light of a broken snowman and his own fond memories. As I sat in the now-familiar chair across from him, I felt myself - let myself - melt a little bit. I took a breath, softened. I could feel his love for his younger self, hungry for eggs and creativity, amazed by his own luck, his own life, how he’d somehow made it to Manhattan for lunch.

I remember thinking, as I listened to him talk and watched his face as he recalled the past, I am consciously opening to this moment. I am choosing gratitude for this, right now. This time, this story, this moment with my father in the strange dark space that we are in together. It was only a moment but in that moment, I was awake to all of it, and all of it felt like some kind of grace.

And then, that was that, and I was back to being irritated and impatient as I waited outside the bathroom trying not to check my phone as the minutes before my interview slipped away. It was just a phone screening with a recruiter, but I had wanted to review my notes and get my mind ready. I told myself it was all fine, I knew what to say: I am passionate about blah blah blah, I’m great at this and that, “collaboration,” “detail oriented,” “fast-paced environment…”

When it was clear that we would not make it back to Lindenwood Place in time to drop my father off, I told him we’d need to pull over so I could take the call. He didn’t really understand what I was doing with this new career direction, but most people didn’t really understand what I was doing. I didn’t really understand what I was doing.

“I promise to be good,” he said. He made a goofy face at me, to indicate the kind of thing he was promising not to do while I was on the phone.

Ideally, I might have dropped him at a Starbuck’s or someplace he could sit for a few minutes and I could be alone in the car, but having him wandering alone and unsupervised through a public place would have been more distracting than having him next to me, and anyway, the phone rang before I had even pulled into a random parking lot on McCormick Avenue.

I stopped the car while exchanging pleasantries with the recruiter. My dad was giving me a thumbs up as I pulled my notebook out of my bag. I said all the things, jotted a few notes, hung up.

My dad said I sounded great, like I really knew my stuff.

He was practically deaf even with his hearing aids, and I was pretty sure he had not really heard much of the conversation. He also told me I might want to slow down when I was talking, “just a little bit.” He held up his hand with his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart, to illustrate just how little.

I thanked him for the feedback as I started the car.

As I headed out of the parking lot, he said that my mother would probably really enjoy a cruller right about now. I reminded him that crullers were his favorite as I pulled into the Dunkin drive through..

When my next interview was scheduled and I was reviewing my notes, I wrote “slow down” at the top of the page so I’d remember.

Leave a comment

April Fool’s Day, with the full moon in Libra, seemed like a good day to launch. So, here is post #1:

Ravaged

I am here, in my son’s bedroom with the door closed, writing this, now.

I am here, in my son’s bedroom, because my son is away at school, and because there is a desk where I can write and there is a door to this room that I can close.

I am writing about what I am imagining, now.

I am imagining: sitting in a circle, at the retreat center. It’s two weeks from now, and we have returned for our next session. A month has passed. We are checking in. As we go around the circle, we each get three minutes. I want to tell them everything. There is so much to say, about what has been up since last time, all the insights and epiphanies, the movement of energy through my body, the processing. I can feel it now, in my son’s bedroom, writing this.

There are only three minutes and so much to say, and I might say the other things, but what I want to convey, what I want them all to know, is that I have been working through things about my father’s death. A lot has been up for me about that, because of the time of year, maybe, and because of the breathwork we did in our last session, how, in addition to all that got released during that process, there is a chunk of energy, a jagged brick of a thing, that has been dislodged but not released and has been working its way through my system. It is still heavy, still sharp-edged. What I want them all to know is that I am coming to understand that, yes, my father died, and the grief around that is its own thing, the natural, human, organic process of metabolizing the loss of my father.

And: there are the other parts, other kinds of loss and grief that are connected but separate.

I imagine myself sitting on the cushions at the retreat center, on the side of the room with the windows, the facilitators at the head of the circle, an apex of sorts, to my right. As I say all of this, my right hand is making a circle, palm down, in the air in front of me. This is the grief. The loss of my father.

My left hand makes a circle slightly above my right hand. This is the caretaking piece. I am illustrating the layers. Layers of grief. Subcategories. Related, but separate. Grief from death. Grief from caretaking.

Somewhere in there I might say something about how my friend who does grief literacy trainings talks about how, when practitioners are working with bereaved people, they need to listen for the utterances that keep getting repeated. The repetition indicates something that is hard to swallow, that the person can’t digest, can’t metabolize, something that has gotten stuck.

For me, it’s been this caretaking piece. Because I am only now starting to realize it is separate from the grief/death piece. It’s its own thing, and what I keep hearing myself say is, it was so hard. And, it took so much out of me.

Part of what made it so hard is that it’s so fucking tedious, the phone calls, appointments, paperwork. The waiting. Waiting in ERs and doctors offices and outside of bathrooms and for people using walkers to make their way down the hallway. And it’s all so invisible and hard to explain, to explain why it’s so hard, and sometimes real shit is happening with ambulances and blood and more blood and wondering will this be the time he dies. It’s relentlessly lonely and silent somehow, even with a siren screaming through traffic to the ER.1

All of that has been lumped in with his death, with that loss and grief, but it’s its own thing. Because ushering people to their death is a human, natural process. But ushering people to their death within the systems that are available to us is not natural. It’s not human. It’s part of something that is inhuman, a machine that takes from us parts of our humanity and parts of our lives in order to keep itself churning, and I am only now starting to recognize that there are no funerals for those losses.

Now, here, writing in my son’s bedroom with the door closed, I imagine myself saying, on the cushions at the retreat center, as my left hand moves up, making a circle above where it just was, to indicate a new level, a different, separate, level of loss, that inside, or on top of, the caretaking are specific incidents that happened, incidents that should not have happened but did happen, that were the result of dealing with the system and that were really fucked up. Things happened that were really fucked up.

So there is the grief of the loss of a person, and there is the difficulty of caretaking and the assorted losses that come with that, and then there is fucked up shit that happens because of dealing with inhuman, inhumane systems. And this piece - my hand indicating the top layer, the layer that is the fucked up shit that happened - is trauma.

Which is different from grief.

It all got lumped together when he died as one loss, one grief, and I’m only now realizing that they are separate, different layers and textures and experiences of loss and trauma associated with my father’s death.

Part of what made the incidents, the fucked up shit that happened, so traumatizing, is that they were, ultimately, a revelation: the inhumanity of the system was revealed to me. I saw it: a telescopic view of the whole thing, and it was clear, in these moments of revelation, how completely devoid of humanity the system is, how, at its core, is something very, very dark.

I imagine myself sitting on the cushions in the circle at the retreat center, bunching the tips of all of my fingers together and jabbing them toward the very, very dark center, and now as I write this and in the future, as I imagine saying it, and back then, as I experienced it, I see the machine: dark, cold, steel cogs, some so enormous that they expand beyond my field of vision, rotating slowly, steadily, unstopping, sucking me in toward the cold dark center where I - and you - we - will be annihilated.

I say to my fellow retreatants and to the facilitators, sitting at the apex of the circle to my right, all of us on our cushions, when I said that encounters with our healthcare system evoked primal terror, it was because of this. Because of the revelation of the machine. Because I had encountered evil at the core of the system meant for care. Because of the way that I simultaneously comprehended and rejected - could not get my head around - the fact that this is what we have built. We have chosen this. Because of the intensity of the chest pain that woke me at 3 am. Because the cardiologist told me that during sleep is the only time I can squeeze in panic attacks. Because I was also at this time, this time of year two years ago, single parenting two teenagers full time and because I also had a full time job, and it is only now, now as I write this, now as I imagine speaking this, that I can see how fucking hard it was, what it took from me and that, yes, I have been grieving the loss of my father but also:

I have been ravaged.

As I arrive at the word ravaged, I feel its weight and heft, how satisfying it is to say. I think this and feel this and imagine saying it because I want to, need to, because it is only now, having entered into a community, a community of new people who don’t know my story, that I can see how unheard I have felt about all of this but have not been able to understand why. I’ve had such great support it seems I should be - something. That by now I should have been able to metabolize the jagged brick, or to at least have worn down its edges.

But I can see now, only now, that there is something about the lumping together of the layers that has made it so difficult to convey what happened in a way that I might be heard and understood because it was so much more than my father dying and

we don’t have rituals yet for the ravaging.

We don’t have ways to acknowledge what gets extracted from us by the system while we are navigating the decline and death of people we love, and I suddenly need everyone to know, to be witnessed in my gutted state, and I want to have a way to hold all of the others who have been ravaged, those who are, in this moment, being eaten alive. I want them to know that I see them. They can hold out a hand and I will pull them back from the edge of the vortex, from the ravenous suction of the machine that feeds on our isolation, on our exhaustion and confusion, our desperation and our love.

I can see that I am still only able to come at this a little sideways, as an imagined utterance which, I know now, from my seat here at the dining room table, where I am expanding and revising this piece, a month or so since I began writing it, that I will not say all of these things during my three minute check in on the cushions at the retreat center. Which is fine. I know that I am still being held within that container, even when I am here, and I am still, within the writing about the imagining, the imagining of the performance of ravishment, able to get clarity about the layers and levels and categories. To say what I need to say, for myself, for now, perhaps for you. To you. I have imagined being witnessed in saying these things, which, in this moment, is plenty.

May this be a space of healing and connection, of light.