Too Much of Spring: The Second Half

 Note: This is directly tied to Leaving the Planet, about a seven-week hospital stint in 1982. This is no less difficult than that entry, so I get it if you might want to time your reading, or just skip it.  I had to write this all because it is how I breathe through my life. I write. It occurs to me for the zillionth time, though, just how glad I am that I blog, for MY sake. Thank you for slogging through these entries. I learn about writing, about who I am NOW, and the entries are the final let go before I decide whether they go into a memoir or in a file.

Thank you all for helping me remember what I needed to. I am alive. I walk. I love the spring with a passion beyond logic. I am alive. Dr. D is not. Except here on this blog and in my heart. I am alive and I still walk.

Here goes...

Post-Op Re entry

I woke up briefly in the Recovery Room. The kind nurse was there again. This time I noticed she had soft, hazel eyes with eyelashes that really were unfairly long and thick. "Well, that's just not fair," I said and she was startled.

"How can you be talking?"

"I opened my mouth?" I was startled by her comment. "What do you mean?"

"Your blood pressure is 65/35! It's not possible."

It would appear that she was right, because when I awakened next, I was in my blue room, my bed table there, in reach, everything on it, just so. I could move my arms and my head!

Only some twelve-year-old nurse named Mandi was looking very stern as she shouted, "Cough! You know you have to cough for us."

I took a deep breath.  Oops. No, no deep breath was forthcoming. I could not fill my lungs without pain and enormous pressure, but the cough was a chokey, shallow, pitiful excuse for a post-op cough. Usually I just coughed a couple of good ones and all that had to be cleared was done and that was it.

Mandi, a ranting chipmunk, was yarping at me, when I tried to say that it hurt to breathe. "Well, of COURSE it hurts. You want pneumonia? Do you want to be on an IV for days? You have to cough and move things around so your bowel sounds come back and your lungs do not fill."

"I know that. I am telling you that I can't."

I got the "whatever" sigh I already knew from Mark's kids and other friends' teenagers. I kind of remembered it myself, from my own youth, only we tended to tag the sigh with "groovy."

Funny. I was twenty-nine and thinking my youth was over, remembering it the way my parents spoke of their own youth. Something was weird in that, but the thought drifted off as most thoughts did during that stay.

All that stayed with me was that I could see my legs because I could bend them. The body cast, however, was horribly tight, I thought. Perhaps they could loosen the side Velcro. Normally the things attached in the back. Mine attached on the left side, over my staples. Something about the fitting of it, someone said. Anyway, instead of lying on the flexible flap, I was lying on lined, rigid vinyl with a thin compacted foam rubber lining. I could not see it, but I felt holes, regularly spaced like ceiling tiles. What, so it could breathe? Ironic, I thought.

The Velcro strapping pressed directly on the incision. Staples everywhere, stabbing me. Bone-deep throbbing. Pressure, pressure, everywhere.  I reminded myself it beat the hell out of a Stryker bed, like a mantra. I chanted, "It's better than the bed, it's better than the bed."

I was right. It was.  Mark was there, but we were almost never alone.  I guess he was worn out. He had to leave that night, but his last words were, "Don't ever go away like that again, sweetheart. We need you home. Look at all these cards here. See how many love you."

Cards?

On my bed table were about fifty envelopes, and I decided to sort them by day. Apparently it took time for my mail to find me. Why they had not given me these for those ten days, I'll never know, but I had them now. A wealth of love, all in one cacophony of cards. The next two and half hours the nurses simply let me be. They checked on me, read the cards I showed them, laughed, and let me be.

But my breathing got worse and I felt as if someone were stabbing my chest, just like the staples everywhere else. Sometimes the cards blurred and I would clean my glasses.

Carol came for the late shift that day, looked once at me, frowning, then at the cards, smiling. She disappeared, and around 11:00 pm some maintenance person appeared with a large bulletin board and two nails. She came back in the room and by midnight, I had a field of dopey and pretty cards to look at across the room, and a long piece of string taped on the side wall, holding about a dozen more cards. She rigged up a bag on the side of my table to hold the rest.

"There. Next time you think you're an alien, look at these. Although, you are beyond weird." She left the room before I could find something to throw.

Between the Dark and the Light

What followed starting at about 5:00 a.m., though, were eight hours of nurses yelling at me to breathe and to cough, and doctors trying to figure out why I couldn't give them a deep breath. They worried that someone had nicked something. I don't know. I longed for my planetary pod at that point.

And I was hungry. All I'd had in almost two weeks was broth, so I asked for food. Some idiot nurse gave me some because she did not bother to check the no food order on my door, I learned later. I had had no bowel sounds yet. None. I had only just been given water to drink, to start stimulating something or other. I think. Hell, I was in no position to think about it at the time. I knew only that someone brought me food that I could chew. Bread and butter. Pudding.

Twenty minutes later, I was projectile vomiting. I remember some ten-year-old in my body went, "Cool. I wonder how far I can puke." And the 29-year-old went, "GROSS." Sigh. Groovy.

All that is relevant is that I could not stop it, I could not breathe deeply, and I could not bend at the waist to accommodate the cramping. Carol was SCREAMING at someone outside the door, probably the girl who had brought me food.

"My GOD! What the hell else can we put this young woman through? If she doesn't sue us for just about everything this nursing staff has done, we will be luckier than you know! Damn it!" The yelling faded. Everything faded. I could no longer see or hear. I could not feel. The room blessedly disappeared into a blur of color and bright lights and voices that faded into whispers that came and went. Some of them were Carol and Dr. D., but mostly just strange voices. One of them was not in the room.

"103.5. This is not right."
"But her breathing is shallow. Why can't she just cough?"
You are never going home.
"We need to get the fever down."
You know no one cares if you die. 
"104? What the HELL is this? "
Death.

I made it go quiet when I could. Quiet and dark and all alone so no one would bomb me with words I could not find. Pain occasionally ripped through the lights or the dark, at will, along with the voice.

This was four years before I remembered my childhood, before therapy.  But something was starting. Here in hell, more hell began.

A familiar face, out of focus. A laugh. One needle sticks me, like familiar needles from a time beyond my reach, a thousand needles, over and over, beyond my control, everywhere beyond an arm, a leg, everywhere, over and over. Something ominous, hiding in corners of a dark mind. My mind. Someone's. Dark. Bright. Dark bright. Quiet. Noise. Quiet. Noise. Screams like me, but silent. Somewhere else. Blurring in and out of Hell.

Then suddenly large blue eyes. A face. Carol. I know the face. I do not want to see clearly. But I know her face. Her eyes too shiny and she's all full of lights.

"Don't you dare go! DON'T you dare go. LEAVE HER HERE! Don't you TAKE HER!" The eyes darting all over the place. Then drilling into me too bright.

Who? Take me where? Who's she yelling at?

Dark. Nothing at all.

Suddenly, sound tearing through, forcing me here. Velcro ripping with Carol's fortissimo accompaniment,a battering trumpet in my brain.

"Get this FUCKING THING OFF HER! How stupid can anyone be?"

Hands everywhere, flipping me. Am I in the bed again? What are all the hands? Jimmy, leave me alone. But no. Not Jimmy. Different. Jimmy? What am I saying? Who? A clatter and my eyes opened as my body cast hit the far blue.

White on blue, Carol on silence.

"They didn't leave room for her DIAPHRAGM! They MEASURED the thing when she EXHALED!"

And I coughed and I coughed and I gasped and I coughed and I vomited and I cried and I breathed and hands held me stiff with Carol at my head, there. Always there.

"It's okay, it's okay. YOU'RE okay."

Ice on the head and  wrists. The rhythms of the coughing slow. The woman in the bed surrounded, but only one head shining. Carol's. She is old enough for shiny silver hair? The woman in the bed, so small when the coughing stops at last. I see her clearly there, so small, entirely without colors.

"Thank GOD. 100. She can live with that. Jeannette. Jeannette, come back. Earth to planet Jeannette."

The woman laughs, I fall, crash landing into dark once more. A different dark. I think they call it sleep.

Gone Quiet

It was dark when I awoke, so I was not sure whether it was the room or me, but there was Carol, holding my hand. At my head. There, always there.

"How many shifts are you working, there, woman?" I asked. I realized that I was all in the same place again.

She simply smiled, but was holding my hand. "You let me worry about that. Listen. You listen to me, BACK in BED B. Look into my eyes and listen! I am telling you you MUST lie still today. Your cast has been sent to cut a hole for your diaphragm." She seemed upset, suddenly.  Her voice quieted as she leaned in closer. "Alien dear, you have to be still. We have strapped you in here, but you can move your arms and your head. It's not the bed. It's your bed. See? The doctor said that the anterior fusion is tight, so you don't have to be frozen. But if you don't pay attention, you have to go back to the planet Hell, and you've had enough, don't you think?"

"Yes. Frankly, I am so tired, Carol, I don't want to move. I don't think I can move.  I am so tired." I didn't know I could sound so small. I didn't mean to cry. I wanted to be strong, but strong was nowhere to be found. She stayed until the drugs put me back to sleep and in the morning, for the first time in forever, all the me's inside were together, there. In one body. In one place. One very blue place.

A Quiet Crash of Spring

With metal. White uniforms, with an occasional jacket of color. New nurses. Mandi again. And there was someone in Bed A. She was nice, but when she said she'd got there Friday, I realized it was six days after surgery, and the weekend was nearly gone.

Dr. D came in the afternoon, which seemed to shock the nurses.

"Have you had any visitors this weekend?"

I shook my head. He held my hand a moment then asked, "When was the last time your folks came to see you?"

I teared up and told him they'd never come. Basically, no one came except Mark, because I was too scary.

"May I borrow your little address book, Miss Jeannette?" Perhaps I was wrong to let him have it. Perhaps he was wrong to ask, but I didn't care. I really didn't care about anything. Lunch came and there was chicken. Dr. D. came back into the room with a hot fudge sundae and my address book about an hour later.  He took me for a stroll, the first since the night before my first surgery, and when I looked out the hall window, I started to cry.

A film of green had covered the world while I was sleeping.

"You'll be out there before the lilacs, dear. I promise you. Before the lilacs."

Lilacs seemed so far away, but he was the kindest man I'd ever known, and he had prepared me for every step.

I didn't believe a word. He was no fool; he knew that I didn't believe him. Funny. He did not try to convince me or tell me to buck up. He did not think that it was odd that I was so detached.

All he said was, "Do what you have to, Jeannette. You still have the new posterior fusion to endure, and all I can say is that if anyone screws things up for you again, heads will roll. Some already have, but I'm sick to death of the mistakes because some people have not done their jobs, and I do not mean your floor nurses. You stay in whatever place you have to be, just like the Stryker bed, honey. Go where you must. But hear me when I say, you WILL see the lilacs bloom."

The Final Cut, the Final Wait

I had to wait for the last operation until the incision could withstand the last surgery on the back. I had no clue what that meant. It seemed silly to me, to wait for something to heal just to slash it open again, but then, it kind of seemed like my life. One wound would start to heal and another would land before the process was done. Why not?

I did not like my cynicism, but I did not care to try for improvement just then. It was Wednesday and no one had come except Judy, who lived near by. It turns out she'd been there three times last week, but I could not remember. She wisely did not describe what she saw; she simply sat quietly by me, reading, occasionally holding my hand. But we'd been friends since we were born, summers in the same play pen. Our connection reached past words.

The last surgery was a piece of cake. Except for the hematomas. The second morning after surgery, the nurses wanted my blood pressure to build, so they sat me on the edge of the bed. We were going to go for a walk, they said. The nurse took my blood pressure, and went, "Oh my GOD. 50 over 30? Why aren't you dead?"

Irony everywhere. All the hovering over the woman again. Hands, IVs. Bottles. "Preppy blood, she calls it." Rolling machine. Something hurts my heart, makes it jump. I leave the room.

When I had my first transfusion a lifetime before, I'd had a reaction. So I had to have "washed and buffy packed cells." Buffy cells. The only way I could remember to remind staff of this was to say I needed "preppy cells." By the time I had had my eighth operation, a year and a half later, the whole staff called packed cells "Buffy Cells." I'd made my contribution to the medical community.

When I returned, opening my eyes with me behind them, it was dark again, but I had not clue what day it was. One of the regular nurses, Janice, I think, said, "This is getting really old, Jeannette. Will you stop dying on us please?"

"What day is this?"

"Friday, dear."

"What day was the surgery?"

"Tuesday. Mark is outside the room. He's been here since yesterday."

The hazel eyes were tired, but they stayed soft and close, and Mark's hand did not leave me once through the night. They did not make him leave.  I had company all weekend, even Jean Ellen. Gail came. Mark went home and came back with the kids. Three of my other friends. Judy again.

It was lovely to be alone again on Monday, but I did not speak that thought. It was too late. The people who came had too much light and too many colors. It was not safe. Nothing was safe. It was time to walk again, they said. I had too much to do to absorb all those colors and the noises of the weekend. I had to walk again they said, so I could go home this week.

Go home this week.

Home? Jean Ellen said she had been painting in my room, but had moved the easel out again, to make room for me. She said that Mark and Daddy had moved my bed in at last, so I did not have to use the foldout any more. Home? It was not my home, not now. I had no home. It was Jean Ellen's home. Before that it was my friend's home. I remembered that last Connecticut operation, living with my friend, her telling me on the phone that her boyfriend had moved in and could they put my stuff in the garage until I knew where I was moving ... My calling Jean Ellen to move back into the apartment, and her saying, "But I just got it to myself last year! Your room is my studio." And Daddy saying I could not live back home with them because of Mom's "knees." He was right; no way I could live there. I was one day out of surgery with nowhere to go home to. Jean Ellen had said yes, but only if I left my stuff in storage. No one had wanted me. Here I was only four months later; it was too late for talk of beds and home.

Alone. Alone. Always a burden, never at home. What do they mean, so you can go home?

That voice again. I shook it off. I had to walk today.

I sat on the edge of the bed. The blood pressure was 104/55. Not great, but okay, they said. I had Carol on one side and Janice on the other. I was taller than Carol now, which shocked me.

"Well, kid, you are standing up straight." I was. We stopped in the bathroom and my face was in the top half of the mirror now. At least I think it was my face. She was pale and her cheeks had caverns beneath. I would not look at the eyes.

Death is not pretty, huh, Jeannette.

I shook it off again.

We walked down the hall. An armchair was by the window at the end of a tunnel that would get longer, then shorter. Dark. Light. Dark. Light. Ceiling tiles above again. Familiar patterns. Dark. Light.

We reached the window where I could look out directly into Spring.  This is how it looked to me.

I shouted in a whisper, "Too bright."

Carol said, "Breathe. Just sit down and breathe." I looked at her and she was crying. "Soon you will be out in the colors again. It's been too long for you here, in with all this sterile crap."

What is that color? Magenta? Too many lights. Sunny. Too bright. Laughing somewhere not from the hallway.

Then the voice came. Stop talking about home. I'm dying you  know. Apparently the voice is jumping out from me, this time. It occurs to me once more that I am the woman in the mirror, but it doesn't really matter.

Carol started, then came in close, blue eyes staring into me straight at the voice. Then only dark again.

The Daddies Get Me Home

A hematoma had burst. I remember absolutely nothing at all from the two days that followed. Nothing. I had finally learned to simply leave the scene entirely. What I know is that I awakened exhausted, but quiet. The voice had fled at last.

I would live. But sorrow wrapped me like my flannel robe. My colors had fled my body, the building, my world. Even the blue of my room was gray.  I awakened at peace, in a black and white film. Three surgeries, four near death experiences, seventeen transfusions, hands with phlebitis, wounds like a heroine addict dotting the veins of my arms, like marching white ants.

Carol at my side. I asked for the date, but all I heard was May. I had missed my dad's birthday. Why was that all I registered? When had I come? M. March. The other M month. Lilacs.

Dr. D tried to apologize for something. I looked at him blankly, not understanding why he was saying he was sorry. Somewhere in a place I'd never seen another voice was speaking,  You are alive. You are alive. It's done. You are alive.

An older voice. Older than me. Older than Dr. D or Daddy. I smiled at him and said, "I'm here, Doc D. I'm alive. I can walk."

And then I felt something missing inside as well. For the first time since 1979 that feeling at my core was gone. Something weak and sapping at my core. The pain beyond "1 to 10" was gone. I smiled at Dr. D. and said, "I'll be okay." For the first time, I meant it. He simply squeezed my hand.

Wisely, they did not walk me toward windows. I did not care to see. I had lost track of so many days that I did not bother to try to count. Not tiles, not holes, not minutes. I simply breathed through whatever came.

At last Daddy came and Dr. D. pushed the wheelchair piled high with me, and pillows Jean Ellen had brought from home, and cards, and instructions. It was hard to sit. The cast dug in. Something to get used to. Whatever. I was so tired. Carol kissed me on my forehead and said, "Brace yourself. It's Spring for real. It's okay."

I took her face in my hands though, when she kissed me. I looked her full in the eyes, trying to find regular life words, but said, "You were the only color I saw." The chair pulled me away, while my face adjusted to what smiling felt like.

I stood up to walk out the door, then froze. "Daddy, TURN THE COLORS OFF!" This is how it looked to me.

 

It had rained a few hours before, and now the sun shone full upon the world and all I could see was a world too alive for me to know. Too alive for my black and white soul to absorb or to bear.

My father turned me so gently to him, arms holding me, my face hidden. "It's okay, Jetty. Just breathe. Let's get you to the car." The station wagon back seat was lined with pillows. Mommy's afghan was there, pastels against pale lavender. 

Before I got in I turned to Daddy again and said, "I missed your birthday."

He teared up and kissed me on my hair and said, "No. Not even close, Jetty." 

He drove us up a side street in the town,where the houses were dappled in shade and light, but it was alive with life, growing. Colors, softer, glowing. I wanted to stay lying down, but he had me sit up and climbed in beside me from the other side. "Just take a look out the window, Jetty, for just a few minutes. I'm right here." I leaned back against him and breathed.

The place was the closest place to Heaven here that my father could find.

 

He sang silly songs the rest of the way home—our songs, not Dr. D's—and when we turned up my street, I smiled.  The corner house's lilacs were just in bloom.

Robin Hood and Maid Marion: and All My World Grew Still

Be prepared. This memoir draft is neither funny nor light.   It was difficult to write, and my guess is that it will be difficult to read. I understand if anyone chooses to wait instead for Runaways to Red Bank III, which I will put online in a couple of days! Thank you, all of you, who somehow keep choosing to read what's uncomfortable.

It is my story, and I have to be able to write "ugly," as I used to say when I could not write anything that was darker than  Anne of Green Gables meets Pollyanna. As always, though, the power for me lies in the beauty, the beautiful power of my brother Jack in the face of evil. And the power of a little girl's love.

My brother's and my journey together is in bits and pieces of other blogs, but primarily in  Approaching the Pain, Keeping the Love  --  "I move to Robin Hood" well down, across from my Blog list.  That entry holds pieces that can shed light on more about our years between childhood and his end.

 'Tis I, Robin Hood!

When I was three, my brother Jack got a Robin Hood outfit. My mom and Jean Ellen made me a Maid Marion cape with genuine fake diamonds all along the bottom. Together, he and I would listen to our Robin Hood records with the books. You turned the page when Friar Tuck sang. Then we would run into the front yard where the ancient ... magic tree with roots that were above the ground, not just below it, stood.

We had adventures. Sometimes I got to be Friar Tuck or one of the Merry Band, but mostly I was Maid Marion. She was not a wimp, so I got to ride away with my Robin Hood to foil another plot of the bad Sheriff of Nottingham. We had sacks of acorns from the woods to throw to the poor in the village below (our neighbor's three horses in a corral).  We smite the mighty smoke-belching Tractor Dragon one evening, sneaking out of the house just before bedtime.


Just as we were about to revel in victory, "John Harvey and Jeannette Louise, YOU GET HOME NOW!" My father's voice could be heard three towns away, we thought.

A typical ending of our days -- mostly running home.

I followed him like a puppy, and not once in my memory did he shoo me away.

I had the measles when I was four, right after we moved, and nearly died of kidney failure and double pneumonia. Jacky was by  my side more often than not.  A head would pop in my door.  "Tis I, Robeen Hoooood!" he would cry, and bow before his lady in her room-darkened bed.

"You sound like an owl, not a hero," I'd say. And he would wing around the room "Hoooooooting" for me, making me laugh. Then I would start to cough and he would stop, a study in worry. He would sit on the side of my bed and  hold my hand, stroke my forehead. I was deathly ill, but I don't remember that; I remember how kind everyone was, especially Jacky.

"Jetty, get better, now," he'd whisper.  "We have to build that city for my trains, remember? You promised. You know I stink at making the trees and all the little stuff right.  I just break everything. I need you." That was the thing, you know; Jacky needed me. I got better.

Our dragon-slaying days had ended, though; we had a greater fight.


The Monster who Lived in our House
Our older brother Jim was the Sheriff of Nottingham. I will never know how Robin Hood truly fared in the tower he shared with Jim. I had Princess Jean Ellen in mine; he had Jim. I was protected until she left the house when I was in third grade, at least at night. But daytime was a different story long before she went away. The Princess was seldom home in the afternoon...


Sometimes the queen fell into a deep, deep slumber, with her royal glass of amber on the table by her throne. Worse still, sometimes she went on royal errands and left the Sheriff in charge. Those days Jack's call held urgency, "Jetty run and hide! He's coming!" Wherever I was in the house I ran like hell for my daddy's bedroom closet. The back had a slanted floor for the bathroom plumbing, but there was a little ledge at the top. I could just crawl behind Daddy's Old Spice clothing and tuck myself in tight, wrapped in a sports jacket, and simply wait. To wait and wait where no one ever came.

I would hear the muffled cries, the sounds of a chair scraped over wood. Other sounds. The laugh, a barrage of staccato explosions. I tried to cover my ears. There were other sounds I could not name. I would wait in the safety of my father-smelling dark. I would wait. Wait for the only sound I wanted to know.

"Maid Marion, the Sheriff has gone!"

Out I would fly to Robin, to my brothers' room. I'd look out the bathroom window first, making sure the sheriff was headed down the road, whistling usually. Then I would go to the boy in a chair, just a boy no more than six or seven, tied up and silent, with dark eyes and long lashes heavy from trapped tears.  I would untie his hands and let him be, while I fetched the cotton balls, the iodine, and held a facecloth under the cold water.  I did not rush. Robin Hood did not want me to see him cry. Heroes are like that.

Our ritual was silent. Full. Maid Marion dressed the tiny wounds, and turned the dampened, cold cloth on his forehead.  I would kiss the places where blood was drawn, but there never were many. The sheriff grew quite skilled at leaving no marks beyond pin pricks all over his skin.  He hurt the places that never showed; it was a mission for him.

Sometimes Jim found me, but only when Jacky was not there. Besides which, Jim preferred to find me at night...

And the reign of terror did not end until I was in seventh grade, and Jim moved out for good.

Those years held too much darkness, and so I learned to forget; to forget all but the fairy tale, to forget the reasons my brother's light simply dimmed, and finally went out. I became expert at forgetting the moment something happened, keeping only what I chose. And yet, somehow we know. I began to remember in 1987, after my father died. I wrote this poem after waking from a "nightmare," however, in 1980.

Brotherssong

A hole fills my heart where a childhood should breathe

 and a blood-dripping moon floods my dreams.

The bats start flying

In the house of my death and the songs of my night spin to screams.

There's a blank at the table where my brother's face should feed;

 his hands in my night sprout to claws.

Then the bats start biting while my brother grins on

while the moon drips blood from his jaws.

A newspaper breathes where my father's face should see,

a dead wind rattles at the door.

While the bats bite deeper and my other brother screams

the half moon's bleeding on the floor.

There's a dead mouse in the dark where my other brother cries

and Mother grows drunk on the tears.

While my father keeps reading and my brother grins on,

while my other brother withers with the years.

Too Soon Gone...
He was only 50 and I was not yet 48.  His son, John, had hanged himself in February and I had not seen Jack for several months when I saw him at the cemetery.  He had aged at least a decade and could not walk without a cane. Jack seemed shorter, smaller entirely and his hair and beard were white now. But he eyes were there, the eyes that got to me always, darker brown than the deepest wood, with thick long lashes that made them stand out all the more. And they were so very large and lost that day.

He was surrounded, though, by teenagers. Teenagers with piercings and tatoos. Teenagers with pink hair, purple hair, no hair, black hair. Punked out, gangsta'd, of all types. So sweet, so tender to him. When they found out I was the baby sister of his stories they surrounded me and I saw what the real Jack's life was all about. I will not take away from the love for his children, but in the love Jack gave these emotionally bereft, hurt, abandoned, throw away children, I saw that Robin Hood lived for them. And they loved him back. His colleagues knew me, too. I was surprised, since I had been non-existent in his adult life.

When I walked to him, he opened his arms, but when he held me, I knew Jack was leaning on me, this time. And he was as nothing in my arms. I pulled away a moment, looking him straight in those grief-haunted eyes. "You're dying," was all I said.

"I'll call you," was all he said. But I knew.

His liver was shot and the only answer was a liver transplant. This was now April and he was at my  house. It was late. His visits were always at night. His banjo was in his hands, because it was easier for him to talk that way.

"Why don't we test mine?" I asked.  "Jean Ellen's not a possibility because of her diabetes, but I don't have diabetes."

He smiled and reached his hand out as Daddy had always done, stroking a wandering strand near my face. "No. Not a possibility. You need your liver."

"I KNOW THAT, But they can take just a lobe and--"

"NO, Jetty. NO." His voice was harsh. "No. Don't you get it? I told you. I'm not going to stop drinking. I'm not a candidate for a transplant. I don't care what they do for celebrities. It's wrong. I did this to myself and I know it. Just the way Mom did, I did this. And I have NO desire to stop drinking." He stopped a moment, and registered that I was shaking. He took my hand, again with the familiar Daddy gentleness. "Jetty, the fact is, I really don't much care about living. I've had to retire. My back is worse and pretty soon I won't be able to walk at all. I won't be able to take care of my family; they'd have to take care of me. Jetty, you gotta let me go."

And it just burst out of me, "But, Jacky, I just got you BACK!"

And we cried ...

In May, he was admitted to intensive care, where he stayed for the next two weeks. He could not run away from me. I was editing catalogs for Northeastern University at the time, and Jack's wife was still teaching, as were all his friends. So during the day I got to see him. The first day he could still talk a little and he said he' would never go home. I saw tubes coming out of him in all directions. I knew what came next. The hepatic coma, where he could sense everything done to him, but would not be able to speak, where he might come in and out of it, but would slowly become someone who did not resemble himself. I knew the swelling in the feet, then the hands. I knew, I knew, I knew.

I said, "But why do you have to be hooked up? Why can't you just GO, Jacky?" I was sobbing. I was useless to him like this. He looked wildly at me, but speech was so hard for him.

I heard "Family" and I realized. I held his hand and said I was sorry at least a dozen times. I told him I understood and would never mention it again. I promised. He was letting his family prepare; he would let his wife pick the time. It was his last act of love--an overwhelmingly selfless act of love. We both became calm and we simply held hands in silence.

I asked whether I could come back every day and work beside his bed, if I promised not to be maudlin. Jack usually disliked company in the hospital. I awaited the answer. His eyes filled with tears and I felt him squeeze my hand. He nodded. He did not stop nodding for the longest time.

Maid Marion's Turn to Rescue
The ritual became a staple for his longest days. I would get there at about 11, after the cleaning and the poking and the prodding were done. By then there was a tube down his mouth and he was on total life support. The sound of the respirator gave us privacy. I was given permission to untie him every day for the durations of my visits. His hands danced, just as Mommy's had, only they grabbed at the wires and the tubes--randomly, not with purpose. They grabbed at the sheets resting against over-sensitive legs. I knew what to do. I was more experienced than they knew. I would create a tent of the sheet over his legs, so they would not touch the calves, so swollen and mottled purple now. I combed his hair as HE liked it, so the follicles could rest from over-stimulation.

Sometimes he got angry, because I had to grab his hands to keep him from pulling out the wires or tubes and his angry eyes were like Rasputin's.  My eyes would fill; I couldn't help it. Robin Hood NEVER looked at Marion so.

I had to raise my voice to reach through this lightest of comas. I don't know why they even called it a coma, but it really doesn't matter. He had slipped into it before his mind was gone, so I could bring him back just enough, at times. "YOU HAVE to STAY ALIVE, JACK. You promised yourself. JACK. I have to keep your hands from dancing there, dance them over here!" And I would point to somewhere safe.

And suddenly, after what seemed like hour-long seconds, something would click and the eyes would soften. On the two occasions when he reallized he'd hit at me, he started to cry and I had to get him to stop by threatening to sing "Muskrat Love" to him.

Gradually the eyes would soften, the hands would drop to rest at his sides, and usually by noon he was thoroughly relaxed. I would sing softly, the songs we both knew, while I'd work for an hour or so. By around 1:00, he would drift into what looked like sleep, and I'd stay awhile longer, watching him when he looked comfortably at rest. When he could not see me cry.

The nurses saw, and would usually come over in another fifteen minutes or so and ease me out of the room so they could do their afternoon care. It was all right then, because I knew his family would be there by 3:00. They did not know I came every day.

I was his only visitor. And all I could give him were those minutes when his hands were free.

Singing Our Way Home
The day came at last; the nurse told me that his wife had made the call that morning. She had asked that they wait until after she had visited at dinner time.  I asked how that could work so he would die alone, and the nurse said they expected he would be able to breathe for a little while but that the effort would be too much for him within a few hours at most. I didn't get it; I didn't have to. But I knew it would be the last day.

He was looking for me and I asked him if he would like me to sing the entire Wildflowers album. He blinked and his eyes seemed to smile. I untied his hands, but he seemed almost present there that day.
I began to sing and forgot to sing softly; a nurse came in and I began to apologize.

"No,  no," she said. "May we open the curtain a little longer, so we can hear?" It made me shy a moment, but Jacky took my hand.

I knew it all by heart. We had so many songs and I could hear his guitar in my heart as I sang. He began to drift away it seemed, but, well, I AM his baby sister. I got to "The Sisters of Mercy" and deliberately botched the words and his eyes flew open, glaring at me.

I know my grin was evil. "Oh. Gee. Let me see. Squeeze my  hand once, for Jetty I love you so. Twice for  you colossal little bitch." Two squeezes and all was right with the world; I finished the album without further incident.

By the end, I knew he was resting, and I sang my final song, changing the words just a little. James Taylor's Close Your Eyes. I often sang that to him. Only this time I ended with my own reprise,
"Darlin' close your eyes.
You know ... I'll always love you."

I got up to go, but he grabbed me and squeezed my hand just once. I kissed him and left.

***
His wife called me at 11 and said he was going and I could go to the hospital if I wanted. I took off. I raced to the hospital, but I was too late. No, I probably was exactly on time for Jack. The doctor was removing the stethoscope and the monitor was turned off. His eyes were open.

I shooed them out and said, "Let me do this." Both had seen me before and the nurse touched my shoulder gently as she left. I slowly removed the restraints for the last time.

"Robin Hood. It's Maid Marion. Sheriff Nottingham's gone for good and no one will tie you up ever again."  I smoothed his johnny and washed each hand, then gently crossed them over the sheet I tucked it around him, as if he were sleeping.

And I began to sing "Close Your Eyes" again. I heard a gasp from somewhere nearby, but I kept going. It got so quiet. I brushed his hair as I sang. His silky, pure white hair .. and I combed his beard. Robin Hood lay there so very still. And I finally got there,
"So I'll close your eyes
'll just close your eyes, cause it's all right. 
I'll sing you this last love song. 
But I won't sing the blues any more. 
Cause we have sung our songs. 
And I'll still sing your songs, now you're gone. 
I've closed your eyes. 
You know I'll always love you."

As I walked to my car, making this one last trip, all I could think was this:
Robin Hood slept; Marion wept. Now all the world is still.

When I Awoke to the Notion of Being a Writer

Last week I unpacked a box that had my very first short story, written when I was in sixth grade. My mother had kept it. She didn't keep everything each of the four of us did; she kept the things that stood out.  "Rita" was the name of the story, and there was a picture of a dark-skinned girl with long dark braids and clothes that were too big for her. When I read it, a memory flooded back with such pain, that I had to stop.

Then I marveled at what I had done, and I remember that this was the year I thought I would be a writer. My first poem was there, too.

Loneliness
The old man walked out of his shack.
Surveying land and sky
He smiled.
A lone eagle circled into view,
Wheeling and soaring with joy.
It dove out of view.
The old man stood still for a moment.
Scanning the sky again,
He sighed.

And sighing again, he walked in.
(1964)


I remembered our teacher had assigned us to write as many different poems as we could in two weeks, and to include them in a booklet of poetry we liked. I thumbed through and found I had written seven more, but they were mostly an exercise in learning how to use a Thesaurus.  My teacher had written "Oh, my Jeannette. This is special" below that poem. And Mom had written "It is, honey" under that. She must have written that when she stored it away with my short story.

"Rita" was about two little girls in third grade. Our heroine, Annie, had befriended Rita when she entered school in November, wearing a thin skirt and blouse. She had no coat. Annie helped her when other kids laughed at her, worked with her on spelling and reading. Rita had trouble speaking English because she was from Mexico. Annie helped her all year, and gave her some of her own hand-me-down winter clothes because Rita's parents didn't have money. Rita moves away at the end of the story, and Annie says, "I always missed her after that. It was the one year where I wasn't lonely."

I had gotten an A+ for the story. No one ever asked me how I came up with such uncharacteristically somber stories, or questioned whether I was sad or anything.  But that story struck home, and to this day I remember vividly the true story... Susan Hoyt was the new girl. And it was, in fact third grade.

***
She stood in front of the whole class that November day, with Mrs. E telling us we all should feel sorry for Susan because she had foster parents whom she would talk to and set straight about sending her in with proper clothes.

"Now, Susan lift up your head and for Heaven's sake, get your hair out of your face." She got a barrette out of her desk and, not particularly gently,  fastened Susan's bangs out of her face. So now, Susan not only had on a very large puff sleeved blouse untucked, with a skirt that had slid to her hips, but she also had a wing of uneven hair sticking straight out of the left side of her head. The class giggled, but stopped with one look from Mrs. E.

I swear Mrs. E could have stopped a police car in the middle of a chase with that look.

"You know how it goes. I need a buddy to stay with Susan for lunch. Someone she can get along with. Jeannette, you seem a good match."  Mrs. E did not like me, and not many kids did, either. I didn't fit in anywhere, but mostly it was okay. Except when she had weighed me on a cattle scale with G.  We were so big, she said, it's what we should be weighed on. In front of the whole class.

That had backfired, though, because three girls thought that was so mean, they actually started hanging out with me again. They had in first and second grades, but in third grade, when I got kind of big, and mostly I didn't have clothes like them sometimes, they stayed away. But not now. Now they remembered I'd been their friend before, and they would play with me sometimes. The only girl who never deserted me was Paige and she and I played lots of times.

Still, sometimes at school--well, I knew what it was like a little bit for Susan. I didn't really mind being her buddy.  That was the beginning of a relationship that stayed with me the rest of my life. Susan was from Kentucky and her English was very odd. She hesitated when she spoke, and kind of hunkered down when she talked to adults, like dogs do when they are not used to people. I got assigned to work with her for spelling, for reading, and for arithmetic. I think it mostly got me out of Mrs. E's sight and she liked that.

I know she didn't like me because even though I got good grades she always wrote things like, "Jeannette just doesn't seem to play with the girls properly. She plays with the boys, playing kick ball instead of jump rope."  or "Jeannette must remember she cannot be the leader for everything. She must learn her place." Huh???

My mother didn't care for the comments and told me not to pay attention to them and just be myself. That was okay by me.

So Susan and I would work in the back of the room for the last hour or hour and a half of every day. It kind of made me mad sometimes because that was when we had art or music, so we missed it. After a few weeks, though, something changed and I decided that Susan and I were sisters at the soul.

My mom and Paige's mom had put together winter clothes for Susan and they FIT. Her foster parents, which my mom told me were parents that the government assigned for children who were alone, did not buy her anything it looked like. And along the way, five moms sent lunches in with their kids, for Susan, one for each day of school. Susan took to smiling sometimes and she was kind of pretty. I was jealous of her thinness, but one day she told me SHE wished she wasn't so thin. She never said more than a sentence at a time. It was too scary, I guess, but I wasn't sure why.

Until one day.

We were working on a story about a big brother being mean to his little sister and how he had to learn to be nice. After the usual struggle to learn the words, I had Susan read it aloud one more time and she did it perfectly. At the end it said, "And Timmy gave the puppy, his very favorite puppy, to Mary and said, 'Here, I think you should have this one,' and was never a bully to her again."

Susan started to laugh a little. I looked up at her quickly. "He wouln' do thet." And she gave a short, bitter laugh. I said, under my breath, "no kidding." We looked at each other straight in the eyes for the first time, sort of wide-eyed, like deer, and we both laughed until Mrs. E told us to shush.

And I began to pay attention to her more. Things were easier between us and we would joke once in a while, even.  Kids stopped picking on her. They ignored her, but, as I told her, "That's way better than when they notice we're different, you know? First they get used to you, and don't worry, eventually most of them get nicer."

About two weeks after that first story, we were deep into arithmetic. I was trying to show her the fast way to understand how to know the answer to her 9 + table, when the door opened with that nearly silent motion of air that said someone was sneaking in. Susan and I both jumped and turned to the door at the same time. Susan dumped her book on the floor.

Our principle said, "Girls. It's just me, for  Heaven's sake. I didn't want to disturb the class, but I guess it didn't work."

Everyone laughed but us. That's when I knew it. Neither of us liked that sound, the barest click as the latch button went into its part of the door, and that minute when the air enters just before trouble. Susan looked down and she was shaking.

I wasn't shaking on the outside and I just said, "no, Susan, it's safe here." She looked up at me and smiled and I smiled back, but I was sad. Sadder than when she'd stood in front of the class. Sadder than when the kids had teased her on the playground and Paige and I had brought her over with us to play our imaginary dinosaurs game, far away from the crowd. Sadder than when I realized she never had lunch.

When I went home that day and up to my room, I saw that the pull lock I'd put there had been taken off again. I sighed and went to see how Mom was. She was in her chair, half asleep, the glass of golden liquid on her side table. Dinner would be inedible again. "Is Daddy coming home?" I asked.

"No. He's away on business again." Right. That accounted for her, although sometimes it seemed as if there was no accounting for Mom.

Jean Ellen was at college, so I had my room to myself. A couple of my friends would say how lucky I was because they had to share with their baby sisters. Lucky. I guess.

Jack was as sad as I was at dinner and we looked at each other, lost. Mom had burned dinner but we always had to eat it anyway because "food didn't grow on trees." I think that year it may have been starving kids in Biafra, but I am not sure. I managed to avoid going to bed for a whole half an hour past my bedtime, but bedtime came.

About an hour after I was in bed, eyes wide open, the tears filled my eyes and I wondered if Susan was thinking of me, too, as I heard the too-quiet sound of the door opening, and felt the air attack me just before Jim did.

***
Susan moved away that year. My mom told me that she had been put with other parents because she had been hurt in that house. She sputtered about how anyone could hurt a child, and I remember just getting up and walking away.

By summer of that year I had forgotten all about opening doors. My sister came home. And the following year, for some reason, I took to taking a steak knife to bed with me, but I had blocked out the why of it all. For a long time, that door did not open again unless I opened it.  Which was pretty much the case for my memories of that year at home. I remembered only what I chose.

And in sixth grade I poured out the harmless part of the memory, but kept the loneliness I felt that was visceral and always there. It truly was the time when I decided I simply had to write. I had to. And I never stopped.

What about you? 

Was there a pivotal moment you turned to your art to express something deep inside? Was it a sparklingly beautiful time? That would be wonderful to read about.  I do not assume one has to suffer to write or paint or sing or dance or ANYTHING. But it was my moment.

I don't jump at the too small sounds of life any more, though. For which I am grateful beyond all words.

The Next Reinvention

I was pouring coffee for one of my dearest friends the other morning. She stays over at my place sometimes to save herself a forty-five minute commute from her second shift job. Sometimes she stays over just because we're like a couple of teenage girls who want a sleepover so we can talk all night.


Regardless, I took the coffee to her and realized I had started to cry.  I had been thinking about the day ahead and it hit me; I don't have to do anything. My bills were paid; for the first time in years I was out of debt. There were no contractors to talk to, nothing to fix.  I had all the groceries I needed for another ten days.  The agony and terror of the week before was gone.  For ten days I had had trouble walking from my bedroom to the kitchen. I had shooting pains up my spine, down both the insides and outsides of my legs, as well as down my right arm; both feet were about 80% numb, so that I had to walk barefoot just to be able to feel them hit the floor--and with every hit to the floor there was pain.

I think those ten days were the farewell pitch of the previous two and a half years. The last hurrah of chaos, failing health, financial instability, emotional turmoil.

In that short walk from kitchen to the couch where Martha was sitting, all those things went racing around in my brain and, like a beautiful sunrise, two words rose from somewhere inside of me, from that life-feeding force some call God, 'gratitude' and 'hope.'

Often, I've mentioned my back.  I wrote very badly of the last dance with romance I had a couple of years ago. And I talk about the struggle to find my way to balance, to learn how to dance around the pain, in spite of the pain, in spite of the inability to even move my legs at times. I try not to touch too much on the terror.  When I want to write in my blog, I want to be exploring the "what's next" aspects, or the parts of my life that saved me; that kept the torture, the abuse from killing me figuratively or literally. It's those things I was given that saved me, not some sort of super human strength.

My strength is real human and fails me often enough.

We do not do it alone. If we rise like phoenixes, usually I truly believe it's that somewhere along the line we were offered examples of the rising. So I write of my mother's and father's graces more than where they hurt me. I rarely write at all of the brother who was so sick. I do not yet know how to handle that, or even whether to handle that. If I want to write the book, he has to be there, but until I know how to write of him with grace, a blog is not the venue.

And I want to write the book; I have already begun the book for real.

I tend to write when I have mostly processed, so that I am comfortable with exposing my heart--long after the fear and anger have left. At least, that's when I write my best. But these last two years have leaped in here anyway sometimes. How could they not?  And reading other people's blogs, looking at your artwork, marveling at your wisdom has helped me believe that I could still write, and reminded me that I should still write.  And paint. And sing.  That if I kept even sporadically returning to the page, either online or in my journals, one way or another the latest hell would leave.

Thursday morning, in the little act of pouring coffee for my friend, I realized I'd made it home again. A new home, true, but home nonetheless.

And for the fifth time in my adult life, I am reinventing my life.

The difference is that, for once, I am aware of the whole process as it is happening, not in retrospect. I am alive. I can still walk! I am in my new home and do not ever again have to deal with contractors, leaking roofs, bad septic systems, sewer hook ups, co owners who do not share the responsibility, tenants to evict, mold in the basement, and neighbors who sabbotage my livelihood. I am here, in a lovely apartment, with room for my studio. I have a studio again!

On that long coffee walk, I realized that all is well at last. I felt flooded with something overwhelming, as I realized that finally I really do not have to worry about a thing for now. Who gets that in their lives? Perhaps lots of people; I don't know. I simply know that it was a novelty in my adult life. For now, for at least a couple of years, I truly have all I need, to allow me the time to create a body of work and build my health back as far as I can, without really thinking about much else. I have no one I must take care of and no home for which I am responsible, and I have the money to care for my needs for probably MORE than two years.

Who gets that? I don't think a whole lot of people have that these days. So that flood of gratitude was real. It was mixed in with a relief or release that I have never known. I've never been in this position!

And I admit, this weekend I may just revel in it a little. I am safe. I am free.

And that's the thing I had not even dared to think, let alone write or say. I am free. Even now, as I write, the tears are beginning. I have never felt this way in all my adulthood. I remember approaching this one February morning. My dad was out of intensive care and my older brother (this is pre-memory of all he did to me) was going to survive the car accident he'd had the night of my dad's surgery. Dad had had a complication and Jim was in a coma and Mom was drunk. So my sister gave money to my other brother to drive to New Hampshire to give to Jim's family while he was in a coma, and everyone decided I should be the one to tell Dad that he was not expected to live! Yes, well. Imagine the scene with my mother slumped over, drunk in a chair in the corner. Daddy asking me if Mom was okay from all the stress, because, after all, she couldn't keep her eyes open.

"No, Dad, she's drunk. THAT is why she's asleep. She couldn't cope."

"Well, don't say it like that. She is just under too much pressure."

"Yes, right. Whatever. But, Dad, I gotta tell you something."

So that February morning, I was going to go to the hospital to tell Dad that Jim was okay AND that I had been accepted into Boston University's graduate school, to get my degree in adult education! I could not believe how great life suddenly was, and was marveling how everything could change in a matter of hours, when my foot hit black ice and I fell down six concrete stairs on my back. That was 1980, and my life changed in thirty seconds, let alone a few hours.  My first of nine operations was six months later.

Thirty-one years later, my spine is far worse, but I am far healthier in a dozen ways. I have lived several lives since that morning.

And now, at 59 years old, I am starting yet another. I haven't any idea where this new one will lead, or whether the goals and dreams I have now for it will come to fruition or change along the way. I know only that Thursday morning something inside awakened the phoenix yet again. The last two years have been two of the most difficult I have ever known, but they have also been two of the richest as well.

I know I am loved; when I do not believe in myself, there are all these women who do it for me, giving me the chance to heal, to rest, to revive.  I know that I am safe; I know I have all I need. I am lucky beyond belief in such a time of uncertainty for so many, to know that I will be okay for at least a few years now.

The rest is up to me, isn't it. No one can reinvent my life for me, and I don't want someone to. I did not spill the coffee, even. I sat on the other couch, looked at Martha and said, "I'm free. I really am free."

She just smiled and said, "Welcome home."

Weeding to the Music of Lilacs

"In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary." Aaron Rose

This quote was used as part of Pauline's Writing Down the Words: January 28 entry   That particular quote made me remember the role that gardening has played in so much of my healing time of the last twenty years, the years of home ownership, and visiting without words.And it reminded me of the extraordinary friendships forged around ordinary routines.

When I was in my twenties I did a great deal of visiting over toddlers and folding laundry.  I was single; my friends were not.  (See   "Laundry Eagles"  for an understanding of what I mean.) I was a thoroughly obnoxious sort of friend. I'd watch their children for an hour or two when they had errands to run, hang around to help unload the groceries, the laundry, whatever and, when the little ones began to implode along around 3:00, I would smile so sweetly and say, "Ha ha ha, ha HA HA, I think I'll go HOME now." They all threatened me with much future suffering, but continued to allow me into their homes nonetheless. NOt only that, they fed me, listened to me, and held me close when my heart was broken and my body followed. 

During that decade we visited with talking. Endlessly deep, profound and mundane conversations over coffee, stolen lunches out, when one child or another invariably slumped into her soup, sound asleep. When my parents went off on vacation, I would overrun their home and entertain the lot of them, husbands, wives AND children. I would make some Julia Child wonder of a meal, insist on no help and have everyone at the table together. The children would be bundled en mass onto my parents' bed, and the adults had hours to laugh, watch bad t.v. and discuss everything from politics to the dangers of the new something on the horizon called "Total phone" and the clunkiness of mobile phones. The best night was watching the Miss America Pageant and feigning disagreement over whether or not Miss Oklahoma's singing "I am Woman" while dressed in a ridiculously frilly apron and riding a tricycle  trumped Miss Nebraska's attempt to sing "Send in the Clowns" while dressed as Bozo. I had served coq au vin with a magnicient four layer Boston Cream Pie (Made entirely from scratch) and flopped onto the couch, saying, "Someone peel me a grape." I was ignored.


Ten minutes later Andrea appeared with my mother's hexagonal  silver tray with one peeled grape in its center.


It's the little things.

But our friendships were loud.  We danced and had parties. We lounged by the pool, watching with one eye, the endless games of Marco Polo as toddlers grew to double digit children.  I was the neighborhood silly mobile aunt. I loved it. I knew I should not have children with the back I'd been dealt. I did not have my first surgery until I was twenty-eight. I was diagnosed with severe problems at just 23. So I exercised like a fiend to avoid surgery. I did weights when it was not fashionable, and tried the weights machines, only to find that it made a difference that they were designed for men. I hurt myself. My PT guy said I was the only woman he'd ever met who overdid it in the pool to the point of injury. 

What's this nonsense anyway about moderation being good? BULL.

I dreamed big. I Mean BIG. I would write the best novel ever and Oprah would have me on. I would be "Discovered" at a poetry reading by Coventry Lake. I would go to grad school and become an expert on Adult Learning, and write the definitive light reading books for adults--compelling and interesting, not glorified kids' books. So many dreams.  My friends had them, too, and they were not so big.  How was it, then, that my friend who spoke English as her second language got her masters in international accounting, and another became a nationally known and respected program director for Public Broadcasting, and another went to law school at thirty?  I talked about the big dreams, and so did they, but when it came down to it, after all the talking and laughing and sharing, in my thirties I watched the others run after their dreams while I spent five years in hospitals, raising half-grown children in between the four to six-week stints?  I felt my life slipping away, I thought.  The noise seemed to die down, but not the chaos.  

I did not lose these friends at all. On the contrary, I was the stay-at-home mom for my daughter's best friend. I was the one who would suddenly show up at whichever home "the gang was hangin" with a tray full of Slurpees® and a bright smile. As my son said, "It was impossible to, like, be that mad. I mean, you didn't stay. You sat down and you asked us about our days, brought the drinks and sometimes cookies and smiled and then left after fifteen minutes. And come back later because you forgot your wallet or something. You always forgot something."

I would smile at his recollection and then he'd say, "DAMN. You didn't forget, huh. But we NEVER knew if you'd come."

"Exactly."

The life was mundane and my pleasures were tiny, mostly. An unexpected hug from my son.  Dinner time laughter that included Mark AND the kids.  And, of course, hanging out with my friends for cookouts. Still, mostly we talked. And, sad to say, mostly I envied them their marriages, their vacations, their big homes.  I felt that not only had I disappeared, but my family was not likely to move forward. Of course, it was my fault. I was disabled and brought in almost no money. I banked all of the kids', and used my own for necessities. I had no right to buy luxuries. The money was Mark's, not mine...

But somewhere along the line, I realized that I was not seeing my life. I had not held up the proper light to it.  Others seemed to see me as a success. (Not my family, of course. There, my Aunt Joy summed it up when they were dissecting me as if I were absent. Joy said, "Well, Jean, she IS a wonderful mother.  Let's give her that much.) My friends saw more, for which I am beyond grateful, but they told me I was either seeing myself and my life in a funny mirror, or I needed new light bulbs in my brain.

It began after the eight operation, when I was confined to bed because I had gotten up on my own to use the loo, and had lost my mind in a sea of blood in the bathroom.  It was a new procedure, trying to avoid my normal hematomas. The fourteen inch incision was sutured very loosely so the pressure would not build, and blood could escape in a controlled way, but I went into the bathroom and, well, the thing exploded, splattering blood all around me and I had a flashback. My first. Right there and then, blood on porcelain and I was gone to another place.  The sound. The sight. The fear. I remember nothing more.

I awoke tied to my bed, and life changed immediately. I did not then confront the flashback; it was too soon for that. Yet at last I knew that there was something to confront.  As I looked next to me at my drug-addicted, far older roommate, a woman whose husband would come into the hospital and say, "Why don't you simply DIE, Annie, and help us all out?"  .... as I looked at her, and looked back at my panic-stricken husband beside me, my life took on a new sheen.  Our marriage felt strong and real. And I remembered something about Jessie.
One day she had come home with a papier maché  daffodil from middle school art class. "I can't even show this to Mom or Dad. They'll laugh at it. I can't laugh at it. Jeannette, it's pathetic." Well, yes, it truly was. It had a stem the size of a Grecian column and a blossom the size of a thimble. It was lopsided and one leaf was fat and squat, the other tall and leaf-like. "She gave me a B out of pity and for the good leaf." There she stood, hair to her butt, one arm behind her back, the other holding this monstrosity toward me, eyes pleading for help.

"Well, Jess. I can't throw it out. My guess is you worked hard on it." Her tears were falling and she nodded. "I know, I'll put it on MY shelf in the closet and I'll think of you every day."  She brightened up enormously, but every time she saw it in the closet she'd come out and look at me, shaking her head. 

A couple of years later she said, "You really don't have to."

I always said, "I love it. Especially when I knock something near it and it falls on my head." She would laugh and kiss me.

But when the ceramic vase came home, lopsided and unevenly glazed, she begged me not to put in the living room. "No, REALLY Jeannette. You can't do it. There is nothing that you can make look okay in this. Nothing."

I'd said, "Trust me, honey. You wait." Jess ran into her room crying because she thought it would be humiliating.
I found some beautiful silk flowers and dried boughs of who knows what? I put it in the corner of the shelves, and you saw only the ruffled line of the lip of the shining forest green vase, and the curve of the base, and a profusion of delicate color, there in the center corner.  

She looked at it and began to tear up and smiled, "You made something beautiful out of something ugly. You always DO that for me." And she hugged me, holding on longer than I did,  and I was never as whole in my life. It was the sweetest compliment I'd ever known. An ordinary act of motherhood, I thought, seen through the eyes of an extraordinary child who did not know her power yet.

I lay in my hospital bed, tied down, thinking of her and a dozen other little sweet things that suddenly felt huge, and how I'd nearly blown up my marriage.  And I apologized for the billionth time for the pain I had caused Mark, only this time he looked at me and said simply, "I want you home. I want you not to hurt so much. I can't reach where your pain is, Jeannette. It's always out of reach."

But he kissed it away just the same and I remember it as a series of the best kisses of our marriage.

Something changed.  I was thirty-five and was about to learn the heaviest of life's lessons, but I began to listen to silence and look harder at the small things of my life. I stopped paying so damned much attention on the big successes of my friends, and looked at my small successes. I could stand when they told me I'd fall down. I was not an addict.  And I was determined to stand STRAIGHT. I was able to do the laundry within two weeks, and for the first time in three years—I started dancing around like Rocky for the accomplishment. There, with no one to hear or see the mountain I had climbed, I danced. 

Sometimes simply tying one's shoes is an extraordinary act. That's what I was showing Dad--that I could tie my shoes--while quietly and slowly the subject drifted away.  I was always quiet with him toward the end.  Noise confused him. But because I was happy to simply BE with him, I had the opportunity to meet the man behind the FATHER, even more than when we'd commuted together. He gave me the journal of his last months, a revelation of pain, selfish arrogance and humble regrets.  Anyway, on this particular day, I'd told him how hard it had been to learn to do and how much  harder it was to appreciate an act I'd done thousands of times, and he nodded. Then he said,  "I've sung Ah Sweet Mystery of LIfe at Last I've Found Thee easily a thousand times. Why did I have to be dying to listen to the words? Love was next to me all my life, sweetie. Don't be like me. Mark hurt you. I know that. We know that. He isn't the man we thought he was. Dear, you can do anything. Listen to your words when you sing them. Listen to your life as you live it. Listen. I never listened."  There were many small moments with them both, while they were consciously preparing to go. I'll save them for another time, but when they were gone, and we had bought our house, I began to garden.

The quietest thing I know, gardening. My friends gardened, too. Sometimes we would work together and say nothing, yet felt we had visited all the way through to our cores. Perhaps we had. We would be filthy, sweaty, make-up-less and aging. Yet sometimes I thought that Andrea was most beautiful with her hair unruly, her unmatching eyes glittering, her pale skin still shining from her sunblock. There seemed nothing ordinary to me about many of the flowers, especially peonies.

I mean really. Every peony is its own statement of life -- no, of LIFE, with flourishes of trumpet as well. Their coloring is as delicate as Dresden, but the flowers themselves? A subtle peony is an oxymoron.  I was weeding in my lilac island when I thought about that one very early morning.  I liked to weed when the sun still cast gold in the sky, there on the far side of my yard. 

I was laughing at myself because I love their showiness, revealed only through the  never-ending ordinary march of ants to soften their buds. Ants. What is more ordinary than an ant? The lilac island was my first garden, designed, planted, dug with my own hands out of the twenty-year-old perfect turf. My mother's and sister's favorite flower is the lilac and, since Jean Ellen lived here, I wanted to have my first garden be for her and for Mom, whose soul I had clearly channeled, against my will I tell ya, against my will! (I loathed gardening as a child, as I stood by her holding the trowel, the watering can, and some worms to put in the holes. Worms, it appeared, were the key to every garden success. They were the best thing about it all, because the rest of gardening seemed the most boring thing in the world. Put in some nameless tiny green thing and when you were done? It looked like a limp clump of weed. And a clump of junk we had to be careful not to let the kick- soccer- foot- or baseball get into.)

So I chose four different lilac varieties, then found the Miss Kim, and realized that I could have a whole month  of lilac blooming with one of those, if they did not all bloom at once because of a hot spell. And I had to admit that subtlety had not been what I was going for here, either.  The double blossom shrub was nearly bent to the ground from the weight of the eight-inch long pregnant blossoms. 

That season we had had a hot spell, though, and I saw that every single bush was budded, from the doubles of the deepest violet bush to the white. None were in bloom, but they would be any moment. Oh, well. I shrugged and decided how beautiful our enormous vases would be with five shades of blooms, if only for a few days. 

I shook my head a moment because a decade before I had planted them too close together, and had actually put a peony plant in there, not realizing how big both got. A common mistake for new gardeners. Furthermore, lilac island across from an open field, so nameless horrid weeds invaded all the time, including the Chinese vine I SHALL NOT NAME. I call it KUJO, for the killer dog. I had just finished wrestling one 20-foot obsenity out by its roots from the very center of my "grove", and had removed, painfully, no fewer than EIGHT thistle plants when, as I unbent my body to breathe, I heard the rain. I looked up and the sky was blue with the barest hints of rose and gold on the horizon.I stood very, very still; stunned, in fact. Gentle rain engulfed me, yet all was dry. 

"A miracle?" I asked aloud.

No. An ordinary act of nature, the sound of lilacs blooming.

Clearly, though, I should have answered, "Yes."

Time, Memoir, and... I have absolutely NO clue what this is about!

I saw a Facebook thread which loosely talked about time. A friend said something to the effect that we might consider that the moment we experience as now holds many other moments in it. He was trying not to talk about past or future because thinking of time so linearly might not be the way to go. (Forgive me, David, if I have blown my paraphrase.)

I have no clue where his mind was running, but mine ran to memoir. To this blog and why I have schizophrenically included another. I may eliminate the blog, but fold the old entries into this. I am not sure. I was trying, at one point, to figure out where my past could end and my next path start--as if they were separate in any way! In fact, I think the point of the memoirs I love the most blur any sense of time, really. One writes in terms of events, of experiences and growth. We blur the sequencing in memory and often the details. And, truly, does that make one iota's worth of difference? I don't think so. We try to preserve the broader truths, and the enormous truths contained in details, but few of those have much to do with linear time.

Before I remembered events from childhood, I clung to a myth and to a bogglingly detailed memory of each school year, what I learned, who my teachers were, what the weather was. I had no gaps of time, I thought, because I knew the chronologies, events that surrounded the big events. I could reconstruct things in every year. It was the way I could surround the terror with detail and tell myself that I had nothing more to remember.

The healing came when I wrote the rest of the time line, in truth. What I called "Time line of Terror: Time line of Grace." In fact, I had HUGE gaps and blanks. I remembered almost nothing that happened in my home except at Christmas for probably ten years of my life. The trivia found its level, like water, filling in the cracks. So I had to let go of my ridiculous chronology by writing a different sort of chronology. There were not years listed. I had experiences, eras of pain without dates attached. On the left were the punctuation marks of pain in my life, and it was chillingly long, I thought, as I began. In fact I would not and should not subject readers to such a lengthy mess, I thought.

On the right, however, was a list easily four times as long. For every single atrocity I made myself list the graces that got me through. THAT was and remains the sheer wonder of my life.

I remembered the people, the Christmases, the little kindnesses and overwhelming love of some. I remembered silly events that made me laugh. My list of graces took up four times the space, but in numbers? I think they outnumbered the terrors six or seven to one. To me, to this four-year-old and eight-year-old heart, the graces were as tiny as a feather I found on a beach. They required little explanation.

What has this to do with time? I think that when I let go of worrying about what happened when, when I let go of this fear that I misremembered things, that I was not journalistic enough, the real growth began. Like Louise, these other pains held the yin/yang of my life. At every turn we can choose light/love/feeding life or the Other, whatever that is. Sometimes, if you are as lucky as I, you are given markers, nudges toward that love and forget to even LOOK at the other part of our circle. That's the thing; at every turn someone or other pointed me toward beauty.

I live on the edges of things. I've said that before. In the old days, Olympic skaters had to do compulsory exercises, one of which involved skating an eight on one blade over and over and over, repeating that same line. I think I aim toward that line in the yin/yang sign. I think I see life that way, and experience my own life that way. I want to skate on that edge, leaning on the side of the blade toward wonder and the things that feed our lives.

When I hit fifty I tasted my first fresh fig. Rivaled the pluot, I must say. It's not the time, it's the alliteration ...  It's not my brother's foot on my tiny hand as I tried to protect a trapped mouse when I was four --the foot coming down on the hand, murdering a mouse. It was the choice presented like a gift to me, to guard future mice in traps so no foot would ever again end their days. I sat by the mice in the traps and I sang to them.  It doesn't matter what happened before or after--it's the experience and what that teeny girl drew on to cope. Love. A gift. A gift that has never left me.

When I finish my book, I want it to be about flying and wonder,  and my true goal is take my readers on a joyous, if somewhat terrifyingly beautiful flight with me. And I want it to be abundantly clear that none of us is strong all by ourselves. Those of us who survive the most appalling abuse, who have had to cope with pain and perhaps overcome many odds--to say we were just not quitters, or that we were somehow better than... I think that teaches nothing. It simply makes those who are floundering feel less than... as if we do not ALL flounder at times? Oops. Time. That word.

I was taught to look for the magic, to expect to find it everywhere. I was taught that love is a gift we give and may receive. It is not an emotion and we do not take it from someone. I was taught that the lessons were in the giving more than the receiving; in the receiving we found joy and laughter and wonder, sure. But to give the love when it was not easy? My parents believed that this was what made it love.

How do I say, then, that my parents are gone when their voices live so clearly in my heart and mind? Where does that past end, when its lessons still live? I named the pain Louise. That was easy. Embracing my mother was easier after my time line. Over and OVER, even when she was the terror, she was the grace as well.

And she still is. Jack, Jean Ellen, Jessie, Daddy, Mom, so many people not walking on this earth live inside of me. The years are meaningless. In the act of writing I don't let go of the past; I hug it to me and reveal its power. In these last few months, what I see is that I have let go of WANTING it to be "in the past." I let go of wishing I were someone else.

I don't; I would rather have had my own life than another's. I do not think things happen for a reason. I think the free will lies in whether or not we stand up and decide to use the horrors to create beauty or to enrich life, or whether we choose to hold onto our identity as ACOAs, or "Survivors" or something that sets us apart from all humanity, from this earth. We choose to continue on paths of self-destruction or bit by bit, we learn to choose life. But I don't think God or Anything in particular sends us pain, abuse, abandonment, loss, or even hurricanes for a reason. Whatever God is, or whatever Energy feeds and sustains life? It sends the magic and the joy to find ways to ride or even fly out of and above the rest. It's what allows us the capacity to be a phoenix.

Mind you, I have not arrived on that Tibeten Mountain Top there, with the great Zen masters. Not hardly. I'm simply thinking that past, future, where I'm going, how I thought of the future as "starting over," it's all bunk. I start over one way or another every day... don't you?

Memoir is self-involved, but somehow or other, the best ones have reached to all who read them. We search for what we all can share, regardless of the "niceness" of our families. We take our little teeny lives and find what resonates, we HOPE. That's the goal anyway. To find something beyond the littleness of ONE life, to touch and perhaps help or support or validate other lives.

Of course, then we can eat a pluot or a fig and simply live in the joy of juice running down our chin, and to HELL with reaching for anything more.

And if you can make sense of any of this ramble, you are "a better man than I am Gunga Din," as my mother used to say. It was fun to write it anyway!

***
This is unedited or reviewed stream of consciousness dribble. I just need to make writing my habit once again!

WOO HOO

I have been awarded Social Security Disability. I am eligible immediately for Medicare. The first hurdle toward my reconstructed self has been CLEARED.

I have dreamed of coral reefs two nights in a row now. Time for a new painting, I guess, while I work on the two unfinished.

Such a New Year's gift. The judge wrote her decision BEFORE the Christmas break, only a couple of weeks after the hearing. She was clear and, well, it validated a good deal, this judgment of hers.  I will be able to be financially okay for at least ten months and, hopefully my house will sell before that time is done.

I find myself hoping only to move forward, to not just reconstruct myself as an artist and writer, as one who creates solely what is in my heart and imagination, but to feel that I can tutor as well. I LOVE helping kids unlock their curiosity, finding the words that help them over their own hurdles. It is challenging and fun, too. I am only eight in my brain, so it seems a natural fit, no?

I want the new year to propel me toward simple peace, toward loving my friends better, toward more productivity and choices that keep me on the planet a LONG time.  I want to write the wonder of my life, which was the gift that got me through the pain--the gifts of my mother, my father, and my sister, really. Each had their own whimsy and sense of the absurd that they gave to me.  And the wonder that was my brother Jack's willingness to protect me the best he could from the violence of the other brother. And of our friendship as children and teenagers. In his own disease, he committed one horror, but ONLY one. Mostly, as his birthday draws near,  I remember Robin Hood, calling to me as I hid in the closet. Calling to me when his own torture was over and the monster had wandered off, losing interest in causing him pain. "Maid Marion, Maid Marion. The Sheriff is Gone. It's safe to come out."

And I would untie him and bathe the cuts or the bruises myself. Jack gave me my very life, I think.

It is a new year. Some of the limbo has suddenly ended. I am acutely aware that I was given more gifts than my share, I think. I called my friends who had been long awaiting good news. It took three hours of laughing and crying and just being happy.

I have virtual friends in here, many of whom have reached out to me beyond the blog. I have thanked you all before, but I simply must again. The progress on the book is slow, but it has to be. I have made peace with many things in these months of chaos and pain.

Long ago, in the early days of biofeedback pain therapy, I named the pain Louise. My  middle name and my paternal grandma's name. I may have mentioned this elsewhere. I did this because my grandma taught me many things as a small child, and I adored cooking next to her, eating lunches she made for Jude and me at the Lake on rainy days--we sat at a lace-edged tableclothed card table, on the screened in porch, eating egg salad sandwiches cut on the diagonals with the crusts off, off of special plates with a spot on them for the chocolate milk-filled glasses. And we had M&M's for dessert. Grandma would serve her two little wild girls as if we were grand ladies. It made us giggle, as we sat in overalls and t-shirts, barefoot. Huck Finn girls with Lady Louise. Grandma mourned the demise of whale-bone corsets. She showed me how to dip candles for fun and we churned butter.

But when I hit puberty I learned that Louise was mean to my mother. She spied on us. She was bitter. A vicious gossip sometimes. Louise was not likable, barely lovable, in fact--but she was my grandma, part of my being, part of who I was, part of my life.

The Louise of my body, born of spinal disease, has tamed my tendency to self-destruct. Pain is not something we want. I don't want it.  But it's here. It is part of my life. Louise is here and saved my life and made it hell and I cannot discard it. I must live with it and use my heart and soul to find the ways to use it to FORCE me into going after the dream.

I never gave myself permission to paint, to sing, to write simply what I WANTED. To create from my own music for the sake of creation. Well, I can't do it on deadlines any more. There is no path left for me but to do what I want!

So, tell me. What sort of irony is in that? I mean, talk about a dope learning things the hard way!

I will be getting the first step of financial respite. I have accepted what IS in relation to my spine. I KEEP ON STANDING UP. But I know enough to sit down or lie down when I have to.

It IS a happy new year. Thank you to any of you who keep no looking for me to write. There will be more.
Woo HOO.