A Short Time to Be There

Last Saturday, June 14th, I dropped Morganne at the airport for her trip to Argentina. I continued on to San Francisco to support my mom during my dad's hospitalization.

My dad was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme (the most aggressive kind of brain cancer) 20 months ago. Since then, he and my mom have done an amazing job of continuing to live their lives amidst medical treatments and a dour prognosis.

The prognosis is still dour, but my dad has lived (so far) 8 months longer than expected, even with treatment.

When I got to the hospital, things looked pretty bad. He was in the ICU, struggling to become conscious, and pretty much completely out of it. The right side of his body was paralyzed, and the doctors told me to call my sister and brothers and tell them to hurry if they wanted to see him alive, and conscious, again.

I was doubtful of the "conscious" part of that, myself, but my dad has rallied so many times that my mother and his doctors thought it was possible he might rally again.

Supporting my mother is always a challenge. Just about the time I'm saying, "Don't you want to sit down and rest for a while and read a book or something?" she's thinking that a dinner party would be just the thing. Right after visiting the hospital the first night, I drove her to a dinner party where most everyone spoke French.

The hosts have known me since I was a teenager, and it was pleasant to chat in French with the foreign guests, but the whole thing was a little surreal. My dad is sitting in the hospital, barely there. My daughter is on a plane bound for Buenos Aires. My mom and I are at a Thanksgiving celebration (really!) in June practicing our French.

I did get the (now familiar) thrill of watching someone faint when he learned I have a 19-year-old daughter.

The surreality continued. We spend about half our days at the hospital, watching my dad struggle. We spend the other half of the day socializing. My mom's giving me fashion advice, loaning me jewelry, and encouraging me to take special care with my appearance. I've never loved my family role as show daughter, but I submitted to it more willingly than usual.

I was also my mom's designated driver. As I wove my way uncertainly through the city, my mom encouraged me to drive more aggressively. "Go go go!" she'd exhort, "you've got to speed up or we'll be stuck at that light for 10 minutes. Hit your horn to tell that guy to get out of your way." Her language was a lot more colorful , though, and her road rage a lot more emphatic.

Okay, I thought, she's incredibly stressed right now, and she always drives like a bat out of hell anyway. And despite driving like a bat out of hell, she has an excellent driving record.

So we're very different, my mom and me. I like silence, solitude, serenity, and a slow pace. She's an extreme extravert and an adrenaline junkie.

I had my brief for this week: to support her the way she needs to be supported. Not the way I would need to be supported, but the way she needs to be supported. This required constant adjustment on my part, because my first impulse was almost always dead wrong.

So I went to brunches and dinner parties and ran errands that (in my opinion) didn't need to be run. I cooked and drove and tried to maintain my serenity. I met with an endless bevy of family friends, cousins, aunts, uncles, and, of course, my grandmother.

One night when we were driving home from a dinner party at a Thai restaurant, I told my mom, "I like all these people. I just find them overwhelming in such large, loud bunches."

The large, loud bunches energize her. I don't understand how this works. I don't need to understand how this works. I just need to accept that it does.

Meanwhile, the hospital visits continued to be agonizing. My dad was in a constant struggle for consciousness, almost getting there and then slipping below the waves again. He was in restraints, because he kept pulling his tubes out. He had frequent seizures and involuntary muscle movement on his right side because of misfiring neurons.

Also meanwhile, Morganne got to Argentina and started posting frequent updates to her trip blog. If I hadn't been so absorbed by my parents, I would have been a basket case with her going so far away. As it was, my basket-case-ness came from quite a different source.

And also also meanwhile, Garry celebrated his birthday with the three younger children. Morganne was in Buenos Aires and I was in San Francisco.

When my mother wasn't busy in other ways, she was on her cell phone. On Tuesday morning, I decided to confiscate it for the afternoon. I told her she could have it if she really wanted it, but that I'd make all her phone calls for her and answer it so she could have a break. By that time, even she was totally frazzled, so she agreed.

My sister arrived late Tuesday night, which was a relief.

On Wednesday, my dad was a little more aware. His seizures were under control, and he could focus his eyes for periods of
up to a minute or so. My sister and I spent the afternoon together at the hospital while my mom went to work (she's a therapist, and she still works Wednesdays and Fridays). We each gave the other one an hour or so alone with our dad.

During my hour, I just sat with him like you'd sit with a baby. I'd been wanting to do that, but my mother and other visitors
kept up a steady stream of chat. I sat, made eye contact when he'd let me, cried some, prayed lots, and spoke when he spoke.

He didn't speak much, and only in fragments. "Unnatural," he said, and I had to agree that the whole hospital thing was
unnatural. "Facts don't matter," he told me emphatically, probably because his doctor and my mom are constantly asking
him about irrelevant details like what year it is. (The year, in case you were wondering, is January.)

Science, he said at one point, isn't important. This was quite a shift from the person I've always known.

Finally, after an extended period of eye contact, he said "I don't like to be rushed."

So he's not going to be. He's taking his time about dying, and he's welcome to it.

My dad's always been pragmatic and a problem-solver. He was a programmer. When I was 13 or 14 and struggling with some word problems, he told me that he solved word problems for a living. He then sat me down and showed me exactly how you go about solving any word problem you run across. He was methodical and precise.

He never wasted energy wishing things are different than they are. When some crisis appeared, my mom would get all het up, go into what-ifs and it's-not-fairs and rail against the situation they found themselves in. He had no time for any of that.

"Here's the situation," he'd say, laying out the bare facts, "and here's what we need to do about it."

He's still doing that, I realized, watching him struggle with the smoking wreckage of his brain. He's still figuring out what he has to work with, what his givens are, laying aside the hypotheticals, and trying to solve the problem he's been given.

Maybe that's why he's lived so long, and how he's managed to regain function that the doctors believed he'd lost. All along, he's problem-solved around his limitations, and I could still see him doing it. He might lack memory and motor control and even the ability to stay conscious, but he'll continue to use what he has as long as he can.

No matter how out of it he was, he'd struggle to kiss us good-bye and tell us he loved us. Even if all he could do was move his lip a little and grunt, he did it.

I left San Francisco on Thursday.

Saturday was Merlin's (Remus John's) 9th birthday. We have a new rat in the family, the Rat of Khan. We celebrated at the pool with lots of friends, watermelon, and ice cream. It was lovely and hot, and the day in the sun was refreshing.

Basking in the Tropical Afterglow

My reputation as a selector of movies has been ruined forever.

Last night, we watched (and loved) Stardust, to the point where we consider it a serious contender to replace the Princess Bride in our affections. We especially liked Michelle Pfeiffer's evilness
and Robert DeNiro's buffoonery. It seems to fall down a bit in quotability, but we love love loved it.

Tonight, however, we watched the worst film we have ever seen. It's called Over California, and I expected it to be a natural history filmed from above. Instead, it was a collection of not-half bad aerial shots of (mostly) coastal cities accompanied by some nice music and the worst, most syrupy, adjective-laden narration it has ever been our misfortune to hear. We had hoped for interesting facts and amazing footage a la Planet Earth, but this film was amazingly short on facts for a documentary.

We seriously considered turning it off, but then there would be a bit of narration so bad that we were gasping with laughter. So, despite the fact that we hate hate hated it, we kept watching in the hopes that it would top itself.

Finally, the narration soared to meet our dearest dread. As the sun was setting over LA (the film had a penchant for sunset shots over cities, during which the narrator would bid them a fond farewell generously larded with complimentary adjectives), the narrator waxed lyrical about how LA was bathing in its tropical afterglow.

Tropical afterglow? Tropical afterglow? TROPICAL AFTERGLOW?

We have decided that we must immediately market something as Tropical Afterglow. But what should it be? A bath oil or cocktail seemed most appropriate, or perhaps a sunburn lotion or sexual aid.

Given the number of musicians in the family, however, we have settled on a rock band. Right now, Tropical Afterglow seems to consist mostly of drums and kazoos.

We have not laughed so hard in many moons as we did this evening. Don't get this film, don't watch it, and, whatever you do, don't steal the Tropical Afterglow brand idea from us.

A collaborative haiku on the subject:

haiku has no place
for tropical afterglow --
poison oak on fire

My Flip Side

On retreat this weekend, there was a Dark Side/Light Side art activity. Despite (because of?) the fact that I don't pretend to be an artist, I've found spiritually-connected art activities to be strangely powerful.

I was delighted when I found oil pastels on the table. I've played with oil pastels a few times before. I immediately decided to leave the safe harbor of magazine image collages and draw my light and dark sides.

Without letting the fact that I can't draw inhibit me.

I played it safe at first, drawing a sailboat to symbolize joy and freedom. I then added a few pirate stick figures to represent friendship.

Any Puzzle Pirate friends looking on might recognize me and Scaggles in the drawing.

I reached into Puzzle Pirates for the dark side, too. First, I'll give you the image, and then I'll tell you what it was supposed to be.

When I showed this to my Friends at the retreat, they all burst out laughing. If I looked at it for a few seconds, it would reduce me to hopeless giggles. It is so obviously not what it was supposed to be, and yet, at the same time, perfect.

It's supposed to be a fierce and angry Kat, with claws out ready for the melee.

My Body, My Self

After Meeting last week, I was eating lunch with a group of women Friends. One of the older gentlemen came towards me slowly, and carefully squatted next to my chair. This took some time and some doing, because he walks with a cane.

"Friend Heather," he began slowly in his unhurried, deliberate voice, "you are living proof of the proposition that less is more."

He met my eyes, smiling at me as I worked out what he was saying. When I smiled back, he said, "You look great."

We shared a smile for a moment, and then I thanked him. He slowly rose to his feet and walked away, leaving me to appreciate the joy of spending time with Quakers.

It was a few hours before I started wondering whether his wife had put him up to it.

It was a few days before I realized that I find old and young men more attractive these days than men my own age. A man at the next checkout counter at the grocery store smiled at me, and I was repelled. He had a pot belly and a bad hair cut, but what really got to me was the tired look in his eyes. Weighed down by his responsibilities, maybe. Whatever it was, it wasn't the least bit sexy.

I'm feeling young and sexy myself these days, having reclaimed my body from the years of childbearing and breastfeeding and painful disability. My hips move freely and there's a spring in my step, and I'm very much enjoying the way I look and feel.

I'm finding my path through middle-aged sexuality to be a place of exotic surprises, a far richer and lusher paradise than I thought it would be. I flirt with very old and very young men and don't take it too seriously. I feel freer than I did when I was younger, more sure of myself. I enjoy myself more. It's not at all what I expected to find when I got here, and I'm savoring it.

Fortunately, my husband is not one of the middle-aged men who has let himself go. He's still got his boyish figure and his hair. When he recently got back from a trip, I took one look at him and thought, "Damn, he's a good-looking man."

There's a lot to be said for old married sex, too.

Poetry in Motion

Today's schoolwork by Remus John, age 8:

I am neither friend nor foe.
I use neither sword nor bow.
I will neither catch nor throw.
I will neither lead nor row.
I am neither fast nor slow.
I will neither come nor go.
I make neither joy nor woe.
I will neither see nor show.
I sing neither high nor low.
I say neither yes nor no.

Various members of the family were challenged to memorize this poem. It proved to be surprisingly difficult to do so. After about the third try, three members of the family launched into a recitation of Hamlet's soliloquy in protest. When they finished, Remus John announced that they had lost the memorization contest.

Undiscovered Country

Oh humility is endless and my preconceptions often blind me, but I never thought I'd end up here.

When Jazzercise first started, I thought it was strange, artificial, and peopled by former cheerleaders. I didn't like the music, the workouts seemed poorly designed, and the moves were funky. The regulars wore funny clothes. They used bunny weights. They hung out in multi-purpose rooms and public halls and church basements. They left their children in the care of strangers for an hour so they could get buff.

I took my exercise outdoors, often with a pack on my back. I took my exercise in a real gym, with weights and machines and macho muscular guys bragging about how much they could bench press.

I started water aerobics several years ago at the prompting of my next-door neighbor. She said it had been wonderfully rehabilitating for her hip. At the time, I was in near-constant pain from my own hip and back, and willing to try anything that might help.

Water aerobics did help the hip and back (although not as much as discovering my food allergies and changing my diet), so I kept it up. I also continued my weight-lifting. Due to my disability, hiking had become a rare treat, one that I paid for with several days of immobility.

Once I cleared my diet of allergens, my body began to heal. Within a few months, I could walk without pain, and even run for short distances. I bought myself a set of exercise videos, and started adding land-based aerobic workouts to my exercise mix. I also lost a lot of weight, and now feel better than I have in many years.

A friend from water aerobics has been encouraging me to try Jazzercise for a while now. She's a regular, and she says it's the best part of her day. One day, I agreed to try it.

I walked in the door, and it was everything I had imagined. The instructors were friendly, peppy, and definitely cheerleadery. The music, frequently country, insulted my intelligence and my esthetic sense. The funky routines made me feel silly and uncoordinated and switched fast enough to make me cautious about injury. The weight and abdominal parts of the routine did not meet my exacting standards.

I loved it. My waist and hips flowed free with the routines, and I left the class feeling sexy, even predatory.

Nor was I the only one. Jazzercise attracts 50-70 women every morning of the week (and two week nights), a pretty good feat in a one-horse town that rolls up its sidewalks at 10pm on summer weekends. The class attracts women of all shapes, sizes, and ages. In the light of the silly country music and funky moves, all of these women are beautiful, sexy, desirable.

Winter Sunshine

A single moment that has brightened what has otherwise been a pretty bleak winter:

Getting ready to go to the hospital one morning, I happened to notice my parents' valentines to one another on their entry hall table. I picked up the pink confectionary cards and read the short, loving notes on them. Placing them back carefully, I am reminded of how my parents' love and devotion for one another is a warm fire at the heart of my father's struggle with cancer. The naked heart of love is everywhere apparent in their lives.

Living in the Santa Cruz mountains, I often receive gifts of sudden beauty:

• Rounding the bend in the road to see the mountain in the evening light.
  
  
• Seeing the sun flash out behind a cloud to illuminate the white crown of a sycamore.
  
  
• The trees opening to reveal a sky full of crystalline winter stars.
  
  
• The scent of first violets in the bouquet presented to me by my son.
  
  
• The redwoods' branches tossing merrily in the breeze.