On the subject of grief

My mother was sick for my entire life. She was diagnosed when I was a baby with an autoimmune illness that could cause severe complications as it progressed. "You'll be able to live with it as long as you never develop the heart and lung problems associate with the illness", her doctor told her. She did live with it, for over 20 years before she noticed one day that she was having trouble catching her breath. Two misdiagnoses later (first they decided she had asthma, and then emphysema) and it was confirmed. She had developed Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension, and was given 3-5 years to live.

I was in my 20s by that point, and always in the back of my mind was the vague knowledge that one day, Mom's health condition might progress to something far worse than what it already was. She was always so tough, so difficult to keep down though that even after the diagnoses it was impossible to imagine that she would ever succumb to it. She had survived breast cancer. She fought the day-to-day complications from her autoimmune illness like she was dealing with something mildly inconvenient. She grew a little more weak every year, a little thinner, shrinking steadily as time went on, but inside she was always pure determination. She did better than her doctors thought she would on the medication for the PAH, staying on the first level of drugs for far longer than most people did. Three years passed. Then five. Then seven. She walked me down the aisle at my wedding and was there for the birth of her first grandchild in those stolen years, the years that her doctors didn't quite think she would still be around to see.

I kept the knowledge that one day it would finally catch up to her tucked away in the back of my mind, only dusting it off every now and then when a holiday or birthday would come around. "This might be the last one, you know" it would whisper to me, and I would think "yes, but she's come so far already and what do the doctors truly know? They're making advances with medication all the time. She'll keep going. It's what she does."

 Denial is a wonderful and terrible thing. It's like the blanket you pull over your head at night, telling yourself if everything is covered the monsters can't get you. But bit by bit, it started catching up. Her hands started to give her problems as her disease marched on, causing the tendons in her fingers to shorten and the skin to harden, rendering her once-clever hands into claws. She used to paint and take beautiful photographs. She would garden and knit and cook. It became more difficult for her, and one by one the things she loved to do became things that she used to be able to. She couldn't drive anymore, so we sold her car to help pay for all the medical bills that constantly piled up. Her ability to sing was the next thing to go. She always sang, all day, whatever snippet popped into her head at any given moment. She had a song for every situation, every occasion that arose. She knew some lyric that fit, and she had a beautiful voice. But her breath was too short and it took too much effort, so she stopped.

Still, I told myself that she would somehow manage, though the creeping fear was growing more persistent. I saw how she couldn't take care of herself anymore and I did my best to shut my eyes to it, because I didn't want to admit what it meant. Her stolen time was running out. In 2013, she was getting steadily worse. By the end of the year she was barely functional in many ways. The slow progression of her illness had turned into something faster, something more difficult for us to ignore, and by the time she was ready to admit that she needed help she ended up in the hospital. Anemia, fluid on the heart and in the lungs, double pneumonia, an infection in her ankle, and so on and so forth. Her doctor used the words "life threatening" and told us that perhaps we should prepare for the worst.

But once again, against all odds she came through it, but this time there was no true recovery. She lingered in the hospital for weeks, then a care facility for months, trying to get strong enough to walk and function again. For a brief time, she managed to drag herself into something resembling life again. It was temporary. Within a year she was fading fast. Her health was going downhill, and one year to the day of her going into hospital, she was admitted again and this time her doctors gave us the worst news. This was it. There would be no more recoveries. There would be no care facility, no rehabilitation, no adjusting of her medication except to take her off of some because it didn't matter anymore. They recommended hospice care and they had her fitted for a new wheelchair because she couldn't walk anymore.

We had one last Christmas with her. Her sister came from Florida to spend it with us. Then her mother and father came and spent a month with her. A few days after Christmas I was over at her house. She and my aunt and I were sitting in her bedroom, talking about music. Mom sang a few broken pieces from songs she had always loved. It was the first time I'd heard her sing in a year or more, and I knew then it would doubtlessly be the last time.

A week after my grandmother left, Mom started having trouble eating. Nothing stayed down. She could barely move. She was admitted into the hospice facility and even then, we all still clung to the hope that she might keep going a little longer. Please, just a little more time, I thought. I knew that it would happen eventually but I wasn't prepared for "eventually" to become "now". She passed away the next day, in her sleep. The night before she passed away, she looked at my sister and me and said "I'm so sorry. I tried." It was the day before my sister's birthday, and exactly one week to the day before her 61st birthday.

Her being gone was a shock to the system. We'd known it was coming. Of course we did. We'd spent years with the knowledge rubbing away at us. I spent years pre-grieving, watching her slip further and further away, knowing she hated the way she had become and wishing there was some way to make it stop for her, without her having to be the one who stopped. When she passed away it was a feeling of "how did this happen so fast?" paired with "finally, she's not suffering anymore. All those years and it's finally over for her." It was an odd combination of feelings, that too-soon and too-long. Her last year was a difficult one, her last month a nightmare. Her tenacity and ability to keep going against all odds won her more time, but it wasn't a pleasant time for anyone, least of all for her. Seeing her deteriorate so much was probably the hardest thing I've been witness to.

Grief has been an odd thing. It's been a month and it feels sometimes as though she's been gone for years, and other times I forget she's gone at all. The first two weeks after she passed away I felt peaceful, full of warmth and love for her, and I thought "I can deal with this. If this is grief, I can bear it". I thought all of my years of knowing what was coming had allowed me to bypass the loneliness and gut-wrenching pain. That quickly gave way to depression and anger, but those days were still mixed in with those oddly peaceful ones. I see things in the store that I think she would like and then I remember that she's not here anymore. I nearly had a breakdown over a red stone cat statue, because it was exactly the kind of thing she would have loved and had she been alive, she would have been getting that cat for mother's day. I had to stop myself from buying it anyways. I have emotional responses to teacups and pairs of slippers (she had a million sets of both). I changed salons because we used to go to the same one, often together, and I couldn't bear to go without her, and the first time I went to the grocery store after she died I almost had a crying fit in the bananas. I'd done all of her grocery shopping for her during the last year, and she was particular about her bananas. No more than four to a bunch, but no fewer than three, and they had to be short and skinny and a mixture of green and yellow so she'd have some to eat right away and some to eat a few days later. Picking out bananas for her was the biggest pain in the ass at the grocery store and the first time I didn't have to do it felt like someone had ripped my guts out. I cried when I got home from the store because of the fact that she was gone and I wouldn't ever be hearing her complain about inferior bananas again.

I assume one day things will even out. That like her, I'll pick myself up and carry on through this. It's what she wanted, for us to live our lives after she was gone. She didn't want us to be lost in grief or to even mourn her too much. "I'll always be there, in some way or another" she said. "Just talk to the trees, and the flowers, and I'll hear you." I hope she can hear me. Even if she can't, talking to her helps. Day by day, I remember her and smile more than I remember her and cry.

The Sandman Sucketh

I have a rather rocky relationship with sleep. We've not really been on good terms for years now. Sleep is a grudging visitor at night, often arriving far too late and then fleeing before I'm ready for it to go. I sleep in fits and starts, and what I do manage to get is often punctuated by disturbing and extremely vivid dreams. Part of my issue with sleep is that my brain simply will not turn off. It doesn't matter how tired my body is. As soon as I climb into bed and turn the light off, it's like my brain decides it's time to drag up every worry or fear I could possibly have and parade them through my head like supermodels on a runway. I've tried everything to stop this. I've faithfully followed every piece of advice on relaxing before bed time, not using the computer or watching TV, letting myself unwind, not eating after a certain time, making sure the room is dark and quiet. I've counted sheep and I've gone through relaxation techniques and I've even tried to force my brain to picture a quiet meadow with wind blowing peacefully through the long grass. The problem with that is I have an overly active imagination that insists on populating the meadow with squirrels and rabbits and deer and creating stories about what they are doing. Eventually I'm obsessively building generations of wild animals that, akin to some Disney movie, live happy little lives until something awful happens. Like a fire.

To stop my brain from either going through the anxiety parade or sending squirrels to a fiery demise I just take OTC sleeping pills, of the sort you can get from any grocery stores.

I have been doing this for..oh..about four years now. Unfortunately they don't really provide me with good sleep. It's better than the no sleep I'd get without them, but I typically wake up feeling groggy and like someone has been beating me with a stick. I'm always exhausted and it takes me a few hours in the morning before I feel even remotely human. Over the years my quality of forced sleep has been getting worse and worse, to the point that I've been having episodes of sleep paralysis. On my list of fun things to personally experience, that one ranks very low indeed.

So this week I am attempting to venture back into the world of natural sleep. Last night was my first foray back into dreamland without the aid of sleeping pills. It went better than I expected, but still not as well as I would like. When I woke up this morning I didn't feel as groggy or sore like I usually do, but it took me so long to fall asleep last night that I spent the entire day yawning and doing my best not to doze off at my desk.

Probably I should finally give in and go to a doctor about it. I just wish I could do what I used to be able to and drift off into a peaceful, natural, deep sleep without my brain being an asshole about things and making it complicated. Sadly, something tells me that those days are probably long behind me. Unless I can find some sort of "off" switch to stop myself from focusing on every wretched little thing when I get into bed, I think I'm probably stuck with some form of assistance in getting myself to sleep.

Something New

I've reached the point in my jewelry work where I am no longer comfortable teaching myself new techniques. I've taught myself wire wrapping, beadweaving, etching, piercing and cutting metal, and various other things over the years. I've wanted to get into metalsmithing badly for years now, but the fact that I am incredibly accident prone paired with having to use an open flame seemed like a really bad combination. It's not that I am careless. I'm just naturally clumsy, and even when I am being as careful as careful can be I seem to attract injuries like a magnet. Take yesterday, for instance. I was sitting in the break room, reading a book, when a co-worker walked past me swinging a can of soup in her hand. Somehow she managed to whack me squarely in the knee with the can of soup as she walked past me. My bad knee, mind you, the knee that dislocated in 2010 and is only really starting to heal properly. All my care and babying of my knee undone in an instant by an unintentionally well-aimed can of Progresso.

Because of incidents like that I'm pretty certain at times that the universe has it in for me. So again, me + open flames + trying to figure out what the hell I'm doing while unsupervised = bad things bound to happen.

One of the universities in the city I work in offers non-credit courses for a variety of hobbies. This year they're offering metalsmithing classes for a relatively reasonable price, so I went ahead and signed up for the first available class. I will be learning how to make a sterling silver bezel-set ring, and a small copper box. I'm having to overcome my various personal quirks with this class, though. I am a hermit by nature, preferring to hole up in my work room by myself. I tend to avoid other artists and haven't gotten involved in the local scene at all. It's not through any disdain or thinking myself above such things. It's rather a personal nervousness around people and new experiences that keeps me solitary. Right now I'm a swirl of anxiety at the thought of stepping outside of my personal comfort zone, paired with excitement at finally being able to learn a technique I've loved and coveted the knowledge of for years. I collect techniques like a crow collects shiny things, and no sooner do I learn one than my eye turns to something else, some other new fascinating thing that makes my heart pitter-pat a bit faster.

I'll be sure to post progress pictures as I make my venture into metalsmithing. Wish me luck for tonight!

Captain Underpants

We've been living in the subdivision now for just over a year. We're only really familiar with a few of our neighbors, but mostly we just chat with our next door neighbors on either side. To the left of our house live a married couple close to our own age, and to the right of our house is a single mother and her 14 year old daughter.

The daughter recently lost her cat and had spent weeks combing the subdivision for it. She taped "lost cat" signs to every stop sign and put cat food out on our porch, as the last place the cat had been spotted was in my front flower bed. Eventually I had the bright idea of loaning her my father-in-law's live trap, and she caught her cat this past weekend. The trap was returned and profuse thanks offered, and the girl was happily re-united with her lost kitty.

Until this morning, when our doorbell rang about two minutes before my alarm went off. Our bedroom is at the front of the house, with our windows right next to the front porch. I groggily elbowed my husband and said "someone is ringing our doorbell!", to which he offered the response of "muuuugrrhhh...."

The doorbell ringing was followed by hard knocking, and then we heard the sound of someone hysterically crying. This spurred my husband into Instant Action Mode, which pretty much meant that he leapt out of bed and was out the front door in lightning speed, thinking Something Bad Was Happening Outside.

What had actually happened was that the girl's cat had darted outside again this morning when she was getting ready for school, and she was desperate to catch it and wanted to borrow the live trap again.

What also happened was that my husband went charging out the door onto the front lawn clad in nothing but his Marvel comic book hero t-shirt and a pair of baggy blue boxer-briefs. The trap was quickly retrieved and given to the girl, and then he seemed to realize that he was outside. In his underpants. In front of a teenaged girl and her mother. You know that sinking feeling you get when you realize you've done something horribly embarrassing? I'm guessing that was the feeling churning through my husband's gut as he hightailed it back into the house and retrieved his pants before the whole neighborhood got an eyeful.

While he was procuring his jeans, another bright idea crossed his mind. When he bought some special edition of one of the Call of Duty games, it came with a pair of functional if rather comical looking night vision goggles. I'm sure you can all imagine where this is going. Now clad properly in pants and t-shirt, my husband decided to join the cat hunt..with his Call of Duty night vision goggles on.

Because that's not weird, or anything. I suppose I should be grateful that he didn't decide to grab one of his replica lightsabers while he was at it. Just in case, you know, an evil sith lord appeared from the bushes.

Thankfully the cat bolted back inside when the mother raised their garage door, the trap was returned, and my husband came back inside. I'm pretty sure the cat was terrorized by the sight of my husband charging around on the lawn first in his underpants, and then in his night vision goggles, and decided "screw this outdoors shit, I'm going inside for some friskies!"

In which I attempt to take my husband's nose by force.

I've been married for nearly a year now, and honestly it's not much different than just living with the man was. I can't say that marriage brought about any big surprises or revelations about my husband. I've known him since I was 15, and we've been together for about 8 years, so it's not as though there's much about him that remains a mystery to me. I know he likes to wear athletic socks and not dress socks. I know he likes funny t-shirts, and that he can recite episodes of Star Trek line by line, and I know his favorite foods and his favorite color and that he is excellent at cooking and useless at doing laundry.

So I knew going into this marriage that he snores like a fucking chainsaw being wielded by a pissed-off grizzly bear. I imagine that such a thing would sound like NNNNNNNG NNNNNNNG NNNNNNNNNNG BZZZZZZZRRRRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOAR NNNNNNNNNG, which is exactly the same sound that emanates from my husband's nasal passages and mouth at 3:00 A.M. nearly every night of the week. Naturally, he refuses to accept or admit that he snores, let alone snores like an enraged power-tool using ursine, so of course one night while he snored away and I lay awake and balefully stared at him, I decided to grab my iPod and use the handy video feature to record evidence.

After capturing several seconds of his open-mouthed symphony I tried my usual methods of making him stop. I shook him. I elbowed him in the ribs. I flopped around in the bed like a fish hoping that my restless tossing and turning would penetrate his sleeping brain and send "stop snoring please for the love of god" signals to him. None of these things worked, so my next course of action was to extract myself from the warm cozy bed and stomp off to the kitchen in search of the box of breathe-right strips in the cabinet. I know those things don't stick worth a damn unless the wearer's nose is totally clean and dry, so I made a stop by the bathroom for a toner-soaked cotton ball to aid in my efforts.

Imagine, if you will, that it is 3 A.M. in a dark house. The only light is coming from the bathroom, the door of which has been left open to provide some illumination to the bedroom. In the bed there is a large, sleeping man who is snoring. Perched atop his chest is his much smaller and very pissed off wife, who is cleaning his nose with a cotton ball soaked in toner. The man, against all odds, is sleeping quite soundly through this experience even though the toner proclaims how refreshingly tingly it is (which is beauty product speak for "holy shit this stuff burns!"). The little plastic backings are peeled from the breathe-right strip. Ever so slowly, the wife applies it to the husband's nose. Probably thinking the unpleasant nasal-passage-lifting sensation he is experiencing processes as "bug trying to excavate my nostrils", and he keeps swatting her hand away in much the same way that you'd try to swat an annoying fly.

This continues for several moments, until the damned breathe-right strip is now utterly de-stickified and useless. The end result is one wasted strip, one still obliviously snoring husband, and one still exceedingly irritated wife who has just wasted a cotton-ball's worth of refreshingly tingly toner on her husband's undeserving nose.

I ended up just wadding my pillow up around my head and glaring at him for another hour before I finally fell back asleep. I presented him with the proof of his snoring the next day. He had no recollection of me attempting to open his sinuses by force. He claimed that he slept peacefully and listened with disbelief to the pissed-off-bear-with-chainsaw sounds emanating from my iPod. "That's YOU" I told him. "Wear a damned strip to bed or I will kill you in your sleep."

He always laughs when I threaten him, of course. But if he'll sleep through me sitting on his chest and trying to stick things to his face, I'm pretty sure he'd sleep through me smothering him with a pillow. Of course, then I wouldn't have anyone to get things out of high cabinets or open jars for me, but oh, the uninterrupted nights of quiet sleep just might be worth it.

Crazy Stamp Lady

Today while I was on my lunch break I went to the small post office that's around the corner from work. There were only two people ahead of me in line, so I was internally congratulating myself for getting there before the rush hit. Unfortunately, I was so very, very wrong.

The two customers ahead of me both had rather involved transactions. One was a jeweler who was sending pieces of fine jewelry, which of course involved insurance and tracking numbers, and about a quarter of the two dozen packages he had were international, so they needed customs slips as well. His end of the counter was quickly covered in sheafs of little green customs slips and packages and insurance forms.

The other customer was an elderly woman who was purchasing stamps. She was toting a wheeled cart stuffed to the brim with empty Dillards bags, and she was sorting through the stamps with the intensity of a scholar perusing the Dead Sea Scrolls. The post office clerk brought out book after book of stamps, each one scrutinized and rejected for various reasons that the elderly lady loudly shared with the entire post office.

"Oh, if these had forget-me-nots on them instead of violets, I'd get these. These are nice, but I don't like that they say 'love' on them. Oh, I don't need Black History stamps..Oh, no, I don't even know who that singer is. These are too bright. These aren't bright enough" on and on she went, like some kind of Post Office Goldilocks, trying to find that "just right" book of stamps. 15 minutes she took, as she thumbed through each pile, asking if there were any others, if other post offices might have other designs. I leaned back against the counter and waited, inwardly grinding my teeth but outwardly radiating patience as I watched my lunch hour tick away while the woman hemmed and hawwed and compared stamp after stamp.

Finally she settled on some stamps featuring cats and dogs, but she made the post office clerk tear off a segment in such a way that the stamps would not have white cats on them. Because she didn't like white cats, you see, and simply would not send stamps with white cats on them.

After she left I mailed my one package and scooted out into the parking lot with a sigh of relief. But it wasn't over just yet. From across the lot came the reedy voice of the stamp lady: "Yoohoo! Miss! MISS! Are you going in the direction of Hikes Lane??? Would you give me a ride??"

I froze, and then told her in a regretful tone that I was going back to work, which was in the opposite direction, and hurried back to my car. Even if I had been going in her direction, my car was crammed to the brim with so much stuff that I had no room for the woman or her cart. Last I saw her, she was heading for the bus stop.

Girl on a Wire

I've written before about my mother's overweight Houdini beagle, Bradley. Bradley's main goal in life is to escape through the fence in my mother's yard. Despite his corupulent size (he continues to find ways of sneaking food, despite my mother's efforts at putting him on a diet), he manages to wriggle through the smallest of gaps in a manner that would suggest he is actually half snake.

Nothing we do ever keeps him in for long. My mom went so far as to put dog-sized saddle bags on him, stuffed with tennis balls in an attempt to make him too bulky to wriggle free. This slowed him down until he figured out how to shed the saddlebags. So our next method of containment was to find every single Bradley-sized gap in the fence and fix it by using a layer of rabbit fence and lengths of rebar. This works in fixing each individual spot, but the problem is that my mother has 3 acres of land that slopes and is surrounded by woods. The undergrowth in some areas cannot be penetrated by anything larger than..well..a beagle. So his escape spots often go unfound because we simply cannot get to them.

My mother finally gave up on attempting to contain the dog, and simply walks him outside, in her fenced yard, on a leash. This is fairly successful during the nice sunny warm months, but right now when we're in the clutches of unusually cold weather, it's hard on her. Last week we had a small ice storm that coated the ground in a good inch thick layer of ice, and Mom simply couldn't do it. She has a number of health problems that make walking around on ice a very bad idea. She had to just let Bradley roam unattended in the yard, and hope that the ice was enough to keep him from escaping.

For two days, it worked. Bradley ran around outside, came in when called, and otherwise behaved himself. He was the model of good behavior during that time. Of course, like the ice, it did not last. It warmed up just enough on Saturday that everything started to thaw, and by that night it had thawed enough for him to make his escape.

The problem with that is the only remaining escape spots are along the side of the fence that runs down the length of a neighbor's horse pasture. The neighbor, by some miracle, has a fence that Bradley cannot escape through. He is also too stupid (his intelligence seems limited to figuring out ways of doing what he shouldn't) to figure out how to get back into the yard through the same way he got out, so when he discovered that he was trapped in the horse pasture, he began to wail in the way that only distressed beagles can. The neighbors were not home, and their pasture gate has a padlock on it, so getting him out that way was impossible.

So I had to go over to my mother's house at 7:30 PM and scale her side of the fence to get into the horse pasture. Luckily for me, there was a barrel located on the neighbor's side of the fence that allowed easy access for me, as the fence is tall and rather more of a drop than I care to make. So up the ice covered fence I went (getting snagged on the barbed wire top in the process, which took some time and wriggling to extract myself from), over the top and onto the barrel. The barrel, as it turned out, was there to block a rather large gap between the front of their fence and another neighbor's back yard. This gap also created a convenient spot to shove Bradley through, and was also luckily just wide enough for me to wriggle through as well once I had heaved the overweight and by now frantic beagle into the other neighbor's (thankfully unfenced) yard.

Since he'd burned his paws on the remaining ice, I had to carry him down the 3 acre length of the yard, into my mother's house. By the time we got inside, I was so out of breath that I could hardly speak. See, I am not in good shape. I am skinny by way of genetics, but I spend my entire day with my rear end firmly planted in an office chair. I also have a joint condition that has caused my knees and shoulders to deteriorate quite badly. So scaling an icy fence, getting tangled in barbed wire, and then carrying an overweight beagle down 3 acres of sloping yard was not exactly a Good Thing for me.

One of these days we will finally fix the last escape spot in the fence. I'm pretty sure that when that happens, Bradley will figure out how to climb, or build ladders in order to get out. Either that or he'll have become so fat by that point that he'll require us to carry him around on a litter.