Home

 About a week and a half ago the message at my church centered on one's return home, especially to a home town where one doesn't feel welcomed. That's had me thinking about it since. 

I've returned at different times to the area where I grew up, and sometimes it's been good and sometimes not. I think that's most people's experience. I'm a part of the estimated 25% of men who have moved far away from their hometown and I have been for a lot of years. There were periods when I stayed at my parents home or even lived in a cabin at the end of the road I grew up on. But I knew in each case I wouldn't remain there.

Which when I look back seems strange. I grew up thinking my area was a reasonably all right place and I would remain in its environs for life. I mean, it had access to nearly everything I wanted: a big city (NYC, where a lot of my friends moved to), lots of bookstores and schools (including my alma mater), deep woods and nearby mountains (the Berkshires and one end of the Appalachian Trail), good local music I could listen to for free when I wanted, even one of the best art collections in the country (the Clark Art). 

Still, I left early in my late teens, and I've stayed away as far as I can for what's probably the rest of my life. On occasion I imagine it's because of the potential me that might have been if I'd remained: a conservative rednecked mouth-breathing rethuglican. That image warms me for my decision to stay away.

But I really know that's not true. A lot of my friends who are still in the area are not that way at all (especially of course the ones who moved south to The City but even a fair number who stayed in nearby counties). I suspect the truth is it's not the environment that makes you but your reaction to it.

Besides, if stultifying right wingery is what I'd hoped to avoid, I wouldn't have spent the bulk of 30 years living in the central midwest and a few years ago having retired to the deep south. It should seem the opposite.

There's where a part of the paradox may lay, that having grown up in the bastion of red state behavior in one of the bluest states I find myself in adulthood more comfortable in the bluer segments of some of the reddest states. 

I'm well aware it's a privilege to live somewhere one is comfortable, not afforded to everyone. When I was younger and I found where I was staying didn't fulfill me, I'd leave. It was a comfort, knowing I was a step away from being gone if I wanted to be. That's how I disappeared from a lot of people's lives too and as I grow older I wonder where and how they are. The internet and Facebook have been great for catching up and I'm glad for that. But I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to watch the people I knew age and change, both for the better and worse. 

Old People at Concerts

 

Last night my wife and I attended a concert and at intermission I went to the restroom. I was surprised at the sight: the women's room was nearly empty while both entrances to the men's room had lines ten deep. I said, "You've got to be shitting me, no lines to the women's and long lines for the men's?" To which one ahead of me shot back, "Yeah, look at the age of the guys waiting."

I've written in the past of the hope I draw from the energy young people bring to music from before they were born, but I want to celebrate too the opposite, the energy of old men and women to music they may have grown up with but is being played by people younger than themselves. This concert was one by the Allman Betts Family Revival, a rotating group of musicians made up of relations of Gregg Allman, Dickie Betts, Berry Oakley, and Butch Trucks. Other than a few geezers who played with Duane and Gregg while alive, the average age of the musicians was probably late 20s or early 30s. 

The music they played was pretty spot-on versions of original Allman Brothers tunes, sometimes a little harder rocking than the originals. Make no mistake, there were younger folks there too, but the bulk of the audience, and the ones making the most noise, were geezers like us who had seen the Brothers in their heyday. Now when I call us geezers, I am referring to an audience whose average age was probably 65, and whose younger selves would have looked down their noses at their balding, pudgy, finger-shaking, Indian-whistling, lite beer-sucking, trucker hat-shaking, snake-dancing elders for all that uncool behavior, but didn't give a fuck anymore. They were just digging the vibe of listening to music played by young people who understood its appeal and what it meant for them. 

Are they going to watch those videos they took on their phones at some future date? I think they're likelier to than most people who record concert moments. We wish we'd had that technology in our prime to waste. Were these old men wagging their fingers and shaking their cowboy hats trying to get in touch again with their younger selves, or were they touching something divine? I'm biased, but I think it is the latter. Enough people in wheelchairs were slithering and sliding to suggest, not their youth, but some liquid self that could still lay in all our futures. I don't doubt today there are lots more creaking bones and handfuls of ibuprofen going down instead of hangovers, but that we can still embarrass ourselves this well this late in our lives fills me with a kind of contentment maybe unique to our age and ability to appreciate. 

My Life Has Become a Less Freaky Memento

 

For several years I have had issues with short term memory--recent conversations, for instance, plans I've made with others--as well as  with dizziness and, sometimes, fainting. Since moving south I've attended a memory clinic suggested by my doctor, and have taken tests.

One such test was an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), a nonsurgical procedure that produces a detailed image of an organ, in my case my brain. This was intended to see if I was suffering from traumatic or other brain injury. In the results I was given before my diagnosis, it was noted I had a ganglia on my left hemisphere. I knew this already, having been given the information from a previous MRI from a few years ago. I had even mentioned its existence to the technicians in relation to their questions about anything I might know was already there (e.g., lesions, metal plate). 

Now, my big fear was that I was experiencing the first symptoms of the sort of dementia from which my father died (in fact, when I had been told about the ganglia's location, my wife and I understood it was in the same place as one found in my dad's MRI). I was somewhat comfortable with this possibility, assuming that my dementia, like his, would be fast-acting but otherwise peaceful. My father was one of those people for whom the dementia made him more himself, in his case, more patient and calm most of the time. 

My appointment for my diagnosis was postponed for a day because the Nurse Practitioner in charge of my results was ill. As a result, my anxiety, already heightened, became nearly unmanageable for 24 hours. I woke early, did some stretching and tai chi to ground myself as best I could, but went in with a blood pressure reading almost off the charts. The NP and medical social worker, once they found out why I was anxious, told me right off that dementia was actually off the table. I had done much, much better than I expected on the memory test: the top score was a 30 and I had reached 27 (I never found out what those were points of), a score reached by people who had, at worst, "some" memory issues. "Where have I left my keys?" "Why did I come to the kitchen?" that sort of thing.

This is not my brain or MRI

So I was relieved until the NP turned back to her notes and said, "But now, tell me about your stroke." 

I don't recall saying anything although I might have because my ears were stopped up by the sound of blood pumping through my veins. When I did answer, I gurgled something along the lines of "Stroke? I had a stroke?'

The ganglia on my brain, she explained, was a holdover from an "old stroke" that I might have had decades ago. (It was later explained to me an "old stroke" is any over two years, and isn't to worry about because whatever damage done had happened long before.) Had I ever had periods of weakness on one side, or face-drooping, or long loss of consciousness?

No, never, I said. At least not that I remembered. 

I was the only one who thought that was funny. 

Over the course of the next hour and change, and over the next couple weeks, I would find that a) it is not unusual for someone to be unaware he or she has had a stroke; there are about 11M of us. And b) unless doctors have a pre-stroke MRI to compare it with, unless symptoms occur, there's no telling when the stroke happened. I do not have a pre-stroke MRI handy, so I'm left with racking my brain for memories of stroke behavior. I find none. 

And c} the fact that I had no indication I had a stroke means that the brain area affected was not "important", it wasn't responsible for motor skills or balance or speech; the duties of whatever was affected were easily taken on by another area. Something like a full professor falling ill and a teaching assistant filling in for a class.. 

However, my doctor pointed out to me that I had suffered a loss; the effected area was in charge of short term memories. Like recent conversations or plans. 

When I was teaching writing, I used to show the movie Memento to classes. Because it's filmed "backwards", it's a perfect way to teach cause and effect by stopping it at different points and asking "Why did that happen?", letting them guess before running the "previous" scene that explained why Leonard, the protagonist, reacted the way he did. My life is currently a less extreme version of Memento. I don't need Leonard's "freaky tattoo" directions on me, but I do have to make notes about where I go in the future and why. 

Aging as my father did

THE SMALL SIGNS I’M GROWING OLDER EXACTLY AS MY FATHER DID

Liver spots on the backs of my hands. Loss of
Interest in watching television, greater interest
In listening to other people. Occasional random
Missed strips of white whiskers from shaving, standing
Out because they’re whiter than my hair. Driving onto
And then back off the pavement. Forgetting keys,
Glasses, addresses, names, my own age, children. A large open spot
On the top of my head anyone looking down would
Understandably mistake for a UFO crop circle.

People the barricades without me

 I hadn't promised to anyone except perhaps myself, and had only mentioned my intention to my wife and mother-in-law, but I expected to attend a small protest here in my small midwestern city. It was sponsored by the March for Women's Rights, the same organization that had set up the anti-trump protest in DC around 2017's inauguration I had missed, as well as one in 2019 in Madison I managed to attend. 

I had somewhat made plans  in the way I do, keeping in the back of my mind while my day goes on were I intend to go and what I intend to do once there. But I read an article this morning--I forget where and can't locate it again--that was a recognition of the necessity of this sort of constant protest, spurred by the recent Texas Law and the number of states trying to ape it. It is a bad law and I am against both it and the attempts by other places to make the same law. But this article had one interview that stuck in my head all day and kept me finally away.

One of the article's interviews was with an older woman who said, and I am paraphrasing here, "Will I be at the protest today? No. It's a protest against the right thing, but Roe v Wade was decided 50 years ago, and I've marched in hundreds of protests to keep it safe, and it's obviously had no effect at all. We shouldn't have to keep marching after something becomes law. I'm tired. Maybe we need to lose the right for a generation in order to remember why we fought for it."

Bitter? Oh, definitely. But it's an earned bitterness. In driving my mother-in-law home, I passed the park where the protest had just started. I saw a number of people I know, all of them over 60. 

Of course, there were other protests in other larger cities and I don't doubt there were thousands of people of child-bearing age marching and shouting and making a ruckus. But that isn't the point. This woman, whose name I can't locate, is right about one thing. We shouldn't have to keep marching after something becomes law. We've marched and made noise for a half century, and if all that has led to is the ease with which a Republican majority can effectively ban a legal and safe procedure, then we have done nothing. Is it wrong of me to agree with her that perhaps we need to lose the right to them for a generation to remind us why we marched? Maybe. But I speak from the perspective of metaphoric sore feet. Those women with more at stake and sorer feet have the right to suggest maybe it's time to step back. 

Simple survival

It's been nearly ten months since I last posted, and every one has laid heavy on my mind. I'm one of those for whom writing about a subject is thinking about it, and both the end of trump's reign of error and the success of covid19 infections, which are related, has demanded I do a lot of thinking but very little writing. But here it is, nearly solstice, so I must say something.

Solstice is important to me as it's also our wedding anniversary. This year marks our 30th. But neither of us has bought or made the other a gift. I think it's the mere fact we remain as a unit that is the gift. It is also the year I turned 60 and that likewise was a gift to remain alive and comparatively healthy in a year marked by so much death. That is not to say we haven't been touched: both my wife and I have seen a dozen or more patients for whom infection hastened the end. She has endured several illnesses that leave us nervous that she's been infected, and through her I've also been suspected of infection. Testing has proven us free of that worry. Now, a vaccine has been developed and released that is promising, and I received it 2 days ago; I experienced the smallest symptoms as my immune system kicked in yesterday, enough to ensure that I don't want to have anything like that.

Solstice is important to me too because, as Dr Robin Kimmerer of the Citizen Potowatomi Nation has said, "Winter is a teacher of vulnerability."  This year has not lacked for lessons in vulnerability and I have no doubt winter promises to bring more, probably harsher, lessons. As Elizabeth Dias points out, for most of human history and even for many humans today, winter is a period when simple survival is the aim. "Winter is a primal time of death and loss, and a time for grief. It reminds us that darkness, not only light, is part of the recurring rhythm of what it means to be human...The great irony of winter is that the moment darkness is greatest is also the moment light is about to return. Each year the winter solstice comes with the promise that the next day will be brighter."  

Our solstice darkness of the past four years has opened to what we hope is the brighter period of Joe Biden's presidency. I have great hopes for this, but what I think many of us have learned is that we can survive. But many of us have not survived, neither trump nor covid 19, and we must not lose sight of this. This is what people like me need to remember, that some of our neighbors are struggling, on multiple levels, with simple survival.

The Red-Monster

I certainly wasn't his best friend. And although I knew him for a long time and we stayed in touch as well as we could, I couldn't call him a close friend. But he saw me, in his wife's words, as "a good shit." I would have said the same, and for a lot of us, that's about as good as it gets.

We were in grad school together, his first time and my second. He was part of what another friend described as "the Raymond Carver crew," writers in the 90s who felt the power of the word lay in saying things plainly, without flowers, without elaboration. Back then he only wrote fiction, so that when I found out years later he'd published a chapbook, I wondered when he'd started writing poetry.

He married, had kids, found steady work that was meaningful and often frustrating. If I hadn't kept in touch with him on Facebook, I wouldn't have known him if I'd passed him on the street. He went from a Marky Ramone shaggy mullet to a hairline rivaling Patrick Stewart's for brevity. When he died a couple weeks ago, it was a shock. He hadn't been sick, had stopped drinking a long time before, didn't even smoke or eat much fried food. I heard it was his heart and I like to think it surprised him too, so he didn't feel anything more than the snap of an artery.

He was the kind of good shit that, when a lot of us got together last Saturday to remember him, the words said more often than any others were, "I'm gonna miss him." We told a lot of stories about him, and I wrote this one down for his wife and kids. He might have told them, but maybe it's mine to tell.

This was back before I knew him, back when he was still drinking and living the sort of life he would write about. "I was in jail in St. Peter, on a DUI charge. The judge gave me a choice, I could stay in my cell during the day or go to college. I chose school because I'd been in cells before. There was a school in St. Peter but I couldn't afford that, and Mankato is about 12 miles south, and they accepted me.

"They took away my license and my car, so I had to bike the distance. I took classes every day so I didn't have to stay in my cell. It was dead winter, and there I was biking there every morning and back every afternoon. I did that my whole sentence. I was about 7 weeks in when I realized I must be getting something out of it."

Visiting Dad, Day 7

This was my last day on this trip visiting Dad. It was a good day, although we didn't do much talking. Like the last couple days, he dropped off and on asleep for the length of my time there, which is an average of four hours each day. I read my book, I do my crosswords, sometimes I fall asleep myself for a little while. What stood out today was that he didn't have a sun-downing episode at three or at any time I was there. He woke the longest about four until I took him to dinner, and during it he knew who I was. And while he didn't seem to know how long I'd been visiting him, he knew I was returning home soon.

This is a photo I took today while he was alternately sleeping and watching out the window. He is relaxed and meditative. This is a relatively recent situation. I'm a child of the late 60s and 70s, a generation that focused on its feelings and ethics, looking at ways we should get in touch with what and who we are. I fear, however, that the epithet that we were the Me Generation is accurate, because it was our own feelings, and sometimes those of our peers, that we were interested in. Had someone asked me then what feelings he was in touch with, "relaxation" and "meditation" are not words I would have used. I know that in my own case I have become more relaxed, at least most of the time, than I was when younger and learning meditative techniques. My dad of course would not know asana from prana (and would skew up his face at the words, saying "What's that?"), and yet here, in his 80s, I would say he's more poised and relaxed than I can pretend to be.

My Old Man

Twenty years ago, in an obscure regional magazine, I published a story about my dad. It was called "My Old Man" and it was funny and affectionate and my wife calls it her favorite piece of mine. I am, I think, rightly proud of it.

My old man, as described in that story, is a different old man than the one I come here to visit. There remain some indications he's the same man. He's funny and has the same goofy grin widening his cheeks when he says something he knows people will laugh at. He still sits with his arms folded or purses his lips, steeples his fingers, and puts them in front of his mouth when he's relaxing, often after a meal. He still doesn't want to be seen without his teeth in and a "nice" shirt and pair of slacks on. With shoes, not slippers. He's a favorite of the nurses and aides at his nursing facility, partly because he rarely complains and partly because he will spend days smiling at nothing.

In a deeper, more important way, he is a different person. He's like the hospice patients I visit. When I see him and he's asleep, I sit quietly in a chair next to him, touching his shoulder, holding his hand. When he starts to make sounds, like my dogs when they dream, I gently rub his shoulder, his hands, and he has the same reaction as them. He remains asleep and settles, calmed, relaxed, his breathing that of someone sliding into a warm tub. The flecks of dead skin on his cheeks or the dried milk on his lips remind me he has joined ranks of the elderly who have either forgotten to wipe their faces after eating or no longer care. He loses control of his emotions, on occasion, possibly as a result of his strokes, possibly because of the UTIs his body collects like stamps. It rarely lasts long, a flash of fear and hopelessness, tears, and then he's forgotten it. He's smiling again, at nothing again.

It took me decades to come to love the Old Man I grew up with. He was a good man although like most children I wasn't always aware of it. Frankly, it wasn't until my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and he became her primary caregiver that I realized just how good he was capable of being. When I began to visit him in the nursing facility, I was faced with a different Old Man, one who was more frail and, at that time, not even certain of who I was. He has improved, partly physically and partly mentally, to the extent he can occasionally use a walker instead of a wheelchair and he usually recognizes my face and voice. But he tires easily and I can't spend more than a couple hours with him before he's got to sleep, and doesn't want to see me until the next day. He is, in some ways, the same Old Man I've loved, but in a more profound way I've had to come to love a new Old Man.

They don't all go gently into that good night

Tonight I attended the funeral of a patient I'd barely gotten to know before he told me he didn't need my coming around any longer. He went, in the course of less than a year, from 300+ pounds to the less than 90 pounds at which he died.

What made being there tough wasn't that he had told me I wasn't needed--I rarely take things like that personally--but that his death was so agitated. He fought, I'm told, to the last moments, flailing, swinging, muttering, so that his mother compared him to a very old man held under water. But he was less than 40 and the quiet death, I find, rarely appeals to the young.

I don't know whether to admire him or pity him. Personally, dying peacefully is my dream, as I think it is for many others. Alternatively, given his history, if anyone deserved to be pissed off at the lousy cards he was dealt, it was him, and maybe fighting until every last breath is exhausted is the way some should go. I'm uncertain, ultimately, what to make of it. We spoke of it, his family and I, in a mix of awe and sadness, and perhaps that's the best epitaph someone so young can hope for.

258 candles-days 48-41

When I was a kid, I knew two things (well, I knew a lot more, but I knew two things about the New York Post): They had the best selections of comic strips (two full pages!); and they were pretty reactionary in their outlook on the City. Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the paper in the mid-70s solidified that outlook and codified the neo-conservative view.

As I grew up I discovered that a lot of good writers also wrote for the Post: Pete Hamill, Murray Kempton whose work I'd come to admire in The New York Review of Books, and Drew Pearson whose book Washington Merry-Go-Round I found long after his death.

The point is that as a result it comes as a surprise to me that the Post published a feel-good, touchy-feely, "That smile made it all worthwhile" human experience like the following. But it's a good surprise.

258 candles-day 131

It's all about the humanity.

258 candles-day 77

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: How we behave toward one another is how we are judged.

258 candles-day 52

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: This is a fantastic list for remembering what's important to folks with dementia. 

258 candles-day 17

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: Krishna devotees looking to help religious retirees.

258 candles-day 5

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: Today I'm celebrating myself because I don't want to forget the little humanizing touches that will never be written up for posting or linking otherwise. It was above 50 degrees today in the hub and I desperately wanted to get outside and walk in the sunshine. Although I'd walked yesterday, my body felt the familiar ache of wanting to be in motion. When I stepped outside, putting on my gloves and sunglasses, I ran smack into Alice.

Alice is an older woman I've come to know who lives literally around the corner. She will turn 87 this year, and takes a daily or nearly daily walk around the block just to keep herself in motion. Naturally, at 86 and using a cane she is very, very slow. 

Alice doesn't know my name although I've mentioned it several times, but she knows my face and my dogs and as I came down the steps she greeted me as if we'd just been talking earlier. What I did, what was so small and good, was to walk with Alice the length of the block to the corner where she peels off to her apartment building and I swung off toward the park. I shortened my stride, matching her tiny steps with half-steps, and listened to her as we walked. 

I lost perhaps five minutes of my walk, or I didn't lose those five minutes so much as I postponed them. Now, I'm not about to convince myself or you that those five minutes made any kind of difference to Alice--she's unlikely to remember having walked with me or what we talked about, and may not even remember (again) who I am. But five minutes is an awfully small price to pay to keep the wheels of human behavior lubed. There's the old quote by the otherwise awful didacticist John Bunyon that "You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you." It's true, as what we are made up of, and what makes our frail human race ultimately greater than the sum of its parts, is the coming together of those moments that, in the best sense, are forgotten by both the payer and the payee because there are simply too many of them to keep track. 

what we talk about when we talk about death

"Ultimately, the human being is designed for dying." --paraphrase of Joan Halifax

I've been wanting to write for weeks about an experience I underwent almost a month ago, but which both circumstances and my inability to articulate it has kept me from examining too closely. This was the death of one of my patients.

A few weeks ago psychiatrist Robin Weiss published an interesting essay in the New York Times called "How Therapists Mourn." It's a good read, well-written, thought through, and full of life and death. He comes to a conclusion that holds as well for chaplains I think as for psychiatric professionals: "Therapists mourn alone."

It's not that we don't want others to share our sadness as that they are probably unable to understand it. I don't mean they don't understand the general sense of loss we feel when a patient dies so much as I think they can't understand the specific loss that patient's death means to us. We've come, through sitting and listening to them, or just sitting quietly with them, to see them in ways that others, who may know them better or more intimately, are unable to.

A month ago I visited a patient whose decline was dramatic after a period of relative energy. Inside a week she had gone from sitting in a wheelchair and actively participating in life to being bed-bound and sleeping nearly all the time. She was unconscious when I arrived so I took her hand while the RN who'd got there before I had went through her paces. She said over her prone body, after her visitor had gone, "I'll be surprised if she lasts the day."

The nurse left about 20 minutes later. We were waiting for one of her daughters to arrive and as I had no other visits that day I said I'd stay with her until she came. But a half hour after the nurse left she became agitated, having difficulty breathing, and opening and closing her eyes without seeing. Her dyspnea, called Chayne-Stokes breathing, is a series of quick, almost urgent, shallow breaths, as is she can't catch it. While I didn't know then what it was called, I was aware she was near her death.

I talked to her, letting her know I was there with her and she wasn't alone. She could be scared, I said, but I was with her and wouldn't be leaving until she was finished. She lay on her back, swallowing great gulps of nothing. I held her hand more tightly and reminded her of my presence.

There was no great shudder. No death rattle. No final words of wisdom. One moment she was breathing, which I could see from the gentle rise and fall of her chest. Then she stopped. But then she started again. This went on a few times, the shallow intake, the rise, the wheeze out, the fall. Until finally, she stopped. From my seat I could see the flutter of her carotid artery. I watched that pulse slower, until it too stopped. I touched my fingers to it but couldn't be positive if I felt it still or if it was the throb of my own pulse. After about a minute I pressed her eyelids closed and they stayed that way and I stepped out to ask a nurse to check her.

I have seen other people die, but it was always with the safety of distance. This time I had held her hand and felt her life slow until I couldn't feel it at all. I don't know exactly what I felt. It wasn't fear or anxiety or even relief at its conclusion. What comes nearest I think is humility. I felt humble in the face of what happened, struggling to hold her one hand while she held a stuffed chipmunk in the other, and keeping the live flower her daughter had placed in her hair from tipping and rolling off her pillow. My entire role came to, "I'm here." There seemed nothing else that needed to be done.

wrong number, right caller

I got another call from brooklyn tonight.

about 3 years ago, I started getting calls from a 718 number. I tend not to answer my cell phone if I don't recognize the number calling and this caller called for several weeks before he left a message. when I listened to it it was so faint I could barely make out what was being said and had to listen 3 times before I understood. it was the voice of a very old man asking if jerry would return his call.

I didn't like to leave this old fellow hanging so I called the number back. the same wheezy old voice answered and I tried to explain to him that I didn't know who he was trying to reach but he had the wrong telephone number. he seemed unable to understand and I had the impression I was talking with someone with very white hair sticking out at odd angles from his head, wrinkled face like his face had nearly dried up, and arthritic clawed hands.

finally he gave the phone to someone younger and female who asked who I was. I explained the wrong number to her and she apologized. she said her uncle likes to talk with her brother and usually waits for her to call for him but sometimes he takes his own initiative and he gets the number wrong. I said that was okay, no harm done.

the calls continued, maybe every couple months, for another year and a half. he never left another message and I never bothered to answer. it was just a semi-regular thing: my cell would ring, I'd look down and see the 718 number on the screen, and I'd let it roll into voicemail. I presume that he realized his mistake once he heard a different voice.

but my wife is in california visiting a friend so when the phone rang I answered it, assuming it was her, without pausing to look at the screen. I said, "hi," in the way I say that to her, and in return heard a very weak wheeze say, "can I please speak with jerry?" I said, "I'm sorry, there's no one here by that name" and he said, "oh, I'm sorry," and hung up.

it wasn't until after that I realized it had been nearly a year since I've last gotten a 718 call. and it wasn't until I'd realized that I also realized how glad I am to know the old man is still alive.

pastoral clinical week 10

The most affecting experience I’ve had this week has been finding and then going through the artwork and photographs in a resident’s room for her memorial. I was lucky there was such a large cache to go through and I’m disappointed her remaining wants nothing to do with them.

First of all, the artwork is rather nice. It’s not something that will blow anyone away, some hidden Picasso or Chagall, but she had talent and a flair for drawing that comes through nicely. The photos of her sculptures were also impressive: some were horizontal, like a woman looking as if she were coasting through the waves, and were these massive, granite slabs often teetering as if playing with gravity, while others were vertical, like one that resembled a stylized milkweed, and willowy and slim.

But what really affected me was the implication of these photos and artwork that our residents were not always the people in the conditions that they are in now. Intellectually, we all know that. But as I sorted through the work in the interns’ office, sometimes holding something up and saying to anyone there, “look at this,” we were reminded constantly of that fact and commented on it. After her memorial, I showed the display to a nurse who had known her when she was still mobile and somewhat verbal before disassembling it, and she was like a little girl pawing through the work and saying over and over, “she was really, really young once.” I think that’s the takeaway from this experience, that while we’re all aware these folks had previous, maybe extraordinary lives, it’s nonetheless good to be reminded that those lives often didn’t include whatever illness or disability defines them for us now.

alternatives to church, number 4

One of the nicest scenes was in the movie “Ray” when Ray Charles, when he’s visited in his apartment by Atom Egoyen to discuss a record deal, asks him to hurry up: “You see I’m in church.” It’s this notion of church being where you find it and being a state of mind rather than a building or even a congregation that appeals.

I’m considering this after a couple days at the Rainbow Gathering near Warren, Pennsylvania. There were more dogs and fewer naked people than I remember from the 80s and early 90s. The road to the Gathering, like much of life’s journey, is long and arduous and full of many sideroads that lead nowhere you want to go. But it was on just such a sideroad I met some other Family members equally lost—actually more lost than I was since they’d been over the same mountain roads for 3 hours while I’d only been over them for 1—and we teamed up since 10 eyes were better than 2. While they gassed up their truck I found a local and she gave me back way directions to the site. We knew within 10 minutes we were on the right road, found Welcome Home, parked and unloaded their kitchen, and I drove on to a more remote spot and settled in for the night.

I stayed a little over 36 hours, far less time than I used to spend but enough for this trip. I’ve decided it is my final one. I had a good time, probably better than the previous 2 I’d attended in the early and mid-90s, and decided it was a good way to say goodbye. I was disappointed because I’d come in the hope of seeing people I’d known or at least would recognize from 20 years before, but that didn’t happen. It was early of course—most folks don’t show until around July 2nd or the 3rd—although I did see 1 woman from Wisconsin, which surprised me as I hadn’t known her for Family. But most of the men my age fell into 2 camps: the pale, big-bellied, t-shirt riding high on their paunch, desperate types and the stringy, rough-ridden types who’d been on the road for decades and forgot where they’d lost their teeth, and I didn’t care to be associated with either one.

But what really sealed it for me was a comment I heard someone say yesterday about another brother he’d been discussing. This brother was “one of those corporate types who gets all his Rainbow lifestyle 1 week a year and then heads back to his corporate life.” And I realized, in my Guggenheim t-shirt and my cargo pants and my New Balance sneakers, he could have been talking about me. It is a lifestyle and a good one but it’s a lifestyle for people 30 years my junior. Not only were there fewer people my age and the ones who were there unappealing, but some accommodations had been made for a younger crowd—Main Circle is only a mile and a half from Welcome Home, the shortest hike I ever remember; there were dozens more busses at Bus Village than I’d ever seen this early; also, harder drugs were easier to get, while people seeking out hash and smoke were offered meth and crank. One couple I met trundled in 8 pounds of dip and they offered it up for free, which was kind, but snuff is better than tobacco in the way heroin is better than ditchweed. Similarly, there was a larger black and Hispanic contingent than I remember 25 or even 16 years ago—true, smaller than in proportion to the general population, but the Rainbow Family used to be whiteout central and now there are dots darker than the tan that comes from lying naked in the sun.

But in the key of church being where you find it, being out in the woods with the hundreds of hippies and freaks I choose to call family was like the best religious experiences: short, intense, intimate, frank, non-judgmental, and welcoming. When I sniff deep I can still smell woodsmoke and incense and sage and ganja on my skin as if I’d been in a temple where it doesn’t matter whether I was worshipping or being worshipped. In these spaces, it’s easy to smell stale beer on people’s breaths and so I avoid them—I like my beer as well as anyone, maybe more than most, but I go to Gatherings so I don’t need to drink. Despite the harder chemicals people managed to find a way to carry in, alcohol is still the dominant nastiness at the Gathering and it still wastes people’s ambition and commitment to anything other than themselves. This is why the revolution will not only fail to be televised but will not be well-attended. Some churches are too hard to get to.