Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
#1 of 92: Trying Out a Wet Suit as a Metaphor
You know when you get out of the pool and go in the locker room and start peeling off your bathing suit and it sticks like heck until it winds up, rolled up at your feet? That’s me. I’ve been peeling my sad suit off.
It feels great.
And while I’m doing this, I’m in a graduate class on Death & Dying at UWM. The lectures, the homework, the class discussions are scholarly and heartfelt at the same time. I am, by far, the oldest person in the class, possibly in the building, and, not surprisingly, the only person with my very recent lived experience. Yesterday, we discussed research on grief in children, reflected on our own early experiences with death, and talked with a geology professor who’d walked across campus to tell us about Camp Hope, a twice a year weekend camp for, yes, kids who’ve lost parents.
Research tells us that young children, like the one who calls flared pants ‘fire pants’ and has lost her grey hoodie three times so far this school year, flip from crying (grieving) to playing in minutes. Older kids ask a ton of questions and teenagers go mute. When asked, they’ll say they’re fine. “I’m okay.” It’s actually what I always say as well. A teenager at heart.
I listen to all this and because it’s in a classroom and it’s research, the discussion feels arm’s length and cerebral and that’s a clean and easy place for me right now. It was an oddly good time to take this class.
Anyway, about the bathing suit. You can’t sit around in a wet suit. After a while, it itches, bunches up in inconvenient places, makes you want to jump out of your skin. And then you finally get it off and there you are free and unrestrained? That’s my plan.
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92 days from October 1 to December 31
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The First Beef Stew of the Season
I made the first beef stew of the season.
It was lovely except there were no peas. There ought to have been peas though they weren’t missed amongst the carrots, potatoes, and green beans, all carrying the dirt of the farm from whence they came, dirt so thick it might have shown fingerprints had I thought to look.
Son Joe was here for dinner. He comes on Tuesday to lift heavy things and do disagreeable tasks, watch Blippi with his niece, and do his laundry. Today, he took all the heavy fans to the attic. This signals the true end of summer and ought to have some kind of chanting ritual, one of gratitude for sure, because wrestling the fans downstairs in the spring was a son of a bitch if you don’t mind my saying. It must have been hot that day for me not to wait for Joe to take the weight off me.
There was also a perfect loaf of bread and pie with whipped cream. I made neither of those. Just the stew.
Go Where It’s Dark and You’ll Need to Start a Fire
What are some life hacks that you practice?
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My biggest life hack at the moment is leaving my comfortable and cozy home to go camping where I spend an hour trying to get a good campfire going, drink wine out of tiny plastic bottles from the drug store and dilute the can of chili so it goes a little further for the two of us. We weren’t that hungry anyway having eaten several chunks of cheddar cheese sliced with the old man’s jack knife like we were some bad hombres hiding in the mountains about to attack a wagon train carrying loot from St. Louis.
Yesterday, I thought I had a death overdose. I went to a friend’s funeral. It was surreal. I hadn’t seen my friend in a couple of years, but I could still hear him laughing. I could see him laughing. It wasn’t until the end of the very beautiful service that it occurred to me that much like the day after our daughter died in June when I went to Trader Joe’s but then realized I was too weak to be there, that I shouldn’t have come. I am not ready for funerals as much as I think I should show up. There was another funeral of a friend yesterday, after my first friend’s but I didn’t go. I didn’t show up. I could not.
Last night my five-year-old granddaughter Paulina and I sat on my bed eating peanut butter toast and apples. We split a Hersey bar and six marshmallows. I read Travels with Charley, and she painted her nails with markers. She found one of my books, opened it up to the middle, learned back on the pillows and ‘read.’ This is what I determined was the antidote to the death overdose.
This morning, at dawn, as she does every morning, Paulina tapped me on the shoulder and then crawled into bed with me. Together, we looked out the bedroom window at a jet’s contrail soaring over the slightest pink of the sunrise. Herc, the cat, stepped his way over the pillows to say hello and I knew I’d recovered, at least temporarily.
Today, we embarked on an overnight camping trip, just the two of us, with Paulina safely ensconced with her aunt and uncle. We found the last camping site in all of southwest Wisconsin. It’s fair away from the bathroom, and oddly configured, with the picnic table many yards away in a crowd of trees. I built a fire which went well for a while, but my skills are limited and so after an hour or so it went dark. We ate chili out of a can and donuts from Kwik Trip and finished our tiny bottles of wine. I am mended by the inconvenience of all of this, the fire starting, and the bumping of my head on the camper’s roof. We figured out how to reconfigure the bed, the quilt is spread out, and sleeping is next.
It will all be okay.
The Short Answer is I Don’t
How do you write what people actually want to read?
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My writing is an acquired taste.
Most of my readers are older women. When they die off, my husband will be my only reader. He reads everything but doesn’t like everything. He’s anti-haiku and gets exasperated with my occasional extreme run-on sentence stream of consciousness posts. He often says he especially likes the posts he’s in which is no surprise because I always talk about him in the most complimentary way.
For instance, I’m not writing about the fairly surprising fact that he went to have coffee with a friend in the same sweats and sweatshirt he wore yesterday (and maybe the day before). This from a man who used to wear three-piece suits with ties carefully curated the night before. That notwithstanding, my husband is my most loyal reader so I have to be careful not to offend him.
To answer the prompt, I don’t know what people want to read. I only know what I want to write. And what I write appeals to a pretty small band of folks. I have a fair number of followers on this blog (about 5,000) but way less actual readers (maybe a hundred on any given day). I watch the stats, but I don’t care much about them anymore. If one person reads and likes what I’ve written, I’m good.
There have been a couple of my pieces that have hit a nerve and gotten a very wide readership. The one I’m most proud of was about reconciliation after family estrangement. Entitled “The Power of Saying You’re Sorry,” the essay ran in Newsweek magazine on September 5th, 2008. A friend from Alabama later sent me the transcript of a sermon at his church that used my essay as its base. Hundreds of people sent me emails describing their own family’s estrangement and appreciating the story of my family’s reconciliation.
Pretty rewarding, but it didn’t start a career. It’s been said that I didn’t exploit the opportunity – you know, the one afforded by being in the issue of Newsweek with Sarah Palin on the cover holding a rifle over her shoulder (and maybe looking at Russia the same time).
Oh well. I bump along with my little self, writing about death and children and aging and homeless people and Herc and Tempest and dogs I’ve loved that died on me and not having a clue about what people actually want to read.
Piercing in a Couple of Ways
I waited an hour at a chain clinic to get a blood test for TB so I can do ‘service learning’ at a hospice for my Death & Dying class and I think my son might have been right when he said that I was really getting too far into the thick of things with this dying business.
It’s a series of coincidences, actually. Hard to sort out without drawing a diagram.
After waiting an hour, the blood lady started in on me, right away appreciating the prominent vein in my right arm but then complaining that the vein was quote giving out on us unquote. She explained that a vein could be as big as the biggest earthworm and still not put out.
Who knew?
So then she went after the other arm where, happily, the blood flowed like a river. There were no stickers or donuts, but I swiped a little pack of fruit snacks on the way out the door, stepping around a guy draped over a chair, napping or sick, not sure. When I looked back at him, he had a little plumber thing going on.
At home, I decided to tackle my homework – three short training modules about how to have difficult conversations with seriously ill people and then an hour-long documentary telling the stories of three very sick people with no further treatment options. Central to the stories was how the drive for cure, longshot to improbable, crowded out conversations about how people wanted to spend their last bit of time on earth.
The moderator, a doctor himself, told about a time when he conjectured with a patient that an extremely experimental drug could have him ‘back on the tennis court by the end of summer.’ He said he knew he was lying but couldn’t help but offer some tiny dust mote of hope to his patient. It made my head spin. I’ve been in the room where fantasy games were being played by people who ought to have known better. Yes.
In sum, I don’t know what I’m doing except there seems to be pieces of tile strewn all about that if I fit them together will make for great coherence and insight. Just a theory. I am only guessing that will happen.
Sorting Out What’s What Where and How
We took three bags of our winter jackets, hats, and scarves to Goodwill along with a lamp, a gingham blanket, and the last small stack of my deceased daughter’s clothes. On the porch sits a big plastic bin with my daughter’s blue striped tote bag and two Bibles, combined Old and New Testaments. I have been stuck on what to do with the Bibles. One doesn’t take Bibles like these to Goodwill.
So, I think, should I keep these massive Bibles for my five-year-old granddaughter, Paulina? Or should I try to give them to a pastor friend, someone who might appreciate their heft, find a purpose for their existence, so I don’t have them sitting in the attic for years waiting for someone to remember that they’re there. We already have boxes of jewelry and pictures and other keepsakes of her mother’s stored away.
This morning, Paulina shut the door to her room. It’s her room because that’s where her clothes and things are, her hair ties, stuffed animals, and little mementos of her life with her mom and her new life here with us, but she still sleeps on a cot next to my side of the bed. Our concept of space, however, has become very fluid. We treat the area encompassing our room and hers and my office and most of the downstairs living space as Paulina Land. It’s part of our new life, don’t you know.
Anyway, she emerged from her room reeking of perfume. When asked, she said she’d found the perfume in the drawer of the vanity, the one my folks bought in 1937 and where my mother used to sit painting her nails red with a perfect halfmoon at the cuticle. Unbeknownst to me, my daughter had left three bottles of perfume behind when she suddenly left our house for the hospital.
“You’re too little for perfume,” I told Paulina and she quickly scooped up all three bottles to bring to my room and put on my dresser. “No, keep them in your room. Just don’t wear any.” I’m thinking the perfume reminds her of her mom. Having the bottles on her vanity maybe says something, that the smells in them are still hers even though she’s so little.
“When I get bigger, can I put on perfume?”
The perfume stays. Do the Bibles stay? What about the tote bag?
There is so much losing and keeping and moving on going on here.
Driving Over the Bridge Takes Practice
Yesterday, I went shopping and then driving with my grandson who is trans. We split up for shopping but then drove off together so he could practice for his road test with the DMV. Today was the first time he drove on the freeway, a short but exhilarating run over Milwaukee’s Hoan Bridge. We were on the outside lane, the one overlooking the Milwaukee harbor and I, of course, had fleeting images of the car taking flight over the too low barrier. As I’ve done ten thousand times, I entertained the question of how to get out of a submerged car but then quickly put those thoughts out of my head. It seemed contrary to the great progress we were making on the driving education front.
We spent two hours together and I didn’t misgender him even once. It’s a first.
It’s not like this transition is new. I’d gotten hints of it while he was in high school, but it wasn’t until a week before his graduation that our grandson texted us that his name on the big screen was going to be different than his birth name. Oh my, I thought, and then ensued the seemingly endless battle of reality vs. reflex.
At a family picnic last week, I asked my grandson if he wanted another hot dog and he said yes. I grabbed a bun and the tongs and went to the grill to pick out the best one. Then I turned around and said, “Here you go, ma’am.”
I apologized. I always apologize. Sometimes I do an ‘end of the evening blanket apology,’ usually it’s mistake by mistake. I don’t have trouble with his name. It’s the pronouns that mess me up.
I need a shock collar.
As my mistakes are reflexive, so is my grandson’s forgiveness. I remember that when he takes a turn too wide or is slow to brake at a light. Grace. Taking our mistakes home with us in the backseat and tossing them in the trash. Starting out next time clean.
We’ll both get there.
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Photo by Zach Lisko on Unsplash
What I’ve been Doing on My Days Off
I’ve been resting and gathering myself and also starting a little girl in kindergarten, selling a once-beloved beach house, studying death and dying, writing papers and getting grades, taking my last swim (probably) in Lake Superior, loving the lake I have (Lake Michigan), dancing to music from a new toy record player, searching for the purple shirt, reading emails from the teacher written entirely in Spanish, wondering if I should sign up for Spanish I at the Rec Department, thinking about taking riding lessons at Steppingstone Farms, writing a long essay (for me) called The Guys and Gals in My Death & Dying Class, writing Postcards to Swing States (for Wisconsin), showing up as part of the leadership of a new Disability and Aging Advocates for Crowley (running for Governor in Wisconsin), surrendering my ungainly and quite ugly office lamp to Goodwill, turning on Paw Patrol every morning, taking the same little girl to a family grief program where we had pizza and cookies and made things with pipe cleaners, and sitting on the back porch at 6:30 every morning drinking coffee with the old man and our ‘ward’ to count the birds on the wire overhead (today there were sixteen!) and wait for the cardinal to appear which he or she does depending on whose turn it is that day.
Sofas I Have Found and Loved from Down the Street
I could claim to have found a lucky charm or a hundred-dollar bill, but what I really found, careening around my neighborhood late for some meeting or some kid, were two sofas. A rose-colored mid-century beauty that seemed to have been barely touched and a serviceable, tending toward the raggedy, kind of lumpy thing that drastically needed a cover-up.
I zoomed home to get my boys to help me load them one by one into the back of our SUV. It was just a few blocks from the ‘curb store’ to our house but treacherous, the physics of the carry (more weight out than in the automobile) making the odds of a dump in the middle of the street not in our favor.
People are embarrassed by curb shopping, especially in their own neighborhood. I get it. My neighbor ventures out in the dark when I put something yummy at the curb. It’s like “I don’t want to know you that well.”
I’m not above tiptoeing down the street in the dark if there was something especially lovely. During the pandemic, I scored the cutest wooden table and two chairs, but the chairs quickly became undependable, sitting-wise so we, of course, put them at the curb for someone else to pick up.
Once my husband and a neighbor came upon a pair of bedroom dressers at the curb. “You should take them. You have a lot of kids,” my husband said to the neighbor. “No, you should take them, the drawers don’t shut right.” I’ll let you guess.
I’ve been infatuated with the whole ‘making do’ approach to life forever. So picking up furniture off the curb makes sense to me – not all the time, you know, we have actually purchased decent furniture in actual furniture stores but sometime when there is a particularly unique sofa or table or lamp or whatnot that someone has fallen out of love with, something that has been orphaned, well, that’s a magnet for me.
You asked.
Dear Deb
Dear Deb,
A few months ago, you told me to collect myself, buy a small camp chair for our new little friend, and get back to doing our freedom thing.
Well, here we are.
With a fire and an Etch-A-Sketch and chocolate milk and a raided bag of marshmallows and the dog fast asleep and the old man napping in the van.
We made it.
Thanks, friend. Thanks for telling me the thing that’s stuck in my head the past few months.
We can make a new life. We can and we are.
With great appreciation,
Jan
Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
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