this is life! (part deux)

Last night.

 Dylan stood in Kohls choosing shirts for Ray while I picked out jeans. We carried them back into the men's dressing room, yes, I walked right back there as if I belonged because in a sense, I did.  Ray, in his little dressing cubicle,  pulled on the pants (always the more difficult fit) and tried on the shirts to smiles and applause from both Dylan and myself. Then Dylan bent in and suggested that Ray push a sleeve back here or straighten a collar there while I stood back and watched...lovely... As much as I really wanted a daughter, how much I have enjoyed spending time with these sons. 

Today.

Today is another completely beautiful fall day, mild and full of sunshine. The cat (Ron Paul) rests on my lap, purring before jumping to the floor to stretch out. The morning was spent leisurely yet with purpose. A trip downtown accomplished much: a stop by the radio station, a cut and style at the Clip Joint then wandering through a small downtown bookshop and buying dollar books for Christmas gifts before heading over to campus and browsing the University bookstore, sitting down to peruse the latest Alice Water's book on sustainable food sources (loved it!) before hiking back downtown to sit on the patio of the Uprise Bakery, visiting with Joy and waiting for  Ray (middle son) to meet me for our new tradition of Tuesday lunch. It was a pleasant lunch and how fortunate I am to be able to have the time and resources to do these things.

Downtown.

There are storefronts downtown where the businesses have recently gone belly up. There were men in these empty shops and storefronts this morning, sweeping and cleaning. I do often wonder how expensive rents are in the downtown area.  My favorite tea shop, at one time on Broadway, is  now defunct and has been replaced twice, but not with tea. No other shop downtown has the tea that Kayotea had. There are no GOOD tea shops downtown and I bemoan this fact incessantly and unceasingly. whine,whine. All the other places sell tea in pre-made 'bags'...blah.

Dylan.

My youngest son told me that he needed Graduation photos and so I have been calling around and the cheapest I have been able to find them is @ 150.00 for the session, no prints. Is there anyone who has any ideas?...gulp(!)..of course, he waits until nearly the last minute to tell me something which I should have been on this past spring. Where on earth has my mind been?

The eighty-five year old woman.

There was an eighty five year old woman who had been recently diagnosed with a recurring type of brain cancer. Typical to this cancer the outcome is, was and always has been, death. The only question was, when. For some people it happened relatively quickly, for others, the process was much more gradual (over a period of years). She was in the Neuro-ICU following her diagnosis and in preparation for what was considered in this league, a 'minor' procedure (as if any 'procedure' is ever minor). I will never forget her. She was healthy, robust and did not in any way, shape or form, appear her stated age. Her hair was dyed a chestnut brown, her face was without stitch or scar (no apparent lifting). She looked at me with wide eyes and asked, "Am I going to die?" How do you respond? She was eighty-five. Had she not ever considered the possibility? Had she not felt the march of time? I stood at her bedside, tinkering with her IV's, re-adjusting the monitor before looking her in the eye and saying, "Not tonight". She smiled and lay back against the pillows. We discussed her disease and disease process. 
conclusion:

The next day, still in my early forties at that time, I made an appointment with a lawyer and drew up a living will and a will. The march of time had not hit me yet, I was still doing stupid things.


now. about those photos....

the coming winter

The morning was cool and along streets and lanes, leaves had begun to turn, some lay already, scattered and crushed, and with them, the first scent of fall. While tonight, down the hall, Dylan dresses, preparing to leave, to go out for the night. "No dinner?"..no. Still the icebox sits filled with food and I have been shopping on a more daily basis, attempting to not over-buy. Attempting.

Mother was through today, on her way to St. Louis to visit family. October is just around the corner and we will be taking a week to drive to Phoenix and back. To see the beautiful Patrici get married. To stop. To tour. It will be: Mother, Margie (her cousin recently widowed), Simon (my English-photographer-nephew, quite brilliant really) and me....

Which makes me smile, thinking of Margie, her exuberant personality, her stories. The day her second graders were 'driving (her) crazy'. And while she was always a good teacher, that day, she just was not coping well with a classroom full of eight (?) year olds. And so, during the morning recess, while the class was outside, she was in the break room taking a valium. Yes. She is/was a woman of that generation. The generation of women, now in their seventies, many of whom still take 'a valium', periodically. "Whew, the rest of the day went really well", she said and laughed and smiled, pushing her hair back out of her eyes, while her husband Bob, stood to the side with the men, smoking and drinking.

Cigarettes and cocktails. The post-apocalyptic fifties, the feminist sixties. There is a picture of me, pre-teen, skinny-armed, wearing a t-shirt given to me by my radical-bra-burning aunt from Michigan, and written on it is, 'i am the product of a non-sexist household'. A few years after that, I would be stoned out of my mind and nearly flunking out of a high-school where they stopped honors classes after our freshman year, and where everyone was lumped with everyone else in an attempt at what, I don't know. It was the seventies. A decade of drugs and disco and horrible clothes and then the sex pistols and body slamming at big-town clubs. Margie and Mom and their co-horts and friends were younger than I am now and it doesn't seem possible. There is a strangeness to time, as if death, inconceivable, is not real.

Last night, two of my patients were of the generation of mother and Margie. One, a woman, feeble, but getting around and still taking valium, "I take half a pill before bed, and if I can't sleep then I take the other half." She was prescribed only half. I gave her the additional other half. She still didn't sleep.

The other was a man, eaten through with cancer, lungs filling with fluid, fighting, fighting pain, pressing the button on his morphine pca (analgesia pump). His family had gone home, out of the room, away from the evidence of pain, of anguish, of holding on, holding on (they had been there all day). He held out his hand, I took it, standing there at his bedside holding his hand while he grimaced through the pain. Morphine, diluadid. Damned if you do and damned if you don't. Make them comfortable is the adage of hospice, but this wasn't hospice, but a hospital room. With his other hand he gripped my arm. There was life still in his fingers, warmth of hand against skin. He let go and pushed the button again only to hear the thin beep-beep-beep. failure. locked out. "Do you want me to get you something more for pain." He nodded yes, his eyes closed, then opened. The pyxis (drug dispensing machine), was tucked away, a short distance down the hall: dilaudid. and then later, more, useless for air hunger, good for pain. "What's your last name?" he asked after the second dose. I told him. "Oh", he replied, as if he should have known.