The Valley of the Shadow

She slipped away from us so quietly - she had been in a coma-like state for several days, breathing more slowly, pausing between breaths. Finally she did not take another one and it was over.

I find myself wondering where she has gone.

Is there a heaven and is she there? Somehow I cannot quite picture it. The choir part is reasonable - she used to run one and I can picture her doing that, straightening the halos on the cherubim, getting them in line and on key. But I am afraid I can also see her arguing with the archangels, sliding down golden bannisters, colour co-ordinating rainbows, dying her wings bright turquoise. No, not quite right. She's certainly not in the other place; she's had the lake of fire and demons prodding her with sharp things already. No, definitely not down there.

I don't have any idea what really happens to a person when they die. It could be endless sleep with no awakening to pain. It could be a real heaven, not my leftover-from-irreverent-childhood imaginings. There are several religions that believe in rebirth and that's rather a nice idea - I rather fancy her as an especially mischievous marmalade cat, expiating her misdeeds in her past life by making some child or children laugh. She would make an excellent dryad. Well, it doesn't matter, really. She is out of pain and beyond fear and suffering.

When I look out a window, I hear her voice saying how she thinks of us as living in a park - 'a view out of every window'. I look at the paint swatches sitting on my bathroom counter and wish so much I could talk the colour choices through with her. I sit down with a coffee on the screened porch and remember the last time we sat there together. I hear a red tailed hawk cry and think about how much we enjoyed spotting birds together. I try not to cry.

At least I was able to say good-bye. 'I love you,' I said, bending close to her ear. 'Love you too,' came back in her husky whisper. And I do. I always will. If no where else, she will live on in my heart.

How I wrecked my daughter's refrigerator and other stories from the trenches.

I am living at the elder daughter's house this week, looking after Little Stuff while the ED and spouse are at a conference.  This should be quite an easy task as Little Stuff is now almost seven and can look after a lot of things herself.  Grama's tasks include putting together a huge lunch including three snacks and a main noon meal, finding something a starving kid wants to eat for supper, delivering her to school, picking her up from daycare, listening to and helping with homework, and keeping the menagerie fed.

It is this last task that was the undoing of the refrigerator.  This house resembles a small zoo.  There are lizards, snakes, fish, a tortoise the size of a punch bowl, a quite demented cat (of whom more later) and Charlotte Ann, the guinea pig. She lives in Little Stuff's bedroom in a well appointed cage and gets fresh veggies twice a day to supplement her kibble (or whatever - dried guinea pig ration, I guess).  On the first evening, Little Stuff opened the frig to get out some greens and ripped the front panel off the crisper.  Oops.

Well, Grama decided that fixing this ought to involve disassembling the three drawer pile and cleaning it all up, then putting the front panel back on and reassembling.  All went well for the first two steps as I carefully took out all the food, took the parts out and set them in order and cleaned.  The last step was a big disaster.  I could not get the pile reassembled in a way that allowed the door to shut.  I tried over and over.  Meanwhile the food in and out of the frig was getting warmer and warmer and so was I.  I needed help.

Now the ED is without doubt the most organized person I have ever known, even more so than my mother whom she resembles a lot, and so I knew that the manual for the refrigerator would be stowed somewhere logical.  I am not logical, I guess, because I could not find the dern thing.  I found labelled and dated photo albums, art supplies, correspondence supplies, camera manuals, a neatly stowed drawer of scissors and other necessary bits and pieces, an alphabetized disc collection, with notes and dates, a stash of cards and other games, financial correspondence, all neatly stowed and handy.  No frig manual.

Food still getting warmer.

Finally, in desperation, I stacked all the bins back into the frig, with the food in them, piled one on top of the other.  And the door shut.  Daughter and spouse return home tonight and will, alas, be greeted by an almost unusable refrigerator.  I have stacked the beer and diet pop in the front where they can get it easily.  Logic tells me this mess will seem less annoying after a nice cold brew.

As for the cat, she decided last night to abandon Little Stuff and sleep with me, having fallen in love with my dressing gown as a cat bed.  At approximately 1:00 am she jumped up onto my bed with a resounding thump.  Startled out of a sound sleep I flailed out with both arms and sent the poor kitty flying off the bed and onto the floor.  And then she disappeared.  I was afraid I had hurt her and so I got up and searched for her to see if she was intact.  Cat was no where to be found.  This morning she reappeared, her usual sinuous self, and when she saw me she arched her back and hissed.  I am persona non grata in cat land.

And here I thought I was going to have a fine, easy time.

A Milestone

We are looking after almost seven year old Little Stuff this weekend.  After lunch, when Granpa announced that he needed a nap, Little Stuff said cheerfully "I will get my library book and read it."  And she did!
It's all downstream from here.  Or I thought it was until she brought out the Uno game.

Something Left to Lose.

One of the best friends I have ever had is dying. These words seem to colour everything I do, everything I think, make me numb, swirl a cold, opaque fog around everything I usually enjoy. She is dying and there is nothing - nothing - that I can do. Nothing that will change the fact. Nothing that will make things easier for her. Nothing.

Her doctor has said that three months will be a long time for her to live. She has already gone a long way away from us. Some days she will not talk to anyone, sometimes she cannot hold a cup, keep her balance, focus her eyes. Other times she becomes something like her old, feisty self. She checked herself out of her palliative care room at the hospital last week and went back to her seniors' residence. She is 'doing better', her brother says, the last little while. I think she is angry and the anger is carrying her - she does not want to be a helpless lump in a hospital bed any longer than she has to be. She does not want her daughters' anxious hovering, trying to do for her what little she can still do for herself. She doesn't want anyone's sympathy or pity. She's still the fighter she has always been, even when so much else is lost.

Her daughters are trying so hard to help. I remember my mother's last illness and how hard I fought, coaxing a little food into her, planning to make her hair look better, blinding myself to how fast she was fading. One night my husband said to me 'She's dying, Mary. You have to face it.' How stunning a blow those words were as I did have to realise that I was failing. I couldn't keep her. Now I watch my friend's daughters, her brother, her mother (so fragile herself) trying to come to terms with the same hard truth. I see her daughters fighting, as I fought, to bring her back, just a little, to comb her hair, get her attention, support her. I remember the bewilderment. The stubborn denial. The pain.

The words of 'Bobby McGee' keep running through my head. 'Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.' I've learned that when the person you love has gone, when you have nothing left to lose, the pain is different and finally it too fades to a dry, sealed scar. You are free of concern, of obligation; you also lose the connection although not the love. But it isn't the same love. It's a bowl of pot pourri, not the scented, living rose. I already know that survivors feel guilt, anger, regret. For many years I fought to remember my living vital mother, not the pitiful little ghost she became before she was finally gone.

I love it that my friend is fighting. She may drive her family nuts, she may do things that hurt all of us, but it is so like her. I want to shake her and tell her to let up on her daughters, her brother. At the same time, I want to cheer. She's still herself, aggravating though that self may be.

My friend has always been there for me for more than forty-five years now. Looking after my kids, going with me on escapades, always ready for lunch full of delicious gossip and highly sugared dessert. A provider of advice, of sympathy, of camaraderie, of fun. Vivid, colourful, opinionated, a blazing bonfire at which to warm my hands.

I'm already cold. But I will fight to remember her outrageous hats, her warmth, her real self, to hold her in my heart. And I will try to be there when she needs me until the end.

 
 Here they come again, or soon will.  The lakes and ponds hereabouts are still partially or wholly frozen but a few more days of this false spring will produce open water and then there will be geese.  And arctic swans.  And redwing blackbirds.  Already the chickadees have switched from 'chick-a-dee-dee-dee' to 'hey sweetie' and the turkey toms are displaying in the trees at the back of the lawn.
The lawn, alas, is slush.  The laneway and the roadway are both quakes of miserable mud. The cluster flies have come out of hibernation and are bombing the windows - I have put the screens back on.
But, who cares. Any day now my daffodil garden will appear out of the slush and spring will have, officially, arrived.
Eh, sweetie?

C is for CopyCat

Slouchy came up with a fascinating meme over at her place.  She says "I stole this meme from the lovely Schmutzie. It's an interesting little personality test, I think. Type just one letter (a, then b, then c, etc.) into your computer's internet address field. What is then suggested to you is the site (starting with that letter) that you've viewed most often."
I didn't read the instructions carefully enough, and typed the alphabet into my Google search box.  Equally interesting results.  I use Mozilla Firefox, so when I retried using Slouchy's parameters, I came up with the site that has the letter 'a' in it most often.  But the Google search window showed me some very strange sites; I finally figured out that my daughter, son-in-law and the grandson of friends had all been using the search engine. Anyway, here are the search box results, also an interesting personality test.

A = audrey hepburn movie lists
B = brian hughes toronto star
C = canadian bronze figure skating medal 
D = disaster in haiti
E = effect of hst in ontario
F = farenheit to celcius
G = golden lads and girls all must
H = how to get hst rebates ontario
I = ice grips for shoes uk
J = jewish calendar
K = kate mcgarrigle
L = little black dresses
M = moguls olympics
N = natural disaster in haiti
O = oregon coastal highway
P = pirate bay
Q = quotes
R = rumer godden books
S = saaq
T = tom brokaw canada
U = urban dictionary
V = voles in ontario
W = washington state tourism info
X = xs cargo
Y = youtube
Z = zero punctuation

Come up with your own explanations of who went where and why.

Our Editable Anthem.

I've got a post up over at Canada Moms Blog to-day.  Here. So, what do you think?

Forty seven years ago today ... taken at our wedding reception. Every time I look at this photo I marvel at how young we were. I also snicker a bit at the arrangement of my feet and the super innocent expression on my face as I grasp my illicit glass of champagne. (My father had just pointed out to me that I was the only person under legal drinking age at the party.) I was twenty: I would turn twenty-one in two months' time. And I lived in a society very different from this one.

In 1963 divorce in Canada was only possible by an Act of Parliament, abortion was illegal and the sole reliable female contraceptive (the diaphragm) was only supplied to married women. The pill was just being invented; the majority of women who trained for a career became nurses, teachers or secretaries and only expected to 'work' until marriage or, at the upper limit, until the first child was expected. Women wore trousers only for leisure; teachers, nurses and secretaries arrived for work dressed in skirts, nylon stockings with seams and dress shoes. We all wore girdles with suspenders to hold up the hose. We were sitting (in some discomfort) at the start of the roller coaster ride into the very different culture prevalent by the end of the decade.

I had been raised by old-fashioned parents pretty much to pre WWII standards - Kipling style standards. I promised to marry 'forsaking all others, as long as [you] both shall live'. That is pretty much what I have done. And so what I am describing here is the life choice I perceived, not that of the boomer generation and beyond whose partnering options are greater and different. When I was a teenager I also speculated about studying law and was deterred from doing that by my father, a lawyer, who told me that the women lawyers he knew were frustrated and miserable. That was his experience and that informed my choice.

There have been a number of times in my life when I have regretted marrying. Not marrying the man I have - I can't imaging being married to anyone else - but marrying at all. The grass growing in the yards of the self managed living quarters of single women with their own incomes and lifestyle and furniture choices has looked very green and lush at such times. If you marry, as most of us do, someone with interests and decision making processes far different from your own, the necessary compromises and choices of life as a couple make you into a person far different from what you ever expected you would become, in your heady and heedless youth. When I decided that I wanted to be married, I clearly remember thinking that I would have to make such compromises and promising myself that I would do so. It has sometimes been harder that I ever could have imagined. I have, from time to time, failed that promise, have been too stubborn or too spineless. I have also, from time to time, been astonished at the generosity of the man I married in accepting my interests and accommodating me against what his choice would have been. But still - marriage can be a very Procrustean bed.

I am sure that my grass might look long and luscious to a single woman from time to time. A strong marriage, and mine is one, gives a woman a husband who earns money, does not stray, is a good father and grandfather, a partner, a companion. While a single woman chooses her own bed, she does lie in it alone, must be solely responsible for supporting herself and has a very different and less permanent support group. For a single woman to have a child is a very difficult choice but the knowledge that she will never have children is also difficult.

Well, it is 2010, and I live in a world so different from the one of my childhood that I can sympathize with my grandmother's bemusement at stretchy baby clothes, television cartoons and suburbs built for car-driving families. Sometimes I imagine myself telling her about my neighbour who checks out her granddaughter via Skype. I own one dress and two pair of pantihose and run a graphics business out of my house while wearing slippers. The only constant in my life has just finished calculating that we have been married over twice as long as we were single. He does that kind of thing.

And I may haul out a bottle of champagne later on to-day.

The Games We Play

I come by my love of cards through my genes. My father was addicted to card games and very, very good at them. According to family legend he financed some of his education playing bridge and his stay in the Navy with poker. He taught my daughters to play poker when they were little more than toddlers; he was always ready for a cut-throat game of euchre or an even more lethal round of hearts.
My mother was not in love with cards but she did love her husband and so she played cards a lot, particularly a highly competitive two man game of solitaire (called variously Racing Demon or Pounce) at which she could keep up with my father through dexterity and sharp fingernails (he said.) They played pounce at our kitchen table most evenings and kept a running score. If there were wagers laid on anything, it was pounce points they bet with.
In fact, most of the adults in my family loved to play cards and, in the days before universal television, most meetings of family and friends included card games. One of my aunts taught me cribbage but I don't remember when I learned euchre. I do remember being hauled out of bed on one occasion to make a fourth for euchre; I can't have been more than nine or ten at the time. I played canasta in high school and bridge in university but was never very good at the latter; I love euchre and any kind of solitaire and hearts to this day. I stay away from poker, though. Unlike my dad, I cannot remember what has been played in detail and if you can't do that you are going to lose.
My husband is not a card player; he can't remember what is trump and can't keep his mind on what is being played. Accordingly, my passion for cards was unrequited for many years. Until we got our first fast computer and I discovered that you can play all sorts of card games against it. Hardly a day goes by that does not find me playing spider solitaire or hearts with my blank-faced (perfectly poker faced!) friend. Talk about a procrastination tool!
Although he bombs at cards, my husband is really good at board games, especially Trivial Pursuit, and so when our daughters lived at home we played that and Scrabble by the hour at our cottage where there was no television. I thought I was a pretty good Scrabble player until we got high speed internet and I started to play with some on-line friends. It's fun, even though I get beaten all to pieces all too often. I don't mind losing at any game with a random element in it. I don't mind losing to a better player. For me, the fascination lies in seeing how well I can do with what I am dealt.
I also love chess, as did my father. After my mother died, dad came to dinner at our house often and we would play chess after we ate. And, with love and sorrow, I would make sure he won half the time as I watched his sharp mind gradually lose its edge. I also have a quite sophisticated chess program on my computer - one that you can set to play at a multitude of levels against computer generated 'players' pre set to make a certain number of typical errors. This is a mixed blessing, though. I hate, hate, HATE to lose to the computer because I have made more than my typical number of errors. There's no random factor in chess at all and if you lose it is because you screwed up, lost concentration or, and this is my nightmare, are losing acuity. I can be in a bad mood all day because I messed up at computer chess. Talk about childish! If I ever disappear from the on-line community, it will probably be because I have put my foot through the monitor after losing badly at chess.
A game of spider solitaire that I win, however, always cheers me up. As does watching my on-line Scrabble opponent score two seven letter words in a row, even though this feat puts me down a hundred points. It's a pleasure to see something so well done.

Twenty-five Steps to Better Procrastination.

1.) Allow yourself plenty of time. Procrastinating works best if you are not, quite, on deadline.
2.) Surround yourself with lots of other small jobs that look easy or fast.
3.) Play Scrabble, check out Facebook, check all email accounts.
4.) Get coffee.
5.) Re pile small, easy jobs. Consider which you will tackle.
6.) Drink coffee.
7.) Check Google Reader. Go and read someone whose posts are always interesting. Comment at length.
8.) Excrete coffee.
9.) Pull up Headings list to start Main Job.
10.) Go and get a sandwich and a drink.
11.) Start small job. Re pile others.
12.) Eat half of sandwich, drink drink, check email that just pinged in G Mail.
13.) Send several emails.
14.) Take plate and glass to kitchen. Get more coffee.
15.) Consider next step in main task.
16.) Check Scrabble game. Check Scrabble statistics and become frightened by the number of games won by your present opponent.
17.) Eat other half of sandwich. Wipe katsup off keyboard. Enter several headings in your topic list. Check time. Realize that it is one hour later than you thought it was. Lick fingers.
18.) Think about Cadbury chocolate fingers. Try not to think about Cadbury chocolate fingers.
19.) Return dishes to kitchen. Get chocolate fingers.
20.) Work on one heading on main task list. Find this is heavier than you want it to be. Rework heading list.
21.) Excrete drink and coffee. While you are up, change washer and dryer loads.
22.) Reheat coffee.
23.) Realize that you can't figure out what you have done to your heading list. Retrieve original heading list. Eat several chocolate fingers.
24.) Calculate how much time you have left to accomplish main task. Lick fingers.
25.) Panic.

Headlines. And a Mission

The Painted Maypole hosts a writing group at her site called Monday Missions. Yesterday's mission was to write a post in the form of headlines. The assignments are a lot of fun and I learn a lot from the writers that take on a mission. We all learn from one another. To see the latest MM, go here.

As often happens, I am getting to the mission on Tuesday and twisting its tail. A lot. Because after I slithered down the lane to the mailbox and picked up our papers this morning, all I could see were the headlines.

CHAOS RULES IN PORT-AU-PRINCE and

Disaster in Haiti.

To the horror of the earthquake and the heart tearing frustration of the slowness of arriving help has now been added the violence and fury of looting. It is hard to watch; it must be maddening to try to manage and terrifying to endure. I do not find it hard to understand. When I was taught to be a lifeguard, we were warned and taught how to deal with drowning victims who might be so frantic, so panicked, that they would grab their rescuer and prevent the rescue. We were taught how to approach from behind, how to break a stranglehold under water, how to choke a victim enough to stop the flailing that would prevent us towing him to safety. Tough love, in fact, in the extreme. And I think the people of Haiti are like those drowning victims. So without hope that they see no help, no rescue and flail out at all around them.

I am afraid that the tough love solutions are what is needed now. The rescuers are going to have to defend themselves, to ensure their own safety, before they can rescue. The American group running the airport is going to have to prefer landing for munitions and soldiers over medical aid and supplies. Canada may send peace keepers; as a Canadian I would demand that such young men and women be armed and allowed to defend themselves and the aid workers they support. Of course this slows the aid and limits its delivery and so more people are going to die or go so long without treatment that they will end up with amputated limbs or chronic debility.

The root of it, as I see it, is the poverty in Haiti, a poverty that leads to hopelessness and a hopelessness that leads to rage and amorality. We don't experience that kind of poverty in North America; not even the worst of our slums, the most lost of our homeless, have no one, ever, to reach out a hand to them, have no expectation of ever being helped. Our government works, even when Mr Proroguey is running it, our safety nets are there, stretched thin in places, but there. But in Haiti the government and its programs are sometimes so corrupt that they are part of the problem and not of the solution. So it is a country of grinding poverty in which a disaster brings a situation where it is every man for himself, where morality is a luxury and the ability to fight for it ruthlessly is what gets you food and water.

I am sure that the majority of people in Haiti are, like all of us, a mixture of good and bad, noble and venal. They deserve peace, order and good government, as all of us do. So, I am happy to give money to emergency relief. But I would throw my heart behind anyone who knows how to make that relief effective and who has the skill, the knowledge and the power to clean up some of the basic problems that have made a natural disaster into something so much worse