It hurts to write. No, really...

Hello, Lovelies Out In The Universe Whom I’ve Been Avoiding But Whom I Miss and Love. That includes you, Friends I Haven’t Called Back. And also you, Adored Ones Whose E-mails I Have Not Returned. Hugs to ya, Everyone I’ve Let Down.

Apologizing feels a little weak at this point since I’ve done it so many times, but what I’m really just sorry about is that I’m doing the best that I can and sometimes that best falls short of demonstrating how much I care about and am grateful for All Of You. So, I’m not so much sorry for my absence as I am just regretful of the unfortunate circumstances that have limited my capacity for consistency with regard to human interaction. (I should really write greeting cards.) There’s a dearth of consistency on the whole in these parts. Or, to put it less writery and rationalizey----there are good days and bad.

I’m sitting here going back and forth between explaining what’s been up/ keeping me away or not doing that because it will feel boring to you and blah, blah, blah to me.

But of course part of my intention in keeping this blog going through my parents’ illnesses and deaths was to share the experience honestly, so trying to edit myself now that they're gone in order to sound less whiny (or sad) sort of defeats the purpose...and also causes two-month posting gaps.

Since today’s small goal was to simply show up, I’ll keep the explanation of where I've been brief. Really it’s just the stuff of dead parents, depression and anxiety, oh my. Just that. Really, boiled down, it’s just that.

Sometimes I need to isolate. Sometimes I feel too fragile for the vulnerability required to share my work. Sometimes it’s just too painful to write.

Emotionally painful, yes, but as of late it’s been physically painful as well.

About a month ago I made an appointment with the eye doc figuring I just needed stronger glasses because I was increasing the font on my computer to size 87-year-old, and the doc discovered I had a hole in my retina and sent me to see a retinal specialist. (There is such a thing.) Though it had taken me over a month to get an appointment with the eye doc, I got an appointment with the retinal specialist just a week later, something I now recognize to be indicative of an urgency I didn’t pick up on at the time. This was when I learned that not only was there a hole, but my retina was actually partially detached and I needed to have laser treatment...that very day. The idea is to scar the area around the tear so that it can’t rip further. This is done by BURNING MY EYEBALL WITH A FUCKING LASER! It was some crazy shit, guys. I had my face in a machine and there was a flashing green light searing my eyeball and I might have even time traveled for a minute. When the nurse led me out to Dan in the waiting room afterwards---eye patch and all---I declared (with a smidge of whimper), “I was brave!”

Dan couldn’t be in the room for the procedure because the doctor said something about the indirect laser exposure being a risk to him (although apparently perfectly safe when aimed directly into my retina and right through to my soul). But he was able to be with me before the procedure and watched as I GOT AN INJECTION IN MY EYEBALL! He said the anesthetic created a bubble of fluid on the surface of my eye, though in all my Googling I’ve not been able to find a picture of it so I can only offer Dan’s artistic rendering.

That is exactly what my face looked like. He could probably do courtroom sketches.

The whole procedure made my eyes pretty sensitive in general this last month---reading and light were especially tough----but it worked. My retina is not likely to rip further though I’ll have to have my other eye examined somewhat regularly since I’m predisposed to this kind of thing now. The seriousness of the situation was again made clear when I saw how relieved the retinal specialist was at my follow-up appointment to see that it had gone as planned. He said I was really lucky it was caught when it was---totally a fluke thing since I didn’t have the typical symptoms. If it had detached entirely, I could have had permanent vision loss.

It’s pretty messed up and there’s no explanation for it. Not aging, not advanced diabetes, not a blow to the face. Everyone kept asking me if there had been trauma or injury and I think it was code for, “Is everything okay at home?” which amused me to no end since of course Dan is Dan and, let’s be honest, the least likely of the two of us to be the abusive spouse.

He is, however, the most likely to say that were I to lose my vision he would rearrange the furniture and watch me stumble around the apartment. This was his first thought upon hearing that I could have gone blind.

My first thought: I’ll have to learn how to write dirty words in Braille.

So you see, I have been thinking of you guys...

Just thinkin'

Tonight Dan and I are going to see Idina Menzel in Boston. She's famous now but the first solo show of hers Dan and I saw was at the Regattabar in Cambridge---a famous, but really intimate jazz club inside the Charles Hotel. I didn't even really know what she looked like then, so when Dan told me as we stepped off the elevator in the hotel that we had just shared the ride with her, I was shocked and then pissed that I missed it. Though I do recall that I was a little drunk---we had just finished a bottle of wine on the back deck of a little Italian restaurant near the hotel--and I'm sure I would have embarrassed myself. Tonight's show is at the Wang Theater...I'm doubtful we'll ever share an elevator again.

It's been hard to get myself out of the apartment lately---in large part because I'm writing again, so I'm not complaining---but I am making myself go (and made myself buy the tickets) because Idina Menzel's voice is nourishment for me. The thing about music is---there's no thinking, just feeling. As a person who can muck up feelings with layers and layers of thought, music is sometimes a Lola-to-Lola (Lola-to-Laura? Laura-to-Lola? Sybil-to-Sybil?) translator. With music, my brain gets totally bypassed as the processing center and while sometimes the result is the stuff of shedding a mood to dance alone in the car, often the result is sudden, aching weeping. It's why sometimes I dodge musical entirely but also why it's sometimes the only way to get release and relief.

I'm a little nervous going into the concert tonight though---like I'm bracing to be ripped open. The last time we saw her was the spring of 2010---two months after my mom was diagnosed---and for the encore she sang "Tomorrow" from Annie and my whole body just caved in on itself as the tears roared up in an out-of-nowhere cry. Because just thinkin' about tomorrow all of a sudden felt totally terrifying. I saw that tomorrow and the tomorrow after that and those that would follow would be the tomorrows when my mom would get sicker. Would be the tomorrows that would take me to the tomorrow when she'd be gone. I could take being stuck with this day of gray and lonely forever because my mom was still alive. She sang that tomorrow was only a day away and it felt like a threat. I was overcome with panic that I couldn't stop time. I cried and thought, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, I hate you. Stay the fuck away.

The song doesn't offer any more comfort now, even as I know that the cobwebs and the sorrow of today are exactly what it promises relief from. When I listen to it now it feels like my chest muscles are straining to hold a load beyond their strength---the weight of yearning for yesterday, steeling myself for today, and fighting for the absence of fear and the cultivation of enough optimism to want tomorrow. Time feels like a betrayal now and tomorrow is a day traveled further from my mom and dad and the memories of their smallest details. Tomorrows fade the details, they already have. People look down on visiting your yesterdays, but I never feel worse than when I tell myself I shouldn't look back. That's what now feels like to me. I know I should want tomorrow---I know it's coming (it came) no matter what I want, so it would be helpful to look forward with hope. But this is the stuff of thinking versus feeling that I was talking about. What I know is moot---what I know has no power and soothes me not.

It will be a barometer of healing, this song. If listening to it ever again reminds my heart (as it used to) that time holds dreams instead of pain, well then I'll know that, wow, I'm in that tomorrow now. I've already felt whole minutes of that tomorrow, just not whole days. And maybe that's what this song will eventually mean to me---that time is no longer concrete. That yesterdays, todays and tomorrows will just always exist on top of each other from now on...come what may and come what already has.

Even in this post I've gone from feeling to thinking (hence the time-as-abstract-concept meanderings). I'm sure I'll love the concert. It will unlock me from my brain.

My dad's birthday is next month and I've been shutting my eyes when I think about, like I'm hiding from my own thought. The two-year anniversary of my mom's death will be days later. My body is re-experiencing her dying---the trauma of watching her get sicker, of not being able to protect her from her pain and fear, of knowing she was going---through the cellular memories triggered by the changing season. This used to be my favorite time of year and I am hiding from the leaves she loved---we wheeled her onto the deck to see them---and the memories carried on the changing air: her hand holding mine, our connection still tangible and resting on the lap of her cotton nightgown; hugging my crying father as we stood alone on an early fall morning and said to each other, she's gone.

And now you're gone too, Dad. And your birthday is coming up.

My body is telling me in its cute way---insomnia, conjunctivitis and a cold sore---that it's best if I just acknowledge this escalation of sorrow rather than create further sickness with my resistance. It's a time for self care and compassion and I'm trying. I began beating myself up for something yesterday and then I heard myself saying, "You're doing the best you can, you're doing the best you can, you're doing the best you can." I heard it afterwards, as if through a two-second delay and I thought, when did that voice move into the neighborhood? I ought to make her a pie.

I'm dreading the holidays. Better that I say it out loud than try to pretend I feel otherwise because I think I should or wish I could. In bed the other night I told Dan that I wish I could just wake up in January and it made him sad because he once knew a Lola who lived for this time of year.

I don't think I'll feel this forever---today just feels sad.

Tomorrow? I'm not betting my bottom dollar on sun, but I do feel grateful to have one.

Also, the lines on my computer are all wavy.

So...hi.

Hi, guys.

hi.

I am trying this now because, well, I miss being a writer and I miss you all and I'm so close to hallucinating, having slept maybe five hours in the last 48, that I figure a blogpost will be proof that this night really happened.

I CANNOT sleep. CANNOT. cannot. It's been days of this.

And it's not the productive kind of not sleeping---it's the cracked out kind. It's the a-brain-can-really-only-take-so-much-of-this kind.

This is going to be a strange reentry to our thing here, isn't it? And I'm just going to try to go with it---no picture, and blob-like as it is---because lowered expectations on the whole are probably a good thing.

I'm seeing spots.

Love y'all.

Something fierce.

I've been drinking!

Dear guys,

That’s how I just started this post---as a letter. Like I’m writing to my family from prison.

I’m not in prison, though I do watch MSNBC’s Lockup to help me get to sleep. (Dan has suggested that this is unwise but I think he’s just mad because I ripped a hole in our mattress so I’d have somewhere to store my toothbrush/shank.)

I’ve been gone because...

I’m just sad---that’s the title of the memoir at this point.

I’m just still fucking sad. (And there’s book number two.)

I’m sad and pissed and just all sorts of unpleasant right now. (A self-help trilogy?)

It boils down to this: I miss my mom and dad and I wish they hadn’t died and I’d like things to just go back to how they were when I was stalking my next-door neighbor and all was right with the world. (The fact that writing those words makes me feel like a 10-year-old kid does not help.)

I’m assuming at this point that you understand my longish absences to mean I’m struggling/hiding. Maybe I should change the entry titles while I’m gone to keep you posted on the state of things---a sort of Spew weather channel.

Monday: Hot Mess.
Tuesday: Miserable Fuck.
Wednesday: Trying to not worry and be happy.
Thursday: Bobby McFerrin is a douche.
Friday: Inexplicably horny.
Saturday: Aha---ovulating. God’s a dick for making everything harder for chicks and inventing centipedes. Also, giving both parents cancer and nabbing them? Not cool, Dude.
Sunday: (Intentionally left blank.) (Despondent.)

The last few weeks were actually more the stuff of anguish, mania, and a kind of pathetic bewilderment that took the following form:

I painted the wood paneling in my dad’s office white.

I watched the entire first season of Showtime’s Episodes. (And also what’s aired of the second season. Solid show.)

The form it did not take: writing.

That’s not true, actually. I was writing. I just stopped writing. It’s more cause of the crazy than effect.

See, I wrote my way into a sad patch---I often can’t see where I’m going---and then I ran. I painted. I Episode-ed. I ran and ran.

I tried to write an e-mail to a friend and the sad patch showed up there too! The computer ratted me out! So I ran again.

The sad patch wants to be written and I don’t want to write it. I don’t want to feel it.

So I’m putting on a third coat of paint in the office.

I’m thinking of getting into Web Therapy.

Also, I’ve made a new friend. Her name is white wine and she’s the shit! She’ll hang out any time of day---screw 5pm! She’s pretty much orange juice’s prettier, more sophisticated cousin.

Sometimes though...sometimes...right now...white wine brings along sad patch and I’m like, “What the fuck, white wine? I thought you were cool!”

And she’s all, “Really? I’m pretty sure you learned in 10th grade about my depressant properties.”

And I’m all, “Did you really just say ‘depressant properties’? Cool it with the three-syllable words, Miss Smarty McSmartSmart.”

And she’s all, “You’re going to have to look at sad patch sometime. You might as well---”

And with that, I have to run.

I know I sound like a fucking lunatic. I know.

But it’s coming on fast and I’m feeling too sad to breathe so I have to go.

More to come.

Love,
Lola

Hostess Cupcake O'clock

Hostess Cupcakes were my mom's favorite treat...mine too when I was a kid (and again now). When I was young, I would walk up to Cumberland Farms and get each of us a package (two per person, the way it should be) and surprise her with them when I got back. Then we'd sit at the kitchen table or out on the deck and eat them together---a cup of coffee complementing hers, a glass of milk with mine. She was always so delighted by our little cupcake parties---our stealing a few minutes of the day for this little bit of fun.

And I was delighted by the chance to steal her.

As I spend time at the house now, working on my parents' gardens or writing, I always take a break for what I now call Hostess Cupcake O'clock---a time to just stop whatever I'm doing and sit down by the river and appreciate the beauty of the day or think of my parents. It's much more reverent than a moment of silence.

Today I'm taking it at my mom's spot at the kitchen table---another most sacred place.

How I spent my summer vacation

You didn't think I was going to follow through, did you? (Missing from photo---some of my favorite people.)

I didn’t want to feel sadness going into our Chatham vacation but there it sat. In my chest. It’s always in my chest. As I folded each thin cotton dress and set aside each pair of worn flip flops, I thought of her. I thought of how much my mom would love to be joining us on this trip. I thought about how seeking joy, no matter how much I know she would want it for me, feels like I am betraying her.

And then I danced alone in my bedroom on a Tuesday morning.

I visited Chatham for the first time two summers ago when Bec and Jeff first invited us to join them at the house they’d rented there. By that time, five months after her diagnosis, my mom had tried two kinds of chemotherapy and a grueling round of radiation and was beginning to feel like and know that she was dying. We all had hoped she would join us in Chatham but she just didn’t feel well enough. I didn’t want to leave her but I was tired. I had been to every appointment since her diagnosis and thought I owed it to myself and especially Dan to take the week for vacation. My guilt and worry were exacerbated when I checked in with my mom each day via text message and learned she was getting worse. She was supposed to have chemo that week---the first treatment I’d be missing---and she skipped it. I read magazines on a towel warmed by the Chatham sand and tried to pretend I didn’t know how poorly she was doing.

As I packed for this year’s return to that beach, I thought of all of this. Here I was again trying to forget her. I felt constipated in my chest.

And then a song from the Broadway version of The Lion King came on---out of my shuffled iPod rose Circle of Life. I closed my eyes and listened. My neck started to roll in rhythm with the swelling chorus and as my arms rose above me, I lifted my knees and set each foot back down in gentle stomps. My hands swayed through the air as my body moved. I felt my mom telling me to go down to Chatham and love my sisters up for her. To love up my Aunt Gail who joined us from Miami. To love up my brothers-in-law and nieces and nephews. To let myself be loved up. That it didn’t mean I was forgetting her. That it was our turn for the long beach days that she had enjoyed so many of during her life.

I did a white girl’s tribal dance and then I finished packing.

****************************************************************

I spent our week in Chatham at the intersection of joy, sorrow, love and anxiety---a four-way stop where each emotion took its turn without pattern, unsure who had the right of way. We packed coolers of food and stared at the ocean all day in a semi-circle of beach chairs, family and love. But afterwards, as I hung towels over the railing and thought of my mom doing this chore on summer evenings, sorrow took and squeezed my heart. At night we did puzzles and laughed and talked over big delicious dinners, good coffee, and fresh blueberry and key lime pies. And then I’d go out on the porch alone for a bit with a glass of wine and let myself think of her text messages.

“I skipped chemo today. I don’t think I’m going to do it anymore.”

It was a great week---a wonderful week in so many ways---but the sad tugging never quite left me. My sisters probably felt the same but we didn’t talk about it as much as you’d think we would have. It’s hard to synchronize our grief. The aching, working, sobbing, writing, child-raising and anguish of our days rarely coincide. Or maybe like so many other families hit by tragedy, we just don’t know how to talk about it. We just try to get through the days.

But when everyone packed up their damp bathing suits and greasy half-used bottles of suntan lotion to leave Bec and Jeff to enjoy the rest of their vacation without us, the grief came through in the heaviest of good byes. Our sadness was left for the last moments of the trip when our hearts dropped together, contained and disguised by the busyness of getting out the door. We all felt it, some of us cried. We hugged good bye and it was every good bye. The good bye with our mom and dad, the good bye with the house, the good bye to life innocent of this pain. It was the good bye in which we now exist. And it was good bye to a reprieve from the ache of pretending out in our individual worlds, that we are hurting less than we are.

When one of my sisters started welling up, I locked the door of the bedroom behind us and told her to let it out, to give herself that one minute to cry. She took just the minute. Then she put on her sunglasses---we all put on our sunglasses---and we walked out the door.

We emerged from our vacuum and felt the sorrow of not being able to keep each other in our pockets.


Photos by Becky Breslin. Also, there is an entire sister/Ohio constituency/family that was missing from this trip and is missing from these photos. Don't you think they should move east?

Chatham on Dwellable

I'm under that hat and towel.

...sun-lover that I am.  And I'm on my back as you can tell from my ample bosom.  See 'em?  (Photograph by Becky Breslin)

As they say in England, I was on holiday---which sounds much lovelier and not so socks-and-sandals as vacation.  Dan and I were in Chatham staying with my family at a house that  Bec and Jeff rented down there and generously opened up to all of us.  Then Dan and I  took our time (and an overnight) getting off the Cape before heading down to RI where I am now on this perfect 10---sunny, breezy, glistening river---day.  I am writing from a rocking chair on my parents’ front porch, if you must know how truly picturesque this scene is.  

I should have told you I’d be gone but I really thought I was going to check in during our trip.  In fact, I have about five half-written entries from the last two weeks that I just never got to posting. It’s a hard thing for me---that balance between living life and writing about it.  I remember thinking that I should have been writing more during my mom’s illness---capturing every conversation, every handhold---and then realizing that I didn’t want to miss a minute that I could be spending with her to be alone writing about it (in any capacity that required my spelling words correctly).  It was much the same in Chatham. Should I find a quiet spot to write about how the joy of my family gathering at the beach like we did as kids is tempered by the sadness of knowing how much my mom would love to be here?  Or should I head out to the back deck with my sisters and eat blue cheese on rice crackers with a cold glass of chardonnay?  


You see the dilemma?

It’s one I have here at my mom and dad’s house too.  Like with my parents, I am aware that these are my last days with the house.  Do I find a quiet spot to shape my feelings on all of this into a topiary?  Or do I scribble out pages of messy reflections in my journal and then get out in the gardens for a good bye with this home and the sense of my parents that dwells here.  I will spend my life fighting the urge to stay in my head and analyze and the need to get out of it and live, but this is different---this is death.  Any day now---any day the universe decides upon---these gardens will no longer be mine to tend.  I would regret missing my chance to prune my dad’s roses and water my mom’s brilliant purple hydrangeas were I to miss it.

And while vacation doesn’t hold this same weight, my trying to engage with the world and allow moments of joy does---which is why I tried so hard to stay on vacation rather than retreat into writing.  But there’s so much joy I get from writing and hanging out with you guys here, so I’m never really sure where I should be.  Mother fucking balance---I’ll be trying to find it forever.  

I’m going to try to shape what I wrote while in Chatham into some sort of “How I spent my summer vacation” to post here but I’ve put in eight writing hours already today and the yard is calling me.  Maybe today I found a smidge of balance.  Maybe I just have to accept that this is a time of imbalance.  The truth is---whether it’s in Chatham or New Hampshire, in the gardens or on the porch---I have to consider it a good day when I’m standing at all.