It Sucks To Be You

Disclaimer:  The following is a work of fiction.  More or less.  Sort of.

~~~~~~~~~~~

"It sucks to be you," Rebecca Wolfe said laughing as she leaned forward in her office chair.  I'd just told her something personal and emotionally charged.  I wasn't laughing.

"And I thought you had it all..." she finished.

"Well, people aren't always what they appear to be," I said.

This was a woman in a position of power, and I was alone in her office without witnesses.  She'd requested a meeting via email on a Sunday night.  She wanted to know if we could meet the next day.  I knew it must be serious, her asking for a meeting late on a Sunday.

I suspected she was angry at me, or perhaps disappointed that I'd written a piece about an incident which took place at her business.  The incident involved violence against my child.

She had to delay our meeting for a couple of days, which gave me time to become more convinced that this was indeed about my blog.  I checked the website for any unusual activity and noticed a significant increase in traffic.  I saw a "referral" from Rebecca's business.  That was odd, I thought.  I labeled it as SPAM.

The next day as I sat in the reception area waiting for my appointment time, I imagined being face to face with Rebecca, her looking down at me from the top of her little empire.  I felt strangely guilty for "getting caught."  But "caught" doing what?  Telling my own story?

To ease my nerves I pictured Rebecca as a floating face, like the holographic head of the Wizard of Oz, except made of glass.  I imagined repeatedly smashing this face with a wooden baseball bat.  Over and over again, I crashed through her ornamentation, shattered her mask, her fragile front.  This uncharacteristically violent reverie built up my courage to face someone I'd actually admired up to that point.

When she finally emerged from her office to escort me back, I noted how briskly she moved toward me, her shoes like heavy metal clogs sprinting over ceramic tile.  I mentioned this jokingly, but she didn't seem amused.  Her face didn't seem fragile at all.  It was hard and fixed.

This was gonna be bad.

Sure enough, I'd been called in about the blogpost.  I initially let her do most of the talking, nodded quietly while she told me about incidentally finding my blog (nobody reads my blog).  I struggled to keep my facial expression as blank as possible, telling myself to keep nodding, to look down at the table, to avoid making eye contact.  I'd rehearsed this, letting her tell a story I'd already anticipated.  I'd decided that she probably Googled me out of curiosity, or maybe habit, a ritualistic gathering of dirt to use against those who might transgress against her.

Her story of how she found my blog was different.  She claimed to have been looking for information on autism, and lo and behold there I was, keeper of a blog about a Japanese aesthetic.  Not a very solid connection.

She was hurt, she said, that I'd written about something so confidential, something that could hurt her business.  She asked me to take down the blogpost, which I agreed to do.

What specifically didn't she like about the post?

That it was damaging to her reputation, that it was shocking, that it was true.

"I thought you believed in us," she said.  "Don't you trust us?"

I hesitated, glanced left then lied, "Yes."  I apologized for hurting her, said that I felt ashamed because she's "such a good person."  I'd always needed her approval for some reason.

"No I'm not," she blurted.

Ah yes.  People aren't always what they appear to be.  Right before my eyes, a former saint became a bully.  What I'd felt toward Rebecca Wolfe wasn't admiration; I was intimidated by her.  That walk, those shoes, the hard fixed face; the way she sat at the top of the heap.  She was a Viking in a dress, driven and on a mission to succeed.  At almost any cost, I would later learn.

I'd named no names in the post, and when I wrote it, I hadn't expected any traffic beyond my meager 36 followers, none of whom live in my state much less give a damn about this woman, her heap or reputation.  The post wasn't even about her.  It was about an employee of hers who broke the law and was quietly escorted out of sight, out of mind.  No incident report.  No notes.  No paper trail.

The only indelible mark was what still remains on my child's psyche.  His and mine.

She made the point that people would still know who the post was about if they know me at all, and she wondered out loud again why I would want to hurt "the business."  Why write about these things publicly, she wanted to know.  "Why not just put it in a private journal?"

I'd wondered that myself.  I had no ready answer for her, so I agreed to take down the post.

I would come up with an answer much later, which was that although I've kept a journal for forty years, this incident wasn't something I wanted to talk only to myself about.  I needed someplace else, a small quiet corner in space, like a cyber broom closet.  Nobody really notices a broom closet, except maybe the few lost souls who open the door by accident.

I hadn't wanted to be alone with what had happened to my son, so I whimpered within this small cyber closet, shared my stained rags and dirty mop water, just me, enough of a nobody to fly under most radars.  I named no names in my post.  Writing online was about a need I couldn't satisfy any other way.  I needed to scratch my message somewhere more visible than a private diary, less visible than a giant billboard;  I needed to pour bleach on my wounds in the company of a few disinterested eyes.

Rebecca suggested that maybe I'd been trying to reach out to others in my circumstance, others with children who'd been hurt.  Perhaps.

Unfortunately, the incident I wrote about isn't rare.

What else could I have done with this pain?  Called the media?  The police?  My attorney?  I'd considered these options at first, when my rage was out of control.  Without a doubt I had -- have -- a very strong case (with a five-year statute of limitations, by the way).  The guilty employee confessed, in writing.  She was terminated for injuring a disabled little boy.  At first this seemed sufficient. Then it wasn't.  So I shared.

I took down the post immediately following the meeting with Rebecca.  I felt better, cleaner, but the next day I felt duped.  I'd been silenced.  And laughed at.  By a bully.

Who and what are we allowed to write about?  Who has the right to tell us to take our words down?  Someone who quietly shuffles a child abuser out the back door?

I still wake up every morning feeling angry and unsettled, like I failed my child, like I gave away my own power at his expense.  The incident is more than three months old.  The evil employee was removed from the system, albeit quietly.  Why don't I feel better yet?

Perhaps because it's very likely that the incident was never reported to the proper authorities.  By law, Rebecca should have called CPS or the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services, or police.

Failing to report this type of child abuse is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment of up to 180 days and/or a fine of up to $2,000.

My intuition has been screaming at me:  Something's not right.  Why did Rebecca ask other employees to keep quiet?  Why did she vaguely answer, "It's been handled," when I played dumb and asked how these incidents are reported?  Why didn't any staff members suggest that perhaps the increasingly distressing behaviors of the injured child prior to the nun's admission were due to frequent or repeated incidents of abuse?  Wasn't that a possibility?  

Yes it was.  And what do we know for sure?  That if this crime wasn't properly reported, the offending employee will go on to work with other children.

I called CPS myself within 36 hours of the incident, then again eight weeks later.  I called TDPRS as well, and General Counsel for the _____ of _____ _____.  They can't talk about cases, even those involving my own child, but they had no record of any other reports made.

Well, well, Rebecca.  Looks like it sucks to be YOU.

Why Dogs Don't Commit Suicide

George Carlin once described dogs as having a simple philosophy:  If they can do it, you can watch.

Their decisions are simple.  They're either eating, drinking, barking, peeing, playing, pooping, mating, licking, scratching, or sleeping (my Ratcha actually barks and poops at the same time, which I call sharking).  Dogs do have thoughts, but nothing like, Should I go with the gold or the indigo blue eye shadow?  Should I break up with Amanda, become a Buddhist, or take a fencing class? 

I was wandering around the lower level of Neiman Marcus the other day, searching for the restroom.  This lower level was for men's clothing and fine housewares.  Odd combination, don't you think?  Anyway, I was looking at a whimsical furniture line and thinking to myself, This might go well in a small English cottage, someplace Beatrix Potter might have written Peter Rabbit.

Then my phone rang.  It was my 9 year old daughter saying she had to stay after school because she'd failed to finish a social studies assignment on supply and demand.  Just after I hung up, a heavyset woman asked if I needed any help.  I was bent over, trying to see a price tag of $285 on the underside of a crystal decanter.  I told her that no, I was fine.  Just looking.  Then we discussed the types of items on display, including the whimsical furniture with it's black and white checkered patterns mixed with grandma floral upholstery, how much my husband would hate it, and I said, "It all boils down to what's soulful and what's not."

She agreed, although I don't think either one of us knew what the hell I was talking about, not yet at least.

My husband insists that dogs don't have souls.  I don't agree.  I think all living things have souls, that to be alive is to breathe, to inspire, to have an essence.  My husband thinks that only humans have an essence, a soul, that only they get to go to heaven.

Heaven would be boring with only humans.  We're too unnecessarily complicated, too petty, too stupid.  It takes us too long to learn the most important things, how to love well, how to live and die well.  Dogs don't have to learn these things.  They just know them.

I think it's significant that humans were created last.  Almost an afterthought.  God created all of nature, the flora and fauna, the planets and stars, and then he made the messed up people, the only part of creation to fail.  Why is that?  Why would anyone create creatures with a known failure glitch?  A surefire trigger to fall?  That's like using playing cards to build a skyscraper.

What was he thinking?  I'm gonna make these big, hairless, talking mammals that mess up all the time.  It'll be fun.

Considering all the choices we humans have, it's no wonder we make the wrong ones.  There's too much going on around us, social media, thousands of religions to choose from, deliciously unhealthy foods, and cable channels galore.  Dogs don't have this problem.  They don't have to decide what they're in the mood to eat or Tweet, which god to follow or movie to watch on HBO.  Dogs don't have to search for the down escalator to find a place to pee within a mega-commercial-worship-complex.  They just....Go.  Need to eliminate?  Nature says, Not a problem.

Dogs live in the uncomplicated moment.

Not humans.  They go nuts when making decisions, either too impulsive or indecisive.  Sometimes they have to research how to make these decisions, with the head or the heart, whether to follow their intuition or make pros and cons lists.  They even ask trusted friends for advice.

Why would we ask other people what we want?

Henry Miller once wrote, "The purpose of discipline is to promote freedom.  But freedom leads to infinity, and infinity is terrifying."

People aren't free.  We're too mentally untethered to be free.  We've either got thoughts scattered all over the place, like a train wreck, or our heads are so crowded we have to go to classes to learn to focus on what really matters, our own breath.  We meditate to get away from our own minds.  We have to clear out space, find a focal point of nothingness in order to pray, to listen, to hear.

Again, dogs don't have this problem.

I have a great coffee table book titled A Home For the Soul by Anthony Lawlor.  Lawlor introduces the reader to the soulful connections found in all homes, how a stove expresses the transforming power of nature, how clothes closets reveal our inner personalities, how to find the mythological and archetypal meanings within common objects of daily life -- beds, bathtubs, shoes, loaves of bread.  He explains how to use wood, tile, brick and stone to express qualities of the spirit, how to create meaning with furniture and personal objects.

This is just another example of humans trying desperately to find soulful connection, to locate the pulse of their own souls, or connect with others.

But check out Fido, taking a nap, snacking, licking himself or his poor anxious owner.  Dogs aren't feeling any existential angst, looking for their lost souls or struggling to keep them out of the mud of sin.  For dogs, there's no such thing as sin.  There's no such thing as evil or a haunting Devil.  For our canine friends, there's just nature, biology, instincts.  Dogs feel no shame, have nothing to apologize for, no reason to ask forgiveness (unless we yell at them for peeing on the synthetic carpet).

Dogs are just hairy, stinky, uninhibited creatures full of natural joy, which must be pretty awesome.

Maybe the problem with humans is that we have too much supply, of everything.  We have too much time, too many choices, too many unnecessary decisions to make.  All these choices, and we still demand too much.  The opposite should be true.  Demand should go down, but it doesn't.  Humans are never satisfied.  Our minds are fragile, inflamed, eternally stunted.

Maybe it's us humans who are soulless.  Maybe we're here to learn from the dogs.  Maybe we've got it all wrong.  After all, Dog is God, backwards.

We have this vast complex world all around us, exquisite beauty and mystery, but we always ask for more, bitch about no WiFi or why Seinfeld had to end, why there's not more leg room on airplanes or Doritos chips in a bag.

Maybe some day we'll figure it out, how we're supposed to go about this life thing with less misery and complaint.  We'll learn how to be consistent, how to cooperate with each other, how to be free without getting stuck or running over each other, killing each other.

Life is life.  It's a gift.  It's not meant to be squandered or broken into pieces.  We've been poisoned by ego and endless layers of soulless stuff, the Jimmy Choo shoes and $285 decanters, political hierarchies and "reality" TV, warring religious views, superstition.  We're stuck on which brand of deodorant to buy, how many cents per kilowatt we pay, who's kissing whom and what's for dinner.

We've become terminally distracted and suffocated beneath mountains of heavy, heavy stuff.  Now we can't breathe, and forget finding a pulse; we don't have one.

Pay attention to Fido.  He's here to teach you what you once knew.  Take it easy.  Romp and play.  Shark if you want.  Really live.

Pieces

There are four plastic crates on the floor of my office.  Each is full of photographs, notes, personal journals and short pieces written about my family, a few of these published in local Houston newspapers and magazines.  There are five Jumbo Hefty bags filled with letters from various family members   Each letter is still tucked inside its original envelope, some dating back to 1972.  Many of these voices have been forever silenced.

Only a handful of the oldest journals remain, two years worth salvaged from a fire intentionally set by a deranged man in 2001.

If I had them all today, the journal made of notebook paper and bright yellow yarn would speak first, that first entry penned from a pink bedroom in Crowley, Texas, 1974.  Those pages would lead to 1984 and a red spiral notebook, unsteady words describing a violent immeasurable loss.

That particular shock was paralyzing.  It took three days to write such a difficult entry.  Shock is like a tourniquet, to keep a mind and heart from hemorrhaging.  I couldn’t speak, eat, or breathe.  

Writing this memoir will feel just as difficult at times, but the stories and characters won’t rest until I do.  Their chains rattle in my head daily.     

This story involves my parents, Joseph and Beverly Williams, my siblings, Charlotte and David.  Our family reached completion on East Crenshaw Avenue in Polytechnic Heights, where I was born and my family lived from 1964 to 1973.  We then splintered off in separate directions, toward others, toward drugs and alcohol, the streets and homelessness.  Mental institutions, hospitals, halfway houses and jail cells received a few family members who wrote letters from these and other temporary addresses.  Sometimes home meant a cluster of trees near busy highways, a roach infested motel or halfway house, a trailer without electricity, or a clapboard shack on a hog farm.  We each had adventures, lost and found each other over and over again along the way.  Some were luckier than others.  

It’s quite an undertaking to connect the heavy crates, faded photos, reams of notes and essays, to piece together the letters and journals as one continuum.  It’s even more difficult to blend the voices of both the living and the dead into one song.

And where does the song begin?  In the one-bedroom house on Crenshaw with my father’s red, white and blue guitar?  Or at the Houston morgue where one mystery became two?   Do we open with the bloated body discovered by a neighbor, or with the wailing sirens of emergency vehicles racing toward the Crenshaw house, my family gathered in the front yard to escape the fire my mother started in her sleep? 

My father has given me what he can to help solve various other puzzles.   We’ve exchanged letters for twenty-two years, sometimes in a question/answer format.  We haven’t seen each other since 1998, for reasons I still can’t put into words.

My sister Charlotte is also my memory, her almost nine years of back story preceding Crenshaw Avenue, kindle for that first fire.

My task is to paste until every piece has a home, to trust the story to know where to begin, which is like throwing a dart at a Jupiter.

Soul Glaucoma

Glaucoma runs in my family.  My dad has it.  He puts medicated drops in his eyes every day, to lower the pressure on his retina -- the light-senstivive tissue at the back of the eye.  Lowering this pressure prevents further damage to the optic nerves which connect the retina to the brain.

If he didn't use the drops, the vitreous humor (fluid) would build up and cause extreme eye pressure, damage the optic nerve.  Eventually, he would develop tunnel vision.  Then the tunnel would get smaller and smaller, until it disappeared altogether.

He would be completely blind.

I have high pressures in my eyes too, since my early 20's.  But the optic nerve still looks good, so no drops yet.  But I do worry about my vision, a different kind of seeing.

I used to think of depression as seeing only the negatives in an envelope of photographs.  The images on the negatives are real, but they're the dark version, the ghosts of familiar objects floating with eerie shadows.  It's the creepy side of reality.

But today I revised this metaphor.  I think depression is more like glaucoma.  We're still aware of our surroundings, what they're supposed to look like, but we can't see beyond the small tunnel.  Our spiritual vitreous humor is backed up, creating extreme pressure that chokes our vision, shuts our soul windows.

I've been struggling for months to keep a positive outlook.  Life has been challenging, and I've worried considerably about my most vulnerable loved ones.  Even when the pressure has been siphoned off, I've still had trouble seeing.

I couldn't find the crock pot or my auto insurance card.  I lost shoes and a jacket.  There were missing hand towels, medical reports, car tags, house keys.  I couldn't find joy, the light or my future.

Then today I woke up happy.  No particular reason.  Of course I embraced it.  But I noticed that it felt a lot like when we fall in love, how that high suppresses any negative reality.  The joy supercedes worry and pain.  We can get a speeding ticket or a late fee, stub our big toe or forget to pick up a prescription, but that's okay.  We're in love, and when we've got that, we can handle just about anything.

Even soul glaucoma, at least when it's in remission.

When it's not, I can't handle the slightest hangnail.  All obstacles, even the tiniest blips that very few radars would ever pick up, feel like a horrendous assault on my spiritual being.  And it's all because I can't see.  I'm blind.  And what I can't see, even though I know it's still there, feels lost forever.

Today when my joy returned, I found many other lost items.  I found the crock pot in a lower cabinet. I remembered that my lost shoes and jacket had been relocated to a storage unit to make space in my closet.  I found my auto insurance card, right where it'd always been, in my wallet.  My hand towels were near the crock pot, the medical reports were in an accordion folder, and the car tags were where I'd left them six weeks earlier.  So were the house keys.

These items were never lost.  I just couldn't see them, or remember where I'd put them before I lost my joy.  It was as if a life recorder had stopped where my vision ended, and the useful tapes were just out of reach.  The recorder stopped creating new memories, at least ones I wanted to remember.

Depression is very real, and can be as debilitating as complete blindness.  Even worse, once that tunnel completely closes off, so does the human.  Because it isn't only a sense of light we lose as our retina ceases to measure it; our life energy stops registering.  The life force never makes it to the brain.

I'll hold on to this joy for as long as I can, this light I can feel and see.   I'll believe it's permanent, just as I often believe the darkness is.

Baby, It's Cold

Happy 2015.

While walking the dogs around the neighborhood last week, I thought about deoxyribonucleic acid.  It wasn't the type of thing I normally think about while watching my dogs relieve themselves, but I'd just ordered James D. Watson's, The Double Helix, a personal account of how DNA and its structure were discovered -- the messy human version.  Science isn't so neat and distinguished at the onset.  Sometimes it's ugly with turf wars, papers to endlessly edit, credit to give and fight over, and the decision has to be made:  What do we call this highfalutin thing we've just discovered?

DNA is complicated enough, and the length and difficulty of the word makes it even more so, more intimidating and apart from the everyday.  But we carry our DNA around wherever we go, pass it on to our children, leave bits of it all over the place.  Why does it have to be such a long difficult word?  Why make something so everyday so far away and inaccessible?

What if we simplified the complicated?  What if we renamed DNA, 'The Twisted Ladder'?

What I'm getting at is, what if we had fewer parts, more wholes?  What if things could be reduced not to their smallest parts, but to their poetry, deeper meaning, their art?

Maybe I'm dreaming.  Life may be too complicated to simplify.

When does life get simple again?  Like when we were eight and mornings meant throwing on a t-shirt and shorts, grabbing a snack and riding our bicycles all day?

PB&J has been replaced with DN&A.  Life is a tall, tall place, too high to reach, too far to climb.  We'll never get to the top, and maybe we don't want to go there, but how far is high enough?  How much do we need to know?  How much do we really need?

Last night I stayed home.  Very few people in my circle of friends and family went out to celebrate New Years' Eve.  We all have small children and care less about partying.  We were content to stay in comfortable clothes, light fires, snuggle with our partners, kids, pets, and watch old Simpson's episodes.

Others dressed up, attended wild parties, drank too much, screamed until their throats were raw.  They drove in the cold to get where they were going.  They left home to find something else -- fun and adventure, a 'higher' plane.  What they were seeking was somewhere else, a place they had to dress up for, a thing they altered their senses to achieve, a realm beyond their comfort zones.

Did they get there?  Did the parties take them where they wanted to go?  Was it worth it?  Were there longterm gains?  Is a party moving toward or away from something?  Are we celebrating life, or trying to forget life?

I think those of us who were hibernating last night feel that all the partying back in the day was just a prelude to the real party, the true prize in living.  We've got our prize now, the security and love of family, a short distance that feels like forever.  There's nothing "out there" we need.  We don't have anything to run from or to, nothing we need to forget.  What's worth remembering is right here, at home.  All this, and no hangover.

Why go long when we can just chill?  Why go to Times Square when there's buttery popcorn, a warm fire and a thick alpaca blanket at home?  Why leave home when, Baby, it's cold outside?

Maybe some are still trying to find home.

Popular Alcoholics Anonymous sayings are teaching the same message:  Easy Does It and One Day At A Time.  Keep It Simple Stupid.  We've all been addicts of one stripe or another, always running, leaving one place for the next, looking for that special elusive 'other'.

There's a place for the complicated, the kind that can simplify our lives.  I love my iPhone, my Mac and Kindle Paper White.  I'm all for being plugged in when I want to be.  But at the end of the day, I don't want to be.  I just want simple, to snuggle, be warm, feel safe.  Let the Watsons of the world play with the double helixes, fight over who gets credit and what names to give all the pieces.  But at the end of the day, even they want to go home.  We're built for wholes.  And what's the highest whole?  What do we call this hifalutin thing we're all hoping to find?

Love.

This year I hope you find it, your whole, your simple, your home.

Heartbeat Of The World

In a blogpost dated 4/16/2012 I wrote:

Today my daughter texted the answer I'd feared, the answer I knew the way mothers just know:  '+'...

She is my first born, the most anticipated child of four.  She arrived in the winter of 1987, three years after my own mother passed away.

On ultrasound the beginning looks like the glowing rim of a full moon, the inside hollow except for a pulse, the heartbeat of the world.

I sense this first grandchild must be a girl because she will come in winter, a favorite season for our females, another gypsy.

So I ordered Anne Lamott's book, Some Assembly Required, to quell my anxiety and laugh about this grandmother thing.  But I still want to crawl into my daughter's womb, pull up a chair and sit beside this unique pulse to monitor intricate vitals, to wipe away the fever and sweat of becoming.

L was born seven months later, 11/1/2012, and was indeed a girl.  She's now two years old, but only chronologically.  In spirit, she's just shy of seven centuries.  'Old Soul' doesn't do her justice, and neither does 'smart' nor 'funny'.

But I won't brag you to death.  In fact this post isn't even about my most precious genius granddaughter; it's about her unborn brother, G.  He's due by scheduled c-section on 12/17/2014.

Who is G?  Well, he's not small.  We know this much.  We also know he'll share a birthday with a former club bouncer, His Holiness, Pope Francis.

That's just cool.

I haven't been as fearful this time around.  My daughter's got this mama thing down to a perfect science, complete with her own brand of moxie and a personalized Citrus Lane subscription.  She has a vast collection of vogue baby clothes and cloth diapers, earth friendly and state-of-the-art everything.  She's a cooler mother than I ever was, maybe even a better mother, period.

Isn't that the goal of reproduction?  Of any production line?  To make better product?

I've got to stop reading the New York Times.  It's killing me -- the wars, ebola and U.S. government nonsense, abuses of power and people.  My brain freezes over every morning when I see the headlines, then my heart skips and overheats as I scroll down the list of atrocities.  What kind of world will my grandchildren inherit?  I don't really want to know.

When I sprouted in 1964, we hadn't yet put a man on the moon.  Today, we're gearing up for space tourism.  We can transplant faces, hands and uteruses.  We can make a baby in a test tube, or clone one.

In 1964 the term terrorism was most often used domestically in the context of violence against blacks and civil rights workers in the South.  Now we use the word to mean something else.

In 1964 we were a different people.  Or were we?

There was no internet in every back pocket, no Keurig, microwave, electric car or Kim Kardashian.  We've doubled our vaccination schedule, can treat erectile dysfunction, enhance our anatomy and alter our gender.  We have a drug for EVERYTHING.

Have we malfunctioned, or are we equal parts messed up and progressing sloppily toward evolutionary maturity?  I honestly don't know.  We're either going down, or this is that terrible moment just before dawn.  I can't help but hope.  I still have young children to raise, grandchildren too.  I have to keep my mind open, but wrapping it around this world is a challenge.

The reason strangers Oooh and Awww over babies, besides the fact that most babies are so stinkin' cute, is because a baby represents hope.  Every new life is another possibility, a casting of fresh DNA into the world, our round asylum on its wobbly axis.

A newborn doesn't have a criminal record or a leaked sex tape floating around the internet.  He or she isn't a member of ISIS or Westboro Baptist Church.  A baby is, as far as anyone can guess, "good".  Infants are the closest a human being will ever be to sacred.  And that's what we want, something sacred, or at least something better that what we've got.

~~~

I'm not as worried about the health of my daughter or second grandchild this time around (lie), nor do I have any concerns about my daughter's mothering ability (truth).  I also know that I can be a pretty decent grandmother.  L has confirmed this with her explosive enthusiasm when we see each other.  So we're good, and aside from a wee bit of anxiety regarding standard surgery risks, I'm comfortable with what will happen next Wednesday, 12/17/2014.

G will be lifted out of his cozy gestational nest, and he will cry because the room will be cold and the overhead fluorescence glaring.  He'll have to process strangers' gloved hands, the sudden shift in gravity and proprioception.  A stranger will weigh his bigness, and measure his longness.  They will listen to his steady heartbeat, wrap him in a warm but unstylish blanket, and hand him to his fabulous parents.

Someone will then find the slightly (extremely) nervous grandmother waiting nearby and tell her that everything is better than okay.  Baby and mother are spectacular.

Beyond this bright beginning, the journey depends on G's particular genome, his parents' influence, this place and time, his future choices, and circumstances beyond his control, most of which are the choices of others.

Fate is a committee.

For now, G is a new heartbeat in the world, the most important heartbeat there is:  HOPE.

Living & Dying Tidy

Brittany Maynard's brain tumor was the size of two fists, a large chaotic cloud disturbing her otherwise beautifully symmetrical brain.  Her doctors were surprised the twenty-nine year old functioned so well for so long.

I read about Brittany in the October 27th issue of People magazine, intrigued by her decision to end her own life rather than ride out the cancer storm for the next few months which meant more expense, pain, and the inevitable loss of her mind.  "My [cancer] is going to kill me, and it's a terrible, terrible way to die," she told People.

Brittany wanted to die on her own terms, so she, her husband and family moved to Portland, Oregon which has a right-to-die law.   Her plan was to dissolve 100 capsules of the sedative secobarbital in water and, surrounded by loved ones, slip into a permanent sleep.  The proposed date was November 1st.

I watched the calendar after reading the story.  Her life had been magical.  She was smart, accomplished, beautiful, happily married, well-traveled.  Now her days were numbered, and she knew the count.  We all did.

On November 1st, as planned, Brittany passed away.  Although her death was an assisted suicide, the official cause of death was listed as a brain tumor.  She'd written in her final Facebook post:  "Goodbye to all my dear friends and family that I love.  Today is the day I have chosen to pass away with dignity in the face of my terminal illness, this terrible brain cancer that has taken so much from me...but would have taken so much more."

Three days later a top Vatican official condemned her decision to die, calling assisted suicide "an absurdity".

Was it?  Was it ridiculous, foolish, incongruous or unreasonable?  Did Brittany's action manifest the view that there is no order or value in human life or in the universe?

A friend just lost his young wife to the same type of brain cancer, a glioblastoma.  The prognosis is most often 99% grim.  The young wife lived one year then died in hospice.  Her children watched her suffer.  I juxtapose the two cases, Brittany and the other young wife, and I can't tell you what I would have chosen, but I can say that I'd like to have a choice either way.

Hopefully I will never have to consider suicide or palliative care, but chances are the subject will come up.  Dying will most definitely come up.  So the question is, what now?  How do I want to live?  What's more frightening to me than dying is dying unprepared, dying with a life in limbo.  There are not only things I haven't accomplished yet, but things in the way.  My life is cluttered.  This must be how purgatory feels, to be neither living nor dying.  I'm stuck.

I've been reading and thinking about purging my house for the past six months.  I've gotten rid of a few bags of clothes and toys so far, but now I'm getting more serious.  I've noticed that when my house is tidy, so is my mind.  Both worlds, which may be mirrors it turns out, are more peaceful, clear, balanced.  Once fully purged of the things that are no longer useful, things that no longer bring us joy, there's a sense of ineffable freedom and lightness of being.  We lose those final ten pounds or complete unfinished projects.  We quit the dead-end job or loveless marriage.  We move again, finally able to see the wide open spaces beyond the choke hold of clutter.

In the end, if we're lucky, all that remains are treasures.  We're surrounded only by the things we need or love.

I've been surrounded by clutter for more than three decades.  There are clothes that don't fit, irrelevant stacks of papers, books I'll never read, broken Christmas ornaments and stray pieces of junk rattling in forgotten drawers.  There are drawers filled with makeup items that seem to have duplicated themselves over the years.  I keep replacing what I already have, stacking taller and taller mountains around my life.  I no longer know what I have, need or want.

My soul can't breathe.

Brittany gave away her possessions just before she died.  When she moved to Portland, I'm sure she purged thoroughly with the help of friends and family.  There were boxes to keep, to donate, to throw away.  There's a picture of her sparsely furnished bedroom in People.  In the photo is a four-poster bed, two matching nightstands and lamps, photographs of Brittany's husband and family.  The flooring is a light honey-colored hardwood.  The white window blinds are drawn up, completely open.  The bedspread is white, walls sand, ceiling fan a buttery cream.  The room is flooded with golden sunlight.

This is where Brittany died.  In this clean room full of light and loved ones.  She did not die in a hospital bed beneath harsh fluorescence.  She did not die with plastic tubes snaking in and around her head and body, with needles in her arms or neck.  She did not die surrounded by strangers, mechanical beeps, ventilators, the smell of plastic and Clorox.

She died at home, surrounded by love.