Tag Archives: death

I prefer au revoir not goodbye

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January 2017, Washington, DC
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The only person I consistently write about here is Pat. There’s an archive of Pat stories and reflections. Pat was my mom.

In the tapestry of all of the relationships, if Pat was once my center, directly adjacent was her sister, Nancy. Anne L. is her actual name, and for my whole life, and I guess her whole life, she flipped between the names Nancy and Anne, Anne and Nancy. For the family, it was Nancy.

Then, Nancy got married. Pretty sure it was 1970, but being around 5 or 6 years old, I may not be the best chronicler. From then on, there was another name change. The family ran everything together — NancyandRon.

I feel like it was every Friday night, but maybe it was Sunday. Let’s say every weekend. For every week of of my life as a kid, Nancy and then NancyandRon came over our house for a meal. During the week there was more often than not other visits and activities and meals and all sorts of things. My childhood memories all include them alongside Pat and my brothers and sister.

I can’t for the life of me figure out one memory in line with the historical record. A thing that never happens when you are the youngest of five kids happened. I got adult attention all to myself, and NancyandRon took me into the city of Boston to see the movie Doctor Doolittle.

If you had a gun to my head, I would swear the year was 1972, and I’d also claim that after the movie they took me to the Museum of Science, walked me through an exhibit on reproduction, explained all the things no one had ever told me about babies, and then shared the news that my cousin Ted was on his way.

Only thing is Doctor Doolittle came out in 1967. Back in ’67, my own father would have still been alive. I would have been only three.

The important part is Nancy did indeed tell me where babies come from. Nancy equipped me with so many things everyone needs to know. In my childhood, she was a colossus. She was a second mother. She was just so many things.

Pat had gaps in parenting. And, Pat’s precocious youngest child — the one clicking on a keyboard with these very words — had all her formative years overlaid with Pat’s toughest years. When I was 4, the world changed. My dad died, and buried with him was a part of Pat. Deep inside, she wore sadness that stayed for the rest of her life.

She soldiered on and raised us kids and did everything she could in a world not really welcoming of single moms. My school life coincided with Pat’s getting a teaching certificate and becoming a teacher.

Whenever Pat was too tired, or overwhelmed, or sad, or busy, or just not able to answer all of my questions, she turfed me over to Nancy. Nancy always had answers for me.

Nancy taught me about books and how to process real from imagined. When I began voraciously reading any book in front of me, which included The Exorcist around age 12, she explained adult themes and horror.

I learned about art, philosophy, travel, theater, museums, and culture at her knee.

Nancy told me stories about my dad that no one else did. My mother couldn’t talk about him. I think it hurt too much. But Nancy told me about fun trips and how she, 12 years younger than Pat, loved hanging out with my mom and dad when they were dating. She told me one of my favorite things to hear about my dad — That he always loved novelty, trying gadgets when they came out or new foods. I see my DNA in that memory.

Nancy also taught me about love and family. As a pre-teen or teen or whatever hormonal nightmare age, I did something wrong. In my apology to her, I made it about myself and said something about it being OK if she hated me. In her anger at my shitty apology, she taught me two things, how to apologize empathetically and sincerely and that she loved me and you can make mistakes and still be loved.

As an adult, Nancy was a co-conspirator in wrangling my adult relationship with my mom. We checked in with each other, Nancy would call me when my mom was pissed off at me, and we’d strategize. Late in her life, Pat wasn’t doing great at taking care of herself, and so then we could strategize on keeping her going.

I learned from Nancy a great strategy of managing Pat that always worked. Pretend you needed her help, even if you didn’t.

I suspect that ALL of my childhood years when Nancy was there visiting, and the prevailing narrative was that my mother was making sure Nancy had a good meal or help with whatever, it was a sham. Nancy let my mother take care of her, and then take care of her and Ron, and then take care of her and her family, because Pat needed it, as much or more than Nancy needed the help.

They both had death and overwhelming loss in common. My mother’s husband, and my aunt’s son, Tommy, left wounds that never fully healed. They also both hid their wounds and soldiered on.

Yet, in the worst times and the best, they were a pretty hilarious and awesome duo. I recently told my cousin Ted about when our grandfather, their father, was in a nursing home. Nancy hated the ritual of signing in and signing out and thought it was particularly stupid, when week after week the people at the home recognized all visitors. You couldn’t leave unless you signed out, apparently a gesture to keep the residents in.

So, she would make up fake names.

One day, she and Pat visited, and she signed them in as Charlotte and Emily Brontë. But, then, she had to leave before my mother, running out without telling my mother their fake names.

In the end, after a lot of frustration, my mother had to beg to see the sign in sheet. They were able to verify that the Brontë sisters had not, in fact, visited anyone that day.

One of my favorite weeks since moving to California was when Nancy came to visit. Her presence and everything she shared was for me the closest thing to M. meeting my mother.

It was incredible to hear Nancy’s views on San Francisco — A Mecca she had read about and wanted to visit. We took her to City Lights, and walked around North Beach talking about the Beats. She bought a “Howl” cap and I think a Ferlinghetti book. We ate fresh strawberries that she declared the best she had ever had. We cruised by the Berkeley campus, where she quoted Mario Savio and talked about how much his speeches from the steps of Sproul Hall meant back in the day. And, bonus of bonuses, a naked man tipped his cap to us while we crossed Castro Street.

With some of my cousins, my sister, a friend, and me, Nancy marched on the Whitehouse in January 2017, alongside an army of pissed off women.

I write all of this down, because as a co-worker said to me this week, “aunts can be important and weirdly influential.” And, yes, this aunt to me is very very important and was weirdly and enormously influential.

Nancy called me today. She called from hospice back in Massachusetts thousands of miles away. She called to say goodbye. We shared words of love and an awkward conversation that no one is ever prepared to have. And then we hung up.

I really wish it was not goodbye. I really wish it was au revoir. I hope for peace in the end.

The other Mother’s Day

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I was reading that it is never ever St. Patty’s Day on March 17. But, today is March 15, and Patty’s Day it is, the erstwhile day of birth of my old, and not quite sainted mother.

Erstwhile, perhaps, because can you celebrate birthdays when the guest of honor no longer stomps the earth?

So many reasons to think of my mother, Pat, today. Not the least of which is being there for the funeral of M.’s mother. The ceremony, the prayers, the food, the people, the rituals so different. Yet the similarities so deep.

Both M. and I grew up with just one parent. My dad died when I was four. His dad and mom split when he was a kid and then dad died young. Now we are both orphans together.

Like for my mother’s wake, a wave of older people came by for M.’s mother. So many people identifying as friends, explaining who they were, where they lived, how lives intersected. For both women, the presence of these mourners spoke to affections and warmth and relationships that we, as children, did not know. Shading into depth the women we knew only as mom, but they knew as a friend.

Comic relief: My favorite old broad who came by to say goodbye to M.’s mom, walked up to him, and I’m told said to him, “If you don’t remember who I am, I will slap your face.”

I hope a long line of people drops by my remaining body to call me friend in the end. Of course, I hope more to have more years of partying it up and making and having friends.

M. and I have talked about our mothers. It seems to me that they were both gentle people bruised by unexpected circumstances and tragedies big and small. Each woman was shy and reserved, sometimes too passive, sometimes just bound to get the smallest piece of pie, shortest straw or dealt the unlucky hand.

Each of them squirreled away pennies, sacrificing their own wants, for their kids.

Consequently, M. and I each rail against an imagined fate, louder, stronger, more resolute than the women who raised us. We don’t save money for cake tomorrow. We buy cake today and enjoy it with gusto.

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Holy shit, I wanted this one to be funny and light. As the kids say — FAIL.

Here’s the manifesto to put the morose and melodramatic bullshit behind.

Every month of March, every year, hell every freaking day, I want to remember and climb on the hand offered to me. Our mother’s didn’t die in vain. Our mother’s didn’t live lives of privation for no reason. Precisely because our mother’s didn’t have every opportunity and real life undercut their dreams, we will live ours.

Don’t wait. Don’t stop. Don’t allow worry and anxiety to be roadblocks.

Dream and more importantly act.

Hate your fucking job? Leave.

Landlord sucks? Move.

Tired of the cold and snow? Relocate.

Today, and I hope every day, if I don’t fucking laugh at least once, I haven’t done it right.

For both our mother’s, who weren’t given the chances to do it all, we will try to cram in the fun we can in the days we have left. Misery is not an option.

Finnegan’s wake without the whiskey

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I’d make a terrible anthropologist, I think. Rather than finding the unique and reportable, my thesis would be “people, right, yeah, pretty much the same.”

As the crow, or maybe a toucan or something tropical flies, I’m sitting just under 10,000 miles from my birthplace. All of the funerals I’ve attended have been in New England. The magic has been brought mostly by courtesy of your Roman Catholic holy and apostolic traditions, with the occasional Protestant mass for flavor.

This time around on another continent I was a newly minted family member, daughter-in-law and wife of the elder son. Just as with every service I’ve ever been, it all started with the family convergence, phone calls, the bustle of professional death handlers, friends, neighbors and relations. And in the ensuing afternoons and evenings, something like a party.

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I’m not James Joyce. And, I don’t speak Hokkien, Hainanese, Cantonese, Bahasa Malay or any other tongue piping up among the crowd. So I don’t have any stories to tell.

A bottle of whiskey wasn’t in the coffin. Nor was it stolen and sent around the crowd. No one evilly plotted a cannibal meal. And, no spare whiskey and beer were passed among the crowd.

Still and all, among the chaos, the scene was familiar. Old friends and extended family wandering in and out. Reminiscing about who was where when and what ever happened and how did everyone get so old. It was a wake, just the same as “visiting hours” in the U.S. Like in a not so distance past in my old neighborhood the guest of honor lay quietly among candles and prayers inside the house. And catered food and handshakes stayed up on the porch.

What a week, what a world

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There is absolutely too much to write about.

Saturday was a big bash. Along side local friends, some of my family and some particularly fabulous friends got into planes to celebrate with us. From different places on at least three continents and both the east and west coasts, a bunch of others tuned in to watch us actually do the “I dos.”

The week started on a high, and it ended on a low. Morgan’s mom, Leong Fik Yak, finished her stay on this mortal coil. She was a try gentle and warm soul. We are currently participating with more and different family on sending her off to celestial planes.

When my uncle died, Morgan experience for the first time how the Catholics say goodbye. Now, I am Margaret Mead, trying to stay out of the way, make the right motions and help however I can with the Buddhist way.

For now, my only observation is Catholics and Buddhists both have chants, bells and incense. There is time for old family, friends and associates to talk and remember and in remembering it’s part party with the guest of honor quietly in state.

Maybe I will sort out something wise and insightful about the human condition and death. For now, I’ll go with the flow.

It ought to be a holiday

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Every year, well more frequently than that, I think about my mother. I think about her on the Ides of March, the portentous day in which Brutus stabbed Caesar and my mother was born. Not the same year, mind you, as I’m not tapping this out on my ancient Roman computer.

Actually, it was portent upon portent for old Pat. She was born on the Ides of March the year of the stock market crash for the Great Depression. She was meant for great things.

So, another anniversary rolls around.

I like to remember the ways in which Pat stood out from the crowd. Or in my warped and selfish and self-absorbed brain, the ways in which Pat affected me and stood out from the crowd.

Today’s memory is tied to the current season of my manual toil. OK, typing and sitting at a desk isn’t manual labor, but some days it grinds you just the same. I got callouses on my tappy type finger tips.

At work these days the pesky little papers (now computer files) that once a year worker drones planet-wide, or at least U.S.-wide, bemoan are due — the annual performance reviews. The neat little report where you and your boss get to write out how you’re “meeting expectations” and otherwise doing what a cog does when one is employed.

You say to yourself right about now, I can hear you breathing and thinking, you say, but how does that relate to Pat. Surely, she was not your boss, apart from the sense in which we are all subordinates to our mothers.

Well, here’s the thing. I might be one of the only people rambling around that has written their own performance “self reports” for the decades that I have been employed as a grown up adult, who got their start years before they were allowed to work.

Pat, enmeshed in some heavy duty politics and just short of Brutus-like backstabbing in my town’s school system, turned her typewriter over to her precocious daughter one fine day and asked for her help in word smithing her review. She had to describe her classroom contributions, and since she floated around helping learning disabled kids within other people’s classrooms, she had to talk about that too.

By nature, she was a mix of fierceness on some opinions and topics (ahem, Catholic molesters) and shy reticence on a whole lot more. She complained to those nearest and dearest, but she was way too polite to complain to anyone or anything with any authority, including a cashier at a convenient store. (Although, the school teacher might pop out at any time if said cashier couldn’t do the math to make simple change.)

Real humility, not the false stuff that often passes for humility, was part of her core, and she could not find any words at all to describe what she contributed. She knew what she did, but she couldn’t spin it to advertise her brand.

I could do that for her and with some nudging to not get carried away with florid prose extolling her greatness, together we spoke about her patience with kids in the classroom. Her vast experience. Her gentle but persistent nature. Her true and deep caring for children and learning and education. Her mastery of basic skills and pedagogies and learning methods. That she could set and meet goals until the sun rose and set a hundred years.

She was a champion to a whole lot of kids fumbling in classrooms with dyslexia, a host of other syndromes and disorders, and simply poor study skills.

Pat was also a drill sergeant. No misplaced modifiers, misspellings (which I incidentally just mistyped), prepositions dangling at a sentence’s end, no math not shown happened on her watch. For the stuff where there is a right and wrong way to do it, by god she was going to teach you the right way or die trying.

All of her skills, the ones that made strangers come up to me in high school and beyond and say they knew my mother and that she was great, they were in her heart effortlessly as a teacher.

But, she did suck at telling management what was up. I helped do that for her. I was a kid and it was a fun writing assignment and in truth I had no feel for the politics or fear of the consequences, so I could write without inhibition. She could not. It became an annual ritual in her later years of work.

Now, about a thousand years later, or maybe just shy of that, I have to do the same kind of reports for myself.

So, I sit at my desk and return to the game that I had done at my mother’s typewriter. I right fast and furiously, and I have learned how to advertise my own brand but temper it with a soupçon of self-reflection. I allow for the things I do not know, and I hammer out my strengths. I find the notes of self improvement that are surmountable and demonstrate my good attitude.

I try very hard not to by cynical. But, for that to happen, I do not dwell, I do not agonize. If I spend over 15 minutes on the thing, at about 10 minutes in, I walk away until my head is in the game and I give it only 5 minutes more.

It’s impossible to tell your boss that in addition to my 25-30 years of doing the things for myself, I might have done 10 years more. We breeze through the things, the virtual online handshake is done and another year will pass.

And my highest proof of mastery were the words of my attorney, the one I hired on account of my work at the time not really feeling the love, the labor lawyer who helped me out of a jam. That besuited gentleman pulled all of my Human Resources records out of the belly of the employment beast, and he went through each paper with the loving care that an hourly fee will get you.

Upon sage and learned analysis, he proclaimed that while many a person had come through his office doors with a sad story to tell about the workplace, almost all of them had some marks in their permanent records. But my file, the years of reviews and meetings, they were a pristine and glimmering example. He said in all his years of lawyering he had never seen such stellar performance reviews.

Trying to get back on the horse, or some other cliche

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I’ve been mildly and definitely unhealthily obsessed with one person recently. Mostly because she’s an idiot, or boring, or possibly worst of all, both.  
 
I like to play a game in my head — would you rather be stupid or boring? I’ve always wanted to be stupid. Many people might say I have undoubtedly succeeded in that goal.  
 
Imagine the happiness of always living up to people’s expectations, given that they don’t expect much. But, boring, dull, plodding, conventional, plain, run-of-the-mill? Where’s the fun in that?  
  
My obsession has extorted me to act more “normal.” Apart from having my itty bitty feelings hurt, seriously, I did, I kind of just wanted to punch her. It’s a curse, I think, that mainstream folks who meet me feel compelled to give me solid advice like be more normal. Apart from missing the obvious note that I don’t have any desire to be like them, they want me in their camp.  
 
Why? I can’t imagine. I’d truly be a shitty foot soldier in their regimental army.  
 
I had an epiphany brought on this week not just by the woman over whom I obsess, but an equal character who was giving M. unsolicited advice. The aha moment was that a lot of people around our age suck. They suck in a very specific, very boring way.  
  
Here’s the breakdown. 20 year olds, your average young adult set, know how to have fun. Pretty much, drinking, fucking, eating when theyre hungry, getting their first apartments, hanging out, learning how shit works. They are annoying as fuck, because they think they have a lot of answers that they in fact don’t, but they got the fun part down or at least know how to try new things.  
 
Early, mid-30 somethings are maybe a sweet spot. The douchebaggery of 20+ has mellowed, but the going out on a Thursday night, because that’s when the weekend starts, or renting a vacation cabin with relative strangers is still doable. Plus, by then with a tad more security and disposable income, there are many more fun things to do.  
  
And, the seniors, so fucking many of them now are partying it up like life really does begin at 60. I know someone who got her first tattoo at 65. Other folks are taking college classes, traveling, selling the family homestead to keep it light and flexible. I’ve had some great conversations that basically have the subtext of fuck it, I’m old, it’s now or never and let the assholes judge.  
 
What’s missing in that chronology are my peers — lets say maybe hovering around 40 on up to 50 something. Sweet Jesus on a Popsicle stick, we, as a demographic, suck.  
 
The object of my obsession fits neatly in the group. She has a list of foods longer than Wilt Chamberlain’s dick plus another 7 feet that she can’t eat. They are fattening, bad for you, too inorganic, stomach upsetting, have too many ingredients, weird, unknown, new, contain alcohol, cholesterol, fat, sugar, chemical additives, and are gassy, bloated, rich, poor, and just out and out bad. The only thing safe is salad – no dressing – and a cracker washed down with water no ice. Followed by a sliver so narrow of dark chocolate that more calories are burnt in the shaving of the morsel than gained in the eating. Further calories are burnt in the endless recriminations and self-flagellation for tempting the fat fates with such a taste.  
 
I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about someone else’s food hang ups, but by god I wish those people so obsessed would shut the fuck up about it. You know what I don’t need when I’m grabbing an afternoon Diet Coke and M&Ms? Someone reminding me I’m going to die.  
  
 
Better yet, maybe with the bloat and the chemicals, I’m actually puffed up enough like a marshamallow that I’m not as wrinkled as the sour pusses of my peers. Chemical preservatives keep me young. That and the blood of virgins.  
 
I guess the whole point is, why are the miserable, dull folks in the world trying to enlist? They should all stay home and frown over a careful, tepid broiled chicken breast. It leaves more for me and my kind to enjoy 
 

Not writing and writing

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I guess it’s summertime and I’m busy going on adventures, like whitewater rafting, walking to the beach and barbecue. And, of course, there is my most recurring adventure, sitting on the couch and getting fat.

I’ve had some ideas for things to write here. I could write about the full on anxiety and trembling I felt whitewater rafting when the full force of my first experience on the Nile came back and I started feeling irrationally and overwhelming phobic. I could write about Dr.Laura and how I learned about her epic fail from a chat with a homeless dude named Larry in Berkeley.

I could write about my experience concocting an evening outing for work that turned into my own little amusing performance art piece in which with a little help from some friends I brought a crowd with some uptight and overeducated folks to a veritable hippie street party. I could write about the mundane, or maybe the way in which I still feel like an abused spouse in the workplace, even as I only get positive reinforcement in this job.

Or, I could do what I’ve been doing and not write.

For over a year, I’ve been naval gazing and hang wringing and other body part manipulating in a pretty unspectacular, boring cave of writer’s block. Someone asked me seriously, genuinely, strongly why do I write, or more why do I feel compelled to write. Further, he told me I didn’t have to write and I certainly didn’t have to validate myself through self-flagellation at a keyboard.

It struck home, and I haven’t gotten full on unstuck. Combine that with the sinking feeling that the books I loved as a little girl are a technology with a cloudy future. Being an author was never an easy row to hoe, now with the state of publishing it seems worse than dirt farming.

This week, or more last week, though, I was reminded by life one of the reasons I do want to write. Not to be all cliched and philosophical at the same time, but sharing stories is kind of what it’s always been about humanity wise.

A good friend, someone who I feel would have been a great friend had I not fled Boston, lost her mom. For the past year or so, she’s been keeping house and cooking meals and taking care of her mother however she needed. She emailed me a few days before when her mom was in a bad state after a stroke and then a series of strokes. The inevitable happened on Thursday.

Now, on the side of the country I left, she’s gone through the busy flurry of wakes and a funeral and having folks back to the house and making food and eating and storing food. No doubt, she’s functioning on autopilot and in the coming months she’ll feel intensely the change in the universe from not having to worry any more about her mother’s fragility and missing the place where her mother used to be.

I have the kernel of the idea about my mother, Pat, and me, and a few shallow chapters on my ‘puter, because story telling keeps us sane and keeps us knowing we aren’t alone. Not only would I get to exercise my demons by writing them down, but just maybe a reader would dig it and breath a little easier.

I can’t do anything to help my friend out but talk on the phone. I told her about my small smoking binge for the months that followed Pat’s funeral. It felt OK when she, having quit years ago, told me she and her brothers had been having a smoke on the stoop. For both of us, I think, there’s something cathartic in knowing someone else did the exact same thing.

The other day, I took a day off of work for no reason and with no plan. Ultimately, I wandered the aisles of Target and Daiso, a Japanese store with housewares and junk. It was relaxing to have absolutely no agenda. I came home with new underpants and various things for the house.

I laughed out loud in one department of a department store. A middle-aged woman and an older woman, crooked from osteoporosis, stood side by side in front of a shelf if empty bins. The older woman was examining a little plastic storage bin, carefully considering the possible purchase. The other woman, who really could only have been her daughter, questioned why she could possibly need it.

“You never can have enough storage, you know.”

The retort was quick and exasperated, “Yes, you can. Especially when you have no where to put it.”

I smiled a friendly head nod, as I passed by them in the aisle.

The dialog and its tone were so familiar, so comfortable. Among friends and strangers, I’m sensitive to all of the daughters and all of the mothers living through the last phase of their relationships. It’s a tough rite of passage, frustrating and rewarding.

On top of losing my mother, there are also a thousand ways in which I remember the Pat I did know and have in my life. I almost wrote on Twitter the other day that I can’t pass doll house furniture without quashing the urge to pick something up for her.

I wish now I could get some of her inspired and surprising creativity.

For example, I know she could help with another thing I could write about–a friend with breast cancer. She’s an unlikely friend, in that we’re not contemporaries (in fact she’s the same age as my uncle) and lives in Washington, DC. Still and all, we are long-distance coworkers who have swapped stories and realized some kinship, including strong-charactered mothers, and sharp, wicked senses of humor that have caused almost as much trouble as laughter.

As the contemporary of my aunt and uncle and from the generation about which Gail Collins writes, she’s straight up first generation feminist and solidly liberal. The pink ribbons, pink everything else and what Barbara Ehrenreich bitches about for its infantilism leaves her flat.

As does the notion that she should be a docile and placid patient, as opposed to the pugnacious fighter in her soul. I pity the poor oncologist or radiologist who doesn’t take the time to explain enough.

I want to send her something, especially post surgery and going into her second chemotherapy treatment, when she’s talking wig shopping and whether to go down to the army base for a $10 head shave from the barber there (apparently that’s a real option). If Pat were here, we could brainstorm. No doubt she’d come up with an off-the-wall scheme or some bizarre conglomeration of bargains and nonsense. Maybe she’d loan her a hat.

At gift-giving moments like this one, I always imagine the crazy, ragtag, assembled over weeks gift basket, which in my memories was colossally large, that Pat put together for a retiring colleague.

She didn’t leave behind blueprints for how to do such projects proud. I need those skills and those plans now, with one friend sick and another grieving.

At the same time, I need to remember all of the fights and frustration, big and small, with Pat or with life, including all of the many indignities she described as holding her back in life. If I remember the thousand things that made her great and the thousand things that made her troubled, i might have a story. I definitely would have a reason to not become complacent,

My life ain’t bad, But, somewhere there is still a gnawing. Maybe the words will escape some day, late to help my friends, but in time for some one else.