06.20.09
Posted in Home Life, Mom, The days at 3:23 pm by Beau
I’ve spent the weekend thinking of friend who lost his mother to cancer this week and who is sitting at the funeral right now next to his partner and the rest of the family. His partner lost his mother several years ago to cancer also. When I think back now, I now have a spate of six years, really since my own mother died, where a friend has lost a parent each year and while I initially thought “how strange” to myself, now that I’ve really looked at it, I guess maybe it isn’t so much strange as just part of our lives as we’re getting older.
I don’t know if there is a right or expected time to start losing our parents. I would have said in my early to mid thirties that I would have expected people to start losing their grandparents. I lost two and have my very last grandmother still around and kicking which I know I’ve been lucky to be able to say and appreciate each conversation and time I spend with her. But now that I’m on the countdown to 40, I know I have to be more expecting of eventual life events. I was even telling Jeff the other day that on my run I was thinking about the next ten years of our lives together and how, statistically speaking, this will be the decade when things start breaking and falling off of us. I could realistically expect one of us to have a heart scare if not an outright cath and stent for a blocked artery. I think we’re now in the window for certain kinds of leukemia and more uncommon organ-based cancers. On the plus side, I feel more and more confident that I’m finally out of the woods for testicular cancer which I was at a higher risk for and had been expecting anytime after I turned 25, since I’m a black cloud kinda guy.
As I’m big on clich´s, “I guess if it’s not one thing it’s another” suits me just as well as anything else. Pithy, for sure, but true, none the less.
And yet my thought still go back to Jay and the passing of his Mom. This one a steep and quick decline from pancreatic cancer that took her so quick I’m still not sure anyone can make sense of it. Jeff’s dad was that way too…three weeks from diagnosis of lung cancer to being gone. In some ways, I can’t even fathom what it takes for someone to gird themselves to that kind of decline because unlike a sudden accident, I think people probably tell themselves and hold out for improvement or at least more time. I thought it was amazing to watch Jeff with his dad the day after the diagnosis go in and settle up the account, making sure his Dad knew exactly where he stood in Jeff’s life. Jeff had a clear idea that there was no time to wait, even with a long-term diagnosis and that days are lived as days. I was luckier, some would say, I had six months with my Mom before she passed away and five and a half of them were really good months and so, in my typical fashion, I stammered and hemmed-n-hawed over the months, dribbling out the same truing of accounts with her, never denying we had limited time but in some kind of denial that there would always be a tomorrow to say and do more.
And so we’re here today. More sorrow and loss and now, rather than an aberration, it seems like maybe more of a right of passage for those of us getting a little bit older and moving from our young adult hood into whatever this next phase is (Early middle age? Certainly not!).
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08.11.08
Posted in Home Life, Mom, The garden at 7:20 pm by Beau
Jeff and I have a spot in our backyard that has a particular circular pattern. This was the result of an above ground pool that came with the house when we bought it back in 2001. Two brutal winters in a row finished the pool off and we opted for a year-round hot-tub with deck rather than put a pool back in. The spot remained bare for several years, then we put the garden in but there was still a faint circular foot print that I’ve always wanted to do something with.
Two years ago, I planted some bee balm (mondara didyma Aquarius) along the hill which has spread nicely and filled in a crescent-shape, giving us the first hint of something else, something bigger that might make use of the existing pattern. We’ve also been focused on making the beds in the back yard friendly for butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds while trying to keep deer uninterested. So this weekend the ideas for the spot came together and we came up with the idea of a memory garden, filled with flowering plants to draw in my mother’s favorite butterflies and hummingbirds but also to give us some focus against the garden. So we put in a circular path of stones around a central stone and then continued the crescent of bee balm around the parameter. We have a bronze bird-bath/sundial combo coming for the center and lots more salvia, milk weed, bee balm, and butterfly bushes to fill in. I’ve also got creeping thyme seeds coming to sow between the stones because frankly, the idea of buying a ton of 3″ pots of established plants, cutting and dividing them up to stuff between the stones sounds perfectly horrific.
But the little thing that will only be significant to Jeff and I, and the reason we’re calling it our Memory Garden, is because we’re totally going there: we’re having a few stones engraved with significant dates in our life together: when we first met, when we first boffed one another (eerrr…see “when we first met”), our domestic partnership, the day we bought our home, and now in late September, our wedding date. We’re not typically schmaltzy boys but when we apply ourselves, we do it whole-heartedly which I sorta love.
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06.17.08
Posted in Being Better, City Life, Health and well-being, Mom, Vanity at 10:54 am by Beau
I turned 38 this past Sunday and though wishful thinking because of the potential hot twin boffing we could do and video for x-tube, I am not his twin. Though in general, I’d regard 38 as one of those birthdays that is a blurry slide into 40, this one is interesting to me for several reasons. First and foremost, my father, when he was this age, had a debilitating brain aneurysm that quite literally shattered and change irrevocably the lives of many, many people. I’m certainly not pointing this out because I’m all doom and gloom about the task of actually trying to live through 38 unscathed but rather, the stangeness of now being the age of my father and being able to see for the first time how much of his life he had in front of him.
At the time of his aneurysm, I was 14 and he was my parent so what did I know about it? Now I have a much different perspective. I’m just starting my life and finding it’s groove. The home life, the home, the man, the work, the friends…all things are really, really good and I can only see better days ahead and I’m sure that is how my Dad must have been too. His masonary business was taking off and he was venturing out into investing into finanicial partnerships that were going to make him even more successful than he had been. He was known for the quality of his work and the integrity of his work ethic. All this ended the moment he blacked out and came crashing down to the sidewalk where a stranger found him. And so there is some heaviness about being 38 that I didn’t quite grasp so fully before. I often think about all the things my Mom I and would talk about now if she was still alive and I think she’d be shocked and pleased at the understanding I’ve come into. I completely get how young they felt and how young at heart they were.
Related, but much more Me!Me!Me! is that idea that at 38, my parents had four sons, 19, 14, 10, and 9. I can’t even begin to fathom having kids and what it means at this age, let alone to have four, two of which were adolesents. Jeff and I are spoiled and rotten and if I don’t get my weekly comics, I’m grumpy and distressed so what did my parents give up so that we could be taken care of? The mind reels. I told Aunt Pam, who spent so much time with my parents along with all the cousins at that time, that the big secret I think I figured out is that not one of them had any clue about parenting and were really no different then I am now at this age…they just had to fake it and make it look like they knew what they were doing. They did a good job, by the way, in that we’re all still alive and kicking and generally happy and most of my cousins and brothers and their families are having their own babies and whatnot so what’s old is new again. Still, my mind reels.
And so 38! I actually had a hard time believing I wasn’t going to be 40 this year and a little disappointed too. I have a total hard-on for the 40+ crowd and don’t even get me started on the hotness of salt-n-pepper hair so to think I still have two years to go is just something else. I’m not the most patient of people but nothing I can do about it other than just continue to enjoy the good days and work on being better.
The whole sha-bang though, was clarified for me this morning, as I was running a practice 5K in the Central Park this morning, getting ready for the real deal NYC Corporate Challange coming up on Thursday. I’m in no way the hotness of him, or him, or him, or her, or the others who continually inspire and push me to pass on the bread at dinner and get up at 5:30 to go running but it’s a good first step for me to run the 5K. I’ve been on the treadmill for months but there isn’t anything like actually running outside and this morning was SPECTACULAR. Cool and low humidity, the sun was out, and I was reminded the very best of NYC is being able to run through Central Park, looking at the museums, and the Dakota, and the Bethesda Fountain and the Jackie O Resevoir, or finding a statue of a crouching panther hidden in the blossoming hydrangeas along the east side of the Met that I hadn’t ever seen before. I was just banging out a fantastic run when I totally got cruised by a hot bearded guy running the opposite direction. My gaydar pinged so hard I just HAD to turn and glance over my shoulder at him one more time and totally caught him doing the same thing! I’m 38 and I still get cruised. I mean, please. How much better could today have been? Perfection or endorphins, it totally doesn’t matter cause I’ll take the cloud I’m rocking on right now.
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03.31.05
Posted in Mom at 4:33 am by Beau
Two years ago today, my mother succumbed to her metastatic lung cancer that had been diagnosed six months earlier. I was fortunate in that I was set up at work to be able to take a leave of absence and essentially move back to Ohio to care for her those last six weeks. I look back on that time as a whole, especially those last six weeks, and realize how much of a blur it all is but thankfully, I was able to blog through it so I have some uncorrupted memories. I still look back at that time and in a strange way, for the sadness and loss that it was, it was also something so significant that it couldn’t help but change who I was; in subtle ways but change none the less. I’m better because of it and I guess that is the silver lining on the whole thing.
Now we’re two years out and I have to confess that this anniversary sort of crept up on me. I’m otherwise engaged and focused with work and school and vacation then all the sudden today was here. It wasn’t a bad day and it wasn’t even as particularly sad in the way that last year seemed to be. I miss her every day and especially in the last couple of days with my promotion, I really wanted her to be around to be excited for me. I know wherever she is (and she’s everywhere) that she knows and I know she would have been excited for me but it is a pale shade of really having her here and hearing her on the phone as I told her what happened. But really, that’s more about me and what I need which is sort of selfish, really.
It would be impossible for me to not draw some comparison between her death and the horrifically drawn out ordeal of the Terry Schiavo case. There was some headline a few days ago from her mother pleading, “Don’t let my daughter die of thirst!!” which absolutely turned my stomach at the hyperbole and drama of this whole thing. It actually infuriated me that the dying of Terry Schiavo has been so overly-exploited and twisted. I thought of all those people being arrested for trying to sneak water to her and keep her alive under any circumstances and all for what? For God’s will? The case is obviously much more complex then anything I can say here but ultimately, I think you just have to be a first-person witness to the dying to know what is and is not true and to know that sometimes the hardest choices to make are learning about one’s own selfishness and how to overcome that to let go when the time has come.
For my family and myself, when Mom was diagnosed and quickly decided that she was going to turn down chemo and radiation, palliative treatments that would have possibly extended her life for a bit longer than six months, it was the hardest choice she ever had to make and one that was equally hard for our family to accept but I never once thought that my Mom had ever given up. She never once rolled over and let her impending death overcome her will to live. She did however recognize and embrace the idea that we all have our time to live and die and sometimes you just take the time left and make the best of it. It was something that even saying I admire doesn’t do it justice by half.
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09.23.04
Posted in Mom at 8:18 am by Beau
My mother visited me last night; a feat in and of itself since she’s been dead now for a year and a half. I’ve surprised even myself since she died because I’m about the only one I know of who she hasn’t come calling on in one way or another. I would have though of anyone, I’d be the one who would most fully feel and see my mother in the everyday waking world since I think I’m so open and accepting of that kind of non-logic but in reality, when Amber left the building, she left the building. Even when I went looking for her, she wasn’t there. I was beginning to resign myself to a life without her, even in my dreams, feeling somehow my wiring wouldn’t let me pick her up, even though in my mind, I was ready and willing for however she wanted to appear. Leave it to her to pull a trick like last night when I didn’t even realize I was dreaming or having the visit.
Though the dream is twisty and convoluted in the way dreams usually are with people melting into others and strange, cryptographic symbolism that I can’t figure out (the bridesmaids in her wedding were all told the theme was “greed” and came with soot on their faces and bobbed hair cuts with the ends dyed blue), the important part to realize was that I didn’t know I was dreaming which is rare for me. I can usually tell when I’m wrapped up in a dream, though I still can’t do much about it and suffer plenty with running in place scenarios and those kinds of things. But last night I was enjoying her wedding, her fourth one, and to a previous long-time boyfriend who in her living years she never married and who, coincidentally, died several months after her from the same lung cancer she did. Yes I found it strange she was dressed in periwinkle since she’s always been more of a violet-lover but the wedding was nice and everyone was happy and nothing seemed out of place. I spoke to her afterwards as she was sitting with her new husband, asking where they were going for their honeymoon. She told me Marti Gras and that’s when something changed for me. I told her that Marti Gras was in late February or early March and it’s only September. Was she sure they were going to Marti Gras? She couldn’t be going to Marti Gras because that doesn’t make sense and then the dream started to melt and she just looked at me and smiled and I seemingly woke up…on a train with my Dad. I was still trying to shake off the confusion about the honeymoon but I was even more confused as to how I’d gotten on a train and where we were going and how I couldn’t remember anything in the past. It was disconcerting in a way that had me starting to panic because my Dad just couldn’t answer me. I kept asking him how I got there and he kept asking me how I couldn’t know, so I got up and started to walk the train aisles and that’s when I found my Mom, standing around one of the corners, looking like she was waiting for me, and that’s when I knew she was gone and I was being visited. She looked the same as she always did to me, petite, tanned, thick, wavy brown hair and she was smiling.
“But you’re gone,” I said.
“Oh honey,” she snickered like the joke was on me. “It’s ok, you’ll get over it.”
And then she put on a big, wide brimmed straw hat with a purple bow tied around it and walked off down the train. Strangely, she’s not really a hat person.
I woke up just as the alarm was going off this morning, feeling like I’d gotten the best kind of visit because it wasn’t sorrowful and it wasn’t full of despair or relief or even the feeling that it was other-worldly. It felt like her playing a fun little trick: let’s show Beau something he’d like only to be ruined by my anxious curiosity to make sure everything was right and sensible, blowing the illusion away to reveal my Mom, as she had always been: humor and insight and exasperation with my never-ceasing anxiety fully intact. She always thought it was funny and a little sad at how worked up and over-wrought I’d become over the littlest, stupidest things. I was much too high-strung for her but of course, she smoked a lot of pot so a lot of people seemed that way to her, I think. Regardless, the visit was a pleasure for me. One of those rare treasures to put away and look at every now and again if for no other reason, then to remind me I’m not really as cut off from her as I think.
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04.18.04
Posted in Mom at 2:00 am by Beau
Of all the senses I like, and honestly I like them all, it’s my sense of smell I’m most dazzled by. Have you seen my nose? It’s huge and not much goes by that I don’t end up inhaling. In the city, I was ripe for pollution-induced allergies which miraculously, but unsurprisingly, cleared up after we moved to Bashert. I’m more responsive to smells and more likely to be knocked for a loop by a sudden smell triggering a deep memory than by just about anything else which I believe supports research’s supposition, showing over and over again, the powerful, synergistic connection between smell and memory.
Today was the first 70+ degree day and it was loaded with the smell of spring, finally. The cold, wet days we’ve had over the last month have kept most of the trees from greening up though the grass is getting verdant and the daffodils are up. They don’t have the sense of Job but then again, nothing kills them and the deer won’t touch them to save their winter-starved lives so they obviously know what they’re doing. While I was suppose to spend most of the day indoors reading about organizational behavior and management for school, eventually I had to close up the books and move outside to walk around the yard, kick around the limbs that need to be picked up and rifle through the flowerbeds, dreaming of what should go where and figure out how I’m going to manage all the work that needs to get done.
It was finally walking back to the house late this afternoon, pulling in deep fistfuls of warm, afternoon spring air that the memory struck me like a thunderbolt. Mom. If there was ever an Earth Mother/Wiccan/Mother Nature, it was my Mom. She was a woman of Spring and Summer unlike any other I’ve known. Really powerful and connected during those seasons…really alive and in her own way, verdant. She loved taking the whole day to mow her yard and putter around the flowerbeds or just sit out back and soak it in and get sun-kissed. The day I missed her most was the day after she died last year; an unseasonably warm, sunny, early spring day we spent outside on the back porch of her house with my family, flying kites and just really, really grieving in a way that at the time didn’t feel like grieving at all. It was one of those unbearable days that looking back was tinged with a wonderful, deep river of emotion that I find so hard to share, usually. It’s amazing to me how in that one instant of being outside this afternoon, I had a deep but immediate connection with Mom again. That was in and of itself as powerful and exhilarating as just being able to enjoy the first real day of spring. I live for days like today but I think everyone knows what I’m talking about. You only get that extraordinary New Spring exhilaration once or twice a year after being literally beaten down from the drawn out, gray days of a late, wet winter. I completely needed mine right now, today, so how weirdly, wonderfully, perfect.
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03.30.04
Posted in Mom at 10:41 am by Beau
I was debating even posting because as I explained to Jeff last night on the ride home, I think I’ve beat this dead horse to death (ba-dum-bump) but of course, time goes by and today ends up being the one-year anniversary of my Mom’s death.
I miss her every day but honestly, while today was starting off OK, I figured I needed to give her a little more attention so I threw myself into all the writings from last year and now I’m all weepy looking at her picture. There is nothing more to be said then that…it’s a weepy thing, even still.
But she would have been the last one to get all squishy about it, believe me, so I’m trying to get on with my day and plan for a little stone unveiling at the end of April for friends and family to honor her memory. Of course to really celebrate her memory, we’d all have to stand around drinking that piss-water she called wine from its box and getting high on home-grown weed, but I think we’re going to go a bit more casual than all that this go around…at least for the sake of the more delicately-inclined of the family.
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03.17.04
Posted in Mom at 2:32 pm by Beau
It seems almost impossible, I know, that pretty much all of a year has passed since my Mom died. I managed to save all the entries I’d written during her illness from last year and everyday I check in to see what I wrote, what new horrible thing was happening to her and to see if I had any hint at how short the days were really becoming. Tomorrow will be what I consider the beginning of the very fast slide out of this world for her. She’d already been diagnosed with tumor metastasis to her brain and we’d been doing a week of radiation to her hip for possible bone mets when she seized up in her chair that afternoon during an episode of “M*A*S*H” in front me and my brother Matt and his family. This is what I wrote last year:
“I don’t think I can imagine witnessing one single worse acute event other than a grand mal seizure. A full out body-rattling, electrical storm that winds the muscles of the body so tight in constrictures you’d think you could just about hear bones getting ready to crack, not to mention the complete look of utter horror in their face with the eyes rolled back and the mouth drawn up into some wicked, maniacal grimace of what looks to be mind-blowing pain. I’ve had years of experiences with seizure patients and at first, it’s one of those episodes which causes you to lose complete control of yourself and start yelling for someone to do something, anything, just to make it stop. That’s the very problem with seizures: they are completely, utterly unstoppable once they start up and there is nothing you can do about it. They run their course and you’re left standing by the wayside, watching. In the ER, we’d roll the patient to the side in case they started to vomit so they didn’t aspirate and choke and we’d give them some meds, put them on some oxygen which is all secondary symptomatic treatment and not doing anything to limit the seizure time. You just learn to not panic and realize you have to ride out the storm, hard as it may be.
I mention this because, inevitably, my mother experienced the first seizure of her metastatic brain tumors while sitting in her chair watching “M*A*S*H” yesterday afternoon. Her leg started kicking uncontrollably which she had just started to mention to me and to which I immediately knew what it was before it washed over her totally, causing her first to clutch her chest and scream the most harrowing shriek you hope never to hear anyone ever let loose and then went complete rigid with that horrific grimace of shear fright. She did the whole deal, turning blue by the end of the thing from her inability to breath and literally, all I could do was sit there and hold her hand and wait for it to be done. I hadn’t done that kind of seizure care in a long time, but it was the calmness of just holding her hand, calling, “Mom, we’re here” just sort of popped out of nowhere. Of course I had that voice screaming in my head to do something, ANYTHING, but I also had this really strange, calm voice put its hand on my shoulder and say, “if this is it, then it’s ok” and that felt alright too. Unfortunately, my youngest brother and his wife and two little boys had just stopped over right before this whole thing launched into orbit and there isn’t anything like trying to be available to a room full of people all at once. My brother, God’s most gentle, soft-hearted, soulful dad ever, thought that Hell itself had just erupted in the middle of the living room and was dragging Mom away in front of him. I know he and his beautiful wife will never forget that image for the rest of their days and that’s a sorrowful thing added to the bank of misfortune that clouds their lives anyway.
I say all this for this reason; I know anyone and everyone who’s following this whole thing has been thinking and praying and hoping for whatever is appropriate to hope for in this situation. I’m telling this to show the story moves on. This is where we are now and we move forward, quicker than I thought. It’s hard to explain but my new mantra for each day, to make each day count is “time grows short” and I can manage with that.
As it turns out, we had less than two weeks left which even then and now looking back was a blessing. She was literally well and walking one week, wheel-chair bound the next and dead two weeks later. That’s a slicked down slide if I’ve ever heard one. By this time last year, I’d already painted her bedroom a strangely comforting but saddenly infuriating shade of lilac and lavender. I’d scrubbed her floors by hand with a brush almost every day and I’d baked what was probably my 15th or 16th loaf of bread because I was so powerless to do anything else.
It’s a cliché to say how the time has flown over the last year but I can say, more truthfully than ever before, that’s exactly the whole of it. The days simply melted away without her and now we’re circling her death’s year-anniversary. It’s been a year that has been gearing up for me to get back up and start doing again so that’s what I’m into. Her estate is coming to a close, finally, and her grave stone is ordered and should be ready in May and those were the last things I’d been holding onto not really wanting to let them go but knowing sometimes, you just have to call it a day and make do. And there is some REALLY good family news coming down the pike which makes the timing seem on the sweeter end but still bittersweet, none-the-less along with the day to day fizz of all of us waking up and shaking off the long, cold winter. Spring is coming, things get green, the world turns like always.
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