Diary 11/19/20

Plan: Derived from the noun Plan in Old French meaning diagram or drawing as for a garden or building. That was likely derived from the Latin adjective Planus meaning a flat, even plane.

Most of the time we are consciously or unconsciously busy making plans. What am I doing today? What am I wearing? What am I eating? Who am I interacting with? What am I doing on the weekend? We have impulses, desires, and thoughts, and then take step by step actions to bring our plans to fruition. We start with an even plane and build on top of that.

We are not used to considering that even the simplest of our plans now must be seen as a potential life or death issue. What we used to do has become interwoven with a new reality of the silent, invisible, and potentially deadly virus that is wreaking havoc on our lives. Where we got our food, where we used to buy our shoes, who cares for our children, who we used to hang out and work with, and how and where we found our relaxation and pleasures have all been charged with being directly responsible to our own health and that of others. Our planning skills are being tested over and over as the small daily decisions we make may mean having to trust others or having them trust us in order to be safe.

My family made plans to be together for Thanksgiving and for my older daughter’s baby celebrating his first birthday (and our other birthdays past and present). It seemed very safe for us even coming from three different living spaces. The Care Center where I live is constantly monitored (I just got tested for Covid for the second time in a week) and is very well protected. My older daughter and her family have been hyper vigilant since the beginning of the pandemic and were planning to be in quarantine for 2 weeks prior to driving to pick up my younger daughter in New York State, who was also in quarantine for the event. The travelers had safe houses to stay in for the long drive, would bring their own food, and had safe rest stop measures. Massive planning was coordinated to ensure we would all be as safe as possible.

Although my older daughter is not teaching this semester at Oberlin College, she regularly went into their clinic to get tested for the virus anyway. To her shock, the test she took last week came back positive for Covid! She thought of all her precautions and wondered, how was this even possible? Added to the confusion was the fact she felt fine as did my son-in-law and the baby. She realized it likely happened more than a week ago during a socially distanced and masked connection with another mother when they let their babies interact as babies do. Probably that baby passed it to my grandson who then passed it on to my daughter. Neither family shows any symptoms ten days out from the likely exposure. That is the good news. Thank goodness she had the forethought to take the test.

But- there went The Plan. Like millions of others, we obviously scotched the gathering. We always had the caveat of “it may not work out if Ohio and New York state shut down because of increased cases” but we were thinking of that coming from the outside, not from within our own carefully vigilant ranks. Letting the plan dissolve was a disappointment to us (well, not to the baby). We likely may try to gather again this spring when my daughter is finished teaching the next semester, and the warmer weather means greater outdoor connectivity.

Teaching all Americans to take on the responsibility of life and death planning is a big step, one which millions have been actively discouraged and bullied from even considering. We must go back to a flat, even plane to construct a safe life from there. In order to grapple successfully with the real promise of vaccines and more accessible and accurate testing, our nation is being asked to grow up as soon as possible. It is already too late for hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens. Somehow, we must come together to make a new plan. May we teach and be taught.

Diary 11/3/20

I had just turned seven years old the first time I remember going with my mother to vote. Our new house was a couple of miles down the road from the Wittenberg firehouse in Bearsville, NY, our assigned polling station. I was a shy little girl who had a hard time with my very social mother greeting all of our neighbors. I would bury my head in her skirts, pulling them over my face when she endeavored to introduce me. The wonder was that we were inside the building that housed two huge shiny red firetrucks. This was a place of awesome power because the fire siren went off every day at noon setting off a frenzy of barking, howling dogs up and down the mountain.

The mysterious voting booth, hidden behind the curtain operated by a huge lever, made me think of being backstage inside a puppet theater. Because my mom was a folksinger, I had been behind the scene of many local theaters and was familiar with complicated lighting boards and the big reveal of opening and then closing stage curtains. I was a little disappointed when she swiveled all of those tiny levers above my head and nothing dramatic happened at all. As we left, I helped her pull back the big lever and endured saying goodbye to yet more people lining up for their turn to vote.

Thirty years later, my husband and I built our house up the road from the same firehouse, our new polling station. Twenty plus years after that, in the 2016 election, my husband was installed in Albany Medical Center due to have an operation to biopsy and remove the largest tumor on his frontal lobe due to his just diagnosed small B cell central nervous system lymphoma. The hospital atmosphere exuded the tense nature of the election and was carried in the chatter of patients and their families from both parties. The staff was professionally silent on the subject but there was no doubt as to who we wanted to win.

As Richard was wheeled away, he moaned in cognitive confusion, “I just want to wake up in a country I can live in!” Ironically, my older daughter, suddenly called away from teaching as a professor in North Carolina to meet us in the hospital, did not have time to request an absentee ballot. Richard and I clearly were not going to make it to our local voting place that day, and our younger daughter became the only one in our family to vote- in the firehouse.

When I first moved to Kendal at Oberlin, I was happy to think of rolling down from the Care Center to the main Heiser lounge to vote using the apparatus placed there for the next presidential election. I had my newly minted Ohio ID ready to go. Of course, that is not happening in any retirement facility today. Mail-in ballots were provided to all of us in the Care Center, and they were legally filled out and safely delivered to the appropriate place en masse with plenty of time to be counted in a contentious state like Ohio. Today I feel like echoing Richard’s plaintive cry, “I just want to wake up in a country I can live in.”

Of course, I will wake up tomorrow morning living in this country no matter the outcome of this even more contentious election. I am an American citizen and will stay present on the long road to healing the painful divides and glaring inequities of the land we must learn how to actively and lovingly restore.

10/31/20  

The world issues are scary enough, so I offer this piece instead. I was in my thirties when I first began to lose words as I summoned them. I was leading a movement meditation workshop in Vermont and that perfect metaphor, that evocative description of our work, began to slip away from my grasp as I taught. When the workshop was completed, I don’t think anyone but me realized that my MS had begun to develop cognitive malfunction. I tried to adapt language that did not need a master’s degree to comprehend. I pictured my brain as having tiny Swiss cheese holes growing inside. On the long drive home, I decided that I would go back solely to conducting one on one counseling sessions. I could no longer hold the stress of twenty egos in my awareness when I was struggling to keep my own intact.

Now that I have begun my seventieth year, I have joined everybody else around me in those slippages of short term and working memory loss. Euphemistically called “senior moments”, they are a normal feature of our daily interactions. As I am describing the movie that I saw just last night, the name of that actor is….?? I go into my kitchenette for….??? I am learning to stop right there and observe what happens next.

Invariably I run through a number of reactions. Frustration, anger, fear (strong one), and eventually, humor, all take their turns. I live in an assisted living area and my neighbors are in various stages of cognitive capability. My 100-year-old near neighbor is sharper than I am on many fronts. Other neighbors, in a carefully monitored area, are unable to function on their own at all and are supervised so that they don’t accidentally wander off beyond the secured doors. Dementia is very stigmatized label, and I have a healthy respect that their current condition could easily become mine or yours. At Kendal we are given so much compassionate care with appropriate stimulation tailored to every individual. Of course, millions of people are not so fortunate as those who are privileged to live here. I watched my mother die with AIDs related dementia, and my husband had brain tumors that distorted his participation in the world before he died.

What if I looked at my own forgetful blank spaces as a gift? I am stopped in my tracks to pay attention to my normal juggernaut of words and actions. Why not hold them as a teaching and not a sign of something that is being taken away from me?

What happens if I allow myself to not know” for that instant? I am offered an opportunity to pause, to breathe, to be quiet, to be still, to watch what happens next. Often, I sigh in relief when I stop pushing forward where my thoughts did not want to take me. If I am in conversation with a friend, I can simply say,” I can’t remember the actor’s name, but we liked his work in that other movie we saw together last week”. Or in the kitchenette by myself, I can simply sit on my rollator, breathe, and look around. Then I might spot the cup of tea I made an hour ago still waiting for me. If I can do this without embarrassment or hint of shame, I waste no emotional energy to reheat the tea and take it back to my desk to continue writing.

Awareness is a much more efficient space from which to direct our energies. The lack of memory retrieval can be a gift to unwrap. We can learn to treat ourselves with care, respect, compassion, and self-love, which is perhaps the hardest gift of all to accept. Humor also gives us the distance to accept our aging body/minds. My cousin’s mother use to say, “Oh, I’ll remember alright, but it’s not always the same day delivery.”

Stop Right There

That unarticulated thought

the unshed tear

the catch in your throat

that sigh

was it relief or sorrow for what is lost?

A forgotten name

an unmet appointment

pushing the wrong button

 a failed attempt

There is a way

to hold yourself

in loving acceptance

to be aware

without judgement

for always being exactly who

and what

and where you are

and still to do your best

this is my return address