Not All Haiku Are About Nature—Especially Mine

I’m still using the 5-7-5 syllable structure, which I know is passé, but I like the constraints for now, even though they seem positively wordy by comparison. 


Dog park, 9 pm. 
Lamplit, ice cold, just us two. 
Then—the gate. Why now?

*

No longer a son.
I’ll always be their son, yes.
But a son? A death.

The Way You've Changed My Life

Today I spent several hours with my 95-year-old mother, who has been in hospice care for a

Mom and I doing some leg lifts last summer.

little over a week. We don't know how long she has, but as D. once so aptly said about my father in the weeks before he passed away, she's winding down. 

Ten days ago, as her frail yet strangely resilient and willful body was jostled onto a stretcher (with great care but jostled nonetheless) for the trip from the hospital back to her assisted-living facility—where we would initiate hospice and 24-hour aides—I thought: You'll never have to go anywhere again. This was good news for her, but it made me sad.

These are the words that came out of my mouth to D. yesterday: "She was my first friend, my first love, and my first ally." 

The person I am today is more due to her than anyone else in the world.

This afternoon, as my sister dashed home to attend to some pastries rising in her kitchen and the aide stepped out for a break, I held hands with Mom—lying in her bed, her feet lightly moving under the sheet—while a CD of old musical numbers played. This song filled the silence like a chest expanding:

The way you wear your hat.
The way you sip your tea.
The memory of all that—
No, no, they can't take that away from me.

The way your smile just beams.
The way you sing off-key.
The way you haunt my dreams.
No, no, they can't take that away from me.

We may never, never meet again
On that bumpy road to love
Still I'll always,
Always keep the memory of . . .

The way you hold your knife.
The way we danced until three.
The way you've changed my life.
No, no - they can't take that away from me.
No, they can't take that away from me. 

This Life

André Kertész, "Fork, Paris," 1928

I was listening to a podcast of This American Life as I went for a run in the park tonight, and on this one segment the guy being interviewed was saying that when we finally get it together to confront our parents about past hurts or mistakes years after the fact, we suddenly realize that they're no longer the same people who once hurt or slighted us or whatever. They're just these old, loving, gentle people. So the confrontation isn't at all satisfying.

There's nothing I really feel the need to confront my parents about anymore, even if they were capable of understanding me. I really can't think of anything about Mom (not that she was perfect, but any failing seems minor in retrospect); I can think of two or three biggies about Dad, but I let go of those years ago. Truly, if anything makes me feel grown-up (and lots of things are still capable of making me feel not grown-up at age 50, believe me), it's that these particular things just haven't mattered for so long.

This past Sunday, I sat at one table in the memory-care dining room feeding Mom while my sister sat ten feet away at another feeding Dad. In both their cases, sometimes my parents are able to get the food on a fork or spoon and into their mouths on their own, but usually they're not, whether because of arthritis, dementia, jitters, fatigue, distraction, or any number of other factors. Most nights, when I'm not there, I assume a caregiver assists them. (One evening when I arrived, Dad had eaten all of his dessert but hadn't touched the main course; as soon as I started helping him, he ate every bite.)

If you'd asked me a couple of years ago how I thought it would feel to be spoon-feeding my parents, I couldn't have found the words to describe the fear and anticipated sorrow. Now that the time has arrived, it feels surprisingly easy.

Who doesn't know how to feed someone? Turns out that's something we learn very well without even trying.

Somewhere Where Deep Down Inside of Me I Don't Want to Be

Tonight my brother and sisters and I met to start talking about some of the logistics of arranging a funeral for our father, who has not died yet but is steadily fading. It might be this year, it might be later.

One of his younger brothers passed away a few months ago from Alzheimer's (at 91, Dad is the eldest of eight, and three have died). My two sisters went to the funeral in Buffalo, and when they asked our cousin—whose father was the deceased—how she and her brother had pulled such a nice ceremony together in such a short time, our cousin said, "We didn't. We planned it." That's when my sisters realized we should start thinking about how we'd like to honor both of our parents when the time comes.                                   

Tonight's discussion was a productive one over pizza. I won't go into the details here, but for a conversation I was dreading, it went surprisingly well, even with some laughs.

Last night, I was reading letters Dad wrote to me when I was in college. He didn't write as often as my mother did, but he corresponded throughout my four years away from home, often just a postcard from a museum, sometimes a single-spaced typewritten letter of a page or two.

Here is an excerpt from what appears to be the first full letter I ever received from him, dated September 11, 1979, within the first couple of weeks I was away at college, feeling miserably lonely and out of place. At this point, I'd had more than one tearful phone call with both him and my mother. This letter from Dad exemplifies so much of what made him who he was—the formal language, the highbrow mixed with low, the offering of memories from his own life, the encouragement and generosity, the kid-like interest in the modest pleasures of the world. The rest falls away.

Dear Billy,

Your feelings about finding it hard to adjust sound exactly the way I felt when I first got into the army air force. But it is bound to get better. It is not knowing when that makes it bad. . . .

I found in my own life, adjusting to these unfamiliar and indeed alien situations, that the difference between liking and not liking usually was somehow or other allied to finding a friend or two who bit by bit contributed to removing the alien-ness of the atmosphere. Actually it doesn't have to be a friend—they are rare enough. It can just be a pleasant acquaintance. . . . If it is possible to do so, Philadelphia has many fascinating museums. The Benjamin Franklin Museum is world famous and on a par with the Smithsonian. Give it a try if you can spare the time. Of course it has been a long time since I was there, but I remember with pleasure that they have a little movie house there where for a pittance you could see classic black and white films of historical note. Call them up and ask. . . . 

I noticed that on the back of the Grape Nuts Flakes box there is an offer for a "Yogurt Machine" that looks pretty nice. Would you like that for a gift? It would be a good hobby and you could make your own without a lot of fuss. Things like that fascinate me. As you know. There is an old joke about Philadelphia that W.C. Fields was supposed to have originated. There was a contest in which first prize was a week in Philadelphia. The 2nd prize was two weeks in Philadelphia. I am sure it's not really fair. Sounds like the things people used to say about Buffalo. There is something good and interesting about every place. I used to determine that I would find something to do at some real holes where I was on TDY (federalese for temporary duty) and would read a Baedeker or other travel guide and find that there was a Roman ruin, or an old cathedral, or a dinosaur dig or whatever. That is what I would do to put some fabric in my life, and of course it is a useful surrogate for providing the feeling for having a purpose for being somewhere where deep down inside of you you don't want to be.

Love, Dad

Five Cents, Please

I think this will be the first Thanksgiving ever that each "unit" of my family will celebrate separately—which is to say the first when nobody is having our parents over. My local sister, who has usually hosted dinner for whoever is available, may stop by their assisted-living facility (where now are both in memory care), may bring them a bit of turkey or pie, but she'll have her own celebration, like each of the rest of us. (D. and I are going to see friends of his in Lynchburg, Virginia.)

Dad moved into memory care about two and a half weeks ago, and neither he nor Mom even remembers that it's Thanksgiving or much cares (I mentioned it to him tonight, to little response). They'll be served a holiday dinner by staff, and after that Dad will go to bed and Mom will sit up in the common room with her neighbors. She's up most of the night, I'm told (one of the caregivers has her sit beside her and help with her "paperwork"), catching up on sleep during the day.

We've been reading Dad Winnie-the-Pooh, and he seems to enjoy it. (He's actually doing remarkably well in general under the circumstances.) The other day I bought him a book of Peanuts comics, which I thought would be interesting and possible for him to read on his own. Tonight I couldn't find it.

***Lucy: "Follow me. I want to show you something. See the horizon over there? See how big this world is? See how much room there is for everybody? Have you ever seen any other worlds?"
Charlie Brown: "No."
Lucy: "As far as you know, this is the only world there is, right?"
Charlie Brown: "Right."
Lucy: "There are no other worlds for you to live in, right?"
Charlie Brown: "Right."
Lucy: "You were born to live in this world, right?"
Charlie Brown: "Right."
Lucy: "WELL LIVE IN IT THEN! Five cents please."

Fragments, a Return

This weekend my siblings and I started hospice for Dad.

It's been almost a year since I wrote in this blog (I'm a little shocked but not totally surprised to see). In that year, my mother's condition has remained mostly stable, which is to say that 13 years of dementia quietly rolled into 14, with no major changes from one to the next. Tonight when I was talking to D. and my brother and sister, I described her conversation as a bagful of disconnected words, sentence fragments, gestures, expressions, questions, phrases, and moods all shaken up and spilled out. I just ride the wave of what emerges— "Oh, no—not that!" "Really?" "I know." "Yeah, I'm Billy." "Don't cry—be happy." "Want to sing a song?" When I'm with her these days, I rarely feel anything but loved.

On Friday, we got a report that Dad was drooling and going in and out of consciousness at lunch. There was more to it, but that was the most alarming development. Most likely, in retrospect, he was probably having an ischemic attack, one more of the stealth mini-strokes that both he and Mom have experienced over the years, she for a much longer time.

He has declined markedly in the last four to six weeks, sleeps most of the day when left to his own devices, eats little and irregularly, and rarely converses at all except in single words. We'd already been taking the initial steps of moving him into memory care (the wing where Mom has lived for the last year and a half), but this turn of events sealed the deal. Among other benefits will be better monitoring of his diet and hydration, although the accompanying loss of independence makes me sad.

Hospice quickly entered the picture, and at this stage it seems essentially just another level of care, one that's more sensitively attuned to his weakened condition and making him more comfortable. It will start out at least once a week but will probably increase somewhat from that according to his needs as the hospice personnel get to know him and us. Nowhere near round the clock . . . yet.

As D. put it recently, my father is winding down. It's very hard for me to look full on at what that means.

When D. and I were falling asleep and talking about Dad last night, D. said, "I'll miss him." That brought tears to my eyes because I really believed him—he's been a great friend to my father—and it made me think about how much I'll miss him, too.

Do You Remember?

D. and I went out for our weekly Silver Diner dinner with my father tonight, Thursday, because we'll be away in Provincetown this weekend. Dad was very quiet, but I didn't have any reason to think he was unhappy. In the car on the way there, I asked him if he had any New Year's resolutions, and he said he couldn't think of any. Then later at dinner, D. asked him again, and Dad said, not with irritation but with a small, shy chuckle, "You asked me that before—I can't think of any." (I can't either!) It's sometimes surprising what he remembers from moment to moment.

After we said good night to him, we popped in to say hi to Mom in the memory-care wing. We weren't sure she'd be up, as it was 8:30, but we found her poking around the hall in her nightie and slippers. We took her back to her room and turned on a CD to get her relaxed. It took only a few minutes to coax her into bed as the music played. We kissed her good night; D. said "I love you" and told her we'd see her in the morning—a lie but a benign one. I had told her I'd see her "in the daylight," unnecessarily staying on the factual side of the fence. We will see her in the daylight, just not tomorrow's.

Here's a picture of me and my father tonight in our tissue-paper crowns after opening some British "Christmas crackers" D. had brought.


And here's what we left playing when we said good night to Mom:

Dearie, do you remember when we
Waltzed to the Sousa band?
My, wasn't the music grand?
Chowder parties down by the seashore
Every Fourth of July . . .

Dearie, life was cheery
In the good old days gone by
Do you remember?
If you remember,
Then Dearie, you're much older than I.

Only This

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
" 'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door;
Only this, and nothing more."

This weekend, I hand-delivered a card bearing the image at left to my 90-year-old father. Inside were small notes from D. and me. It was part of a little project I began at the start of my 50th year about two weeks ago involving getting back to writing to people on paper—not directly related to my feelings about Facebook, but you could say there's a connection. (I might write more about the project in a future post.)

This print is "Circle Raven" by Yoshiko Yamamoto— one of many beautiful letterpress designs from the Arts and Crafts Press.

The card got Dad and D. and me talking about ravens and crows and their ilk. My father has always had a curious mind, to say the least, but these days there's more curiosity than retention, more silence than response—you often have to simply trust that he's taking information in and let go of expectations about to what use his mind may be putting it.

I had recently bought him a large-print book of poems because his eyesight is bad and he's so bored and he used to be someone who cared about poetry. I don't think he's read much of the book, so given what we were talking about, I decided to read Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" aloud to him.

I have to say I absorbed only about half of it myself—it was the first time I'd read it in at least 35 years—but the rhythms were a blast to feel on my tongue and vocal chords, a tour de force of language offered to a man whose world was once nothing but language. (He is—was—a polyglot linguist whose specialty was Russian.)

As I read, Dad leaned forward, appearing to listen intently. Every time I got to the refrain "Nevermore," which ends the last four stanzas, he looked up and joined in with heart—"Nevermore!"—finding, it seemed, a place of memory within him still. A place where a single familiar, archaic word was stored from adolescence, or childhood, or even deeper back, a place where words themselves originate, where he would have found me at that moment as well.

"Good Night, Prosecutor": Ten Good Things

As I slowly resurface . . . ten good things since late March, the point at which my life reached overload:

1. Riding the Vamoose bus back from NYC on a Sunday night in April, D. and I eating still-warm H&H bagels with vegan cream cheese and scallions from, of all places, Zabar's (who knew?) and doing the Times crossword. As D. said, speaking for me, "It doesn't get better than that."

2. Please Give.

3. Finding four perfect-condition Stangl "Fruit and Flowers" teacups and saucers with a creamer and sugar bowl for only $26 at the Bethesda Op Shop, my first pieces in that pattern. The fact that I found them not in an antiques shop but in a mostly junky thrift store—and on a day when I was actually thinking I probably shouldn't even bother going in because this place only has junk—was a sign that I should get them. So now I seem to be collecting two patterns—I already had a Bachelor Button coffee service. D. has an almost complete set of Thistle. Though he introduced me to the line, I was the first to buy, last summer in Provincetown. I said to him, "It's the only thing we're competitive about."

4. Great Sage.

5. Taking Dad to a real barbershop for a haircut (instead of waiting for the next time someone comes around to cut hair at his assisted-living facility), putting an extra cushion we brought with us on the seat, telling the barber how to cut his hair . . . and remembering that about 45 years ago he he did much the same thing for me. And seeing what a pleasure it could be, amid his daily existence of mostly tedium and dozing, for him to be out in the world surrounded by male voices and be matter-of-factly yet expertly groomed.

6. The trip to New York itself.

7. During a mostly agonizingly dull eight weeks of grand jury duty, volunteering one day to read the role of the prosecutor when we were hearing the transcript of previous testimony in a case we were considering (the actual prosecutor read the role of the witness), and not only enjoying the heck out of it but receiving numerous compliments from fellow jurors. "Good night, prosecutor," one said to me at the end of the day. It reminded me that several years ago I thought about volunteering for an organization that records books and articles for the blind. Maybe I'll revisit that when things calm down more.

8. Slice some onion, sauté it in olive oil till it's soft, add some chopped green cabbage, cook it some more till the cabbage is softened to your liking but still a little crisp (in other words, nowhere near sauerkraut soft), season with salt and pepper, and stir in a little Dijon mustard and a sprinkling of fennel seed. Improvisation transformed into inspiration.
9. For the first time, on one of my days off from grand jury duty (to which I was committed three days a week), coming into work on an intense deadline day when I was just barely keeping up and saying to a colleague, "It's good to be here"—and meaning it.

10. One thing that never changed: that hour or two between Patsy's early-morning walk (usually between 5 and 6 am) and the time I have to get up for work, when the two of us get back in bed and breathe together—even better when D. is there, breathing along—knowing we have just a finite time in that peaceful state, but not yet willing to start the day.

Winter Weekend

I didn't have to do any digging out during the snowstorm, because I'd taken my car in for service Friday morning and was allowed to leave it there after the work was done (though how and when I'll be able to get it home from the suburbs and find a space to park in my neighborhood, I'm not sure). Others in my condo beat me to the shoveling on and around our property (about which I feel somewhat guilty). My ventures outside have been mainly to walk the dog -- multiple times a day -- so I've seen the snow's nature, in the air and on the ground, change over the last two days, like a a body blooming, coming into its own, slowing down, then yielding to the onslaught of footprint and tire.

I baked and cooked -- pancakes, muffins, bread, pasta with avocado and tomatoes, Irish oatmeal with apples and cranberries. And I ate.

D. and I have been apart, separated by the weather, like lovers on separate continents, though we're only a handful of miles away. He's finally on his way over as I type, having braved the roads, the Metro, and the icy streets.

Mom and Dad's phone service and cable -- their only connections to the outside world unless one of us is visiting -- were out for a time, but they're back up. This weekend I had a good excuse to have no obligations to them, other than checking in (when it was possible). So I had that rare thing: a weekend at home, where I got to walk and sit and doze through full cycles of sunlight and dark; scents of breakfast, lunch, dinner; the intermittent scrape of shovels on pavement, like an animal's insistent pawing to be let inside.