Going Back

We made a whirlwind trip to Upstate NY in mid-May. It was the first time we went back since moving to Florida in March 2014. We arrived late Friday and left after lunch on Monday. Absurdly short visit, I know; but T is not a good traveler. I apologize from the heart to those dear friends I was unable to see this time. The guilt and regret I feel is palpable. But this trip had a specific purpose.

Our friend, ShS, died in January and we were unable to go back for her funeral. We specifically planned this May weekend with the old gang to honor her and help her husband process the loss.

Saying goodbye to her was one of the last things we did before leaving NYS over two years ago. She was not sick yet. Still, when I hugged her goodbye at her doorway that cold March day I was overcome with sorrow and didn't want to let go of her. I fought tears as we drove away. It would be an understatement to say I don't usually cry. I am usually steely calm with goodbyes, so Tom asked if I was okay. I told him I had a strong feeling I was never going to see ShS again. It was one of those moments when the future reaches back with fully extended claws to rend your heart with foresight. Spooky.

On a lighter note, while there we went to our favorite Vietnamese restaurant. When I walked in, the waiter immediately remembered me! He also remembered my standard lunch order after all these years. Whatta guy!

His kindness reminded me how we impact everyone we meet. A kind and gracious waiter can make a customer's day. We might remember him/her for the rest of our lives. Relationships take many forms. Make no mistake, we all play a role crafting goodness and light in this world.

Yes, we went to Wegmans. I had a hilarious "moment" with an elderly stranger who was sitting down in the dining area eating an entire Mini Ultimate Chocolate Cake all by her sweet self. As I walked by, I saw the cake and exclaimed "Look, it's one of those cakes!" She heard me and said, "I am just trying to make sure I stay fat." Ha! I'll probably never forget her, either.

Just so you know, we brought a small, empty carry-on suitcase on the plane. Before leaving NYS we filled it up with 3 dozen bagels for our return. The security bag scanner at the airport got a big kick out of it. Six of the bagels were garlic. Now the suitcase will forever smell of garlic. I don't care.

Bagels, ripe for the picking

Heaven on Earth: the produce section at Wegmans

FYI - We are going to be preoccupied with a family wedding this weekend, so I probably won't be checking my or other people's blogs for a few days.  If you send comments I will publish them and respond Monday or Tuesday.  Have a good weekend!

At a loss, except for words

My last post, about losing our gardenia, made me think about loss again. It is an interesting concept, loss.  I am going to chew on this for awhile.  If it bothers you then for crying out loud, please do not read it.

What is this potent euphemism, loss?  Can you really understand it if you have not had the experience of losing people, places, and things? 

It happens to everyone, I am not special in any way.  Many people have had more and worse loss than me. I am not feeling sorry for myself in writing this.  I just want to step back for a few minutes and explore this thing called loss.  Why not?

I have moved many times.  Leaving one place for another is a special kind of loss.  I am not only thinking about houses and people, I am talking about the land, the climate, the flora and fauna, the way a sofa might fit perfectly in one living room but not another.  This is the loss of the familiar.  Of course with this kind of loss (moving) you also gain something in the process, so the loss of the familiar is tempered somewhat by the excitement of the new.  There is still emotional pain, but there is also hope.  And, of course, you learn things. 

As an adult I became acquainted with death. In early-middle age it seemed like people I loved were dropping like flies.  That is when I figured if boys could condition themselves to stop crying, so could I.  And I did. It was easier than you might think.

I thought maybe I was starting to get the hang of it after awhile.  I imagined I was becoming accustomed to loss.  I distanced myself from pain. Working and being busy helped.  People in my life continued to die or move away and I handled the losses fairly well.  I started spouting the whole “death is a natural part of life” line - as if that statement isn't just the most obvious thing in the world.  I was beginning to imagine I was well-adjusted, strong even. It was great, too!  I think of those as my glory years.  Yes, I know that is a stupid thing to say, but I am not going to lie.  I am as stupid as the next person.

There are people who read this blog who only know me from that long period of my life when I did not cry and I am quite sure they found me super annoying. I was overly proud of not crying, and when you are overly proud you are kind of begging for a slap down.

Death is uncomfortably personal and indelicate; we come up with alternate words to describe it because it is frightening. It is a little like Voldemort.  We do not want to speak his name for fear that he may show up or exact revenge in unspeakable ways. We do not fully understand what he is capable of, so we fear the worst. Best to keep him at bay.

Losing someone to death begins a process for the living that is very similar to losing a place or a thing. We look for our loved ones but they are gone.  We miss them deeply.  We come to realize we will never find them again. We feel our loss and we mourn their passing. We grieve our loss.  We change. We reluctantly adjust. Truthfully, I find the whole process infuriating.  But whatayagonnado?  I guess that is why it is so fascinating to me.

Since retiring and moving to Central Florida in March 2014, I have been reacquainted with loss.  I retired and moved away, leaving my job, friends, gardens, home. I found myself missing many of the "things" I threw out or gave away when we were downsizing, preparing for the move. I lost things when we moved into our new place. I learned to live without these things and reluctantly adjusted. However, I am happy to report I finally found my black handled scissors!  At least there is that.

The first year and a half after my retirement was fun. Everything was new. I was ready for change. I was happy and energized.  I could not wipe the smile off my face.  Then in March 2015, I "lost" my mother and all bets were off. Holy shit!  Suddenly there was too much change and too much loss with too little time to process it all.  I kind of overdosed on change.  Does that make sense? 

I am reluctantly adjusting to all this change. Reluctantly is the key word, and I think it is a reasonable adverb to use here.  It kind of happens over time. It is fair to say that, more often than not, loss sucks.  Loss is that empty hole, that endless tug, the searing pain, those burning tears pooling just behind your eyes.  I hate losing people, places, and things.  I totally understand why some people become pack rats and others stay in bad relationships.  Change is a bumpy damn road.

Apparently loss must be felt if we want to be healthy minded. Or at least that is what society would have us believe. It seems to be one of those “you can run but you cannot hide” kind of things we hear so much about.  And I (reluctantly) think that is true. 

Shutting down is useful, pragmatic, and effective if you can manage to pull it off, but it is not strength. It is not that.

I never want to get too old to cultivate strength. It is a matter of principle and seems like a worthy goal, which is not to say that I AM strong.  I often fail at being strong, sometimes in notably big and sloppy ways.  I am not sure about you, but I am no Athena and I did not spring full grown from the head of Zeus.  

We all get knocked down from time to time. There is no shame in that.  Of course we all want to pull ourselves up by the count of 10.  Sometimes we can and sometimes we can't, "there's the rub!" There's the humanity.

I am beginning to see that strength comes when we are willing to feel our pain, not in the overcoming of it.  Big *$#@! surprise to me, by the way.  I am not romanticizing or promoting this crap.  I take no pleasure in thinking this is true. I take no pleasure in thinking of it at all.

Demeter, in winter

 

A crying shame

Being someone who does not cry in the workplace is a persona I have carefully cultivated over the years.  I believed I needed to be strong; even tough.  As an old feminist, I feared displaying too much emotion at work was one of those things that held women back.  I still believe that. 

I have joyfully mentored many women over the years.  For better or worse, one of the things I tried to do was to break them of work-related crying habits.  I am not saying that crying is bad.  In many areas of our lives it is appropriate and even a good thing to do.   I am saying that it does not serve a useful purpose in the workplace.   It is hard to take someone seriously as an employee or as a “player” when they are crying.   Although I know people usually cry at work simply because they are not able to control their emotions, and often for good reasons, it is important to realize that observers often interpret workplace crying as either a tactic or a weakness.  Neither perception helps get raises, promotions, or more challenging job tasks. 

I hate to cry – even if I am alone and at home.  It is physically unpleasant.  I look awful.   I feel awful.  I use a lot of Kleenex.  It gives me a headache and a sore throat.   My eyes become bloodshot and my nose gets red.  At this point in my life, only the death of a loved one can bring me to tears.   Perhaps that will change in retirement as I learn to “live in the moment,” (a cliché I am personally tired of hearing, sorry to resort to using it here) and become more relaxed about how I react to events.  In the workplace stressful events were things I had to “get through.”   In retirement stressful events will hopefully become things I “live through” and allow myself to feel and fully experience.   Does living well mean feeling deeply?  I will have to get back to you on that.   I am not actually ready to give up my non-crying persona yet.

If my mother read this she would ask me if I was bragging or complaining.   Hard to say.

Circumcision

OMG - let me tell you about the circumcision!   It was heartbreaking but memorable.

Yesterday my son-in-law, MV, had to go back to work so he could not go to the circumcision.   Because my daughter, M, still cannot drive I took M and N to get N circumcised while my granddaughter, E, was in school.   The hospital (a prestigious Women and Babies Hospital) had given MV a referral to a pediatric practice that regularly did circumcisions for them, a husband and wife team.  All sounds good, right? 

We had an adventure finding the place to begin with.  When we finally got there it was a small practice in a funky little inner city shopping center.   Just one waiting area (no "well" waiting room with a separate "sick" waiting room like M & MV have become accustomed to with their pediatrician).  The floor of the waiting area was tile, and obviously had not been mopped in recent years.  There was only one other family waiting, but they had a very sick little boy, so we sat all the way on the other side of the room from them and I held up N's blanket over his face to block him from germs. 

The woman in the other family was a skanky, skinny, white street momma with obscene tattoos all over her arms.  I cannot figure out how she had two children because she had the skinniest butt in the world; absolutely no hips and 0% body fat.  Her lank hair hung to her waist.  She could not sit still.  Her eyes were messed up and unfocused - maybe on drugs?  Apparently she had been there for a while because she was super angry, bitching out loud to her equally skinny Goth husband about the doctors making their kids wait and taking others in before them.  She also ranted on about how the doctors spent too much time with their patients and should just get a better system to move people through more quickly.  I found that to be an interesting argument for a young mother to make when her kids were sick.  She kept interrupting the secretary to give her a hard time every 5 minutes or so.  She just would not shut up or sit down. She was working my last nerve. 

I scoped her out, figured I could take her down if I had to (she was really skinny and obviously distracted) and passed the time by fantasizing about beating her to a pulp.  She stayed on her side of the room.  At one point she caught my eye and said, "I'm so mad at these damn doctors, I'd like to just clean this room."  That made me laugh, and then I felt less inclined to kick her ass. 

When an African American family came in, both parents with their children, it made the skanky white woman settle down.  The African American mother was clearly a woman of substance.  She had three small children and would not let them play with the toys because of germs, and had the children singing church songs while they waited.  Cutest damn thing - those kids sang so sweetly and were trying to remember the words to "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands." 

M texted MV the whole time we waited, seemingly trying to get information to fill out the forms.  She told me later that she was texting him about leaving because the place was so skeevy.  He was helping her plan her escape.  She was just getting up to tell the secretary we changed our minds when they called her name.  So we went in.   Keep in mind that we expected this surgery to happen in the hospital, but the hospital dropped the ball.  MV took him to his regular pediatrician last week, and that doctor said she did not do circumcisions.  This poor baby needed to get this circumcision done before he was old enough to remember!  I decided that if the doctor did not wash his hands I was going to grab N and run with him.

I really liked Dr. W (we got the husband).   He wore superhero scrubs and was funny and friendly.  He talked to N, and laughed at my jokes.  He was kind and thoughtful to Mother M.  The room we were in was clean, and the nurse was sweet and attentive.  The doctor said that, although we were welcome to remain while the procedure was done, most people opted to go in the waiting room.  We wanted to stay.  I asked if I could watch.  He said "Sure, as long as you don't get queasy."  I am the woman who wanted to be awake for my hysterectomy, so I knew I was going to be fine. 

I am not one to display (or even feel) emotions in the midst of a crisis.  Well, that's not exactly true - I do feel anxiety.  If that is an emotion.  Mostly, I am just there... in the moment, rolling with the punches.  I fall apart later, when I am alone.  Crying in public is not an option for me.  I would not be able to cry if I wanted to in most situations.  Good thing, too, 'cause I look God awful ugly when I cry, and I need an entire box of Kleenex.  Plus, in this particular situation curiosity got the best of me and I could not pass up the opportunity to see exactly how this infamous surgical procedure was done - up close and personal. 

I could not believe my good fortune.  At first M was up there with a touch to his face and the pacifier handy, but when N started raging and turning all red faced (he has never cried that hard before) she just could not bear it; she had to sit down next to the desk where she cried her heart out at the idea of her baby suffering.  They both cried their way through it, actually.

Of course that meant the way was clear for me to move in and get a closer view, and also to provide some emotional support and love to that sweet, sweet baby boy.  I was there like a shot!  I put my left hand on his hair to make sure he knew he was not alone and then I sang to him.  I sang every nursery rhyme and children's song I knew.  He actually stopped crying a couple of times to listen.  All of this while I struggled to contort my upper torso to keep out of the way of the doctor AND continue to keep my eyes on the task at hand.  

Actually, they had numbed his private parts, so I do not believe he felt any pain after the needle delivered the pain killer.   The needle hurt him, I am sure, because that is when he started crying.  But what REALLY pissed him off was that they tied down his hands and legs so he couldn't move - and this boy is a mover and a shaker.   It freaked him out and he was raging against the injustice of it all.  The reason I know this to be true is because if you could have seen what I saw, and if that baby could have felt what was happening, he would have been shrieking in pain. Which he was not.  He was red faced and mad.  Totally different cry.  Anyway, that's my story and I'm stickin' to it.  I hope it is true.

By the time I drove them home, I was shaking.   All three of us were overwhelmed by what we had been through.  I just wanted to drink a beer and stare off into space for an hour or two.  But I needed to pick up E from school instead.  That's another story.   Next time.