Brave-to face or endure with courage

In the world of cancer treatment it is known that sometimes the treatment causes problems of its own. Medicines strong enough to kill the bad cells of cancer also kill some of the good cells. The hope is that the good cells recover and come back, the bad ones don’t. During my son’s long months of chemotherapy there were times he needed transfusions of blood and platelets. Many was the time we drove the hour to our beloved Children’s Hospital to get one or the other, or both. They had to be administered through his I.V. very slowly. If he needed both it was understood that we would be there all day.

One long we day we had outlasted all but one other patient and her Mother. Anna Grace was 12 and had been fighting for a long time, the horror of a cancer for which there was never any hope of cure, only the hope of time, precious time. Recently she had been too sick to go to her 8th grade graduation, the last grade she would ever complete, so they had brought it to her. Her Mother showed me the pictures as waited. And in the pictures I had seen on her face the same look I had seen on her face that morning. A 1000 yard stare of such blankness and resignation, as though she already had a foot in the next world and would soon be going. It was a look I had come to recognize over the months we had been coming to the clinic and it was as reliable as any biopsy or MRI to indicate who would soon be gone.

Today they were here like us, to get blood and platelets. A full day in the clinic and we had again outlasted all, even some of the employees whose shifts had come and gone as we sat there. We were getting it to be ready for the next round of treatment, they were getting it so that she would feel well enough to go to the beach one last time. It was the end of the day and the lights were low as the two patients slept in their recliners in the infusion room. Anna Grace’s Mother sat beside her, her Bible in her lap.

Out of nowhere she burst into tears, a sudden, violent storm of weeping, inarticulate but conveying all the anguish and grief and sorrow that could ever be. I started to go to her but felt the gentle restraining hand of Spirit to stay put and let her have this moment. I prayed silently for her, for all of us, as my own tears slid down my face.

After a moment, it was over. She took a deep breath, dried her eyes and blew her nose. She reached over to pat her sleeping daughter and then picked up her Bible and began to read again.

That was so many years ago now, my own little patient is 20 years old, and so far away from all of that that it seems like another life. I guess if Anna Grace had lived she would be a young woman now. I hope the years have brought healing to her family and that they have known joy again. But that moment has stayed with me, an image seared on my mind of courage and strength. Of what it means to be brave.

Christmas Eve 1996

I ease him into his “Baby’s First Christmas” outfit. He is 3 months old and starting to sleep at night. This coincides with me thinking that I may survive this tiny earthquake and all it’s aftershocks with sanity intact. I will be going back to work soon, but first I have promises to keep. I add the finishing touch, a tiny hat, which for now he is leaving on his head. We are ready. I step out into the cold.

My firstborn was born in September. I was a home health nurse at the time. I cared for mostly elderly residents in what was once a nice part of town, with small but neat homes that you could own if you had a job at the Paper Mill or the Coal Mine. A piece of the American Dream slid into the darkness of drugs and crime, leaving my patients to cling to what they had built as it crumbled around them.

The day I found out I was pregnant it was because of a visit to one of these patients. He was cooking chitlins (my non-southern readers may have to look this one up) and the house was full of the stench of it. I kept having to go hang my head out the back door and gulp fresh air to make it through my visit due to my nausea. I left from there and immediately took a test and that is when I knew I would be creating a new being. What I didn’t know was that I would soon be a new being too.

My patients, many of them so lonely and isolated, took great interest in my pregnancy, weighing in on whether it was a boy or a girl, and how big it would be. Many shared stories of their own long ago babies. All made me promise to bring the baby to see them.

Even my most notoriously difficult patient took a grudging interest. Carrie was, as we say in the South, a “mess”, and not always in the good way. She was alone in the world and barely able to manage in her tiny section 8 apartment even with our help. Help she frequently didn’t cooperate with or even appreciate. She could cuss you so a fly wouldn’t light on you just for trying your job, and if you ever came and her pistol was on the table that meant she didn’t want a bath that day. Still, I liked her and tried my best to win her over with mixed results.

She spent the months of my pregnancy making dire predictions about the baby’s chances with me as a mother inserted into her usual grousing. But occasionally while I was taking her blood pressure or checking her blood sugar, her gnarled hand would slip over to touch my belly, and a small smile would steal across her face. Once he kicked for her and she announced that I would have to bring the baby to see her, because she just loved babies.

And so it was that on Christmas Eve 1996 we went visiting. My son passed through many hands that day and endured it all patiently, his eyes never leaving my face, trusting. I left Carrie for last and prayed that it would be one of her good days. She looked at him for a long moment and then asked to hold him. I hesitated for just a second, as she was weak and unsteady, but only for a moment.

I carefully settled him in her arms and stood back. She rocked him and spoke to him much nicer than she’d ever spoken to me, in a gentle tone I’d never heard from her before.

“I just LOVE babies!” she exclaimed. Then she looked up at me with a radiant smile, her face beatific. And so it came to pass that on the night before Christmas there they were, she and my son, an unlikely Madonna and Child. And for just a moment the dinginess and sadness and darkness of the tiny room was pushed back by the light into a circle of all the love and joy in the world.

I carefully separate the cuttings, teasing the roots apart gently. As I press down the soil around the plant in the pot, I press down my prayers and hopes for healing for a friend whose family has suffered an unimaginable loss.

In the corner stands the Mother plant, lush and glorious, of uncertain age, though certainly many years old. As is my habit, every time a sprig falls I root it for just such a time as this.

She came to our center for radiation, palliative of course, as there was no possibility of cure. We bonded immediately because of a certain shared feistiness, and a love of plants and digging in the dirt. She had once had a magnificent yard though she now could only go and sit and direct her son to do her bidding.

It was spring and all was in bloom, and every day she would bring an offering to lay on the altar of hope that was the nurses desk, in supplication for the gift of time, more time. Usually it was a day lily, she knew all the names and we would stand there and admire and debate the merits of Stella D’oro and Crimean Crimson and Barnabus. And for those few minutes her face would light up and she would forget that she was dying and remember that she was alive, and somehow still a part of that life force web that weaves us all together.

Time passed and eventually so did she. One day I was told that her son was at the front desk and wanted to see me. In his hands was a pot with a beautiful Christmas Cactus in it. He told me she had wanted me to have it, a final act of sharing beauty with me.

That was many years ago, and I have faithfully tended it and enjoyed its blooming, in winter and again in spring, the time when I knew her. Eventually I had enough potted to call him back and give him his own plant, a piece of his mother returned to him. He stood there in the waiting room, wordless and moved to tears, and in the silence we remembered her and the beauty she left behind.

I’ve shared pieces of that cactus many times now, usually to someone that has suffered a loss. A reminder that every life, no matter how short, leaves something of itself behind, something beautiful, that says “I was here.”.

I carefully place the plant in a box with a note of explanation, and head out the door, in my hands another slender thread in that great tapestry being continually woven by the hand of something greater than ourselves.

In memory of:

Blaire Margaret Bennet

Child of God, who lived an all too short, but perfect life of love.

Disclaimer: the opinions expressed here are entirely those of the author on a account of its my blog. And anyway you wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t languishing in a really long line somewhere, thinking bad thoughts about your fellow human beings and possible saying “Bah, humbug!”.

So let’s talk about Christmas songs. We might as well, they’ve been playing in Hobby Lobby since before Halloween. And you have miles to go before you sleep (read, New Year’s Day).

First the good, I could have an entire playlist of covers of O Holy Night. All the really old Christmas hymns, the Christmas Song by Nat King Cole, Santa Claus is Coming to Town by the Boss. Run DMC, Christmas in Hollis. You know, the classics.

Then the bad, New Kids On the Block, Funky, Funky Christmas. No…just no.

And then the ugly, the songs I could happily live the rest of my life without hearing again. Here are my top 5. Number 1 is DEFINITELY number 1, the rest are in no particular order.

The Little Drummer Boy

1. Why would a shepherd boy in 1st century Israel need a drum? Do they have some previously unknown soothing effect on sheep?

2. Who wants visits from dirty strangers moments after giving birth?

3. Who in the world thinks playing a drum for a newborn is a good idea? I know when mine were small and sleep elusive, I would’ve shown that shepherd a special new place to keep that drum.

Christmas Don’t Be Late, Alvin and the Chipmunks

1. Chipmunks don’t sing.

2. Chipmunks don’t observe Christmas.

3. Chipmunks don’t wear sweaters. (At least not in Alabama).

All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth

1. Sure hope you got ‘em by now.

2. Stop.

3. No really, stop.

I Want a Hippopotamus For Christmas

1. It’s an ear worm.

2. It’s an ear worm.

3. It’s an ear worm.

Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer , Randy Brooks

1. Because what’s Christmassy about Trauma?

2. Do I need another reason?

3. Randy Brooks, what’s the matter with you?

In short, it just seems like some songs (even the ones that were cute the first 125,463 times you heard them) have just been played so much that they should be taken out of circulation. You know, retired, like a sports jersey, and never, never played again. And when we’re through retiring Christmas songs I’m coming for you Stairway to Heaven.

Wow, I feel better now. Thanks for letting me vent. If I missed any, let me know. I think I’ll go have a Christmas cookie now, just not a reindeer one…or a drum.

Faux (adj.)-made to look like something else that is usually more valuable.

In 2016 I made the decision to get off of Social Media. I had been edging that way for some time. During times of prayer and fasting it had consistently been the thing I gave up, the thing that was always in the way of my connection with God. Finally, my keen mind realized that it needed to go.

At the time it was for reasons more personal than global, but with time and distance I can report that I’m concerned about the effect it’s having on the world, on us as a species. Like a gun, it’s a neutral force , the harm depending on who is wielding it; but it is also true that guns were made to kill things. From the remove of 6 years it now seems to me that Social Media is a Trojan Horse, something that looks good but tricks you into letting something bad within your gates.

For me it became a seduction of sorts. I began to share pictures of my kids and share the funny things they said and did. I came to enjoy the attention it got me, the “likes”. I had no thought for the fact that my kids had not given their consent for their words, their images, their whole lives to be put out there for all the world to see, a vehicle for their mother’s dopamine hits. By the end it became common for them to have my “friends” approach them, to have people they didn’t even know know a lot about them. The dark underbelly of parenthood is that we get reflected glory from our kids, but Social Media has elevated it to the level of a sacrament. (I have since apologized to my kids and offered to pay for their therapy).

I hesitate to talk about my reasons for decamping, much less blog about it. It seems to make people feel the need to justify to me that it’s okay for them to have Social Media. It absolutely is. So please don’t blow up the comments section to tell me that you use it to keep up with your Aunt Pearl in Omaha, Nebraska (say hello to Aunt Pearl for me), or so you’ll know what your kids are doing (you still don’t, trust me on this). As you were people. I just found that in me, it fed things that needed to be starved and starved things that needed to be fed.

*Sidebar: Social Media platforms make it very difficult to actually delete the account, and I think that’s on purpose. I had to Google instructions and eventually call in my tech support (read my teenagers) to do it. And even then I got a message from Facebook that was the digital equivalent of a bad boyfriend saying:

“You don’t know what you want. No one will ever love you like me. You have 30 days to come back or all your stuff will be out in the yard.”

(Think Hamilton, King George singing “You’ll be back”.)

But finally I succeeded and then there was silence. I had the strange sensation of coming out from under something. I was stunned to realize that somewhere along the line I had begun to live and view my life in terms of how I would post it, how I would present it to others for their approval, what caption, what hashtag. Now I just lived. I took less pictures. I had more time and less anxiety. It was a relief to not have to know what everyone was doing, and what everyone felt all the time.

I was surprised to see how few of my “friends” were actually a part of my life, the ones that you called or they called you, got together with, actually saw in person. I had collected a host of people that I felt benignly positive feelings toward, but that I really didn’t know. We were friends in theory as long as no effort was required. I came to see that there was really no relationship. Social Media had created the illusion of relationship, a facsimile of friendship, a faux intimacy where none really existed. It was as though I walked through neighborhoods, peering into windows, making note of what was on the table, the pictures on the fridge of school first days and vacations and they didn’t mind, they left the curtains open just for that purpose, and mine had been open too. Yet, we didn’t know each other well enough to come into the house. There was no “there” there.

A few months after the big break up I was in the mall during the holidays. I saw a woman I’d known in high school who’d been one of my “friends”. I’d seen her wedding, vacations, her sweat streaked face moments after giving birth to the little boy standing beside her waiting to see Santa. We inquired after each other’s families, plans for the holidays, remarked on the busyness of the season. And within 5 minutes we were completely out of things to say to one another. I said goodbye and walked away from her, a very nice woman that I hardly knew at all.

Retreat

Retreat (n)-a period of group withdrawal for prayer, meditation and study.

Once a year I and some like minded friends gather deep in the woods of north Alabama for a Spiritual retreat. It takes place at a beautiful camp belonging to a religious denomination in possession of a great deal more certainty than we ragtag band of spiritual vagabonds. The woods and even the very walls of the buildings seem to radiate with the patina of decades of spiritual pursuit.

As we turn into the drive the world begins to fall away. Our worries, our hopes, our struggles get out of the car and step away. They light a cigarette and side eye us as we drive away. They will be waiting for us as we go out on Sunday, but they will seem smaller somehow and harder to see. But for now, we are lighter by the minute.

We drop our bags and head into the woods. Soon there are no man-made sounds save the crunch of leaves under our feet. We follow the music of the wind in the trees and the songs of birds. We descend into a canyon and stand for a time in silence surrounded by boulders left there by glaciers. It has been a dry summer and a small creek barely trickles into a pool made in the rock with a few minnows swimming lethargically.

We hike back out and the rest of our friends are there, some we saw last week, some not since last year. There are hugs, laughter and a dozen conversations at once. We eat, we laugh, we study, we meditate. There are moments of connection, big and small, as we walk the trails or rock on the porch.

I lie down for a nap on Saturday, but there is a serious card game going on in the other room. I am pulled back to consciousness by the sound of my friends’ laughter. I open my eyes in the twilight and inside I am perfectly still.

On Sunday we load our cars, hug our hugs, our minds already beginning to think of the things we left at the entrance. But we go back to our lives more peaceful versions of ourselves.

My mind goes back to the canyon. As we stood in that place as old as time, my friend bent down and gently brushed away a clump of leaves. And what had been a trickle of clear water became a gush and flowed over the rocks into the little pool. The minnows began to swim around, their tails moving faster and faster on the rising tide of hope.

“Side B song #5-me and the major-belle and sebastian-it’s so poppy and fun. play it when you’re driving down the freeway. it’s amazing.”

I was clearing an old bookcase cabinet yesterday and found in it the cassette tape graveyard, where all such were relegated once technology moved on to the point that we no longer had a way to play them. And that is where I found it. A mix tape my sister Lil had made for me years ago, before cassettes went the way of the dinosaur. She had made a cover for it and entitled it

“a li’l sistah compilation”.

I don’t remember exactly why she made it or when she gave it to me. I’m sure I took it from her hand casually, certain that there were oceans of time left between us and untold number of things to receive from her hand. Before we knew how bad it was going to be, how we would watch horrified as the nose of the plane slowly turned toward the ground, and be helpless to do anything about it, the right thing, the wrong thing, something, anything, I don’t know. Until early one morning the phone rang, and when I saw the hour and that it was my Dad I knew what he was going to say before I lifted the phone. And then he said it and the long wait for that phone call was over.

The day after her funeral I stood under a winter night sky as one year turned into the next and beheld the first sky of the first day of the first year that she would never know. And I wondered how it came to this. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. I don’t know what I should’ve done, I only know that somehow I didn’t do it. Now she only visits me from time to time in my dreams. The first time she did we were walking on the street. She was ahead of me and the distance between us kept getting greater and greater. I called her name, louder and louder, but I couldn’t get her to turn around. Don’t need to bust Joseph out of Pharaoh’s prison to interpret that one for me.

I opened the mix tape box and a piece of paper fluttered to the ground. It was a carefully typed song list with notes explaining why the song was chosen, and what it meant to her. It was full of references to people and events in her life that I knew nothing about and now never would. I sat in the floor surrounded by obsolescence and pored over it as though it were runes that could help me understand a vanished world, while all around me dust swirled and a Greek chorus shrieked:

“Too late, too late, too late.”

And so I took the song list and made a new playlist for my phone. And I’m listening to it in honor of her and as one last chance to know something of who she was.

It is a gray fall day as I guide my car onto the interstate, gusts of wind shower my car in yellow leaves. I ease into traffic and imagine for a moment that I can see her out of the corner of my eye, a shade riding shotgun with a small smile on her face. I step on the gas and turn up the volume, and she’s right, it is amazing.

In loving memory of Lillian Plott

February 27, 1986-December 29, 2014.

“May the one who creates harmony on high, bring peace to us, and all Israel. To which we say amen.”

He is standing at the nurse’s desk shouting at the top of his voice. He is demanding more pain medicine for his wife down the hall, a la Shirley Maclean in Terms of Endearment. The nurse in front of him is so rattled that her hands shake as she lifts the phone to dial the on-call doctor.

When the order is received she asks me to go with her as she gives it, to help her turn and reposition the patient. She tells me the lady has end stage cancer and is very near death. When we get to the room I see she is a tiny thing, lost in the vastness of the bed, a wraith, a winter leaf about to crushed under foot. My colleague gives the pain medicine. And as we pull back the sheet to move her I see it, left forearm, upper part, a number. A number that can mean only one thing. I stand there like a stone as the full weight of what it means lands on me. After a moment I look up into her face and her eyes are on me, obsidian, giving away nothing. After a lifetime of absorbing the reactions of others she will not help me in this moment.

When we are done he comes back into the room and give her a kiss of such tenderness and a look of such love that I am ashamed to be present, so intimate is the moment. He says

“I’ll see you in the morning my love.”

and turns to go, his face a mask of anguish. Perhaps he thought she’d suffered enough. From the window I can see him walking to his car, his jacket around his shoulders. A gust of wind whips the sleeves up around him and I can’t decide if they are like fists raised to God or arms begging for mercy.

When I turn back to her, her eyes are closed. She is at peace. In a few days she is at peace for good. I tuck her, and him, away in the storeroom of my memory and move on to the next one. And the one after that.

All these years later I’ve forgotten so many of the patients that I’ve cared for, their names, their struggles. But I remember her. I’m happy to say that I can no longer remember a single digit of that terrible number, although the shock wave of seeing it echoes still. When I think of her I remember her dark eyes on me and I remember her name. The sands of time have rubbed away the number, but the name remains.

“I’m not going to live to see my baby get on a school bus am I?”

The patient said this from her chemo chair in the oncology unit I work in, with tears in her eyes. She was a young mother with a 2 year old son. I don’t remember what my colleague said or how she got past the moment, but I do remember that the patient was right…she didn’t. She was gone within a year.

When told that I’m an oncology nurse, most people exclaim that they don’t know how I can do it. Many times I’ve wondered the same thing myself, you see things so sad that you just want to scrub the memory from your mind. Some memories I’ve put in a mental drawer never to be opened again…or not very often. I’ve been in oncology long enough now to have taken care of friends and relatives and teachers and neighbors and now even co-workers.

But there is this, it has made me remember to live my life, to be present in the moment, to look around my table and be grateful, knowing that one day there would be empty chairs, and now, of course, there are. It has made me leave dishes in the sink and play with my kids, and not leave things unsaid and undone. It has made me appreciate all the joys of life, the great ones and most especially, the small ones. I try to live with the thought that I am also living it for those that can’t.

We have new neighbors across the way, and they have a son who rides the bus to school. I am an empty nester now, and haven’t thought of the bus for a long time. But when mine were small they rode it, and waited in the same spot he does. I would turn them out in the morning, tumbling over each other like puppies, while I rushed around doing various necessary and forgettable tasks. But when I would hear the school bus coming up the hill, I would stop what I was doing and go to the nearest window and watch my babies get on the bus. I did it for me because I knew it was a privilege, and I did it for her, because she never got to.

Gauntlet (n.)-a double file of men facing each other and armed with clubs or other weapons with which to strike at an individual who is made to pass between them.

Recently I read about a Baptist minister in Missouri who preached a sermon and in so doing sailed right off the cliff of his evangelical, male privilege, without ever realizing there was a cliff’s edge. He now lies stunned and battered below on the rocks of “on leave and seeking counseling”. A metaphor about a barn door and a horse and timing comes to mind.

I won’t link it here because I don’t want to give his words any more attention than they have already gotten, but a simple google search should summon more than you want to know for the interested. The substance of the message was to instruct the women of his congregation on the importance of maintaining attractiveness and sexual availability to husbands as these are things God has decreed that men are entitled to and what they agreed to when they married. That though you may not ever be able to achieve Trophy Wife status, with effort you might at least be a Participation Trophy. Yeah. I know.

Apparently neither he nor any other staff member saw a problem with his words and the sermon was posted to the church’s website. From there it was picked up and taken to the World Wide Web via Social Media, and the rest is history. Enter the digital mob, with their torches and pitchforks and their outrage and he has been well and thoroughly dragged. The general theme of said dragging being that his own appearance was somewhat lacking. And while it’s true that in taking such a stand on appearance one should be a near perfect physical specimen oneself (think young Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise), it’s hardly the point.

I thought about the women of his congregation there that day (61% of most churches if statistics are to be believed) and wondered how they felt. Did they sit there feeling stunned and exposed, eyes straight ahead, tight smiles at the “funny” parts, his words falling like drops of blood on their heads? Had they thought that they were sitting in the one place where they might not be judged, listening to the one person that might look on them with love? Agape love. And it made me sad, sad.

You see it starts with us at puberty, maybe earlier now, and there is hardly a day of a woman’s life where she is not evaluated, judged, dissected, approved or dismissed, based on how she looks. The constant measuring and sifting, sometimes from forces without and often forces within.

The first I realized that I wouldn’t do was in the early days of 7th grade. In halls teeming with hormones and the sociopathy of youth I received a quick education on the very narrow ideal for beauty and that that was all that matters. Not that you were smart, or funny or kind. Just how you looked.

Every day I rode to school on the bus. I waited with my friends and we were the last stop. The seats were full of boys, the alpha boys, and the only seats left were toward the back. We would walk down the center aisle, a gauntlet, and pass through the Greek chorus of body shaming, raked by eyes. Each body minutely and openly evaluated, commenting on the merits or lacks thereof. Their words fistfuls of glass to the tender flesh of adolescence, as we fell into our seats, bleeding from 1000 tiny cuts. Each coped in her own way, some with tears, some lashed out, and I, stone faced, chin up, shoulders back, pretended not to hear, pretended not to care. Indifference my costume for my teens and 20’s.

And so it has been for me almost every day since. In some form or fashion it comes, the evaluation, the valuation, the devaluation, for every woman I know. I’m of an age now where I largely go unnoticed, and it’s fine with me. An Invisibility Cloak the costume of my 50’s.

But for my younger friends it’s louder than ever. The impossible expectations, the cacophony of social media, swipe left, swipe right. Every day, every woman will walk the gauntlet, be it long or short, in her school, on her job, on the street, in her own mirror, and apparently even to her seat in church.