fears and dreams

.

Monday morning blues. Let them be brief...

--My son turned18 yesterday. He and his girlfriend and their babygirl came over for bagels and chocolate pudding pie. We gave him four new tires, how’s that for symbolic? See ya. Stay safe.
--I have a disappointing resurgence of an irritating and mildly debilitating injury. I have nursed it along, including thrice weekly rehab, since January.
--This past weekend I retreated with other faculty from my family medicine residency program. Our annual event. The group has been stable for over 15 years. We’ve recently lost two to retirement and by next fall will have two new members.
--My mother’s cancer chemical number is rising, ovarian. I just loved every minute (even the hard minutes) that I spent with her on her recent two-week visit here.
--I am heavily involved, hours a day, in writing my final for Memoir Class. I am trying to show how it was to be me during the early reaction phase from an indecent sexual assault that occurred in 2007. Not to tell, mind you, and not to summarize! for god’s sake, but to show my life in reaction, acutely and realistically – so the reader can live it on the page. Again and again, until I get it right.
--I have a card sitting on my kitchen table. It tells me I missed certified mail and need to pick it up. It’s hot. Scary. It is from the National Certification Board for Therapeutic Massage and Body Work, NCBTMB. I sent in a formal complaint about the sexual assault in late 2007. They took my statement by conference call six months ago. I’ve been waiting for the determination. It’s here; I just need to take that card to the post office this morning to find out whom they believe in this ongoing He said-She said saga.

Is it any wonder then, that I had a dream last night that I was under dark murky water, alone and scared? Or that once my feet hit bottom it was heaped up with dead bodies? Men mostly, middle aged and bald, or shaved with growing stubble, naked and muscular, buoyant somehow when I had to kick off of them to get back to the surface. I woke up in a start with palpitations and a long and intense hot flash.

I took an antacid and wandered reluctantly back to dreamland as the trees outside swayed noisily in the wind and the rain dripped down my window.

Snow on Daffodils

Snow falls quietly and sits heavy on the daffodils this morning. Must be the anniversary of my sister, Eileen’s, death. It’s been fifteen years now, if I’m doing my math correctly. Although she was from New Jersey, she died here in Pittsburgh. Failed liver transplant. Hepatitis C. The sad part is that I think of her only in post-death terms now. The incredible conch shell I found in a moment of utter hopelessness, on the beach where had spread her ashes years before, sits on my mantle. The unusual butterfly that visited us on that same beach months before found its way into my writing just last week.

Maybe it’s because I’m in medicine, or maybe because my friends are of an age where death appears in their lives more often, but I think about the last day of Eileen's life a lot, the regret I have about giving my consent for her final operation. The stupid monitor and fake pacemaker that they kept running until my sisters, Theresa and Kathy, and I were phoned in the waiting room, told to dress up into space suits, and finagled into the operating room (we had to give my eighteen-month-old niece to the front desk nurse to hold on our way). They had promised we could “be with her when she died.”

It is difficult, in the high tech world of medicine, to define the moment of death. You’ve seen it, on "ER" - the arbitrary decision to “call it” and note the time out loud. I think my sister actually died in the middle of the night, well before the morning we were called into the hospital and asked for permission to try one last, heroic, thing. I wrote a poem about that in my creative writing class last term. I'll print it on my blog. (see last blog "Time of Death" (I'm resisting the urge to add a disclaimer)).

And then I’ll spend today trying to remember her when she was alive and passionate, funny and flawed. Her big fat round bear hugs. Her full-throated laughter. Her obsession with blue. Or the late night phone calls, like one I sleepily received at one o’clock in the morning to ask, “Hey, Jan, do germs crawl?” because my sister, Theresa, had put a cold infused Kleenex down on her bed as they sat there giggling, pajama party style. Or, or… see, I can’t remember all the good stuff.

Today I will try. Today I will remember that on my way to her hospital, quite possibly in the hours between the time her spirit left her body and the time medicine's machines were switched off, I stopped in the garden to say a prayer. Today I will remember what I knew in that moment, and why I knew that finding snow on the daffodils was just perfect for the day she died.

Time of Death

Operate again? I ask. But, isn’t that…
No, they say, it’s not heroics.
It’s just before dawn; I throw off my covers.
Ok then.
What do you wear on the day your sister dies?
I wonder as I hang up the phone.

On my way I notice a light snow lay on the daffodils.
I stop, dip my fingers into it like holy water.
Say a prayer.

It’s not going well, they say, come into the operating room.
We crinkle as we enter the sterile space
in our white paper suits.

Dialysis off
Ventilator next
Finally the
Pacemaker.

Sorry.

Silence hovers.

We cry, say goodbye, we’re sorry.
Sing “Don’t weep after me.”
As four sisters become three
in the still, cold room.
…

Is that when she died?

Or, was it the night before
when a great gust of wind
blew in as we slept?

It opened the French doors of my bedroom
rushed down the steps
and lifted the paper poster,
her ethereal version of afterlife,
right off of the wall…

I wore blue, 'cause I knew.

****

uploader's remorse

I planned to write my blog this morning on regretting with hot faced embarrassment the quality of my most recent piece, "The Hand of Justice" (future blog)... but my memoir classmates did it for me - I've plagiarized the words they used when uploading their own pieces:

enjoy.

roughest draft in the world...
I am "telling" a lot
scenes are coming
pick the best ones
for the piece.
question is
working?
for or against?
Should I
choose one issue,
stick with that?
or should I
tie them
together,
connected?

I’ve bitten off
more then i can chew.
back there again.
an early draft
as yet unfinished
very rough
working on that!

a little overwhelmed
with information
so I feel like
is there?
a lot of telling
not enough showing.
still struggling
what it wants
when it grows up.

two essays here
I'm wondering
what to keep
what to save
another time.

DRAFT.

forgot
add a title,
open this one.
(so far)
never managed
I'm sorry
it's late—
trouble.

Let me know!