Normal things in life can still be crappy

Every afternoon, when Dad was here, I would come over and we would watch reruns of Bonanza on the old kitchen TV (which was my old 1991 TV, and which I still had in the basement and brought over for him when his TV quit).

"The Cartwrights are in big trouble.  I'm not sure they'll get out of this one," he would say with a mocking look of concern. "Oh dear," I'd reply, as though it were possible that the Cartwrights would succumb to any villain.

Today, for the first time, I am watching it in his kitchen without him, to occupy myself while estate appraisers go through every, and I mean, every item in my parents' house.   This was their life.   These were the things they used, and were given for their service in church offices, and collected, and cooked with, and listened to on the CD player, and decorated with at Christmas, and read, and remembered their own parents by.  Now it's all being inventoried for "fair market value" to value the estate, as estates must be valued.

It's what happens as each generation passes, and it's normal, and it's really crappy.   I'm trying to enjoy Bonanza but I miss Dad.

My Dad : 1927-2013

We lost my dad last night.

This poor shot is a year old, but it makes me smile because it's Dad using an iPhone.  He wanted nothing to do with modern technology, but needed something with a camera function.

There aren't words for how I'm missing him.


Back later

The shells

I wrote a post back in 2009 about marking the seasons with my mother's dining room centerpieces.  She passed in July 2010 and it's my job now.

It's April, Easter is over, it's time to put away the ornamental fruit and bring out the seashells.  As I arranged them i realized, with a little sock-in-the-gut feeling,  that I was doing it for the third time.

The first year is milestone after milestone, every occasion, and naturally the hardest. The second year kind of marks a passage into relief and making things your own.  As I did the table arrangements in spring and fall 2012, there was a kind of "Wow. Okay. We got through it" feeling.  Smiling and grumbling both started to uncurl little fiddlehead-style new growth.

The third go-around is oddly disquieting.  Has it been that long?  Have the ordinary days and the periodic rituals piled up to that degree?

We change some things.   We had never, ever, gone to a restaurant for a major holiday meal, but Dad surprised us all by agreeing to Thanksgiving 2012 at our favorite cafe (!) letting us all rest from kitchen work.  Mom loved poinsettias, Dad doesn't like them, we're skipping them.  Christmas and Easter still take place at the family table (which is back and nicely repaired after its Christmas collapse!),

....but I put out (gasp!) paper napkins at Easter.  The spring seashells and the autumn fruit gladden my heart, and I'll keep that tradition up even when it's just for myself, wherever we land, hopefully for decades to come.

There's a song called "Lesson of Love" (which I won't link because of the nauseating Christian "art" the youtubist added but you can find it easily on YouTube if you want to deal with a Christian song.  Singer is Ashley Cleveland) :

   World keeps turning.
   Bridges keep burning.
   I am learning
   the lesson of love.

Life moves on, and doesn't move on.  The seasons shift, the marsh grass greens over, and browns, and greens again, the tide churns in and out and the wind shifts.  The house stays, time eddying around it.

Holidays happen.  The hummingbirds are back for the summer.  I walk back and forth between houses.  We're keeping up the Mediterranean diet, which might get easier now that I've found a Mediterranean Slow Cooker cookbook. Late to the party but finding that, by damn, NCIS is really good! Older daughter HAS HER BACHELOR'S DEGREE! She fought hard against Crohn's Disease and plenty of ordinary obstacles too, and she did it!

Now our niece is applying to colleges, which astounds me. She was a child, like, 10 minutes ago.

I'm learning the lesson but still feeling like I don't know much about it except to keep on putting one foot in front of the other, to strike a good balance in providing for Dad and the rest of the family the level of continuity that helps and heals, but the changes and the forward motion that keep our souls from stagnating.

I try to think what I would want, what I do want, for my loved ones when I'm gone, and I feel like only the genuine pleasure from the traditions should stay.  If they like things I liked, then we're connected when they enjoy them, but anything I enjoyed that they don't, I pray they'll skip.  Maybe plodding through some tradition that I was all into, even though it annoys people, is a kind of remembrance, but not a kind anybody needs.

I'm older and colder.  There have been huge losses since then for Larry and me, and I feel like I'm in my 60th year and still don't understand a thing in this world.  Believers tell me life is about preparation for the next life, and non-believers tell me life is about here and now and each other on earth because That's a Wrap, and neither one makes sense to me.  The things that do make sense are : cats; Vermeer paintings; Denise Levertov's poetry.  Much is good.  Trying to keep Dad supplied with fun mysteries to read, the often enjoyable pointlessness of telling someone he's wrong on the internet, catering to cats, making things and swearing at yarn, concocting recipes, connecting with friends, planning new plantings for the yard.  Mostly just doing the Next Thing in front of me and having no idea where I'm going.

Control Issues. [R] language warning

I've always lived by the idea that we have some control.  Maybe not as much as we want, maybe over surprising things and not always over what we want to have it over, but that applying some wisdom increased our ability to control outcomes. 

There's the Serenity Prayer:  serenity to accept what I can't change but courage to change what I can, with wisdom to know the difference.  Maybe I interpreted that the way I wanted to, more than the way it ought to be interpreted.   And there's the Gandhi quote I repeat over and over:


But life for a few years now has sent disquieting messages that nothing is certain; that being an emotionally well-centered adult requires acceptance of that, and ability to enjoy life anyway.

I sit here in a comfortable house some people would sell their souls for, and I want to flee, and then hate myself for my ingratitude, which is kind of a useless pattern unless I go deeper into why I'm so tense and unhappy.

But the reason is the pervasive uncertainty of it.  A parade of funerals.  Storm vulnerability.  Exposure of this formerly out-in-the-boonies little dirt road to the outside world.

I'm very grudgingly revisiting a book I bought a year ago and have avoided reading : Comfortable with Uncertainty.  The fact that I bought it long ago indicates I dimly realized I needed to deal with the issue, but that's as far as I got.

About once a year we see swaths of road-bank grass on either side of our house, and saplings just inside the woods, brown and wither in an obviously unnatural manner.

It also shows up all over the county, and there was no doubt that the county was poisoning the vegetation, for reasons unknown - I figured it was cheaper than mowing the shoulder.
 
It wasn't quite the reason, but I was close. The other day we caught the county employee spraying nauseatingly day-glow-purple-colored poison along the edge of our woods, and he insisted it was required to keep limbs from interfering with the power lines. Never mind that no limbs are anywhere near the lines.  The worst ice storm on earth wouldn't bring any of those limbs into contact with the lines.  Never mind sending a crew to cut limbs instead -- too expensive.  It's standard county policy; spray poison within X-distance of the lines. The groundwater or marsh runoff be damned.

Not a great photo - but last year's poisoning shows in the brown patch and dead saplings. THIS year's, sprayed the day before the photo, is just starting to yellow out - see  foreground, and background just behind the discarded drink cup.

The bypass highway is one block over from our street, and the traffic noise has always been there, but the neighborhood used to be left alone when it was not a destination to anywhere.  Then the bike bridge brought SUV after SUV of tourists, blocking the road (It's just dirt!  It can't be a road!), dumping trash.  Our neighborhood is theirs to do with as they please.

Take the green snake.

Here comes the bad language. And no, that "damned" in the paragraph a bit above was Jane Austen-esque compared to my feelings about some other things.

In the brush next to our driveway, there lived, past tense, a small green snake.  One morning about 3(?) weeks ago, I came out and it lay dead at the side of the dirt road, its head cleanly chopped off.  Not run over by a car, not attacked by an animal.  Neatly cut by a man-made implement, and left to rot in the sun.

Some total and complete fucked in the head tourist came into OUR neighborhood, decided to walk/jog/bike down our little country lane, did not approve of the little country wildlife on our little country lane, and had the arrogance to decide the snake was not entitled to live.

I understand snake fear.  I understand quick reaction that can't take time to look at head shape -- venomous snakes have distinctive heads -- and I'd have understood if this snake were at all sizable, or had any kind of scary markings.  Some harmless snakes look similar to venomous ones unless you know the markings.

But WHO on this godforsaken planet is LEFT that doesn't know small plain green snakes are harmless?  Who doesn't know that they eat little pests and certainly hurt nobody?  Jerknuts tourists from concrete jungles?

Am I supposed to feel sorry for the daily lives of those property-rights-challenged touristas, and not begrudge them this brief vacation in a place with country lanes whose wild residents are so unfamiliar?

I don't feel sorry for them and I do begrudge them.  They can go to goddam zoos, where the wildlife is protected from them behind walls, and they could realize it's, duh, not their neighborhood or their place to make any bloodydamn decisions here, and they could learn some basic kind of response to new experiences, like, say, leave it alone if it's not affecting your life or wellbeing.  There is no way that this Touron felt threatened or trapped.  The snake was not invading the moron's space.  There was plenty of space to avoid the snake, which lay at the SIDE of a wide road going in two directions.   Even massive ignorance doesn't make killing it, rather than dashing off, logical.

Why couldn't I have caught them at it?  I know, best I didn't.  It would have been unpleasant.

My reaction is awfully big, considering the fact that the species isn't in jeopardy and there are are plenty more little green snakes living large all around the area.  I feel like it's not just another wildlife anecdote, and it's not just another lamentation about how this quiet little street that used to be nowhere anybody would walk to, now is violated by trash and crass stupidity and now, thefts, over and over. 

Someone has broken into our basement again.  Our ground floor linen closet holds only some old bedspreads and a black-and-white screen gameboy.  They were terribly disappointed.  I'd like to disappoint them further with a cartilage-popping kick to the knee.

Someone else has stolen some small hockable items of cherished sentimental, more than monetary, value from inside the house.  Family obligations have sent us off on several short trips in the past few months, and we still think that the people to whom we needed to give access while we were gone would never do this.  We're saddened, angered and baffled because no answer makes sense, except that someone left the door unlocked, but it adds to the bafflement and the uncertainty.

Yeah, we're looking into ways to take back some control over this.  We can do more about the house than we can about the Nature Lovers. No locks will keep away the poison or the trash dumping or the wildlife abuse.

Eventually yall will realize that I am not being funny when I say I am not a nice person. I dream of painful justice.  I also feel like it's been a long time since I posted anything joyful or positive.  Anger is a natural response to most of this and I don't want to beat myself too badly about it, but I do feel spiritually off-kilter in my loathing for so many fellow human beings.

You see dead animals on roads all the time, and I always hate it, but the death of that one little snake just tore it for me.  We feel we have so little control over our home and lives anymore, and it's just the precise illustration of that.

OK, so, Gandhi's quote.  It's about leaving results in other, or Other, hands, but not about saying we can't make a difference.  In our tiny little ways, we help the birds and the garden spiders and an occasional turtle or lizard, and we take some cans to the food bank, and maybe I only need to believe we have power to make an actual difference.  Unless we're given something else to do, these must be what we're meant to do.

And of course, somewhere inside, I have the fantasy that there's a Shangri-La we could get to where there are no natural threats like fires or storms, and no jerks, and I'll never get teed off again and can sit and sip tea in blissful serenity.  I know it's rot, but my knowledge is intellectual, not heartfelt.

I'm not sure I can let go of the need to have some power. The idea that I really have no control over anything disturbs me, so I'm sitting in a comfortable house with air conditioning and a refrigerator stocked with food, and swearing anyway, because I'm starting the grieving process for the idea of Control now.

I may be through the Denial phase but I'm probably gonna be stuck in Bargaining for awhile, mixed with Anger and gloom, before I get to acceptance.  I might not ever get there.  It's not lookin' good.

Me and silver

Losing my mom 2 years ago had a component that's probably universal.  Regrets.  They're a stupid way to live, considering that linear time is going to keep marching forward, but maybe it's inevitable that I not only miss some of the things we shared but badly miss some of the things we could have shared but didn't.

For every special occasion, Mom and Dad's wedding silverware came out of the hutch, got polished up and got placed at the dining room table.  And with the approach of every special occasion, I made sure my mother knew how much I despised the silver, the polishing, and the formality, and would never, ever have such things as part of my life.

Kid, teenager, Young Woman, endlessly I hauled out the same snide comments about the silverware and she'd smile and preempt my beaten-to-death joke :  "Yes, yes, I know, when I'm gone you're going to melt it all down into ingots and sell it."

No, she didn't smile because she knew I'd come around.  She smiled because she never took material things all that seriously.  She mentioned my distaste for the silverware to a friend just a few years ago.  She really thought I hated it, and there's a good reason she thought so.

I thought I hated it, too.

And maybe she and I share responsibility for our complete lack of understanding about the silverware and why I claimed not to want it.  With some communication we might have uncovered the real problem.

Because what I actually hated was silver polish.

It seems unfair to name the brand.  It was a good product, it was all there was back in The Day, and it did the job.  Nobody had invented anything better, or at least nothing else was commonly publicized. The brand is still around and I think they solved the stench problem awhile back, so it no longer needs to be dissed.

But back then, W------ Silver Polish had a nasty, sour smell.  And taste.  As the pre-holiday polishing job got underway, it formed a nauseating little atmosphere of sulphurous sourness in the kitchen, where she polished the utensils, and maybe it was my imagination, but I could taste the stuff on my dinner fork, a sour-ish encore to every bite of turkey or rice.

I doubt if anybody liked the smell, but it may be that I'm just built to react strongly to it.  The smell gave me the kind of headache that in turn causes queasiness.  However mild both sensations were -- and they were.  I ate and socialized normally through the meal -- still, it took a form of Formal Dinner self-control for me to sit and eat with the smell clinging even so gently to the whole table spread.

To her end, she thought I hated this silver that she cherished.  For so long, I thought I did too.

Possibly she suspected that my dislike had eased some when she gave me this pitcher about 10 years ago.  I've positioned it so you can see one of its dents, center-bottom.  There are more dents, and lots of scratches.  It's silver plate, and she kind of waved it off, saying, "Would you like that?  Now, it's not any good, but you're welcome to it."  And I responded with a happy "Yes!"  Plate needs care too and so, by my taking something silver when she offered it, I hope she knew I would at least treat her flatware with respect.

But I doubt she knew it would ever be real love, and it is.  The pieces are beautiful, and she loved it, and for her sake and its own, I love it too. I probably would have loved it long ago if i'd known that my problem was NOT that silver was an inherently sour and nauseating metal, but that W------ Silver Polish was making it act on me like kryptonite.

She'd undoubtedly get a big kick out of seeing me spot this little tray in a thrift shop and actually want it. This too is plated and came cheap, but I loved the shape and the clean, classic design, and finding my initial on it closed the deal for 10 bucks.

Spending the present regretting the past simply piles up more lost minutes squandered, but still, sometimes, I wish....

Snark that Springeth Green [PG-13]

On Saturday, July 17th, 2010, we got a morning phone call from NY, that my 85-year-old mom-in-law had been taken to the hospital with congestive heart failure. All day we waited for the next phone call.

But when the phone rang it was my father next door, saying that my mom was going into the hospital with congestive heart failure.

I didn't know what CHF was, really. I would never have believed that my dear mom-in-law would see her 86th birthday (2 months later) much less be back to driving and active life, which she now is. At the time we thought we might lose them both that very day, and Larry and I were basket cases.

We sat in our (South Carolina) ER waiting room with my parents, and we tried to talk normal things like the garden. The Brussels sprouts were doing well.

Mom summoned a smile and said, "Well, your mom will be very happy to help you eat them."

Days later her doctor discovered the MAC infection that was too much for her, and she died on the 28th.

We ignored the Brussels sprouts and most everything else. Every time I looked at those pretty plants, I'd think, "We should think about how she'd enjoy them, she'd want us to enjoy them." It didn't work. Everything went to seed and the gardens dried up into rectangles of dry brown stalks. As I felt a little better it seemed a shame, but at the time, the very thought just reopened the loss. We debated whether we'd even do gardens this year.

So flash forward to mid-February in South Carolina and a couple warm days. And the dry brown stalks have re-greened and are producing little sprouts. Photo taken Feb. 17th.


This seems like some kind of Spiritual Symbolism. You can't say no to The Giver of Life, for Lo! the .... something something [INSERT BIBLE QUOTE HERE].

I'm coming back to life too. And we will hope it's only a phase of my fuller emotional engagement, but i am grouchy as holy hell.

I'm sure no one has noticed. Shut up.

But it does not resemble Biblical doves with olive leaves, and rainbows of promise and renewal. I yell at everything.

Stupid kitchen knives that won't slice an onion evenly.

Stupid [bleeping] gigantic water tank in our bedroom closet taking up a desperately-needed quarter of its space so I have to stand on something to reach teetering piles on high shelves, which fall off when I try to pull something out. Really hate that water tank.

Stupid Facebook's "New Photo Viewer, created because we Luv our members so-o-o much! Or maybe because if it ain't broke, we fix it!" that CROPS THE BOTTOM OFF MY PHOTOS. And claims it doesn't, when I go to the charmingly spelt "help centre."

[Bleeping] giftwrap industry. The giftwrap industry is phasing out flat sheets and the choices are gift bags, which don't pack well when you have to immobilize a breakable, or big rolls, which are holiday-specific, to force you to buy more instead of using the leftovers. And then store them. It's a whole Temperamental post in itself.

Getting angry about spam email is the most pointless of the pointless, but spammers have destroyed what started out as a great way to message, and the more copies I receive of Hookup2nite! and money scams and TARA! wanting to read my palm, the angrier I get. I find myself wanting something very ugly to happen to "Tara." Then I convince myself that since this is a spambot and not a human being, it doesn't harm my soul to wish it. But my Higher Power probably wants me to remember that it's the thought that counts.

Oh, and there's a whole rant I wrote but haven't posted, about a video that subtly mocks and humiliates older women. I want to take the little bastard CameraPerson and ... never mind.

My Craving To Criticize threatens to take me over. I read other blogs (no, none of this refers to you guys who are on my blogroll) and want to write whole long responses full of phrases like "What planet is she on?!" and "mentally deficient puling," and "Praise Jesus! feeling good about ourselves is the cruise-ship to Hell, you tell 'em, honey!"

I know my readers kinda like my snark posts and I'm happy to do them at times, but a constant stream of it doesn't wear well. I'm indulging myself with this post, but believe me, the 10 separate posts it could have been would be overkill. Yet it's all I seem able to write or think lately. I'm really not in the mood for The Examined Life, I have no desire to examine my life right now, I just want to eat chocolate and say swear words, but I kind of need to look beneath it all at the cause.

The real me is a grouch, but I'm also well aware that none of these relatively trivial things is what I'm really angry about.

What am I really angry about? The last half of 2009 I went to 5 funerals in 6 months, including my uncle, Dad's only brother. And I begged off of attending a 6th funeral. The summer of 2010, you know about. The illnesses and deaths of people dear to us have kept slamming us since. Larry's uncle, who meant a whole lot to him, died a few weeks ago. We are wrung out and feeling brittle and I really want to slash God's tires, but I get sent to Celestial Voicemail instead. Your fury is important to us, please hold.

So I blow up about matters either trivial or outside my sphere of influence. That Serenity Prayer again. What can I change and what can't I?

According to grieving literature anger is part of the grieving process, and there's no exact formula as to when you hit that patch. I've hit it. So, at the moment the voice of the turtle is heard in our land and it's saying, "%$*#!"

Books and ribbons

We went to Books-A-Million the other day, like we need more than the umpteen thousand books we already have, but sometimes a little retail therapy is nice. I usually have no interest in the self-help section, but this time I wandered over to it. After lots of scowling at the offerings, I found a book on grieving that looked fairly helpful and intelligent.

Then I put it back. I've found or been given 2 books and a website already. Is there really any reason to get another book? I think that in some way I pictured grief as kind of an assembly-line process, where 4 workers could build a car 4 times as fast as, say, one doing it alone, so 4 sources would make me feel better much faster! Nah, probably not.

I bought The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, instead. I'm impressed! It's good.


Last year I discovered the mental health benefit of making chains out of shiny, colorful Christmas ribbon. It started as a way to use up tangled messes of old ribbon, but became so much fun that when I ran out, I began scouring gift-wrap displays to buy more. By January, the good colors were gone from local stores, and I began searching online for metallic ribbon dealers. That's where I finally happened on Mystic Alley. I bookmarked the site, but the year was going in other directions and I didn't get around to picking my colors and ordering.

Last week, I realized it would be a happy activity to get back into, so I ordered a box of ribbon. A very big box. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Mystic Alley is great to deal with, by the way, fast, accurate, and service-oriented.


That's a standard 12-inch LP album, which I put in the box only for size-reference. It was not obvious how big the box and the contents are, so I used the album to show the size of the ribbon reels. Only then did a cat come helpfully along to pose with the box and make it unnecessary. She couldn't do that before I went to the trouble to hunt through our albums and find it. Certainly not.

It takes as long as it takes, but we're all doing OK.

Grief, briefly observed

It's not going to become a grieving blog. Grieving is a major part of my life right now, and if I've learned anything at all, I've learned that "the only way out is through." I wouldn't try to bury the feelings and Soldier On like everything's swell, but I haven't got much in the way of words or insights so this is a one-timer.

One thing is that my feelings change so often. I could write about Sad, or Lethargic, or Life is a Joyful Gift, or Irritability, or the peaceful feeling that Mom's life was complete and fulfilled, or the frustrated, angry feeling that she got cheated out of some years. Pick any one, and by the time I get it written up and reviewed and spellchecked, it isn't even the way I feel anymore and I've shifted into one of the others.

Maybe the one unusual thing about my experience is that I got such a long, long, deferment from grieving. I've never really experienced this before. They say that all major losses -- job loss, divorce, etc -- are types of grieving, accepting a loss and remaking your life. I did that during my life-implosion in 1994 when my job and my brief marriage tanked all at once. But this is different. That earlier sorrow was one of grieving my own illusions, facing the reality that people I'd trusted were not who I thought they were. But this is the loss of one of the best people I'll ever know. There's no "something better" out there.

And it's odd that grieving feels so new, because I dearly loved my grandparents. We were close. They were my advocates and supporters. My grandmother sent me to graduate school. Funded the whole thing. I could do so little for her in return except visit her in the nursing home, write them funny letters, give her university souvenirs and, when I was done, my diploma.

But the era of great trips to see them on their farm, of all the good times, was so long over by then. By the time I lost them, they'd had years of illness and it felt more that the "real life" of having them had been gradually going away for awhile.


Mom was born in 1927. This cherished little girl made it through a decade before antibiotics were available. I remember my grandmother telling me how parents worried about getting their babies to live through their "second summer." The second summer was a precarious time, I guess because when breastfeeding ended, its immunity benefit ended too, and they seemed to have a somewhat higher death rate.

This baby lived to be over 80, flew in jets, owned a computer, had children and grandchildren, yet I feel like she was entitled to more years, and I guess I'm still at the grief-stage of looking back, thinking, Why didn't TWO doctors find the infection years ago? She'd be here. She still seems so close. 6 weeks ago, she stood in their kitchen scrambling an egg, and I feel like she's barely moved out of reach.

Most of my readers, unlike me, have been through grieving long before this, through deaths timely and untimely. I feel guilty about finding Mom's death a few weeks short of her 83rd birthday "untimely," but there I am.

But on her last day in the hospital, my Mom said to me, with a smile, "Don't worry about all this. It's just ridiculous." I didn't know what she meant, but she either knew, or had decided, that life was ending, and wanted us all to feel that this was right. I guess she deserves to be taken at her word on that, so I will get there. Eventually.

Meanwhile, here's a flickr photo set of my beautiful, dear, funny mom. One of the smartest people I ever knew, and what stands out about her to me was her complete lack of bullshit. She could see through, and cut through bullshit in a heartbeat. I think that's what I treasure most about her, but there's plenty more.

Two oddities

If i have any literary ability or culture at all, it's due to my mom. She took me to plays and musicals, locally, and in New York and London. We rifled old bookstores and junk shops together. She introduced me to Brookgreen Gardens when I was 11 years old. I haven't been able to go to Brookgreen in the last couple weeks, though it's usually my favorite de-stress place, but things are progressing and I'll get back there soon.

She also took me to The Big Library: the downtown Charlotte Main Branch library. Going "downtown" was an expedition and a special treat. One subject among many that I got into while browsing the Big Library was English history. I was the usual romantic teenaged girl -- I read all the library's books about the abdication of Edward VIII, which fascinated me even as it became quickly clear that romance was the least important part of that story.

One book that they had on the subject was this rather vitriolic thing called Gone with the Windsors. The author, who had spent his journalistic career writing food and hospitality books until then, was so outraged by the Duke of Windsor's sentimental and sometimes self-contradictory autobiography, A King's Story, that he felt compelled to write his own book about the events of 1936, in which he took the couple apart piece by piece. Some justified criticism and some serious over-the-top snark.

Awhile back, someone offered the book, now a library discard, on eBay. She's a Charlotte seller who gets a lot of the library's discards, and I'm pretty sure it's the same copy I checked out when I was about 14, since it came from the main library, not a branch, and they only had one copy.

It's one of the thousand things I've thought about in the last two weeks. "Mom would get a kick out of knowing that I now own the same copy! I never thought to tell her! Now I can't."

I can't tell her things anymore. This will keep happening a lot for awhile, and on occasion for the rest of my life.

Meanwhile, last week Dad asked Larry and me to walk around the yard and make notes of things that needed to be done to the landscaping. I pulled a pad of paper out of my mass of junk on my desk shelf, and this photo fell out.


Mom and my dear dog Sparky, around (?) 1971.

They both live on in my heart, but that doesn't cut it for me. Whatever comes next, we apparently are on a Need To Know basis about, and the Higher Power doesn't seem to think that we Need to Know, so all I can do is hope that the photo tumbling out for me was a little message that she's there with loved ones, and with all her favorite animals, and that she's as delighted and joyful as she looks in this picture.

Purpose

They say that everything happens for a reason and it could be true or it could be bull that we use to comfort us in loss, I'm not equipped to determine that, at least not right now. I do think some things can be turned to a purpose. I also think I have a need to do that right now, whether it matters or not, so put up with it while I share a little, possibly useless, wisdom I've gained just in the past couple weeks.

If you're diagnosed with pneumonia, and it's not the first time, make sure it really is pneumonia. Whatever your age, though the elderly usually are less strong for the fight.

There are some bad bacteria out there. Tuberculosis is one but it's not the only one. Another, biologically related to TB, is called MAC and acts much the same, and needs pretty much the same treatment.

MAC is different from TB in that we all get exposed to it all the time -- it's a common bacterium in the environment, we get little bouts of it and our systems knock it out quickly.

But if you've got a vulnerable zone, as my mom had in her left lung since a bad bout with pneumonia in 1965, MAC can settle in and become chronic. Ordinary courses of antibiotics, for secondary bronchitis/pneumonia things, won't kill it.

Several chest X-rays, which revealed the colony of bacteria over the past 2-3 years, all were diagnosed as individual bouts with pneumonia. The same shadow appeared, over years' time, in the same place on the x-ray. And I guess it wasn't totally illogical to mistakenly think that she'd repeatedly get pneumonia in the same vulnerable location. But it was a pouch of MAC, and settled in over, the doc guesses, 5 years or so.

If .... if. The "if onlys" may be a very natural reaction, and I'm not inclined to either diss myself for having it, or to dwell on it and let it fester. My mom's doctors tried. We got her to better ones, but it needed to happen years ago.

She was ready, even happy, to stop the fight. It had been a harder, longer fight than any of us realized, circa 5 years of it sapping her. She'd had enough. None of us feel that, things being what they were, there was another outcome.

So maybe things have a purpose and maybe some that don't can, still, be turned to a purpose. Don't live with an infection like this for years. It's not necessary.