I'm not a big fan of the birthday, at least not mine. Not because I fear getting older ----- I actually kind of like that. I'm far more comfortable inside my skin now than I ever was back when it fit better.
No, first of all, birthdays kind of annoy me because they don't really mark what we think they do. I was born on August 24, 1950. (By the way, as birthdays go, that's a good one, especially the 1950 part. Makes it so easy to figure out all other dates.) But that was just the day I was born, not the day I started.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not some google-eyed anti-abortion terrorist determined that life begins sometime before conception. But when you get launched into the world and you're a full-fledged, breathing person, it'd be nice to get some credit for surviving all that cell division, and growing of fingers and toes, that went on in the womb. That's not nothing. So we already start out 9 months behind, give or take. Then we've got to put in a whole 'nother 365 before we even get to the big ONE. Somehow, that just seems wrong.
What all this amounts to for me is that in 2015 I'll turn 65 (see how easy that math is? I love 1950!) and that's supposed to be meaningful in much the same way that turning 21 is ---- it marks an artificial milestone that translates into describable, sometimes legal, changes. Everybody knows that when you turn 21 you can drink (wink wink) and you're considered an adult. Similarly, when you turn 65 you can go on Medicare. You also get all kinds of discounts, like with airlines and gym memberships, and people automatically put you in the category of OLD ----- or elderly or senior citizen or, my personal favorite, a golden-ager. You know who really thinks you're old, besides grandchildren? Car rental companies. Some don't even want to rent cars to people over 65. Huh! Why Sonny, I've been driving since stick shifts were everywhere and seat belts didn't exist!
Since Mom died, I've been in touch with a lot of people from my previous lives. It's an interesting process. First of all, I don't think I'm that much different, so why do all these people have gray hair (or bald heads!) and grandkids and social security? I still think that me being able to collect SS is some sort of scam I'm pulling --- surely I'm not old enough for retirement, right? All of my notions about time and life-span are up for grabs right now. I suppose it's a perfectly predictable life passage that happens just about now, but it's MY life passage and it's a novelty to me. How can life go by so quickly? How can I feel so new when, chronologically speaking, I'm sliding down the far end of the bell curve?
I'm reading about brain chemistry and neurology, creativity and consciousness. I'm also re-reading Agatha Christie to give those neurons a break from trying to find hooks on which to hang new learning. I get the butterflies in the tummy with excitement when I make new connections, understand something that had never been clear before. I clench my teeth and read some paragraphs over and over, almost feeling the reach of dendrites as I try to grasp something new. Wears me plum out!
When I was 30, I first noticed that the skin on my hand was loosening up. I was appalled. I kept poking at the back of my hand like it was a dead mouse, fascinated and horrified. Thirty-five years later, with far more loose skin, I assure you, I see my mother's hands, the hands of my grandmother ---- wrinkled, veiny, age-spotted ---- and I love them. They're not new, they've been used to work and play and dig in the dirt and hold babies and make love and open jars. They've been surgified several times, rehabilitated, puffed up and shrunk down.
At Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Raleigh (UUFR) my favorite part of the child dedication ceremony is the call to 'use these hands in the work of the world.' I have done that and, most recently, in the care of my mother in her last days. As we gathered around her bed, and the world fell away, it felt like a death and a birth, rolled into one.
That is new learning for me.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Monday, December 22, 2014
Meeting the Reaper Head-on
My mother died ten days before Christmas. That's so like her.
Nancy was a woman who was easy to love. She drew people like Monarchs to milkweed. They simply couldn't help themselves. Not only was she funny and pretty and kind, she had a way of listening that was attentive and made you feel like you were her sole concern at that moment. It was usually true ---- she loved being with people. It was also true that she was hard of hearing and had to lip read. That helped her cultivate the soft, sincere, focus that people felt in her presence.
She was genuinely happy to help people she knew and loved, and people she didn't as well. When I was a girl, she had a way of adopting people into the family. She cooked too much because there was no way to know how many would show up at dinner time. She listened to people's troubles, even though she rarely offered advice. Her attention and compassion were enough.
In her later years, as the kids grew up and moved away, she became increasingly independent. In her forties, she moved back to the US from England for two years, in order to complete her degree in teaching. She had taught for years without it, but wanted to achieve full career status with the Department of Defense Dependent Schools, and needed a diploma. A few years later the folks turned the tables and she held down the fort in the Azores while Dad pursued his ambition to be an itinerant, starving, actor in the US. In a marriage that surely had its ups and downs, they were both committed to helping each other fulfill their dreams.
After 31 years of living overseas, traveling widely, and teaching generations of kindergarteners and music students, they settled near grown kids in Louisburg, North Carolina. The final two decades distilled a lifetime of family ties, artistic pursuits, community living, travel, and caregiving. There were innumerable family get-togethers always accompanied by board games, singing at the piano bar, and laughter. When hurricane Fran blew through, it was at Mom and Dad's we all took refuge. Theirs was the only house in our family to sustain bad damage ---- wouldn't you know it? ---- but at least we were all together through that frightening night. Because that's exactly what we do.
Retirement for the folks brought the chance to do community theater, to attend grandchildren's plays and concerts, to go on their annual pilgrimmage to Disney World. Mom and I would talk on the phone almost daily, a delight after living on different continents for so many years. We discussed the birds in our yards, bragged on how many loads of laundry we had on the line or what we were cooking for supper. We swapped stories and gossip and shared resentments and troubles. An already close relationship blossomed under the ordinary of daily contact.
When Dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease in 1998 it was not a surprise since he had been behaving strangely for some time, but it was a shock. Reality check. Life was changing completely and abruptly. She took care of him at home, taking on the brunt of the burden and shielding the three of us kids who live here, so we could carry on with our own lives and families. It was not until he became unmanageable and dangerously combative that we understood the true extent of his decline. She continued to visit him several times a week in the Memory Care unit, overseeing his treatment and condition, but relieved at last from feeling unsafe in her own home.
She was widowed after 53 years of marriage and several years of Lester's dementia. Now she was free from caregiving and could travel once more. She flitted about, knocking things off of her bucket list and visiting friends and her three older siblings. Good times, indeed . . . . until. Small things at first, lost objects, repeated questions or statements, getting lost in a town of 1,500. With utter despair we all came to realize that she was showing many of the early signs that Dad had shown, and the diagnosis was confirmed. Two years after Alzheimer's claimed Lester, it came gunnin' for Nancy.
Nancy Lou Ewers Bundy was a determined woman. She was eminently practical and, though blessed with the spirit of an artist, she did not shrink from the real world. Whatever her thoughts and fears after she started treatment, she rarely let on that she was anything but firmly grounded in living her life each day to the fullest. She took care of legalities. She divested herself of most of her belongings. She chose which independent living community she wanted to move to in Raleigh, close to the kids. She voluntarily gave up her car and couldn't say enough how glad she was that she didn't have to take care of that big house and yard, or cook or clean for herself anymore. She made friends and became a BINGO maven. We continued to talk on the phone and see each other as usual. She fell in love with an older man, Jack, and passionately threw herself into a relationship that sustained and uplifted both of them for five years.
There's no pretty way to live and die with Alzheimer's. There are ways to manage it, there can be joy and laughter ---- sometimes high hilarity ---- and there can be intense love and devotion. But no matter how you cut it, it ain't pretty. She lost memory. Her speech and coordination faded away. She was confused and frightened sometimes, often courageous, mostly resigned. Her body gave out as she lost half of her body weight and the ability to walk or feed herself. Her limbs contracted until finally, mute and vacant, she was curled into a grotesque fetal position, ready to launch into an unknown world and leave that tortured body behind. Which she did, nine and a half years post-diagnosis, at 9:28 PM on Monday, December 15, 2014.
Isn't that just like her? She didn't want to trouble anybody. Maybe she knew we were bringing her home on the 10th for however long her final weeks would be, and decided she would cut it short and bring us all together. With the help of Hospice, she was carefully installed in a hospital bed in the front room of our house. Within two days she started to fail. On her final day, the family gathered. Music played ---- Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Christmas carols. The lights on the Christmas tree drew her eyes when nothing else could. We whispered and talked to her, told her how much we loved her, thanked her for the light she had always been. We patted and soothed and kissed and held her and she slipped away, enveloped in love. That was her gift to us, a final light on the path she has always illuminated for her children, her family, and friends.
She was my mama.
Nancy was a woman who was easy to love. She drew people like Monarchs to milkweed. They simply couldn't help themselves. Not only was she funny and pretty and kind, she had a way of listening that was attentive and made you feel like you were her sole concern at that moment. It was usually true ---- she loved being with people. It was also true that she was hard of hearing and had to lip read. That helped her cultivate the soft, sincere, focus that people felt in her presence.
She was genuinely happy to help people she knew and loved, and people she didn't as well. When I was a girl, she had a way of adopting people into the family. She cooked too much because there was no way to know how many would show up at dinner time. She listened to people's troubles, even though she rarely offered advice. Her attention and compassion were enough.
In her later years, as the kids grew up and moved away, she became increasingly independent. In her forties, she moved back to the US from England for two years, in order to complete her degree in teaching. She had taught for years without it, but wanted to achieve full career status with the Department of Defense Dependent Schools, and needed a diploma. A few years later the folks turned the tables and she held down the fort in the Azores while Dad pursued his ambition to be an itinerant, starving, actor in the US. In a marriage that surely had its ups and downs, they were both committed to helping each other fulfill their dreams.
After 31 years of living overseas, traveling widely, and teaching generations of kindergarteners and music students, they settled near grown kids in Louisburg, North Carolina. The final two decades distilled a lifetime of family ties, artistic pursuits, community living, travel, and caregiving. There were innumerable family get-togethers always accompanied by board games, singing at the piano bar, and laughter. When hurricane Fran blew through, it was at Mom and Dad's we all took refuge. Theirs was the only house in our family to sustain bad damage ---- wouldn't you know it? ---- but at least we were all together through that frightening night. Because that's exactly what we do.
Retirement for the folks brought the chance to do community theater, to attend grandchildren's plays and concerts, to go on their annual pilgrimmage to Disney World. Mom and I would talk on the phone almost daily, a delight after living on different continents for so many years. We discussed the birds in our yards, bragged on how many loads of laundry we had on the line or what we were cooking for supper. We swapped stories and gossip and shared resentments and troubles. An already close relationship blossomed under the ordinary of daily contact.
When Dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease in 1998 it was not a surprise since he had been behaving strangely for some time, but it was a shock. Reality check. Life was changing completely and abruptly. She took care of him at home, taking on the brunt of the burden and shielding the three of us kids who live here, so we could carry on with our own lives and families. It was not until he became unmanageable and dangerously combative that we understood the true extent of his decline. She continued to visit him several times a week in the Memory Care unit, overseeing his treatment and condition, but relieved at last from feeling unsafe in her own home.
She was widowed after 53 years of marriage and several years of Lester's dementia. Now she was free from caregiving and could travel once more. She flitted about, knocking things off of her bucket list and visiting friends and her three older siblings. Good times, indeed . . . . until. Small things at first, lost objects, repeated questions or statements, getting lost in a town of 1,500. With utter despair we all came to realize that she was showing many of the early signs that Dad had shown, and the diagnosis was confirmed. Two years after Alzheimer's claimed Lester, it came gunnin' for Nancy.
Nancy Lou Ewers Bundy was a determined woman. She was eminently practical and, though blessed with the spirit of an artist, she did not shrink from the real world. Whatever her thoughts and fears after she started treatment, she rarely let on that she was anything but firmly grounded in living her life each day to the fullest. She took care of legalities. She divested herself of most of her belongings. She chose which independent living community she wanted to move to in Raleigh, close to the kids. She voluntarily gave up her car and couldn't say enough how glad she was that she didn't have to take care of that big house and yard, or cook or clean for herself anymore. She made friends and became a BINGO maven. We continued to talk on the phone and see each other as usual. She fell in love with an older man, Jack, and passionately threw herself into a relationship that sustained and uplifted both of them for five years.
There's no pretty way to live and die with Alzheimer's. There are ways to manage it, there can be joy and laughter ---- sometimes high hilarity ---- and there can be intense love and devotion. But no matter how you cut it, it ain't pretty. She lost memory. Her speech and coordination faded away. She was confused and frightened sometimes, often courageous, mostly resigned. Her body gave out as she lost half of her body weight and the ability to walk or feed herself. Her limbs contracted until finally, mute and vacant, she was curled into a grotesque fetal position, ready to launch into an unknown world and leave that tortured body behind. Which she did, nine and a half years post-diagnosis, at 9:28 PM on Monday, December 15, 2014.
Isn't that just like her? She didn't want to trouble anybody. Maybe she knew we were bringing her home on the 10th for however long her final weeks would be, and decided she would cut it short and bring us all together. With the help of Hospice, she was carefully installed in a hospital bed in the front room of our house. Within two days she started to fail. On her final day, the family gathered. Music played ---- Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Christmas carols. The lights on the Christmas tree drew her eyes when nothing else could. We whispered and talked to her, told her how much we loved her, thanked her for the light she had always been. We patted and soothed and kissed and held her and she slipped away, enveloped in love. That was her gift to us, a final light on the path she has always illuminated for her children, her family, and friends.
She was my mama.
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