Prioritizing to a count of four

Within the last three days, I have learned that two women (around) my age have died suddenly: one from the flu, the other from a heart attack.
Of course I am freaked out. The hypochondriac in me immediately goes on high alert: What were they doing that I might be doing? What did they have that I might have? Too much Starbucks? Too much exposure to children? Job loss? Too much waistline? That weird vertical earlobe crease?
And then the realist in me kicks in and I do some 4-4-4 breathing, which a counselor taught me to do years ago: Inhale to a count of four; hold the breath for a four-count; exhale to the count of four.
I cannot even fathom making out my New Year's Resolution List for 2015, including such usual resolves: eat more vegetables, drink more water, sleep eight hours and then WHAM!! being hit with sudden death/unplanned death. No one writes: Don't die in 2015.
Oh. My. God.
Oh. My. God.
Breathe.
Breathe.
Breathe.
Breathe.
***
Life. Wow. Full of surprises and heartache and good chocolate and food poisoning and ten thousand great things and another ten thousand shitty things.
Makes a person rethink her existence, and the planning that goes into living. Am I really in charge?
***
I am in charge of prioritizing my life's joys and stressors, that I know. I can choose to wake up feeling happy; I can choose to watch a cartoon instead of the CBS Evening News; I can choose the broccoli over the banana pudding; I can choose to believe that good things happen to good people.
Until they don't.
I can choose to google the shit out of Why a 50-year-old-woman dies from a heart attack?, or I can choose to sit in my comfy reading chair with a cup of hot tea and an excellent book. Which action will cause me the least amount of stress?
Which future job will cause the least amount of stress? Would I be happier ringing up people's groceries or returning to the classroom? Becoming a nanny again or getting my real estate license?
For now, right now, I am choosing my reading chair and a new book. Also, four calm breaths.

Grown-Up Accounting

So I'm trying to get life insurance. I want to leave some sort of financial legacy if I should kick it sometime soon, or, as is the case with my (proposed) twenty-year term limit life insurance policy, within the next two decades.
Although I've long thought about dying -- I'm a neurotic sort -- it's occurred to me, as I near fifty, that people my age do, in fact, die, and when someone dies at fifty, people shake their heads and say, Oh, so young, but it's not the same kind of head shaking that happens when someone eight or eighteen passes. Now THAT's tragic. For people my age, the body starts deteriorating: There's cancer. A lot of cancer. And sudden heart attacks.
Like many people who think about their deaths, and hope they get to be ancient and die in their sleep, without a conscious last-breath clue, I can easily picture myself, being visual and all, my own Last Day. There I will lie, in the Death-Is-Approaching Bed, all veiny and wrinkly and smelling of lavender and stale urine, a metal pitcher bedside filled with icy water. I picture beautiful music present in the background, something flute-y or piano-y or harp-y. And candles. Maybe incense. Ideally, I will be surrounded by my three children and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Probably my husband will already be gone -- he's seven years older and prone to high blood pressure -- and I will not remarry should my sweet man predecease me, so it's with great likelihood that the people surrounding me as I die will be biological offspring. Maybe a sister or two. A cousin. Possibly, although this is a long shot, some long-suffering friends. (I am not a very good friend. Ask people who are friends with me. I never call or invite my friends over. They make an outing date and I say, Yeah, that sounds like great fun, but then that date approaches and I would rather take a bath or read a new book or roll around on the floor with my dogs.)
***
In my ideal death scenario, as my respirations decline slowly, slowly, slowly, I will see Jesus waiting for me at the end of that bright light we've all heard about, and there will be Mother Mary, in her beautiful blue robe, with her slender arms outstretched, waiting to receive me. On the sidelines will be my grandmother Dorothy, holding an enormous jar of dill pickles (this makes great sense to me); and my mom and dad, who will greet me with hot cups of coffee and an open Scrabble board, maybe even a Winston Red; and my Aunt Jannie, who makes me think always of pink cotton candy, I don't know why; and possibly my favorite teacher, Miss Pagna, who was the reason I taught school to begin with; and my husband, of course. My guy who loved me through all my neuroses and shenanigans and fluffy-cloud-unicorn thinking. He's going to be there, all strong and tall and smell-good-y. Also welcoming me will be all the dogs I've known and loved: Midge, Blackie, Fluffy, Barney, Taffy, Sunny, Bella, Millie ... and each will be freshly bathed, healthy and bark-y, but the good bark-y, not the annoying bark-y. They will dance around my feet and I will magically have endless peanut butter spoons to lay at their feet.
Heaven is going to smell like cinnamon rolls and espresso and a baby's neck, right after its bath.
***
Now, at age 48, I must prepare for my eventual passing, even though I desperately hope it's another thirty, forty, dare I say, fifty years away. I love life, I mean, I get a huge fucking kick out of being alive, and I sure hope there's more in store for me. I want symphonies and concerts and crab legs and black-tie dinners and Christmas Eves and ocean holidays. I'm greedy.
I want there to be more in store for my husband, too, and our three children, all of whom are adults and poor (the children, not the husband) because they have liberal arts degrees and have to pull espresso shots at Starbucks just to get health insurance. They are suffocating under enormous student loan debt, and it brings me great joy, therefore, to think that when I die I can bequeath money, enough to clear their frigging academic debt and maybe allow for a European vacation.
***
When I worked full time, I think I had a $100K policy. Now that I am not working, I have a $0.00 policy. The hubby carries $10K on me, which is enough to bury my corpse and/or cremate me (I'll let him decide should I die first) and maybe have a small get-together, but not enough to be preserved in a fancy coffin and/or urn suitable for important placement and then have cold shrimp served at my wake. I think it would also be nice to hire an improv comedy troupe to perform at my service. I have no idea how much that would cost. Do you? For sure, I want a readers theatre group, small in size, from the local high school (if such schools still exist when I die at 92, which is the age I've aiming for). I want the group to read portions of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, concentrating on the part where the woman who died in childbirth exclaims, Oh Earth, does anyone realize how wonderful you really are? and then goes on to discuss hot baths and hot cups of coffee and new-ironed dresses.
***
If my Scrabble-playing parents were still alive, they would tell me that I am being perfectly ridiculous spending any time at all planning my death scene, funeral, and subsequent monetary plans. Possibly my father would be interested to know if I planned on having any George Jones music played at my service, but I know for sure that Mom would tell me, as she lit another cigarette an inch away from her oxygen cannula, that I was a person with a paper head and should spend my time instead making her a big bowl of tapioca pudding.
***
In about a week, I'll know whether underwriting approves my life insurance plea. I'll know how much money the policy will be worth; I'll know how much my monthly premiums will be. This, this I can intellectualize. I get it: it's grown-up accounting. Responsible living.
Why am I so anxious? It's not like I don't have a plan.

Really, Philip Seymour Hoffman?

Oh, good God, here we go again: another celebrity drug-induced death.
Why?
Why?
Why?
Is it because they're so rich and famous that snorting coke or heroin or shooting up, or whatever the drug lingo is (I don't know; I've never even smoked weed), that being high is the only
way to go higher in life?
I gotta tell you: I am effing pissed off at Philip Seymour Hoffman. Utterly disappointed.
Forty-six too old for him? Had he had enough living?
Look, PSH: You had a pretty damned good life, by all accounts, by how we Americans measure success. An Oscar, a respected acting career (you were the actor's actor, man), money in the bank (bet it's been a long while since you had to pay an overdraft bank fee ~), a freaking glorious apartment in New York City.

Top of the game, Philip, and you decided to roll up your shirtsleeves on Groundhog Day and pump poison into your veins. You selfish, stupid idiot.

Were you not aware that there are other human beings, right now, this very minute (the kind who live month-to-month financially and are anonymous in the world) who are battling cancer and kidney failure and COPD and sickle cell anemia and name Some Other Horrible Disease and they, THEY, are wanting nothing other on this second day of February than to live to see the next second day of February.

I don't get it, I don't get it, I don't get it: the unfairness, the inequity. How some people love life and want only to live and have lives that are cut short through no fault of their own, and then how there are some people who molest children and/or are drug dealers/or steal money from the elderly and/or plant bombs in big cities during marathons and those people live to be freaking 92 years old .

Where is the justice?

How did she die, and why do I care?

There are many obsessions in my life, chief among them finding great cups of coffee, outstanding chocolates, and off-the-beaten-path yummy eateries. These obsessions are socially acceptable.
What bothers people, namely my husband and children, is the obsession I have over figuring out how  young people die. My husband and daughters tell me that I am moribund and waste my time investigating the deaths of people I do not know, nor have ever met.
Look. I read obituaries with the same kind of interest that others hold when they read biographies of famous people. It is my life's philosophy that every person, no matter how long he or she has lived, has a story to tell. As such, I truly enjoy a well-crafted obituary. The Sunday Kansas City Star is my favorite source, as no fewer than seventy-five death notices are published then. Between discovering interesting names (Syd Sidebottom) and amazing achievements and/or actions ("When she was eleven years old, Melinda cut the word impossible out of the dictionary."), I am generally inspired to go out into the world and Do Something Important by the time I've read the final obituary. Besides, by the time I'm finished with the listings, my coffee has run cold.
 
This obsession isn't a fun one. I get depressed when I read the obits of children who have passed, especially the ones who die during their teen years. Having raised three children into adulthood, it strikes me as particularly crushing and soul-wounding, to have loved a child into his high school years and then  lose him right before it's time to graduate, to head to college, to realize childhood ambitions. At its core, I believe it is wrong for a parent to have to bury a child, no matter how old that child is. I am reminded of a saying: You bury a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, in the ground. You bury a child in your heart. There is not a day goes by that I do not worry about my children, that I do not have anxiety over all the What-ifs that befall young people. I pray to God that they are safe and out of harm's way.
Still. Young people die. Parents bury their children. I have a close friend whose son died riding his beloved motorcycle on the Fourth of July. A brand-new high school graduate, he and a friend were taking a quick bike ride before heading over to a relative's house for a celebration. A drunk driver turned right in front of him on a country road. He died instantly. The drunk driver walked away, unscathed.
My friend has never, will never, be the same. Her marriage ended and her joy dwindled. Three years later, I cannot look at her without thinking that she is a mother who buried her child. It is my first thought. I wrote this young man's obituary and typed through my tears. I also wrote my dad's obituary and my mother's. When my sweet aunt died a few months after my mom's passing, I said to my sister, You have to write Aunt Jannie's. I can't do it again.

Still, I read the obits. In a way, I feel that readership is necessary, that it is important to read about the people who were here on a Tuesday and gone on a Wednesday, and that by reading about their lives, their lives have meaning and they will be remembered. For many people, the only time their name is in the paper is in an alphabetized fashion on that page of remembrances.
I am particularly sad when I read about a young mom taken by breast cancer, who leaves children of the home, or a young father who fights for his country and never comes home, or for the young father who drowns in a lake on a Saturday night and is survived by two boys, ages three and six.
Sometimes, I experience anger, when an obit of a three year old is sandwiched between the obits of a ninety-one-year old named John and a ninety-four-year-old named Josephine.  Little Allie Fisher never started kindergarten. Where is the justice for her? Why do some people get to be so old and others die before they've barely begun to live?

There are cancers and accidents and house fires and military deaths (Army Staff Sgt. Jesse L. Thomas Jr., 31, of Pensacola, Fla.; Army Lt. Col. Todd J. Clark, 40, of Evans Mills, N.Y.; Army Maj. Jaimie E. Leonard, 39, of Warwick, N.Y.) There are deaths from natural causes, like with the Johns and Josephines of the world who get to be in their nineties, and, hey, let's face it, that's pretty damned old. There are homicides and suicides and heart attacks and folks who die peacefully in their sleep, surrounded by family. Usually, the cause of death can be determined by the context of each obituary: "The family requests donations to the American Cancer Society in lieu of flowers" ... "Contributions may be made to the American Heart Association."

And then there are the obits that don't make any sense, the ones that make me go all Nancy Drew trying to figure out why the person died. Someone like Andrea Beerman, a thirty-four-year old dentist of Westood Hills, Kansas, who passed away June 11, 2013. She wasn't old, that's for sure. We can rule out natural causes. Newly married, Andrea Beerman had a thriving dental practice in the Kansas City area.
Why is she gone? She was educated and ambitious and had her shit together. She volunteered in Honduras and El Salvador to provide dentistry to the underprivileged. She ran marathons and practiced yoga. She served on the board of the Timber Creek Retreat House.
There's nothing in the obituary that explains her passing. She is pictured, young and beautiful and healthy-looking, an enormous smile on her pretty face.
How did she die?
Why do I care?
***
I don't know the answer to that last question. I guess I want to try to make sense of things, to intellectualize that thirty-four-year-old yoga-running women don't just die randomly. It's something I need to make sense of. I've got children in their twenties. I want to think that if they lead healthy lives and make good decisions and stay away from drugs and crack houses and abusive relationships, and always wear their seatbelts and never drive drunk, they'll be okay. They'll live to be old people and they will bury me, not the other way around.

Missing Mom

Sadness to my core today.
Missing Mom in a heavy burden kind of way. I feel weighted down with my grief.
Most of her sewing supplies, some of her clothes, and some momma tchotchkes are sitting on my dining room table. It is a mass of memories, heaped in piles of heavy, disorganized, sporadic heartache. Yesterday my sister and I went to Mom's. I took with me my rarely used bottle of Xanax, a just-in-case medication. I should have known I wouldn't be needing it, not because sorting through Mom's belongings was going to be easy, but because I have figured out that grief and anxiety are not the same emotion. (As it turns out, I am better at handling grief. That emotion is natural; people don't judge me for crying because my mother died ~)
Surprisingly, I did not cry while bagging up Mom's sewing stuff; I did not cry while using her bathroom (I had envisioned my seeing her plastic cup of bobby-pins ~ circa 1967 ~ as the conduit for a river of tears); I did not cry while sorting through her dresser, handling her bras and underwear, her slips, her little packages of bra extenders that she ordered through the mail; I did not cry as I sat on her bed; I did not cry going through her jewelry with my sisters, the three of us sitting on the sofa upstairs, Mom's costume stuff splayed out on the coffee table, her "good stuff" coming out at the end, we girls deciding who got what. (Still, the Xanax hid out in its bottle, in the depths of my purse.)
There was no argument. Sisters decided I should get Mom's wedding ring, as I've been the longest married (27 years).
I did not even cry as I took several Grandmother hangings off her desk; just tenderly handed them over to a sister.
Today, though? Today is tears and sadness and melancholy and an emptiness the size of the buffet over at Ryan's (one of Mom's favorite places to eat).
I have zero motivation. Writing this blog causes pain. I forced myself to launder one of her nightgowns and a couple of her housedresses. Ten minutes ago: stood at the washing machine, tears rolling, as I sniffed the collar of her black and white flowered muumuu. Her smell was there, but it was an odor of sickness and decay.
I tossed it into the machine and hit the start button.

Father's Day Blues ...

I am filled with melancholy today. It is Father's Day, and I have no earthly father. It will be five years come June 30 since my dad's passing. I know that he is in Heaven, and that understanding brings me peace, but I miss him tremendously. He was just so fun to be around. He was always in a good mood. Would put on a pot of coffee and then sit outside on the deck and talk to you until the coffee was gone. I miss those conversations. I miss the sound of his "shower clogs" tap-tap-tapping down the hall. I miss his stupid jokes: "I have a corn on my toe," and then point, to a kernel from the dinner table that'd he'd placed on his foot.
Now they're both gone. Mom died March 25. I think about her no fewer than fifty times a day. Each morning, when I awaken, when I make the bed (Mom always said: Make your bed first thing, then at least you've got something to show for each day ~). At the grocery store, passing the bags of potatoes (she was famous for her homemade potato soup, which my kids called "white soup"); reading the paper each morning (she loved the paper); while I'm cooking dinner (I used to call her to tell her what I was making; she told me what she had fixed for supper); at night, when I turn on the fan in the bedroom (Mom had to have a fan blowing directly on her).
I miss them as a couple; I miss being their child, the grown-up kid who could show up day or night, uninvited, and feel welcomed and loved.
Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to let you in. I'm not sure what famous person said that, but I like it. Because it's true.

So much, so much, so much ...

So much has happened these last six weeks. March certainly came in like a lion.
My husband had a brush with a heart attack. A scary-ass emergency room visit and an overnight stay. A treadmill stress test; an echocardiogram. No heart attack. We don't know why he had chest pain that snaked down his left arm and left him weak, shaky.
A week later, our daughter (age 26) slipped on the driveway at 4:15 a.m., attempting to leave for her opening barista shift ~ and broke her wrist, having fallen on a slippery driveway, courtesy of the only snowfall we had this winter.
Two weeks later, back to the emergency room. Arm-in-cast daughter, doubled over with abdominal pain. A dysfunctional gallbladder to blame. Emergency surgery to yank out the tiny troublesome organ.
My mom died. On Sunday, March 25, 2012, shortly before 1 p.m., she took her last breath. Her artificial heart valve stopped its tick-tick-tick-tick. Although she had been ill for years, her death at Kansas City Hospice House shocked me. I had thought I would be ready when it finally happened. Figured I would feel a sense of relief. Thought I would softly cry and kiss her tenderly on the forehead and tell her goodbye like they do in Hallmark made-for-TV movies.
No, none of the above. Instead, I lost my shit. Threw my body onto hers and heaved anguished cries. I felt strangely detached from my own body. What came out of me was visceral and uncontrolled. I'm so stupid, I'm so stupid, I'm so stupid I sobbed ~ no, wailed ~ not giving a single care to the other people in the room ~ my sister Kelly, the chaplain, a hospice nurse, Kelly's fiance. Oh God, Oh God, Oh God. Mama. Mama. Mama. Oh my God, I'm so stupid, so stupid, so stupid.
So stupid for thinking it would be easy. I shook my head back and forth, rapidly, clenched my eyes shut, hoping that when I opened them that Mom would still be breathing, her valve softly ticking.
Watching Mom die was even worse than watching my father bleed to death back in '07, and I certainly never in a thousand million years would have thought my mother's death would affect me more deeply.
I didn't want to leave her body. I lingered, asked for scissors to cut some of her hair, wanted to crawl into the bed with her, spoon her, scratch her back, sniff her hair, hold her until she became completely cold. I took a picture of her in death using my iPhone.
I look at that picture every day. It does not frighten me; it does not comfort me.
It is.
They made me leave.

Going gently into that pecan-pumpkin good night ...

My mom is still hanging on.
Here in my dining room, she lies in the hospital bed, sleeping 20 hours of every day, waking to try to toilet herself ("Mom, you have to let me know before you try to use the commode!") or to ask for a piece of pie. Since coming here, she's consumed an entire pecan pie ~ one tiny slice at a time. She's now eaten half a cherry and pumpkin pie.
In thirteen days she's eaten two turkey sandwiches, some French toast, three slices of bacon, and twelve pieces of pie.
I am reminded of what my diabetic grandmother said in the weeks preceding her death: "If I can't have pie, then I don't want to live." She meant those words.
And so history repeats itself. At times I want to withhold the pie, say No, Mom, you need to eat something more nutritious, but then I remember what her hospice nurses have said: "It's about quality, not quantity."
It's no easy feat watching your mother waste away; it's hard to hear her talk nonsense as her cognition fades; it really sucks to have to empty one, two, three ... eighteen ... thirty-six commode buckets.

Death is not pretty here in this house. It smells bad and there's lots of moaning. Yesterday Mom cried, but I cannot remember why. She had a very good reason, but I am so tired from the caregiving that my own cognition is fuzzy. Lack of sleep. Tending to a dying parent is like having a newborn in the house again, only far more depressing.

It is not easy as pie.

Rest in peace, Michael

So the King of Pop left this world today too. What is happening?
First Farrah and now Michael.
I feel numb and so .... so old. So much of my adolescence revolved around Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. I was in high school when MTV premiered; Michael's Thriller video was something to behold. Everyone I knew endeavored to learn the dance.
One of my boyfriends had Farrah's red swimsuit poster hanging on his bedroom door.
My family watched Charlie's Angels together; I wore the Farrah signature style from 1979 until 1982.
Two pop icons are gone.
I'm feelin' pretty down.