hospice, beautiful and sad

Nan had many visitors today. The end is coming and no one is pretending otherwise. This is so wise, so simple - and so rare that we are able to experience it in this gentle but raw, unprocessed way.

There is a woman in a hospital bed. She does not speak, but people speak to her - lovingly, teasingly, cheerfully, gently -and touch her and rub her hands and wash her face. She opens her eyes from time to time but there is not really any way to know for sure what she can see, hear, or understand. She is lovely, her face softened.

The room is small and light and cozy. There seems to be space enough for anyone who wants to be there. There are cards, posters, flowers, pictures. This is a space for love and goodbye, and you cannot be there without weeping, and I cannot write this without weeping, yet I am overcome more with love than grief, more with memory than loss.

Here is such beauty. In this room, Nan's presence is strong even as her spirit is letting go of her body. Her presence is alive in all the people who surround her now, and we all know, we know together as one, her death cannot change that.

~~~~~

Standing by is about Nan and her daughter.

A new "right" of passage

I am done taking my daughter on family vacations. By last summer, she already seemed too old at 15 to be told: this is where you're going and when and who you're going with. She's not quite at the age where she can manage her vacation planning and trips all by herself... but I guess this is the transitional time in which she will learn how. This year, I am going to Vermont for the family visit over New Year's, but she is not - she is going to Florida to visit her friend Olivia.

A related development is that Laura has told her dad she does not want to spend any of her winter holidays at his house. She wants to have a "normal" vacation at home in Oak Park for at least part of her two weeks off. I approve of this. She will see her father on Christmas, and they can visit back and forth as much as they like, but she shouldn't have to pack up for an extended stay out there, away from her friends, away from her room and her stuff, away from the nice perks we have here, like our health club two blocks from home. She's not portable like she was when she was 10. Her life is here, and she is old enough to claim her right to this life.

Last summer, I had interesting and thoughtful conversations with my family about Laura's need to choose for herself about family visits. My stepmother, who has a certain gift for honesty that I often can truly appreciate, commented that she and my dad do not really want the older teens to visit if they don't want to. I think this is wise. They know that the children love them (they do!), and the children know they are welcome and loved by their grandparents (they are!). The issue is whether the teenagers will enjoy a family holiday in rural Vermont, or whether they will actually be kind of drag to have around. My brother and his wife are sad to lose a playmate and helper for their two younger boys, but they are realistic and very understanding. We will all miss Laura, but we get it.

Strangely, the one who is most resistant to this new policy is my ex-husband, who tried to persuade Laura to go to Vermont this winter by offering her a free ticket to Florida for the week before Christmas, if she would also go to Vermont with me. He said that he is trying to reinforce the importance of family for Laura by doing this.

I wrote him an email to explain that I was not willing to take Laura to Vermont unless she wanted to go, and also that my family as a whole had already agreed on this. He responded oddly, I thought: "She knows that if she really wants to go to Florida then she will really be wanting to go to Vermont too." Hmmm. Maybe to him, her agreeing to go to Vermont in order to get a free ticket to Florida is the same as her wanting to go to Vermont. But not to me, and not to her.

It seems well worth it to contribute some money to Laura's ticket to Florida (Merry Christmas, Laura!), and very satisfying for Laura to be able to pay the rest herself from her babysitting jobs.

Autonomy: priceless.

What I wrote to my students this week

MIDTERM: THE CARROT AND THE STICK

Some students in my English 1102 classes start to feel confused at this point in the semester. It's just midterm, and we just about have a full draft of your long paper assigned. What's left that's going to take up the rest of the term, you might wonder.

What's left is the possibility of taking that essay to a much better place - and the learning that is possible for you in the process. If you have looked carefully at the grading rubric for the final essay, you may have begun to realize how many arts of writing are involved in getting a good grade. These arts take practice, effort, and focus. They can also have great payoffs in building your confidence as a writer and developing skills that you can use in the many writing projects you will face in the future.

If you bring the best possible essay draft that you can write on your own into the feedback process (which includes both peer reviews and an instructor conference), then you will be much more likely to get feedback you can really use. If we spend our time giving you feedback on basic stuff that you could have completed on your own if you had done more work sooner, you won't get the feedback you need to actually do better.

So that's the carrot: learning is available to you in this process if you work this process, do the assignments faithfully, read and review the textbook and apply what it says. You can improve your writing arts, and you can get a better grade that way.

(You know the carrot and stick metaphor, right??)

So here's the stick: I am going to grade your final essay really, really hard. If you want to know what I'll be looking for, study the rubric. By the end of the term, you will have had many weeks to try to do your best to achieve what it demands. There won't really be any excuses left that I'll be interested in at that point.

I always promise my students that I will do my best to be a good teacher. But I know, after many years of teaching, that students have to be full partners in their own education. Many of you are excellent partners, and it's my great pleasure to work with you.

If you are one who has not been doing your best up to now, please step up. It's not too late to go back and learn from assignments that you haven't done yet. It's not too late to meet with me and get extra help. It's not too late to become one of the students who asks questions in class, who does more research to fill the gaps, who suddenly realizes that doing better work is worth the personal satisfaction.

There's an ironic element of pride involved in working hard in a class like this. Often the students who work the hardest are not prideful during the process of developing big writing projects - they ask a lot of questions, they seem like they don't have a lot of confidence, they realize how much they don't know, they struggle to get things right. But in the end, when they get their good grade, and they know they did their best and they realize how much they learned, they are excited and filled with pride!

Every one of you still has the potential to be one of those students.

Sick at home, alone

This week's rash of Facebook messages from friends who are at home with sick children reminds me sharply of the first time I left Laura home alone with the flu and went to work. She must have been about ten years old. Laura is pretty calm when she is sick, and she tends not to do very dramatic things like spike high fevers or go into spells of awesome vomiting - but still, the first time you drive off knowing your sick child is at home all alone is certainly memorable.

In those days, I was still getting used to being a single parent. I assumed that my ex-husband would help care for Laura when she was ill, as he always did when we lived together as a family. In the first months following our separation, I would ask him if she could spend sick days at his house if she had a cold, since he and his new partner often worked at home. Their house was on my way to the office, even after they moved out to Downers Grove, and we did that a few times, but it seemed like none of us really liked this arrangement.

Then she got the flu, and she was a lot more sick than just a cold. I spent one day at home with her. I probably could have figured out some way to stay home longer, but my job really is fairly demanding, and it's bad to cancel classes - students need to know they can count on their college teachers to show up and teach. There are only so many class meetings in a term, and we have to finish the course before the term ends, no matter what.

I thought hard about calling my ex and asking him to let Laura spend a couple of days on his sofa while I went to work. But what I could see, once I let myself see it, was that she would be more relaxed and more able to get well if she could stay home in her usual nest and not have the extra stress of being moved to her dad's. So I left her at home and crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. How strange it was to come to understand that she would be better off at home, on her own, than at her father's house with an adult present. But there was also liberation and a kind of peace in realizing that we would be fine without his help.

This week Laura has again been home with the flu, and I asked her if she could remember that long ago time. She does - but what she remembers is that she got to lie in my bed all day and watch TV. I'm glad.

Standing by

Nan, a single mother with a daughter in college, in her early 50s, a cousin of my ex-husband, is going into hospice care. Treatments are over now. She is dying of cancer, and many people are standing by.

Nan's daughter is in the process of requesting of her college downstate that she be allowed to go home for her mother's last weeks and complete her courses online.

Nan's sister is staying for the duration as well - working from her laptop, somehow holding onto her job on the east coast.

Nan is not married, but her daughter's father has been present in their lives all these years, remaining close to Nan and her daughter. Last night a relative told me that lately he has been sleeping in Nan's hospital room.

Nan's aunt - the kind of aunt you grew up with who has long been divorced from the uncle who is actually your blood relative but somehow she never stops being your aunt - has been visiting several times a week.

Nan also has another sister here, a father and stepmother, a mother and mother's partner, not to mention layers of other friends and relatives. All standing by. All offering what we can offer, and all waiting - for release.

This is what I reckon, from my removed and partial view: Nan and her family are really preparing themselves for that release. They are tired and their good options are past. This is not to say that the letting go will not be deeply painful, sometimes agony. But I am glad for everyone's sake that they are preparing, not denying or fighting against what is coming.

I know that I am writing about this because of how much I am thinking of Nan's daughter. I think of her frequently, yet I do not want to try to enter into her experience. I really believe she has everything and everyone she needs right now.

She is five years older than my daughter; they have known each other for all of my daughter's life. I cannot help but think that my daughter will be much affected by all this, though she will not show it outwardly: here is another only daughter of a single mother, getting ready to lose her mother.

I know, though - from my own hard learning, from my own mother's death - that Nan's daughter cannot lose her mother. Nan will be with her always. We may be forced to let someone go from their life in the body, but we dwell together forever nonetheless.

As I write this, I hear Nan's voice in my memory, talking to our girls, as she would have on any given day when they were little. "You're missing a word," she would say with a teasing lilt in her voice if they didn't say please. On your birthday, at any age, Nan would proclaim, "Free paddlywhacks!" She always had ideas, advice. She knew the fastest way to drive from any point to any point around Chicago and the suburbs. She organized parties and gatherings. She offered food and conversation and plans and outings.

No one can take any of this away from Nan's daughter - and she has the added blessing of all these people standing by with her, people who know and love all that Nan is and has been, who know and love all that her daughter is and will become, into the future. We are standing by, many of us, in a thick circle that cannot be broken.

"I don't cook - I purchase."

This is what I said to the dinner coordinator Thursday night when I delivered about 40 servings of fresh fruit to Laura's swim meet for the girls' dinner. I had washed all the grapes and apples, cut the grapes into bunches, and cut the bananas in half. All organic, all neatly presented in a couple of cartons that no one had to return to me - simplify, simplify. Next week I am bringing "salad" - which will consist of bags of salad greens, bags of prepped carrots, bottles of salad dressing, and perhaps one or two other toppings that require only the opening of a package.

I used to cook, and I'm not a particularly bad cook, and I even enjoy cooking when there is a little time for it. When I lived in a household with two adults, and there was more than one driver, more than one shopper, more than one cook, and more than one child supervisor, cooking seemed like a good idea. It made economic sense, and even though we both were busy working people, the fact that there were two of us made a difference, and we probably cooked dinner three or four nights a week.

But for over six years now, there's only one of me. Now I do all the driving, all the shopping, all the homework supervision, all the scheduling. I pay all the bills. I go to Curriculum Night and teacher conferences and sign permission slips and call the attendance office. I pack breakfasts, lunches, and snacks for days when Laura will be at school from 6am to 6pm with two swim practices. I arrange dentist and doctor and orthodontist and acupuncturist appointments. I do the "volunteer" work for church and school. I clean our apartment, take care of our cats, do laundry. I make lists. I remind Laura to do things and take stuff and take care of things. Sometimes I hound her a little. Sometimes she has to hound me a little, like reminding me over and over that her bathtub was clogged. It was hard to imagine how to find time to get someone in here to fix it. I found a lovely handyman who would come on Saturday morning, what a blessing.

Every once in a while something catches me up and I notice how amazing this really is. I made a homemade dinner one night this week, and we really enjoyed it. It may be a month before I make another one. But that's all right. When I say, "I don't cook - I purchase," I say it with happiness and without guilt, because I am loving my full and wonderful life. Laura won't be here very much longer, and she doesn't like my cooking all that much anyway! Our apartment, halfway between Penny's Noodles and Trader Joe's . . . well - as the saying goes, "there must be a reason." Or, as Laura and her friends say, "It's all good." Yes. It is.

12 Stages of Disgust

A friend who is growing disenchanted with his job asked me if I could name the 12 levels of Disgust. This led to an earnest effort on our part to arrive at descriptors for 12 levels of Disgust, followed by a corresponding 12 levels of Catharsis. I kind of imagine that these lists might live in some hazy psycho-social universe between the Stages of Grief and the 12 Steps of Recovery. An English colleague mentioned that it made him think of Dante's Levels of Hell. Enjoy - and feel free to suggest amendments.

(Disclaimer: this is a free-floating vocabulary exercise, and any resemblance to any responsible theoretical or research framework is purely accidental.)

12 Levels of Disgust

1. Mild Distaste
2. Strong Distaste
3. Medium Dislike
4. Full Dislike
5. Medium Aversion
6. Strong Aversion
7. Mild Disgust
8. Strong Disgust
9. Full Repulsion
10. Overwhelming Revulsion
11. Inability to be in the same room
12. Urge to violence
    

12 Levels of Catharsis

1. gentle exhale
2. sigh
3. mild gesture, such as a shake of the head
4. stronger gesture, such as rolling the eyes, or the classic shrug of arms and shoulders together with the palms raising
5. a polite but honest expression of disappointment
6. a focused, articulate complaint
7. a brief and controlled rant
8. a full expression of frustration
9. an actual repudiation
10. a calm refusal to engage
11. a forceful refusal to engage
12. no longer having any awareness of the previously offending party or issue