Going... Going...

Hallmark Corporation has completely ignored one of life’s guaranteed passages.

We’ve got welcome new baby cards; birthdays of every number - well, at least First Birthday, 21st, 30, 40... 100, etc.; wedding cards and even ‘congratulations on your divorce’ cards! You can buy mother’s and father’s day cards in English and in Spanish, graduation, anniversary, bon voyage, get well, retirement, and sympathy cards for the survivors after someone dear dies.

What we DON’T have is a card for the one who has been given a diagnosis and has to wait it out until Merciful Death finally grants peace to the sound-minded, tormented and tortured soul trapped in a dying body.

Here are some possiblities I might share with the card-designing “heart-ists.”

“Have a good death... wish I could be there with you, but I can’t stand to see you disintegrate... makes me              squeamish to be aware of my own mortality.”

“Sorry, you won’t be at the bridge games on Thursdays. We’ll miss you. Say, can we borrow your coffee urn?”

“Wow, bummer, dude! You can keep the $20 bucks you borrowed from me.”

“Sorry to hear of your decline. Before you’re too far gone, could you possibly please pay me back the money you owe me?”

“How unpleasant, you are sick... hope this poem does the trick... when you lay you down to sleep, pray the Lord to make it deep. If you croak before sun-up...  I’ll come by and feed your pup.”

No apologies. Macabre is as macabre does. Just in a weird mood.

We went east (Maryland) last Sunday through Tuesday to visit an aged and ailing auntie. At ninety six, she’s entitled to choose her window of exit, right?  Cancer is weakening her body, but her mind is sharp and clear as ever. She wishes someone would just end it for her. She is so done with life. She asks her doctor (not named Kevorkian) and sons for help to end it all. The son who is a lawyer says, “Sorry, Ma... it’s illegal.” She sighs deeply and with dignity sucks it up and stoically continues with her decline.

October two years ago, (photos) when we triangulated a trip to NY with another visit to Silver Spring, Maryland to see Aunt Esther, she was complaining that the orange tee-shirt her teacher wanted her to wear for the line-dance competition was a wretched shade of orange. She rolled her eyes - feigning disgust in a humorous way.

That trip, at her request, we took her to IHOP for breakfast. I asked the then spry 94 year old, “Aunt Esther, how is it that you keep so fit and pull so much enjoyment from life?”

She was pouring syrup on her pancake stack as she answered, “I think it’s because I watch what I eat, and never over-indulge.” At that moment, the lake of syrup, which she continued to pour all the while she was answering, completely filled her plate and was overflowing onto the table. Mark and I just giggled - and still do - to recall the dichotomy.

She is a roll model of grace, humor, dignity, compassion and living life to the fullest - if not dietary discretion.  “Aunt" Esther was best friends with my husband’s mother - from the time they were both teens in the Bronx. Esther and her husband Phill were very supportive when things were rocky for my mother-in-law, her three kids and (estranged) husband.

The last of the ‘old guard,’ Aunt Esther’s inevitable death marks the end of an era and brings up for us the loss of parental figures all over again. We plan to cry a lot.

Before flying, we had prepared a book for her: “The Book of (a very special) Esther” in which we posed open-ended questions for her to contemplate...

Recall growing up... What was it like to be in your family? What kind of sister were you?

What were your dreams and aspirations?

When you met your husband, how did you know he was the one for you?

Remember the first time you held each grand child?

How did you manage to hone your skills, be there for your children and Phil and

still keep the business running? 

And so, on it went.

She quite liked the book and began recollecting right then and there in her den during our first visit of three over two days. We had a fabulous Greek dinner with Aunt Esther’s two sons and their wives on Monday night. The waiter, who was accustomed to seeing their mom with them all, asked about Esther... he knew exactly how she always liked her Moussaka and salad.

We’re all losing someone special. 

All of us in the human family lucky enough to have loved deeply are bound to have our hearts lacerated by loss.

Waiting for the connecting flight from Vegas to home Tuesday night, it seemed fitting that the sunset was particularly gorgeous, drawn out and full of glory holes - where the sun streams through the holes in the clouds making artful (heart-ful?) beams - so distinct you could climb them to heaven.

Maybe that’s the Hallmark card... “May the sunset of your final days be as welcoming as the world was on the day you were born.”

(And may we learn to welcome our babies in as gentle a fashion as we allow our elders to depart! At this writing we’re not very good at either end!) 

A macabre sense of humor seems to run in our family. In 1989, when Mark’s dad was dying in Florida, we asked our daughters to help us make a card for Gran’pa Buddy. We had magazines and scissors and glue sticks on the dining room table. Nine year old Megan found some printed words in a slick ad that read, “Going, going... gone!” We all had a good laugh. It’s OK to laugh even when we’re grieving. It’s all part of the process.

With all the healing I’ve been privileged to witness over the years, I find that when it gets right down to that final layer of the onion... it’s all LOVE.  

Smooth Sailing to the Infinite Beyond, Auntie Esther.

This is no ordinary feeling...

An unnamable emotion has my innards sloshing like those of a sea-sick-queazy kid. My back feels steely, my gut is equally hard. What is this feeling?

Mostly everything is going along just fine - I’m enjoying my work with families at camp, my work with clients and kids is going really well. My honey and I are getting along sweetly with a deepening love that keeps refreshing itself as we witness one another’s triumphs or hold each other thru the sad times. What is this yucky background color that’s got me all knotted?

Sure the house could be tidier, cleaner, even. There are cobwebs I can’t reach without going to get the ladder. The garden could be more well-tended and productive. There are termites gathering in the rafters upstairs and raining down wings and wriggling bodies onto the carpet. There’s termite poop gathering as they eat the oak threshhold of the patio slider door. The squirrels have eaten all the apples, all the figs, and all the blackberries. There’s a melancholy that those gorgeous grapes are gone. At least we got some of those! Grasshoppers have strip-mined the kale to nothing but spikes and the collard forrest is fading fast as white flies suck their green blood - turning them a whiter shade of pale. Still, these lossy-things are not the cause of the ooky feeling I cannot name.

Night comes sooner. Days get shorter and although my heart quickens as I write this and think of the enormity of the task of buying, wrapping and mailing holiday gifts to the hoards of nieces and nephews - in a timely way for the coming Season of freakin’ Joy and Light... again it is not cause enough for the unrest in my midsection... 

No, it seems to have to do with the impending birthday October 6. Ah! That’s it! Will you still need me? will you still feed me when I’m 64?? AND... this is the first birthday of my life when my mother is not on the same plane. Her’s took off last February first and all the days in between have been the first of that date for me to live without her. There’s a poignancy in it that makes my eyes swim in their sockets and my brain a little foggy. Yes, I’m still her baby and I miss my mama. It would have been her 93rd birthday August 23, her 51st wedding anniversary with my step dad September first, her first born’s 70th Birthday September 8... yikes she was only 23 when she birthed my bro! And here I am, sad at the thought of celebrating without thanking her by hugging her tight. Still, I’ll give her a call... let’s see that’s Heaven 4- 6321, right? 

At least I now know what’s been making my middle murky. Grief has no logic to it - only thorns and barnacles, brambles and sticker pokes - sort of a whole-body event of discomfort. 

Sigh... I know how to get through it. I just don’t like it. No one does. Just one of those human tasks... gettin’ through ‘til it’s over or easier.

By the time I’m officially a Senior Citizen this time next year, the pokes will be softer, the tightening less intense and the unnamable will be named and tamed - a bit.

Grateful Again

After countless cycles of finding myself squeezed into as small a ball as I can tighten and trying to relax out of that tightness, I arise at 4:30 to write. I tried talking myself down from the ceiling and into sleep again so many times, that I finally gave up. The hover muscles won. It is enough that I did sleep some. I’m grateful for the mercy of whatever rejuvenation I received; I’m grateful for the muse nudging me to get my butt out of bed.

Yesterday morning held one of those watershed moments for me. I stopped stifling myself and shared one of the songs I’ve written over the years out loud in a group where it truly fit.

What better context than a workshop entitled The Resilient Child could there be for this song that I wrote in 1989?

I cry for the children whose terrors come in the night

Who tremble through ‘til the morning 

And walk the day without light

I cry for the children who forget what they mustn’t know

Who bravely smile at a stranger 

To hide what they mustn’t show

I cry for all the ones whose secret’s never been told

I cry for those of us who kept it ‘til we were old

I cry for the young ones whose eyes stare blind into space

Whose smile seems so disconnected 

From tears that once stained their face

I cry for the power that was stripped but not really lost

The first time ever they were touched

Too young that boundary was crossed

I cry for all the ones who are struggling hard now, like me

To heal the ancient wounds and taste what it means 

to be free

We are all little children with nightmares, yearning for light

The deeper we dare into darkness, the more we’re given 

true sight

So we toddle like children, small steps and small victories

Freshly facing the old situations, re-writing our own histories

I cry for all the love we needed when we were small

I cry and with the tears - begin dissolving the wall...

Someday I’ll fly-y-y-y-y...

I Cry For the Children lyrics and music by Melinda Maxwell-Smith,1989

After I sang it to my thirty or so fellow students and the two teachers of the workshop, I shook and shook and shook for a good twenty minutes while the workshop went on and I wrote shaky notes. The waves of shiver-shake moved through fiercely - until they softened and finally subsided. Then feelings of warmth, calm and contentment filled me from tippy-toe to the top of my head. A familiar feeling of a veil being lifted made all the colors in the room more vivid and I felt more connected to eveyone there.

It’s so easy for this “kid in the closet” to stay in there - thinking she is “safe.” Coming out still feels risky, but each time I do show-up as my authentic self, my gratitude for the world being there is so profound I’m moved to tears.

It felt easy rather than queazy to be at lunch with classmates. It felt easy, not queazy to be in therapist role for a fellow “traumatized baby” for our afternoon exchange session of table work. 

When it was my turn to be client, there were different kinds of waves moving through me. I couldn’t stop laughing. Hot, sweaty undulating waves of laughter broke and cleansed my internal shores - nearly the full thirty minutes - while my capable therapist (thanks, Laura, you’re the BEST) tracked wave after wave from my feet through the whole body to my neck and head - watching and sometimes supporting my neck as my back arched and curled. 

At some point Steve, one of the workshop leaders, came over while I was trying to laugh as quietly as I could so as not to distrub the other diads of students who were also (more quietly) in process. He seemed completely unconcerned about the noise factor for which I’m grateful. It’s hard to stifle a head to toe laugh.

He did ask me, “When did you last do this?”

“It used to come up a lot in sessions,” I said, “but I got chastised for it. Therapists told me it was covering over the grief and rage underneath and that I should get to that.”

“I think you did it just before you were born,” Steve said and walked to another part of the room.

Still not sure if he meant the literal laughing part or if the arch and curl of the spine as those huge waves of cathartic laughter moved through me were similar to what happens during the birth process. I’m guessing the latter.

What’s that old cannard? 

When I was born, I was crying and everyone around me was laughing. 

When I die, I will be laughing and everyone around me will be crying.

Ecstatic birth and Orgasmic birth are perhaps possibilities, but most of us seem to come through kicking and screaming - not wanting to leave the other side; not wanting to take up residence in a sensitive body to live in this prickly and torturing world.

For just this moment, I am feeling gratitude for the life I’ve been given. I am smiling and extremely GRATEFUL for the path I’m on and the folks who surround me.

Thank you for being there!

Ancient Love

“Gra’Moose, could you tell me another story that you know?”

“Could you sing me another song... what OTHER songs do you know, Gra'Moose?”

It’s 9:30. Mama says Miss D generally gets to sleep by nine. Maybe it’s the chocolate Paleo brownie with nut milk whipped cream which mama prepared for all of us to enjoy for my 'early birthday' before going off to her book club. Maybe it’s missing mama. My three year old granddaughter shows no signs of winding down. We've already talked about Wynken and Blynken and Nod, which my Grammy used to sing to me. 

She asks, "Did your Grammy die after Bubelah?" 

"No, I say, "She died a long time before Bubelah died and she lived to be almost a hundred years old!"

"Rip Van WinkIe fell asleep and slept for a hundred years," she confides earnestly. "Could you tell me that story, Ga'Moose?"

"I don't know that story very well, D." 

"He fell asleep and he grew a really really long beard." She crinkles her nose and lifts her upper lip revealing perfect pearls.

I memorize the moment, etching her astonishing beauty on my retina.

I haven’t really run out of songs and stories, but we've read two, quietly looked at four more library books, made up three tales- one each of  girl, a princess and a butterfly and sung countless songs. She's told me one story - incorporating many details of the ones I told her and the purple flowers from Lilly's Big Day - the first book we read tonight. Also, I’m exhausted from the weekend at a Pediatric Brain Tumor camp and have set the task of blogging tonight and, much as I would LOVE to stay up all night talking and sharing songs and swapping stories with her, I know she has school tomorrow morning.

I resort to Ujjayi breathing, suggesting we make the sound of the wind together.

Eventually, Miss D does close her eyes and begins breathing deeply and evenly.

Watching her pat the purple downy-soft fur of the gorilla she’s hugging to her chest in a self-soothing ritual, and seeing her touch her own silken fingers so close to my nose, as she settles in - finally - for sleep, is utterly fascinating to me. How could I be so lucky as to share in this miracle of listening to her soft breathing, feeling the rhythmic kneading of her toes against my shin, and smelling the fragrance of warm dreams rising in her head? 

I must’ve stepped in the biggest pile of dog poop in another life to deserve so much delight this time around.

Great Spirit... I thank ye and ask ye to keep her safe from big ugly nasties and things that go bump in the night.

Of Leap Frog and Heart Blessing...

Petaluma is a lovely place to spend eight days working. The Earthrise retreat center at The Institute of Noetic Sciences sprawls on ooodles of acres of oak-tree studded rolling hills. The sheep I mentioned last blog made a big impression on me and on all the students and assistants at this final leg of a three year training program. The drive home afforded me that "doodly-doo" time to think and noodle with ideas. I jotted some of them down while driving. Maybe next time I'll use a hand-held device to record thoughts rather than try to write 'em! We'll all be safer for that!

To the anonymous drivers on the freeway: 

Nice playing leap frog with you down the FIVE - 

skirting around the Big Boy Tonka Trucks 

who lumber along behind one another

like elephants holding one another's tails. 

You, the green Lexus SUV, 

we've played do-si-do a dozen times in the past two hours - 

not once nodding in recognition that it IS all a game.... 

yet there's comfort in the familiar and this truth is stranger than friction on the road 

where tires worn thin by miles of black stone and tar shred and shed their skin with a BANG!  

leaving behind their hide for others to avoid rolling over

and catapulting into the air like heavy black crows

and, though I'm hungry for something to munch, 

I don't dare stop for lunch on the hunch that the truck 

that's full to the brim with garlic and seems to be 

the slowest moving elephant of all,

will catch and pass me and I'll have to pass it all over again... 

plus I'd miss trading glances with the Lexus Lady and comparing my vanilla white Escape SUV 

with her greenie sexy Lexy 

yes, indeedy...

************************************************************************

“Bless your Heart” is a phrase I picked up from Dr. Nelson in 1995. Saying it to people I meet steeps me again in the warmth of his slow and expansive manner. He made quite an impression on me during a three week intensive yoga teacher’s training. He was 82 at the time, and I 47.  He was learning yoga for himself - to straighten out his body and immerse himself in the divine through meditation.

He told me the history of how he came to be the first African American dentist admitted to the New York Associaion of Dentists - back in the day. One lunch hour, he entrusted me with the task of removing his extensions which were long white and black braids woven into his own black and white hair. He felt light-headed once they were removed. It was odd tossing it all in the trash as he asked me to do. I thought it could've used a ceremony.

His southern drawl fell cozy on my ears like a warm shawl on an October evening, so I have often wanted to share that cozy comfy feeling with my circle of familiars periodically over the intervening 17 years. I have said, in an admiring tone, to someone who has just innumerated to me her various volunteering venues, “Well, Bless your Heart!” I always mean to conjur that all-accepting, warmth-exuding true appreciation that Dr. Nelson’s exclamation carried. I realize it has truly become one of my favorite phrases.

Imagine my slow to build laugh when, the last night of my work week in Petaluma, I witnessed a skit which was part of the culmination of the three year Somatic Experiencing training which I’ve been assisting this year. At Stage Night, a Southern Belle of a certain age explained that very self-same vernacular expression as she gave us a tour of Southern Bell Speak - which is similar to Valley Girl Speak - only with fewer “like”s and fewer “you know”s and a lot more batting of eye-lashes. 

“When I want to say to someone,” she elaborated, “‘Well, ain’t you just wearing the sh-t ugliest dress!’ I simply bat my eyelashes and say, ‘Well, Bless Your Heart!’  Or, if I want to say,  ‘F--K off’, I say, ‘Well, Bless Your Heart!’”

Driving home, I wondered out loud if Dr. Nelson was using this sweet phrase to convey a big ol’ F--- Off! to everyone he met. I laughed and blushed at the thought. I doubt it, because he said it almost as much as he said ‘Namaste,’ and he was such a polite and gentle man. Namaste, roughly translated from Sanskrit, means: 

I honor the place in you in which the entire universe dwells. I honor the place in you which is of love, of truth, of light, and of peace. When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, we are one.

Butter my butt and call me a bisquit! Ya learn something new every day! (I learned this one from the Southern Belle... NOT Dr. Nelson!)

Namaste to aaaall y'all! and Bless Your Heart... Dr. Nelson style.

Baaa, Baaa, Baaa

Tonight, the coyote’s call makes my hair stand on end. Their laugh is inocuous enough, as a vague concept, somewhere out there on the hillsides. But I’ve grown fond of these little lambs and their family units traveling as a community of ecological lawn-mowers - munching down the hillsides of this retreat center where I’m staying in Petaluma.

Earlier today, at lunch time, I walked by the flock and noted one sheep had a wound - like an open gash on its flank. I wondered if it had had a too close encounter of the tree kind. Hearing the coyote’s yip yip at midnight and linking it with that visual of torn sheep flesh, gives me the heeby jeebies.

In our workshop assistant’s meeting Saturday morning I heard that one of the students  was particularly tuned in to how different one lamb’s bleat sounded from the others. Following her ears and intuition she found the little one trapped in the fencing and terribly dehydrated. The mother had gone in a different direction. Another lamb nearby was dead of dehydration. She picked up and carried to the caretaker the living lamb and one other who was in trouble. Cindy saved two lost lambs! There’s an upwelling of tears through my core at the thought of lambs lost and lambs found... and saved from the brink.

These third year students of Somatic Experiencing are doing such profound work with one another around resolving trauma, that I am moved to tears several times a day - just to witness the depth of grief, terror and rage we humans can endure, embody and process - with enough awareness and enough safety. To know that we have the equal and opposite capacity to soar to spiritual heights of ecstasy is cause for hope.

Lost lambs coming home.

This is one of the songs my mom used to play on the piano and sing all the lyrics in her rich alto. It’s by Cole Porter.

We’re poor little lambs who have lost our way, baaa baaa baaa

We’re little black sheep who have gone astray baaa, baaa, baaa

Gentlemen songsters off on a spree doomed from here to eternity. 

Lord, have mercy on such as we, Baaaa Baaaa Baaaa

Punning for your Life

“For my next trick...” thought the three year old grand-darling, “I’ll single-handedly wrap three adoring adults around my little pinky finger, by saying something so disarmingly cute, yet still in keeping with the genetic imprint of obligatory punning that they’ll know they are MINE... and I am theirs!”

And so she did... with this line: “Gran’Pun and Gra’Moose, I really like being here with you in this ‘Ja-COZY.’”

“TA-DAAA!!”

(Sounds of one mother and two grand-parental-units melting and slooshing down the drain of the hot-tub.) 

“My dada has a JaCozy too,” she reminds us, “only his is smaller.”

Which leads me to remember the pun-run between mother (who reported this to me) and daughter while riding in the car... 

D: “Mama, I like this lollipop!”

M: “If it was doggy flavored, it could be a ‘lolli-pup!’”

D: “And if it was DaDa flavored, it could be a ‘lolli-papa!’”

OY! My cheeks are hurting from smiling too much. I hear my mother-in-law, (may she rest in peace), saying, “Oy! I LOVE it!” I see her biting the heel of her own hand because we won’t let her bite our children’s tuschies. Were she alive today, we’d have to hide her amazing great-grand daughter D, so Freidabel, affectionatley known as ‘Mama Freddy’ or ‘GranMa Frimmit’, wouldn’t bite D’s perfect tuschie!

Our list of ancestral PUN-tificators is long. My step-dad asked, "What kind of a nut is this?" 

"Cashew." 

"Gesundheidt!"

At just two, our younger daughter took her thumb out of her mouth long enough to hold her father’s earlobe and tell him, “Daddy, you’re EAR-resistable.”

Of course, her father’s name at camp is “Pun” and he gave me my nick name, “Moose”, because I’m too big to call ‘deer.’

Most often our family’s humor is used to fortify the bonds - that feeling of belonging and having something in common. It’s an easy opener when we’ve been parted from one another’s company for a long time. It’s a way of picking-up where we left off. Sometimes, under stress, our humor is an attempt to stay just a half-step ahead of despair or other yucky feelings. 

Laughter is a very high-toned emotional discharge. It’s very warm. For me it’s easier to laugh than to get angry. I laugh a lot... and discharge the heat quickly, instead of doing a slow burn.

Hearing things out of the corner of my ear, sometimes makes for some comical interpretations of reality. I may have written in a previous blog of my mistaking what my older daughter said to me in a phone conversation earlier this year - just before my husband’s birthday. I knew he wanted some special trousers and she had seen them at a store. When she called, I was cooking and had the phone cradled on my shoulder. What I heard her say was, “Mom there’s BKACK BEANS with PESTO.”

“Oh, sounds good... where, dear?” was my distracted reply.

“What?”

“Where do they have Black Beans with Pesto,” I asked.

I had to hold the phone away from my ear because her laughter was ear drum splitingly loud.

“No, mom... They have black JEANS at COSTCO!!”

It’s all good. We miss the children when they’re out of sight, cherish every moment we have with them and savor the sweet memories of visits past.

May you savor every moment of this Labor Day and the entire month of September. 

Enjoy the Equinox... On September 22, try balancing a raw egg (in the shell) on its end. S’posed to be able to do that at both vernal and autumnal equinoxes... when the days are EGG-zactly as long as the nights...