All pissed off and nowhere to go

So I know that whining is frowned upon by virtually everyone the world round. In yogic terms, it indicates attachment and a failure to achieve maitri (loving kindness). But isn’t it ever justified? I’d like to think so, because right now I want to snivel about a few things. Unfortunately, my complaints are so petty and the people provoking them so abject that I’m embarrassed. But of course I’m going to let loose anyway.

*I’m pissed that my sister-in-law neglected to make a will, thus dumping the whole mess on Other (and by extension, me). Yes, I know that the very fact that she had a life-threatening disease made it difficult to undertake the tasks that put her in direct confrontation with death. I’m still pissed.

*I’m pissed that my parents refuse to hire the help they need. What they call independence is actually dependence on their kids. It’s not that I mind lending a hand. But I resent the stress inflicted by their willful teetering on the precipice.

*I’m pissed that my employer has pared not just the fat but also the muscle and bone of my department so that my ridiculous job feels desperate.

*And I’m really pissed that my back aches so ominously and insistently that I cannot dismiss the fear of metastasis—even though I know (but am I sure?) it’s just post-cancer hypochondria.

There, I’ve done it. Do I feel better? Maybe a little. But was there a better way than the path of whine and whimper?

Good-news Wednesday

The headlines in the mainstream news are disheartening: “Cyclone Kills 85 in East India,” “Iceland Evacuates Hundreds As Volcano Erupts Again,” “Strong Earthquakes in Western China Kill at Least 400.” But picking up the Positive News, delivered yesterday by my off-the-grid brother, is a perk-up call: “A Peacewalker Follows Her Dreams,” “Climate of Cooperation,” “Café Gives Laptops a Rest,” ”Meditation Teacher Saves 20,000 Bees, “Barefoot Solar Engineers Brighten Lives,” “The Secret Society of Happy People.” You can’t make this stuff up, so it must be true.

In memoriam

I spent the weekend of JG's death thinking about our relationship, which was not an easy one.

I remember the conversation in which she told me about her cancer. I was incredulous. One of her closest friends, H, had died two years earlier of breast cancer. Then her friend and writing partner, K, was diagnosed with stage iii breast cancer. And about six months after that, I was diagnosed with stage ii breast cancer. The whole world—and everyone in it—seemed to be mutating, and not in a good way.

My relationship with JG has not been uncomplicated. Early on, she was warm but distant. The eldest child, she didn’t have a lot of interest in her siblings or their partners. But we were on friendly if not intimate terms, though I blundered often. Once she came to San Francisco while Other and I were living there. I had just cut a friend’s hair and boasted that I had done a great job. So JG decided I should cut her hair. Alas, the result was disastrous—one side way shorter than the other and the whole thing just a mess. I was humiliated, but she was agreeable about it. I know I unintentionally offended her by complimenting her “womanly” figure on that visit. The next time I saw her, she was notably slimmer. When she headed home to Massachusetts, she left behind a beautiful Indian shirt. I coveted it. But in an excess of probity, I returned it to her. She was surprised. She’d never missed it, and I wished I’d kept it.

She was renowned in her world (first English literature, later political economy) as a brilliant thinker and teacher. People gravitated to her. She changed lives. But she scared me a little bit. She had a problem with boundaries: put her face too close to yours in conversation, so that you wanted to back away. I once saw her chase someone completely around the circumference of a room in her unconscious absorption in a conversation that was clearly making him want to flee. She also—and this was none of my business, but of course fascinating to me—stepped over the line sexually: had affairs with a friend’s father, a hostess’s husband, a friend’s boyfriend, another friend’s husband, and so forth. The friends seemed to forgive her. And that behavior seemed in keeping with the sense that the usual rules didn’t apply, that she could take whatever she wanted, without consequences. Oddly, as far as I know, she never had a lesbian affair—although her intense relationships with her friends, plus a short spikey hairdo and a somewhat mannish bearing (though she had a girly side too), prompted much speculation that she was gay.

Once I had children, my relationship with JG deteriorated. Perhaps I offended her by gloating over what she didn’t have (unbeknownst to me then, she pursued fertility enhancement and adoption). Perhaps, in my obsession over my kids, I became a terrible bore. I’m not sure. So, although she grew closer to Other over time, she and I were not friends for a good many years. She said cutting things. And I must have said things that provoked them. I don’t know.

But as my kids got older, she took an interest in them, sought them out, seemed to actually enjoy them. Though she had once intimidated and irritated them, they now loved and respected her.

She was also beloved by her community. She lived in a kind of Beatrice Potter New England world, where people had woodchuck nicknames and old-fashioned village roles—there was a mechanic and a cooperative-grocery-store manager and lots of teachers—and an enviable tradition of Monday-night communal dinners for which a dozen or more people would gather every week. She may not have had a biological family (although she did have a husband for about a decade), but she had a very large and devoted communal family, which stepped in to take care of her when she became ill.

Although my friends were no slouches, and I had a companion accompany me on every major event of my cancer journey, I was astonished by the devotion of JG’s friends, who because of the nature of her illness and her singlehood, were critical to her survival and independence. Early on in her illness, they spent nights with her, performed fairly technical nursing duties, drove her to chemo and radiation and lab tests and doctor consultations, helped her research her options. Cancer is a full-time job—actually two full-time jobs, one for the patient and one for her companions—and JG’s friends were wonderfully supportive. Eventually it became clear that JG’s cancer was actually the equivalent of three full-time jobs, and an actual nurse was hired to fill in the gaps.

JG’s illness and my own occasioned a new intimacy. I made a resolve to love her unconditionally, the way I love my children, and there was a glorious three days when I succeeded. I drove up to Massachusetts to take her to a radiation appointment and ending up staying an extra day because the next volunteer stepped down. I tended JG as thought she was a newborn, getting up several times a night to measure and crush superstrong narcotics and feeding them to her in her “bottle,” the plastic funnel that fit into her feeding tube, then staying up to cuddle her and read her back to sleep. It was exhausting, and I was scheduled for a bilateral mastectomy the following week, so I felt raw and surreal. And it was scary because the drugs were so strong that I was afraid that if I measured them incorrectly, they would kill her. But I did it! I really loved her and cared for her with total solicitude—and she understood and loved me back. But we couldn’t sustain it at that pitch. I withdrew a bit—because I couldn’t actually manage an extra child, which was what it amounted to—and I suspect she felt wistful, maybe even resented the promise posed by that loving interlude followed by my withdrawal.

There were many sad muddled overtures in the past three years: the time I took her to a support group, and she was reprimanded for bringing her coffee tankard (her spit jar) into the meeting room. It got straightened out, but not before she was in tears. The time she told me she felt sorry for my children because I was so invested in them that they had no emotional privacy (I can’t remember her precise words, but they were brutally frank). The time she asked me to give her a yoga class, and (partly because I feared being exposed as an incompetent), I gave her such a short one that it could only have been a disappointment.

I admit it. I dreaded having her come to stay. I hated the spit jar and the way it looked like a coffee mug and made you think about the possibility of drinking its contents and the threat it presented of being knocked over. She had bouts of thrush, and I was scared I would get it too. But mostly I dreaded facing her sorry plight—which was just so damn dispiriting. She faced it, but I couldn’t.

But for my 60th birthday, she wrote me a beautiful loving note that startled me with its genuine lovingness (why didn’t I save it?). She wrote a similarly loving note to her mother on her 91^st. Did she know these were last words to us? Regardless, I’m grateful for them. I wonder if it’s harder to lose someone you had an imperfect relationship with than someone with whom you had a perfect one.

Thank god for the Internet

Thank god for the Internet, where you can find checklists of “What to Do When Someone Dies” and instructions on “How to Write an Obituary” and “Plan a Memorial Service,” plus contact information for county probate courts. What did we ever do without it?

Death watch

This is my sister-in-law’s last day of breath. She was diagnosed with head-and-neck cancer about four years ago. The primary tumor had metastasized and disappeared, so there was no “tumor bed” to excise, and her treatment was intense and painful and ultimately deadly: months of chemotherapy and, in particular, weeks of concurrent radiation seared her upper digestive tract so severely that she lost and never regained the ability to swallow, and the feeding tube that was intended to be temporary became a permanent necessity. The radiation destroyed some salivary glands and damaged the remaining ones, and she was forced to continually cough up and spit out the thick mucus that choked her.

Do you have any idea how awful it is to lose your ability chew and swallow food? To lose the carnal pleasures of “mouthfeel” and “umami” and sweet and sour and salty and bitter? To be forced to rely for nourishment on the grayish contents of a can poured into a plastic tube inserted into your navel? To lose the pretext of almost all social events? To lose your seat at the table, figuratively and literally? To be unable to participate in perhaps the most basic activity that all life forms engage in?

It depressed her, and she went to some lengths to find a solution in medicine to the defect that medicine had caused in saving her life. When it became clear that any solution might result in more damage—loss of speech the foremost risk—she resigned herself to carrying on as best she could and waiting for a breakthrough.

Then she began having trouble breathing. The mucus became so thick and her throat so constricted that she had trouble discharging the phlegm. She had some panicky episodes over the past few months. But a doctor assured her that such incidents were not life threatening.

He was wrong. On a plane from Tucson to Hartford yesterday afternoon, she choked on a mucus plug and stopped breathing. The plane made an emergency landing in Nashville, and she was rushed to the emergency room. By then she had not been breathing for 45 minutes. In the emergency room, doctors were able to restore her pulse and her breathing, but her brain has swelled and she is “nonresponsive.” She is racked by shivering and soaked by sweats as her body struggles to stabilize her temperature. Her blood pressure surges, then plummets. Are these hopeful signs—signs that she will live, and that her body is strong enough to have that life be a meaningful one? Or are they signs of her body’s losing battle, the spasms of shutting down?

A call from K reveals it is the latter. The doctors have made it clear that she is essentially dead, may not survive even till Other arrives in an hour. She has been maintained in this semi-dead state only as a matter of form (or perhaps forms, since I am sure there are many of the paper variety), so that Other can sign off.

The gray-haired lady sits alone

It's a middle-schooler's biggest fear: sitting alone in the cafeteria. And today I did it for the first time. It was a little sad, because it reminded me that I have virtually no friends at work. At the age of 60, I am one of the last survivors of a massive age cohort that has all but evaporated into retirement and other (better!) jobs. It reminded me of the wistfulness my parents express when they hear that yet another friend of theirs has died.

My daughter used to beg to stay home rather than face the humiliation of a solitary sitting after she and her best friend had a tiff. Humiliation wasn't in play for me today, and aside from the whiff of melancholy about the way the company has peeled away my work friends, I enjoyed the solitude—especially since I was armed with a really great egg-salad wrap and a free People magazine (I'm a sucker for hard-luck stories about Elizabeth Edwards). And then there was this delightful mention in a review of "The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag," by Alan Bradley: "Bradley, who made his debut as a novelist at 73, plans four more Flavia adventures. The first two are utterly beguiling." Hell, I've got a whole lifetime of achievement ahead of me!

The last Bowels movement

From my notes of July 25, 1980

Bowles told us he pays only $85 a month for his apartment, up from $35 a month when he first moved in 40-odd years ago. He told us about how a guy named PR stirred the waters of social Tangier by writing an article for Oui magazine several years ago in which he described how Bowles always instructed his driver to park the car with its wheels turned out for a quick getaway during parties at DH’s house. “It was true, of course, but you can’t go around saying such things,” said Bowles ... He has a beautiful apricot-colored canary he keeps in a cage in his study. It warbles constantly, no doubt helplessly incited by the musty fumes wafting in without cease from the living room, where in the course of a short half-hour Bowles has been known (M counted) to smoke seven and a half joints single-handedly. The canary was born in Bowles’ study, along with four siblings. Bowles’ consort, Mrabet, raises canaries in an apartment below, which he barters off for extortionate prices. …

From my notes of July 26, 1980

Two more Bowles stories:

1. Moroccans treat sex as an animal act [Bowles says]. They don’t romanticize it at all. There are no porn movies, even in Tangier, and until the last few years, there were not sexual graffiti—just airplanes, weapons and cars.

2. Sherifa, the witch [who was the Bowleses' maid], used to tell Bowles that she was a saint and a virgin (“Ana santa, ana bint”) and claimed she had papers to prove the latter. Bowles surmises that although her virginity paper was certainly not official, she may have obtained one to show the police in case they caught her outside after dark—any unaccompanied Muslim woman out at night is assumed to be a prostitute.

From my notes of July 28, 1980

Here’s what Bowles said today: The sand used in mixing concrete here has salt in it which accumulates moisture in damp weather and cause the concrete to crumble. It makes terrible houses, hot in summer, cool in winter … Once when he was in South America he got bitten by a spider. Two months later the bite was still there and very sore. So he went to a doctor in Guatemala who lanced a cone-shaped core from his ankle and showed it to him under the microscope. Inside were hundreds of tiny spiders … In the Yucatan the chickleteers (chicklet cutters) get bitten by a fly in the ear. I guess the fly lays its eggs in the ears. Because eventually the ears fall off, having been eaten away from inside the cartilage … In Msab, Algeria, the hand of Fatima is hung over the door whenever the husband is away from home. This is to protect the wife and children during his absence, but in effect it is a signal to the world that the husband is not home … Mrabet says that two hours after his mother gave birth she was back at work in the fields. No shilly shallying … Bowles once lived in the house Cortes built for Marija in Mexico. Some Americans had bought it and let out rooms … The people of Fez are disliked by the rest of Morocco. This is because at one point in the 17th century all the Jews in Fez were were forced to convert to Islam within 24 hours or lose their land. They kept their Jewish names but became Muslims. Now Fez is assumed by the rest of the country to be all Jewish, although in actuality the population is only about 5% Jewish. Muslim can’t forgive Jews for not being Muslims. They’ve lived side by side with the Muslims for so many years and still won’t see the light. Clearly they are devils. Anyway, Fezians are considered to be arrogant and snotty about their culture. A sidelight: Jew is the favorite imprecation to hurl at a donkey who won’t move … Bowles’ suggestions to me: Practice is everything. Try writing something you don’t like just to have the experience of exploring alternatives. Avoid first-person narratives …