Up in the air

I used to hate flying: fear of death. Now, because I'm often flying to or from a catastrophe, I love it. I don't even mind the middle seat. The whole week I was at my parents' house, I looked forward to that ecstatic few hours when I would be free—free mostly of the fear that something would happen that would keep me there.

What with my sister-in-law's unsettled estate generating unexpected expenses, I get panic attacks about opening envelopes with a Massachusetts postmark. With my parents' failing health, I get panic attacks when I see the area code 415 in my caller i.d. And e-mail can bring bad news from both fronts. In the air, free from e-mail, snail mail and voicemail, I am unreachable.

(Sadly, my freedom was short-lived. I got home from San Francisco on Sunday at midnight. Tuesday my father had a fall, banged his head and generated such a bloodbath that the home-care agency called me at work. Somehow I wrassled my father into going to the VA emergency room, where they kept him till Friday. Somehow I failed to wrassle my mother into submission. I ordered full-time home care for her in my father's absence, and she canceled it. I ordered it again. She rebelled. Ach! How can I get any work done when the 'rents won't obey!)

When I was a child, I loved this poem by Robert Louis Stevenson. And it has a bit of the cut-loose feeling I have about flying now:

How do you like to go up in a swing,

Up in the air so blue?

Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing

Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,

Till I can see so wide,

River and trees and cattle and all

Over the countryside--

Till I look down on the garden green,

Down on the roof so brown--

Up in the air I go flying again,

Up in the air and down!

Home aides and heroines

I have huge admiration for the underdogs of America. The underdogs I've met include such unsung towers of strength as women who undergo breast-cancer surgery and chemotherapy and radiation at filthy substandard public hospitals and struggle to feed their kids and fund their treatment on public assistance when they'd just like to lie down and die, illegal immigrants who for pittances clean the homes of the wealthy who never consider that when they get their raises and end-of-year bonuses they might consider providing the same to their household help—and the Philippina home aides who uncomplainingly care for my parents.

I simply do not know how they do it. My parents' home aides, L and R, surely do not consider themselves underdogs, for one thing. R has diabetes and and scrambled innards from a busboard injury a couple years ago, yet five mornings a week at dawn she doggedly (underdoggedly!) trudges up the steep hill to my parents' house, sweetly requests their breakfast preferences and patiently waits as they bicker over whose choice it is, then whips up waffles or eggs or whatever they decide on. While the 'rents are eating, she jumps into lunch and dinner prep, bedmaking, laundry, stopping only to bring them their coffee, the salt, whatever they desire. She raised five kids on her own, ran a family farm and started a catering service back in the Philippines. Here, she takes pride in the loving care she gives the elderly. L, the relief aide, who comes just two days a week (her two days off from providing 24-hour care for a 96-year-old with Alzheimer's), is not much of a cook, but she's a cleaner and a charmer. She used to be a dental assistant before she "retired," and clearly knows how to touch others in a loving, caring way. My mother nearly swoons in anticipation of having L give her a shower.

I love my parents and appreciate their sterling qualities and the uprightness with which they have conducted their lives, but after two weeks of serving them, I feel desperation. That may be in part because they're my parents and not my clients, but it's also because I simply do not have the strength of character possessed by their home aides. I cannot wait on other people, cannot put their needs first, cannot slow my own pace to accommodate theirs. Thank god the home aides can! I worship their kindness and fortitude and pray that they stay on.

An apology for being so mean

That last post seems so mean, and I don't feel mean at all. What I feel is anguish and fear. Here are two formerly competent people, proud of their accomplishments, respected in their professions. They were good democrats in the upper- and lower-case sense of the word. They lived their beliefs, fulfilled their own potential and worked to help others do the same. They led blameless, worthy lives. Yet their pleasures in old age are few and their troubles many. I'm scared of what will happen to them as they spiral on down, and I'm scared of what will happen to me as I try to keep them company on the descent, and I'm scared that I will end up in their shoes 20 years from now.

And in order to have Thanksgiving with the family I was born into, I'm missing Thanksgiving with the family I chose, and I feel a little sorry for myself. It was my decision. And I'd do it again. But they live in San Francisco, and I live in New York, and when I am in their world, I am absent from my own. After nearly two weeks' absence, my own life, the one back in New York, seems like a dream, distant, perhaps imagined, and I am desperate to rush back and grab it before it vanishes.