A quick hello and temporary goodbye

Hi there,
I've been wildly busy and unable to post consequently.  Just finished a major application that if successful would significantly alter my life and the life of others as well, so was amazed and stunned to get it done.  Now, I'm off to see my husband in a country that does not allow me to access this account, so will not be able to post again probably until mid-February.  I will hopefully however keep a running diary offline and post that.  It's exciting, this travel as I've never been to Asia or anywhere outside the 'first world' really, so I was pretty much jumping up and down with excitement last night when printing out the boarding pass.

Right now, though, I have to actually pack as have to leave in a few hours and do last minute things.  So, Happy Chinese New Year everyone!  Let it bring blessings to us all.

Christina Taylor-Green and the Hubble Space Telescope - sadness and gratitude

I almost wrote something the day of the Tucson shootings but am glad now that I did not.  I am haunted as I'm sure many are by the photo of Christina Taylor-Green.  I was the geeky less stable version of her at 9.  If there had been a congress person at a supermarket, I would have been there, absolutely.  But that's not the point.  It's just the utter senselessness of the whole thing, and when I look at her, I just cry and cry.  Maybe because she was also born on 9/11 it makes it even worse.  I was in NYC on that day and had the same reaction to that, I'm having to this - please everyone stop killing each other.  Stop hating and yelling and screaming and especially now that I live in a country without semi-mandatory gun ownership - please put the guns down.

But even that isn't the point, is it?  It's just that these people and in particular, this little girl was killed.  I will admit to being moved by Obama's speech and glad again that he was elected president of my native country and that I was someone who worked for that to happen (in a small way - phone calls and such from here, which was funny - calling people in Ohio from my computer in Europe, trying to sound like I was just around the corner in Columbus or wherever...but hey he got elected and the Ohio Dems keep sending me email).  I did not work for him to be president because I thought he'd be some left-wing super-hero.  I am not that delusional.  I worked for him to be president because of the history of race relations in the US (abysmal), the fact he seemed like a basically decent and intelligent guy and because Sarah Palin is scary.  I think these last few days have given me the sense that in fact I was right about all this.

But OK off the point again...it's hard to stay on the point and so easy to move over into politics...so much easier.  The point is that something like: what? evil?  Can I say that word anymore?  Leviathan?  I have been reading Job a lot recently for my own self...swirls in at times and takes out people.  But this seems particularly horrible.  Why?  Because I know there is rhetoric around available everywhere that lauds this kind of behaviour?  Because this guy was clearly unhinged but then somehow this is how he expresses it which means what exactly?  And it makes me sad because it seems to be yet another expression - no matter 'who' in the literal sense is responsible - for why the American dream (and by that I mean the dream of a real democracy not the dream of having a bunch of stuff) is so precarious and seems in so many ways on the way out.  Or has it ever existed?

I was struck whilst being moved by Obama's speech at the pep rally atmosphere of the clapping.  Kind of an only in the US type of thing at a memorial service.  This weird mixture of the sombre and this celebrity worship that I find so bizarre and endemic to the world right now (and is in fact the focus of so much of my work).  And the fact that there always has to be a happy ending - we will endure, we are the Waltons not the Simpsons kind of thing.  And yet for all that, still being moved that there was an adult who showed up and knew what to say at the right moment and clearly brought some relief to the victims, their families and the town.  America - such a strange project.  Is it on the way out?  I am so afraid it is.  I will be visiting China in a couple weeks - our future I imagine.  The very oldest culture in human history about to usurp the newest.  We do in fact live in interesting times...(the 'ancient Chinese curse'...humorously enough...)

But for all that, I was born in the US and still want to believe in the potential of what she created, and then don't and then do and then don't and then do...and then, because I've lived outside the US for over 7 years, I also know the triumphalism and apocalyptic voices on the left and right are all outsized.  It is just one country amongst many and it is not the only narrative.  Yes, that's true, but still there is a focus on it even now, outsized, outrageous and at times just plain silly.  But it's there.  I feel that here too.  All the young people where I live with their NY (Yankees) caps on and some - the rebels with NYM (Mets) caps on.  These are the underclass here and they desire to be in the US where they perceive things are better and they have more access to a sense of inclusion and belonging.  And in some ways, I think that's true.  If - and that's a big if - they 'made it' somehow, they could be part of the great American project.  That is the difference in the end.  Europe for all its attempts to open out, in the end is only open to itself and has a paternalistic attitude toward 'others' even if it does attempt to care for some.  In the US immigrants have a hard time initially and can even face outright hostility, but once established - which is an inexorable and ultimately unstoppable trajectory - they are accepted.  There are those, and we just got to see them in living technicolor (and one who went too far, who was sick and lost it) who resist this, but the major movements are that - of inclusion and 'we are united' because it is and always will be a country of immigrants.  And at the service for the victims of Tucson the opening blessing was by a man who was half Native American and half Mexican, but 5 generations back.  So that is included too.  When I was growing up, the coolest thing you could have was Native American blood.  I didn't have any but wished I did.  Me, I'm from here - where I live now, again humorously enough.

It is such a puzzle and I'm so sad for Christina Taylor-Green because I know she felt she could be part of this crazy project and she was taken out.  Now she will be held up as a martyr and perhaps her death will usher in some 'new era of civility', but dear God, think of her mother.  Horrendous.  Or that neighbor who brought her to the congress woman's event who survived.  Will she survive surviving?  I hope so, I really do.

And then there's the Congresswoman herself - who gets to be the first female national figure to be assassinated (almost - hopefully her recovery will continue).  Something so weird about that and so sad again.  I love that she opened her eyes when her female colleagues from Congress were in the room - somehow that just seems right.  Even when I was growing up, it would be an unlikely sight - all those congresswomen and a female senator in a room.  And of course Christina Taylor-Green, had she lived, would never have thought there was a barrier to her doing anything - she was even on her Little League Team and was determined to be a MLB player.  I love that.

Yesterday I saw in the paper a picture from the Hubble Space Telescope - my personal favorite piece of technology ever - that showed a green 'blob' that was in fact a supernova - a dying star - that was giving birth to new stars.  That just fills me with awe and makes me understand the book of Job and everything else.  We can got so obsessed with the goings on of our tiny lives and even the tiny lives and travails of our plant, but then there is this - cosmic time and space - where we come from and where we are going to and even that - we don't understand.  And what is dying is giving birth to new things and this seems to be the way this universe works and that is kind of astonishing and kind of like Vishnu who dreams a universe, wakes up and it disappears and then sleeps again and creates a new one, except no 'Vishnu' - just an endless stream of becoming out of dying, which is gorgeous really...

And for those following my little life, I went to neurologist yesterday and he thinks I'm OK maybe migraine symptoms (which apparently can include dizziness and tingly sensations rather than headache) brought on by fall in April but will have MRI next month.  Mighty relieved and glad I will be having scan anyway just to be sure.  But the doctor was good and I liked him.  Felt heard and understood especially about not wanting to take medication forever that I don't need for sure.  Have a feeling these days of being on the right track somehow and being held.  However, my time in terms of sleep is completely whacked.

Speaking of which, time to begin my day in earnest...be well everyone, dance while you can and here's hoping we get to do that in other realms as well...

In memorium

 Now let me remember my father.  A deeply imperfect man as I imagine he would agree if he were alive to do so.  It was a year ago in a few hours or so that I watched him for hours and hours on life support making the agonizing decision, with no one there except a lovely nurse from Scotland or South Africa, I can’t remember which – there was one from Scotland too,  though, Ayreshire, which is where my husband’s family lives.  I was in California, in some weird suburb of the capitol city in a modern Catholic hospital.  I had arrived from the East Coast the night before, outrunning a blizzard, barreling down an airplane aisle so I could just get on a flight in O’Hare going to Sacramento.  The stewardess had asked people to make way for me because I had something urgent to attend to but everyone piled into the aisles anyway.  I said loudly, I need to get through because my father is dying in Sacramento and I have to get there.  I pushed passed people and eventually made it through, blazing a path for a Russian couple with a baby trying to get to the same plane.  They managed to run up ahead, one of them did anyway, so we could board.  And then the miracles started.

Miracle one: when I got off the plane, my father’s bipolar, methadone consuming, pot smoking, heart of gold, mind of confusion partner had actually made it there on time.  Miracle two: my luggage had made it to the plane and so was spit out unceremoniously on the tiny luggage carousel (I guess most people don’t like Sacramento or certainly don’t fly there) – how that was possible is beyond me.  My father’s partner, C and her friend, the chronically depressed friend met at the group therapy for methadone ex-junkies, a large and taciturn woman who was fairly convinced she was smarter than she was, but yet clearly meant well in her own dark humored way, when she could see past the fog of God only knows how many pharmaceuticals, somehow managed to drive me to my sponsor’s husband’s friend’s place.  I forgot that was miracle 1a, a woman who’s name is not angel but who will hereinafter be referred to as Angel, because that is what she was.  I was at my AA sponsor’s house on the East Coast, about to go back to Europe, when I got the frantic email from C about the fact my father was in the hospital on life support.  She asked her husband if he knew anyone in Sacramento and in fact he did and right after I booked my flight, not knowing where I would stay, fearing staying at C and my father’s place (which after I saw it the first time a couple days later looking like a teenager’s crack den with cat litter box overflowing I knew my fear had not been unfounded), Angel had gotten back to me saying I could stay with her.

My cat had died the week before, she had lived with me for close to 20 years and her death on my father’s birthday had been devastating, especially because I was not home to be with her.  So when I walked into Angel’s house, I was met not only by a lovely woman to whom I will be eternally grateful (who had also lost her father a couple years earlier under unfortunate family circumstances) but also her two cats, one of whom was a lovely Tom cat, sleek and subdued and in the end very protective but also a blind, skittish but ultimately magical cat Angel had of course spent a fortune to save after she had been mowed down by some car.  Her friends thought she was insane but believe me, she was worth it.  So I had three guardian angels, one human, two feline, and I needed them all.

The next morning, because I knew C would never get out of bed, Angel drove me all the way to this God knows where Catholic hospital that looked from the outside like a mix of one of those horrendous modern Catholic churches, a shopping mall and some kind of Disney ride called Hospital World.  So wherever I was, there I was.  Angel dropped me off and went to do her good works in state government saving rivers and trees and all innocent creatures and landscapes.  Seriously, she did that, no joke and was successful even though her boss sounded like she could leave something to be desired, but anyway…Angel was/is amazing.

So, I walked in and asked some lovely seeming volunteers where the ICU was and somehow after some mis-steps found it.  This amazing nurse showed up and brought me to my father who was in his bed, being kept alive by machines.  In fact, from the moment I walked in I could tell he was gone.  He was a body being kept alive by machines.  Perhaps his spirit was trapped in there, but the body was done.  So January 7, 2010, I just sat there with him for hours and hours.  Stared at what was left of the father I barely knew, his only daughter and living relative.  The amazing nurse walking in and out and giving me coffee.  I was surrounded in Sacramento by the Commonwealth, which since I like in the UK now seemed kind of amazing.  I began to realize they were nuns or somehow Catholic and deeply spiritual in a real sense.  These folks were living it.  They were also as I sat there arguing with my father’s Godforesaken insurance company, explaining that no they could not move him from their ICU to fucking Kaiser’s ICU just cause it was costing them some extra money.  Someday I will do bad things to Kaiser, but revenge is best served cold, so will wait on that…

But sitting there, next to this body being kept violently alive by oxygen and every other kind of support, I just prayed and prayed to anyone and anything and asked him what he wanted.  I tried to talk to him like the nurse suggested but words seemed beside the point.  Instead I spoke to him silently and had confidence he could hear.  And then the most amazing miracle happened, well it happened from when I walked in, I forgave him everything, all of it – the abandonment, the non-existent boundaries, his inability to be there for me as a child or hear me as an adult until way later, the whole thing.  It just vanished.  And I knew we had to let him go.

So for hours, after I check with him by asking him to move his foot, which was the only thing that moved – even though I’m pretty sure it was involuntary – if he wanted to go – his foot twitched pretty violently and repeatedly and I figured we were on the same bat channel.  So the wait for C began, as I was no way making this decision without her, even though she asked me to come to make this decision.  She had of course lost her health care proxy so they needed my consent.  We or rather I found it later crawling through the pit that was their house…over and under pot resin, burns on the carpet, encrusted food and little Buddhas…How much more California can you get?

And then came the next miracle, I ate lunch.  I actually realized I needed to eat and went down to the cafeteria, made some calls and had a hamburger.  I talked with my mother who was being relatively calm and one of my step-father’s who was quite present in his own way.  And I went back upstairs to hear their last ditch attempt to help him had failed.  Eventually C showed up and I told her what was happened.  She cried and freaked and agreed amidst sniffles that we should let him go.  He looked unbelievably miserable.  They explained to us that when they took all the plugs and lines out it could be minutes or hours before he died.  There was no knowing.  I had a feeling it would be quick.

The lovely nurse gave me some aromatherapy cream, I picked lavender or she did.  She asked if we wanted a cast of his hand, which she prepared and then a pillowcase a volunteer had made.  It was spectacular.  Catholics know how to do hospitals.  I have never seen anything like it.  I think they also bumped up the morphine so he wouldn’t be in too much pain. 

When they took everything away, somehow C had disappeared and I was there with him alone again.  I was rubbing his head with the aromatherapy cream and said ‘You are loved’ and then he took his last breath.  It was kind of astonishing.  Of course a moment later, an admin woman walked in and asked me to sign a form regarding my flight home and I told her to go away but she wouldn’t so in the midst of what may be one of the more sacred moments of my life I had to sign paperwork.  Typical.

Then C reappeared and freaked out she had missed his death.  God knows what she had been doing in the bathroom, needless to say I didn’t ask.  One learns.  But then she cried and cried and I held her, or was that before?  I honestly can’t remember.  At some point I cried and she held me.  At some point my mother called and talked to me and C.  At some point people sent lovely text messages as I told people when we took off life support to send prayers or whatever they believed in and of course because I have most excellent friends, they did that.  And I know it helped.

And then at some point C and I sat there with his dead body and started laughing because I showed C that if you looked at his face, you could see his wry little smile and she did see it.  He looked so much better after the crap was taken out and off of him.  I forgot the other black humor part – his pacemaker kept on ticking way past his death so they kept having to try to get it to stop to declare him dead but the fucker was relentless.  I knew this would cheer him up no end.

I think at some point they gave up. 

At some point C called her two sons who showed up eventually along with a girlfriend of the youngest one.  They stood very far away from my father’s body, and I remembered that when you don’t see someone die, dead bodies are scary.  I had never seen someone die before and I discovered, that day, dead bodies are not scary.  I was unbelievably grateful for the experience of being there, but as I type all this now, it brings it back and it’s hard.

At some point, we said goodbye and left and ate dinner at a Godawful Chinese buffet place, the kind that only happen in the US in strip malls in nondescript suburbs of B-list cities.  It was incredible as the food was made up of dayglo colors and had nothing to do with China but I ate it anyway.  It was all very strange and we all kind of laughed and cried and I tried to sort out the relation of the one son back from Iraq, who was acting tough but clearly could be pushed over with a feather and the other son the math whiz with the limp and his girlfriend who kept asking me if I wanted a Xanax.  Bless her I know this was her idea of trying to help but somehow I just couldn’t convey and probably didn’t even explain I was a sober alcoholic, and no, really, it’s OK, I didn’t need any fucking pot or Xanax or Whatever.

Somehow, I got back to Angel’s house, I think it was C’s Iraq vet son who got me there in his Huge truck thing.  I was grateful people weren’t too drunk or high.  I was grateful to be going into Angel’s house in the city out of the suburb near decent coffee and even more crucially AA meetings.  Did I go to one that night?  I don’t think so.  I don’t know.  I stared.  I actually don’t remember the rest of the night.

The rest of the week was a whole other kind of nightmare and I will write about it later this week.  It was also a kind of grace and of course was incredibly funny in a dark humor kind of way.  Welcome to my life folks.

This is where I come from. 

Jerry Brown is now Governor of California again, in a post-script.  When I visited my father in California for the first time as a young teenager, Brown was Governor, newly elected then.  We were listening to his state of the state address, and he said “I was thinking about the problems this state is facing and then I decided to listen to whale sounds, which I will play you now” and he did, he played whale sounds.  I think I laughed, but I was truly freaked out.  A northeastern girl surrounded suddenly by palm trees and a governor who listened to whale sounds.  And he’s back now.  If only my father could have seen that, he would have laughed with delight.  In 2003, after he had his stroke which took away his speech and left him aphasic when he could speak, Schwarzenegger was elected and all he could do is point at the screen and gawk in horror.  At least however, before he died his beloved Red Sox beat the Yankees in the World Series.  A first since the curse of the Babe in the 1920s.

Who says nothing changes?

Good-bye, J.  I never did call you Daddy, except when I was very little and only on cards...too embarrassed to say the words...but I know you’re my father.  Thanks for the ride, even if you weren’t ready to buy me the ticket.  Blessings to you.

Happy New Year and all that

Hi everyone,

Haven't had time to write since last time because of travel chaos getting back to where I live and now have a lot to do, but am wide awake late my time as jet lag hasn't quite lifted and now that my husband is away across the world and I'm alone, I drift into my late night ways...apparently some people are biologically night people.  If so, I'm one of them.  However, I also have to get up tomorrow relatively early so hope writing this will send me off to sleep.

I'm excited, scared, overwhelmed and then weirdly peaceful all at once.  The past few days I've walked through sound barriers of self-hatred and whackiness and then just plain delusional bullshit.  This Friday will be the anniversary of my father's death and on the 28th was the death of my last cat, who was almost 20 years old when she died.  And the grieving has come out all sideways.  Not to mention my husband leaving for 3 months, which kicked up a shitstorm of it's own.

However, I'm also weirdly peaceful at times and people keep telling me how good I look, relaxed and rested etc. which I find so weird.  It just shows me that I don't know what's going on half the time and as usual my head is way crazier and more judgmental of me and my actions than anyone else is. 

It was hard to leave my family home because my step-father was in a bad way when we left but I was glad to have been there and asked if they wanted me to stay and meant it.  That was not necessary but I cried a lot the night before we left, afraid I wouldn’t see my step-father alive again.  I hope I’m wrong and just projecting stuff about my father onto him.  Unlike my father, my step-father from when he and my mother got together when I was 16-17, has been present and accounted for in my life.  He was my mother’s 4^th husband, so girls 4 times is a charm!  FYI, my mother married 4 times and my father 3 times and had a 4^th life partner when he died.  Neither of them ever had any other children.  Imagine my confusion.

So anyway, it’s an interesting time.  I go from deep calm to a sense of panic and being overwhelmed by the Tasks at Hand…but then again just said yes to an invite to do a completely frivolous and wonderful-sounding thing with a friend on Saturday because I realized trying to do my taxes the day after the anniversary of my father’s death or indeed anything ‘logistic’ is probably insane.  This is a miracle people.  It means even with everything going on, I’m not totally in thrall to my workaholism.  Thank Christ or Whomever.

I’m also doing my creative work in the whirlwind and that is deeply important.  And I’ve also taken weirdly to drinking Diet Coke sometimes, something my AA sponsor does and others do and I’ve always sniffed at and yet what’s in my fridge now?  Diet Coke.  Weird.  Peer pressure, I blame all of You who Drink Diet Coke for this…scary.

Have been spending my time applying for stuff, some of which – a lot of which – are very competitive and may well bring rejection but also, and this I have to begin to accept, may bring success as well.  As my sponsor says “you don’t know”.  And she’s right and I’d love to be able to just stay there.

Battling a lot with feelings of failure that come and go and when they are here, and I think they are so virulent now because my mother, when I was young, framed my father as a failure (as did a number of ex-wives of his btw…), I think the Failure tag is just hanging there.  Plus I’m 47 and so at that age where if I don’t ‘make it’ in a certain way pretty soon, I’ll have to begin wondering if I’ll be labeled an also-ran, has-been, coulda been a contendah, etc…However, I’m not going to dwell on this now as it’s a sleeping dragon that when woken takes me out.

And as someone said at an Al-Anon meeting I was at tonight, practicing these principles means practice and when we’re not practicing ways of freedom or happiness, we are ‘practicing’ anger or impatience or in my case endless worry.  So if I give that stuff too much airtime, I’m practicing Fear of Failure and I don’t want to practice that anymore.  The best antidote is doing my creative work but I also need to keep on top of some other tasks like applying for things that can bring in money to make it possible…because as I enter into the assessment phase of my teaching, I remember again why I hate teaching.  I don’t hate teaching, but I do hate the admin part of it and having to grade students and argue with other lecturers about the grades, etc.  It’s soul destroying and has Nothing to do with art at all in my not so humble opinion.

So the goal this year: learn how to put myself first.  Meaning self-care so others don’t have to piece me back together again.  And find a way back into making enough money from my own work to not have to depend on teaching income because that shit will drive me mad.  I have accepted teaching work for the spring, and will do that but hope, pray, and dance around whatever Maypole or statute in hopes some of what I am putting out into the universe will work because I do believe, I really do that by now, I deserve to get paid properly for what I do and have done for over 30 years now.

Anyone who believes in such things, please pray for me that this is so…and also spare a thought for me on Wednesday when I have to go get an MRI.  I think I’m OK but was getting dizzy a lot for a while (that’s gone away) and so having my Head Examined.  Here’s hoping it’s all kosher.  My Head that is.

OK, past even my bedtime now.  Wishing you a wonderful 2011 and upcoming Year of the Rabbit – which is supposed to be a nice year than Year of the Tiger, which is ending now.  Tiger tears things apart (even if it’s necessary it still is painful) and Rabbit’s apparently a bit chill.  It’s also my birth year so here’s to the Rabbit cycle no. 5 upcoming….