Pretty Damn Terrific Don

Don has died. Holly is now faced with being a widow. This is something we don't know how to do. When you lose a limb, there are programs for learning to live without that part of your person, but nobody seems to have a system for learning to live without your life's love.

I joined a grief group to get some professional answers, but it's not like there are prosthetic devices for our hearts and souls. The holes in our hearts simply have to scar over as we limp along through life. Our memories and those shared with others do help in the healing, and they certainly provide a salve for the pain.

We were privileged to have several days to "sit Shiva" with Don before he crossed to the next stage of his life. If one's good works live on after we depart this life, there's a lot of Don left living. We are still collecting stories of all the lives he entered and enriched. He was really larger than life; I know there's a great deal of his positive power left in all of us.

No matter what was going on in Don's life, his constant reply when asked how he was doing was "pretty damn terrific." I've got to figure that if he was terrific even when eaten up with cancer, he's certainly even better in his perfect Paradise.

I don't know if he's resting in peace; I suspect he's throwing parties in Paradise.I do know that Don is now permanently pretty damn terific.

Dancing With Death

Her husband is doing his final dance;
There's nothing more that we can do.
We've laughed, cried, worked and prayed;
In their places waiting grew.

Waiting for him to breathe his last,
Waiting for all their folks to leave,
Waiting for the empty to descend,
Waiting for her pain to proceed.

My every moment is a misery,
Because I fear that what awaits
Is a deep dark night of her soul
When she can no longer touch her mate.

When she feels her blood is pumping
With only half of her heart,
And she will perhaps come to feel
That she is literally torn apart.

When her skin will sometimes seem too big,
And other times stretched to breaking.
The only thing worse than the love that is lost
Is the regret if it never was taken.

Sitting Still

My nephew's wife has informed me that this is Special Education Week. Seeing as I come from a long line of people with ADD, I have a bit to say on that subject. Now, I want you to know, that in my day, ADD was spelled differently: BAD, and only boys were allowed to be bad.

The problem for people with ADD is that they can't do or think any one thing at a time. Talking with them is a lesson in scatter-shot conversing. I've taken to having sticky notes with me as I converse with any fellow scatter-shot speaker. Just as I learned to do in board meetings with a facilitator, I jot down what my friend, Mountaintop Mary, calls "bunny trails" and agree to table those discussions for later.

I once tutored for a second-grade literacy program. The little boy I was teaching just couldn't sit still without completely shutting down. It was only after I found a rocking chair and obtained permission for him to rock and read that he began to get with the program. He became a star student.I only wish I had known this trick when my children were students.

It seems that we spend most of a child's developing life punishing them for moving around, and the rest of their lives wondering why they're so out of shape. The fidgeting of other people makes us nervous, so we seek to stop it at all costs. The more I have to make myself sit at the computer, which is the only way I'll ever reach my publishing and writing goals, the more I realize all the things we do to burn off our nervous energy. Some of those things are obvious, like running, sports, and dancing. Others are not so obvious, and can be performed right at one's desk.

Smoking, eating and drinking used to be allowed in adult workplaces, but not in this day of air quality control and sensitive desktop electronics. We were broken of the gum-chewing habit by our grade school teachers. A lot of people try to control what my daughter refers to as "buzzing" with various drugs, both legal and otherwise. Many prefer alcohol.

The home-employed are not limited in what methods they employ, but there are only so many one can do while sitting. Food makes a body fat, alcohol makes a brain fuzzy, and what I know about medicating what our psychologist friend called "the wooglies" in his son seems to only work for so long before the doses have to be increased. This leaves movement.

I'm almost sixty years old and female, and I still can't sit still. Many executive chairs come with rocking and rolling mechanisms, both ways to discretely fidget. I have one of these. I can freely rock, roll, drum my fingers, tap my feet, whistle, hum, go back and forth to email and Facebook, and take bathroom, snack, and beverage breaks. Yet we think that a bursting ball of energy like a six year old should be able to sit silently for hours on end. What's wrong with that picture?

Maybe some of our educational dollars should be spent on rocking chairs.

Party Your Way To Paradise

I really get on people’s nerves insisting on families facing death straight on, but I have a lot of experience with this issue. I never got over the fact that a family member that I dearly loved when I was nineteen was dying for six months and none of us ever got to tell her good-bye. We just kept pretending that she was going to get well again even though her brain was eaten up with cancer. Most of her family wouldn't even come to the hospital to see her because they just didn't know how to act. How horrible is that?

When we thought Richard was dying while he was in a ten-day coma, I got into all kinds of trouble with one of our physician friends by making jokes about him at his bedside. The way I figured it is that if we can hear while we're in a coma, we'd feel a lot less scared of our future if we heard our loved ones laughing than if they were all weeping over us.

After Richard woke up, we still knew he would die without a heart transplant, but he made me promise that I wouldn't get mushy (he called it maudlin) about it. Me maudlin? As controlled as I am emotionally? We spent the one-year plus waiting time getting his affairs in order.

Another friend of ours was recently facing a good chance of imminent death. She chose to laugh about the fact that her husband would no longer have to worry about how she'd handle their financial affairs if he predeceased her. Neither her husband nor her children could see the humor in her situation, but I was blessed to be the one she chose to share in this little laugh.

When one of my people is hurting, I'll cook for them, clean for them, cry with them. But it seems that the people who will help them party their way to Paradise are few and far between. It's a tough job, but if somebody's gotta do it, I'm glad it can be me.

The Dearly Departing

Our friend is dying. Of course, we’re all dying from the moment of our conception, but this friend has been handed a time frame in which he'll reach the end of his time on earth. We've been anticipating this day for over a year; actually, more like five years, since he had his first heart attack which left him in congestive heart failure.

After that, he had to have a kidney removed because of cancer. Once he recuperated from that, cancer was discovered in his liver. He had surgery to remove the tumor, but the cancer came back. We just got word that there's nothing more that medicine can do for him. He said a year ago that he's ready to go, but he's continued to be so vibrant that it's hard to believe his time is so close.

This friend became part of us by the back door. His wife is one of my best friends, like a sister to me and an aunt to my children. I was dead set against her marrying him and even threatened him with bodily harm (while dancing with him at their wedding) if he hurt my friend. Over twenty-five years, his love for my friend made her so happy that I couldn't help but learn to love him. Now, he's leaving us.

When we began this last year's journey through the killing cancer, I thanked him for proving me wrong about his marriage to one of my best buddies. I agreed to write a eulogy for him. I kept that promise, writing my thoughts on him as soon as we returned home from his house.

Yesterday, he, not she, called me with the fatal facts from his doctor. We laughed about what everyone would say about him after he's gone. I teased him that I was glad I hadn't sent his eulogy to him a year ago; that I wouldn't want him to hear any of the nice things I might say about him in case he lives longer than the doctors expect. I'd hate for him to have that to hold over my head.

Then, I got to thinking how nice it would be if we all knew what people would say about us after we're gone, so I sent it to him. There are some things that are worth the chances you take.

Why I Don't Want a Boy Beautician

I strongly suggest that my women friends think twice before agreeing to their husband’s help in any beauty rituals.

I’ve always had unattractive hands; my fingernails peel and crack; my cuticles are quite shabby; and a high school friend likened my hands to the “man’s hands” on the Lava soap television advertisement. I wanted to look my most glamorous when marrying the man of my dreams, so I had a set of fake fingernails applied for our wedding.

After the wedding, one of the nails popped off. I mentioned to Richard that I needed to have my manicure repaired before we headed off on our honeymoon. He was mystified; “Why would you do that?” he asked.

“Well, my hands look worse with only a partial set of nails, so I either have to get the missing nail replaced, or I have them all removed.”

“Those nails make you look like you’re going to scratch someone’s eyes out. I like your hands the way they were.” And, to be truthful, one of the first compliments he had given me was, “I like your hands.” When this set me to guffawing, he continued, “They look like strong hands.” Who knew that a professional person would be looking for a strong woman instead of a glamorous trophy wife?

Richard offered to remove my nails, and I agreed. He asked me to stand by the sink while he got some supplies. Upon his return, he was carrying a bottle of paint stripper and some steel wool. It worked to get the nails off, and since my hands weren’t any thing of beauty before, I was satisfied with the results as soon as I saw that my skin was still intact.

I recently developed a staph infection in my armpit. Richard had recommended that I not shave until it cleared up. The first time I shaved after it cleared up, the infection returned. Richard’s theory was that my razor made small cuts in the skin into which the bacteria entered. Hairy pits on a woman, like strong hands, don’t offend him, so I stopped shaving again.

Today, he decided to assist me with shaving my underarms after a long break. This was precipitated by my request that he pick up a lady’s electric razor for me. “Oh, just try my electric razor,” he said. As I began the process, it felt like I was receiving electric shocks under my arms wherever I put the floating heads to my flesh. Upon hearing me scream, the ever-gallant Richard, offered to help. “You just have to do it more slowly,” he said. He knows I have two speeds: “overdrive” and “dead,” so I handed him the razor.

Mistake! He slowly ripped the skin off my under arms, but we didn’t realize what was happening until after it was over, and my pits were oozing something that looked strangely like blood. So much for safe shaving with an electric razor, and so much for Richard being my beautician.

Soul Soothing

The ever-moving, ever changing wildness of the water
Soothes my sorrowful soul in ways that nothing else can match.
I don’t need to be on it, I simply need to see and smell it
To keep me ever-mindful that nothing living remains the same.

The trees in the forest whisper and swish, also ever moving;
But not with the seething, soaring sounds of surf upon the shore.
I feel like I’m caught in a lullaby trying to quiet my quest for better,
Especially in the dead of winter when our wooded world turns to gray.

Winter weather on the water is not the same as summer storms,
That roll in, touch down, destroy much, and then they’re gone.
But the winter’s gray sky becomes one with the rippling water,
And the low light glints rainbows on the air around the land.

I love and desperately long for living on the water;
Happily taking my chances on being washed out to sea.
I’d be more comfortable braving the height of a hurricane
Than suffocating slowly in the bosom of Mother Earth.

People who have spent their childhoods on a rural route
Seem quite content with waiting for nature to run her course.
When one is mostly defined as a woman at war with the world,
It’s difficult, at sixty, to become a woman who waits.