Starting today, I will find a thousand things to be joyful about this summer.
Petunias, wildflowers, the perfume of cut grass, crisp salads, dogs in life jackets, fireflies, campfires, berry-picking, polished toenails, green, the nightly frog chorus, the sun, thunderstorms, Cayuga Lake, afternoons on a boat with friends, sweet time …
When she wasn’t feeling sick, every day was a party for my daughter. Every summer was an adventure. Marika didn’t get enough summers. To honor her I will embrace every opportunity to laugh and have fun.
We are ALL dying. This is what I tell myself, driving to the hospice center to train to be a morning-shift kitchen volunteer. Even with weeks of hospice training, I’m still nervous about interacting with people who are dying. I don’t want them to see behind my eyes, the hidden thought: you might not be here when I return next week. So I keep telling myself we’re All leaving town sooner or later – some of us just have an earlier flight.
Shadowing the Thursday-morning volunteer, I operate the sanitizing dishwasher and the coffee machine. She shows me where to find spatulas, and introduces me to the staff and the routine. Then she has me make an egg, my first egg for someone who is not in my immediate family.
“I’m not much of a cook,” I apologize before I’ve even cracked the shell. This might be someone’s last egg so I want it to be good.
“We’re all leaving town, we’re all leaving town,” I say to myself as I follow Thursday-Morning into a darkened room and place the tray with the egg and a tippy-cup of milk before a pale man in a hospital bed. I follow as we peek into rooms to offer breakfast.
When we return to the kitchen, a tall man in boxer shorts is rummaging about. He does not look like he’s dying. He looks like he’s hungry.
“Are you finding what you need?” Thursday-Morning asks. The man walks out with a big bowl of chocolate ice cream.
“That’s my kind of breakfast,” I say to him. But he is focused on his dish.
A white-haired woman sits at the dining room table waiting for her eggs. I bring her coffee on a tray hoping she won’t get impatient as I scramble around to help Thursday-Morning make a perfect egg and piece of toast. The woman is very polite to me. She’s not scary at all. And she’s in no hurry.
When the morning shift is over I drag my feet saying goodbye. I find myself smiling, looking forward to the next time.
Then, in my car heading home, I have a flashback of long ago breakfast trays with bright cloth napkins, jolly eggs and toast, and smoothies. To coax my daughter out of bed for high school, and later for morning drives to the hospital, I’d bring her breakfast-in-bed trays.
“Mom, you make the worst pancakes,” she used to say.
I cry when I remember. Marika, do you believe this? Look where I am. I’m gonna make breakfast trays for all these people now.
But I quickly wipe my tears. There’s something else to worry about now: when I do my kitchen shift, what if they ask me to make pancakes?
“Thank you, Dad,” I say to my father almost every day.
In September 2009, my sisters and I flew to our father in Florida. In the Delray Beach Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit, we watched him sleep, hooked to machines and monitors, sensor pads pasted all over. His glasses, dentures, and hearing aids lay on the bedside table. He was beyond fixing.
He woke up annoyed, tossing his head from side to side, No.
It was not supposed to be like this. He had not intended to get stuck in an artificial extension of his life. He had planned and prepaid for his trip out of the world. The bills had been paid and a large loose-leaf binder was filled with his living will, advance directives, insurance information, and paperwork on everything he owned including a prepaid cremation. For months, maybe years, he had designed and documented his smooth exit like he was leaving on a long vacation.
“It’s time,” he said from his hollow mouth, not blinking. He wanted out.
How did he come to welcome his death with outstretched arms, I wondered? Could I ever design my own dying as if it were a shining adventure? If I watched a hundred people die might I lose my fear and see death for what it really is – the last part of life – and wrap it up royally?
I need to understand this thing that separates me from my father and my daughter. To gain a closer connection to death I attend Death Cafes, grief film series, and trainings at my local Hospice center. I photograph things that have died, determined to appreciate death’s beauty.
In September 2009, the nurses at the Florida hospital’s Hospice Unit wheeled my father into the family room unconscious and finally freed from all the life-supporting paraphernalia. He lasted long enough for me to say, “Thank you, Dad.” I wanted the last words he heard to be “thank you” although I didn’t know where he’d be taking those words. As I watched him take his last breath, I made a promise to be my father’s daughter for the rest of my time.
Five years later, in his honor, I have started to fill my own loose-leaf binder.
I don’t curse. Probably because of all the hours I spent as a kid in the back of my mother’s car, stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway, with my mother ranting at the wheel. There were f—ing idiots driving alongside us, damn a–holes in front of us, and stinkin’ s—heads in the front. The swearing fascinated me. I couldn’t master her competence or style. So I never tried.
This past week, on the day of my colonoscopy, my friend drove me to and from the hospital and stayed for the brief review after the procedure.
“Do you remember what the doctor said?” she asked the next day when the whole event was a vague memory. I couldn’t even remember what the doctor looked like. “He couldn’t finish the last part of the procedure because you were in pain and were cursing,” she said.
“Me? I don’t curse,” I told her.
“You were cursing. Yes you were,” she insisted.
I was crushed. How rude, I thought. How crude. This couldn’t be true. The worst four-letter words I ever dared to use were “darn” and an occasional “what-the hell?” I got queasy just typing those. The self-image I’d always nursed of a bland, demure, tight-lipped girl-woman was suddenly gone. My self-identity was a fraud. Here I was trying to recover from the loss of my daughter and I somehow had lost myself.
Who am I? Whose words did I use, I wonder? My son’s? I’d heard a sorry earful the time he broke his leg in high school and the doctor set the bone without using anesthesia. Or did I use the long forgotten language of my mother stuck in traffic on the LIE?
Flummoxed, I then had to wonder: what else did I not know about myself?
“Right after the procedure you wanted me to take your photograph,” my friend said. I winced at the photos of me sitting up, wrapped in the hospital gown and blankets, silly and shameless.
“You don’t show enough struggling in your blogs. I need to see more of the pain,” my friend, Lion, tells me. I call her Lion because that’s what she looks like on her good days. “I want to see the raw parts. I want to hear more about your suffering,” she says, seated across from me at Tamarind Thai Restaurant where I’m giving her a copy of my manuscript. Today is not one of her good days. It looks like she may cry at any moment. I’ve already shifted the conversation to avoid discomfort. How can someone in so much pain and loss stand to see more?
Only a few hours earlier I had photographed Cricket, another friend, leaning on a garden hoe, using it as a walking stick. It was hot and muggy when it wasn’t raining. And in between shots Cricket had retreated to her wheelchair to recover from the effort it took to stand upright for five minutes. But she was determined to carry on with the photo session.
“I want to be tiny in my garden, sitting on the rocks,” she had said. Hence the name Cricket. Afterwards, gathering the garden shots into Photoshop as she looked on, I quickly erased the photo I had not intended to snap, of Cricket wincing as she collapsed into her wheelchair. We watched as the other eighty shots flashed across the computer screen like a movie of her easily traversing the lawn. Before I left, I started to photo-shop together the pretty picture that would make us both smile.
“I want to offer my readers hope,” I tell Lion, over our Thai roasted duck. “They’ll never keep reading my blogs if they have to drag themselves through all my suffering.” But inside my head I wonder if the manuscript I’ve written is raw enough.
The first thing I did in Massachusetts, after emptying the car of my mother and her bags, was to put the dieffenbachia plant back on her porch. The plant had spent the winter on my dining room table in New York while my mother spent the winter in Florida.
How long do houseplants live, I wondered? I’d been bringing this dieffenbachia back and forth to my mother’s summer home every May and October for four years. Since the year my daughter lost her fight with cancer and I couldn’t bear to let anything else die.
“Cheers!” my mother and sister and I toasted once we were all assembled. “To another great summer,” we said, clinking glasses. I knew I was not the only one thinking it might be our last at October Mountain.
Things were changing. The packing and traveling each season were becoming difficult for my mother. Many of her friends were no longer there. One by one over the past years, the playing golf, barbequing on the deck, driving to nighttime theater, … had stopped. And now the cozy summer home would be put up for sale.
It didn’t seem possible that we would not keep returning summer after summer. Even as we settled into the familiar routine of opening up the house, I felt the loss.
I’ve learned loss is not only about losing a loved one. Loss can be losing a place you are rooted to, or a lifestyle. A friend of ours lost her mind; another lost her mobility. My sister has to give up the work she loves. I fight hard not to lose my dream. We all know loss. Dealing with it demands all the things we think we don’t have, like strength, faith, patience, creativity. It takes courage to let go of what you love but can’t keep. Sometimes all you can do is look to what’s next. For better or for worse, something’s always next.
“Cheers,” I say. Here’s to the mountains that greened up over the weekend, to the spider that weaves web masterpieces in the lawn, to exquisite meals at Chez Nous Bistro, to the old dieffenbachia. A toast to being able to get up and down stairs, to the West Massachusetts skies filled with bright stars, to family. To health and happiness.
Here’s to another summer.
To all of us. To what’s next.
We are ALL dying. This is what I tell myself, driving to the hospice center to train to be a morning-shift kitchen volunteer. Even with weeks of hospice training, I’m still nervous about interacting with people who are dying. I don’t want them to see behind my eyes, the hidden thought: you might not be here when I return next week. So I keep telling myself we’re All leaving town sooner or later – some of us just have an earlier flight.
“Thank you, Dad,” I say to my father almost every day.
I don’t curse. Probably because of all the hours I spent as a kid in the back of my mother’s car, stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway, with my mother ranting at the wheel. There were f—ing idiots driving alongside us, damn a–holes in front of us, and stinkin’ s—heads in the front. The swearing fascinated me. I couldn’t master her competence or style. So I never tried.
“You don’t show enough struggling in your blogs. I need to see more of the pain,” my friend, Lion, tells me. I call her Lion because that’s what she looks like on her good days. “I want to see the raw parts. I want to hear more about your suffering,” she says, seated across from me at 
The first thing I did in Massachusetts, after emptying the car of my mother and her bags, was to put the dieffenbachia plant back on her porch. The plant had spent the winter on my dining room table in New York while my mother spent the winter in Florida.