Hard To Say

I've only had the opportunity to blog on Leap Day twice before today in my blog's history, and I was surprised to find out that I actually did blog on both those days...mostly because I used to blog a lot more regularly. So doing it today probably makes it the most consistent thing I've ever done here. There's an exception to every rule, isn't there?

I had planned to finally do my post on how I condition my hair following my baking soda cleansing revelation and the subsequent questions in the comments, but it's once again not to be. (If I'm not careful it's going to become the One Ping Only equivalent of Kimmel's No-Time-For-Matt-Damon gag...) Unfortunately, it's not for a particularly happy reason.

This past weekend, my cousin, Michael, died while on vacation in Hawaii. He had been scuba diving and something happened (I don't know what, so I'm not going to speculate or elaborate), and his body was deprived of oxygen too long for him to survive. It was sudden and stunning and so, so saddening. Coming just a year and a half after losing my mom (almost to the day), it is just so hard to comprehend and digest.

Michael was the last person left who had known me all my life. He stepped up and was so there for me and my brother when Mom died; he was never more than a phone call away and he made sure we knew we mattered to him. He wasn't one to talk about that kind of thing, but there was no doubt in my mind that if I needed him in any way, he would be there.

He had a special place in our lives because, when I was 7 or 8, and he was 18 or 19, he moved from New Jersey to California and came to live with my family while he got settled. I remember feeling like I knew what it was to have an older brother for a while. Though we moved back east within a couple years, he had an influence on me during that time. It was from him that I got my love of classic rock, because that's what he listened to and I just absorbed it, and I can never think of Dan Fogelberg without thinking of Michael because he had a t-shirt from one of his concerts that he used to wear all the time. I remember talking to him about how sad it was that Fogelberg had died so young just a few years ago. This is especially hard to remember right now because Michael was a year younger at the time of his death than Fogelberg was.

My mother was especially close to him, as he was her first nephew, and she was really involved in the early years of his life. I think it always meant a lot to him that she provided a place for him to go when he needed a fresh start and she was always in his corner. There was the typical amount of family drama to contend with over the years, but there was an unbreakable bond there that mattered. When we moved back to California, it was a comfort to have him nearby and more a part of our lives again.

He wasn't a perfect guy, by any means -- his smoking drove me bonkers but I was so proud of him when he quit a few years ago and stuck to it -- and he had a weird fondness for gnomes that left me scratching my head, but he was honest, caring, and a good guy, and I thought the world of him.

I'm going to miss you terribly, Michael. You left your mark and you won't be forgotten.

The Not-So-Confirmed Bachelor

My brother's last guest post was well-received and, as he's still on a writing kick, I wanted to share another offering from him just in time for Valentine's Day/Single's Awareness Day (whichever works for you). I kind of like this turning-the-writing-over-to-someone-else-and-just-editing-their-work thing! You know, for now.

So, I have something to get off my proverbial chest...

There are some people out there who say as I approach age 40 and find myself never being married, that one of the following is true: A) I probably never will marry, B)I am in the closet, or C) I am afraid to commit to a long-term relationship. Naturally, no one besides me knows the full story, even those I date or have been close to for years. Hell, I don’t know that “A” isn’t true, but deep down I know (I hope!), it is not assured at this point. This is my retort to the skeptics and an affirmation to myself.

I will dismiss “B” and “C” right off since they are very easily explained away and are not really worth much attention.

If someone ever says to my face that they suspect I might be gay, I know exactly what my reaction would be without even having to think about it. “Have you ever met me?” would fly off my lips faster than a particle smashing in CERN’s collider. This is not a denial or any commentary on that lifestyle, it’s just who I am. I love women and have only ever found myself attracted to them. There is little that I actually do or say on a regular basis to make any rational person think I come across as a charade or that I am anything other than a straight up hetero (no pun intended...ok, maybe a little...) If you ever spend time with me you will find I genuinely love the female form and only ever see myself being with a (naturally) female partner. Anyone who seriously postulates such a theory would only make me question their orientation. Deflection isn’t just for shields. I’m just sayin’...

Next then...I’ve often heard, mostly from one person who was emotionally invested in the discussion, that I am afraid to commit. In only one small respect was she right. I am afraid to commit...to the wrong person. Sadly, this particular woman was the wrong person for me. I took a long time to discover I didn’t want to marry her, so I could be sure of that decision. I do not want to marry more than once and spending my life with someone I know is wrong, for any reason, is just not how I choose to spend the rest of my days. In traditional terms though, I am not afraid of commitment. Quite the contrary as I spent nearly ten years with this woman. I was always faithful to her and invested all of myself in our relationship. For a lot of that time I had my doubts and I spent heaps of time trying to figure out how to make it work. A significant part of that was dedicated to deducing what was wrong with me that prevented me from walking down the rose petal-lined aisle. I thought maybe she was right for part of the time, but even though I knew I always wanted to be married, ultimately it just was not to her. Suggesting, then, that what I sacrificed and put into the relationship was anything short of commitment is highly insulting and plain wrong.

Ok then on to “A.” This is the most agonizing and depressing possibility for me, honestly. I am also convinced with every passing day that it may very well come true.

One thing I can admit to myself now is that I don’t like how I am outside of a relationship. I will do just about anything to be in one, except settle. I am not entirely sure why I do, but I do believe in getting myself a traditional marriage. Most do not appear to work these days, granted, but it is thing I aspire to someday. It is rather shocking how much I am surrounded by friends in divorce. Some of them are marriages that I never imagined would dissolve but they have, sadly. It is scary, intimidating, and demoralizing when I think of them. I’m pretty sure my parents’ marriage would have ended in divorce if my father had not died shortly after my mother separated from him.

Hollyweird marriages or ones of convenience I can accept failing. However, people I knew for years and never saw a hint of trouble telling me they are getting divorced really rattles me. So then, it would be so easy for me to look at those getting divorced and say, “Whoa, maybe I don’t need to get married.” I would be right; I do not need to be. The difference here is I want to be married. What is strange is even with my dogma, I couldn’t evoke a cogent argument in support of marriage when my best friend challenged me to convince him why he should ever get married.

Notwithstanding all the negative evidence, one fact remains that I don’t question (which for me is quite an achievement): I plan to get married someday. So doubters hit the road. The willingness, the means, and the desire are there. I will admit that there is one thing consciously holding me back; I will not settle for anything but the right woman. I am not a player, completely dysfunctional, or romantically challenged. I am simply highly selective and perhaps too romantic. I hold out hope for “the one.”

I could so easily settle for the next random girl that agrees to a date or conceivably even acquire a foreign bride. I do often feel despondent enough to cave to such actions. In the end though, my principles and better instincts prevail to keep me looking for “the one.” However, it is important to note that I am not just sitting around waiting and hoping for my princess to fall in my lap (literally or figuratively).

Recently, I took it upon myself to look at life differently and work on growing myself after I came to a realization that there were things that I could improve upon in my interpersonal relations. Some extraordinary interactions with friends opened my eyes to the fact that perhaps I had some things to learn before getting myself in a relationship again. Just finding Ms. Right was not the only solution. Mr. Me needed to get in shape and not just with his P90X DVD.

To that end, I am launching to Sean 2.0. Here’s hoping dreams really do come true!

Guest Post: Vader Is My Father Too

As promised, today is the day for the first guest poster here at One Ping Only. You may as surprised as I was, when he first asked about doing this, to learn that the author is my brother, Sean. I hope you'll welcome him and support his efforts in the comments.

I was asked an innocent enough question today that neither the person asking it, nor myself, could have known it would elicit the reaction it did in me later in the day. 

A little background context: Recently, started I dabbling in literature exercises. The reason for doing most of them is as cathartic therapy to express and/or release pent-up anxiety or frustrations. Some are just for fun as I decipher some creative manifestations rolling around in this ponderous head of mine. Sometimes the batter that oozes out onto the keyboard resembles a talent.

In this vein of thought, I was asked if I ever considered submitting something I wrote for publication. The answer was a quickly registered “No.” I enjoy writing (my sister would say that I write too much and you may agree by the end of this) and I have for a long time, but I stopped many years ago for a variety of reasons. In fact, creative writing was one of my favorite classes in high school. As I considered this, I wondered why I stopped. Sure, I never had any real interest in pursuing a career in journalism or writing, but I just stopped writing around college. It didn’t help that when I was 17 or 18, I just didn’t see myself in a modern author lifestyle or having any real talent that I could make money from long term. I wanted to become a psychologist because the human cognitive systems and their malfunctions really interested me as I was deciding what to study at college. I was inspired by events in my younger life to learn how to “fix” what was wrong with people’s mental faculties. I later gave that up, but that story is for another time.

The more I thought about it, while driving around some of the most beautiful California countryside the Bay Area has to offer, I remembered why writing as a career was so distasteful to me back then. It still is to some degree even now, if I am honest. The reason is … my father. You may not understand that simple a reason if you don’t know me well. Even if you do, it is neither something that I talk about much nor something I am likely to bring up in most conversations. I am finding lately that I can open up and be more honest about issues with my father though. So I hope you allow me to share more here and continue reading.

I had a very complex relationship with the man that was my father. Lots of people do, so I am not in any way unique in that respect. The reasons why are not unique to me either and really are not worth outlining here. It simply boils down to this: when he died I had no love lost, no tears shed, and I was actually relieved it finally happened. This may sound cold, heartless, and maybe even pathetic. However, you should know that I was very disappointed in and angry with that man. He was very sick and that had a lot to do with why he did everything he did that upset me. He was also killing his heart and liver with alcohol. He had resorted to drinking mouthwash to get his high and this may well have led to his early death at 52.

Yet, he was still my father and I should have been able to look up to him and love him. The problem is he never really found a way to remove himself from the clutches of his mother’s mental illness and family dysfunction. Despite years of therapy, numerous prescription drugs, mental health treatment facilities and friends/family working to help him out, he ended up a lonely corpse that I hated. Those are strong words, but it is the simple truth. His best contribution to my life was serving as an example of what NOT to do.

That being said, the reason I lay it out there is because due to whom he was, to me, I vowed and actively work to avoid doing anything that I associate with him. The list is not really all that long and over the years I have been able to whittle it down so that it doesn’t take over too much of my life. When I come into “contact” with one of these associations though, my immediate and involuntary (self-learned, not naturally instinctual) reaction is to make a 180 away from doing/being that “thing.”

I avoid going anywhere near it, if possible. This is a defense mechanism I use to protect myself because I know most of what troubled him, and not a specific mental illness, could be passed along to me as a learned behavior. It is my belief that in many ways this is what happened to him; learning from his damaged mother. I do not recall exactly when I did it, but I made a very solemn vow to myself that I will NEVER, EVER become my father. I can accept that there are certain similarities, but very key traits I never want to have in my life. I cannot catalog all of them here and I do not think it would help in anyway besides. 

Apparently though, writing anything more than what is necessary for an email or work became lost in my subconscious. What you need to know now is what my father did for a living is forever ingrained in my memory as a writer. A technical writer, before he retired, to be precise. So, when he died that is what I remembered him as being. Therefore going into anything relating to writing was verboten. Now, this wasn’t the only reason, but it was a very high priority one at the time.

OK, so now you have the backstory. You may now be asking yourself, “What was the reaction to your friend’s question?” Well, I became very upset. I even started weeping so much I had to pull over, compose myself a bit, and take some time to figure out why this affected me so much. Why now? I’ve never had that kind of reaction to the conflict with my father’s memory. I usually just got tense and determined to stop.

Yet in this case, I suddenly found my perception of my father conflicting with something I enjoy and want to do more.  In essence, I was afraid beyond words what it meant for my life. Could I be a writer and not associate it with him? What you would need to understand is that while I am not seriously thinking I can become a novelist or anything, I have really been enjoying writing again. Also, I very much want to find a new occupation soon and, at the time I realized the association, I was considering choices involving more writing. Having this awakening about the association with my father and a possible shift in my life, I was now facing down one of my biggest fears and most serious vows to myself.

I now need to learn whether I can overcome that fear, forgive him (another project in the works), and continue to pursue something that other people see as a talent in me. I do not want to limit my options based on what can possibly be seen as some loose association with my father. The important take-away here for me is: I need to open myself to the possibility that I could at least find a new hobby and not have to walk away from something I might be good at AND enjoy just to spite him. If I do pursue writing further though, I will definitely need a really good editor! (Maura agrees, especially since she gave this a good once over.)

Life-altering epiphany and subsequent impending changes to improve my life aside, there is also the atmosphere surrounding my life that is helping me work through this all. 

I need to see talent in me first and doing just that has been another recent realization for me. I apparently fail to be aware there are things in myself that I cannot see that others do. For the introverted and self-aware individual that I believe I am, this is something I fail to comprehend well at all. I believe that I know full well what I am and what I do well. However, recently very good friends have helped me understand I have some blind spots to my abilities and a of lack confidence that I should not maintain.

Final point, it is a very strong trait of mine that I need explore and understand something that is such a fundamental flaw for me to be content. In a way, these revelations all relate back to my current endeavor of learning, growing and being a better all-around person.

Sitting there, you may think that’s just what it means to be an adult. I cannot disagree with you at all. 

It’s about time damn it, isn’t it? :-)

I Am Become The Bay Bridge

At some point late this month, I realized that neither my brother nor I had changed our calendars to August. We hadn't talked about it and I just happened to notice that he hadn't done it, either, when I was at his house last week. By unspoken agreement, apparently, August is now our least-favorite month and I think that neither of us wanted to acknowledge that it was upon us.

As of last Friday, our mom has been gone for a whole year. My brother wrote this soul-crushingly good piece on Facebook that he posted that day, but I wasn't able to order my thoughts enough to put something here. I'm still not entirely sure I've got them together, but I felt I needed to get something down as we usher out this unfortunate month and move on to the next year of our lives without her.

I had to smile wryly as a friend on Facebook put in her status update that August 26th was her favorite day of the year because it was the birthday of three of her favorite people. It was one of those reminders of the Circle of Life and all that, a theme that has been popping up for me quite often, recently. As hard as it is to acknowledge sometimes, life does indeed go on, even when we lose someone so vitally important to us. That same day, babies are born, couples get married, people find the help they desperately seek, doctors heal the grievously injured and, as much as we feel like our lives have spun to a stop, the same things will happen the very next day. Though we move forward feeling as though a piece of us was ripped away, we do still move forward.

Last November, I wrote about how hard it was to go to places where Mom and I had gone, because in every corner were reminders of her and I was sometimes overwhelmed with how gaping the hole was in my life. I said that "I need to find a way or simply get to a point where these reminders bring me moments of happiness instead of pings of sadness." Much to my surprise, I have gotten to that point. I can smile when I am hit with those little reminders of her and think of them more fondly than sadly.

I'm building my bridge. Every once in a while a bracket or cable snaps (to further abuse that metaphor) and I'm right back in that ICU room listening to the machines go nuts that one, final time before she was gone. But I keep making repairs and shoring up my pillars (I'm done, I promise) and I'm inching toward the other side.

I couldn't be who I am and where I am without my mom's gifts to me and, even though looking back at them and weighing her loss in my life still brings me to tears, I'm infinitely grateful for her -- who she was, what she did and all she provided to me and my brother, tangible and intangible, while she was here.

Forgetting And Remembering

Are you familiar with the saying, "You'd forget your head if it wasn't attached to your neck" and variations thereof? I often think that, if it weren't a saying that's older than I am, it could have been written expressly for me. While my maternal grandmother died before I was born, two of her sisters were very close to my mom and were like grandmothers to me and my brother. From them, I heard that phrase a LOT in my youth and, really, it hasn't changed much.

I forget and lose things everywhere. I've lost (temporarily and permanently) more jackets and hoodies than any one person ever should. I've had to drive back to hotels to get some vital item that I left behind (usually in the bathroom) on more than one occasion, and have had to ask them to mail things to me if I'd traveled too far by the time it was remembered. I've misplaced a drivers license, only to have it resurface months after I'd paid to replace it. I've lost enough earrings to supply a small store for one-eared people. I forget the names of people I've known for years during conversation and have had to explain a few times that calling someone "what's-his-name" isn't meant as a slight or any disrespect, I just can't pull the name out of my brain when I need it. I pretty much forget what day it is almost every day. I put things "away" in a really good place, then can't remember where that place is. I've forgotten to pay bills, take the credit card at the store, take the keys before leaving the house or the car, turn off the stove, blow out a candle, return library books, take my medicine and go to appointments; those things that all of us forget from time to time.

I have a knack for being able to remember only the first letter in the name of someone or someplace. I can almost guarantee that if you've known me in-person for any length of time, you've heard me say, "Oh, you know, that street...it starts with an 'N'," or something just like that. Probably more than once.

One of my favorites is forgetting something I just said not five seconds before. That always makes me feel good.

Not far behind that is starting a post with an idea in mind and not remembering what the point was a few paragraphs in. Fortunately, this time I do recall what the point is, but my list of posts is littered with half-finished drafts that seemed like a good idea but then I went off on a tangent and made a complete mess of it before losing the thread completely.

The irony is that there are so many things that I'd like to forget but simply can't, no matter how much time has passed, how much rationalizing I've done over it, or how much I know something wasn't really my fault. Usually things that are a result of my having done something stupid.

Like being around nine years old and making an observation to my mom about someone at another table in a restaurant (quietly, I'd thought) and the feeling of utter mortification and shame that swept through my body when I realized that the person had heard me and someone at their table said, "How rude!" loud enough for me to hear.

Like being in middle school and forgetting something (I can't even remember what it was anymore) and being told to call my parents about it, but I either forgot to do that (duh) or just didn't feel like it. When I was asked about it, I told my mom that I hadn't been allowed to use the phone in the school office to call. She went back to the vice president and railed against my being denied the use of the phone and backed me up all the way. Weeks later, when it came up again, I admitted that I'd lied about not being allowed to use the phone. The expression on my mother's face when she realized what I'd done and the position I'd put her in left me feeling about an inch tall.

Like being in college and forgetting about Mother's Day one year and knowing how hurt my mom was by that.

Like the last 48 hours of my mom's life when I practically lived at the hospital and every moment of her last few minutes is etched on my brain for me to relive again and again. Wondering if we could have done something different. Wondering if I hadn't left to go to lunch that day when she began to decline, could we have caught what was happening to her? Seeing the grief on my brother's face when we knew she was really gone.

But even with of all the things I've managed to forget over the years and will no doubt continue to forget, remember, and forget again, there is one thing that I will never, ever forget.

March 18th was the day that brought my mom, Betty Ann Burns, into the world and it was so much a better place for having her here.

One Ping Leads to Another

I need to write. I know I need to write. But deciding what to say and how to say it ties me up in mental knots. Because this blog has always been a balance between the impersonal and the vaguely personal; it has never been something like a diary. That's not me, that's not what I do. Others do and it works for them, and I say good on them if it's what they want, but my blog is just that: mine, however I define it. And laying bare all my thoughts and feelings here is as alien to me as saying no to chocolate. It just doesn't happen.

But I'm not sure I know how to "just blog" while there's all this distracting emotional stuff in my head following my mother's death. It feels like there's simply nothing else for me to write about at the moment, and while I've happily taken a blog break before, that's not what I really want to do.

So, how do I bridge that gap? How do I go from talking about the universal to the personal, and still feel comfortable and true to myself? The only thought that comes to mind is: Baby steps.

I'll start with something that occurred to me today, and what really prompted me to finally sit down in front of the keyboard and at least try to start moving forward.

The biggest problem I'm having is that there are so many things -- so many, many things -- that remind me of Mom, and they pop up constantly, pinging on my consciousness. Our lives had become so intertwined, and I was so used to caring for her and thinking about getting and doing things to help her, that thinking about her when I'm out and about is second nature. I've always been a person who has a very visual memory. I see a stuffed lion and I think of my dad, because he was a Leo. I see a "Back to the Future" poster and I think of the summer we spent in Maine, the year it came out. I see an owl and I think of my mom, even though she stopped collecting them almost two decades ago.

Going to the grocery store is a mini-nightmare. Get a cart, go in, see strawberries, think of Mom. *ping* Keep going, see the apples she liked, think of Mom. *ping* Push on, see the oranges, think of Mom and resist the impulse to buy her one because it was a thing we liked to have on hand for when her blood sugar was low. *ping* Get out of produce, go down an aisle. See the biscotti she liked to have with her coffee each morning. *ping* Look to the other side of the aisle, see the braunschweiger (don't ask) Mom loved to have on crackers. *ping* Continue on, another aisle, remember a conversation we had right there about Eggo waffles. *ping* The hits keep on coming and finally I get to the checkout. Oh, and there are the pumpkin seeds that she loved and that we were buying constantly the last year to help her fiber intake. *ping*

Each of these reminders has a different feeling; some are somber, some are melancholy, some are funny, some are regret-inducing, a few are a little painful, some are surprising, while others are just "Oh, Mom would have liked that" kind of moments. (Not all of them are related to food, I swear. The grocery store was just where I was tonight -- the first time I'd gone back to that one since Mom died, as it happened -- thinking about it.) All in all not really bad things, but I just feel bombarded by them in a typical day. When I'm overwhelmed by them, I tend to think about and recall the more painful aspects of losing Mom, like the last 48 hours in the hospital and the last few minutes of her life. When I flash on those, and they tend to get gloomier the more I think about them, that's when I start to feel down and teary and like I will never stop feeling like this, like the bottom has dropped out of my life.

Then, as I was driving along tonight, it hit me that I need to find a way or simply get to a point where these reminders bring me moments of happiness instead of pings of sadness. For some reason, just realizing that and feeling like it can happen seemed really significant to me. It doesn't give me the slightest bit of insight on how to get there, but it feels like a starting point, at the very least.

So, there's the first pylon. Or whatever it is you use to start a bridge. The real question is, will it be the Bixby Bridge (short, scenic, stylish and leading to sunshine), the Bay Bridge (long, winding, keeps breaking, closes down every once in a while and its repairs won't be finished for years), or the infamous and least-desirable Bridge to Nowhere? (If I need to explain that last one, all hope is lost and you should move along to LOLCats or some such.)

I have no idea. I'll just be pleasantly surprised if I can successfully build it.

A Eulogy

My mother, Betty Ann, died on August 26th of this year after a long period of being in and out of hospitals and nursing homes. What follows is a modified version of the eulogy I delivered at her funeral service. It's modified because my eulogy followed my brother's, and it wouldn't have entirely made sense the way it was, as I made reference to a few things he said. He declined to become my first guest poster, and I can't blame him for that. (Except that it was really good.) Obviously, I wrote this at the time, but it has taken me this long to be able to edit and post it. I am, to put it gently, adrift. I miss my mom more than any words I can scribble down will ever capture.

The last few days have been filled with more laughter than you might imagine. My family is not a somber group and while there has been reminiscing and missing going on, there is still life, humor and joy. I'd like to think that Mom would appreciate that.

Though it might sound trite and somewhat underwhelming, to know my mom was to like her. But being universally well-liked is actually a rather impressive thing. Not that many people really pull it off while being genuine. Mom was. She was certainly a lot more likeable than I am, but I could never quite figure out what her secret was. Maybe I wasn't supposed to; everyone has their strengths and that was hers, not mine. And her strengths were often extraordinary.

This year was really rough for Mom, health-wise. I know there were times when she felt like it was all a little too much. She kept tackling each problem, though, even when she might not fully have wanted to press on with yet another procedure. But she did want to, for us, and we were there with her at each step, trying to keep her spirits up and keep her laughing, too.

She and I spent a lot of time together in the last twelve months, even more than normal, and I am thankful that was the case. Until she went into the hospital, we had developed a pattern of going out one day, getting the medical stuff out of the way and then enjoying the day with as much fun as possible; eating out, running errands, going to the library, getting a favorite treat here or there and, most importantly, shopping. Then we'd spend a few days at home, cooking when we were up to it, perusing cookbooks when we weren't, doing the crossword in the paper, reading, watching her favorite shows and, most importantly, shopping. On TV. My cousin Michael asked the other day if my mom and I had stock in QVC. He came across a stack of invoices and drew a logical, if smart-alecky, conclusion. (I send my apologies to QVC for the dip in their profits over the last few months, and I promise to honor my mom by making up for it as soon as possible.) But really, being able to shop that way and keep up to date with what was going on was important to her, and helped her feel less restricted that she might have otherwise. In many ways, our living situation may have resembled The Odd Couple more than Gilmore Girls but somehow it worked for us and we were friends as well as mother/daughter housemates.

For me, there was always a lot to admire about my mom. She raised two kids, mostly on her own, to be independent, self-sufficient and unafraid, which is quite an accomplishment given that she had a lot of fears of her own. But for the most part, she didn't let her fears hold us back. She supported us even if she didn't completely agree with or get what we chose to do, which is a lot more than many kids can expect from their parents. She trusted us to blaze our own path. She just reminded us to be careful at every turn.

Mom reminded us about a lot of things. She was the one who kept the memories for us and was our touchstone of family and history, as well as right from wrong. Whereas my brother, Sean, hears her voice in his head when making decisions, for me it was more a matter of just following her example to where it became a part of my thought process; my fearlessness tempered with her caution, my adventurousness balanced by her practicality, my impatience mitigated by her reasonableness, my procrastination...curbed...well, no, I guess there was no accounting for that. Suffice it to say that she softened my harder edges and I provided the encouragement for her to push past her reluctance to try new things. In that, we made a good team and, with Sean, an even better, closer family.

I will miss you, Mom. But I will always be grateful for everything you taught us, told us, showed us, put up with, laughed over and, more than anything, for the way you loved us.

How To Lose a Limb: A Cautionary Tale

As I write this, I'm sitting in the hospital, next to my mother's bed. She has dozed off but I can tell after many, many hours of watching her sleep that she's only sleeping lightly and can be wakened with little effort. She has become a champion sleeper during her time in the hospital (then the skilled nursing facility, then the hospital once again); you have to be to get any rest with all the noise and interruptions a hospital brings. I've seen her sleep through blood draws. It's really quite impressive.

I just wish this were a skill she hadn't had to develop. She's tired of being in the hospital. She's tired of the needle pokes, vitals checks, blood sugar tests, IV flushes, bed repositionings, med distributions, ultrasounds, procedures, catheter adjustments, blood transfusions, nursing shift changes, doctor drop-ins and, of course, hospital food. I'm tired of all these things for her, too, because it's hard to watch her endure them day in and day out. (Although I think the food is better than she does.)

And we're not done yet. I've been hesitant to detail exactly what has been going on with her for a couple reasons. 1) I wasn't ready for all the questions; sometimes I don't do well when a lot of questions are thrown my way. After a while, I start to get defensive -- it's a personality flaw I'm aware of and it's one I'm trying to get past. So bring on any questions. If it doesn't violate her privacy, I'll do my best to answer it. 2) Then there is, you guessed it, her privacy. If you've been reading here for any time at all, you may have realized that I don't talk about super-personal things here. I don't fault bloggers who do use their spaces in that way, it just wasn't ever what it was about for me. I figured that if I don't talk about my own personal health issues here for the most part, how could I talk about hers? But her health issues are about to change my and my entire family's life in significant and unavoidable ways. Now that this time is here -- it has always been in the offing, but we've been keeping it at bay best we could -- it's now part of my life and this blog has always been about my life, in one way or another. So it's relevant and it's what I need to write about. 3) It wasn't certain what was going to happen. She has a lot of medical concerns and it wasn't clear which one was going to "get" her first. I think perhaps I felt like not defining things here kept them nebulous enough to avoid dwelling on them. Does that constitute denial? I'm not sure.

As I alluded to in my last post, Round 2 is here and it's time to take it on. My mom has had Type II diabetes for decades. This has caused a myriad of medical problems for her, especially over the last decade. The most problematic has been her circulation, especially in her legs, and she has had: two femoral bypasses, one in each leg; surgery on her carotid artery to unblock it; two heart catherterizations that have resulted in multiple stents being put in her heart; multiple laser eye surgeries to stop bleeding in her retina; the onset of congestive heart failure; foot ulcers and dry gangrene; and the amputation of four of the toes on her left foot. She has also been on the brink of kidney failure for about a year, which has required blood tests every two weeks for that time, and we know that dialysis is almost certainly in her future. Another round for another day...or year.

She has come through each of these things, some more easily than others, with a lot of effort, a lot of love, a lot of tears, a lot of pain and a lot of time. It does get harder each time, however, and though each was serious unto itself, life always went back to normal eventually. That's not going to happen this time.

Tomorrow morning my mom's right leg will be amputated above the knee and she will likely never walk again. Because of her age and weakened condition, she may not be able to get or adapt to a prosthesis, so we anticipate that she will be in a wheelchair from here on out. I hope that it will be one she can move herself, but she has little upper body strength so I am not sure that will be possible. (An electric one is, of course, an option but she has an aversion to them and they're a little too big to use in her condo.) I am her primary caretaker and while she has been the center of my life for the last year, this surgery will probably double the effort required to do pretty much anything and everything.

I will do the best I can, with a lot of help, but there's no doubt that it's going to be overwhelming at times, for all of us. My mom's biggest concern, as I imagine it is for most parents in this kind of situation, is that she is going to be a burden to us. I can't say absolutely that, at times, it won't be a burden; I think in part it depends on how you define "burden." I don't approach it as a burden, but I know that it is weighing on her mind so heavily that I worry it can affect her ability to recover and rehabilitate and I know that it is life-changing. The emotional part of it has been, and will be, very hard. But, to me, that's part of family. It just is.

Another part of family is knowing the best and worst parts of your family members, and how who they are affects who you become. Case in point: I know that my mom has always put us first, to the detriment of her own health. She was told in the mid-70s that her blood sugar was high and that she should just cut out sugary soda and other foods. This was right before we moved from California back east to New York and our lives were turned completely upside-down. We all switched to diet soda and kept right on going, trying to make the best out of some crappy circumstances for the duration of the 80s. Mom made sacrifices for us and was always there for us, working full time and taking care of us and the house, while putting up with two kids and a husband who had a boatload of his own problems. She dealt with money issues, worked day in and day out until retirement, got us both through college, became a widow, took in her two elderly aunts and nursed one through the ovarian cancer that eventually killed her, helped us move back to California (each of us moved out here at different times), packed up a huge house and sold it, and moved to California, too.

During most of that time, she ran on stress and adrenaline and didn't take great care of herself. She was too busy taking care of us to dwell on how she was feeling. I come from a family of stoics, and she learned those lessons well. Too well. In the late 80s/early 90s she was diagnosed with Type II diabetes and had to make significant dietary changes and start taking medicine. But really, it was too late and the damage had already started to impact her health.

The consequences of not addressing her own well-being in favor of taking care of her family for all those years led us in a straight line to today, on the brink of major surgery that has her worried about how she will live the rest of her life and how it affects her children. It's this last part that has me shaking my head over the irony of the situation; this is far worse than if she had said no, we can't do that because I need a break, or you're going to have to skip that birthday party because I need to attend a class on nutrition, or I'm not going to be able to take you to the mall because I need to work out for hour or two. We would have been okay, if disappointed at that time -- or, okay, as teens we would have been devastated...for all of an hour -- but we also would have been better off for seeing our mom make her own mental and physical health a priority. This fear, this worry, this emotional draining now is so much harder than it might have otherwise been if she had said "no" to us and "yes" to herself just a little more often. I think it's this part that is more of a burden than any difficulty we will face as she learns to transition from a wheelchair into a bed: She loved us more than she loved herself and now she's paying a steep price for it.

Now it's time to go wake her up so she can have a last few drinks of water before it turns midnight and she's not allowed anything to eat or drink, pre-op. Tomorrow will be another stressful and emotional day. We'll get through it together, barring any of the many complications that could arise, and we'll be back here tomorrow night, with me watching her sleep and wondering about how the next day will go.

Ode to June

Hello June, you little minx. You crept in while I wasn't paying attention, snuck on past while I was otherwise occupied and whacked me in the ass before blasting off into July. So, you know, thanks for that.

This was definitely an interesting month, and not all in good ways. My mom has spent the last week plus in the hospital and it has been pretty damned stressful. But, like I said, she's one of my heroes and she's coming through it amazingly well. I do have to give my brother and myself credit for keeping her afloat and moving forward for a couple of those days, when it didn't seem that she had it in herself to do it. I'm hoping that, in the long run, she'll also see it as "keeping her afloat" and not "badgering." We can be pretty persuasive.

I learned a few things, though. I learned that I sure as hell hope that I have as a good a friend as my mom does in her decades-long friend, Pat, when I'm facing my mortality. That woman is in-cred-i-ble. I now call her "The Velvet Hammer." We may be persuasive but it's hard to stay objective when you're staring your mom's possible death straight in the face and I challenge you to do it without crying. Pat was like this calm voice of reason and compassion and straightforwardness, with emotion but not tears. She made me want to do whatever she told me to do! And she uses her power for good, not evil.

I also learned (again) how much I enjoy my cousin Michael's company. He came in pretty much as soon as he heard what was going on, and it was so comforting to have him here. We are a really small family, but what we lack in size, we apparently make up for in...I don't know...awesomeness when we all get together. At the very least, we crack each other up, even when we're all a little shell-shocked by the goings-on.

On the other hand, I also learned that, as sad and devastated as we will be when the day comes that Mom isn't able to rally one more time, my brother and I will be okay in the long run. Every time she was going in for some test or procedure (sure she wasn't going to make it), Mom would say, "You two take care of each other." And we're ready to do that. He's been pretty great and I hope that he thinks I have been throughout this, too. He's more likely to whack me with a soda bottle than ever tell me that, but I think I might be safe in thinking that.

The last thing I learned is that having friends who are available to me online is the most wonderful thing when you're in the middle of a personal crisis. I reached out and they were there. Every. Single. Time. People can make fun of social media, and Twitter in particular, all they want but at the end of the day, they can kiss my ass. It was one of the biggest comforts imaginable.

So, bring it on July. I'm ready for Round 2.