
I have two followers on my blog, my sister and my mother. My mother can no longer follow me, so I really have only one follower. But, I still love writing in my blog. I guess it is really for me that I do this. Although, if anything I say should resonate with someone else, that is fabulous.
The other day, someone on my mother's caringbridge site asked if Mom could please write a note and I had to tell them that Mom, who was a very talented poet, can no longer read or write or talk or walk. After pleading with the speech and physical therapists last week to please give Mom more time than two weeks, the physical therapist had to be blunt with me. "Your Mom", she said, "had a very severe stroke and she does not have the capability to improve. We cannot justify Medicare paying for any more therapy." It takes time for those words to trickle down past my defenses into my heart.
This is my birthday week. I will be fifty-seven years old on Friday. I usually schedule a therapy session right before my birthday because ever since I was twenty-six, it makes me sad getting a year older. But, this week, I did not. I decided to cherish this week of solitude, this lull when work is slow and the beauty of the day here in California is stunning. Each day, I am amazed anew at the glorious color of the azure blue sky, the pine trees that grow so tall and the butterflies and bees that flit from flower to flower. I have decided to cherish it, sadness and all.
I have slowed down because of bursitis in my knee which is getting a little bit better every day. I have planned a full celebration on Friday which I looking forward to, but in the meantime, I am cherishing this time for reflection.
Every year for the last few years, on my birthday, my Mom compiled a book of my poetry that the two of us had written at the same time. We communicated by Skype which Mom loved because I would often sign while I was talking. Mom has lost alot of her hearing and she loved to watch me sign. She or I would pick a prompt and then we would each write a poem from that prompt. My poems were compiled with love and put in a book with a watercolor picture that she drew on the front.

Here is the picture she drew from last year's book and an excerpt from a favorite poem of hers that I wrote last year:
Straining to Hear
People always ask me
why I became a sign language interpreter
Was someone deaf in my family?
My answer is always no,
forgetting the image of my grandfather
wearing ear plugs with a white plastic cord
plugged into the TV,
straining to hear.
Or watching my mother on Skype
wearing huge headphones
turning up the sound all the way
Doesn't count I guess because
they didn't learn sign language
Unlike me--who fell in love with signs
and followed the inexorable pull of a career as an interpreter
dragging my heels all the way
Knowing in the recesses of my mind that one day
with one turn of the roulette wheel
It could be me straining to hear
I am not yet straining to hear, at least most of the time. But, I am showing some signs of wear. There are little things like forgetting my reading glasses and not being able to see the menu or watching those amazing bodies do feats of grandeur in the Olympics and trying to remember when was the last time I was able to do a cartwheel.
I was inspired to write this blog because I just finished this book by Anna Quindlen:
I have this belief that every book comes along at the perfect time. This book proves my theory. I wish I could write like Anna Quindlen, but since I cannot, I will toss in her quotes in italics for you to savor. When you see a quote below, it is from her. I started her book yesterday and have read it every minute I could since. Anna, who is 60 years old, is looking back on her life and sharing what she has learned.
She starts out talking about "stuff" and how we have too much of it and none of it is important. That reminds me of my decision recently to finally clean out my daughter's room and change it into a guest room. We had the requisite garage sale and sold the furniture for next to nothing and then went out a bought a guest bed. I found the perfect quilt. I have always wanted to have a quilt, not a bedspread and finally got my wish. They had this gorgeous queen size quilt on sale at Bed, Bath and Beyond. Every time I go in the room and see the sun shining down on it, it makes me smile.

I know this is supposed to concur with Anna Quindlen that stuff is not important. I do enjoy that quilt, I will admit. But, a part of me misses that old room and all of the mess that she made. I am surprised to admit that. It is clean and beautiful now, not a speck of dust. But, my daughter is not there...and I miss her. Anna talks about how they leave home in stages. First coming back for all the holidays and then they are too busy with their lives and wander off and even on holidays you are competing with the spouses...No spouses yet, but they don't come home very often. Their lives are full and thriving and I am grateful for that.
Besides, what kind of fool would I be to miss the opportunity to feel the sharp elbow of sensation again, to reexperience life vicariously, armed with the long view? Because naturally at some level it is all about us. Our relationship with our kids epitomizes that old joke: Enough about me. What about you? What do you think about me? It places us squarely in the center of one of the great tugs-of-war of human existence, between connection and independence.
She talks about her husband and their marriage that has lasted the test of time. On August 20th, Michael and I will have been married for twenty-nine years. And like Anna and her husband, our hobbies and passions are not the same. I have no interest in golf and though I like to watch baseball, not every night. I love to look at gardens, but not plant them. Still, I would not trade him for anyone and if I had to do it all over again, I would do it exactly the same way--with him. My mother-in-law, Jeanne, recently lost her husband. I asked her what it was like living without him. She said the hardest part was not being with someone who loved you more than anyone else, not being their "special someone". Right before Jack passed, his caretaker asked him if he knew who Jeanne was. He said, "That is my sweetheart". Those were the last words he said. Michael is my sweetheart. He loves me unconditionally and is always there for me loving me through thick and thin regardless of what I do.
Sometimes I tell my children--well, actually, frequently I tell my children--that the single most important decision they will make is not where to live or what to do for a living, it's who they will marry. Part of this is the grandchild factor; I want them to have two great parents if at all possible. But part is because the span of their years will be so marked by the life they build, day by day, in tandem with another...He has my back and he always has. That's not romantic and it's not lyrical, and it's not at all what I expected when I thought I would never want to spend a night without him...But at this stage in my life, I'm not interested in being with people who don't have my back. All those I'm-just-telling-you-for-your-own-good types I knew when I was younger? Gone.
And of course Anna writes about gettting older, losing your health and death. So many people who I have talked to about my mother have said they would not want to live that way. Anna's mother died when she was twenty and she shares what she learned when her mother was ill.
She wanted to live. That was the lesson I learned from her. She wanted to live until she didn't. It's true of us all. We put fences around that property: I wouldn't want to live if I were in pain. I wouldn't want to live if I had that disease, this cancer. And then, miraculously, we're in pain, with that disease, this cancer, and we want to live still. There's always another threshold.
As I get older, I realize that not only will my mother die, but the world will go on without me. Someday I will not be here. It is not like this is new information, like I did not know it before, but somehow it is elevated to a new level of understanding inside of me.
..I think that someday the river will run, the trees leaf out, the blue sky vibrate overhead, the runners pound out the miles on the path, the dog walkers throw their balls, the nannies push their strollers, but I will not be there. I will be gone.
Once my mother was gone, I was left trying to wrap my mind around the fact that death was always lurking...There was suddenly an unseen barrier between me and nearly everyone else. I knew the secret that was not a secret, that the molecules of the living world are always rearranging themselves so that something is lost, something is lost every day.
So as I sit here pondering turning 57, what are my hopes for the rest of my life? As Anna so brilliantly puts it:
One problem with aging is that we fear nothing much will happen next, that the plot points have passed.
Here are Anna's hopes:
I hope that woman does have grandchildren, and that they like to visit her, if only to see the snapping turtles in the pond or the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park. I hope her husband is still alive, and most of her friends, and please God her children, because there are some things she truly cannot bear. I hope she writes as often as she cares to, and that there are still readers who resonate to her words. I hope she can walk with pleasure and ease to the end of the long drive and back to get the mail from the box, stroll through Central Park to the museum and home again...I hope, after breathing and swearing and sweating and wailing through three natural births, that she manages to have a natural death, without hospital rooms and flourescent lighting and beeping machines.
I hope for all those things as well. I also hope for peace and ease and to be surrounded in beauty. I hope to be able to see more countries--the ruins in Greece, the Louvre in Paris and the Tower of London. I hope to be able to make a difference in the world by continuing to facilitate communication for those who need help. I hope to remember, appreciate and be grateful for all that I have.
In "Angels in America", the brilliant play by Tony Kushner, a play about love and loss and death, there is a valediction: "But still. Still bless me anyway. I want more life. I can't help myself. I do." I do.
I do.

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