Life in Chicago

Just Because it's Inevitable Doesn't Mean I Have to Carry it Around

I've had death on my mind again lately and I'm sick of thinking about it.

It doesn't help that I went to a conference last week on "Helping Parents Through the Loss of a Child." Ugh. I sat in horror with my hand over my mouth for the entire 5 hours I was there, just thinking about how unbearable it would be if we lost Veronica.

And then a couple of different people recommended this blog to me, and while it's beautifully written and I can't help reading it, it also just shoots me through with icicles of fear and sadness and leaves me lying awake at 3am when I'm nursing V, thinking about what it would be like if she were suddenly gone.

I know Greg thinks I'm crazy for dwelling on these thoughts. "Just don't think about stuff like that," he says, and while it's good advice, it's different for someone who is intimately familiar with loss. I still have friends who have never lost anyone significant in their lives and that's hard for me to wrap my head around. I became familiar with death at an early age and have continued to experience the death of close loved ones throughout my life. It's easy, at this point, for me to imagine what it would like if someone else I loved were gone.

I must have only been 5 or 6 when the first person in my life died. My parents were quite wealthy when I was growing up in Atlanta, and during my early years we had a nanny/housekeeper named Johnny who worked 5 days a week in our home. Johnny was lovely. She was in her 5os, African-American, and came from an old Southern family. She had a soft voice and gentle demeanor. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on her lap by the window in my room as she read stories to me. 

Johnny had been working for us for several years when she died, and by then I had become very close to her. I didn't learn the real story about her death until I was older. Back then, in the days surrounding her death, my parents took me for a drive in my father's big, black Lincoln Towncar. This is definitively one of my clearest, early memories. I can picture the smooth black leather of the backseat, the shiny pate of my father's bald head, and my mother swiveled around in her seat as we wound through the old, Atlanta neighborhoods.

"Johnny died and she isn't coming back," my mother said. "She went to sleep and didn't wake up," she said. There is no easy way to explain death to a child. They are literally incapable of fully grasping it until they are closer to the age of 10. The more concrete, the better. Telling a child something like, "she died in her sleep," can make a kid afraid of sleep. They might wonder if they themselves could die in their sleep. But again, there's no easy way to help them understand it. Honesty and direct answers to the copious amounts of questions children are bound to ask about the death are the best route. 

The real story definitely would have been more frightening for me to learn. My mother came home one afternoon that week to find the house quiet. She called out to Johnny as she set down her purse, her keys, removed her coat. There was no answer. My mother tip-toed up the stairs, her heart pounding, and pushed open the door to my room. I was in my bed deeply asleep in my afternoon nap. She pulled the door closed and began to peek into the other rooms, looking for Johnny.

In her bedroom the bed was neatly made and the carpet recently vacuumed. She noticed that the lights in the adjoining bathroom were on, and it was as she approached that she saw Johnny sprawled across the tile floor, an arm twisted beneath her, her body eerily still. She'd had a heart attack, the paramedics told my mother, before they wheeled her out of the room. I continued to nap soundly until after the house was quiet again, until after Johnny gone.

Johnny had a few old house dresses that she kept and wore when she worked in our home. After she died I slept with one of them, a faded, blue one, soft at its edges, and my mother let me take it with me to school for a while. I still think about Johnny some days, still remember her place in my life, and her absence.

I've given so much thought to death in my life. What it means. What it is. What I believe about it. What I know about it. Sometimes it seems like the most banal thing in the world. Some days I think I totally get it and it seems preposterous to view it as anything but a simple and inevitable thing. Other days it destroys me.

Whatever the case with it though, I'd like to stop thinking about it so much. As I write this, I'm one week away from finishing a class at Adler School of Psychology and I'm one month away from completing 2 years at my hospice job. The completion of both of these things mean that I'll be eligible to take the Illinois state exam for my professional counseling license. And THIS means that I can move away from hospice and towards a private practice where I can see a broad range of clients.And hopefully that means I can stop thinking about death so much.

I've actually loved my hospice job and I'm grateful for the experience. And I'm also appreciative of the person I've become in the face of so much loss. But I'm ready to move on from it all, ready to let go of the shroud of sadness and seriousness that I wear so often. I don't want to think about Veronica's death, just her life.

Motherless Mothering

I have missed my mother more since Veronica was born than I have missed her in years. Every single day right now I wish I could talk to her. I want to curl up next to her on the couch with a cup of coffee and talk about this amazing thing of what it is to be a mother. I want to hear all about her experience of it and I want to see her anew, now that I am a mother myself.

I want so badly to show her my beautiful daughter, wish more than anything that I could see the two of them together. I want to be able to call her on the days that I'm driving to work and crying because I miss V so much. I want to be able to tell her about every single, new, little thing that V does.

And I want to thank her for being such a good mom, for teaching me how to be a mother too, even though she's not here anymore.

I wrote about this recently for Mamapedia and the piece went up today: Motherless Mothering

Letter

Yesterday, after I posted my two-month letter to V, I got a text from a friend saying that she was thinking about me. I racked my brains for a minute to figure out what was special about the day. And then I remembered. So I wrote another letter.

Dear Veronica,

I already wrote you a letter today, to commemorate your 2-month birthday, but then a friend reminded me that today is also the day that my father died 6 years ago. I had completely forgotten and was shocked to realize I had done so. And then I felt a kind of warmth at knowing that it's because of you that I'm not focusing on such sad events.

You woke up from a nap just a bit ago and were disoriented and startled so I held you in my arms in the rocker in your nursery until your breathing evened and your head fell softly against my chest. We were both quiet then and I could tell you were drifting off to sleep. I thought about that day 6 years ago when my father died and I couldn't help but cry, wiping my tears with one of your burp rags.

I wish so much that he were here to meet you today. He was the sweetest man, so kind and patient and really, truly wise. He would have loved to meet you.

My last days with him were so sweet and so sad. He died at home in his condo in California and I was there, taking care of him. We held hands a lot those last days and were quiet for long hours, sitting there together in the late afternoon gloom of his bedroom.

On the last day that he was truly conscious, he reached out his hand as I sat beside him and he touched my face. I closed my eyes and let him run his fingers over my cheeks and eyelids, my nose and chin. And only now do I understand what it must have felt like for him to do so. As I sit here with you in my arms, running my own fingers across your cheeks, it breaks my heart to imagine how I could ever do that knowing it would be the last time.

When he was finished my father looked at me and said, "Life is worth living," but it is only now, only since you have been in my life, that I truly understand what he must have felt in that moment.

Thank you for giving me that.

Love, Mom

Suspenseful Tuesday

I know that this event could be weeks away, but I can't help waking up every day now and wondering if today is the day that I'm going to go into labor. After all these months of being pregnant, of wondering about this little being growing inside of me who is surely going to change my life forever, I'm so anxious for it all to finally happen.

And now, being in the very final weeks of it all, life has become very suspenseful. The hospital bags are packed. The car seat has been installed and inspected. All the onsies are washed and waiting in the dresser. Our registry has been practically cleared out (thank you so much generous family and friends) and we have almost everything we could ever need for this baby. I've finished reading my 17 pregnancy books and am now onto the breast feeding and child-raising tomes. 

All that's left is the baby. When is it coming? When I am I going to meet my son or daughter? When will I become a mother? When will Greg become a father? When will we become parents?

Oh, the suspense.

In other news, I hosted The Grieving Room last night on Daily Kos for the first time. Every Monday someone writes an essay about grief and then sticks around to moderate the comments and chat forum that follows. My essay is entitled The Other Side of Grief and the discussion and comments that followed were really interesting to participate in. I still marvel at the way the Internet has opened up our world. I can hardly imagine what it will be like by the time my kid is a teenager.

Speaking of my kid, where is the little guy already??

Grief

Yesterday I made a bereavement follow-up to my old patient The Reverend's two caregivers. These two women had spent close to two years providing 24-hour care to him and I had gotten to know them well over the course of the year in which I visited him weekly.

The three of us met at his house yesterday, for lack of a better common meeting place, before moving on to a nearby restaurant for lunch. I hadn't been to that house since early November, the last day before he died. It's a pretty, old house on a tree-lined street in the typical Illinois suburbs, and I've missed going there. I've thought many times of simply taking a drive by it but, for some reason, I haven't.

Yesterday, as we waited for one of the caregivers, the other one and I went inside the house. She still has a key as she is helping maintain the house for the Reverend's extended family who lives out of state. It was like stepping back in time. Nothing in the house has changed. The Reverend's chair and radio still sit quietly in the gloom by the window. The pictures of his family still sit in their frames all around. The newspaper pile and the church bulletins still on the little table beside the chair.

I began to cry immediately, and unexpectedly. I've missed him, the Reverend. And I've missed those warm afternoons spent sitting in a chair pulled up to his, by the window, watching spring and summer then fall pass by in the trees outside.

It's funny how grief can live inside you like that. You can walk through your days, doing all the things you do, and then in one precise moment, spurred on by a memory or a dream or a smell or a room, this lake inside you opens up and you're reminded of your very own depths.

Twelve Years

Dear Mom,

It is January 24, 2009. You have been dead for 12 years. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been writing these letters all this time…12 years worth of letters telling you about the progression of my life since I last saw you.

Beside me lies a photo of you taken on April 29, 1978. You were 8 months pregnant with me. You look so beautiful in this photo; your stance proud and your smile luminescent.

As I write this, I am 5 months pregnant. I lied in bed this morning with Greg, both our hands on my belly, and felt the little kicking from within. I’ve thought of you so much through this process. I’ve wondered so much about your experience of pregnancy and I’ve sat, hunched over photo albums, peering at polaroids my father surely took of you throughout the nine months before you gave birth to me.

A lot has happened in the last year, mom. A lot that I would have loved to have you here for. Oh, I just had to get up for tissues. I’m already crying. Every single year I think I won’t cry when I write this letter…and every year I do.

I got engaged and married last year, mom. Two things I would have loved to have had you here for, more than anything. Although, I’m sure that when I give birth in June that will top them both, in terms of wishing you were here.

I couldn’t be happier to be married, mom. Greg is the most wonderful man I’ve ever met. Besides Dad. He’s so kind and caring and patient and he makes me feel complete in a way that I never expected. It’s just like you wrote to me all those years ago –

Find yourself and you’ll find your other self, you wrote. Give each other space and respect – there can be no tiny, nagging doubt. The Italians have a name for it – colpe di fulme – and it’s likened to being struck by lightening when you both meet, which I adore. Accept nothing else. Have babies which I can take care of. Please choose a man who adores you and would never hurt you.

And it was like that, mom. There was never any doubt, never any question. Falling in love with Greg was the easiest thing I’ve ever done in my life. In April of last year he got down on one knee and put a ring on my finger and asked me to marry him. It was your ring, mom. He took the stone from the beautiful engagement ring that Dad gave you and had it made into something special just for me. Every time I look at it, I’m reminded of you and Dad and the love that I come from.

We were married in July on Cape Cod. In the very church where you were married over 30 years ago. I’ve never felt so beautiful or happy in my life as I did on that day. Uncle David officiated the ceremony, just as he did for you and Dad, and Greg and I exchanged vows that we wrote ourselves. That afternoon we dined on lobsters and champagne in Pam’s backyard by the beach and then we all went swimming in the ocean. It couldn’t have been a more perfect day.

Afterwards we returned to our life in Chicago, our beautiful home on the river with the ducks and softly flowing water and cicadas ringing in the trees. And in September we conceived the baby that I’m carrying. I thought of you so much that month, wondering what it had been like for you and Dad in those first few weeks of learning that you were pregnant with me. It happened so fast for us, but we couldn’t be more excited.

I’m due in June, just a couple of weeks after my 31st birthday. I like thinking that you and I will have carried our babies through the same seasons. I look forward to the warmer months, to spring and then summer and the baby here, making three of us. If I haven’t already felt part of a family again, I know I will, more than ever, then.

But I miss you, mom. So much. I wish you were here with me through these life events. But I also know that you knew I would do all these things, that I would grow into the woman I am, that I would marry and have babies and be beautiful and happy.

I hope to be as good a mother as you were. To give my child the same fierce love and understanding that you never ceased to bestow on me. It’s a love I still feel today, and of that, there is no greater gift that a parent can give. Thank you.

Your only daughter,
Claire

On Death & Dying

I've been having a hard time at my job. Certain aspects of it have been getting to be too much for me.

I still enjoy the counseling. I enjoy visiting patients and families and I think I do good work with them. It's so meaningful and restorative to me to be able to help someone through such a challenging point in their life. I often reflect on when I, myself, was in a similar situation and how grateful I was for the people around me who stepped in to help see me through it. I sometimes think that is what life is about -- a series of interactions in which when we are strong, we help others and when we are not, they help us.

What I've been struggling with is constantly hearing about illness and disease. Every Thursday I spend two hours in an interdisciplinary team (IDT) meeting. I sit at a long boardroom table, my high heels crossed against the table leg, my case load binder open in front of me, paperwork and pens and sticky notes nudging into everyone's else's piles of the same. On my left is our social worker, on my right is one of our nurses. Across from me sits another nurse, sandwiched between the chaplain and the massage therapist. At the end of the table the two home health aides sit next to each other. At the head of the table our team doctor sits between our clinical director and office secretary.

And for two hours we discuss all of the patients we currently care for. We begin with all of those who died in the last week -- what their death was like, how the family is doing, when the funeral or memorial service will be and any psychosocial risks for the bereaved. After that, we discuss the new patients we have taken on in the last week -- their diagnosis, whether they are at home or in the hospital or in a nursing home, who is caring for them, what kind of help they might need, and what our team can do for them and their family as a whole. Finally, after that, we discuss all of our current patients -- any change in health status or caregiver needs, and who is visiting when.

Words and phrases like stage four colon cancer, mets (metastatic) to the bone, lung cancer, swelling in the brain, morphine, lung mets, albuterol, prostate cancer, bleed out, bed sores, mets to the ovaries, liver cancer, severe hip pain, hospital bed, brain cancer, terminal, alzheimers, dementia, breast cancer, stroke, cardiovascular disease, pancreatic cancer, aortic stenosis,  tumors, renal disease, COPD, failure to thrive, and on and on.

I can't stand these words. They make my belly go cold with fear. As I sit there for those two hours, hearing these words tossed around I literally feel those places in my body as they're said. My liver. My lungs. My heart. My brain.

I think about Greg and I think about my life and I think about how much I don't want to get sick ever. I think about how much I want to do with my time here and how much I want to have kids. And I can't help but think these things and sometimes I can't get these words and phrases out of my head. Literally, sometimes I wake up in the mornings with the word scopolamine in my head. (It's a kind of pain killer.)

And you know, I look around the room at the doctors and nurses and social workers and secretaries and although some of the nonclinical people like me will squirm at a particularly graphic description of someone's medical problem, for the most part, none of them seem to be at all haunted by these words.

I know that so much of my fear has to do with having lost both of my parents to cancer and having watched that disease ravage their bodies over the years, but I can't help wondering how no one else seems to be haunted by all this disease-talk like I am. I'm of the opinion that what we think about grows -- another reason I hate having these thoughts and words and illnesses in my head all the time. But then I think about oncologists who work closely with disease every day -- where do they put these things? How do they wake up in the morning without the word cancer on the forefront of their thoughts?

And I just keep wondering, is there a way for me to do this job without constantly ingesting it all like this??

Breathless

I've been breathlessly busy this week.

In some ways it's felt good--a far cry from 6 months ago--but I really have been hardly able to keep up with myself and it's a little disconcerting. Breathe, Claire, breath.

I spent all of last weekend facilitating a three-day hospice volunteer training workshop. I'd never taught a class before and was pretty nervous in the days leading up to it. But it went better than I could have imagined. And I guess who better to teach a class on death and dying, right?

But I was really quite proud of myself. I put so much work into planning it and I made it quite experiential -- drawing on my past experience doing group therapy back in LA -- and attempting to make sure that all of those attending the workshop were really accessing whatever grief they were bringing to the experience. I really had a great group, too.

The weekend was quite draining though and I guess I didn't realize quite how much I utilize my weekends -- how much we all do, I'm sure -- and this is probably the reason behind my breathless start to the week.

I'm seeing two patients today, have a ton of office work in between and then tonight I'm speaking at a friend's undergrad psych class. I'm still not quite sure what I'm supposed to talk about tonight -- I think just my education and career experience. I was nervous about this last week but after leading that workshop all weekend it doesn't seem like such a big deal.

On his way out the door to work just now Greg scolded me for my lazy blog title. "You can't call it Wednesday Morning! There are already like a thousand Wednesday Morning posts!" Bleh. I'm not good at titles.

I've gotten up at 6 every morning this week so far. That's only three days in a row but still. I've actually felt less tired at night than when I was sleeping later. I've been rereading my book manuscript and feeling really good about reworking it. I've got some ideas and plans that feel really right and it doesn't seem too daunting of a task -- challenging, sure -- but not intimidating.

Less than a month until my 30th birthday. I'm still feeling vaguely apprehensive and slightly ambivalent about it. Birthdays always make me miss my parents and turning 30 might sting a bit more than usual, I suspect.

Okay, running off to catch up with my morning now.

Oh, and Greg and I are launching our new site so soon. In the next few days, I think! We've been working really hard on it and I will of course post a link to it as soon as it's ready. And I'll still  be writing here, so don't worry.

And okay, okay. I changed the title.

This Work I Do

Greg and I have been watching a lot of Six Feet Under. Ever since a co-worker let him borrow the entire series set we've just been plowing through episodes. Last night we finished Season 2 and even watched the first episode of Season 3.

For those of you who don't know, Six Feet Under is about a family in Los Angeles who runs a funeral home. At the start of the series the father dies, thus the family, who not only witnesses the grief of others on a daily basis, is experiencing their own. And at the start of every episode someone dies -- not anyone from the usual cast -- but someone who's funeral will then take place during the episode.

Watching this show has made me feel so much better about the work I do. Or at least so much less alone in it. Usually, the first thing that most people say to me when they hear that I'm a grief counselor for hospice is, "Oh, wow. I could never do that. Isn't it depressing?"

It's not and I feel good about this work and I don't doubt any of that but all the same, it does feel like a very unusual job to have.

Hence, my enjoyment of Six Feet Under. It's been really normalizing for me to watch the two main characters -- two young, interesting guys living in Los Angeles -- dealing with all of their normal life things, yet also immersed in this strange world of the dead and grieving.

Just yesterday, talking on the phone with one of my high school friends, she asked me if it was depressing to do this work. It's really not, I told her. It can be sad, sure, I said. She had just finished telling me how she had done a week-long juice fast and how hard it was and how finally, at the end of it, she'd gone out to a nice restaurant with her boyfriend and how the food and the wine all tasted so good.

I compared my experience to hers, explaining how, after a day spent talking and thinking about and visiting families who are experiencing the death of one of their closest, my life seems that much brighter, that much more in color. Coming home each day from my job I can't help but feel such an intense gratitude to be here in this beautiful home with someone I love. And that's not depressing at all.

More than any other time in my life, I feel so present to my days, to my moments. Winding around the highway on the first real warm day in Chicago, the city at a distance, some old song on the radio, the window down and a warm breeze against my skin, I remember to breathe, to be here now.

Growing Up

My Aunt Pam and Uncle David are coming to visit this weekend -- they arrive tomorrow (well hopefully, if American doesn't cancel their flight).

I've been busy all week getting the house ready and planning out fun activities for their visit.

I've menu-planned all the breakfasts/lunches/dinners (re: poblano cheddar quiches, vegetable lasagna, blueberry, cream cheese-stuffed French toast, Cajun skewered shrimp with Fettucine Alfredo, the individual chocolate molten cakes) and picked out a couple of cute places to dine out.

We're going to see a play, we're going to the museum, we're going to the top of Greg's office building with the amazing views of Chicago, we're going to tour the Ebony Magazine office where Pam worked 40 years ago as one of only 3 white employees (thanks, Greg, for getting the ball rolling on that), we're having Greg's sister, niece and brother-in-law over for dinner, and I even scored last minute tickets to a taping of Gayle King's show in Oprah's studio.

I'd accomplished all this by the time Greg got home from work last night and, although I initially felt really good about the fun plans I made, by the time we got to the gym I felt heavy and sad and couldn't quite figure out why. All through our workout I stared off into space, lifting the weights Greg handed me mechanically and thinking about how long it would be before I could just go to bed.

Finally, walking to the car, I tried to talk about how I was feeling, at first not really knowing why I felt so sad, but then as the tears started to stream down my cheeks, the words came out with them: I wish it were my parents coming to visit this weekend. Greg was sweet and let me cry. He asked me if we'd be doing different things and I tried to imagine what it would be like if my parents were coming to visit me...and I couldn't. I just couldn't really imagine it.

The last time my mother visited me I was 18. It was my freshman semester of college and parent's weekend. She stayed in a hotel off campus and I showed her around the dorms and the dining hall...all those sweet, young things you do at that age. I can hardly imagine what it would be like to actually have her come to visit me now, to stay in our guest room, to meet Greg, to sit at our dining room table and eat a meal that I've cooked myself. I can hardly imagine.

And my Dad...the last time he visited me was for my 20th birthday in New York. He slowly made his way up to my tiny, fourth floor walk-up apartment and then we went to Peter Luger for dinner. I wore a pale lavender dress. It was Spring in New York.

All of this was easier when I was alone. Now that I'm creating this life and home with Greg I wish so much that they could be here, that they could meet this wonderful man I've fallen in love with, and see me in my life as the woman I've become.

And all of that said, I'm so grateful to have Pam & David in my life. They are both wonderful and love me so much and it will be so nice to have them here in our home. And while I was writing this post, Pam emailed to say that their flight hasn't been canceled tomorrow...so here's to a lovely weekend to come.