Life in Chicago

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Hi!

My new website can be found at www.clairebidwellsmith.com and you'll be able to follow along on my new blog by clicking the link. This page should start forwarding right there sooner than later.

See you over there!

The End of Life in Chicago

Four years ago I made a decision that completely changed my life. I was on Cape Cod for my grandmother's funeral and instead of flying home to Los Angeles afterwards like I was supposed to, I changed my flight on a whim so that I could stop in Chicago and meet a guy named Greg Boose.

Greg and I had been emailing and talking on the phone for a couple of months, ever since we both started writing for TNB. He'd been pushing for us to meet in person but I'd turned him down over and over. Something in me shifted that weekend though. I vividly remember lying in the hammock in my aunt's backyard on Cape Cod and thinking about my life and about all the wonderful things that had come into it.

It finally dawned on me that Greg was surely one of those wonderful things and that, before it was too late, perhaps I should honor that.

It was Memorial Day weekend and beachgoers drifted past me on their way to the beach. I took out my cell phone and texted this guy Greg that I didn't really know.

"What if I change my flight and stop in Chicago tomorrow?"

Hardly a minute went by before my phone beeped with his response.

"Yes. Please. Do it."

The next morning I got on a flight to a city I'd never been to and a man I'd never met.

When I landed at O'Hare I texted him.

"Just landed," I said.

"I'm in baggage claim," he replied.

"I'm nervous," I said.

"You'll be fine," he wrote back.

And I was. Better than fine, in fact. The moment I met Greg at the JetBlue baggage claim at O'Hare airport I knew I would marry him.

Four years later I am sitting in the empty living room of our first shared home on the eve before we move and it feels like a thousand years, not just four, have passed.

We are about to embark on a new adventure. Me, Greg and our beautiful daughter Veronica.

We have four solid years of being us, four years of love and light and so many friends. There have been parties galore, blizzards, fancy restaurant openings, runs by the lake and quiet afternoons on the deck listening to the ducks. Four years of happiness and warmth and a love that has filled in all the dark places I thought I would never be free of.

Chicago, you will always be a part of my heart.

California, I'm coming home. And bringing a couple of people with me.

This is the last post on my Life in Chicago blog, but don't worry -- a whole new chapter is about to begin.

 

I Have a Book Cover!

At last, I have a book cover!

It came in from my editor today. I'm still taking it in but it's growing on me swiftly. It's definitely not what I was expecting, but I think it's interesting and edgy and striking, all things I was hoping for.

 

The photo is actually one I took of myself when I was nineteen. My mother had been dead for a few months and I was in San Francisco in a youth hostel, feeling more alone than I ever had in my life. It was this kind of intense moment where I realized that I was really on my own and was going to have to take care of myself. I decided to document the moment, never once thinking that it would become the cover of my first book 14 years later.

On Having Conversations with my Daughter

(Warning: If you don't have kids this post might make you roll your eyes.)

Veronica is exploding with language all the time these days, but yesterday it seeemed like she was saying something new every half hour.

Case in point: we were driving over to Sandy & Sarah's house for one last supper all together (Sarah made her amazing pizzas!) and I was complaining about something to Greg in the front seat. Greg replied, "You're just not going to be happy today, are you?"

I think I replied something to the effect of, "Not until I have a drink," at which point Vera piped up from the backseat.

"You're not happy, mama?"

"Not right now, kitten," I said.

Then she asked something she never has: "What's wrong?"

Greg and I both laughed and I replied, "I'm just stressed."

She didn't seem to like that answer though because she came back with a surprising and heartfelt one of her own. "You're sad because you miss your friends?"

How sweet is that?

But as if that wasn't enough to impress us, a half hour after arriving Sandy turned to Veronica and said, "Veronica, where are you moving?"

She promptly replied, "I'm moving to California."

Although we've been talking to her lots about the move, we had no idea that she had actually retained it. I know some of you are on your third eye roll by now, but seriously, when you go from having a kid that can say a few words at a time, to suddenly answering specific questions and posing emotional scenarios, it's pretty amazing.

Anyway, I asked her the same question this morning and recorded the answer. Please ignore the appalling cat scratch on her face. It's getting better every day and we're doing all we can to make sure it GOES AWAY.

Oh, you thought that was it? Nope. Right as we were leaving I was holding Veronica and I said, "Say goodnight to Sandy," and she turned to him and said, "Goodnight Sandy. Thanks for dinner."

Diving In

My social calendar is taking this weird track right now where I'm suddenly penning down more and more LA plans at the same time that the Chicago plans are ticking off towards their final one. Life in LA is truly beginning to materialize.

We found out this week that we are going to be the new LA editors for BlackBook, which is really exciting because we were reluctant to give up our Chicago post. For the last three years we've been writing about all the new bars, restaurants and hotels that have opened and it's been a great deal of fun. Turns out our first assignment in LA is going to be covering the LA film festival and yesterday we signed up to see a bunch of documentaries, attend the gala opening of Green Lantern and go to a "Conversation with James Franco." All in our first few weeks back.

Talk about diving in, huh?

The last time I moved to LA I was twenty-four and had spent the last four years living in New York. I didn't know anything about Los Angeles but I got a job right away at a really fancy entertainment magazine and ended up being thrown right into the Hollywood scene. It was wildly fun and confusing. I feel like Greg is about to get the same kind of introduction, but with less reprimanding from his boss.

I almost think Greg should start his own blog, all about what it's like to live your whole life in the midwest and move to LA at age 32. I'd read that, wouldn't you? Eh, nevermind. It's never going to happen. I'll have to tell you all about how he's doing. Right now he's worried about what to wear to the gala. (So am I.)

We leave in less than a week and it really feels like it. I've been waking up feeling panicked, forcing myself to pack a bunch of boxes and then by midday my steam runs out and I feel overwhelmed and get nothing else done.

I'm also getting emotional. I'm going to be a wreck tomorrow when we have to say goodbye to our nanny. She's been with Vera since she was 2 months old and she's truly become a part of our family. She babysat for us last night and cried the whole time I drove her home. I keep trying to convince her to move to LA, and I think she's considering it.

In some ways it doesn't seem real. I can't imagine not living in this apartment anymore, even though it looks nothing like it once did. When I drove home last night and found myself looking for raccoons in the garbage cans as I pulled into the garage, I couldn't believe that I won't be doing that much longer. Someone else will.

But then I thought about those last days in my old apartment in Venice and how sad I was to be leaving it. In an instant though, I was able to conjure up so many things about that old apartment -- the little latch at the bottom of the gate and the way it used to stick, the feel of the ocean air through the screens and the light in the kitchen, and I realized that just like everywhere else I've lived, this Chicago home will always be a part of me.

Saying Farewell to Chicago

Yesterday I turned 33 and our Chicago friends threw us the most fantastic party. They asked to hold it here at our house, on our deck, for one last night at the Boose household, but they provided everything (tacos from Big Star! margaritas! cake!) and made sure we had nothing to do but enjoy ourselves.

It was magical.

See all the photos here.

Please excuse sporadic posting over the next week. We are moving in 8 days!! I'm launching my new website on June 1 and will have so much to write about as my big, new adventure begins to unfold. Stay tuned!

Look Familiar?

This is a photo of me and my mom taken around 1980. I haven't come across another photo in which Vera and I share such a strong resemblance. She even said it was a picture of her.

 

On Turning 33

My birthday is this week. I'm turning 33.

My birthday this year happens to coincide with the "End of Days." It's been weird to hear my birth date mentioned so much in the news this last month. I wonder what all those people are going to do when the world doesn't end at 6pm on Saturday. Personally, I'm going to be at my very own going-away party drinking champagne and celebrating the end of my life in Chicago.

In some ways, I guess it will be an end of days for me. The start of an entirely new life. For a while now, I've been looking forward to age 33, for a few reasons. It will be the age I am when my first book comes out and also the year I moved back to California with my little family. I know it will be a year I look back on throughout my life.

However, I always get a little squirrely about birthdays. It's always felt a little strange to celebrate the occasion of my birth, without the two people responsible for it. I never fully understood why I felt so weird about it until we celebrated Vera's birthday last year. That day was just as monumentous for me as it will one day be for her.

These days though, I feel the presence of my parents in my life more than ever, and so I vow that on Saturday while some people are hunkering down and waiting for their demise or salvation or whatever, I'm going to be reveling in my existence, and hopefully drinking something sparkly.

On Finishing My Tenure With Hospice, After Almost 4 Years

The biggest difference between my parent's deaths was the circumstances surrounding them.

My mother died in a hospital in D.C. at 3 in the morning. Her sister was with her, but my father and I were not. She had been in that hospital for 6 weeks, undergoing experimental surgeries for "last hope" patients. Two months before that her regular oncologists in Atlanta told her that there was nothing more they could do for her. They suggested that she go home, that we, as a family, employ hospice. Instead of listening to them, my mother urged my father to find something more, anything more.

We all said that she was fighting, but when I look back it seems more like she was evading. When I think about the last two months of her life, I'm always saddened by how peaceful she wasn't. None of us were. The surgeries she endured, the treatments she tried, they simply destroyed her body further, they broke us all down really. Even if she had lived, it wouldn't have been the kind of life that anyone would want.

And because she kept pushing, because we all kept pushing, none of us ever fully accepted that she was dying. We never really said goodbye.

I was in New Jersey, on my way to her, when she died.

Seven years later when my father was dying, he wanted to do it a different way. I did too. Much like my mother, he reached the end of his medical rope after months of radiation and lengthy hospital stays. At the final meeting with his doctors, when the topic of hospice was broached, they tried to hard to convince us that my father would be best served in a nursing home during his remaining time. My father said nothing; he knew it was ultimately up to me, his 25-year old daughter, to make that decision. I would be the one caring for him.

I'm taking him home, I told the doctors, and I watched tears of relief run down my father's cheeks. I also saw the social worker shake her head with doubt. I knew that whatever misgivings she had about me taking care of my dying father were likely right, but I was determined to give him the death he wanted.

A few days after we got home, a hospice nurse came to the house to do a presentation. She explained the philosophy behind hospice -- one that works to ensure that a patient's remaining days are as comfortable and pain-free as possible, and one that works hard to ensure that the whole family is cared for through the process -- and my father and I quietly listened to her talk. After she was gone I cried into a pillow in my room so my dad wouldn't hear me. He'd signed all the paperwork she brought and I knew that there was no going back.

In the coming days though, my tears about hospice became ones of gratitude, instead of fear or sadness. That social worker with her disapproving head shake had been right. Caring for my dying father by myself was one of the hardest things I'd ever done. There were dentures to brush, diapers to change, meals to make, 3AM wake-ups to deal with, and medication schedules to adhere to. It was nearly impossible for me to take care of it all.

There is absolutely no way that I could have done it without the hospice team. Nurses came on a regular basis and helped me to make sure that my father was pain-free. CNAs came to bathe my dad and change his catheter and his bedsheets. A social worker came, this one not so scornful, and helped make funeral arrangements. Volunteers came so that I could leave the house for an hour or two at a time, and throughout the entire experience, my father and I both felt cared for and watched over.

He died in his bedroom at 7 in the evening on a Tuesday. I was holding his hand.

All this to say that three days ago I concluded my job as bereavement counselor and volunteer coordinator for Advocate Hospice North in Park Ridge. When I moved to Chicago four years ago, I was fresh out of grad school and could have taken a thousand different routes with my degree. I still remember the night, up late in my first Chicago apartment, when I thought about the hospice team that had cared for my father. I thought, I could do that. 

A simple google search and suddenly I was filling out an application. A week later I had an interview, and by December I had a job. I went on to work for Advocate for three and half years. I had two roles -- as the bereavement counselor who followed up with families after the death of the patient, and also as the volunteer coordinator who recruited and trained volunteers and then matched them with families in need.

I met dozens of people who were trying to make the same difficult decisions for their loved ones that my father and I made for each other. I held the hand of patient after patient, counseled countless family members and worked with a team of doctors, nurses and social workers every week to ensure that each family experienced the most peaceful death possible.

I think I'll be processing the experience of this job for a long, long time. It absolutely changed my life, in the most meaningful way possible. I'm so incredibly grateful for everything that hospice gave me, and for everything I gave to it.