The better, the good, and the somewhat less than optimal

First off, my biopsy came back just fine. For this news I should be doing a dance and feeling all sorts of happy, but instead I’m kinda like, “meh.” I’m that wore out.

The surgery itself went fine, except that it took four determined sticks to get an IV into me. I’m very grateful for the numbing medicine the inject beforehand, but really there’s not much that can take away the sensation of an inanimate object rubbing against the small bones in your hand. My hand is now an ugly mottled yellow/blue. But whatever they gave me to take away my anxiety also took away my consciousness. Usually they try to keep you alert enough to help them out in the surgery by scooching onto the operating table, but I don’t remember anything. I did dream something fairly peculiar, of lying under those big surgery lamps, watching nurses tote around crocheted afghans and doilies. Then I felt myself wash up on the shores of consciousness with an oxygen canula poking my nose and a muddled Winnie-the-Pooh feeling about me. Although I had to be perky enough to get into our car, I don’t really recall anything else about the day, despite the fact that I was out of surgery and on my way by noon. They aren’t kidding when they say that anaesthesiologists put some sort of amnesiac in your tank. But by the next day I was alert enough to go with Dear Husband to JCP and buy a new comforter set, which was very…comforting.

Speaking of Dear Husband, we recently celebrated our wedding anniversary. Dear Husband has a knack for thinking up thoughtful, creative gifts. Did anyone see that Modern Family episode in which Clair racks her brain to come up with a completely lame present after her husband presents her with a sweet and original series of gifts? Well, that’s me all over. I haven’t yet brought home the guitarist from Spandau Ballet, but it’s the sort of desperate leap I might take.

Dear Husband vanished after a number of mysterious trips, letting me know that a taxi would arrive to take me to my secret destination. The taxi ride was something of an event unto itself, as I found myself with the Chattiest Taxi Drive in History. He told me (and he told me quite a lot in the mere 15 minutes he transported me) that he spent part of every month driving in New York City. I was rather surprised that a New Yorker had not yet murdered him just to get him to shut up. New Yorkers aren’t all that chatty. He also managed to get me to tell him about our two girls (“Maybe you could try for a boy tonight.” – I kid you not, he actually said that) and my 4 brothers and their marital status. Of the unmarried one he said, “Are you sure he isn’t gay?” “I see the place!” I chirped, as we nearly passed by a house I recognized. Dear Husband had arranged for a romantic meal at our friend’s house (she happens to be a caterer). She made the side dishes and dessert, Dear Husband made the main dish – lamb chops in balsamic glaze. The dining room was set with the good china (not our good china, since we don’t have any, but my friend’s good china) and candles. There was a vase of pink roses and pink and lavender balloons. Dear Husband also had his laptop set up, as he had created a special slideshow for us. My friend and her husband vanished to a movie and we had the place to ourselves. The best part of the evening, better even than the lamp chop and pencil-thin asparagus, was the fact that Dear Husband and I got each other the exact same greeting card. It doesn’t sound so funny put like that, but we couldn’t stop laughing. Dear Husband had also devised a game for us. On the table was a treasure chest with a giant ruby-red gemstone nestled among smaller gems (DramaQueen helped with this) and chocolate coins, and little slips of paper. We took turns drawing the slips and answering the questions printed on them. I ate a lot of chocolate coins.

What did I get Dear Husband? Some gluten-free licorice. Which he had asked for. See? – lame. I added an iTunes card to show that I am capable of some independent thought. Then I ate some more chocolate coins.

This Labor Day weekend (while recovering from that operation), we had a cookout with some neighbors and friends. This involved a lot of cleaning. Many items are now missing, because they were put away, and they are not accustomed to being put away. I would like to know why there is always at least one basket of stuff that refuses to yield to any organizational scheme whatsoever. This is where various cords and mysterious hardware items end up, along with papers that seem to need something but we aren’t sure what, and anyway we don’t have a filing system because we still haven’t cleared out that old one stuffed with items from 2002. On the plus side, somehow or other I located both the missing wheels off the bottom dishwasher rack. Until then I would locate one and think, “Okay, now I know where that one is when the other one shows up.” And so it went for months for at least 2 years. I cannot tell you the sense of vindication and triumph I felt reattaching those two wheels. “Look!” I crowed, demonstrating the ability to close the dishwasher door without having to kick the bottom rack into place. Dear Husband, I think, is still not sure what I was talking about or how our life has changed for the better.

Besides finding lost things and losing things we haven’t yet noticed are now lost, I discovered that my keepsake box is missing. That’s where I keep old letters from my mom and hand-made cards from the girls. It used to be under the bed. At least that’s where it was 3 years ago when we lived in an apartment. It is now either still in an unpacked box in the garage (unlikely) or was put in the wrong place when we unpacked. The only right place in under our bed, because the strain of remembering it in any other place is an unnecessary burden.

Back to Labor Day weekend. I have this observation: If you plunk down 100+ dollars on an inflatable bouncy party house, and the kids spend all morning nagging you about when it will arrive, when it is finally set up all the children will mysteriously rediscover a board game they haven’t played in months. I crawled into the bouncy house at one point, until it occurred to me that I shouldn’t be bouncing a mere 3 days after surgery. So I lay down. Then the girls had the idea to have a sleepover at someone else’s house, which meant Dear Husband and I could go out for mojitos (for me) and dirty martinis (for him). I really wanted to go to Toys R Us, which struck me as a really great destination after a couple of mojitos, but dear Husband was not convinced. He did share his olives, though.

I’m sure it won’t surprise anyone that I’m not particularly excited to be back at work. I’m feeling sludgy. I also feel as if every month contains at least 4 doctor appointments (in addition to the doctor appointments I have to put off or reschedule to make room for the newer, more pressing doctor appointments) plus at least one school event I can’t ignore (a school skate night on a Thursday? Really?). My dad’s things are still to be dealt with sometime in the future. A thread of sadness winds its way through most days. There are two school fundraisers and two picture days (prepaid – the jerks), then Halloween costumes, and we haven’t even started saving for Christmas. I have an intense craving to stay at home and putter about, like, permanently.

See how far afield I’ve wandered? I’m tired and melancholy and uncomfortable.

The Silver Cord

Then man goes to his eternal home
and mourners go about the streets.
Remember him—before the silver cord is severed,
or the golden bowl is broken;
before the pitcher is shattered at the spring,
or the wheel broken at the well,
and the dust returns to the ground it came from,
and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
 - Ecclesiastes 12: 5-7

A long time ago Dad had emailed me a lot of stories from his childhood. Dear Husband bound them in a booklet and we put out copies for folks to take. Turned out to be very popular. Even the funeral director read it. Of course, he’s probably somehow related to us. It’s one of those sorts of places. You can’t fling a cat without hitting some kinfolk. I was never too into my kin, so I was pretty much clueless about family members and how they are related to each other. I always look a bit vague at family events.

Why at a funeral do people feel the need to comment favorably on the visage of a dead embalmed person? The man in the coffin bore only the faintest resemblance to my dad. He looked a bit like my grandfather, actually, if my grandfather had been worked up for Madame Toussaud’s. At least no one said anything about him looking peaceful. There were two pastors, one from the church he went to with his current wife and one he attended with my mom. You can’t always depend on pastors to forgo an altar call, even at a funeral, so I thought they restrained themselves nicely.

As an aside, my brother told me that just before my dad went on the respirator, he took off his mask (keep in mind that he was struggling to breathe, so he thought what he was about to say was of some importance) and said, “Larry, don’t ever get mixed up in the Church of Christ. They’re a bunch of nuts, and they’re all bipolar.” That was so completely my Dad. I can hear his voice saying it. He had very little tolerance for churches that white-knuckle their doctrines. The Church of Christ doesn’t allow instruments to be played in church. My dad thought that was the stupidest thing ever. I’m not sure what else he objected to. I’m not that familiar with the denomination, but this particular church seemed to focus on rules and doctrine rather than Grace, and that probably affronted my Baptist leaning dad. So Dad wasn’t particularly fond of his second wife’s choice of church, which is why we called in his former pastor to share the funeral service.

Dad had a military send off. There was a military funeral. Dad was in the Navy, the Army, the Navy and Army reserves and the National Guard reserves. Turns out he was the youngest Chief Petty Officer in the Navy during WWII. Didn’t know that. He was retired by the time I was born, so I didn’t know much about his military career. After hearing relatives talk about it last week, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out he was a Storm Trooper. There was a 21 gun salute – or something like – and two vets to fold the flag and one whippersnapper to play Taps. This being the rural South, the officers looked ramshackle and unwell, as if they might spend their spare time cooking meth, and one was shaking so much I was seriously worried that the flag would slip from his hands. His partner appeared equally concerned and seemed to telegraph instruction through some secret eye communication. But the shaky man was very careful and meticulous, and we all sat their mentally encouraging him, “You can do it! Just a bit more.” The whole time – a very quiet, reverent stretch of time I might add - Firecracker kept asking in a loud whisper, “Mom, why is he shaking?”

There were a lot of people at the funeral because dad loved to socialize. He didn’t get to do that so much with my social-phobic mom, so I think he particularly enjoyed getting out and meeting people in his later years. And although he didn’t much care for the church, he made friends there. He was that sort of guy – affable and good-humored. Almost every day he and his wife went out to eat at a particular diner, and everyone knew them, and everyone knew they could find him there if they wanted a chat.

This being a Southern funeral, the church ladies laid out enough food to send us all into a diabetic coma. And, this being a Southern funeral, they wrapped up the copious leftovers and sent them home with our family, where they were stuffed into no less than two refrigerators. Grief never seems to prevent anyone from eating in the South, and you haven’t properly showed someone you care without a casserole or pie in hand.

One thing brought home to me during this sad event was the utter disparity in my and my brother’s upbringings. They were close in age and ran about as a pack. The youngest is 16 years older than me, so I grew up pretty much as an only child, my brothers having all gone off to college and their adult lives. The stories they told abut their childhood adventures made me wonder how they survived. They also had a completely different experience living with my father. He and I had a troubled relationship that grew out of the frequent and often virulent fighting between my parents. I saw behavior that I loathed in both of them, but ultimately I found my mother more sympathetic than my father. It wasn’t until my mom’s last few years that I began to appreciate his good qualities, such as loyalty, integrity, and a sly sense of humor. My brothers never experienced that anger toward my dad, or my mom for that matter, despite the fact that she had to be institutionalized twice and they witnessed her more extreme expressions of mental illness. Maybe it’s because my brothers had each other. Maybe that’s why they roamed around where they were unsupervised and pulled pranks and got up to mischief. It’s not that they emerged undamaged – the legacy of dysfunction is quite evident – but they never seemed to hold it against my parents. And, after all, they grew up in the 40s and 50s when there were different expectations for parent-child relationships. My parents were strict with them but also hands off because they were boys, whereas they were beyond lenient with me but were also more protective.

Now I have lost both my parents. It makes me feel unanchored. That little corner of Alabama on Miracle Dr is now just a building full of stuff, its contents to be distributed among us, the center gone. As Dear Husband said, people live on through the stories you tell. I often think that may be the only afterlife there is.

Need to Get Away

I haven’t felt much like blogging because:

1. My dad is in the hospital. He’s been there for weeks, battling pneumonia that just won’t go away. He’s on oxygen and forbidden from moving around (he doesn’t have enough breath for any exertion at all). We went to visit him last weekend. He was happy to see the girls, of course, but he slept a lot and the mask made communication nearly impossible.
2. Meanwhile, we are to go on vacation this Saturday for a week. I’m worried that he will take a turn for the worst while I’m away. Or before, for that matter. The girls have been looking forward to this for months. Last year I had to abort a trip to LA because my nephew died. Dear Husband and the girls will go without me, and that will be a great disappointment to them. And of course I want a vacation, too. But I want to be there if my dad needs me.
3. I have to have an excisional biopsy. What the stereotactic biopsy revealed is benign, but it can’t be left and watched because it will inevitably transform into cancerous cells. So, another excisional biopsy it is. And there’s always the possibility that the tissue recovered in this will show ductal carcinoma, in which case I will have to seriously consider another mastectomy. Given my history I don’t think I would feel safe with a lumpectomy or something less radical. Sigh. In any case, I will be revisiting tomoxifen. The oncologist wasn’t all that keen on it, because it offers either no or slim benefits for ductal carcinoma (studies are mixed), which has a low recurrence. But if it does recur… Double sigh. On the positive, I guess I would have a matching and gravity resistant set.
4. Summer. I hate living in a sauna. I loathe being outdoors for even a few minutes while the hot wet blanket of air closes around me. I hate the sticky vegetation and persistent wasps. I hate garbage ripening in the heat. I hate the sickly smell of cut grass. I hate climbing into my car and gasping while I wait for the air conditioner to kick in. Summer in Georgia is utterly disgusting.

So I’m a bit draggy these days. Did I mention that school starts August 9? Preparations for that are breathing down my neck.

I really want that vacation, even though vacationing with kids is more like engaging in a strategic exercise than actually relaxing.