Month: August 2016

I have noted before that Judy is our “books-on-tape,” the audio presentation of books we think we would like to read together and discuss. These discussions are often on the lanai with a glass of wine. It is one of the perks of our retirement.

We are currently reading Unforgettable, by Scott Simon. Simon has been a favorite NPR host for years, so I was inclined to buy his book anyway. The fact that it details the time he spent with his mother at the hospital in the few days before her death made it a natural for us to read, given Mom’s being in hospice care.

Simon uses tweets to begin and end chapters. An only child, he has collected memories of their lives together, she a single mom with a still-around dad, a drunk who was once a popular comic in clubs around Chicago. She had used her skills and good looks to cobble together the money to keep a roof over their heads. In their common experience of relative deprivation, a strong and loving bond between mother and son flourished.

My Mom was not a single mom, and I have two siblings. My dad provided adequately for us even though ministers in his denomination in those days seemed to be bound by an unspoken vow of poverty. Mom was home every morning when we left for school and when we came back each afternoon. In our common experience of relative security, insofar as 1950s families enjoyed such, a strong and loving bond between my mother and her sons and daughter flourished.

Simon tells stories, of entertainments enjoyed with his mom, of special meals, of contact with his mom’s family. Patricia’s efforts to provide for herself and Scott produced an array of gentleman friends, many colorful characters, some even generous. In the course of his time with her in ICU before she died, there were triggers to memories, and these memories almost always led to their laughing loudly together. The hospital staff took note of their levity in the midst of her end-of-life experience.

My Mom’s confinement to bed since February has meant that our times together often depended upon sharing memories. She took me, for example, to a movie in Seattle when I was about 7. We took the bus downtown to what might have been my first time in an indoor theater. We saw “Run Silent, Run Deep,” a war story about submarines. She remembered going to the movies but not the movie. Moms do things for sons that might not be on their list of must-dos.

Another time we saw June Allyson in “The Glenn Miller Story.” I had a crush on June, a blue-eyed blonde, like Mom. Whenever either of us heard the song “Little Brown Jug,” we remembered the Glenn Miller movie.

The laughter Simon writes about was the same as the laughter folks have associated with Mom. Her caregivers say that she cheers them up with her attitude. She was proud of her attitude. Her hospice nurse says that she has always left Mom’s house happier than when she came. Laughter was always a hallmark of our family, led by Mom.

At one point in those ICU hours, Patricia asked to see a favorite priest. Scott called him, and he came to visit. Patricia and Scott were not regulars at their parish but when the priest was with them in the room, they laughed and told stories, and even got in a prayer together.

Mom was a regular at her church until she was bedridden. Not being able to attend church on Sunday was a final straw for Mom as her world shrank. The first loss was when her neuropathy rendered her unable to use the needles to make her Bears by Ruth. She made teddy bears that ministers at her church took with them on hospital and in-home calls. Countless members of the church have or had one of her bears, and she even sent dozens with a Methodist mission to Vladivostok. The church recognized her “bear ministry” one Sunday with a plaque.

Then she was unable to get out of her pool. Swimming ten laps a day through her 93^rd year (provided the water temperature was within the acceptable range) was a great form of exercise and also a source of pride. But one day her knees did not allow her to climb the pool stairs and her upper body strength had waned. She could get into the pool but not out. We joked that she should get in and call 911 when ready to get out, once.

Not to go to church was to be cut off from her home away from home. Foothills United Methodist Church has sustained a climate of openness and acceptance through changes of ministers and the departure of a few folks who did not understand the central point of the Christian faith, love.

That climate was obvious this last week. The preacher was back from his son’s wedding in Norway, and the new Minister of Music and his wife, a Chinese Professor of Music at a university in Dalien (and bronze medalist in an all-China voice competition) were there to perform outstanding music. The Associate Pastor used various colors of M&Ms to illustrate to the children that, despite the coating, we are all the same inside. Mom would have loved all this.

Then the minister used a story from Luke to illustrate the centrality of love to the Christian faith. He proclaimed forcefully that, if you don’t see that in the teachings of Jesus, you simply miss the point. (Mom would have looked over at me and blinked her eyes in agreement.) To underscore his point, the preacher introduced us, first with a video and then in person, to the family of a transgender child who belong to the church. The congregation gave them a standing ovation for their courage in facing their challenge.

Mom was all about love, of her family and friends and also of those who could be unlovable.

That’s Mom’s church, her family apart from her blood relatives. To be cut off from that family was heart-breaking.

This was the Sunday her death was announced in the church bulletin. We could not have scripted a better hour of worship and celebration for the Sunday her death was noted by her church family.

We will celebrate her 96^th birthday one week early on October 22 and tell some more stories. We will invite owners to bring their Bears by Ruth. We will laugh a lot.

One final note: In ICU, Simon and Patricia hummed a few bars together of Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable.” When I got to Mom’s, about three hours after she died, her CD player was still playing softly the quartet of discs that was the backdrop for Mom every day in her home. The song playing? “Unforgettable.”

I should say so!

Daniel E. White

August 23, 2016

On a recent trip to San Diego, we met up with one set of friends we had not seen in decades and another with whom we had re-established contact after our 50^th high school reunion a couple of years ago. In each conversation, one or more of us commented that we did not feel the age indicated by our driver’s licenses but that various aches and pains reminded us that things, physically, were beginning to fall apart.

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” two phrases from the poem, The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats. The poem has a specific historical context and reflects Yeats’ gloominess over the state of the world. But, since reading the poem in college, these phrases have been worms, persistent residents in the recesses of my mind. As I age, they come into my consciousness more frequently, and not just in reference to my physical condition.

People of a Certain Age, you and I have lived long enough to see many “things fall apart,” and many “centers” that did not hold. Yeats’ lines are a poetic way to say “the only constant in life is change.” We have lived long enough to recognize our own reactions to this dynamism.

How well do you and I cope with change, things falling apart?

One of my friends laughed at herself in San Diego, wondering why she had fretted so much in her life over things that did not seem so important to her now. She had changed. So had the comparative seriousness of the things she had worried about.

You and I grew up in an era with fallout shelters in back yards, when there were no graphic sex scenes in mainstream movies, when most Americans attended church on Sunday. What changed? Besides us? What was falling apart?

That was also an era when women were expected to stay home and raise the kids, homosexuality was in the closet, and non-whites were just beginning to gain traction in their efforts to gain equal rights before the law. What changed? Besides us? What was falling apart?

Much has been written about our living in an Age of Anxiety, where once-established norms are less evident than before. Mistakenly, we think our age of anxiety is unique, usually because we have no sense of history.

Lest you think we are unique, consider this: before the Gutenberg Press, the Roman Catholic Church held a monopoly on Truth because the church controlled who could read what. Once the common man could read, and read more than the Bible… That “center” certainly did not hold. (Anyone thinking internet just now?)

Add into that disruption Martin Luther and other Protestant reformers and voila! You have decades of Catholics and Protestants all over Europe killing each other. A lot of people lived in fear because of what they believed. Things fell apart in a big way. That was an Age of Anxiety for sure!

In response to one of my recent musings, a friend wrote about the scientific assertion that the atoms in our bodies are now integrated into you and me but once were part of something else. Someday those atoms will be part of something else again. This thought is entirely consistent with another scientific assertion that matter is constant; nothing is ever lost or gained.

And, though your Chemistry class was long ago, do you remember entropy?

Years ago, Judy and I visited the home of James Hubbell, the renowned artist. I recall Jim getting very excited about a pile of bricks from a collapsed building. “All of those bricks,” he exclaimed, “just ready to be used again for something else.”

I told him that I admired his optimism. I still do. Jim’s attitude made things falling apart an opportunity.

If you know someone who is troubled by the noises of our daily lives that indicate things are falling apart, try these observations on him.

1) Love is not a thing. Its manifestations, like kindness and generosity of spirit, might dip in and out of our lives, but an act of kindness will forever remain so, a generous spirit will always be welcomed. Love outlasts lives.

2) Good news items outnumber bad ones. We just don’t hear about them because they are so numerous. Their great number might be what leads to bad being news. That, and the fact that bad news sells.

3) Yeats did not end his poem without hope. He wonders, “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born” after “20 centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.”

4) Perspective helps. More than one act of terrorism occurred every week in the U.S.—in the 1960s! There were over 1000 bombings in the U.S. each year from 1972-74. Remember when we worried about planes being hijacked in the 1970s? Many saw those facts as evidence of things falling apart during those decades? We’re still here.

When centers fall apart, newness emerges. We call this hope.

If our bodies can just fall apart more slowly, maybe we will live to see the new, and it will be good. Meanwhile, we have love and kindness and the countless daily acts of generosity of spirit to hold onto.

Daniel E. White

August 8, 2016