Category: family

SoCS: commencement

An open prompt! Thanks, Linda! I don’t know that I could have dealt with anything too exotic…

I am writing this on Friday afternoon and scheduling it because tomorrow is spoken for.

We will be spending the day in Syracuse, attending the festivities for our daughter T’s commencement from SUNY-ESF, which is short for State University of New York – Environmental Science and Forestry. She will be receiving an MPS degree in Conservation Biology.  (MPS stands for Master’s of Professional Studies.)  Her program was multidisciplinary and geared toward doing conservation/restoration work in the field, rather than doing lab research.

She also concentrated her work with plants. She loves to root out invasive species and help  and/or re-establish native ones. She can wax poetic about it! She has had the opportunity to do three internships and we are hoping that an appropriate permanent position will appear.

Tomorrow, there will be a reception with her department in the morning. Commencement is in the afternoon, followed by a reception, followed by dinner back in her neighborhood.

We are so happy for her and as proud as can be!
*****
Linda gifted us with an open prompt this week: start the post with a two-letter word. We could also end with a two-letter word for extra fun. Come join us! Find out how here:  https://lindaghill.com/2016/05/13/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-may-1416/

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the original Mother’s Day

Yesterday, for Stream of Consciousness Saturday, I posted about personal Mother’s Day.

Today, I want to post about the original meaning of celebrating Mother’s Day.

It was actually Mothers’ Day for Peace and was not about personal sentiment, but about global peacemaking.

Julia Ward Howe wrote the original proclamation in 1870:

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts,
whether our baptism be that of water or of fears!

Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by
irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking
with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be
taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach
them of charity, mercy and patience.

We women of one country will be too tender of those of another
country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From
the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says “Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance
of justice.”

Blood does not wipe our dishonor nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons
of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a
great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women,
to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the
means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each
bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a
general congress of women without limit of nationality may be
appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at
the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the
alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement
of international questions, the great and general interests of
peace.

(Source and more info:  http://www.peace.ca/mothersdayproclamation.htm)

At our time in history, we are still desperately in need of world peace. Today, let us re-commit ourselves to building that peace.

SoCS: Mother’s Day

So, I have been absent from SoCS for weeks – and the reason has to do with a parent.

Specifically, my spouse’s mom, whom I refer to on my blog as Grandma.

Grandma passed away unexpectedly on March 22nd and tomorrow will be our first Mother’s Day without her.

I am very, very grateful to still have both of my parents here; we will be having Mother’s Day brunch with them tomorrow.

My husband, known on my blog as B, has no parents left at all now. We lost his dad almost eleven years ago.

Since Grandma’s death, I have posted very little. (There are some posts about her death and things that have happened since, but nowhere near the number of posts I usually make.) I have done almost no reading of others’ blogs and almost no commenting. I wish I could say that this return to SoCS marked a sea change – that I would be back to my usual posts in Linda’s SoCS and One-liner Wednesday, my usual level of posting at Top of JC’S Mind, visiting dozens of blogs a day, and writing comments.

I wish that, but I know it is not reality.

There is still a ton of tasks that need my attention.

And, in happier news, our younger daughter T is about to graduate with a master’s degree. We expect her to be moving back home to job search, so I need time for her, too.

I hope that all my blog-community friends are hanging in there and having a good time. I also hope that those of you who are blessed to have a parent still living will make an extra effort to contact them and to show that you care.

Because, someday, you may not still have that opportunity.
*****
Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “apparent/a parent”. Come join us! Find out how here:  https://lindaghill.com/2016/05/06/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-may-716/

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April 8

I am going to preface this post with the statement that Nana is doing well, so as not to cause anyone undue stress.

On Friday, April 8th, my plan was to do a couple of things at Grandma’s cottage, which we were working on cleaning out, have lunch with a friend, and then head to Syracuse to bring daughter T home for the weekend, which would be her first time home since Grandma died on March 22nd.

A few minutes after I arrived at the senior community, my cell phone rang. It was my mom (Nana) calling from the emergency room. She had collapsed in the waiting room of a medical building across the street from the hospital. The rapid response team had done a couple of rounds of CPR on her and she was in the emergency room for monitoring and tests.

I used the speakerphone to tell B what was happening. He made arrangements to go to Syracuse to get T. I left messages for my friend not to expect me for lunch. Meanwhile, I drove to the hospital.

I was lucky to find a parking space in the visitors’ lot and rushed up the hill toward the emergency entrance, a cold wind blowing directly into my face, making it difficult to catch my breath. After an unusually mild winter, we had a couple of cold snowy weeks once spring had officially arrived.

Once I was able to get through the line and behind the locked doors of the ER, the wait was on. An EKG was done. The heart monitor was tracing green lines across a screen above Nana’s head. Blood was drawn for tests. They took Nana down for a chest X-ray. There was a line started in her arm, although she wasn’t hooked up to any intravenous fluids. She wasn’t allowed to eat or drink. We were talking to pass the time. The ER became increasingly busy and noisy.

Nana was having some pain in her back and chest. The nurse told us it was from the CPR. A small price to pay from having been brought back from death…

Several hours later, the physician assigned to her case came in. Nana was not dehydrated. Her electrolytes were fine. She hadn’t had a heart attack.

In fact, her heart had not stopped at all.

She had fainted, mostly likely from a combination of cold, wind, walking too quickly uphill in the morning when her medications tend to drop her blood pressure.

We were grateful that she was okay, although I admit that I have been struggling with the fact that a highly trained medical team missed her pulse and performed CPR when they should have been reaching for the smelling salts.

This was especially difficult as she has had to deal with a bruised chest and ribs over these following weeks. It was all unnecessary.

For me, it was also an extra measure of fear that pushed me within a hair’s breadth of melting down. I have been working hard at keeping myself functional during this stressful time. For a few hours, I felt as though I might not be able to cope with an added crisis.

Thank God that Nana and the rest of the family were spared what could have been so much worse.

 

 

 

March 25th

March 25th, 2016 was Good Friday.

So was March 25th, 2005.

The only reason I remember that fact was that that was the day my friend Angie died.

When she died after fighting cancer for over four years, both of B’s parents were still alive. His dad died in July, 2005, also from cancer; his mom, on Tuesday of Holy Week, just a few days before the 11th anniversary of Angie’s death.

In the early morning hours of March 25th, when I couldn’t sleep, I visited the website of the the charity that Angie’s family established in her memory. I always make a donation on March 25th and on October 25th, which was Angie’s birthday.

This year, the paypal link was broken, so I emailed to ask about it.

Her eldest son sent me a reply and set about getting the link fixed. He also sent me a wonderful photo of his daughter, whose middle name is Angeline, after the grandmother she will never meet on this earth. In the photo, she has a marker in her tiny hand. She may be an artist, like Angie.

Life goes on.

 

Re-jiggering – part two

On the morning of March 21, I wrote this post about how I was making some changes to my blogging strategy.

That afternoon, my mother-in-law, known here as Grandma, had a heart attack; she passed away the next day.

Since then, I have posted sporadically and done almost no blog reading and commenting. It has even taken me days to answer comments on the few posts I have done.

It was just the way it had to to be.

I am going to try to do a series of (relatively) short catch-up posts over the next few weeks. I will also try to get here to answer comments in a more timely way.

Extensive reading and commenting on other blogs is going to have to wait a while longer. There is just too much in-person stuff that demands my attention.

It does feel strange not knowing what is going on with you all. Have fun reading, writing, commenting, and keeping up with each other in the blog community in my absence.

I’ll be back when I can.

Peace,
Joanne

 

Month’s Mind

Yesterday, there was a memorial service at the senior community where my parents and, until recently, B’s mom live. They hold one every quarter for residents who have died in the previous three months; this time, there were eight.

This service marked the first official commemoration of Grandma’s death. She did not want to have a wake or funeral; there will be a graveside service later in the spring back in New England.

By coincidence, the service was almost exactly a month after Grandma’s death. It made me think of a Month’s Mind Mass, which is from my Catholic faith tradition. Grandma was not Catholic and the service was not a mass, but it was comforting to me.

The service was the first time I have been a bit teary. I have been so busy concentrating on doing everything that needs to be done and on supporting others that I haven’t really done much mourning myself.

Reaction to loss follows its own path…

Four weeks

Today marks four weeks since Grandma died.

The time has passed in a blizzard of paperwork, phone calls, sorting, packing, and hauling.  As if to add to the surreal sense of time, we had a springtime siege of cold weather and snow, following a winter that was much milder than usual. Had Grandma been alive, she would have heartily disapproved of the turn in the weather. She liked things to proceed in an orderly fashion and was inclined to take inclement weather as personal affront.

One of the hidden blessings in all the sorting and cleaning out has been that we came upon so many reminders of her life. Photos from the decades of her life, including a newspaper clipping of her modeling a fur coat back in the fifties. Playing board games with our children. Writing the weekly menus in calligraphy so that she could stay in practice. Her favorite authors and movies. Her love of decorating for every possible season and holiday, including three drawers of candles in a range of colors to match the decor.

We reached a milestone yesterday. We turned her cottage back over to Good Shepherd Village so that they can ready it for the next resident. Grandma has been the only person to live there, as she moved in shortly after the community opened in fall of 2009. It was bittersweet for B and me to walk in for the last time, having stripped it back to the bare walls and floors, looking much the same as it did when we first saw it.

The window treatments and the dents her furniture had left in the carpets were the only visible reminders that Grandma had made her home here near us for her last six years.

bubbles

Note:  I wrote most of this post last Tuesday, but just got back to finish it in the wee hours of Sunday morning.

It’s a week today since Grandma died. The shock is diminishing and we have carved out a few bubbles of not really normalcy but times when we could focus on something else.

Saturday was my dad’s 91st birthday. B and I took Nana and Paco downtown to meet their youngest grandchild, our niece S, at the bus station. It is only a short jaunt down Interstate 81 from the campus where she is a first-year. We went to lunch at one of our favorite restaurants, then back to Nana and Paco’s apartment to visit for a bit before we had to bring S to catch her bus back to campus. Paco’s three other grandchildren called during that time, including a skype call from our daughters E and T. It was our first time doing a group call with them. When Paco was growing up, if someone had told him that one day he would be able to communicate with his grandchildren in Syracuse and Honolulu at the same time, he would not have believed it.

Of course, we had not forgotten about Grandma during this time of focusing on Paco’s birthday. After we finished all visiting together on the skype call, B and I went into another room to talk with E and T about how things are going with them as we continue to deal with Grandma’s death. We also discussed trying to schedule a time for the burial later in the spring, which involves trying to work around several commencement dates and long-distance travel.

Another bubble of focusing on something else was Easter vigil on Saturday night. Although the liturgy deals with death and resurrection, it was a way to focus on belief and faith, rather than on my own little recent experience of death.

The third bubble has been the time spent trying to complete my first week of the MOOC I am taking. I was a good student back in the day and apparently my inability to skip out on assignments is still there. I honestly don’t know if I will be able to keep up, but I managed to complete the first week on time.

 

Shock

On Monday, I posted about some re-prioritizing I was doing here at Top of JC’s Mind as I prepared for a busy spring.

Somewhere, the Fates were snickering behind their hands.

Monday afternoon, I wrote poetry with my friends at Sappho’s Circle. Just as I was preparing to drive home, I got a call from B. He was at the hospital, waiting while his mother, known here as Grandma, was in the heart catheterization lab. She had had a heart attack.

I was not far from the hospital and got there as quickly as I could to wait with him.

The cardiologist was able to remove the blood clot that had caused the heart attack; there was no need for a stent. The nurses got her settled into the cardiac intensive care unit and we were able to spend several hours in her room, as she gradually woke from the sedation and B and I answered dozens of medical history questions on Grandma’s behalf.

We left the hospital at about 8:00 PM, with Grandma stable and resting under the watchful eyes of the ICU staff. We all expected a few days in the hospital, maybe a short stay in rehab, and then back to her cottage at her senior living community.

We didn’t sleep well. At 6 AM, B’s cell phone rang. Grandma’s blood pressure had dropped, but they had been able to raise it back to an acceptable level. Then, she became short of breath, but it was difficult to address it. They might need to put in a breathing tube as a short term measure. We dressed and headed to the hospital. It turned out that, as we were en route, Grandma’s heart had stopped.

We waited near the nurses’ station as they continued efforts to revive her, but they were not able to.

Less than 24 hours after her heart attack, Grandma had died.

Shock.

There just isn’t any other word for what we have all been feeling since that moment. Everyone that we have had to tell, everyone who has spoken to us, we are all in shock. “But I just saw her at the movie on Friday.”  “But she was here Monday morning, after her PT session.” “But she was at dinner with her friends on Saturday.”  No one quite seems to be able to wrap their brains around the fact that death can be so quick.

Everyone is grateful that there was not a long period of pain and suffering. It was one of the things that Grandma had feared the most. She loved her cottage in the retirement village and did not want to leave it to live in the Health Center. We are grateful that she did not have to do that.

But we are still in shock.

And we are sad.

B and I have been doing our best to talk to people and deal with paperwork and start sorting and make lists and not miss anything that is important to do.

It’s been less than 72 hours at this point, but it feels so much longer. I have to remind myself what day it is.

And that it is Holy Week for most Christians, including my denomination.

As I write this, it is very early on Good Friday morning.

I had tried to sleep, but couldn’t, so I got up to write this.

Before I go to bed, I want to go to the website for my friend Angie’s memorial fund. It has been eleven years since she died. In 2005, March 25th was also Good Friday.

I don’t quite understand why I am not crying.

It must be the shock.