Mr. Murphy was dying. Mrs. Murphy came to visit. For three days they talked & wept. Sister Brigid wondered if she should intervene. But on the fourth day, Mr. and Mrs. Murphy laughed. Sister Brigid asked Mrs. Murphy what had happened. Mrs. Murphy told her they had spent those days sharing memories of their 40 years together. "This story," the Rinpoche writes, "shows to me the importance of telling people early that they are going to die, and also the great advantage of facing squarely the pain of loss" (Sogyal, 179).
Books about dying are books about talking. They advise the dying to talk, and the living to talk, the dying to talk to the living and the living to the dying, and they talk about all of this. We ease our fears by talking; we clear our psychic inventories by talking; we are cured through our communicative powers. "When I hold her hand," Christine said this morning, "she rubs her thumb back and forth on it, like she did when I walked her to the community center." At meals, I remember, she moved her thumb back and forth over her own other hand.
"Talking about dying is very difficult," David Kuhl writes. "We are afraid that talking about death beckons it" (xv). I say my mother is in hospice, and what I hear back most often is quiet.
--She's weak, she's very weak. Closes her mouth when she doesn't want to eat. We bring her soft foods, puddings, oatmeal, jello. Not doing well on Ensure. Likes the cranberry. She closes her mouth sometimes when she doesn't want us to feed her.
--Did you tell her I'm coming? Next Thursday.
--Yes, oh yes, and I'm going to keep telling her.
My neighborhood is full of signs: real estate signs, do not let your dogs poop signs, reunion signs, birthday party signs, lost animal signs. "Please return my puppy / I am crying" reads one. Another asks its reader to return a stolen rabbit. There are photos, but the puppy is too small and the rabbit appears only from the back. Mark (a third one) says he and his roommates in Boston lost their cat. They spent all night making signs and posting them on Beacon Hill. Hours later, arriving back at their apartment, his roommate released the lever of the lazy boy. Out popped the cat.
Like the first rush of a martini, like the moment meditation reaches the top of the skull, like the time you notice leaves in the air between your eyes and the Ko`olau, like the inside of a house that is suddenly larger than its exterior, like a meadow that stretches like toffee, like a simile strained to the point of rupture, like an active alert patience, grieving.
An impossibly synchronous annoyance. Do not play your video game so loudly. Do not leave your trash in the living room. Do not tease me. Do not stop packing for your camping trip. Do not look at me that way. Do not pass me the phone. Do not treat me like this is an ordinary day. Don't you understand!?
"Connect by talking. Connect by listening. Connect by encouraging memories" (Miller).
I talk to the nurse at Arden Courts. I talk to the nurse at Heartland Hospice. I email the social worker from the care-management agency. I talk to the receptionist. I talk to the man at Murphy's Funeral Home. I email my lawyer. I email the hospice people about Medicare forms, requests to treat forms, requests not to treat too much forms. I send attachments about the body being given to science. I talk again to all of the above.
Bryant and Sangha are on Kauai, camping. If they are near a cell tower, they will call. Bryant did not call last night; he has not called this morning.
The books do not tell me how to connect without talk, without sound, without memories. The books do not tell me what it means to grieve one-sidedly. The books do not tell me this isn't so, that there are as many sides as during meditation--no sides at all. The books keep talking at me. I am at a lecture on grieving and there are five stages to learn for the exam. This will be the most difficult exam you will ever take, I'm told. The results will be scientific, as the form is multiple-choice. You will find yourself a) calm; b) angry, or c) watching a lot of baseball on your computer. The Greek word is a) thanatos, or b) minotaur. Be sure to use a number two pencil and press with confidence.
Which of the following statements is most helpful to the loved ones of a dying family member:
1) DO NOT BE SO NEGATIVE.
2) You are so much on my mind right now.
Word problem: You are on an ocean liner looking in at a dock of faces looking out. There is the space between you, which breathes. If you look at the water's surface, you see flying fish, birds, whitecaps. (The telephone lines at Souza Dairy field yesterday rippled with light, as if there were abacus beads floating back and forth between old wooden poles.) A canoe sets out from the dock, but it does not have the ocean liner's horsepower (sic). Someone is paddling toward the ocean liner as quickly as she can, left hand at the top, at the bottom, right. Will she get there in time? What equation do you plan to use in your calculations? (Be sure to record the process of your work, as well as your final results on the test paper.)
May the Queens of space and hosts
Of angels come behind us, circling
To cover our backs
And together deliver us
From the dreadful
Straits of the liminal, and carry us
To the shores of freedom.
I always thought it would be wonderful to be reborn as a seagull, my mother said, until I realized that they live on garbage.
Works Cited
David Kuhl, M.D., What Dying People Want: Practical Wisdom for the End of Life. (NY: PublicAffairs, 2002). This book belonged to Scott Swaner, a Tinfish translator, and was sent to me by his sister, Sheri, after he died. Thank you, Sheri.
James Miller, "Ideas for a Time When Someone You Love is Dying," http://angel-on-my-shoulder.com/ideas.html
Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.
Caroline Sinavaiana's version of "Fundamentals of Navigation" from The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Friday, June 10, 2011
Thursday, June 9, 2011
A Formal Feeling Comes: Or, Just Forms
I am aware of the prognosis of my illness and I understand that treatment is palliative rather than curative. I consent to the management of the symptoms of my disease as prescribed by my Attending Physician and/or the Hospice Medical Director. My family and I will help to develop and will participate in a plan of care based on our special needs. [Virginia Dept. of Medical Assistance Services, Request for Hospice Benefits form]
How will my body be received once it arrives at Georgetown?
Very special care will be given to your very special gift. You can be assured that your remains will always be treated respectfully, carefully, and sensitively. The doctors, students and healthcare professionals here are mindful of your serious and generous intention to enhance their opportunity to study human anatomy. They are aware of their debt to you for offering them such a priceless source of learning. [Georgetown University School of Medicine, "Information on Bequeathal"]
In accepting these services, which are more comprehensive than regular Medicaid benefits, I waive my right to regular Medicaid services that are duplicative of services required to be provided by the Hospice except for payment to my Attending Physician or treatment for medical conditions unrelated to my terminal illness . . . I may be responsible for hospice charges if I become ineligible for Medicaid services. [VA Dept.]
I understand that unless the donor has indicated her/his preference, which is binding, Georgetown will not share the use of a cadaver with another Medical School without the permission of the Next of Kin. [Georgetown]
Mercy wanders in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. She
climbs to the top of a mountain, one of the Old Woman
Mountains. She sits down, filthy and hungered. Who.
Why aren't you floating? I have to do this this way.
[Alice Notley, Culture of One]
I understand that I may be billed for co-payments and deductibles required by my medical insurance. I understand that I am responsible for notifying Heartland immediately of any change in my insurance coverage and that I am responsible for any charges not paid by my insurance carrier resulting from my failure to do so in a timely manner. [ADMISSION AGREEMENT: Election of Hospice Benefit and Consent to Treat]
Dear Dr. Braddock:
If you die in your sleep do you know you are dead? Your clinically precise word order is a failure of dream-work. It gives an effect of harmless vacancy. Why this violent tearing away?
Sincerely,
[Susan Howe, That This]
EXCLUSIONARY CRITERIA
(Revised from "Donating Your Body to Science")
7. The donor is in fetal position or has contracted limbs.
Rationale: The body must lay flat on a table in order to be placed in our storage area.
__________
May the elements of the earth not rise up against us or the elements of forms, containers, urns, bearers of ash. My son's teachers say his prosody is good when he reads. He scans. I scan form after form, email, pdf, fax, fail. Repeat. I understand the progress of my treatment, where I am my mother. I do not sign for--but as--her.
My sister-in-law tells me about a book in which the inside is larger than the outside of a house. The house of my mother's body still contains her. Not the her a "memory table" can organize, but one on which photographs are set beside the white out. Each visitor must dip his brush into the white substance and cover over a part of her face, her arms, her legs, her breasts, the cigarette she held up in the 1950s black and white snapshot.
Her body is an urn. Ern Malley was a fake. Poet of air, not the dump. Culture of one, where one is multiples of one. He was two men, but a third poet. Why do we say a dog has a good "personality"? The neighbor who walked Murphy died; I knew his widow by the dog she walked. She is he because his little dog loves her. I call Murphy's Funeral Home to make back-up plans, just in case mom's body is "excluded." It's a family-run business. There are the Murphy's on their website, all eight of them, looking out. It was Martha J. Keefe, because the "O" had been too Irish. Whited out. Half the women in Cork looked like her.
I can't remember why I wanted to make a codex.
Marie doesn't know the word "codex." But she tries not
to remember, by making what she makes containing
all her memories and yours, o garbagers
Random access memory. Trunk of a tree or block of wood. The plank in reason. Rationales for "exclusionary criteria": as if fact mitigates fact. If your body is obese, it will not fit in our storage area. Or: "the anatomical relations are altered." No alteration where alteration found. Donne was a nasty poet, Ben notes. Ambition is as ambition does. Has nothing to do with flies, but with aggression. "The point is not to suppress your anger, but to watch it and let it go," writes The Motocycliste.
I am short with family, short with friends, short with cat, short with dogs, short with newspaper commenters, short with people on the phone. I am short. My mother is short, as was my father. Shortness runs in the biological family. My mother's body, stepping into the tub, taught me what a woman's body is. Pubic hair red, her head of hair was brown. (Born a red-head, her hair color changed within days.) It is now mapped otherwise. Choose satellite or map, or the hybrid that offers pegs & pins on photographs of actual streets. They will try not to use IVs, as that might exclude her body from "donation to science."
In Notley's book, Marie's shack gets burned down, and again. Her dog is killed by mean girls. My mother's mother put her dog to sleep when she was away. My mother's body is a house that will be burned. Her cremains revert to Next of Kin, where Next of Kin is I who sign the forms as her.
It means that I make perfect sense. [Notley]
The the. That this. Here, thereafter.
How will my body be received once it arrives at Georgetown?
Very special care will be given to your very special gift. You can be assured that your remains will always be treated respectfully, carefully, and sensitively. The doctors, students and healthcare professionals here are mindful of your serious and generous intention to enhance their opportunity to study human anatomy. They are aware of their debt to you for offering them such a priceless source of learning. [Georgetown University School of Medicine, "Information on Bequeathal"]
In accepting these services, which are more comprehensive than regular Medicaid benefits, I waive my right to regular Medicaid services that are duplicative of services required to be provided by the Hospice except for payment to my Attending Physician or treatment for medical conditions unrelated to my terminal illness . . . I may be responsible for hospice charges if I become ineligible for Medicaid services. [VA Dept.]
I understand that unless the donor has indicated her/his preference, which is binding, Georgetown will not share the use of a cadaver with another Medical School without the permission of the Next of Kin. [Georgetown]
Mercy wanders in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. She
climbs to the top of a mountain, one of the Old Woman
Mountains. She sits down, filthy and hungered. Who.
Why aren't you floating? I have to do this this way.
[Alice Notley, Culture of One]
I understand that I may be billed for co-payments and deductibles required by my medical insurance. I understand that I am responsible for notifying Heartland immediately of any change in my insurance coverage and that I am responsible for any charges not paid by my insurance carrier resulting from my failure to do so in a timely manner. [ADMISSION AGREEMENT: Election of Hospice Benefit and Consent to Treat]
Dear Dr. Braddock:
If you die in your sleep do you know you are dead? Your clinically precise word order is a failure of dream-work. It gives an effect of harmless vacancy. Why this violent tearing away?
Sincerely,
[Susan Howe, That This]
EXCLUSIONARY CRITERIA
(Revised from "Donating Your Body to Science")
7. The donor is in fetal position or has contracted limbs.
Rationale: The body must lay flat on a table in order to be placed in our storage area.
__________
May the elements of the earth not rise up against us or the elements of forms, containers, urns, bearers of ash. My son's teachers say his prosody is good when he reads. He scans. I scan form after form, email, pdf, fax, fail. Repeat. I understand the progress of my treatment, where I am my mother. I do not sign for--but as--her.
My sister-in-law tells me about a book in which the inside is larger than the outside of a house. The house of my mother's body still contains her. Not the her a "memory table" can organize, but one on which photographs are set beside the white out. Each visitor must dip his brush into the white substance and cover over a part of her face, her arms, her legs, her breasts, the cigarette she held up in the 1950s black and white snapshot.
Her body is an urn. Ern Malley was a fake. Poet of air, not the dump. Culture of one, where one is multiples of one. He was two men, but a third poet. Why do we say a dog has a good "personality"? The neighbor who walked Murphy died; I knew his widow by the dog she walked. She is he because his little dog loves her. I call Murphy's Funeral Home to make back-up plans, just in case mom's body is "excluded." It's a family-run business. There are the Murphy's on their website, all eight of them, looking out. It was Martha J. Keefe, because the "O" had been too Irish. Whited out. Half the women in Cork looked like her.
I can't remember why I wanted to make a codex.
Marie doesn't know the word "codex." But she tries not
to remember, by making what she makes containing
all her memories and yours, o garbagers
Random access memory. Trunk of a tree or block of wood. The plank in reason. Rationales for "exclusionary criteria": as if fact mitigates fact. If your body is obese, it will not fit in our storage area. Or: "the anatomical relations are altered." No alteration where alteration found. Donne was a nasty poet, Ben notes. Ambition is as ambition does. Has nothing to do with flies, but with aggression. "The point is not to suppress your anger, but to watch it and let it go," writes The Motocycliste.
I am short with family, short with friends, short with cat, short with dogs, short with newspaper commenters, short with people on the phone. I am short. My mother is short, as was my father. Shortness runs in the biological family. My mother's body, stepping into the tub, taught me what a woman's body is. Pubic hair red, her head of hair was brown. (Born a red-head, her hair color changed within days.) It is now mapped otherwise. Choose satellite or map, or the hybrid that offers pegs & pins on photographs of actual streets. They will try not to use IVs, as that might exclude her body from "donation to science."
In Notley's book, Marie's shack gets burned down, and again. Her dog is killed by mean girls. My mother's mother put her dog to sleep when she was away. My mother's body is a house that will be burned. Her cremains revert to Next of Kin, where Next of Kin is I who sign the forms as her.
It means that I make perfect sense. [Notley]
The the. That this. Here, thereafter.
Monday, June 6, 2011
"If increasing sadness": Muzak meditations
Arrived at the land of Muzak, not a destination really but a hold, a pause if not a rest. "When we listen to music," Susan Howe notes, "we are also listening to pauses called 'rests.' 'Rests' could be wishes that haven't yet betrayed themselves and can only be transferred evocatively" (TT 28). While Muzak means to offer calm, it cannot rest. Relentless Muzak. The tunes are not familiar, except as Alzheimer's music. The voice-overs aim to reassure the listener: your family member is very important to us. There is no sadness in the voice-over. When I reach Heartland Health, I hear the same muzak in my ear as at the Arden Courts number. "We're part of the same corporate food chain," I'm told by a hospice worker.
In the "Health and Safety Appendix" to the Heartland Hospice Care Patient Information Handbook that's sent me as a pdf, I find a chart. Three columns, from left: "Body System"; "Symptom"; "Comfort Measures."
E calls to say mom is "comfortable," and "in no pain." But she does not have funeral arrangements. She gives me two names. One is Money & King. May I laugh at the irony? I do not think the muzak would want me to.
Under "comfort measures" for "Symptom: Feeling sad," I find, listed after bullet points:
Offer gentle support
Allow discussion of feelings
Give medicine as ordered
Notify nurse if increasing sadness
What I'm told is that my mother speaks, but that she makes no sound. Ellen: "She 'mouthed' some words but I couldn't make out what she was saying. I told her that you send your love." Social worker: "When your mom was speaking to me this morning, she was not projecting much sound and it was primarily me understanding the words she was mouthing to my questions."
Mouthing. When the mouth operates, but cannot project sound. The OED defines "mouthing" as
Merriam-Webster on-line defines it so, as well. The fourth definition works best: "to form soundlessly with the lips." The example has to do with a librarian. The librarian has volition; he knows he ought not to speak loudly, so he mouths his words. My mother tries to project sound, but none emerges. Another definition for the noun: "The entrance to an underground working from a mine shaft." To mine the mouth for words. To mine the mouth for words and come up without a seam, a vein, a breath. To go underground but not find the ground of saying. Form without content, and yet still content.
Muzak is mouthing's opposite. It's all sound, no meaning. No, that's not right. There's meaning, but the meaning is to avoid the underground, the mouth, the vein, to pause in thought if not in time. "This is an odd mix of the practical with the metaphysical" I say to someone on the phone from hospice.
After writing that I would not be advertising my posts any more on facebook, I got mad at Mark (this is a different Mark) for commenting that blogs are "so 2006." There are words like platform, like social networking, for what he means to discuss before he knows what I mean to say. The blog is a mouth. It opens and closes with the other mouths. It is the entrance to a mine. It is sometimes thought to be pompous, bombastic, loose with the facts. It might be Muzak. But mine. Is meditation, is retrieval, is trying to make the sounds that mean something. The Heartland handbook tells me, "You may be experiencing many emotions right now. Heartland Hospice is here to guide you on your journey." They mean my mother's journey, but it's mine. I am feeling pain. I am mouthing it. If you visit, you might hear it. In or out of the rests.
Why can't I remember the tune, the content of the voice-over? Why is there a cattle egret at the zoo, when I see three outside my window now, hunting roaches in the wet green grass? Why is memory what binds us together, like a simile, or "the cow stuff," as Sangha calls Elmer's? Why is ambition so predictable in its vehicles? Why does my chest quaver like a string? Why do doves coo, and mynas scream "cat!"?
I ask the social worker, the one who is working between the one who left and the one who has not yet started, if I should come to visit. It would have to be soon, as I'm in Scotland in July. I know this is a loaded question. [The cat comes out from under the bed; he will yell in a minute, as my door is closed. "Mom is busy," Bryant tells the kids.]
Susan,
In the "Health and Safety Appendix" to the Heartland Hospice Care Patient Information Handbook that's sent me as a pdf, I find a chart. Three columns, from left: "Body System"; "Symptom"; "Comfort Measures."
E calls to say mom is "comfortable," and "in no pain." But she does not have funeral arrangements. She gives me two names. One is Money & King. May I laugh at the irony? I do not think the muzak would want me to.
Under "comfort measures" for "Symptom: Feeling sad," I find, listed after bullet points:
Offer gentle support
Allow discussion of feelings
Give medicine as ordered
Notify nurse if increasing sadness
What I'm told is that my mother speaks, but that she makes no sound. Ellen: "She 'mouthed' some words but I couldn't make out what she was saying. I told her that you send your love." Social worker: "When your mom was speaking to me this morning, she was not projecting much sound and it was primarily me understanding the words she was mouthing to my questions."
Mouthing. When the mouth operates, but cannot project sound. The OED defines "mouthing" as
The action of mouth v. (in various senses); spec. the action of speaking in an empty, pompous, verbose, or foolish manner; an instance of this.
Merriam-Webster on-line defines it so, as well. The fourth definition works best: "to form soundlessly with the lips." The example has to do with a librarian. The librarian has volition; he knows he ought not to speak loudly, so he mouths his words. My mother tries to project sound, but none emerges. Another definition for the noun: "The entrance to an underground working from a mine shaft." To mine the mouth for words. To mine the mouth for words and come up without a seam, a vein, a breath. To go underground but not find the ground of saying. Form without content, and yet still content.
Muzak is mouthing's opposite. It's all sound, no meaning. No, that's not right. There's meaning, but the meaning is to avoid the underground, the mouth, the vein, to pause in thought if not in time. "This is an odd mix of the practical with the metaphysical" I say to someone on the phone from hospice.
After writing that I would not be advertising my posts any more on facebook, I got mad at Mark (this is a different Mark) for commenting that blogs are "so 2006." There are words like platform, like social networking, for what he means to discuss before he knows what I mean to say. The blog is a mouth. It opens and closes with the other mouths. It is the entrance to a mine. It is sometimes thought to be pompous, bombastic, loose with the facts. It might be Muzak. But mine. Is meditation, is retrieval, is trying to make the sounds that mean something. The Heartland handbook tells me, "You may be experiencing many emotions right now. Heartland Hospice is here to guide you on your journey." They mean my mother's journey, but it's mine. I am feeling pain. I am mouthing it. If you visit, you might hear it. In or out of the rests.
Why can't I remember the tune, the content of the voice-over? Why is there a cattle egret at the zoo, when I see three outside my window now, hunting roaches in the wet green grass? Why is memory what binds us together, like a simile, or "the cow stuff," as Sangha calls Elmer's? Why is ambition so predictable in its vehicles? Why does my chest quaver like a string? Why do doves coo, and mynas scream "cat!"?
I ask the social worker, the one who is working between the one who left and the one who has not yet started, if I should come to visit. It would have to be soon, as I'm in Scotland in July. I know this is a loaded question. [The cat comes out from under the bed; he will yell in a minute, as my door is closed. "Mom is busy," Bryant tells the kids.]
Susan,
Forgive my frankness.....if you are hoping to see your mom before anything happens then I think the trip in a couple of weeks is a good idea. With "seniors", conditions can change so quickly. She is weak. I've been surprised with other clients how quickly and suddenly their condition turned. I suggest you see her in a timely manner....just in case.
There are now six egrets on the field. The cat (a "senior") sits next to me, watches them, scratches his left ear with his back left leg. She might "turn" soon. A turn in a poem is when momentum breaks and the poet turns her wheel. Away from. Toward. "When we wander in circles / Driven by keen delusion / May the King of clear skies / Go before us, turning / The great wheel, and sounding the conch / on the path of radiant light / The way of all-embracing wisdom." This is where my eye falls when I write the word "turn." Sina sends her re-casting from the Tibetan Book of the Dead for Albert Saijo's passage. It's called "Fundamentals of Navigation."
Should I choose a funeral home by its website? Should I call and test their Muzak? Should I choose the home that uses metaphor? "We understand that family care extends beyond our front door." Ah, the "straits of the liminal." Or should I choose the home that uses a more literal approach? "Among the property's distinctive attributes are its front porch lined with rocking chairs."
The hospice nurse returns my call. Cannot tell if there's urgency or not. "Aspiration pneumonia," so it's pneumonia again. Oxygen mask, so she "obviously" can't say anything. Antibiotics. Not in distress. Comfortable. Will call back with any changes.
Another call. This time it's billing. She's going to send a form, but it's confusing, so she'll explain it to me. Medicare Part B, as in Boy. Three options. Advanced Beneficiary Notice. Medications may or may not be covered by Medicare Part B as in Boy or by the secondary insurer. "I presume you'd like me to choose the first option," I say, after she enumerates them. "I can't say anything more," she says.
"'Rests' could be wishes that haven't yet betrayed themselves," Susan Howe. Why the word "betray"? I know what mom would wish.
"Our spirit ever buoyant as we sank" (Albert Saijo)
Steve (friend on the inside) calls to ask if I want him to take the phone to my mother; he'll hold it to her ear. I say yes, I want that. So he introduces me to my mother; "Mahtha," he says in his Bronx accent, "this is your daughta, Susan; she wants to tawk to you." He tells me he's moving the phone to her ear, so I start delivering news to her. Radhika and I are cleaning house; Bryant and Sangha were out camping last night. Lightning, thunder. Hope she feels better. Respiratory problem--then it's Steve again to say my mother responds to my voice, that she's trying to talk back. There was no sound. "Susan wants me to tell you that she loves you," says Steve to my mother. That's how it's done. We know the words and we say them for each other. It takes an Alzheimer's village to repeat these verbal saws because they're all we have. See saws. The back and forth, without the back or is it forth.
As she loses speech, the blog goes out with more facts, fewer meditations. The hospice nurse who calls says there's a DNR for my mother, but is there a DNT? It takes a moment to remember that DNR stands for Do Not Resuscitate. No heroic measures. Should be NHM. DNT is about not transporting her from this place she knows to a hospital. I ask if I can call back; that is not a question I expected. I'm inclined to say yes, but need to talk to my husband.
She says I might want to look into funeral homes. I don't remember paper work about that. Only about Georgetown Medical School. I will ask around, I tell her. Alan Berliner, who made short films about Edwin Honig in his Alzheimer's, suddenly remembers why he called one box Picasso. That was the box containing film of his father making faces, slow faces, fast faces, taking off the glasses faces, the faces that reminded Berliner of Picasso, the painter Freud. But he had forgotten his own code. Until the film now brought it back. Take four. It was film, so there was no sound.
Honig says to remember how to forget. In another clip, he bangs on his chair, keeping rhythm as he arrives at a word that rhymes with jello. Don't you know it, he's a poet. Silliman wonders why facebook readers hit "like" at the announcement of Honig's death.
BODISATTVAHOOD IS A FUCKING JOB LIKE ANY OTHER. Albert Saijo. So now let us be cheerful as we sink. Because there won't be medicare or hospice care or heartland health or the carlyle group to get us through our Alzheimer's. The ship will sink without our buddhas and our bodisattvas, or they will not have insurance. We'll have to be in it for the poetry, the compassion, the non-return on our investments, the lacks of prizes or recognitions, the hard work for its own. Our friend has no space for his wood carvings, so he carries them in his head. This is not a solution. We suggest, considering the cost of living, that he start cutting smaller pieces of wood, making micro sculptures. He says woodworkers like nature, need their space. We feel silly for our practicalities. Know better.
I want to think that Saijo and my mother met in Italy in 1944. I want to think those were his boots she kept in her closet, the ones that fit. I want to think they ate the same bad food, saw the same entertainers, drove the same trucks, watched Vesuvius from the same hill on the same late afternoon. There are less good reasons for relation than history, lots of them. But when she got back from their war, Martha said she had no idea about internment camps. Not the one Albert grew up in, not the others. It wasn't in the newspapers.
I call the nurse back, say I've talked to my husband, yes we'd like a DNT. She sounds relieved, talks about the significance of staying at home. I wonder about transport. Bryant says the Boy Scout skit had a Star Trek theme: "beam me up, Scottie," said one boy, and another brought him a plank of wood. No, that's teleporting. The trans- in transport does not take us anywhere. That must be why it's beyond us.
Ben says Emerson's dementia did not emerge in his language, but in his silences. The time before our lives was infinite, Howe reminds us, and accepting that . . . we inherit an ancestral quiet. Dementia as return, not diminution. It's the round trip ticket we got off the internet. Print out the receipt; evidence of your voyage will come later.
[ed. note: Caroline Sinavaiana asks why I wrote "sank" instead of "sink" in the title quotation. I didn't realize it was an error. I acknowledge that error here, but will leave it above, as misprision is the poet's emotional flag.]
As she loses speech, the blog goes out with more facts, fewer meditations. The hospice nurse who calls says there's a DNR for my mother, but is there a DNT? It takes a moment to remember that DNR stands for Do Not Resuscitate. No heroic measures. Should be NHM. DNT is about not transporting her from this place she knows to a hospital. I ask if I can call back; that is not a question I expected. I'm inclined to say yes, but need to talk to my husband.
She says I might want to look into funeral homes. I don't remember paper work about that. Only about Georgetown Medical School. I will ask around, I tell her. Alan Berliner, who made short films about Edwin Honig in his Alzheimer's, suddenly remembers why he called one box Picasso. That was the box containing film of his father making faces, slow faces, fast faces, taking off the glasses faces, the faces that reminded Berliner of Picasso, the painter Freud. But he had forgotten his own code. Until the film now brought it back. Take four. It was film, so there was no sound.
Honig says to remember how to forget. In another clip, he bangs on his chair, keeping rhythm as he arrives at a word that rhymes with jello. Don't you know it, he's a poet. Silliman wonders why facebook readers hit "like" at the announcement of Honig's death.
BODISATTVAHOOD IS A FUCKING JOB LIKE ANY OTHER. Albert Saijo. So now let us be cheerful as we sink. Because there won't be medicare or hospice care or heartland health or the carlyle group to get us through our Alzheimer's. The ship will sink without our buddhas and our bodisattvas, or they will not have insurance. We'll have to be in it for the poetry, the compassion, the non-return on our investments, the lacks of prizes or recognitions, the hard work for its own. Our friend has no space for his wood carvings, so he carries them in his head. This is not a solution. We suggest, considering the cost of living, that he start cutting smaller pieces of wood, making micro sculptures. He says woodworkers like nature, need their space. We feel silly for our practicalities. Know better.
I want to think that Saijo and my mother met in Italy in 1944. I want to think those were his boots she kept in her closet, the ones that fit. I want to think they ate the same bad food, saw the same entertainers, drove the same trucks, watched Vesuvius from the same hill on the same late afternoon. There are less good reasons for relation than history, lots of them. But when she got back from their war, Martha said she had no idea about internment camps. Not the one Albert grew up in, not the others. It wasn't in the newspapers.
I call the nurse back, say I've talked to my husband, yes we'd like a DNT. She sounds relieved, talks about the significance of staying at home. I wonder about transport. Bryant says the Boy Scout skit had a Star Trek theme: "beam me up, Scottie," said one boy, and another brought him a plank of wood. No, that's teleporting. The trans- in transport does not take us anywhere. That must be why it's beyond us.
Ben says Emerson's dementia did not emerge in his language, but in his silences. The time before our lives was infinite, Howe reminds us, and accepting that . . . we inherit an ancestral quiet. Dementia as return, not diminution. It's the round trip ticket we got off the internet. Print out the receipt; evidence of your voyage will come later.
[ed. note: Caroline Sinavaiana asks why I wrote "sank" instead of "sink" in the title quotation. I didn't realize it was an error. I acknowledge that error here, but will leave it above, as misprision is the poet's emotional flag.]
Sunday, June 5, 2011
"Remember how to forget. No more."
A kind-sounding woman from Heartland Health Services calls to say they will send two hospice nurses (one new, one experienced) to provide oxygen to mom later today. Am I familiar with hospice care? Have I known anyone in hospice care? "Considering your mother's age (93) and condition, the doctor has requested it." They'll be calling later this week with reports on her condition. "Condition" reminds me of "situation." My father always said "situation" for "condition," for something about which he felt uncomfortable. You get rags lidat.
"Heartland Health is an integrated health delivery system." Their "outcomes are second to none." They have a standard of care that ends: "To help you die at home or in a setting of comfort and peace." When I said mom's been in the Alzheimer's home since late 2006, the kind-sounding woman said, "so that's home for her."
Funny you should ask. I was just looking in my on-line dictionary.
__________
When I was last at my mother's Alzheimer's home, I asked her old neighbors to come see her with me. They said that when they'd first visited, they'd taken photos of her. Other neighbors refused to look at the photos.
This morning the nurse tells me she is trying to get oxygen for mom, but the hospice nurse didn't leave a call-back number, and she can't reach the main office. It's Sunday, which makes planning difficult.
"What made you want to look up hospice? Please tell us where you read or heard it (including the quote, if possible)."
When A puts me on hold, the usual musak starts up. "Be sure to come visit your family members," a voice-over tells me. Something about how important it is to visit. With strings.
I can't see mom, though I know she's in her room, pillows at her back, and she's not getting enough oxygen. "She's alert." There are numbers for breath, numbers for feeding, but I don't catch them as they fly in my ear.
The former neighbors say they'll pray for her.
The nurse says she'll call back when she reaches the hospice people.
"You're going away soon, aren't you?" someone asks me at a party yesterday. I bowled a spare. "Your daughter is strong," Kim tells me. "I like her," says Joy. Her ball halfway down the lane, Radhika turns and grins. Pins don't drop when she does. Earlier, she'd set up plastic water bottles in the living room and knocked them down with her soccer ball.
The central character in Embassytown is a simile. Her role is to liken one to another thing, render fact into fiction, truth into at least a partial lie. My mother is like a space traveler. She needs oxygen. Her narrow bed is like a rocket. Her level is at 20-something, not enough air. COPD makes it hard. There are pillows behind her. She smiled to Ellen & Steve when they stopped by. "She still understands something when I say your name," Ellen tells me on the phone. "At least that's what I choose to think."
The poet, Edwin Honig, died. A facebook friend posts a clip from a short film about him. When asked what he might say to millions of people, if he had such an audience, he says (twice): "Remember how to forget. No more."
"Heartland Health is an integrated health delivery system." Their "outcomes are second to none." They have a standard of care that ends: "To help you die at home or in a setting of comfort and peace." When I said mom's been in the Alzheimer's home since late 2006, the kind-sounding woman said, "so that's home for her."
Funny you should ask. I was just looking in my on-line dictionary.
__________
When I was last at my mother's Alzheimer's home, I asked her old neighbors to come see her with me. They said that when they'd first visited, they'd taken photos of her. Other neighbors refused to look at the photos.
This morning the nurse tells me she is trying to get oxygen for mom, but the hospice nurse didn't leave a call-back number, and she can't reach the main office. It's Sunday, which makes planning difficult.
"What made you want to look up hospice? Please tell us where you read or heard it (including the quote, if possible)."
When A puts me on hold, the usual musak starts up. "Be sure to come visit your family members," a voice-over tells me. Something about how important it is to visit. With strings.
I can't see mom, though I know she's in her room, pillows at her back, and she's not getting enough oxygen. "She's alert." There are numbers for breath, numbers for feeding, but I don't catch them as they fly in my ear.
The former neighbors say they'll pray for her.
The nurse says she'll call back when she reaches the hospice people.
": a facility or program designed to provide a caring environment for meeting the physical and emotional needs of the terminally ill" (Merriam-Webster). English-language learners get no euphemism: "a place that provides care for people who are dying." First known use, 1818.
"You're going away soon, aren't you?" someone asks me at a party yesterday. I bowled a spare. "Your daughter is strong," Kim tells me. "I like her," says Joy. Her ball halfway down the lane, Radhika turns and grins. Pins don't drop when she does. Earlier, she'd set up plastic water bottles in the living room and knocked them down with her soccer ball.
The central character in Embassytown is a simile. Her role is to liken one to another thing, render fact into fiction, truth into at least a partial lie. My mother is like a space traveler. She needs oxygen. Her narrow bed is like a rocket. Her level is at 20-something, not enough air. COPD makes it hard. There are pillows behind her. She smiled to Ellen & Steve when they stopped by. "She still understands something when I say your name," Ellen tells me on the phone. "At least that's what I choose to think."
The poet, Edwin Honig, died. A facebook friend posts a clip from a short film about him. When asked what he might say to millions of people, if he had such an audience, he says (twice): "Remember how to forget. No more."
Saturday, June 4, 2011
The difficulties of long-distance daughtering: updated mom report
In yesterday's report, I wrote that my mother has pneumonia, which is what I thought I heard on the telephone. Ah, but the misunderstandings of long distance daughtering--my mother doesn't have pneumonia, after all. She's resting in bed, smiled at the nurse (I was told on the phone), and then made it clear she was through talking. That sounds like her.
From the social worker, yesterday:
From the social worker, yesterday:
Susan,
I am working with your mom until her new care manager _______ begins next week. I received a call from Arden Court today and asked they contact you. The nurse reported to me that your mom was started on an antibiotic for a cough this week. They're concerned as she remains weak and her appetite has decreased. They are thinking an evaluation by a hospice nurse would be appropriate. Based on the information they told me, I think this is appropriate. It would be an evaluation to determine if she meets their criteria.
I don't know if Arden Court reached you and wanted to ensure you are aware of their concern. I plan to visit your mom next week to get an update on her status. Please contact me if you have any questions. I will give you an update after I see her.
and today:
and today:
What I was told was that the xray was negative. I asked about this because I was confused as to why she was started on an antibiotic if the xray didn't show anything. The nurse explained to me that she had a cough and has a history of pneumonia. It then made sense that they were treating the symptoms and attempting to prevent a pneumonia from developing. I'll double check this. It appears there's a respiratory issue one way or another.
I am sorry that out of the blue I'm bringing you this type of news. I'll let you know of any updates I receive as I plan to follow up with the nurse over the weekend.
Friday, June 3, 2011
Mom report / Susan Howe's _That This_ / Albert Saijo's passing
[Today's weather]
Morning call from Arden Courts: mom has pneumonia. They've done chest x-rays. She's very weak, "weaker than before." [I'm having a hard time understanding the woman's accent on the other end of the phone, so I ask her to repeat herself.] She requests permission to call hospice. Yes, she would still be in the same place, but might have a hospital bed. If she gets better, they'll leave. I say yes, of course, thanks for calling. Yes.
When I look up "hospice" I get the word "palliative." palliative care (from Latin palliare, to cloak): care that makes patients more comfortable, lessens their suffering. Cloak. Loose over-garment. Cloak and dagger. Superman. To cloak. Conceal, cover over, hide. You cannot cover over pain, though perhaps you can ease it.
Her death has been in my mind for days now. Bryant says we had 2.5 inches of rain this morning between 5 and 8 a.m. Rolling thunder, rain at times shearing toward the mountains, plants fallen down on the lanai. When I heard that Mark's mother was in ICU and then died, I worried that my mother does not die. I cannot say that worry is easing, or that it's cloaked.
Say that her death is on or in my mind. What is death's shape, its smell, what rent does it pay, or is there a mortgage, as it comes to own us over time? Death is a resident; she lies on a bed and it is to her that the cat comes. Cats know, you know. To reside is not to abide, though it suggests a coming again (re-) to the activity of being. Do not resuscitate. Do not force feed. Do not extend
beyond.
We own death (it is ours) for a time. We own it as concept, not as fact. It is her death that is on my mind, though my death is there, too. Hers and mine are relatives, but not the same. She gave birth to mine, as I have adopted those of my children. It is still her possession, even if she cannot understand it. But possession also has an end. Not a possession to be bought or sold, but relinquished. Into time, which is not one. I can say "her time has come," but that is a double abstraction. She has her death, but not her time.
Radhika lies on the floor, reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid. She is singing or chanting, I cannot tell which, though I do distinguish the rain, water in the drain, thunder; I saw egrets on the lawn, white against dark green beneath gray. A day without horizon, thick. Kamehameha Highway is closed at Waikane. Bryant whistles: "waterfalls everywhere!" Every mountain fold water full.
That This. That is over there, this is over here. That happened; this is happening. Short vowels tucked into short words. They point. Which syllable is stronger, that one or this one? Is it that this? or that this? A line of egrets moves from this to that.
If I were writing the review of Susan Howe's book, as I'd planned, it would involve her invocation of "ancestors," those who "opened" Japan and traded with China. Or her sentence about Pearl Harbor and Hans Andersen. Her desire to be inside history, the discovery in her grieving for her husband, Peter Hare, that she is relentlessly between things. Temporal tectonics.
"Somewhere I read that relations between sounds and objects, feelings and thoughts, develop by association; language attaches to and envelopes its referent without destroying or changing it--the way a cobweb catches a fly" (13).
Language as cloak, what comes between the spider and her prey. Language as palliative, as nurse, as easing pain before an end.
"More and more I have the sense of being present at a point of absence where crossing centuries may prove to be like crossing languages. Soundwaves. It's the difference between one stillness and another stillness. Even the 'invisible' scotch tape I recently used when composing 'Frolic Architecture' leaves traces on paper when I run each original sheet through the Canon copier" (31).
Howe moves from sound to sight, centuries to languages, scotch tape to the Canon copier. One of her favorite words is "hinge." A hinged picture squeaks.
"It could have been the instant of balance between silence, seeing, and saying; the moment before speech. Peirce would call this moment, secondness. Peter was returning to the common course of things--our world of signs" (35)
Howe's evocation of secondness, that instant between sound and silence, meaning and its release, comes in "Frolic Architecture," where material from the journals of Hannah Edwards Whitmore, sister to Jonathan Edwards, is cut and then spliced to the page with "invisible" tape. Among what's left of Hannah's words are markers of Howe's research: "1208 EP G 3 of 3 folders" (51). Secondness works in both directions, then, as a falling into silence and then a coming out of it, out from the aptly named "folder." Research is not rebirth, but.
Somewhere in the book's first section, "The Disappearance Approach," she writes about "cremains," or what is left of the body after cremation. I have a form on my other computer's desktop, filled out with instructions on what to do with my mother's cremains. The punster in me breaks out with, what we love best, cremains. My mother's voice reminds me that they are the lowest form of humor.
The last word in "Frolic Architecture" is "sudden." As this word falls into that white page, it more resembles "sudder," then echoes "shudder." Sudden death, shudder. This is the opposite to my mother's death, which will not have been sudden. Her death will have an end, but it will not have been soon. That time will come.
Blogger's sitemeter sent me to cuke.com this morning, where I learned of Albert Saijo's death (they linked to my blog post on him from July, 2009). Saijo was a poet of the white spaces, especially toward the end when he refused to publish any of his poems. He was a beautiful man, and will be much missed by me and by my family. Rest well, Albert.
"But you're out. You went away and you came back. Now as you head back to civilization, you have a wildness in your heart that wasn't there before. You know you're going outback again."
Albert Saijo, The Backpacker, San Francisco: 101 Productions, 1972, 1977.
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