The Eleventh

Larger than life, larger than us, he was the man in the size large shirt.

At Christmas, for years, there was an endless succession of gift boxes containing shoe polish, playing cards, Boggle games, wool socks, slippers and shirts.

Plaid flannel shirts.  Cotton dress shirts.  T-shirts with slogans.  All of them size large or extra large.

In high school, my sister and I raided his closet, pulling out shirts with pearl snap buttons and large collars, putting them on over our bluejeans and rolling up the sleeves, tying the front shirt-tails into knots.  We’d bunch them up and throw them in the wash when we were done, pleased with this endless supply of size large shirts.

As we grew up and moved away, our mother received gifts from us in abundance:  roses, comforters, fluffy towels, scented lotions, teacups, gift cards and books.  For dad, it was sweaters and shirts.  All size large.  Because he was the man in the size large shirts.

After I was in my thirties, after I had become a parent and watched my husband be a dad to our daughter, I was talking to my mom.  I told her about my daughter wanting to buy presents for her daddy, and how hard it was to choose a present for a man. 

“How come Dad never wears the shirts we get him?” I asked her.

 She laughed.  “They’re all too big!”

Turns out, my dad was never more than 5’10” and never more than a size medium.  All those shirts, we picked out from the rack by imagining a form to fit the personage we’d built in our memory.  His loud voice and colorful character were bigger than his stature. 

 It’s a humbling and fascinating process to reconcile.  Not only to try to reconcile a personal relationship, but to reconcile your memory to reality.  To re-adjust your impressions to the actuality—of a person, a situation, a life.

Ah, the magical Annette. 

She repaired my ravaged and migrating eyebrows, and vanished my greying roots.  She darkened my hair so that my mother may recognize me when I next visit my parents.  She performed the scalp massage that causes my eyes to roll back in my head and my shoes to fall off my feet. 

Blow drying, brushing, trimming, and applying the smoothing iron, while chatting with me and helping me find the latest People magazine. 

I drove home at 7:00, looking once again like a woman who actually tries to be presentable.  In a cloud of hairspray, the skin around my eyebrows pink from waxing, a feeling of blissful calm from the top of my head to the bottoms of my feet. 

NEVER underestimate the healing power of being pampered.

So here’s the deal.

My dad started losing weight this past summer and my parents told us it was because Dad worked so hard in the garden and doing other work.  When my brother went to visit them in August when he took his daughter up there for college, and said later that “Dad looks terrible.”

A few weeks ago, my sister had a call from one of her friends who lives in my parents’ hometown, and she asked my sister “What’s going on with your dad?”  When my sister asked what she was talking about, my sister’s friend said “Well, I heard he was at the hospital for a CAT scan.”

After a flurry of phone calls to my parents, it turned out that one Monday morning, Dad woke up with a lot of abdominal pain and this was after about a week when he occasionally had trouble keeping food down.  He told my mom he probably should go to the doctor, and the doctor sent him in for a CAT scan.

In the interim, my mom (who suffers from anxiety, confusion and what we suspect may be early-stage Alzheimer’s disease) started panicking and calling different members of the family, to whom she reported anything from “Oh, he’s okay” to “Oh it doesn’t look good and I don’t think he’s going to make it to the end of the year.”  She even called one of her sisters and said “The doctor says he has colon cancer and he’s dying.”

Finally, my sister drove up to see them and went with them to a doctor appointment to hear the results of the scan herself. 

There is a tumor in his colon.  But they don’t yet know its pathology, and will do a colonoscopy on the 18th to get a biopsy and find out what the next step should be.  My mom, who was there for the report, was distraught and weeping.  Both parents were confused about the course of treatment.  My sister took copious notes, asked lots of questions, and did what she could to help them before she had to return home across the state and go back to work.

In the meantime, my brother in Mississippi is flying up to Nebraska on Friday and will be with my parents until December 21st. He is going to help my dad with his prep for the colonoscopy and help monitor their health and daily living needs for the next month.  Once we get the pathology report from the biopsy, we’ll know what we’re up against and can start planning for my parents’ care.

Another sister will be there starting tomorrow and will take my mom to the doctor for some anti-depressants and to help her actually get to the neurologist appointment she cancelled last month, to determine if her confusion is related to Alzheimer’s or just crippling stress.  She’ll also spend some “girl time” with my mom and help make sure Mom is comfortable and taking better care of herself.

For now, Dad has lost more than 30 pounds and can’t keep food down.  My sister had the doctor prescribe pain medication, and she did some grocery shopping for them, ordered Dad a replacement Medicare card and did some cleaning. 

I hope to spend some time with them during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day.  When I’m there, I just want time to visit, play cribbage, bake bread, take them out for coffee, go to church with them and try to make their lives as comfortable as possible. 

I cannot express adequately how touched I have been by the comments and emails I have received from readers and friends who have shared their experiences with sick parents, their struggles with these emotions, and the prayers and good thoughts aimed at my Dad from all over the world. 

Thank you.

Tonight I am empty.  There are not words. 

Where I used to see words floating in air, or feel them forcing themselves out of the ends of my fingers and crowding through my veins, tonight I have none.  There are words for worry, and words for fear, and words for unmoveable sadness that has parked itself atop my feet and freezes me in place.

But there are not light words to make a lilting narrative of the day’s silly events, the quip at work about circus bears, the side joke to a colleague about another person’s shirt, the cookie I saved from a title company appointment for Rabbit, and how she carefully broke it into pieces to share with me, with her daddy, and with her Grandpa.

I have no words that can bandage over the sinking feeling when I look at the picture my sister took of my dad, snapping the photo with her cellphone as he sat in his chair, a pinched look of pain on his face, his arms swallowed by his sleeves, his skin ashen.

I have no words that can gloss over my mother’s confusion and her panic, her late night phone calls to her sisters, her sitting on the sofa with her head on my sister’s shoulder, crying.

There are no words that can act as an antidote to the word “tumor” and no words that can neutralize the clustered, complicated and conflicting soup of emotions I’m feeling when I think of my father being sick. 

I can write about it, but the words are mechanical and perfunctory.  They don’t flow. They drop.  They thud with weight and sit like gargoyles flanking me as I stand and look down on the landscape of the changing future. 

I honestly don’t want to write tonight.  I just finished a weekend youth retreat last night and have tons of laundry to do.  In addition, I’m distracted with concern for my dad, who is pretty sick, and my mom, who is not handling any of it very well.  Suffice it to say anything I could write tonight would be horrifically maudlin and heavy handed. 

I will resume posting tomorrow.  For tonight, I’m going to read to Rabbit (we’re now on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy, a book that never fails to make me gain five pounds from eating after reading the descriptions of all the food), read by myself and then go to bed early. 

If you have some good thoughts for my dad, or prayers, or healing energy or whatever you believe in, I would appreciate if you could remember my parents in your daily meditations.  When I feel more able and when we know more about what’s happening, I will share a little more about the situation.

My Little Ramona Quimby

 I took this picture last Saturday after Rabbit took her hair out of its fancy updo from her Halloween princess costume, and she had a wild cloud of hair around her head.  When I pulled it into a side ponytail, she started mugging for the camera, and one of the shots that resulted was this one.  The first thing I thought of was that it absolutely captured her personality, and also how much it reminded me of the funny and creative little character of Ramona Quimby in the Beverly Cleary books.

This child, who sings torch songs in the shower, who stubbornly insists on doing things her own way, who imagines whole worlds for her stuffed animals….who named one of her dolls “Soapy” because it smelled like soap. 

The other day, she was reading from a library book, out loud, to her Grandpa.  READING OUT LOUD!!!!  I was so excited.  She painstakingly sounded out each word.  “Lions are the only cats that…”  and she stopped.  “Llllll….iiiiii…..vvvvv……eeee?”  “Live,” grandpa prompted. 

She started over.  “Lions are the only cats that live in……” Grandpa helped her. “G-R makes a grrrr sound.” They growled at each other playfully.  He then explained the “ou” sound as being like “oooooooo, I’m scared of lions.”  They laughed.  “P” was easy to sound out, and then he explained that the “s” at the end of the word (groups was the word) made it a plural.  He was getting way too complex about the letter “s”.  Sure enough, Rabbit smiled and started over to read the entire sentence:

“Lions are the only cats that live in SOUP!”

At the end of your life, how will you be remembered?  Will you be known as the ground that was walked on, the place everyone fell?

Will you be the leaf that fell, faded and brown and used up?

Or will you make the most of the ups and downs, the warm weather that fed you and the cold weather that stressed you, and the changes that made you beautiful and unique?

When it is my turn, I plan to be the red leaf.  I hope to stand out, to get better with age, to make an impression. And when I fall like everyone else, I hope to leave a little beauty in the middle of the ruins.

This, right here, is why autumn is my favorite season.  The blue of the sky is different, and the trees throw off their uniforms and show their true colors.  Walking out onto my front sidewalk, I can see down a vista of cottonwoods, pin oaks, sycamore and pear trees. 

I’m going to be posting photos and commentary for a few days as I find some peace and joy in my new camera.  Enjoy!

I admit, I was just at Walmart last week to pick up Halloween candy and a few groceries.  And I think we should all note that date because I am publicly announcing that to the very best of my ability unless an unavoidable situation should present itself, I will NEVER set foot in a Walmart store again.

The reason?  Their inexcusably shabby and dangerous treatment of their employees, which by extension becomes a hazard to their employees’ families and to customers who frequent Walmart.

During the H1N1 outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidelines for employers for dealing with sick employees.  This included the strong recommendation that employers be flexible with the absences of employees who needed time away to care for themselves or for sick family members.

Walmart, according to employees, has issued its own recommendations.  These include covering coughs, frequent handwashing, and “familiarize yourself with relevant company policies including those for attendance, sick pay and return to work following an illness.”

Those policies include the requirement that you request a paid sick day three days in advance, and that if you miss work (known as an “occurrence”) you receive a demerit point and forfeit 8 hours of pay. 

Single parents who work at Walmart are in serious jeopardy because not only do they have to monitor their own health, they are also at the mercy of the health of their children.  WalMart will penalize a parent who has to leave to care for a child who is sick, so many parents load their children up on fever reducing medications and cough syrup and send them to school so that (hopefully) they will not show symptoms that would prompt a school to call and require them to remove their child from school or daycare.

While this is a dilemma facing many parents, to be forced into this action by a corporation that claims to be family-friendly (and which is the largest private employer in the U.S.) seems to be a betrayal of the bitterest sort.  Walmart’s official “help” for parents whose children are sick is to urge them to have a back-up plan in place for care of their sick children. 

Either way, their priority of presence over prevention is appalling.  No matter what the parents do, Walmart’s policies virtually guarantee the rampant spread of illness from employees who show up to work sick to avoid being docked a day’s pay, or from children who remain in care or in school despite being contagious.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Walmart, and have shopped there in the past because I felt I didn’t have a choice because their prices made it easier to get by.  But by carefully comparing prices, you can shop elsewhere. 

So next time you think it’s worth shopping at Walmart just to save $20 on a total purchase of $150, think of the cost to you and society in general to be supporting this corporate behemoth.  

I would far rather spend a little extra or do without certain miscellaneous items and shop somewhere that a) treats its employees better; and b) actively participates in preserving the health and well-being of its customers and employees.

You can read more about the ridiculous and dangerous WalMart employee absence policy in this excellent article from The National Labor Committee.