A Nice Life.

My grandmother (whom we call "Oma") had a stroke a few days after Christmas, and then another one on my birthday. She lost feeling in her right side, and the stroke also affected her brain--causing her to be a little bit more disoriented than before. These circumstances caused us (my immediate and extended family) to alternate between sadness, diligence, and a sort of resigned comedy.

This is what I mean by that: After the first stroke, she had an awareness of her surroundings, but didn't know why she was in the hospital. "So, what happened to me?" she would ask. "Why am I here?" And someone would tell her she had a stroke, and that she would need to stay in the hospital until she recovered. "I don't know how that happened," she often said, as if it were her, or anybody's, fault. Then, a little later, she would have forgotten that she had asked that question, and ask it again.

At one point, I watched her lying in bed, looking at the ceiling. And I wondered about her consciousness in that moment. Was she in mental anguish? She had some physical pain -- did that occupy all of her thoughts, or did she also wonder at her circumstances, lament her lost spot at the kitchen table, grow impatient with the insubordination of her body? Watching a person in a hospital, and actually, hospitals in general, is a sad thing. If you're in a hospital as a patient, what else can you possibly think, if you're in possession of all your mental acuity, other than "Get me the hell out of here"?

As for the moments of "resigned comedy" I mentioned earlier, these were mainly as a result of the Phantom Bar that lay over Oma's leg. Her brain was lying to her, telling her that her leg was underneath a heavy bar. "If someone would get this bar off my leg, I might be able to get some sleep," she would say. We attempted to convince her that her leg was loose and free, partly by instructing her to look at it, but she would forget soon after. "Would you get this bar off my leg, please?" In this respect, I suppose, her brain was also insubordinate. A few of us briefly considered an alternate strategy: telling her that the bar was there because the hospital required it, and to just try to forget it. Ultimately nothing worked: the words and promises of others are nothing compared to the feelings in one's body, which is almost always true, isn't it?

Um, when it's all written out like that, it doesn't seem so funny. I guess you have to be there.

At about 10 PM on the night before I came back to California, my mother found time to come away from the hospital to make me my favorite meal. She felt bad that she hadn't found time to do so earlier . In a way, this act itself was a testament to the life Oma's lived so far: it demonstrates a simple desire to please a family member, the same desire that has all of Oma's children and grandchildren in the hospital to visit her, and in the case of my mother and aunts, to sit by her bedside at all hours through the night and day. As a mother and a person, you've done something right when all your children are there in your hours of sickness, not out of obligation but out of love.

When I said goodbye to Oma, the night before leaving, she said to me, "Have a nice life." My mom thought maybe she meant "Have a nice flight," since she repeated the latter a number of times more, but even so-- if that's the last memory I have of her, then it's certainly fitting: she said it with her beautiful smile, her voice, as always, gentle with affection.

R.I.P. "Oma".

The subtext of the preceding post is now no longer simply subtext. My grandmother passed away this morning, after suffering 3-4 major strokes over the span of about three weeks. After the last of these strokes, it was decided that transporting her to the hospital for third time in as many weeks would add further trauma to her fragile body, while accomplishing little other than confirming that she did indeed suffer a stroke. So, she was initially kept at the rehabilitation center, until it became clear that she was likely not going to recover. And that she had arrived at the end of her journey. She came back to her home (my parents'), entered hospice care, and passed while my mother was

To the Olympics, With Love.

When I was a child, I was a worrier. I don't imagine that makes me unique, but I do think I was somewhat unique in the way I was terrorized by network news broadcasts. Somber reports of people killed or murdered always went directly to my gut, and I often became deeply concerned about the probability of this kind of evil or tragedy entering my life.

When I was 10, a girl named Deanna Seifert was kidnapped while she slept at a slumber party, and found murdered later. She was 10 years old also. If memory serves, one of the pieces of evidence that cracked the case was her fingerprints, found on the inside of the back window of the van of a family friend. I remember reading about this in the newspaper, and imagining her looking out the window of that van, and I do remember also wondering if she knew she was close to the end of her life. These are not, uh, pleasant thoughts in my memory, and neither is the memory of how I often sat in bed, unable to sleep, waiting to be kidnapped.

In case you're wondering what in the heck this has to do with the Olympics, allow me to draw the connection. I don't recall the exact circumstances of this, but in some capacity, I watched the Olympics, taped from the TV. (This was probably classified at the time by my parents as sanctioned television viewing, as little else was when I was a kid). Anyway, I remember watching the Olympics, a lot. And NBC's Olympic music, the bombastic flourish that introduced and concluded their coverage (the "bah, bummm buh bum bum BUM bummmm..") became a signifier of the structure and security inside the Games. For some reason, I associated that sound with a feeling of safety, as indeed the Olympics were. Athlete after athlete, remarked upon by sure-sounded announcers, took turns at their events, doing the same safe thing over and over.

And so now, watching the 2010 Olympics, I find that NBC's musical flourishes are still associated in my subconscious with safety. The same is true, by the way, for Bob Costas and that lady who sounds like a man. They all soothe me still.

Things That Separate.

The night before I flew back to Michigan for my grandmother's funeral, I received a text from a close friend telling me that the mother of another friend of ours was in the hospital, near death from cancer.

This mother-of-my-friend was the type of mother-of-a-friend who opened her home and refrigerator and cabinets and holiday get-togethers to all of her daughter's friends. She was kind and unique, a little salty, and always in good spirits when I saw her, despite ten years of chemo. She watched TV with us, and laughed at what we laughed at, but also at jokes we made about what we laughed at. And she was more.

The day after my grandmother's funeral, I visited my friend and her mother in the hospital. It was my first experience with the arbitrary cruelty of cancer, and I admit I was not prepared. Because, in my sadness about my own grandmother, I still had a sense of peace about it; she was loved and lived a loving life. Of course I didn't want her to die, but she was honored in her death by sons and daughters and grandchildren dedicated to helping her make that passage.

Peace is harder to come by when it's cancer, robbing years and good people of them. It's not fair.

The second night I went to the hospital, the cantor from the synagogue my friend's mother attended came to sing to her. My friend's family allowed all of the people who were there to surround her hospital bed while the cantor sang the song welcoming the sabbath, as it was Friday evening.

As I experienced this ritual, my thoughts went to a similar moment during the hospice care of my grandmother. Various members of my family surrounded her bed, and sang a hymn to her, somewhat together, somewhat on-key, somewhat desperately. The obvious and most artificial difference between these two moments is that my family is Christian and my friend's family is Jewish.

I hope and believe these songs brought some peace to my grandmother and my friend's mom, but I can guarantee they brought peace to those of us around them, trying to articulate the sadness, anger, and longing we felt at what was happening, at the gratuitous apathy and necessity of death. We (people in general) divide meaning and assign virtue to beliefs and actions, and it often seems very important to do so. I relished the opportunity to observe these distinctions fall away, and see them rendered meaningless.

The songs and their words didn't matter; they merely gave expression to the crying souls, the saying of goodbye-- the last, realest one.

Time Unarmed.

"It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me, that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to a man."

"And memory."

"Yes, memory. Without that, time would be unarmed against us."

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That's a little section from one of my favorite books East of Eden. It's pretty cynical, but what if it's true? Of course it's not true, because there's happiness in the the world, but what if it is true?

It's not true. I think.

Well, but the last part must be true. Time is "armed against us" with memory, a simple enough thing to say, but one that resounds like a drum with "truth" when a person is continually haunted by a particular memory. This conundrum is explored much more artfully in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. By erasing parts of their memories, the characters are able to disassociate themselves from the pain of specific relationships. This is a tempting process for a person, depending on where he/she is in the arc of his/her "relationship-breakup recovery." So, sign me up.

I'd like to think I'm too young to be truly haunted by any memories. A few years ago, I made a series of decisions that alternated between stupid, manageable-y risky, and what I thought was best, given my limited understanding of the world. And by world I mean people. And by people I mean women. So, to be perfectly honest, I underestimated how powerful the memory would be of that which my decisions destroyed. Well, not "underestimated"-- more like "failed to anticipate." Well, actually no, not "failed to anticipate." More like "anticipated but never seriously entertained as a reality since such a reality would be so devastatingly void of humanity."

"Night In Da U.P. is a Whole Nudder Animal."

" The immense landscape ... lay like memory in her blood. "

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That's a quote by the author N. Scott Momaday, and I couldn't help but think about it as I drove through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan this summer. Two-lane highways, bordered by wildflowers, bordered further by birch and pine, and then broken by surprisingly blue lakes, and in some special places, by the The Lakes themselves (the Great ones). The Upper Peninsula is, to use a cliche, a "hidden gem." Few outside of Michigan know about it, and even Michiganders are kind of ambivalent.

I never could be ambivalent, since we drove up to the U.P. nearly every summer when I was a kid, and since I was born there. The cabin in the woods was always our destination then, so naturally the only time I paid any attention to the landscape, or to anything outside the vehicle (a prison of boredom), was when we went over the Mackinac Bridge, and also when Suzie pointed out motorcycles for me to see. All other times I ignored the grave beauty of the U.P., since I was a kid, and kids don't care about beauty.

But now when I drive through the U.P., I feel like it's "memory in my blood." The cabin in Nisula is where the memory-blood clots and collects, but it flows all along the route there. And Nisula never changes, however it appears on the surface. That is to say, my father has re-sided the cabin and put in new windows, but the wooden support post in the middle, notched where he was going to put stairs, is the same. The sound of the door latch is the same. The way the wind in the trees sounds like waves is the same. The outhouse is the same, even if it's inhabited by different bugs. The sauna (pronounced "sow-na") has the same cut-wood smell. It's all the same, even now, more than twenty years after my first memories of it.

Except there was a pleasant difference this time around: people. There were a bunch of people up there for Suzie's wedding, and some of them came to the cabin. And their mere presence challenged the legacy of the place. The cousins and aunts and kids of cousins, who know nothing or very little of the darkness there, couldn't help but fill it with light.

The darkness has to do with my father and the private demons he fought there while alone, and it's a darkness I can't help but feel. I don't know, it could be that I'm afraid of the Yooper dark still. At any rate, it was a strange and fun thing to have a bunch of people at the cabin, and to see my nephews, completely innocent of the pain that used to own the place, make it new in their hearts and minds. One of the two cried when he had to leave. 

And now when I have the opportunity, I like to show people the U.P., and take them to these places that are so important to me, and quietly beg them to see how beautiful they are, and how vital they are to me. I want to give them some of that memory-blood, so they can feel it. This is largely impossible, of course.

It's just a place to them, not a life.

Quote of the Month by Someone Not Me.

" I feel like a teenager. "

-- My six-year old nephew, upon unbuttoning his shirt and strutting around with it open.