Tag Archives: Grief

Afterwords

27 Friday Jan 2012

Posted by in Life at Home, Soul Care

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Huddled around the table were men close to my mother-in-law’s heart — my husband, two sons and Janice’s husband Ray —  with Amy and I making six.  It was our first dinner without her.  So I kept numbers small — in hope of making conversation easier.

The dinner menu was less important that the diners, though I did spend hours in the kitchen trying to make the most mouth-watering meal I could.  Not only did I make Ray’s favorite Zucchini Squash Casserole but I made sure to avoid any dish that would remind too much of Janice.  It was way too early to serve any of Janice’s favorite foods, like the chicken-fried steak she heavily favored.

Our dinner conversation wasn’t memorable.  Just the usual mish-mash of words spoken in response to questions about how work was going or something or other about the weather or how Kyle’s truck Betsy was running.  Followed up, of course, by the standard fare of favorite topics like how the Pokes were doing or how the Sooners were doing or how the Thunder was doing.

We failed to talk of how we were doing.

After dinner, conversation was much the same.  Until Ray began talking about new routines at home.  Until I responded by saying something about Janice.

Wait.  Did I just say ‘Janice’ aloud?

Yes. And though I said it as natural as breathing, I don’t recall what words preceded Janice’s name and what words followed after.  I only remember saying, “Janice.”  And then the silence that swallowed up her name.

But I also remember what happened after the silence: I remember how Ray’s surprise softened into something like relief, and that he began to share a few stories about Janice that were important to him.

It was good, I think, for Ray to talk of Janice.  And it felt good to hear Ray’s talk of Janice.  To speak and hear of her was the best we could do.  Why it out-shined everything else about the evening — even that squash casserole I troubled myself over.

Ray’s Zucchini Squash Casserole

Total baking time:   9o minutes at 350.

2 large tomatoes or a 14.5 oz can of petite diced tomatoes (if canned, drain well)
1/4 cup brown sugar
Salt (to taste)
2/3 cup of chopped onion
2 medium zucchini squash – sliced
Grated Velveeta Cheese — 2 cups
Home-made croutons (see recipe below)
Grated Parmesan Cheese

Slice tomatoes over bottom of an ungreased 9×9 casserole dish.  Sprinkle brown sugar and salt over tomatoes.  Add 1/2 of onion and 1/2 of zucchini.  Cover with 1/2 of grated Velveeta cheese.  Repeat layers.  Cover with foil or casserole lid and cook for 1 hour at 350.  After one hour of baking, remove foil, drain off excess water in casserole (leaving some liquid), add croutons and Parmesan cheese to top of casserole.  Return to oven (uncovered) for final 1/2 hour of baking.

Home-made Croutons:

4 slices of bread, cubed
Approx. 1/3 cup butter
garlic salt to taste

Sauté bread cubes in butter and garlic salt in a skillet over medium heat until toasted.

By the light of the moon

08 Thursday Dec 2011

Posted by in Home Restoration, Life at Home

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Is truth told by the light of the moon?

Does it unfold as our dreams play out before our inner eye each night, while we lie powerless to change its outcome?  Or as art emulates life, can it get buried in bits of dialogue spoken on the screen, by one featuring the light of full moons and acting by Cher, Nicholas Cage and Olympia Dukakis?

As I breathe in the shrinking December daylight, I cannot shake off certain scenes from Moonstruck, that dark comedy released in the late eighties, that I viewed for the second time while lying in bed last month.  It haunts me.  And I think that maybe I need to watch it again.  Then I think — no — what’s the need?  Already, the lines of the screenplay, weighted by their heavy subject matter — that fish for truth about our living and our dying –  live within me.

Rose: Why do men chase women?
Johnny: Well, there’s a Bible story… God… God took a rib from Adam and made Eve. Now maybe men chase women to get the rib back. When God took the rib, he left a big hole there, where there used to be something. And the women have that. Now maybe, just maybe, a man isn’t complete as a man without a woman.
Rose: [frustrated] But why would a man need more than one woman?
Johnny: I don’t know. Maybe because he fears death.
[Rose looks up, eyes wide, suspicions confirmed]
Rose: That’s it! That’s the reason!

No, my husband of twenty-five years is not chasing another woman, unless one counts his dying mother.  But if Johnny and Rose are right that men chase women out of fear of death, it makes me wonder whether “chasing women” is another way of saying, “chasing life.”  That is, as long as we’re on the move, as long as we don’t become too settled, too set in our ways and likings, that as long as we make whatever changes we can to keep life from going stale  — all will be well.  Because we will be.

And when the time comes when we’re not, as for my mother-in-law, Janice, then what?  Perhaps then, we answer the question in our own ways, maybe we feel for the answer in the dark until we know its rightness. Because unwell and far too settled, last week Janice was unhappy at being home and wished to return to the hospice center — and after arriving at hospice, she wanted to know when she could go home. And lying in a physical state of in-between — not well enough for one yet too well for the other, Janice now lives in a nightmare;  it began Monday, with her move to a nice nursing home — if such a thing exists.  And yesterday, she looked at my husband, her son, and wished to know what in the world she’d done to deserve THIS?  And after uttering her line, and listening to his too rational reply, she asked to be put into a wheel chair so she could move about — and not done with her asking, she requested a chance to stand upon her own two legs — maybe to prove once for all that she was strong enough to return home for Christ’s sake — in spite of not having done so since the sun shone last September.

Loretta Castorini: [after seeing La Boheme] That was so awful.
Ronny Cammareri: Awful?
Loretta Castorini: Beautiful… sad. She died!
Ronny Cammareri: Yes.
Loretta Castorini: I was surprised… You know, I didn’t really think she was gonna die. I knew she was sick.
Ronny Cammareri: She had TB.
Loretta Castorini: I know! I mean, she was coughing her brains out, and still she had to keep singing!

We live a life of do or die, even while dying, I suppose.  We keep busy, we keep changing, we keep pushing the physical and mental boundaries of what’s possible, because to do so signifies life.  We move on  — if not to a new woman or man of our dreams — then maybe to a new house or to a new garden  — or even, a new shade of paint, as I’m doing in my dining room this week.  In the months leading up to our move, I painted this room three different shades of blue.  Had our moving date allowed, I would have painted a fourth time — because I knew then number three didn’t suit either me or the house.

So what does painting have to do with Janice or thoughts on life and dying?  Oh, who but God knows, except that for some reason, painting and mourning have gone together in my life ever since I lost Mother four years ago.  And as it continues to be my chosen form of grief therapy —  this time around the dining room — I’ve settled upon a dark shade of paint to compliment the antique china Mother gave me long ago  — a midnight, bluish gray complemented by a soft white trim– and tomorrow, when I finish the room, my husband and I will fill our china cabinet for the first time since moving in last June.  And to do so will make me feel as anyone unburdened by thoughts of life and death would feel — as long as the distraction lasts.  And the room will be finished.

Ronny Cammareri: This was painted by Marc Chagall. And, as you can see, he was a very great artist.
Loretta Castorini: It’s kind of little gaudy, don’t you think?
Ronny Cammareri: Well, he was havin’ some fun.

Yes, it’s about having fun, all this changing and fussing with paint shades and moving into new houses and growing up as an artist or growing up as a person — it keeps one young, it keeps one from growing old in spirit.  It keeps life vital — and not just on the surface, I think — and it works until it doesn’t, until reality rips away our protective bubble-wraps of doing.

Rose: I just want you to know no matter what you do, you’re gonna die, just like everybody else.
Cosmo:  Thank you, Rose.

Though Rose is right, who wishes to hear it. Who wants to talk of death while living it up?  Or even living horizontal.  Watching the scene play out, it doesn’t take a mystic to discern Cosmo isn’t grateful to hear Rose’s truth.  Nor was Dad, as I think about it, when he first heard the idea of dying linked to himself — a few days before he passed.   Are you kidding me, his eyes seemed to shout, growing big in his sunken face.  Perhaps the closer we get to death, the less desire we have to talk of it.

So about painting — did you know that where one wishes to be spot on and true, it’s best never to paint by the light of the moon?

Odd One Out

27 Thursday Oct 2011

Posted by in In the Garden, Life at Home

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It feels odd to be out of the garden today — and for rain to be there in my stead.  Gentle.  And steady — as if we weren’t deep in the midst of a year-long drought.  The very one – if weather fortune-teller predictions come true — that will continue through winter.

I brought the key limes in last night for the second time this season.  Temperatures fell below forty-eight degrees — and what is mild conditions for most is hostile to these thin-skinned trees; no use telling them tonight’s forecast is mid-thirties since forty-eight or thirty-eight spells the same dire end — and what are a few degrees anyway, since they’ve been saved from Jack’s frosty fingers of death.  The sad truth is that they will never outgrow their need for saving.  That come cold weather, they will always need a helping hand to stay alive.  No matter how big they get.

Being in retreat and offering retreat to frigid lime trees from the very place that has been my retreat seems — in the spirit of the day — odd.  Because, for better or worse  the garden has been my private escape-hatch when too much about everyday life has felt hostile; family feuds here and there, that few (if any) could explain to outsiders.  Even those mired in the moment and history of the relationship find it a mystery.

On one side of the tree I’ve observed hot anger take flight in hateful words launched as deadly cruise missiles — while on the other I’ve observed the cutting of life ties from a surreal silence, the barest of words offered between two at odds.  Was the first rooted in jealousy over the attention of a dying loved one, as some have said?  And can it be the second began in forgotten cupcakes for a birthday party?  Oh, who but God knows?  All I know, is that after months of hurt, it’s probably good that some things remain a mystery.  Because what if it was really about forgotten cupcakes?

All this brings to mind a Robert Frost poem I first ran across in college that I didn’t then understand.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Does anyone need to hear that I “get” the poem very well these days?

And does anyone find irony in that this truth was written by a poet named “frost.”

Of course, life is full of ironies.  Life is full of finding truth in odd places — like retreating from a retreat to stay alive, as in the case of my too-big-for-their-pots lime trees.  And two, that a family feud is never just about two at odds, because it ripples out like a whirlpool to catch those beyond its edge in its spiral, so that everyone at family gatherings walks on egg shells, doing their darned best to pretend all is well when it’s not.  And three, that it’s not just lime trees that are too thin-skinned and in need of saving from the hostile conditions they find themselves in.  And that few, if any, choose to jump into the midst of their squabble — perhaps out of good intentions, they see it as none of their business — yet, why is it, that even now,  I hear these words of Jesus’ that beg otherwise: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”

Did I just play the Jesus card?  Well, I suppose those Southern Baptist roots are still down there under the soil somewhere.  But if my words feel blunt, they hold no anger.  If anything, I’m only weary.  And oddly enough I’m grateful too — for the silver lining that’s come with this round of rain clouds — both the life lessons learned and the joy experienced in watching the beauty of the garden unearth from hard clay.

Sometimes I wonder if the size of my garden grew in proportion to the size of my sorrow.  Had my year been happier, would my garden have been smaller?  What I know for sure is that the garden has had her way of reducing me to size:  after a day of gardening I know the world doesn’t revolve around me and petty arguments and that some day, we’ll both be reduced to a speck of dirt.

In spite of disrupting my too-much-to-get-done tight garden schedule, today’s rain  — along with this outpouring — is a welcomed relief.  I pray it’s not temporary.