I don't often say these things. . . (but today I will)

I don't often put a lot of personal stuff on this blog, because no one reads my posts anyway except random people from New Zealand who leave comments 12 years after I posted them. I am exhausted and frazzled and worn out after a second bout of having to wait on my husband hand and foot (literally, feed him and take his shoes off for him) after relatively minor surgery, and he will be having another round of it soon. 

What is hurtful is the lack of acknowledgement of what I am doing. I quite literally have to take his temperature, help him to the bathroom, badger him to take his meds, get past his crankiness when he needs to eat, etc. etc. I went through all this during his first hospitalization, when the whole family hopped to and saw that his every need was met. It simply amazed me how everyone came together to serve him, which was far from the case when I used to be hospitalized. 

Then I was left completely on my own, no visitors (and as usual, sending a card or flowers to acknowledge the misery I was going through made as much sense to everyone as sending me a dead carp. It just wasn't done - everyone knew that!) Even discussing it was off the table and not to be spoken of. Had it been ME on that operating table, the family response would not have been the same at all. This I know for a fact. But my illnesses weren't counted as real anyway, as I just should have pulled up my socks and carried on. Which I did, with little or no help to crawl out of a black pit of annihilating depression. And for reasons that I will never understand, I nearly lost the right to visit my  grandchildren because of the nature of my illness. 

So here is what I, the schmuck who has always been blown off by practically everyone, but especially my nearest and dearest, wrote to hand to him. Haven't done it yet, but I'm on the verge. If everything I do for him is neither needed nor wanted, what on earth has my life been all about? 51 years together should amount to more than that.

If you don't eat, even when you are NOT hungry, you will not get better. If I prepare a plate for you of nutritious food that you might like, which takes time and energy, you can at least keep it beside you for later and not wave me off with a look of dismissal. Please try to be a little bit grateful, even if you don't like or want what I am offering.

I am doing everything I can to help you get better, but I am getting near the end of it. It's all very well to tell me "just stop", but that's not what I signed on for. It's not in my nature NOT to want to look after you. You should know by now that I am a nurturer, and I do not feel it would be fair to you to just stop. But it is wearing me down when I see the lack of appreciation.

I walked a long time in heat and discomfort and pain today, BECAUSE I wanted to get things you might like, things that are easy to eat while lying down, and some things to make an actual meal which we have not had since Monday. And then you said there had been no need for me to go to the store anyway. Which meant, "You shouldn't have bothered." So what I did was completely devalued and blown off as unnecessary and unwanted. 

I do these things because I CARE, but I believe I have given far more to this family than they have ever given me, and it is beginning to catch up with me. I think that you should get your own food as far as you can, and I will make an evening meal of real food and you can eat it or not. Please, if I do go the extra mile for you, which I have always done, don't just tell me you didn't need or want it. You did need it, you continue to need it, and I will try to do what I can to maintain my sanity until you are better. 

Well-wishes from the horse's mouth

Was stunned to hear an old and dear friend had suffered a stroke. Since she was one of the people who introduced me to horses, I had to come up with something uniquely equine. This just brought it home to me, as I came home from my 64th birthday celebration: we aren't forever. Our loved ones are just as temporary. 

"I'm mentally ill, guys!" Why Carrie Fisher kicked ass

Neither of the videos I did on this subject were wholly satisfying to me, as I kept leaving out important stuff. I have no capacity to edit, and it's unscripted, so it goes down the way it goes down.

A lot of the stuff Carrie Fisher talked about was my stuff, too. I found aspects of her life history alarming, but she got through it all and would have kept on going, if she could. And she would have done a lot more good with her honesty and no-holds-barred approach. The thing is - and I have even said this to a psychiatrist - as far as mental health issues are concerned, we have not even had our Stonewall yet. We're in about 1970 now and have a lot of catching up to do. There are signs of it just starting, but I still get irritated at the way it is unfolding. No one has any imagination about this at all. Everyone still thinks in straight lines and stereotypes.

I try to hope. I saw a PBS documentary on Stonewall. An archival interview with the head of the Mattachine Society was most revealing. He defended gay rights, but insisted he wasn't gay himself: "no, I tried it once, but it's not my cup of tea." He also said, "society shouldn't feel threatened. Homosexuals will never want to marry or attempt to adopt children." He said it as if the very idea was preposterous. Which, I guess, it was.

I've written of all this before, and now I am tired of it because of the energy it takes to write, and the way it has to be "good", damn it, I mean not a mess. So now I make videos, and those aren't perfect either, but I know they come closer to expressing how I really feel. It's important that I do that, because Carrie Fisher proved to us all that life is a lot shorter than we think.

Things fall apart: thoughts on the attack on Paris

This started out as a journal entry, then evolved from there. I have been known to delete posts that I later thought were too negative, just because I'd rather not put out that kind of energy. But today it's too much. I wonder now what it takes to go on about your business being cheerful and saying, "Yes, isn't it too bad." The feeling is, "if we feel gloomy the terrorists have won" and "everything happens for a reason" (!). This is about as helpful as saying "crying won't bring him back" and other stone-hearted, sappy bromides that are supposed to be so damn helpful. Our grief is being hijacked along with everything else. Put on a happy face. The problem is, I just can't do it any more.

November 14/15

Horrible terrorist attack in Paris yesterday. Out of the blue, seemingly. This stuff is popping up everywhere and makes me feel sick inside, like climate change. I wonder about the future, what kind of hell it might be for the grandkids, such wonderful souls. Irreplaceable. It could be a worse hell than the world has ever seen. People say things like, “oh, the human race has always kept going no matter what happens,” as if that's some kind of insurance policy against disaster.

Because something has been (more or less) true in the past does NOT mean it will be true in the future: in fact, the more time goes by, the higher the odds it will change. Example: "I’ve smoked cigarettes for 40 years and it hasn’t hurt me." That means you can go on for another 40 and be OK! It means that if it hasn’t happened YET, it will never happen, and CAN never happen, which is the stupidest piece of flawed non-logic I’ve ever seen. But I see it every single day, and people believe it, blandly, sticking a happy face on atrocity, which only leaves the door open for it to continue. It’s just a little thing called denial.

I never know how to get my head around all this, or how to feel. Things seem to be coming apart. When will it end? Nuclear war, I think. As if that threat is no longer there! Then the climate will truly collapse - it won't take more than a tiny nudge - and there will be no food. No food is already a huge one, along with where to live when everything is underwater. No food means riots and people tearing each other’s throats out to survive. Humans will revert to the pack mentality from which they sprang, devolving from apes into something somewhat less than that.

I have a purpose in my life, I am very clear about it and have no doubt of it, and that is to be love to my grandchildren. BE love, not just show love. This is nothing grand, but I don’t have to think about it either. It is as natural as breathing and has been the crown of my life after decades of wretched struggle. So many times I have wanted to end my life, but it looks as if it may be taken out of my hands.

At these times, anxious times, I look at my health and the fact that things have not been quite right for a long time. I had abdominal symptoms, quite severe ones that drove me to the doctor, something I only do under duress because I hate doctors. As usual, her attitude was dismissive, but she did delegate, as all doctors do now. I saw a gynaecologist, a urologist, a gastroenterologist, had two CT scans, two mammograms, a colonoscopy, and they supposedly found nothing. More than three years after being told my colonoscopy was completely normal (though my doctor was supposed to “go over the results” with me, an appointment which turned out to be totally useless because she said “there’s nothing to talk about”, as if this was a waste of her time), she was leafing through my chart and said, “Oh.”

Now, you never want to hear your doctor say, “Oh.”

The “oh” turned out to be the results of the colonoscopy. The polyp they found, the one they never told me about and which my doctor either didn't notice or didn't bother to mention, was not a large one, and not cancerous, but these things can turn cancerous in the future. Other things were wrong inside me that may or may not be a problem later, and which might lead to heavy bleeding or perhaps something worse than that.

My colonoscopy was not completely normal, as the technicians told me it was, but my doctor vagued me away because she didn’t really bother to look at the results.

OK, I don’t want to be one of these cranky old ladies who goes on and on about her health. For the most part I don’t talk about it at all because deep down, I don’t think I have much time left. In only a few months, without conscious effort, I have lost well over 30 pounds, and most of it dropped off me in almost alarming fashion. I was weight-obsessed from age 15 on, though I was never more than 15 or 20 pounds overweight (considered huge by the standards of the day). Thus began a siege on my body that left my metabolism permanently confused, if not completely fucked.

I ruined my body, in a sense, meaning there was a lot of fluctuation, some of it quite dramatic, and some really stupid diets, one of which left me 15 pounds underweight. I’ve never had so many compliments on my appearance in my life (oh, wait – there was that manic episode, the one that nearly killed me, when I supposedly looked 10 years younger! And certainly, if you look ten years younger, you no longer need to keep taking those stupid pills.)

So now my weight plummets, just from cutting out junk food. It’s still going down. I feel a vague nausea and my appetite is definitely down. So, do I go back to that doctor and say, “I’ve lost weight”, especially when she warned me I needed to lose weight and was verging on obesity? She'd probably say, "You look marvelous," and tell me there's nothing wrong.

This is why I don't want to go. Do I invite that familiar leaning forward and peering at me with puckered brow, then suddenly sitting up straight and saying in a decisive voice, “Nope. Can’t find anything”?

No.

Sometimes I think (to try to connect these thoughts together) that all of this is a death-march, that we just have to sing our marching songs as we go our merry way. I mainly want to stay around to help with the grandkids, if they survive. I am not yet sure of the nature of the disaster. Climate change experts are saying it could happen more catastrophically than anyone expects. It could all come apart, suddenly give way, as it seems to be already. Right now denial holds it all tenuously together, so that every extreme flood, every sinkhole swallowing up houses, every freak snowstorm or raging forest fire after a baffling drought is considered a separate event.

I get a queasy feeling from it all. When the food runs out. When the terrorists come HERE, not to France, not even to the United States but here. Don’t think about it, your health is bad enough. Die now? Might be a good idea, but it would upset my family, I think. 

I am too much of a coward to face the kind of world that is coming. So if “something” wants to carry me off, maybe it’s a lot more benevolent than it seems on the surface. What will be will be, but we always assume the people who mean the most to us will be spared. And that is the greatest uncertainty of all.

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Signifying. . . nothing?

Medical stuff is a poor topic, I know, but lately I’ve become  preoccupied with it. And this in spite of the fact that I hate seeing doctors and very rarely feel that I am being listened to or taken seriously.

I’m in that grinder of tests that everyone is fed into when there are any sort of symptoms at all.  So far I’ve been safely spat out the other side, given the all-clear. I WANT this to be over with and I WANT to feel entirely OK.

And I don’t.

I won’t recount what the “symptoms” are (and how I hate that word, as it implies “this person must really be sick”, when the “issue” is finding out if I am even sick at all.). They’re boring, “signifying nothing”, as Hamlet used to say on one of his bad days. But whatever they are, or aren’t, they won’t go away, not yet anyway, though I know they will be gone tomorrow morning and never be back.

I can’t go in. That’s what I told my husband today. I just can’t. The thought of “going in” stirred up an ice-storm of panic that sucked me up into some sort of whirling white vortex, and all I wanted to do was get OUT. I haven’t called and I haven’t made an appointment because I know there is nothing wrong with me, so there is no point.

Then how to ignore the swirling forces of “whatever” that I can’t seem to get away from? It’s probably nothing. I’m not bleeding to death, hey! I can walk. Sometimes I find it hard to walk fast however and don’t want to, or have to sit down.

I never get sick, and if I do they throw me out anyway. I am never listened to. This is one of these dysphoric, self-annihilating realizations that jams my face down in the mud of mortality. Have I had a good life? Have I felt wanted? And just what have I contributed, anyway?

It could have been worse, I suppose, could have ended me in my mid-30s, though I jumped clear just in time before the locomotive ran me over. But in the midst of the high of turning 50, at the very peak of my happiness and productivity, it happened again. This one was truly wicked and seemed to indicate demonic forces that I could barely grapple with. At the same time, I completely lost my faith.

I understand self-destruction, too well, but I refuse to do it. I’ve been pared down pretty far in the past few years, though you’d never know it to look at me (for I’ve gained at least blblblblt lbs.) I cling to the tattered remnants of my ambition, realizing that the playwright Clifford Odets was so so right when he said, “Success is the jinni (genie: playwrights can't spell) that kills.”

Another playwright from the same era, George S. Kaufman (whose wife Beatrice was BFF with Oscar Levant) said, “What makes you, unmakes you.” If you understand this at all, then you are already unmade.

But aren’t we ALL unmade in the end, like some great tumbled tangled psychic bed? Trees fall and rot, and so do we, though the medical profession tries very hard to beat back the flames (sorry for the mixed metaphor). I wonder why we scramble so hard to stay alive for as long as we possibly can.  Don’t we all end up in pretty much the same place?

I know that sounds bleak, and I would gladly give an arm and a leg and both kidneys to anyone in my very small, very close, very dear circle of family. I wouldn’t even have to think about it. But I just can’t see it in general. As Charlie Brown once said (speaking of great playwrights of the 1920s), “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.”

I’ve missed the comrades who’ve fallen, and there have been too many of them: wise Gerry the benevolent patriarch, quickly consumed by cancer; beloved Peter, the best friend I ever made in two seconds, who seemed to be gone in another two; Glen the journalist/poet who fled from the psych ward and committed suicide; Ken the devoted cynic and constant presence in my church choir, who literally dropped dead in his tracks. Then – weirdly – Kathleen, who never should have died at all, who cannot be dead because it just isn’t possible.

There’s another one or two in there, and I can’t remember who they were. Now this is weird. I thought there were six, at least. How could I forget a whole person?

I just recently started nosing around in the work of Dylan Thomas again, remembering that he sometimes wrote “shape poems” (concrete poems that took the actual shape of objects or whatever-the-hell. Childish, really.) All I could find in his poetic imagery was mortality, and more mortality, rot and death, mixed in with some pretty ghastly sexual images. The guy ended at 39, self-ended I mean, awash in alcohol: the innocent baby-bird look of his youth had grown puffy, slur-eyed, deathward, with a large bulb for a nose. A tragic or pathetic or even disgusting clown. Poets seem to off themselves early, one way or another, hating life, seeing through it, or hating themselves. Robert Frost was one of the few who escaped that fate, though I remember reading somewhere that his son committed suicide.

So what does all this have to do with not wanting to call the fucking doctor?

I know I will call eventually, or maybe I will not, because nothing’s wrong anyway. I’m just all caught up in this stuff and have to get away from it. I am now in my 60^th year, for fuck’s sake, and though I don’t feel old, time has whipped by in such a blur that it shocks me sometimes. I was sitting in a restaurant across from my son at my birthday dinner last night, and thought to myself: he looks almost middle-aged. His hair is thinning and he has lines around his eyes and mouth. He looks great, is very buff, bulky with muscle as he never was in his boyhood when he generally got sand kicked in his face. He’s a superb athlete who has a good chance of reaching 90 because his habits are so much better than mine. But still. A receding hairline? I remember the night I gave birth to him.

And here are these two Nordic-looking blonde grandgirls who surely must have inherited their startlingly blue eyes and cornsilk hair from my side of the family, though several generations removed: I just helped push the blonde genes along. I noticed Erica’s hands as she did a magic trick with crayons, and I was shocked to note that they look like her father’s, which look like mine.

Well, you can’t bail on THAT, can you? My time with them is timeless, a complete absorption in giggly fun and a wash of unconditional love. Do I need to stay around to be the conduit for such love (for surely I am not the “source” but only the conveyor)? Or, like everyone else, will I stay because of the same primal urge to survive that has overpopulated the earth to the point of near-catastrophe?

Post-blog: Actually, I think it was Macbeth, that "signifying nothing" bit I mean.  I've always liked the Scottish play, and the "life's but a walking shadow" speech is just about the only Shakespeare I can recite by heart. I'm the life of the party, can't you tell?