Back from the Beach with Stars in my Hair

Dear Readers,

We are back from the wonderful beach, my sister and I, and we are both sad and happy to be home.  I just didn’t realize how tired I would be after a 10-day vacation with the family.  Their idea of doing nothing meant finding something to do every day that took all day long; then we had appropriately done nothing all day.  By the time the weekend came and relatives and friends with it, we were having dinners until midnight and watching the kids have the best time with each other.  Please don’t get me wrong, I had a wonderful time, I was just more tired than I knew.

So for the next 4 days, Brent set me up at the beach at 7:45am while she walked, and I wrote or just watched and listened and realized.  We both realized that I was yet again becoming somewhat short of breath after walking part way back to the house from the beach, and that oxygen really did help…..expletive here!  I think we were all hoping that three weeks after an admission for fluid in the pleura (the lining of the lung, not in the lung directly), we might get a longer reprieve from its recurrence.  But we’ll get back to this.

I want to tell a story about two things.  First, I have no double vision.  Let me repeat that.  I am not wearing any opaque lense or other device but my old glasses that have to be several prescriptions behind, and I HAVE NO DOUBLE VISION.  How about that, eh?  The brain is a miraculous thing!  I do have an appointment with the neuro-oncologist next week  .  We’ll see what he has to say.

Also, the first kid to go back to school is leaving next Tuesday…..where did the summer go?  How did this happen?  How do we help them go back to school under such unsure circumstances?  Luckily for all of us, we have each seen counselors/psychologists who are working together to really help us ask the right questions, talk to the right people at each school, make sure exit plans are in place, etc, etc, etc.  This has helped give everyone at least a semblance of a plan, and point people to go to. 

But we finally sat down with our remarkable kids and really asked them what they were afraid of, what they wanted to know, etc, etc, and it was the best talk we have ever had.  I don’t want to reveal to much of what was said, but if I never have another minute to talk to them, that would have been enough.  They feel totally surrounded by love and always have felt so, and they know they will be ok as they have each other.  We tried to give them some over-view of what might happen to me medically in the next 6 months to a year, but even the oncologist is at a loss as I am always a weird outlier (which I’ll take at this point).  The hospice nurse (wonderful) is meeting with the kids on Friday to go over what happens to a person as they are dying (breathing changes, hand, skin, how things won’t be scary, more sleeping, etc) things we doctors think everyone knows, right?  Of course they don’t!  Our children especially. 

I know how much Chip and I will miss them, and I think the feeling is mutual.  We have certainly opened the door to stay home  if returning is too hard, but I think they are both eager to try to get back to school and afraid they will miss something here.  We are working on a plan to reduce this last fear as much as we can—a short video every day, skyping every week at a particular time, whatever seems to work best.  And part of Brent’s sabbatical is to help me with this, so we may find ourselves wandering around Phily/Bethlehem and Lewiston to say, “Hello”.

We will have a “family meeting” every night until there are no kids left, as it is such a wonderful reminder of how much we share, how our values have morphed a little and passed down in such thoughtful ways, and how much we like each other.  We also talked about what we believe the universe to be.  Are we all spirits?  What about God?  This discussion really helped us believe that in some way, we will be there for each other, and we just need to listen and pay attention.  What those stars!  Again I have to say it: How lucky am I?  Really?

How about a little poetry:  how about some poetry with one of my favorite ingredients, stars.

Place and Proximity (Pattiann Rogers)

I'm surrounded by stars. They cover me completely like an invisible silk veil full of sequins. They touch me, one by one, everywhere-hands, shoulders, lips, ankle hollows, thigh reclusions.

Particular in their presence, like rain, they come also in streams, in storms. Careening, they define more precisely than wind. They enter, cheekbone, breastbone, spine, skull, moving out and in and out, through like threads, like weightless grains of beads in their orbits and rotations, their ritual passages.

They are the luminescence of blood and circuit the body. They are showers of fire filling the dark, myriad spaces of porous bone. What can be nearer to flesh than light?

And I swallow stars. I eat stars. I breathe stars. I survive on stars. They sound precisely, humming in my nose, in my throat, on my tongue. Stars, stars.

They are above me suspended, drifting, caught in the loom of the elm, similarly enmeshed in my hair. They are below me straight down in the deep. I am immersed in stars. I swim through stars, their swells and currents. I walk on stars. They are less, they are more, even than water even than earth.

They come with immediacy. They are as bound to me as history. No knife, no death can part us.

Winter Stars (Sara Teasdale)

I went out at night alone;

 The young blood flowing beyond the sea

Seemed to have drenched my spirit’s wings—

 I bore my sorrow heavily.

But when I lifted up my head

 From shadows shaken on the snow,

I saw Orion in the east

 Burn steadily as long ago.

From windows in my father’s house,

 Dreaming my dreams on winter nights,

I watched Orion as a girl

 Above another city’s lights.

Years go, dreams go, and youth goes too,

 The world’s heart breaks beneath its wars,

All things are changed, save in the east

 The faithful beauty of the stars.

Choose Something Like a Star (Robert Frost 1947)

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud --
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.

Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says "I burn."
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.

It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.


Cheers to all,
Lissa