Sabbatical

Sabbatical
Sabbatical!!

Monday, September 30, 2013

Sabbatical, sabbatical, and sabbatical



I’ve been thinking about a sabbatical for a long time.  What does the word
really mean? Sabbatical, from the Merriam-Webster on-line Dictionary, says, “ a
period of time during which someone does not work at his or her regular job
and is able to rest, travel, do research, etc.”  A friend also told me that at her
school, they believe a sabbatical is a, “gift of time.”

Isn’t that nice, a gift of time?  This sabbatical is a gift of time for us sisters to know each other and learn how be with life and death.  We are so lucky to have this time together as we are five years apart, and we really haven’t known each other terribly well until our father died several years ago.  I mean how well do you know someone who is in eighth grade when you are a senior?  Not well, I believe.  So here Brent was, making a very quick decision about a sabbatical without knowing everything about it. Me too, but it sounded great to me!

We didn’t think about her family much, and what her husband would be doing for this year.  Her kids are both either in college or out trying to make it in musical theatre, and that adds a lot of stress to my big sister, as these are very tough jobs to get.  Her son (23) and daughter (college senior) are both astonishingly good, but I am told everyone else out there is too, and that this is a particularly difficult road to hoe.  We didn’t think about my family, and how much or how little time we would need as our insular selves; the 4 of us talking, thinking, reacting, crying, needing each other, etc.  

Brent and I had thought we would have many months of going on bucket list trips to Wyoming, Scotland, Carmel, San Francisco, Vermont, Maine, and Philly, among others.  But when she got here in May, she and everyone else close to me thought I was dying with that first medication error, and plans got sort of derailed.  What about a sabbatical at home?  We hadn’t really thought this way.  We really hadn’t thought any way at all!  We hadn’t thought about whether I’d be too sick to travel; we hadn’t thought about how to pull our mother, who is almost 90, into the mix as she lives here in Cleveland and is having her own problems with what’s happening in her family and her life.

Last week, I had a reading by I guess I’d call her a psychic/artist, and with only knowing Brent’s birthday, she suggested that Brent must be present with me now.  According to her sign, Pisces, she is in a place of, “love, peace, and family.”  In other words, she needs to be with me because there is a piece only she can fill.  We also didn’t think about how wonderful it would be to see the kids and Chip realize what it was that Brent was adding to our mix, and they moved a little sideways and upside down to accommodate her, and there she was, an integral part of us all.  She has been an insightful and wonderful addition to our lives.  Who knew?

No really, when Brent got here she locked some inner key that closed the loop for me and created a safe space amidst the storm.  I’m not even sure what exactly it is, but it is the little things that neither my lovely husband (who has leaned into everything with a passion) or my kids (who are doing the absolutely right thing with love and constant checking in) can or should do.  She is there before I need her with the right thing in hand, an expedition when I have had enough and the tiredness and pain are showing, etc, etc, etc.  I hope and pray I would do the exact same thing with her as she continues to do for me.  Again, how lucky could I be.

And to make things more fun, we are keeping track of the ways we differ, because our tastes are so similar, we could be the same person.  Ok, she likes broccoli flowerets and I like the stems.  She hates brussel sprouts and I love them, and she thinks pumpkin pie is......slimy.  There is just no answer to that.  


Anyway, we are learning to morph this sabbatical time into something we can do relatively close to home and still learn and perhaps write that sci-fi book we’ve been talking about but not doing for years.  “Big sister, thank you for all your doing.  I am overwhelmed and so grateful, but stems are sooo much better!”

How about some poetry?  Most of these have come to me from across the internet as I am sitting in a beautiful room in a glorious bed and breakfast in Amish country on my birthday!

Like You (Roque Dalton, translated by Jack Hirschman)
Like you I love love, life, the sweet smell of things, the sky- blue landscape of January days.
And my blood boils up and I laugh through eyes that have known the buds of tears. I believe the world is beautiful and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.
And that my veins don’t end in me but in the unanimous blood of those who struggle for life, love, little things, landscape and bread, the poetry of everyone.


The Task (Jane Hirshfield)

It is a simple garment, this slipped-on world.
We wake into it daily - open eyes, braid hair -
a robe unfurled
in rose-silk flowering, then laid bare.

And yes, it is a simple enough task
we've taken on,
though also vast:
from dusk to dawn,

from dawn to dusk, to praise, and not
be blinded by the praising.
To lie like a cat in hot
sun, fur fully blazing,

and dream the mouse;
and to keep too the mouse's patient, waking watch
within the deep rooms of the house,
where the leaf-flocked

sunlight never reaches, but the earth still blooms.


Fall Song (Mary Oliver)

Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time's measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay - how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.

 Cheers to all!
Lissa

Thursday, September 5, 2013

A Magnificant Summer (with Journeys and Peaches!)




I am sitting here from my seat in the transfusion center as I get two units of red cells and a pack of platelets.  I have been feeling so tired, that I am fatigued before I get up and exhausted just watching the tennis!  So I am hoping a little blood may perk me back up again to enjoy this beautiful week we are supposed to have!  Now I have talked about this before, but nothing moves quickly in the transfusion center.  My nurse today (usual one on vacation, bless her) is a talker, I’ll tell you.  We got the IV in, finally, over a long discussion what to do in Syria, and then a longer talk about avocados as dinner food.  You can imagine that the discussion took awhile……

But here I am with someone’s gorgeous, barn-door-red blood, pumping into my tired looking arm, and I have time to write.  I want to write about the magnificent summer I have had.  Truly, had I not experienced it, I wouldn’t have believed it.  Starting in May, we had kids come home especially worried as I had had a significant medication error that made me throw up and not drink and get into a terrible cycle that we all thought was going to be my end.  Just as the kids began to come home, the oncologist and the new weekend hospice nurse saved my life, shifted my meds, and literally hours later, I was up and well again.  We will call it save number one. 

Then I had the opportunity to really talk with the kids about what happened, and they had the good sense to want to talk to a therapist who was already working with us.  I have to thank my lucky stars, and I do every day, that our kids are the ages that they are (22, 19).  They were able to reach out to us and to our support system and ask about life and death.  Also, our hospice nurse who comes once a week is such a pistol and wealth of knowledge, that she was also able to sit down with them without the parents and answer the questions that they so needed answers to—like what does death look like?  What will her body look like?  Will it be scary, will she just go to sleep, etc etc etc.  Things we all want to know, don’t we?  I want to know them too, but I know I will be kept comfortable and pain-free.  Those are the things I want to make sure of.



The summer went so fast!  I had one more scary incident that I have already described, but that seemed as if it might be my last.  We all missed the signs of fluid in my lungs, and by the time it was figured out, I was totally loopy and had to be admitted.  Now we will know the signs and symptoms of this complication, but at the time, we didn’t.  And again, this hospitalization allowed us to be totally transparent with the kids, which we realized we hadn’t always been doing.  I think it is especially hard to tell everything when all you want, all you yearn for in this life, is to allow your kids to have a relatively normal life full of everything good.  Well, that’s ridiculous, isn’t it.  In fact, what I see in these kids is a tough kind of wisdom derived from the mess we call our lives.  I don’t think we move forward much in life unless we have experienced failure and sorrow in some shape or another, and I think most of us do.  Then comes the fullness and happiness, I think, and the poetry, if we can find it.



Finally, the kids demanded we have family meetings.  These consisted of talking around the dinner table about relevant, cancer and death-related topics if there were some.  We had the wonderful good fortune of having the kids at the dinner table almost every night, but we hadn’t really been talking much about these topics.  But as soon as the dam was broken, we had truthful and thoughtful discussions about not covering things up anymore, and how do we all plan for them to go back to school in the face of all this uncertainty, etc.  As you can imagine, the discussions were hard, but so good, too.  Just being able to say the words “death” and “what comes next” and “Dad, will you be able to handle the mom-stuff?”  And more.  What a relief to be able for all of us to talk this way.

And guess what I learned?  I learned that my kids feel safe and surrounded by the love of so many people.  They understand what is happening to the best of their ability and know they have each other, Chip, and a whole future in front of them.  I am amazed by them, and I am so thankful for this summer that allowed us time to say how much we love each other and to say a gentle goodbye too.  I don’t have my son to throw me over his back and haul me upstairs any more, as he has gone back to college, nor do I have my beautiful daughter who helped me laugh aloud at myself and at her, but I have my amazing sister who has taken a sabbatical just to help me get to my death while first pushing me towards an outing every few days (Brent, you are a superstar! ), and my  husband who has leaned in to this whole process, loved me through it, and made my outdoor living space a wonderland.  And to all the artists, poets, friends, and colleagues and the mix of all those things, thank you too for this summer; you have and will always be a godsend!

How about some poetry:

This just came across my  email from Panhala: 

The Journey (Mark Strand)

A journey continues until it stops
A journey that stops is no longer a journey
A journey loses thing on its way
A journey passes through things, thing pass through it
When a journey is over, it loses itself to a place
When a journey remembers, it begins a journal
Which is a new journey about an old journey
A journey over time is different from a journey into time
An actual journey is into the future
A reflective journey is into the past

***
A journey always begins in a place called Here
Pack your bags and imagine your journey
Unpack your bags and imagine your journey is done

***
If you're afraid of a journey, don't buy shoes


( This next, a particular favorite, and the peaches this summer have been so succulent and full of wonder)

From Blossoms (Li-Young Lee)

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned towards
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succuluent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background, from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

I’d say, even if death is around, we can still live this way!
Cheers to all,

Lissa