Arms full of flowers...

     It is early morning…and it is raining.  Once again, I am on my way to visit my grandmother's room in the hospital.  Early dawn in this place is eerily silent.  The corridor lights of the floor have not yet been lit.  I walk into the darkness, the soles of my shoes squeaking like the windshield wipers of the passing cars outside.  The morning's palest manifestation of light and shadow spills in through the cracks of the windows, casting melancholy in its wake.

    I enter her room hearing the empty sounds that I hear each day: the respirator keeping rhythm like a ragged timepiece in measured expirations that signify a pulse, but really call out to me the ebb of a heartbeat.  The suction of the nasogastric tube and the intravenous lines giving out occasional alarm bursts caution my hope. This breathing I hear is artificial.  An acrid smell hangs in the room and wondering for only a moment if it is against hospital rules, I open the windows.  The raindrops splatter the windowsill and my face, but the sound of the rain outside the room is somehow soothing.  As the fresh air pours into the room, I remember that if it weren't for the sadness that the mother of my father weren’t here, in this bed, dying, that it is springtime in my Florida home.

    In this bed lies an elderly comatose woman, her long gray hair tumbled across the pillow, the lines of her face tell the unconscious narrative of a life. 

Finally, I do not wonder who she was.  The expectant lift of her brow is gone now.  I can see the tiny blue lines in her skin.  She looks worn and tired, but the remnants of a former beauty still remain.  And with my twenty-something year old eyes, I realize that the beauty of her youth has really given way to a deeper kind.
 

    While she lived, she was so strong, always able and filled with endurance and courage that always came just when she needed it.  Her frailness now in this bed, frightens me.  Medicine offers nothing to help her now.  The stroke was massive.  I think how she would hate this.  No voice.  No control.  As I look at her in this unwanted sleep, I remember that I am an extension of her.  I am reminded of my own mortality.
 

    I begin to do the things the nursing staff does not do, things that would be important to her.  I wipe her face with a warm cloth.  I comb her hair that has become disheveled, taking care that I do not pull too hard and that it is away from her face.  I put lotion on her cheeks.  They are dry, but smooth for an aged woman.  I adjust her gown and fluff her pillow as much as I can without lifting her head, sometimes talking to her, wondering if she hears.  I try anyway.  I tell her things I always meant to tell her.  I tell her that I love her, trying to remember if I have lately.  And inside my head, angry at myself for not saying it every time I saw her.

    Her name was Joan Marie LeClaire Kennedy.  Once she was a beauty queen.  As a child, I had seen a picture of a young woman in a drop-waist dress, twenties style, with bobbed, slightly-waved hair.  She was pretty, smiling, with her arms full of flowers, and her eyes full of dreams.

    Born in Kankakee, Illinois, she went to Tampa, Florida with her contractor father, mother and sisters, May, Blanche and Mary Louise.  In 1928, she won the Miss Tampa Beauty Pageant.  Soon after, she caught the eye of then County Commissioner Harry P. Kennedy, the grandson of Thomas Pugh Kennedy who helped to found the city of Tampa.  Despite a an age difference and some raised eyebrows, she married him.  It was scandalous.  It was fabulous.

    Their marriage lasted more than twenty years when Harry had a heart attack and died leaving her alone with their three children.  The Depression had not passed over Harry.  His fortune had been wiped out.  Joan Marie was completely broke. 

   

     While she had always painted for her own pleasure, she found that she could actually sell some of her paintings.  Her seemingly innate business acumen helped in making some real estate transactions and soon she built a house next to the apartment building she and Harry owned along Bayshore Boulevard in Tampa.  Living there, she managed her small property.  It wasn't much, but it gave her the financial independence that enabled her to pay their debts.

    Joan Marie loved the city and being outdoors.  And as the years passed, her face became a familiar one in the downtown bustle of old Tampa.  She was growing older as the city did.  She loved to tell stories--all kinds--of growing up within the walls of a convent; of old Tampa and its characters; of the grandfather I had never known and of my father as a child.  She loved red hair, French history, Baroque and Impressionist art, antiques and mostly, with her artist's eye, all her "pretty children," which meant all of us, her l3 grand-children.  This was my grandmother.  This was where I came from.  And here she lay in a hospital bed as I stood next to her and tried with my mind's might to will her to stay here--with us.

    The rattle of the hospital breakfast cart is outside the door now.  The smell of hot biscuits drifts in through the door and it is time for me to go.  Once again, as every day she has been here, I kiss her forehead, hold her hand and say goodbye--just as though she hears.  It is the last time I will see her.  She died the following morning.

It was Mother’s Day and momentous for me in a thousand ways. I saw my father, the bravest, toughest man I knew, weep like a child. It was the first time.  I saw him in a new way, but with the all the tenderness a daughter carries for her father.  Now I realized in earnest how he was more than a father.  He was a son too.

    Joan Marie was my grandmother.  She had three children, thirteen grandchildren and was well-known by the people of our city.  She was an artist, a poet and a dreamer.  It is only now that I realize how she did a thing that is most difficult for any of us.  She made her own way.  To do that, she paid a price.  Perhaps she was whispered about as eccentric, "an artist's temperament," people might say.  But she knew all that and still, she still chose those things in that part of life she sought.  I was only a child then.  I didn't understand such a need.  There was much she showed by example that escaped my childish impatience.  That kind of individuality was too abstract a concept for my grasp then. But it was in those days before she died that any of what she tried to say finally broke through and I began to understand the way that she lived and all that it allowed.

    When she died, there were lots of things to be divided.  I got an antique lamp, a book of her poems and a painting that she did, but the best of what was hers had come to me in smaller, intimate ways throughout my life in her stories, her humor, her love of art, her reverence for beauty and in her resourcefulness.

  I find myself thinking of her often.  The memory is not painful now, but as the days pass and I reflect on our relationship it is bittersweet.  I wish I could tell her that it wasn't for nothing; that her efforts, her example, did not fail; that if I have somehow escaped the status quo in even small ways; that if things have been different or better, then I owe her a debt for her tender legacy.  And though she could not answer in those final days, I hope that somehow she knew...

I finally got it.

 

How much does love cost?

The Thanksgiving holiday is over now.  I am flying back north as I write this with my head full of very poignant, sweet moments for Thanksgiving 2012.

Holidays don’t come cheap for me anymore.  When I leave my home up north to fly to the warmth of my birthplace and my family, it comes at a price.  The calculation goes something like $80 a day for the housesitter/dog walker who stays with my two older dogs (remember that the cost of living in Chicago is higher than most places).  That is really the deepest discount I get on the list. 

Wrinkles and Emmy-Lou are getting older now.  They sleep a lot.  One walk a day is fine and they never have the stress of leaving the confines of what they know: their home.  Because they have been with me so long, there are certain things that I can rely on from them.  They are my steady, easy, and somewhat wise, canine companions.  I take comfort in that when I leave them with someone who is unfamiliar to them, I trust them to do the right thing…and they do just that.  At their age, I treat them with a tad more care because I understand that as much as I love them and whatever attentive care I give…they won’t last forever.  So despite the extra expense, I open my wallet.  I love them that much.  It’s just that simple.

My other two dogs, Eden and Lily are not so lucky.  While I wish they could stay home, they are young and excitable…even careless you might say.  Because they are young and have less experience to draw on, their reactions to things are sometimes less than best.  In fact, sometimes their reactions are just plain awful.  They haven’t yet reached the seasoned maturity of my senior citizens.  They can screw-up.  I plan accordingly for that.   I pack them into the car with their toys, food and beds and drop them at the boarding facility.  Their big, sad eyes watch me walk away and my heart is wrenched to do it, but know I am keeping them safe from themselves; from any lack-of-wisdom kind of quirk in their otherwise usually good days that might put them at risk.  I get them a suite, not a cage.  They have playtime.  They have  treats.  That usually runs about $100 a day.

Flying is, roughly, $1300 for the three of us: me, my husband and son.  That doesn’t include cabs to and from the airport or parking.  Like I said, holidays are not cheap, but if you have to assign a price to being with those you love, then that is mine.

But that momentary financial reflection started me thinking about other costs associated with how we love our families; of the intangible costs.  I have been lucky enough to say that every one of my siblings is someone I would choose as a friend.  Each brother, each sister, has been and is, there for me in the deep waters of my life.  They make me proud of them…of us, in a way that I can barely articulate.  We are all quite different and don’t agree on every point, but for me that is one of the treasures of us.  The love means so much, that it is no sacrifice to agree to disagree.  When it is "us," we turn our heads.   It is a love that means more than my ego feeling of wanting to be right about something.  Now I have some mighty strong opinions about things, but when I might take exception to a thing said by one of my family that strays far from my center, my mind wanders to the million other wonderful things that outweigh having my nose ajar at a perceived slight or misunderstanding: the widowed sister who left her own two children to fly to Mayo Clinic to hold me up and care for me or the brother who slept on my couch when I had chemotherapy and slept for two solid days.  This is who we are, this small circle of us, whose biology reads the same.  These are memories that only we understand...a special bond to have in a world that is often unkind.  I try to handle that circle delicately and with the Corinthian Biblical description of how to protect something so fragile:

1 Corinthians 13:4-13

New International Version (NIV)

⁴ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵ It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.⁶ Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.   

We are all growing old together now.  I guess that you could say that about our whole lives really.  We were always headed towards the older selves we wear right now, though time seems to be moving faster as we age.  I understand that in the same way I understand about my sweet, predictable, reliable senior canines; that these family relationships are precious to me and that they won’t last forever. 

I realized some of these things while I was home this year.  And when I lay my head on my pillow at the end of every day I know this:

whatever it costs, I am willing to pay it.  And I am looking forward to Christmas-time with the wonderful circle that is my family.

Wrinkles

Emmy-Lou

Sisters, brothers, mom and dad

Eden

Aspects of Love

"Love is something eternal--the aspect may change, but not the essence."

~Vincent van Gogh

The tired, lonely stare of the sailor in this photograph belongs to the man who was my uncle. His name was Robert Edmund Register. He never married or had any children, but there was no mistaking his heart when it came to home and family. The five children, including me, who were nieces and nephews to him made strong connections to the tired sailor in this picture.   And even in the oblivion of the lightness of childhood, we intuitively knew that he needed us. We naturally assumed a place in the life of this single man that said, "yes, you belong to us."  Somehow we were his kids too, folding him into hearts and arms that were nothing less than immediate and not at all distant.

My earliest memories are full of days at his home on Byrom Drive in Clearwater, Florida, playing his piano with my four year old child's hands.  I was basically just making noise, tormenting all of the adults in the house.  I remember seeing him come home from his job at the bank.  He was very dashing in his suit and tie, pulling into the driveway in his white Mercury Cougar.  And I remember too, not waiting too long to ask him to play a song for me...some young song that a child might love.  And, eventually, he would come over to the piano and do that.  I was drawn to the metronome that sat on the top of the lovely spinet piano in his home asking ever so timidly if I could wind it.  I sat on that piano bench as long as he would play.  I was fascinated as I watched his fingers fly over the ivory keys, loving the beautiful contrast of black and white, the flats and sharps that shaped the magical sound that poured from the seasoned wood of the instrument.  I thought he was the coolest.  I loved him dearly in my childish way.

The days passed, eventually turning from months and then to years, and we still visited my Uncle Bob's house.  My brothers and sister and I would slide down the hill to the pond and hide behind the curved palm that was nearby.  There was an alligator in that pond and we waited hours for him to show himself.  Uncle Bobby generously supplied us with the loaves of white bread that we delivered, piece by piece, to the ducks.  We played outside until our cheeks were pink.  When we came inside the house again, I would ask him again to play some songs for me.   He had plenty of other things to do, but mostly he always came and sat on the piano bench to oblige me.  I was too big by then to share the seat, so I stood behind and sang.  It never occurred to me that maybe at that particular moment he would rather be doing something else.  I felt special that he was playing just for me.  I was eleven then.  I was growing up.  He was older.  The aspect had changed.

My uncle moved later, to Dunedin, near the beach.  By then, I was a teenager and old enough to have a thousand questions.  On weekends, I drove myself to Dunedin to hang out with my uncle and my grandfather.  I usually brought a friend.  The beach was nearby, but we played Yachtzee and after everyone would drift away to watch television or go to bed, Uncle Bob and I would sit around the dining room table and talk--or I should say, I talked mostly and he listened.  Sometimes he would offer up his opinion, but only if I asked, but I felt heard.  I respected his opinion.  And still, I asked him to play the piano for me.  And it was still beautiful.  Life was moving quickly and carrying us along.  I still loved him dearly, now as a teenager.

So today, years later, I'm finally grown but sadly without him since he has long since passed away.  As I write about my uncle the memories rush back, and I am reminded of how relationships are not static; of how they change and they grow with time; and of how all the many small encounters in our lives form the sum of what we become.  And I am reminded that this sailor in the picture, this quiet, gentle man, was a man who loved his family.

There are all kinds of love: the love of a parent for a child, the love between siblings, the love between two best friends.  That love shapes us and shelters us.  It lifts us when we are hurt.

All the love we had for him still remains.  I try to remember that when I miss him; that love is something eternal.  The aspect may change, but not the essence.

The very loved house...goodbye.

Tonight is my last night to sleep in my dear little house.  It is, without question, the cutest house on Maple Avenue.  I have only just begun packing, though I know our move is imminent.  And throughout the whole process of losing my beloved abode, I have waited for the scenario to arrive that would save me from being parted from it.

We dallied with idea of a bigger house for a few years.  There are only the three of us, but we thought maybe as our son grew he'd need more room for recreation and friends and such.  Last fall, when my husband saw a house for sale that he'd always admired, we did a quick test run in the real estate market to see what would happen.  "What could happen?" I thought, "The real estate market is terrible."  We would, at best, get a feel for what our house was worth.  But it sold in just a few days and the buyers gave us our list price.  In that not well-thought-out blink, I lost my house.

The superhero that would arrive and save my house has not arrived and come this Monday morning,  I will say goodbye.  In the nearly ten years that we were the keepers of this house, we lived generous allotments of great love and the million tender moments of watching our baby son go from being three to becoming the 5'11" 6th grader that keeps me, at once, lovingly in awe at genetics at work and in complete bewilderment as to where my baby son has gone and how he left me so quickly.

When I look out into my backyard, I can still see my three year old deep in chalk-picture mode as he lays out the universe for me across the canvas of the patio, "You see 'dis?  Well, that's the lunar lander.  And all that blue stuff?  That's the ocean,"he tells me these things with a serious delivery and as though it is the first time this information has been disseminated ever, like, in the history of the whole world.

It is the same patch of ground where a 4 year old played baseball and then basketball and played happily on his gym set.   And, too, in that very same spot, I remember seeing my best girl Scarlotta in the twinkle of a moment when I realized that something was terribly wrong with her.  My gorgeous Dalmatian girl with more wisdom in her lovely noggin than most people I had known, died from bloat and a torsed stomach later that night.  I came home from the animal hospital at 2 am. and I sat in the corner of the living room of my little house and cried as though I might never see the sunlight again.  And soon, my fourth grader came quietly down the stairs and put his arms around me to tell me I would surely see her again in Heaven.

I still can see squirt fights with the hose and trampoline jumping with our dogs.  And the garage, well, there I see the hours that I spent vacuuming my car behind those doors.  I had lost my baby, a miscarriage, and that little garage with the french doors and flower boxes is where I fled to cry.  The vacuuming could cover the sound of my weeping.  And the side gate?  Well that's where little Minnie and Lily arrived to our home after their long trip from a North Carolina shelter, shaking and covered in blood because they had Parvo virus.  I scooped them up and brought them into my cool, quiet basement.  I bathed them and wrapped them both in blankets and took turns holding them both because they were so frightened.   In those years I acquired four new dogs and lost three, learned how to make crepes, lost two pregnancies, and watched my baby learn to ride a bike.  I made exactly 9 Halloween costumes for my son and gave out candy in costumes of my own.  I opened and closed the doors of that house a thousand times going in and out and now it has come down to this...only tonight and only a few more hours to come and go.  Only this brief coming time for a glance backward to remember how real it was...every little memory, listening to my little one singing or just the relief of walking through the front door after a long trip away.


It occurred to me that this little well-loved house, the one where we grew dreams and watched our child grow, was precisely so tenderly cared for because of all the love that we had in it.  Now I am turning it over to someone else.  It will have its next chapter.  My little house will care for a new couple.  They have three dogs.  I hope they will love it.  The walls of this house are solidly full of the happiness and life we lived here.  They don't know yet what a warm place they've come to, to live.

building snowman with Scarlotta

water fights

trampoline with dogs

Trick or treat!

Dressed for lunar landing back yard

Lily and Minnie 

Blessed Assurance

I came across this piece that I wrote while living in L.A. over 12 years ago and since Father's Day is approaching, I thought I would post it.



I could hear my father's voice above all the others.  It wasn't louder...just the rich perfect-pitch singing I had heard my entire life.  I could find the sound of his voice in the echoes of a chasm or in the din of a cacophonous room.

My father's voice was beautiful.  In high school he had waltzed, singing across the stage in, "The Merry Widow."  And at Stetson University, he sang in the chorus with Ted Cassidy ("Lurch" from the 1960's show, "The Addams Family").

It was funny, but growing up, I hadn't really noticed.  My father's singing was one of the simple, steady things of my little girl life.  Hearing him singing anywhere...while working at home, at church, or even a wedding...was one of the sweet commonalities of my existence.  I didn't really notice it, until I missed hearing it...until I missed hearing him.  This morning my ears heard without effort amid the gently-blended voices of the congregation singing, "Blessed Assurance...Jesus is mine...Oh what a foretaste of glory divine," on that Sunday in December.  This church had no stained-glass windows, it's interior simply furbished, but my father, sang the hymn with all of his heart.  And as long as I could remember, he'd sung just that way.

I was Pierre's oldest child.  We'd had our ups and downs: my growing pains...his being a protective Father.  But for me--for us---I felt as though we'd finally come full circle.  The place we now knew was all that we were in the beginning as a firstborn, very little girl with her Daddy.  Now, with the context of years and very much love, it was a place that was loving and peaceful, full of wistful wishing for what once was, mingled with the peace of the present.  I felt all the safety I'd felt as a little girl, only now it was coupled with a fierce kind of protectiveness for him too.  I finally had a beginning of an understanding for the great accountability that he had given to me without question or resentment.  He wore the unshakeable love of a parent for a child, the love that really did mean "no matter what."  All those too emotional, young woman years seemed so silly to me now.  And the Father that I had often questioned and challenged, had loved me through all of it, though even now I don't know how.

I can remember the younger Father.  The one who tried so diligently to always do the things that would bring all of his children to the same kind of "peace that passes all understanding" (Philippians, 4:7) that he had.  He loved God with the fullness of heart that inspires others.  And that love, I think, somehow made his capacity of loving people more expansive.  He loved his family--he would have given his life for any of us, but he loved people too.  I couldn't quite comprehend it for most of my life.  So often it seemed that he acted without a thought of himself.  He didn't seem to know how to question people's motives.  I knew I was not made that way, but secretly, a part of me envied his ability to live free of worry for himself.

I live so far from him now.  Perhaps it is, in part, that distance that draws me to these thoughts of my Father.  But there isn't a day that passes that I don't catch myself thinking of all the little things about him...his handsome, sun-worn sailor's face or his smile that manifests his warmth.  I think how he would love the ocean here with its Pacific hugeness set against the backdrop of the Sierra Mountains.  Or how he might wonder about the special earthquake-design architecture of California.  He would notice the many people who are in need of any help someone could give.  He would love how different things are here and he would love discovering all of it.

Of the five children born to my Father and Mother, there is not one of us like the other.  Looking back, I can only think that the independent nature of each one of us, came in large part from watching Pierre as we grew up, not yet aware of the concept, but learning it just the same.  And for all of the difference between us, we are tender friends.  There is nothing and no one that can take that away from us.  It is our own circle of unity; a solidarity that is wordless.  It is comfort when no one else is there, salve on any wounds of the heart.

I think on these things now, remembering bickering children whose Father reminds in a most serious, but gentle tone of voice that there is no one else under Heaven with exactly the same blood running through their veins.  No one will ever be closer than brothers and sisters.  Not even the Father.  Not even the Mother.  The bickering children stop bickering, listening solemnly to the admonition of their Father.  The children are young.  He must wonder if they understand him.  But they did.  We would take care of each other...always.  I cannot help but think of how indebted we are for such a legacy, one so full of greatness of heart.  We can never repay it.

I wonder sometimes if I will have children of my own; if I can truly be all that is required for such a tender  endowment.  And even now, all this distance into my adulthood, I only hope that if I do, I can love them as diligently, as wholly, as Pierre loved all of us and how blessed it was-- how blessed it is, to be loved that way.