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1. Why we do what we do

He wanted a cake. Not three cakes like I made his brother, or two like his sister had. Just one. Vanilla, please. Nothing fancy, just cake. He wanted sushi. Just the regular order; he didn’t want, say four whole Lion King rolls to himself. No. Just the usual; a few pieces of Lion King, a few California Rolls, a couple of avocado maki. Nothing fancy, just sushi.

He’d been a little more expansive about his gift requirements, even going so far as to surf the web a bit and make a gift list up (who says unschoolers never practice spelling; have you seen the names of some of the Bionicles? Which of course, led us back to Maori, and how Bionicles stole basically a whole cultural thing from them, and what he remembers of our trip to New Zealand before Kestrel was born, and on, and on…). But I digress…

My pal Steven has a son, Josh, who is significantly older than my boys. He’s stretched his wings thoroughly, and is moving on with his life, as they say, and has given up childish things. Including six crates of Legos. Now, when Steven told me this, I pictured crates, you know, like the small tote, kinda one cubic foot kind of crate. And I said, when Steven asked me, that yes, the boys would be utterly delighted with a new haul of Legos, and of course we’d take them.

A few days before Rowan’s birthday, Steven came up with the loot. And he meant six crates. Not the small ones. The huge ones. I frantically phoned my neighbor, Beverly, and asked her to store them for me until Rowan’s birthday. And then it took Steven and I two trips from his car to her boat, because we couldn’t really fit more than four crates in a dock cart. Crates. Did I mention, the big ones??? Oish.

Slightly panicky and wondering what I’d done (since, y’know, the goal is to get stuff *off* the boat), I asked Jason if he’d bring the crates over after Rowan went to bed the night before his birthday, and provided a blanket for him to cover them up. My plan was to leave them in the cockpit, and let Rowan just whip the blanket off them.

So on the morning of his birthday, that’s what happened.

I love the look on Kestrel’s face here.

Yes, my love, these are all for you. But share with your siblings, OK?

At first, they were too overwhelmed to just, y’know, open the boxes. They just peered through the plastic.

As the day progressed, they started digging in, and pulling out creations and creations-in-progress that Josh had left behind. It struck me, kind of bittersweetly, that there’s a sort of connection between generations, and that some other kid is going to pick up where mine left off with these same Legos. It made me wish that Josh was still of an age to come hang out with my little guys, and reminds me that my boys should pass these along while they can still pass the joy they get out of them along too.

From time to time, for the rest of the day, Rowan would just get this dreamy look on his face, and kind of revel in the wealth.

Some of the pieces were from kits he recognized, or had wanted in the past.

This gives a better sense of why the kid might have gone into overwhelm a few times. I know I did.

This is our whole cockpit, basically (with our hanging lettuce garden for backdrop…)

Aurora was slightly nervous that she was going to get lost in the blocks. Normally, she’s right in there in the middle of whatever her brothers are doing, but this was too much even for her. She mostly hung out on the sidelines and asked me about cake.

Rowan kept vacillating between sorting the Legos, and playing with them. He wanted to know what he had, but kept being amazed instead of orderly. Which is just how it should be.

He stopped playing long enough to eat some cake and sushi, but mostly, just kept playing. For the next few days. Straight. Without breaks. Eventually, he realized that he didn’t just have a ton of legos, he also had an Opportunity(tm). So now, he’s sorting with a vengeance, and is going to take the parts he doesn’t need or want down to the Toy-Go-Round, and sell them for credit on other things he wants. But even that is a lesson; when he got insanely overwhelmed by the task (and who wouldn’t?), we talked about setting a goal, of “I will sort half a crate a day” and that being totally more manageable than “I will sort this mountain,” so he’s learning about organization too. He’s learning to think critically about the parts as they pass through his hands. He’s hopping online to figure out what parts are and what they might go to, and I am blown away by his ability to look at a given piece, and know exactly what thing it is associated with.

I am also blown away at what he’s creating. A few weeks ago, after Rowan used the word “bored” (one of my only extreme hot-button words), Jason and I had a chat with him about what else Legos could build, besides endless variations on a theme of Bionicle Warriors. We talked about the Art of the Brick (which he had gone to see just last summer). Oddly, even though he was fascinated, he hadn’t realized he could do that himself. But now, facing six crates of raw materials, plus the crate and a half of Legos he had before (we measured them), possibilities are opening up, and his creations are spanning wider realms of imagination. I’m documenting them, and will be posting them here from time to time.

This is a kind of insane wealth and opportunity that kids rarely receive. This is largesse unimaginable, and sufficient words of gratitude to Steven and his family elude me. I have rewritten this paragraph four times, and each time I just sort of babble more than the last. So I’ll just say, thank you. From the heart.

And as for storage? He and Kestrel have agreed to put their mattresses on top of the crates, and sleep on them. At least for now.

Related posts:

1. Rowan Turns 5
2. Happy Birthday, Grandpa
3. Aurora’s Two!

She was, as he, his father, and his sister all said, “a kick in the pants.” I’d met her a few times over the years, at the spectacular bridgebuilding event known as “Walter’s Birthday Party,” where he’d invite a bunch of random people to his sister’s home, and you’d find yourself sitting on a couch somewhere, sipping excellent whisky and having deep conversation with people you never really had the time to talk to otherwise. It was at one of Walter’s birthdays that I first really got to know Dave Ponkey.

It was also at one of Walter’s birthdays that while his father was out in the living room playing bagpipes (for real!), his mom was in the kitchen, drawing portraits for people. She was a fabulous artist, and enjoyed sitting down and really studying the panoply of people who showed up to wish her son well.

Jason and I sat for a portrait. After working on it for about fifteen minutes, Liz crinkled up her face, ripped the paper off the pad, and started over. Another ten minutes, she did it again. One last try, and with a wry grin she handed it over. And the finished work, just like the three before it… showed two people who looked very much like she and Walter, and not so much like Jason and I. “I can’t get it,” she laughed. “This is just how it’s going to have to be.” I have that portrait still.

Because of Walter, and who he is, and how his family works, his mother died peacefully, at home. She died surrounded by love, on familiar ground.

Walter has been fighting hard for months to make that happen, because just like home birth in this culture, home death does not happen without someone taking a whole lot of care, a whole lot of time, and fighting a whole lot of bureaucratic insanity. As one of Walt’s friends said, “I don’t want to imagine what they’d have suffered without your vigilance.”

Walter was able to basically drop his whole life here on the West coast, fly back east to his childhood home on Staten Island, and take on the role of caregiver to both his mother and his father, who during this time is also experiencing some serious health issues, not to mention the emotional issues he’s facing. And the more time he was out there, the more, in his phone calls to me, I heard what I jokingly call “New York Walter” take over. You see, Walt on this coast is a sweet, funny, gentle guy who sees the humor in the world first, and says “coffee” funny. Walt on that coast is a hard, fast, decisive, brutal guy who does not put up with one ounce of bullshit from anyone.

And that’s good. That’s survival. Or in this case, that’s him, standing up against the weight of a medical establishment that is not designed to gently care for people at the end of their days.

In a note to friends and family, right before his mom passed, Walt said:

It began at the end of February when my Mother was taken ill, and taken to the hospital. She has only just made it home for good on July 7th. In between was an odyssey of red tape, misinformation, opportunists and obfuscation. As I deal with my parents health woes, one thing is clear to me: we (Americans) do not have a “health care system” we have isolated events that occasionally overlap.

A few years ago my Mother’s “primary care physician” diagnosed her with Parkinson’s. I’m still not sure what led to this beyond a tremor in her hands. He put her on meds that are known to cause hallucinations and paranoid ideation to “slow the progress of the disease.” The meds of course did not, since she was diagnosed with “Lewy Body Dementia” in the hospital in March. They took her off of the meds which were doing her no good, and perhaps harm. This is not a rant against the doctor; it is merely par for the course. One of the many reasonable decisions made at the time with unforeseen consequences you must deal with. She had sudden difficulties walking so we wanted her discharged to rehabilitation, but her health care provider said no. So we appealed as is our right, and the social workers at the hospital asked “why would you (the family) do this?”

I asked the doctor assigned to oversee her care (as her primary care physician doesn’t deal with hospitals) for information. Each time he evaded my answers or my presence either by telling me my questions were not specific enough, or missing our agreed-upon meetings. Most meetings with family in hospitals are held in the halls anyway, strangely the only time you DON’T have to sign a HIPPA agreement to get things done. My questions, of course, grew more specific and technical while being put through this process. When asked to explain what was going on with her care, and what could I expect, he said merely “Lewy Body Dementia”. Not having spent years memorizing medical terms I politely asked him to explain it to me. He responded by saying “What do you want from me?” I wanted an explanation, like you see on TV where the doc takes the family into another room and explains what will happen, why, what they can expect, and what possible options there are for treatment. That moment doesn’t exist in real hospitals where technical gear is left in the stark white halls by the door of whomever it was used upon last. Doctors are distant and uninformed. Nurses know what’s going on, but because of legal issues, must find a disinterested doctor to ask permission to do what only they know needs to be done because all the MD’s are busy doing split shifts at different hospitals, clinics and private practices at any given hour of the day.

It was there in the hospital beneath the scorching florescent light that I had an epiphany. As I sat on the relentless tile watching the nurses and doctors handle their business, as they talked to each other, and most importantly, as they ignored people asking for clarifications, and sometimes each other, I realized I already do their job. Not just could, but do. Working a busy restaurant, or a fancy restaurant is the same thing as working in a hospital. The differences were not structural, but superficial. I recognized the person who was working exhausted and stealing opportunities to rest. I recognized the new manager you had to ask but who didn’t know jack. I recognized the “lower level” workers who were going through the motions & picking up a paycheck, their skill not in their job, but in reducing resistance. I could find only two differences between what they do & what I do. 1) They chose to memorize more useless trivia with hyper-specific uses than I have and 2) the worst thing that can happen if I fuck up is that my customers have a bad night.

However, the prioritizing, juggling, processing, stalling, timing, customer stroking . . . All the same. There was more too. The next time you are in a hospital, watch for it, and you will see. Especially the shortcuts taken for their own convenience.

What this made clear was that an advocate was needed at all times. Without a squeaky wheel, nothing would get done. Hell, I let up a minute when she was being discharged and they sent her home dehydrated. Which led to a new hospital stay, better waiters, and the OK for her to go for physical rehabilitation. This means over a month in hospitals. So in the first week at the rehabilitation center – a fancy way of saying old age homes that need extra revenue & already have physical therapists on staff – there was a complication. Dad was hospitalized twice. Both 911 calls. Gastro-intestinal bleed masquerading as heart attack & sudden afibrillation. That was a hell-of-a-commute-week between hounding doctors for answers for Dad & driving up Hylan Blvd a few blocks to make sure Mom was getting proper nutrition & the physical therapy she was promised. This is at the best “home” on Staten Island too.

Then they tricked me into a naso-gastric tube saying it would only (by definition) be temporary & after I OK’d it they refused to remove it because she wasn’t eating enough, even with the independent worker we hired to feed her. It’s ok she quit w/o notice when she found out we were taking Mom home & she’d have to work full time — the job we hired her for!

Then there was my own trip to the emergency room followed by a car accident leaving us w/o wheels (& me with mad body aches!)

There were battles fought & won with the home employees (they want to put a gastric tube in you surgically at the drop of a hat). They used a doctor who doesn’t return phone calls & moves slower than winter molasses on anything that needs to be done. Anytime you ask for more information about difficult decisions they suddenly throw at you (once again, in hallways) the answer is “we can’t make that decision for you.”

WHAT?! Damn right you won’t make decisions for me, but you damn well better be able to tell me what my choices are!! There are a hundred other minor battles fought & won everyday. As they come up. Every day.

Little by little Mom’s health declined. She went from walking rehabilitation to “She can’t walk. Work range of motion” and then to “she talked for the first time in a week today, I guess the new formula we’re feeding her is better. She recognizes me!”

Now she is in the dining room she designed & decorated, in a hospital bed. She looks lazily to one side, when we’re lucky enough to have her eyes open. We live for every belch or clever quip. She uses her eyebrows quite expressively as well.

The tube is finally removed and if she doesn’t eat enough to stay awake, she will wither and slip away in a week or two. I have to be careful as I feed her that she doesn’t choke, since she wasn’t allowed any solid food with the tube in for the past 8 or more weeks.

Getting your Father away from denial & toward helping with the funeral plan. That’s a whole new level of hard. 63 years together. 50 of them in this house. July 13th is when he asked her to marry him. It’s the day the tube was removed.

As we sit around with Mom, under the shady branches of the side patio, bricks slick with black summer mold in between rain storms that do not “break” the heat, she asks us not to leave her. And occasionally for a Rob Roy.

Back in February, I blogged about Keith Olbermann, who did basically the same thing as Walt has been doing. Over the last few years, I’ve blogged about the Bear, his interactions with the medical system, and his long battle to die.

Here’s what we all have in common. We all thought we could trust the medical system to care for our loved ones. And through fire and pain and madness, we discovered we could not. Then, we discovered through agonizing, daily practice, that we could very well do it ourselves. And finally, we discovered the grace involved in being there, at the end.

This realization would not have been surprising just three generations ago. Before WWII, people died at home, without the system intervening at all. You were ill, you went home, you died there, unmolested, surrounded by people who cared more for you than for lawsuits and standards of “care”.

In our world, people like Walter, who devote months of their lives to caring for their parents at the end, are unusual. Most people have this insane treadmill matrix of a life that does not allow the space to honor the end for the people we love. And that is a bigger tragedy than they know. I think that a measure of success, as a human being, is your ability to hold the space for the people who have held it for you over your life. What grace is there in making the mortgage but having your loved one die alone in a hospital because you were “too busy” for them?

Another friend of ours posted this:

For eleven years I have regretted it, regretted
that I did not do what I wanted to do as I sat there those four hours watching her die.
I wanted to crawl in among the machinery and hold her in my arms,
knowing the elementary, leftover bit of her mind
would dimly recognize it was me carrying her to where she was going.
~Jack Gilbert.

It is time, and beyond time, to straighten out our priorities.

It’s one thing to live a busy life. It is another thing entirely to clear the slate to allow real life to happen, as it’s meant to, at both the beginning and the end. Walter has done something utterly heroic, and while he may face some financial consequence for it, I know that I, and the rest of his family and friends, are enlarged by his example, and are all ready to catch him, however he needs.

And when we are called to, may we all have the strength, the courage, the integrity, to follow his example.

Related posts:

1. Best Family Blog Ever
2. Each Other’s Family
3. Dying Alone: Trembling with Rage

Me? I think that Well, Yeah is the best. Period. Hands down, far and away, the best family blog ever.

Valarie has ten kids. And they are some of the most well-adjusted, decent people you’d ever want to meet. And so are their spouses, their friends, their relationships. I have gotten pretty much all the best parenting advice ever from Valarie. I figure, if she can manage what she has, I want to emulate her.

The thing that finally pushed me over the edge into jumping up and shouting “Valarie is the best freaking parent EVER!!” was a recent blog of hers, where she talks about her teenage children’s teenage friends as “Little Jay brought Sumi and Larry along, and Maria had Heather, and they are all pleasant people, agreeable, nice kids. It was very peaceful.” In an older post, she refers to her son’s prom date as “Her dress is so beautiful. I do really like this kid. She is so funny and kind.”

OK, back the truck up. Precisely how often do you hear a mother of teenagers talk about her kids’ friends that way? And check out this quote on her daughters-in-law: “They are kind, funny, generous, astute… I didn’t realize until some of my kids were grown how central kindness is to every single thing, but it is.”

And really, I think that it’s Valarie’s persistence about how fundamentally decent everyone is that helps keep everyone rising to meet her expectations. You don’t often run into people who are doing as much as she is, who don’t complain, who in fact revel, in the craziness that is a big family. Usually there’s some martyrdom and drama involved, some sense that the madness outweighs the solid comfort. But for her, what matters is how everyone is connected. I blogged about her advice to me on that front here.

Valarie is the person who gave me the best comeback line ever, for when people ask me about why I have so many kids (yes, here in California, three is a lot of kids). I say what Valarie says,”Well… we like them.” Stops people in their tracks; they aren’t used to hearing that. We are supposed to be confrontational with, and annoyed by, our kids. The idea that we enjoy them is downright revolutionary and radical. I love it.

I also am routinely inspired by how she discusses her marriage. I can’t possibly recreate the beauty of the original post here, so I’m gonna make you go read it yourself. In fact, I’ve  not linked to the other quoted posts on purpose, so you’ll have to go read her blog for yourself.

I tell Val how inspirational she’s been to me, and she laughs. I tell her what a gem she is, and she just kind of shrugs. But every week, she puts out this blog that just radiates warmth and compassion and love and humor, and I bask in it. And you should too. Go click over and check it out.

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1. Each Other’s Family
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3. A Blog Featuring Us!

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She had the biggest heart of anyone we’ve ever met. As one of our marina compatriots said, “every time you ran into Charlie on the dock, you came away feeling uplifted. She had something good to say about everyone, and to everyone.”

She adored my dog. She adored my kids. And we all unequivocally adored her back. And the last year without her has been unbelievably hard. There are little reminders of her scattered all over our boat; the dress she gave Aurora on her first birthday, the kites she used to fly with the boys, the pullover hoodie that she gave me when I was in massage school, the bottle of tequila that she and I toasted each other with one night that I have put aside because I can’t drink it without thinking about her, and the combination of tequila and grief is more than I can deal with.

I spent yesterday watching the finger of our dock; I could almost see her walking up to say hi. As she did on that last day. She stopped by to say hi to Kaia, and to tell me she was heading to the hospital for some pneumonia complications, and that she’d call me once she was settled in, so I could come visit.

The call never came. Instead, I got the call from her husband that something had gone wrong, and that she was gone.

Charlie had been sick, but not that sick. I hit the floor, and couldn’t do anything but sob for a few hours. Just like that, one of the brightest rays in my life was gone.

So here’s why I’m writing this. Charlie and I hung out, and we chatted, but always surrounded by either my family or the marina crowd, and never really got a chance to talk, just the two of us. One of us would start in on a story about our past, we’d get interrupted, and we’d look at each other and say “Girls Night Out!”. It was our running joke. We were going to take an evening, and just go hang out together, the two of us, and talk.

And that never happened.

Life is busy. There’s always something that needs to be done or ought to be done or that you think you should do first.

And now, the opportunity is gone forever. I can’t even hear the phrase without stabs of guilt and regret and sadness. I’m guessing I missed out on a wealth of humor, and perspective, and philosophy. And that’s something I can’t ever get back. I was busy being responsible and dutiful, and because of that, I missed something illuminating and incredible.

I’ve had this lesson before, but never quite so pointedly, and never with someone in my peer group. You expect to miss out on grandparents, but not on friends. So I’m asking you… put down what you’re doing. Shut off the computer. And go spend an hour talking to someone you don’t get the chance to. Make the time.

Me? I’m going to spend that hour missing Charlie.

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1. Missing One Small Thing…

This piece, I wrote right after my stepfather, The Bear, passed away, last November.

First, every lightbulb in the house burned out. Simultaneously. Except the long fluorescent tubes in the kitchen, and the high-intensity bulb in the spotlight. Other than that, every time we flipped a switch, there was a small “pop”, and a sigh, as one of us, in darkness instead of illumination, went in search of the right replacement bulb.

Then, the timer on the stove went out. Normally, if you bake something humid, it’ll freak out and beep uncontrollably for a few minutes. This was more like morse code. Only none of us knew how to read the message. I hope we didn’t miss some profundity from the grave.

I suppose the insane wind storm that ripped half the roof off that came next should have been no surprise at all. But it was anyway. The windstorms that spin up out here in the desert are horrors of sand and dust and vicious tumbleweeds. I know that in Westerns, tumbleweeds are a metaphor for freedom. In fact, what actually happens is that this vicious, spiky, dried ball of death catapults along just barely slower than windspeed, ripping apart everything in its path, and depositing little tumbleweed seeds in its wake. Those little seeds sprout up rapidly in the rains, because nothing eats them, and they create more nasty little tumbleweeds to go rocketing along ripping apart fences, paintjobs, undercarriages, and small animals.

There’s a certain hideous tawdriness to grief. In the pull between the desire to enshrine the memory of your loved one, and the inevitable emotional speedbumps when you smack hard into all the crap they did not put to right before their departure, you end up being disingenuous to yourself, and to others. Grief is to veracity as velveeta is to cheese. It’s kind of the same color, and if you ripped off the wrapper, it’d pass for a similar thing, but you know deep down that it tastes of bitterness and plastic.

I am tired of grief. The Bear hasn’t even been dead for an entire week, and already the rituals of grief are making me crazy. The endless stream of people with a) well-wishes, who expect to be fed and entertained, b) their own horror stories of loss, c) an idea for how they can spin the situation to their own profit. Occasionally, we get a visitor who brings food and departs without excess conversation. Those people are blessed.

The ghoulish watching of Mom, to see when she’s going to snap, is really getting old. I know they mean well, I know they do, but I am quite tired of the question “How is your Mom doing, really?” Like, she’s lying to them. Or like I see something they don’t. Or like even if I did, I would tell them. What, precisely, do they think they would do about her pain, even if I did tell them about it? Are they in some particular position to do something to mitigate the fact that days before her 66th birthday and three months shy of their 32nd anniversary, my mother’s husband passed on?

I’m not even going to whine (too much) about the fact that, since I am a grown child living my own life, apparently not one of my parents’ friends have figured out that I’ve lost a parent myself. Mom’s grief is paramount, no doubt, but it is not singular.

I think that homemade grief is too much for people to deal with. Just like homemade cheese. People can’t even contemplate raising a dairy animal, harvesting the food intended for its babies, and hanging it in a cool place to rot into the ultimate yumminess of cheese. The whole process, when you really think about it, is completely disgusting, yet somehow has become an artisanal endeavor. Realistically, velveeta should be a far better product, sterilized, standardized, and industrial as it is. But everyone knows that a block of a small, local, organic, hand-raised and created, one of a kind cheese is always, always superior to the block of melty plasticness that velveeta represents.

It’s like that with grief. We don’t have a place for death in our culture any more; we don’t practice it like the Tibetans do, we don’t engage in community rituals about it, like the First Nations do, we don’t hold wakes, like the Irish do, we don’t even know to bring  casseroles and comfort like our grandparents did. When death got taken out of its context and moved into hospitals, all the rituals of comfort somehow got left behind and forgotten.

So we’re left with gluten and chicken. All of us are gluten-sensitive, yet in this time of mourning, while we’re all still pretty much in shock, we’ve reverted to bread products. It’s part of the velveeta process. Rather than focusing on solid, nutritious food, we’re eating crap in order to shut our stomachs up. Well, crap and chicken, of course. Of the people who’ve brought food to the house, in the time-honored tradition of mourning (which apparently all but two people have no clue about), one hundred percent of them have brought chicken soup.
I like the symbolism there. Mourning feels sort of like the onset of flu. You’re tired, you don’t sleep well at all, everything aches (especially the heart), and your immune system is running uphill trying to fight something that your body perceives as threat but is actually just grief. So naturally, what you need at a time like that is chicken soup.

Both were homemade. One arrived in a crock-pot, ready to be plugged in and kept warm for as long as we needed it, the other arrived in Tupperware. One was thickly chicken, nearly shredded with long cooking, with barley as the primary starch. The other had neat, discreet, cubes of chicken, and a spectacular broth highlighted by parsley, rosemary, and garlic from the giver’s own garden. Both were excellent in their way, just as both of the people who brought them were excellent in their support.

Other than that, people arrived and stayed through lunch or dinner, forcing Mom, who has old-school manners, to invite them to stay. Me, I would have served us food and let them starve, but Mom’s too kind. So we ended up cooking for, feeding, and washing up after, a stream of well-wishers. Here’s a late-breaking news flash; if you are coming to console, please consider that allowing them a long hot bath in privacy and solitude might do the mourners more good than forcing them to throw a luncheon.

The behavior of the folks calling the business line has done more to convince me of the value of gun control than any other argument. These people have the emotional I.Q.  of a pack of playing cards. I started answering the business phone to spare Mom the strain, and it never failed to prang me as well. I finally started answering enquiries with a very pointed, “My father, the gunsmith, passed away last week and we’ll be closing the shop down. I’m sorry we can’t work on your gun, but best of luck finding another gunsmith.” Most of the time, they babbled and hung up, but a few gems replied with things like “well why can’t you recommend another shop?” or “Well are you still selling guns? Because I’m looking for this model…” so I’d go ahead and repeat “Did you hear the part about where that was my father that just died? I’m not really focused on the gun business just now, I’m sorry.” A few of them tried to push past that, even. Them, I hung up on. I guess to some, the Second Amendment trumps death. They’re probably government cheese eaters.

People want to know what Mom’s plans are now. As if, in the scant week of her mourning, she should have plotted out her destiny. They don’t seem to understand that she’s barely able to open the mail right now, because of all the reminders of him. It’s like people want her to move on, so that they can get back to their regular modus operandi, and quit having to be consoling.
The ancient tradition of a year of mourning, where a widow wore black for a year, served so many good purposes. She didn’t have to worry about what she was wearing, or whether people would think she was too “cheerful” too soon. She was wearing a sign that said “look, I’m still grieving, don’t be a schmuck.” (Which, as time goes on, I’m discovering is almost necessary. And have I mentioned how much I hate the question “how are you doing?”?) And she didn’t have to put energy into her appearance. Open the closet, put on the black. Done.

People judge. You’re grieving too much, or not enough. You’re talking too animatedly, or you’re too quiet. The art of holding space for the grieving has, with so many other critical interpersonal skills, been completely lost by our culture. I don’t know how we go about getting it back, and I don’t know how to convince people of the value of learning it, until it’s their turn, when surely, they’ll get it too late to be of use to anyone but themselves.

But for pity’s sake, please, if you’re going to serve me cheese with my whine, don’t serve velveeta.

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Blowing out the candles… You’ll notice in this shot there were actually two cakes. She couldn’t decide what she wanted (especially considering the enthusiastic voting of her brothers), so there was a vanilla cake with lemon icing, and a carrot cake. The vanilla cake was a mix (Pamela’s), but the carrot cake was from scratch, and of course all gluten-free.

The girl and (some of) her gifts. A new sun hat and SPF 50 shirt from SunDay Afternoons, a set of hand-knit goldilocks and the three bears finger puppets from a SAHM that Grandma knows, a copy of the book to read the story from.

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