Black Thursday

Technically, Black Friday starts tomorrow. In reality, it started at about 6 pm today, Thanksgiving, which is about as perverted a thing as stocking store shelves with Christmas stuff in October.

Perverted or not, my husband and I hit the streets of Richmond, IN, at around 8 pm, not to go Christmas shopping but to get really important stuff like chips and salsa, a belt to hold up my pants, a birthday card for our 7-year-old niece and a mouth guard for me (I left my dentist-approved night guard at home, so I’ve been gnashing my teeth to nubs since we’ve been here).  We went to the coolest gig in town — Wal-Mart — to gather all these necessities, and the first clue that something was terribly wrong was the fact that every spot in their 6-mile parking lot was taken. Every spot. And people were prowling the aisles like lionesses looking for something to kill.

When we went into the store, the gong of weirdness started clanging even louder, as we encountered heaps of power tools in the cosmetics aisle, a mountain of PS3s in the wine and spirits section, and swarms of people pawing over Hanes sweat shirts in the seasonal aisle. Yellow “do not cross”  tape sectioned the store into no-pass zones and alleys of deep confusion. I’m still not sure of the rationale behind the tape placement or the clumps of Wal-Mart personnel wielding walkie-talkies and fierce artificial smiles. And since this was Richmond — populated by the salt of the Earth, many of whom have mullets and missing  teeth — there were groupings  of people who looked braced for a brawl over the portable DVD players stacked in the women’s underwear aisle

Taped to these raw bundles of merchandise were signs that said “Sale price in effect at 10 p.m.” Or 10:30 pm. Or midnight. I suppose the point was to stagger the rush, prevent a stampede, baffle the masses. It did not, however, seem to faze customers who had come out to stand guard over the goods and glower at all of us who walked past, clutching our shampoos and tortilla chips defensively.

I’m not sure when shopping for bargains became more important than celebrating our blessings. I used to think it was pretty hateful to get up at 7 a.m. after Thanksgiving just to make a run on the stores. As the times get more and more bleak, retailers are sucking more and more joy out of our holidays in an effort to make a buck. And if we don’t spend enough — whatever that is, or if there ever IS such a thing as enough — then we’ve somehow failed the entire American economy. Really I think the American economy is what has failed, not me.

Because if I spend $100 before midnight at BestBuy.com, I can get a $40 gift card to spend any way I want.  That’s a win-win, right?

How not to wow at a university soiree

1. Forget about the event until three hours before it starts, so that you’re horribly underdressed:  no makeup, no earrings and no perfume. Oh, and no Ph.D. Only people with Ph.D.s are allowed to show up to these things in jeans and get away with it.

2. Arrive early and sweaty and a bit windblown from having walked rather than driven. Grab a water and stand awkwardly in a corner watching well-dressed people slowly filter into the room. Sweat.

3. See someone you know and strike up a conversation with him and then realize he has no idea who you are. Withdraw with loud nervous tittering

4. Find yourself stranded in front of a book table with three undergraduate student waiters; make some stupid comment about how a book on dental surgery makes for a nice bedtime read; withdraw with loud nervous tittering after waiters stare at you in horror.

5. Dash up to a young, rising star on the university faculty that you have interviewed at least three times before and bray, “Are you just NOW getting tenure?” Because you meant to imply, “Surely you’ve had tenure for a long time, you’re such a big hotshot around here!” But what it sounded like was, “What the hell is WRONG with you that you’re only now getting tenure, you big fat slacker?” Try to salvage the situation by shrieking, “But haven’t you had tenure since before you were born?”  Withdraw with loud nervous tittering and red sweaty face.

6. Stand next to people waiting for keynote address, jockeying around and occasionally brushing elbows, and say jovially, “I hate these things! I feel like a pool ball about to get racked up.” Wonder what the hell is WRONG with your mouth today.

7. Crack open a can of Diet Coke and hold it defensively against your bosom so that the beads of condensation end up as dark wet spots on the front of your shirt. Shades of breastfeeding nightmares.

8. Fill your hands so full of crap — Diet Coke, tape recorder, purse, bulky program brochure — that no one can shake your hand. Endure several awkward flailings while you try to renegotiate your load. Drip more condensation on yourself.

9. End up in front row of spectators as university president rushes forward to take podium. Catapult yourself backwards to avoid making contact; careen into people behind you. Make hushed but earnest apologies.

10. Somehow manage to wind up between the only two people whose cell phones go off in the middle of the program. Loudly. And neither of them know how to turn them off, so you get to stand there as Ode to Joy trumpets through at LEAST one full verse. Grab another Diet Coke and run for the door as soon as the speaker finishes saying “Thank you for com–”

 

 

Disassembly required

My mother gave up her fight for life on Oct. 22, 2011, after a long and grueling and somewhat baffling journey that left us all a bit off balance. Family members descended and a lovely funeral was held to honor her life and legacy.

And then we began the arduous task of dismantling everything she had built up for herself these last several years in Nashville.

It’s staggeringly difficult. While not a hoarder in the reality TV, “I need psychiatric help” kind of way, Mom did manage to squirrel away a lot of stuff, and not all of it was just from the past decade. She’d carted a lot of memorabilia, antiques, old linens — see-through towels we’d used back when my sister and I were children, blankets, old pillows embroidered blockily with our names — from California to Tennessee, and she somehow found space for them in her brand-new and beautiful condo.

Furnishing this beautiful new condo is an assortment of beautiful new furniture: leather couches and recliners, flat-screen TVs, glass-topped tables, wrought-iron lamps and ornate furnishings that make me feel like I’ve stumbled into someone else’s reality. How can these lovely, elegant things belong to the same scrappy, frugal woman I grew up with, who washed and reused plastic sandwich bags to save money and never bought new clothes for herself unless something wore out completely?

But now as I’m sorting through all of this bounty, I feel like a vulture, circling, looking for the right moment to lunge and tear. It’s wrong to sift through someone else’s things and evaluate each item as to its potential value or lack thereof to me. I feel like I’m trying to capitalize on this moment of loss and mourning, even as I consider  and appraise the surprising treasures I find among my mother’s possessions.

Being in her place, where she was when the last stroke hit her and she collapsed in her bathroom, feels like walking across thin splintering ice. It feels like I’m ransacking a temple where something sacred and terrible has happened. I look at all the photos on her walls —  there are so many of my children that I can feel her love for them like her own arms around me.  Among all the pieces of opened mail we found on her kitchen table was a card from my son, with his sixth-grade picture inside and a sweet note that reduced me to tears.

There is so much to do, so much to process, so many feelings to feel and memories to forge that we’re all exhausted after only a few hours of work. Each piece I handle brings its own weight of memory with it, from the 10 unopened boxes of Ziploc freezer bags to the keychain she saved from my senior prom in 1989. It’s astonishingly painful, staggeringly intimate and incredibly difficult to catalog, quantify and codify her life, and then to negotiate with my sister over which things I will take and which she will claim.

We travel around Nashville to lawyers and banks and county clerks to transfer titles and bank balances. We carry with us multiple copies of her death certificate as a macabre calling card that gives us the power to take charge of this life.  There are so many details my heart almost stops with anxiety.

So much stuff. Is it what defines who my mother was? There’s a lot of it, more than we knew, but I also know she was so much more than the things she owned, and it feels wrong — dirty, almost — to be viewing her belongings with such an opportunistic eye.

I don’t want her things, I want her.  I want her alive beside me to enjoy with me all these things she worked so hard to gather around her. I would trade them all just for one more chance to have her smile at me and tell me everything is going to be okay.

This sacred ground is awful muddy

Many of the hospice workers we’ve talked to refer to this place as “sacred ground.” Not so much the physical reality of the St Thomas hospice ward, but the space in between the living and the dead, or the soon-to-be dead. It’s the place where the veil between heaven and earth is the thinnest it ever gets; where angels wait with their arms spread wide to receive the weary souls. Eternity waits just beyond the next breath; vistas of gold and light open out like the promised land upon that last beat of the heart.

I suppose it’s holy to people who are able to maintain a certain reverent distance from what’s actually happening: The slow and often excruciating departure from sight of a person we love and want to hold onto. To me, it’s scary, tedious, horrific, intimidating, maddening…. The list goes on, and if God is here, I’ve yet to see Him.

In the 8 or 12 or 300 days we’ve been at this vigil, we’ve seen more than 10 people die. We’ve watched patients take up residence in an empty room, accompanied by family groups that huddle and console each other in large, loud clumps in the common waiting area — and then we’ve shown up the next day to find the room vacant again, or filled with someone else’s dying.

Snatches of conversation — “We can’t tell much because of the burns” or “He loved drugs more than his own family” — remind us that we’re in no ordinary place. Chaplains of various stripe and flavor administer last rites, hold prayer sessions with grieving family members, offer shoulders on which anyone is welcome to weep.

One evening, a man in uniform asked me politely if he could close my mother’s hospital door; turns out he was accompanying a somber procession of a deceased patient on a gurney decorated with a colorful, homey quilt. Once he’d passed, we opened the door and life resumed — as normal as it ever could be in such a place.

After a week and a half, Mom has become an old-timer here.

As a pastor’s wife, I expect of myself a certain level of spiritual maturity and grace that, sadly, is lacking more often than not. So to me, when I hear all my mother’s friends and neighbors — and all my sister’s friends and in-laws and neighbors and casual acquaintances and people she just sort of recognizes but really doesn’t know at all  — talking about how her spirit is already in God’s hands and her body is just a bit behind, I first feel guilty, then hopeful, then guilty again. What kind of Christian am I that I’m skeptical first and then, only grudgingly, credulous? That I look at this process not as beautiful but as fraught, murky, infuriating?

If her spirit is indeed with Christ in heaven, I have to wonder why it’s taking her body so long to figure it out. Where is God in this slow tortuous journey toward eternity, passing up and down and around and under and then up again? Death waits in the room with us, smirking.

I sit at Mom’s bedside, coiled and poised on the brink of a great, steep fall, and the moment stretches so long and so tight that I feel myself ready to explode. If I’m in the presence of angels, surely they like me are becoming impatient and have left the room for some of that free coffee down the hall.

I am not a very spiritual person. I’m more practical, concrete, experiential. If there are angels here, I want to see them. I want to ask them, “Why isn’t she following the rules everyone tells us she’s supposed to follow? Why am I such a bad daughter that I’m not willing to camp out here for weeks, months if need be, and bask in the imminent presence of God?” I see nothing, I feel nothing, I understand nothing. I have hands over my eyes, ears, mouth, nose, heart…

I want to be caught up in the mystery and the majesty of this glorious transition from life to life. I cast visions for myself of my mother, pain-free and jubilant, standing in the radiance of Heaven with the light of forever in her eyes. I look at her gaunt face, the bruised-looking eyes closed tight on her institutional pillow and I force myself to picture a smile there, wide and guileless, eternal.

My doubts run deep. In the midst of this drawn-out, incomprehensible passing, I look for some indication of meaning or message and I can’t find it. I look for grace and dignity and see only my own fears reflected back at me.

HPS (Hospital Positioning System)

Anyone who knows me even a little bit knows that my sense of direction is worse than horrendous. I have joked for years that I’m a homing pigeon for the wrong direction, that I get lost in my own backyard, that if I suggest we should turn one way at an intersection, we clearly should turn the other way instead.

So navigating this hospital continues to be a challenge for me, even after essentially living here for the past nine days. There are elevators everywhere, but somehow not every elevator gets to every floor. One elevator’s third floor button, in other words, does not actually get me to the third floor that houses my mom’s hospice unit.  Not sure how many third floors there are, but I do know that this one bends and turns until somehow you’re in an institutional cave where hospital beds go to die. A hospice for hospital beds, perhaps?

Back to the elevator situation.

There are patient elevators (lifts with more tolerance than your average elevator?) and visitor elevators (just passing through?) and they don’t seem to go to the same place. On both of these elevators, the ground floor is not actually the ground floor, and levels of subterranean depth are designated by little symbols (there’s the clover floor, the heart floor and the star floor). I wonder if there is an inherent significance about each symbol — perhaps clovers are luckier than hearts, but hearts are deeper than stars, and stars are much shiner than clovers?

Anyway, pushing buttons is an exercise in hope and mystery: Where will I end up?

Walking through the hallways, you tend to be assailed by doors suddenly flying open or closed or people appearing around corners holding styrofoam trays of cafeteria “food.” I know there’s only one hospital gift shop, but I seem to find myself arriving at it from a range of different routes every day, which makes me wonder if there are, in fact, more than one. I also know there’s a Subway sandwich shop here somewhere — sometimes, stepping off one elevator or another, I catch sight of it, like a mirage of goodness on the horizon — but I can never find it when I want to have a footlong ham-and-turkey for lunch.

It’s sort of like being at Hogwarts Castle, where the stairs randomly reposition themselves or you have rooms that only open when you need them.

I am beginning to get the hang of the place, but still think it might be a good idea to bring a pack of bread crumbs with me to help me find my way back. I still get lost all the time. I turn the wrong way off the elevators at least five times a day, which means I often end up in the heart and organ transplant ward instead of the hospice. Once when looking for the cafeteria, I stumbled into a Catholic mass happening in the chapel downstairs.

I am holding out hope that I won’t wind up crashing, half-asleep, into someone else’s hospice room, but as the days drag on and my exhaustion deepens, the likelihood of failure becomes ever higher.

Conflict of interest

Waiting for someone to die — especially someone you love more than almost any other person on this earth — is a terrible, excruciating way to spend time. Watching her face slowly change as the hours drag by, listening to the sound of her breathing, waiting for each tiny lift of her chest as she breathes…

People ask, “How is she?” And we’re not sure how to answer, because we wonder what that question really means. Does anyone expect her to recover her life, her self, her health? If we say, “She’s fine” or “She had a rough night” or “She’s resting peacefully,” does that really answer the question?

People want to know how long it will take. When will the last breath finally rattle through her lips? When will her heart stop, her poor laboring heart, thumping away in her chest with dogged loyalty? They want to know when to buy plane tickets to come down for the funeral. They want to know how much time to take off work or school. And we can’t tell them, because the doctors can’t tell us.

The doctors stand with us at the foot of her bed and furrow their compassionate faces as they study my tiny stubborn mother, huffing away in her bed with her mouth first clenched, then slack. They tell us, “Well, there’s a one to three day window here.”

They say, “I’d sort of thought it would have happened by now.”

They tell us signs to watch for and then say, “But sometimes it doesn’t happen that way at all.”

Her feet get cold and we think, “Oh, maybe now…” and then they get warm again. Her breath gets soft, faint, shallow, and we think, “Maybe now?” and then she starts chuffing away again, sucking in air like a a baby on a bottle. Her skin gets hot and clammy, then cold and clammy, then warm and dry.

She’s a mystery, battling her way home on her own terms, no matter if we’re in the room or out of it, if we speak to her or just sit in silence, if we touch her arm and forehead or simply stand at her side, watching.

It’s unbearable, but we can’t turn away. We want to be here with her even as we long to be away, distracted, soothed, absolved. I feel a sense of impatience and then a rush of shame — how can these two competing interests coexist? She’s my mom and I can’t stand the thought of losing her; and she’s my mom and I can’t stand knowing we’ve already lost her, even though her battered vessel is still warm and breathing in this bed.

I wonder how much longer I can go on — we’ve been camped out here since Wednesday last week and I can’t remember what it feels like to sleep deeply and untroubled. I miss my husband and my children and the things of my life that make it MY life, not this dusky half-life where I’m surrounded by people I only slightly know, watching for the unthinkable to happen. Everyone who loves Mom and my sister is wonderful, kind, warm — but they’re not MY people and there’s a kind of guilty loneliness in that.

The nursing staff here today has been very good to us, knowing that it’s my sister’s birthday and we’ve all been anxious that Mom might pass away today. They’ve given her a package of cakes from the vending machine, a cup of ice cream and a tube of toothpaste — an eclectic assortment of gifts, but no less sweet for it.  It’s a kind of love, and we are grateful.

It’s the same kind of love that brings them into our room many times a day to wonder and marvel with us over our seemingly frail but amazingly tough mother, lingering here for reasons we may never know, breathing.

A tale of two nurses

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.  (And even though I was an English major in college, that’s as much of the Dickens book “A Tale of Two Cities” as I can safely quote here.)

No one would ever say that hospice is a walk in the park. But almost everyone who has experienced it talks about how it made the process of losing a loved one as dignified and compassionate as possible.

Hospice nurses are trained to be patient, kind, gentle, soft-spoken. At least this is what I’ve heard, and most of the nurses we’ve had here have been lovely.

Yesterday, however, we had someone who was not at all lovely, and I’ve been trying hard to figure out how to write about this without sounding too snarlish about her. I don’t think there’s really a way to complain nicely about someone, yet somehow — me being me — I feel compelled to process the day, and the nurse, here in writing.

We’ll call her Alice.

She came across instantly as someone with a huge something to prove. Small, tightly wound, radiating tension and a desire to be anywhere but where she was, she strode up and down the hallway with a clipboard and a scowl. She did not appear in my mom’s room until late morning, at which time she told us how busy she was, how many patients she had who were “actively dying” — what a reassuring phrase to hear from one’s caregiver — and we were all going to have to just wait our turn on the meds, because no one was on the same schedule and everyone needed the same meds and she was an “agency nurse” — I guess that means she really didn’t belong here after all – and she was stressed and she knew better than we did about pretty much everything, but especially about how much medication my mother did or did not need.

She said all of these things with a briskness that made us all take a few involuntary steps backward, or at least stare at her in wordless horror and wonder what nightmare she had crawled out of. All day long, as Mom choked and gargled and did her poor moaning cough, this she-wolf-in-nurse-clothing said, “She’s not in pain.” Or, “This is just normal.”

Or, worse yet: “I don’t want to be pushing meds and be the one to push her over the edge.” In other words, I don’t want to be the one who kills her.

And she said, “I don’t want to get a complaint against me for pushing too many meds.”

We were pretty sure that was not the complaint we would have lodged against her, if we were the type to lodge complaints.

We’re not. We’re the passive, smile-til-your-head-pops-off-the-top-of-your-neck type.

So we smiled and sucked up to her. We kept sort of nudging her and asking, timidly, “Well, isn’t it about the PATIENT? Shouldn’t hospice be about comforting the patient AND the family, and not about some bitchy nurse worrying about her license or her liability or her sense of pride?” My poor sister, who rarely gets visibly mad at anyone except me (it’s a gift I have), turned redder and redder as the day went on with the strain of holding her tongue.

At shift change, the nurse thankfully disappeared — though I did have the unfortunate pleasure of riding in the elevator with her and discussing the joys of recycled cafeteria lunches. When I got back to the room, my sister went downstairs for some fresh air, leaving me to sit with Mom on my own for a while. A motherly looking woman appeared in the doorway and said “Hi, I’m Janelle? I’m the nurse manager?”

As it turns out, our nurse Alice had called this Janelle person as a misguided attempt to head off any complaint we might have wanted to lodge against her. As in, “These horrible people are going to call and tell you how horrible I was, and I wanted to beat them to the punch and tell you myself.”

We would not have complained to anyone except everyone who couldn’t have done anything about it — friends, family, people who read my blog posts — so in essence she ratted herself out.

So this motherly woman, Janelle, was lovely and apologetic and very warm: She looked at the photos I’ve been compiling for a slide show at Mom’s memorial service, she said nice things about how lucky Mom was to have me as a daughter (ha!) and how hospice really IS supposed to be about the patient and the patient’s family, not about nurses with serious personal issues.

The nurse who came in after shift change was the complete opposite of Alice the Avenging Clinician. Her name was “Helen” and she was warm, funny, concerned, and reassuring — everything you’d want from a hospice nurse if you’d ever had to sit around and think about what you’d want from a hospice nurse. She kept Mom comfortable; she listened to our wishes when it came to turning her (don’t do it any more than you have to) and medicating her; she visited our room often and offered to bring us things; she sat with me from 3 am to 4 am when I couldn’t sleep and wandered restlessly down to the family waiting area.

She made all the difference in the world and restored my faith in the hospice process.

Today has been better and Mom has been very comfortable, very quiet. No one knows, still, when we will have to say goodbye, but hopefully we’ll never have to say anything at all to Alice the Alienator ever again.

Waiting

The hospice ward here at St Thomas Hospital in Nashville is a strange and other-worldly place. Peaceful, soothing, quiet — yet full of pain and suffering, private and public. People roam the lone hallway in varying postures of grief and anxiety, some clutching cell phones and others with their arms wrapped tightly around themselves, holding it all in as best they can.

In the shared family waiting area at the end of the ward, people fuss over the free coffee machine or the water dispenser or the racks of well-thumbed magazines in the lounge. A woman comes in weeping, her phone to her ear, explaining to someone that her husband has cancer and no one knew, that he’s got failing kidneys, that he’s got less than three weeks to live.

The depth of pain closes over my head and for a moment I can’t breathe. I escape back into the wide hallway to pace and ponder.

I pass other sentries in this lonely outpost. From open doors come sounds of groans, coughs, weeping; and from other doors, the sound of families and friends laughing together, watching together, waiting.

It’s the longest, strangest, loneliest waiting I’ve ever done. There are hours where my sister and I sit in our chairs and play on our respective laptops or cell phones, listening to music, whiling away the time.

In her bed in the center of the room, Mom does her own waiting, breathing in and out and in again, the rhythm changing like the sound of wind through trees. We watch her chest rise and fall. We rub moisturizer on her poor chapped lips. We call in the nurses when the rattling in her chest becomes too wet and she begins to cough, a haunting moan that sounds like the worst kind of sadness. It’s the only time we hear her voice.

They tell me it’s just her way of trying to cough but being too weak to manage it. They say she’s not in pain. How do they know? Are they in her skin? And yet, when I look into her face it is smooth and untroubled, even as she moans and seems to cry.  What a terrible thing this dying business is.

It feels so wrong, so sinful to sit by and watch this happen. We are waiting for her to finish this journey even as we deplore the approaching end. It’s disorienting to be in this bubble of grace and grief, so totally absorbed in the passing of time even as I grasp each moment so tightly my knuckles turn white.

The waves of grief wash over me in surprising surges, ebb and flow, wax and wane. Sometimes standing at her side, looking into her face and tracing my hand along the planes of her forehead, I am overcome with knowing how fleeting my time with her has become. I look at her closed eyelids, her perfect nose, the hollow in her cheek, and I remember the face I used to know, the smile, the gleam of her eyes. How can it be that I won’t always be able to look at her lovely face?

Waiting for the end, wondering if it ever will come, longing for it to be soon because this journey is so hard and praying we never have to say goodbye.

The people who work here are mostly amazing. One nurse told us she feels this place is sacred ground, where heaven and earth come closest together and the veil that separates us from eternity is as thin as it gets. She feels gifted to be here. She sees patients smile in their last moments as they see faces of loved ones long gone to heaven, has seen them reach out their arms for embraces from angels. She gives and receives grace.

Other nurses come rattling into and out of the room, late and rushed with the meds that soothe my mom’s passing. Some are rough as they turn her small body and prop up limbs with pillows; some talk to her — “My lady,” says one silver-haired woman; “sweet girl” says another — and some don’t; some comb her hair with each adjustment they do of her body. All of them look at her pale, tiny feet under the covers, checking for changes in skin coloring and body temperature.

We ask them, timidly, “How long…?” because we feel ashamed for asking.

They tell us, “No one can know for sure.” They tell us, “You’ll know when it’s time.”

They tell us, “The family is always more distressed than the patient.”

I am sure that months have passed in these few terrible days. If death is natural, why does it feel so unnatural?

Even as I wait for her to die, I watch for her to live, to sit up and smile and say “Oh, praise God, I’m well now, let’s go home.”  I wait and wait and watch her breathe, holding my own breath, waiting.

Final chapters

The first thing I notice when I see her is how pretty her eyelids are, still lightly done up with her trademark green eyeshadow and mascara. They are closed smooth over her eyes, no creases, no tightness or tension. She looks startle-able — as if I could say in my usual loud voice, “Hi Mom!” and she would flutter those lids open and smile at me with her brilliant green eyes.

The next thing I notice is how fine her coloring is. She doesn’t look pale, she doesn’t have an ashen sheen. Her skin is warm to the touch, if a bit slack, and occasionally she raises her right arm in an offhand and unconscious summons to an unseen visitor. The left side of her body is completely still.

She is in the deepest sleep of her life. Her breathing is at times labored, at times chesty and full of phlegm. Her whole torso strains and twists for air. It’s painful to watch, and I stare at the neon tracings on the monitor above her head to make sure she’s actually getting oxygen; the little jagged blips are not reassuring.

Around her neck is a gray cervical collar that is too high up for her small frame, so that her cheeks are chuffed up in rolls and her lips, squeezed, make flopping noises with each exhalation. It’s undignified, it looks painful and cumbersome, and it begs the question: Why does she need a neck brace when she’s so incapacitated she’ll probably never be able to hold her own head up again?

On the left side of her head, a vicious black-and-blue lump rises up under the tight skin of her temple, evidence of the terrible fall she took when the stroke hit. It looks painful, and I’m conflicted enough to be grateful she doesn’t seem able to feel anything.

Tubes go into and out of her. In one, gray nutritive sludge goes viscously into her stomach. An IV tube carries blood pressure medication, small palliative doses of morphine and steroids to control the swelling on her brain. So far, nothing seems to be working: Her blood pressure was 194/134 earlier this evening, and the swelling continues apace, threatening her brain stem and the vital life functions it regulates.

So I stand at her bedside, a foreigner in a hostile land, not sure if I can touch her, not sure if I should speak or pray or cry or just stare helplessly at her perfect motionless eyelids. People tell me to say whatever words I need to say and assume that somewhere, somehow she can hear and understand me. They say she knows I’m here. That it’s important for me to be here.

In my clumsy way, I touch her waxy forearm and tell her how lovely her makeup is, that her hospital gown is absolutely ravishing on her, that her hair is growing back nicely over the scar from her brain surgery last winter. And I cry because it’s all so horrible, this last year of her life has been so hard and mean and has worn out her poor body like debris on the side of a freeway.

I don’t want to remember her like this, tiny and limp and pressed bonelessly into her hospital bed. I don’t want to remember the whiffling, helpless little snores she makes as her body continues to breathe, struggle, breathe. I want to remember the gleam of love in her wonderful eyes, the fond rueful smile she saved just for me. Is it possible to ever say “I love you” enough, “I’m sorry” enough, “thank you” enough? Because that’s what I do as I stand at her bed  and look down on her, over and over, touching her wispy hair and willing those smooth powdered eyelids to open one more time.

The hobby lobby is closed

Not too long ago, I sent out an invitation to all faculty and staff at the university where I work, asking them to tell me what they do for fun. It’s for a column we run periodically called offCampus, where we celebrate some of the interesting people we’ve got on this campus.

So, I got about 50 responses, mostly from staff because apparently faculty are too smart to do frivolous things with their free time — or maybe they just don’t have free time? At any rate, staff interests run the gamut from “normal” hobbies like acting and gardening to “exotic” interests like throwing tomahawks in one’s backyard. It was both entertaining to hear about these and, of course, depressing, because it brought home the fact that I’ve got no hobbies to speak of, interesting or otherwise.

In fact my main hobby is being lazy.

I’ve been trying to remember if I ever had a hobby and have just become pathetic as I’ve aged, and I’ve only been able to come up with a few things.

One: I used to write for fun, back when it was fun and not my job, back when I thought I was sort of good at writing.  I suppose blogging is a modern iteration of scribbling stories on the backs of paper bags when I was bored at my retail jobs in high school and college.

Two: I read, a lot, but is that a hobby?

Three: Back when my swimsuit did not resemble a circus tent, I used to swim a lot. I could do a mile a day. And then my shoulders became so wide that birds started roosting on them, so I quit.

Nothing much, in other words. I am a boring old person and have been since I was in my 20s. No skydiving, no glass blowing, no creating my own instruments or baking organic dog treats or tipping over cows in the many nearby pastures. So instead I make fun of people who do have hobbies. People like my co-worker who runs his own clogging group — the dancing kind, not the artery-busting kind — or the people I used to see in the toy aisle at Target, scouring through the Matchbox cars to find just the perfect addition to their collection.

Kevin a.k.a. L.K. Harris, Civil War veteran. I did his hair. Maybe I should take up cosmetology as a hobby.

I even, forgive me, poke a little fun at my husband, who loves genealogy to the point where he dressed up like his great-great-grandfather, a Civil War veteran, and spent five hours in a cemetery on Saturday presenting this man’s life story to people who had paid money to hear it. Yes, he has become a “reenactor” of sorts, although not as rabid as those people who dress up like Union or Confederate soldiers and pretend to die on fake battlefields every weekend.

I’ve heard it said we mock because we love. We also mock because we’re jealous. Not that I want to dress up like a Greek matron who made the arduous journey from the Old Country to America. I just want to have something I’m passionate about, something besides eating and sleeping and making fun of people.

Kevin is trying to help me, probably because I think he wants me to get a life so I can stop rolling my eyes about his. For Mother’s Day he bought me a gift card to Michael’s (the craft store) and wrote in my card, “Here, get a hobby” (not really, he was much kinder but I’ve not got the actual card in front of me and this is funnier — it’s what I would have written).

Because after all, there have been abortive attempts on my part to kindle a love for something. I’ve tried painting — but found out you have to know how to draw if you want to do anything more than smear color on a canvas. I’ve tried making paper — and it’s fun, but messy and slow, and then no one actually uses the paper I make, so it just floats around the house like old dreams until it somehow ends up in the recycling. Ironic.

I’ve tried making journals of the paper I made — even smearing my expensive colorful acrylic paint on the cover! how efficient was that?? — but turns out no one could actually open them when I was done, let alone write on them. They also ended up in the recycling.

Lately I’ve been interested in the idea of making my own jewelry, for whatever reason, since I can barely remember to stick earrings in my ears most days. But still, I dawdle over dangly earrings on display at craft fairs or hospital gift shops (I was tempted to buy some earrings while I was pacing the hospital hallways during my mother’s brain surgery, but it just felt exploitative to think about spending money on baubles while Mom’s head was being probed with sharp implements). I think about making my own cool earrings and giving them to people who will then think I’m amazing and creative and super.

The gift card is only $25. I don’t think that’s enough to turn me into a passionate, skilled maker of anything people would actually want to wear. Maybe we can save it and use it to buy more hair paint for Kevin, who’s reprising his role as his white-haired ancestor in October.

Plus I’m pretty sure Michael’s has candy and bottled water for sale at their registers.