I've been single for almost seven years now. I didn't think it was even possible to go this long without love and not get all squirrely and miserable about it, but I know now that I could probably go the distance, if it came to that, and be content.
I used to read romances when I was a teenager, especially in my early teens when the bodice-rippers read like soft-core porn. The bestsellers had fewer "heaving bosoms" and "steely thighs clad in tight buckskin", but they had their moments (being bestsellers, after all), and I would skip ahead to the scenes when they got down to it, and then go back and read the whole book.
Forbidden Love was a huge theme in the bestsellers. Sometimes the heroine was married to someone else, sometimes a jerk but more often a really nice guy. She loved her husband and he loved her, but this other great Love of her Life would keep popping up, resulting in angst and secret love children and all sorts of mess. It made for a good read, but struck me as being pretty stupid overall. Even as a young teenager, I would think, "Why don't they just get together or move on? Don't you outgrow this stuff eventually?"
I figured that I was way too smart for that nonsense.
I married a guy who seemed to be a nice guy, but was no Great Love. It was a Moderate, But Pleasant Love. Maybe it could have grown into something deeper than that, but instead it took another direction entirely, and we parted after a little less than ten years, emotional strangers. When I see him (because I have to, we have two children), it seems impossible that we were ever together at all.
When I think of Great Love I think of three men I've known. I don't know how this measures up to other women--maybe they have known more, or less, or none, or just the one, like the heroines in the bestsellers--and I can't say exactly what it is that sets them apart from the other men I've known, quite a few who were really, really great guys, but something does. The first man was gay, but he couldn't acknowledge that at first, so we plunged into a very intense, romantic, heady friendship that probably only those under twenty-one with artsy pretentions can experience (as we were). We've lived 3,000 miles apart for the past twenty years, but still have a bond that runs deeper than many old friends do.
The second was married, and that is that. Married, or in any way attached, men do not spark interest in me, in fact, they generally dampen it right out of existence. He was the disorienting and upsetting exception. He and I are not friends, as that could not work. It is peculiar that we can't be friends--I am extremely comfortable with being buddies with guys, but again, he was not just some nice guy who I liked a lot, and I really couldn't tell you why.
Am I a pragmatist at heart? For with both these men, rather than longing for them with a passion that time could not abate, I have long since "moved on".
Then, there is the third man. He is not gay, and he is not married, but for his own reasons, was not available, and still isn't. Maybe that will change, or maybe it never will.
Presumably, those bestsellers do so well because the women who read them daydream about romance. They want passion and excitement, and enjoy feeling it vicariously through a book. I wonder if most of those women are like me, though...have met the guy, felt those feelings, and knew it wouldn't work, so chose the better road...
...and go read trashy novels to appreciate what a disaster it would have been if they hadn't let go of that One, Great Love.
I am content to be single, but I do dream of love. You know--the kind of love where I can go to bed with my socks on, and he doesn't notice because he's too busy flicking through the DVR. That kind of love. The kind I didn't read about when I was thirteen.
(Below is a clip from the miniseries from the book The Thorn Birds. Nothing says "forbidden love" like having a lifelong crush on a priest, having his love child, and pretending it's your husband's...it makes the rest of us look fabulously wise and savvy in comparison. Richard Chamberlain was darn cute back then...too bad he's gay, huh?)
This isn't me. It's Night Windows by Edward Hopper.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Monday, July 4, 2011
Music in the Car
Driving down Route 93 into Somerville to do my first death pronouncement on a patient who was mine and who I was fond of, and fond of the family, and personally sad about, but glad for their release from sickness and decline...
...early in the day, and the commuter traffic heavy, so I put in a CD a friend had burned for me and that I had not yet taken the time to listen to...
...music in my car always helps.
(This is, of course, the first song, called "Sleeping Lessons", on that CD my friend burned, The Shins album Wincing the Night Away. A little bit of a crazy synchronicity, that...)
...early in the day, and the commuter traffic heavy, so I put in a CD a friend had burned for me and that I had not yet taken the time to listen to...
...music in my car always helps.
(This is, of course, the first song, called "Sleeping Lessons", on that CD my friend burned, The Shins album Wincing the Night Away. A little bit of a crazy synchronicity, that...)
Saturday, July 2, 2011
An Update
http://curlytop-upstairs.blogspot.com/2011/04/when-will-you-be-back.html
She died April 28, 2011 in her home, surrounded by her family.
He died June 27, 2011, in a nursing home, at 3:30am, having been visited the night before by a niece who drove non-stop from the Midwest to see him.
They both died peacefully.
She died April 28, 2011 in her home, surrounded by her family.
He died June 27, 2011, in a nursing home, at 3:30am, having been visited the night before by a niece who drove non-stop from the Midwest to see him.
They both died peacefully.
The Kind of Mom I Am, Or: Bruins Hockey
I grew up with my dad watching the Bruins on Channel 38, yelling, "SCORE!! Woooohoo!!" whenever they got a goal. It seemed to happen a lot just as I was drifting off to sleep, and his shout would pierce through walls and wake me up. It was always and constantly Bobby Orr--either him or Phil Esposito. My father took us to Red Sox games at Fenway--presumably it did not cost a week's paycheck back then--which overcame me with tedium at least by the seventh-inning stretch--but to a Bruins game only once, when my sister and I were in high school and had serious crushes on the rookie Mike Krushelnyski. (They played the Hartford Whalers and hammered them.)
My kids don't care about sports, especially sports on TV. I think if someone gave my daughter a catcher's mitt and put her in the outfield, she would spend her time there fiddling on her cellphone sending texts to the bullpen. Neither child can skate, or wants to. My son is starting to enjoy basketball, and plays it for fun at the Boys and Girls Club after school, but he doesn't exactly have a killer competitive edge about it.
They had no idea that their mom cared about hockey until I started to watch the playoffs this year. We don't get many TV stations at home here, so I could only watch the games televised on NBC. By the time the Bruins were up against the Lightening for the Eastern Conference title, I was into it enough to listen on the radio to the games I couldn't watch, and my kids thought I was nuts.
"Mom! Why are you suddenly OBSESSED with hockey?!!"
"Shhhhhh!! I'm listening. Go brush your teeth."
Sports on the radio is very cozy. It reminds me of the happy days of childhood, with adults relaxing and chatting and laughing, the game (baseball, of course) coming through a transistor radio parked on a picnic table.
My daughter would not join me in front of the TV, preferring music and texting and makeup application in her room. My son watched some while he played with his action figures on the couch. "Mommy, this is boring. Can we watch Modern Family?"
"Nope. For once I'm watching what I want to watch, and that's hockey."
And then the whine. "But Mommy, it's sooo boring! You are obsessed with hockey, and it's boring to me!", mimicking his sister.
"Put your toys down and watch it! Hockey isn't a game you can just sort of pay attention to, like baseball or football. It's fast, like basketball, you have to watch it every second! The whole game can change in a flash!"
Their father hates sports, and if they are ever to appreciate them, it is totally up to me. "Anyway," I told my son, "you're a guy. You have to know sports! How are you ever going to start conversations with other guys? The beginning of any conversation between guys is, "Dude, didja see The Game last night?" Don't you know that?"
My son laughed in protest, but did watch a little hockey, and almost got it.
The Bruins won the Eastern Conference and made it to the Finals against the Vancouver Canucks, who I quickly grew to hate. I would have hated them anyway, of course, but the vicious hit on Nathan Horton early in Game Three (which I missed, as I was herding children into pajamas and wasn't able to hear the radio from the next room) cemented it and made it an obligation that the Bruins MUST WIN THE STANLEY CUP. It was down to the memory of my father, too--dead ten years, huge hockey fan, Bobby Orr leading the pre-game rally at the Garden in Boston for Game Four. Playoff superstitions started to beckon at me...okay, I was not capable of growing a playoff beard, obviously, but since they seemed to win the games I could only hear on the radio, maybe I should just listen to the games on the radio?? (It wasn't just me, it was called the "NBC Curse".)
Sanity won out. I wanted to watch those games.
They won Game Six and I had watched it happen, so it was with a sense of okayness that I settled in for Game Seven. This was it; an away game, at Vancouver, which had all been won by Vancouver so far; the series tied 3-3; this was it.
"Don't either of you ask me for anything motherlike after the puck drops at 8! After that, you are ON YOUR OWN!!"
My daughter rolled her eyes and went to her room to do whatever it is she does in there. My son settled in on the couch with me. "You can watch the first period, but then it's bed," I told him.
"Okay, Mommy."
When the Bruins scored the first goal, there in the first period, I think everybody knew. You could feel the wind being sucked right out of Vancouver. It seemed to be the very Will of God. I was so happy it was ridiculous. I yelled "Woooohoo!!" loud enough to make my dad proud. Even my son was happy.
The rest of the game was mostly a lot of icing being heaped on the cake. Vancouver didn't score anything. I felt a little lonely in my jubilance, so I texted my friend John. My daughter wandered out of her room and lay on the loveseat to watch. John texted, "History is being made and your son is sleeping through it??" The mom in me protested, "but it's a school night!" John texted, "You will never be able to live it down if he misses this!"
"Hey, sweetie, wake up," I said, and shook him a little, then finally scooped him up and carried him into the livingroom. He never did really wake up, as much as I tried, even when the buzzer sounded and it was over--Bruins 4, Vancouver 0-- and me and the TV were cheering again. After the players had finished carrying the Cup around the ice and that annoying guy from Channel 7 was trying to power-on the interviews, I put him back in bed, and woke my sleeping daughter and sent her to bed, too.
The next morning my son said, "I missed it!"
I was ready. "No, you didn't! I tried to wake you up--you were a little awake--you were right in front of the TV!"
"But I don't remember!"
"It doesn't matter anyway, because you saw the winning goal, and that's all that matters."
"I did?"
"Yes! That first goal in the first period! Patrice Bergeron! Vancouver never scored, so the first goal was the winning goal! The other goals were only extra."
"Yeah...and my SISTER didn't see it!"
"That's right, she didn't, she was in her room."
His sister interjected, "But I saw the END, and he was sleeping!"
And so it went.
The day passed, and so did their interest, and when I said later on, "I think I want a t-shirt," they both commented on "how obsessed mom is". The season is over anyway.
I'm considering adding Versus onto my TV tier for the fall. Do you think the kids will watch with me?
My kids don't care about sports, especially sports on TV. I think if someone gave my daughter a catcher's mitt and put her in the outfield, she would spend her time there fiddling on her cellphone sending texts to the bullpen. Neither child can skate, or wants to. My son is starting to enjoy basketball, and plays it for fun at the Boys and Girls Club after school, but he doesn't exactly have a killer competitive edge about it.
They had no idea that their mom cared about hockey until I started to watch the playoffs this year. We don't get many TV stations at home here, so I could only watch the games televised on NBC. By the time the Bruins were up against the Lightening for the Eastern Conference title, I was into it enough to listen on the radio to the games I couldn't watch, and my kids thought I was nuts.
"Mom! Why are you suddenly OBSESSED with hockey?!!"
"Shhhhhh!! I'm listening. Go brush your teeth."
Sports on the radio is very cozy. It reminds me of the happy days of childhood, with adults relaxing and chatting and laughing, the game (baseball, of course) coming through a transistor radio parked on a picnic table.
My daughter would not join me in front of the TV, preferring music and texting and makeup application in her room. My son watched some while he played with his action figures on the couch. "Mommy, this is boring. Can we watch Modern Family?"
"Nope. For once I'm watching what I want to watch, and that's hockey."
And then the whine. "But Mommy, it's sooo boring! You are obsessed with hockey, and it's boring to me!", mimicking his sister.
"Put your toys down and watch it! Hockey isn't a game you can just sort of pay attention to, like baseball or football. It's fast, like basketball, you have to watch it every second! The whole game can change in a flash!"
Their father hates sports, and if they are ever to appreciate them, it is totally up to me. "Anyway," I told my son, "you're a guy. You have to know sports! How are you ever going to start conversations with other guys? The beginning of any conversation between guys is, "Dude, didja see The Game last night?" Don't you know that?"
My son laughed in protest, but did watch a little hockey, and almost got it.
The Bruins won the Eastern Conference and made it to the Finals against the Vancouver Canucks, who I quickly grew to hate. I would have hated them anyway, of course, but the vicious hit on Nathan Horton early in Game Three (which I missed, as I was herding children into pajamas and wasn't able to hear the radio from the next room) cemented it and made it an obligation that the Bruins MUST WIN THE STANLEY CUP. It was down to the memory of my father, too--dead ten years, huge hockey fan, Bobby Orr leading the pre-game rally at the Garden in Boston for Game Four. Playoff superstitions started to beckon at me...okay, I was not capable of growing a playoff beard, obviously, but since they seemed to win the games I could only hear on the radio, maybe I should just listen to the games on the radio?? (It wasn't just me, it was called the "NBC Curse".)
Sanity won out. I wanted to watch those games.
They won Game Six and I had watched it happen, so it was with a sense of okayness that I settled in for Game Seven. This was it; an away game, at Vancouver, which had all been won by Vancouver so far; the series tied 3-3; this was it.
"Don't either of you ask me for anything motherlike after the puck drops at 8! After that, you are ON YOUR OWN!!"
My daughter rolled her eyes and went to her room to do whatever it is she does in there. My son settled in on the couch with me. "You can watch the first period, but then it's bed," I told him.
"Okay, Mommy."
When the Bruins scored the first goal, there in the first period, I think everybody knew. You could feel the wind being sucked right out of Vancouver. It seemed to be the very Will of God. I was so happy it was ridiculous. I yelled "Woooohoo!!" loud enough to make my dad proud. Even my son was happy.
The rest of the game was mostly a lot of icing being heaped on the cake. Vancouver didn't score anything. I felt a little lonely in my jubilance, so I texted my friend John. My daughter wandered out of her room and lay on the loveseat to watch. John texted, "History is being made and your son is sleeping through it??" The mom in me protested, "but it's a school night!" John texted, "You will never be able to live it down if he misses this!"
"Hey, sweetie, wake up," I said, and shook him a little, then finally scooped him up and carried him into the livingroom. He never did really wake up, as much as I tried, even when the buzzer sounded and it was over--Bruins 4, Vancouver 0-- and me and the TV were cheering again. After the players had finished carrying the Cup around the ice and that annoying guy from Channel 7 was trying to power-on the interviews, I put him back in bed, and woke my sleeping daughter and sent her to bed, too.
The next morning my son said, "I missed it!"
I was ready. "No, you didn't! I tried to wake you up--you were a little awake--you were right in front of the TV!"
"But I don't remember!"
"It doesn't matter anyway, because you saw the winning goal, and that's all that matters."
"I did?"
"Yes! That first goal in the first period! Patrice Bergeron! Vancouver never scored, so the first goal was the winning goal! The other goals were only extra."
"Yeah...and my SISTER didn't see it!"
"That's right, she didn't, she was in her room."
His sister interjected, "But I saw the END, and he was sleeping!"
And so it went.
The day passed, and so did their interest, and when I said later on, "I think I want a t-shirt," they both commented on "how obsessed mom is". The season is over anyway.
I'm considering adding Versus onto my TV tier for the fall. Do you think the kids will watch with me?
My Ole Depressed Self
A century or so hence, people are bound to find it amusing that we ever thought a "selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor" would actually do something to depression. I suppose PET scans and drug research studies are a step up from those many, many centuries of thinking melancholy was caused by "too much black bile in the spleen"--treated by eating warm, moist foods (essentially a lot of salad, weirdly enough), listening to music and watching plays (will medical insurance pay for that? Please??), and lots of rest and idleness (which is pretty much all I can do when I'm depressed anyway, but it is torture, not leisure, unfortunately). Oh yes, and by bloodletting--the cure-all--which is a nice analogy for what you have to go through to affect any kind of deep psychic change, I'd say.
After a month of finally taking Zoloft, something completely unexpected happened to me. For the first time ever in my post-pubescent life, my chattering head stopped with the endless critiques and backstories and became clear. I truly had forgotten that my head could ever be that still. It was the opposite of my past experiences with chemical substances that affected the mind--those had all softened the edges to a blurry halo that kept my thoughts from cutting me up, but also kept them from being of any use to me at all. That was not what I wanted from life, or from myself. I wanted balance. I wanted clarity. I wanted to just be able to function okay, to get right down to it.
I have never had the kind of depression where you get locked up for a few weeks, or you end up unemployed living in your parents' basement, or you find yourself writing a poignant memoir about it decades later, although I do have a long-standing adoration for literature about mental illness. I've probably read them all. I did my high school sophomore year poetry report on--wait for it--Sylvia Plath. When I am depressed I reread them and find them empathetic and soothing. I reread my favorite books from childhood, too, when I'm in that state--the Little House books, Strawberry Girl, the Melendy family stories.
The kind of depression I had had me limping along on good days, and almost completely inert on the bad ones. I had a particularly nasty stretch of one that lasted from June 1997 until March 1998 when it seemed to vanish overnight and for no particular reason (much like the grasshopper swarm did in On the Banks of Plum Creek). It took every bit of energy I could find to show up for work in that time. Once I was working I could do the task in front of me adequately, in a detached, automatonic way, but right as I left the building to go home, I had nothing left. I was a balloon with no more air. The energy-suck of depression was horrible to me, and coupled with a head that wouldn't stop muttering doomsday prayers over and over, it became my personal definition of Hell.
I have spent many, many hours laying on my couch or in my bed, unable to eat or sleep, worried about all the oxygen I was taking up by the fact of my living, and certain that I would never feel differently again.
It changed. It didn't change because of the Zoloft, either--the Zoloft was actually the last stone in the series of steps that led me out of the hole. I got married and had a baby, most of all. My quality of life and my mood was a concern to me before, and I had been working pretty hard at them, but after being presented with the gift of my daughter, they became of urgent and primary significance. I had a wonderful and very effective therapist who told me, "Whatever issues we don't deal with in our own lives we pass on to our kids," and I still hang on to that. It still lights a fire under my ass when I want to give up and be a wreck.
I started Zoloft when I was toward the end of my pregnancy with my son and had shown up at the obstetrician's crying again. She had an eye on the possibility of postpartum depression and wanted to nip the cycle in the bud, even though I was skittish about taking anything with a baby growing in me. I decided to just trust her, so I took the three week "starter pack" and then got the prescription filled.
There is a lot of talk in the media now about how SSRIs work no better than placebos, and work not at all for people with serious, incapacitating depressions (the psychotic kind, the lock-you-up kind, the kind I have not quite gotten to). The treatment of mental illness is a near total crapshoot, anyway. I worked on a psychiatric unit for a couple of years, and the thing that really surprised me about it was how it was mostly just a safe space for someone to sleep off the side effects of the meds. (I've tended to think that about hospitals overall anyway, even the medical side--"How exactly do people start to heal here, again?"--so it is no mystery how I've ended up doing home care.) People got better there, though. People even had epiphanies about themselves and their lives. Healing can be found anywhere, and it is more a question of open-mindedness and willingness than anything else, I think.
Those crossroads moments come, and the choice is ours, as difficult and scary as it usually is.
That isn't the end of the story. I took Zoloft for about a year, then stopped, and then started up again in July 2005. Strangely, the worst depressions I have had (of which there are three) all started in the summertime, and July has always been a difficult month for me. I have read that Seasonal Affective Disorder is usually a wintertime affliction but a few of us weirdos get it in the summer, and maybe that is all it is...I really don't know. All I know is, I stopped taking Zoloft in August 2007, when I was feeling low and considering having the dose increased from 50mg to 100mg, but got all contrary with myself and stopped taking it altogether instead. The low feeling passed when the weather started to cool, and to my amazement...it has never returned. I was steeling myself for the dark cloud in May 2008, but the weeks went on, the summer got hot and thundery (we had storms almost every afternoon that year--Thor forgot he wasn't in Florida), and my energy level kept in balance and my head held steady. They have remained so since. This is the fourth summer in a row I have not had a trace of depression, and I am still chemical-free.
I can't descibe how wonderous that is.
Don't ask me what happened. I don't know what happened. I did take up daily meditation in 2005, but fell away from it in 2009 and have not quite been able to get back. I read somewhere obscure and unstudied that daily meditation, after being practiced over three years, can permanantly rewire your brain. Could it be that simple? Maybe. I don't know. My diet is as crappy as it has ever been, I'll tell you--no big helpings of warm, moist salads for this girl, at least, not often enough--so there is no reason there why the black bile would be dispelled. What's more, the summer of 2007 is when I started working as a hospice nurse. When people ask me, "Don't you find this work depressing?", I can honestly, and a little ironically, say, "No, I don't...not at all."
Maybe SSRIs do work--maybe Zoloft reminded my brain "this is how you do it, now get to work", and my brain finally caught on. And maybe after all those years of emotional and psychological bloodletting, the toxins purged and my head regained balance so the flow of energy could resume. I can get off the couch and do things I want to do, and what's more, I can enjoy them.
I don't know what happened...but I hope it stays this way for the rest of my life.
It's July 2nd. I'm going to play in my garden now.
After a month of finally taking Zoloft, something completely unexpected happened to me. For the first time ever in my post-pubescent life, my chattering head stopped with the endless critiques and backstories and became clear. I truly had forgotten that my head could ever be that still. It was the opposite of my past experiences with chemical substances that affected the mind--those had all softened the edges to a blurry halo that kept my thoughts from cutting me up, but also kept them from being of any use to me at all. That was not what I wanted from life, or from myself. I wanted balance. I wanted clarity. I wanted to just be able to function okay, to get right down to it.
I have never had the kind of depression where you get locked up for a few weeks, or you end up unemployed living in your parents' basement, or you find yourself writing a poignant memoir about it decades later, although I do have a long-standing adoration for literature about mental illness. I've probably read them all. I did my high school sophomore year poetry report on--wait for it--Sylvia Plath. When I am depressed I reread them and find them empathetic and soothing. I reread my favorite books from childhood, too, when I'm in that state--the Little House books, Strawberry Girl, the Melendy family stories.
The kind of depression I had had me limping along on good days, and almost completely inert on the bad ones. I had a particularly nasty stretch of one that lasted from June 1997 until March 1998 when it seemed to vanish overnight and for no particular reason (much like the grasshopper swarm did in On the Banks of Plum Creek). It took every bit of energy I could find to show up for work in that time. Once I was working I could do the task in front of me adequately, in a detached, automatonic way, but right as I left the building to go home, I had nothing left. I was a balloon with no more air. The energy-suck of depression was horrible to me, and coupled with a head that wouldn't stop muttering doomsday prayers over and over, it became my personal definition of Hell.
I have spent many, many hours laying on my couch or in my bed, unable to eat or sleep, worried about all the oxygen I was taking up by the fact of my living, and certain that I would never feel differently again.
It changed. It didn't change because of the Zoloft, either--the Zoloft was actually the last stone in the series of steps that led me out of the hole. I got married and had a baby, most of all. My quality of life and my mood was a concern to me before, and I had been working pretty hard at them, but after being presented with the gift of my daughter, they became of urgent and primary significance. I had a wonderful and very effective therapist who told me, "Whatever issues we don't deal with in our own lives we pass on to our kids," and I still hang on to that. It still lights a fire under my ass when I want to give up and be a wreck.
I started Zoloft when I was toward the end of my pregnancy with my son and had shown up at the obstetrician's crying again. She had an eye on the possibility of postpartum depression and wanted to nip the cycle in the bud, even though I was skittish about taking anything with a baby growing in me. I decided to just trust her, so I took the three week "starter pack" and then got the prescription filled.
There is a lot of talk in the media now about how SSRIs work no better than placebos, and work not at all for people with serious, incapacitating depressions (the psychotic kind, the lock-you-up kind, the kind I have not quite gotten to). The treatment of mental illness is a near total crapshoot, anyway. I worked on a psychiatric unit for a couple of years, and the thing that really surprised me about it was how it was mostly just a safe space for someone to sleep off the side effects of the meds. (I've tended to think that about hospitals overall anyway, even the medical side--"How exactly do people start to heal here, again?"--so it is no mystery how I've ended up doing home care.) People got better there, though. People even had epiphanies about themselves and their lives. Healing can be found anywhere, and it is more a question of open-mindedness and willingness than anything else, I think.
Those crossroads moments come, and the choice is ours, as difficult and scary as it usually is.
That isn't the end of the story. I took Zoloft for about a year, then stopped, and then started up again in July 2005. Strangely, the worst depressions I have had (of which there are three) all started in the summertime, and July has always been a difficult month for me. I have read that Seasonal Affective Disorder is usually a wintertime affliction but a few of us weirdos get it in the summer, and maybe that is all it is...I really don't know. All I know is, I stopped taking Zoloft in August 2007, when I was feeling low and considering having the dose increased from 50mg to 100mg, but got all contrary with myself and stopped taking it altogether instead. The low feeling passed when the weather started to cool, and to my amazement...it has never returned. I was steeling myself for the dark cloud in May 2008, but the weeks went on, the summer got hot and thundery (we had storms almost every afternoon that year--Thor forgot he wasn't in Florida), and my energy level kept in balance and my head held steady. They have remained so since. This is the fourth summer in a row I have not had a trace of depression, and I am still chemical-free.
I can't descibe how wonderous that is.
Don't ask me what happened. I don't know what happened. I did take up daily meditation in 2005, but fell away from it in 2009 and have not quite been able to get back. I read somewhere obscure and unstudied that daily meditation, after being practiced over three years, can permanantly rewire your brain. Could it be that simple? Maybe. I don't know. My diet is as crappy as it has ever been, I'll tell you--no big helpings of warm, moist salads for this girl, at least, not often enough--so there is no reason there why the black bile would be dispelled. What's more, the summer of 2007 is when I started working as a hospice nurse. When people ask me, "Don't you find this work depressing?", I can honestly, and a little ironically, say, "No, I don't...not at all."
Maybe SSRIs do work--maybe Zoloft reminded my brain "this is how you do it, now get to work", and my brain finally caught on. And maybe after all those years of emotional and psychological bloodletting, the toxins purged and my head regained balance so the flow of energy could resume. I can get off the couch and do things I want to do, and what's more, I can enjoy them.
I don't know what happened...but I hope it stays this way for the rest of my life.
It's July 2nd. I'm going to play in my garden now.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Applied Theology 101
It is almost 11 p.m. Eastern Time, and Judgement Day is obviously not getting underway. There is a bit of a volcanic eruption/earthquakey thing going on in Iceland, but it being Iceland and all, that is not really a big deal. Other than the Bruins losing to the Bolts in game 4 of the Eastern Conference playoffs, and Animal Kingdom not quite able to overtake Shakleford in the Preakness Stakes (and Big Papi scoring his 300th home run for the Red Sox over at Fenway Park), nothing of any importance seems to be going down today.
It baffles me, deeply and sincerely baffles me, that anybody ever could believe that because some self-styled preacher with a radio show in California says the End Times are coming May 21, 2011, that they really are. I saw the billboard proclaiming it on Route 107 as I drove into Revere one day, and mostly wondered who the guy was all hunched over in a fearful, yet reverent position, silhouetted against a full, blazing sun; was he one of the faithful, or was it a stock photo someone chose out of a file? Was he startled to be all mixed up in this, his figure plastered up and down highways all over the world?
I had a patient who was Pentecostal, and her husband was the pastor of their church. She died an arduous death, one I would not wish on anybody (I still wonder if I could have done something more...anything more...to have eased her suffering). She was young, and their daughter was not yet out of her teens. I took a large chunk of time off in the middle of my work day to attend the funeral, and besides all the "praise Jesus!!" and "amen!!" that was going on, what struck me most was her daughter and how happy she was. She was beaming, smiling at all of us, from the pulpit, declaring, "she is Home! My mom is Home at last!" Her eyes shone, but not from a shimmer of tears. They shone with joy, and pride, and pure love.
I thought...yes, but your mother is dead. That faithful servant of Jesus you are talking about may be someplace wonderful right now, but the woman who was your mother is gone, gone, gone.
My father always said, "Religion is a crutch." He ditched his religion right around the time I was born, and it was a heavy religion he got rid of, a strain of Baptist that was less overpowering than the Pentecostals, but not by much. He shed it with a vehemence that never abated. He invited the Jehovah's Witnesses into the house to debate Scripture with them, essentially turning the tables and witnessing to them . My mother was a garden-variety, indifferent atheist, but my father took it on like the born-again convert he was.
"Religion is a crutch!" As I got older, I started to think, "...but if you have a broken leg, you're kinda stupid not to use one."
The first time I prayed I was about eight, and it was for no reason in particular. I was reading the Little House books (I was an early and precocious reader), and Mary and Laura would say a prayer at bedtime: "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." It sounded pretty morbid to me, but it was the only prayer I had heard of, so I started to recite it to myself at night, on the sly, in the mutest of whispers, my clasped hands hidden under the blankets (to actually kneel beside the bed would have risked exposure). It got so I became quite superstitious about saying it, and if I forgot, I would be overcome by dread the following day--which was a decent enough introduction into what religion can be if taken too far in a certain direction, which it often is.
I did eventually give up this small prayerful part of my life, with no ill effects. The desire to be connected to some kind of God has never left me, though. It seems to be something my rational brain has no use for, which makes it tough for me to believe in any theistic religions except as nice cognitive-behavioral guides for effective living, because my rational brain has a very strong say in what goes on in my life. Thank my parents for that.
There is that something else that calls me, though. I will never be sure if it ever called my father; he died ten years ago, athesist to the end--but a few days after he died, for about a week, I felt as if he were very close to me. In my mind's eye I could see him as he looked when I was a girl, with a full head of hair and his beard, shaking his head at me in a rueful way and laughing, "You were right! All the time, you were right!", and I could hear myself replying, "Dad, I told you so. I told you so." Then the feeling of him, and his face in my mind, just went away.
Was that wishful thinking--or was it something else? My dad knew that I had developed some sort of faith in some sort of God, but we didn't much discuss it. "How can intelligent people believe in God!" he exclaimed one day, and I simply didn't answer, and the conversation moved on. Afterlife? Well, how do I know? How could anybody know?
He was sick with brain cancer for a very long time before he died. It messed up his thought processes, and conversations with him often became painfully scattered and irrational. He had a lot of fear around his illness, and the fear never much left him. It took away his brain, the very thing he held most dear, and the irony of that was not lost on me at all.
I have always been well aware of what a strange, scary, unpredictable world this is. Smarts, and even a big heart, won't always get me through. Maybe God is a crutch, even the God I believe in who doesn't give a shit about dogma or the hereafter or whether or not I pray, but I have come to believe that I need one.
I cried when my father died, and I miss him more rather than less as the years go by (as I have since had my son, and my children are growing, and I wish he could be here for it all). I can look that square in the eye, and I can feel how lousy that is and all the questions and contradictions it brings up in me about this world and this life.
I also have the feeling that something bigger is going on. Something far too big to understand. Something that comes to me at times like after my dad died, when his face would appear in my head like something not quite out of a dream. Something I see over and over again in my hospice work--just the sheer timing of events can be striking, completely uncanny. I don't need an End Times theology, and I don't need to focus on the next world to kill the pain I find in this one. I just need the occasional reminder that God is there, and God is good, and I have all I seem to need to go on...upright, strong, with two feet and a crutch (for when I stumble, and believe me, I will).
It baffles me, deeply and sincerely baffles me, that anybody ever could believe that because some self-styled preacher with a radio show in California says the End Times are coming May 21, 2011, that they really are. I saw the billboard proclaiming it on Route 107 as I drove into Revere one day, and mostly wondered who the guy was all hunched over in a fearful, yet reverent position, silhouetted against a full, blazing sun; was he one of the faithful, or was it a stock photo someone chose out of a file? Was he startled to be all mixed up in this, his figure plastered up and down highways all over the world?
I had a patient who was Pentecostal, and her husband was the pastor of their church. She died an arduous death, one I would not wish on anybody (I still wonder if I could have done something more...anything more...to have eased her suffering). She was young, and their daughter was not yet out of her teens. I took a large chunk of time off in the middle of my work day to attend the funeral, and besides all the "praise Jesus!!" and "amen!!" that was going on, what struck me most was her daughter and how happy she was. She was beaming, smiling at all of us, from the pulpit, declaring, "she is Home! My mom is Home at last!" Her eyes shone, but not from a shimmer of tears. They shone with joy, and pride, and pure love.
I thought...yes, but your mother is dead. That faithful servant of Jesus you are talking about may be someplace wonderful right now, but the woman who was your mother is gone, gone, gone.
My father always said, "Religion is a crutch." He ditched his religion right around the time I was born, and it was a heavy religion he got rid of, a strain of Baptist that was less overpowering than the Pentecostals, but not by much. He shed it with a vehemence that never abated. He invited the Jehovah's Witnesses into the house to debate Scripture with them, essentially turning the tables and witnessing to them . My mother was a garden-variety, indifferent atheist, but my father took it on like the born-again convert he was.
"Religion is a crutch!" As I got older, I started to think, "...but if you have a broken leg, you're kinda stupid not to use one."
The first time I prayed I was about eight, and it was for no reason in particular. I was reading the Little House books (I was an early and precocious reader), and Mary and Laura would say a prayer at bedtime: "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." It sounded pretty morbid to me, but it was the only prayer I had heard of, so I started to recite it to myself at night, on the sly, in the mutest of whispers, my clasped hands hidden under the blankets (to actually kneel beside the bed would have risked exposure). It got so I became quite superstitious about saying it, and if I forgot, I would be overcome by dread the following day--which was a decent enough introduction into what religion can be if taken too far in a certain direction, which it often is.
I did eventually give up this small prayerful part of my life, with no ill effects. The desire to be connected to some kind of God has never left me, though. It seems to be something my rational brain has no use for, which makes it tough for me to believe in any theistic religions except as nice cognitive-behavioral guides for effective living, because my rational brain has a very strong say in what goes on in my life. Thank my parents for that.
There is that something else that calls me, though. I will never be sure if it ever called my father; he died ten years ago, athesist to the end--but a few days after he died, for about a week, I felt as if he were very close to me. In my mind's eye I could see him as he looked when I was a girl, with a full head of hair and his beard, shaking his head at me in a rueful way and laughing, "You were right! All the time, you were right!", and I could hear myself replying, "Dad, I told you so. I told you so." Then the feeling of him, and his face in my mind, just went away.
Was that wishful thinking--or was it something else? My dad knew that I had developed some sort of faith in some sort of God, but we didn't much discuss it. "How can intelligent people believe in God!" he exclaimed one day, and I simply didn't answer, and the conversation moved on. Afterlife? Well, how do I know? How could anybody know?
He was sick with brain cancer for a very long time before he died. It messed up his thought processes, and conversations with him often became painfully scattered and irrational. He had a lot of fear around his illness, and the fear never much left him. It took away his brain, the very thing he held most dear, and the irony of that was not lost on me at all.
I have always been well aware of what a strange, scary, unpredictable world this is. Smarts, and even a big heart, won't always get me through. Maybe God is a crutch, even the God I believe in who doesn't give a shit about dogma or the hereafter or whether or not I pray, but I have come to believe that I need one.
I cried when my father died, and I miss him more rather than less as the years go by (as I have since had my son, and my children are growing, and I wish he could be here for it all). I can look that square in the eye, and I can feel how lousy that is and all the questions and contradictions it brings up in me about this world and this life.
I also have the feeling that something bigger is going on. Something far too big to understand. Something that comes to me at times like after my dad died, when his face would appear in my head like something not quite out of a dream. Something I see over and over again in my hospice work--just the sheer timing of events can be striking, completely uncanny. I don't need an End Times theology, and I don't need to focus on the next world to kill the pain I find in this one. I just need the occasional reminder that God is there, and God is good, and I have all I seem to need to go on...upright, strong, with two feet and a crutch (for when I stumble, and believe me, I will).
Provincetown
I went to Provincetown for a night by myself back in April. I almost didn't, because I couldn't afford it, but I had been longing for such a night away for years and years, and something told me it was time.
April is a wet, chilly month in New England, and the grasses were not yet as green as those in Tom and Maggie's picture. It was too early in the year for vacationers, and the day I drove down was supposed to be full of rain. As I left town, making my way past King's Beach, the waves were huge and choppy, breaking spectacularly over the seawall, but before I even hit the tunnel that hugs Boston and heads to the South Shore, the dark clouds broke up and I could turn the wipers off.
Three hours later I was in Provincetown. I sat in my car in the parking lot of the inn where I was staying, eating a lunch of olives, crackers, and cheese that I had packed up back home. The wind was whipping in all directions but the sky had remained blue, and it was surprisingly warm. I put my hair back in an elastic and walked a bit toward the breakwater. On a better day I could walk it out to Long Point, which curls into Cape Cod Bay, but not that day, the wind was too fierce.
In the other direction was the road to Herring Cove Beach. Not far along it was a barricade; it was closed to both cars and foot traffic. It had been a particularly tough winter, and the road was not yet cleared of brush and sand. I got in my car and headed for the other side of the penninsula, the ocean side, and Race Point Beach.
I love the quiet on the very tip of the Cape. I love having ocean hugging close on three sides. It feels fragile and remote. I often wonder how living in a place like this would change me, city-dweller that I am, so used to things being solid and overwrought.
The parking lot was mostly empty. Some college-aged kids were playing touch football on the beach, and couples were walking their dogs. Curiously, the wind was nothing more than a light breeze there, although Race Point faces the open Atlantic. I started up the beach in the direction of Race Point Light, the very tip of the Cape.
I followed other people's footprints for a while, then past where they had turned to go back and the footprints disappeared. The dunes curved gently to my left. The ocean glittered widely to my right, somewhat choppy. It took a while, but after almost an hour, I started to notice the puffs of mist here and there over the dashes of foam. By the time I could see the lighthouse rising up over the dunes, I knew I was seeing whales out there, and quite a few of them, too.
The wind was fierce again when I rounded the bend and could see marshes and Herring Cove spread out before me; a couple of women sat on the sand with their dogs. I had seen no one else for almost an hour, and didn't care to see them, or them me, as they didn't acknowledge me at all (which makes Provincetown sort of funny...some people smile and say hello as you pass, and some ignore you like it's Boston). I turned and headed back.
The sun was warm. It was dipping lower down the sky as it was getting close to four, but the slices of clouds managed to stay out of the way. Flocks of birds dotted the wet sand at the water's edge. I kept my path as close to the dunes as the feds permitted (there are markers along them to keep people out), not wanting to disturb them. The whales weren't breaching, but I could sometimes spot the tip of a tail or the edge of a back as they came up to spout. Birds circled the air wherever there was a whale (that's one way to spot them--a crowd of birds over a choppy piece of ocean).
It was an amazing stroke of luck...whales, birds, sand, sun, and quiet solitude.
The rest of my night away was pleasant and restful--an excellent dinner at the renowned Lobster Pot, a little shopping for salt water taffy and whatnot on Commercial Street the next day, and a meandering drive home along the coast (Truro Light, the both quaint and opulent town of Chatham, and so on)--but the unexpected two hours on Race Point Beach was why I came.
It made all the reasons why I needed it fall away.
I discovered only the other day that what I had been seeing was an unusually large number of right whales congregated in the waters off of Cape Cod. There are only 473 North Atlantic right whales in existence. 201 were counted in Cape Cod waters off of Provincetown on April 20th (here's the link: http://www.coastalstudies.org/whats-new/4-20-11.htm , which I can't make any prettier because a kitten got on the keyboard and killed my plus-sign key).
My bank account was screaming "don't go", but my gut feeling was insisting "GO", in that firm and inarguable way it has with insisting things. My gut feeling does not lie (which will be the subject of another post someday, I am very sure). Thank you, gut feeling (although my bank account didn't lie, either, and I'm still a little behind, but I'm used to that sort of thing anyway)...
Thank you, whales.
(You can see the top left corner where Race Point Light is, Race Point Beach along the top left, Herring Cove Beach down the left side, and the hook of sand down the bottom where Long Point is, into Cape Cod Bay. This view is south-north, not north-south.)
Ariel view of a North Atlantic right whale--
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