I'm not sure we intended any theme here at Gethsemane Girls, but this will be a total non sequitur. A couple of years ago, my daughter became enamored with the song "Thriller" by Michael Jackson. (Not him, just the song.) That in turn led to the video, with it's cheesy special effects, but it also led to her introduction to the great Vincent Price. (He performs the "rap" on "Thriller." ) He and his wife had done a commercial in the 1980's for VisaCard that was hysterical. I described it to my daughter as best I could, but being the brilliant child she is, she said, "let's look for it on YouTube." Bingo!
Here is a little Halloween treat for you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8ip_aEku38
Enjoy!
Friday, October 31, 2008
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Uncle Jerry & Aunt Elaine
Remember the surprise birthday party for Mom? Her brother Jerry and his wife, Elaine, have been here all week. Mom and her "crew" have been like tourists in SD this week. But Jerry and Elaine are leaving tomorrow morning to fly back to Michigan. We all got together one more time this evening to eat and tell stories. It was great. When it came time for them to leave, Mom stayed in the house while everyone else went outside. Just too hard to say good-bye when there are thousands of miles in between the next hello.
I love my Mom, and I love my sisters. They are wonderful women and I'm proud to be in the gene pool with them. Mom said this was the best week of her life - she had a 7-day birthday party that was filled with laughter, fun, food, and love. God bless you Mama.
I love my Mom, and I love my sisters. They are wonderful women and I'm proud to be in the gene pool with them. Mom said this was the best week of her life - she had a 7-day birthday party that was filled with laughter, fun, food, and love. God bless you Mama.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Sine Nomine
I’m beginning to really not like All Saints’ Sunday. I know it’s supposed to be a celebration, but it’ll be two years in a row now I’ll be praying the name of someone close to me that died in the previous twelve months, and I’ll be crying. Not the sad, watery eyed tears of empathy, but the gut-wrenching, unable to speak through cries that can only come from a hole in your heart. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Actually, in 2006, the last of my uncles died. We weren’t particularly close, but he and my mom loved each other and managed to exchange phone calls occasionally, especially near their birthdays, which were only a day or two apart. On All Saints’ Day that year, my daughter and I had gone to visit my sister at her church. They had a very cool celebration, since they were meeting in a church with a belfry and a real bell. So at the beginning of the service, they passed around a clipboard and asked the assembly to write down the names of folks who had died that year. At the appointed time, they tolled the bell as each name was read from the clipboard one by one. But both my sister and I forgot to add my uncle’s name to the list.
Last year, it was Ed. His death in July was like a sucker punch. He was my parents’ age, but it was hard to consider him as their peer. He and his wife Dottie were much more physically active than my folks, and they traveled extensively, sometimes flying stand-by. My folks hadn’t traveled by any mode recently, due to various health issues and annoyances. Ed’s death reminded me that my own parents could die at any moment, but more than that, Ed was my friend and colleague. We served on the team charged with stewardship of our church’s financial resources and we shared the seriousness of that responsibility. We also shared a sometimes wicked sense of humor, and those years serving together were a priceless gift for me. At his memorial, we sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in honor of his love for the San Diego Padres. Sometime later the mailbox slot in the church office was changed, his name removed and the next financial secretary’s name put in its place. The first time I saw it, I burst out crying. Then, hearing his name on All Saints’ Sunday just started the tears all over again.
About six weeks later, in the middle of December, my mom died. She had been ill and hospitalized, but seemed to be on the road to recovery. When my dad called to say she was being rushed to the ER from the skilled nursing facility where she’d been for only a few days, it was a shock. By that evening, she was gone.
So here we are, almost eleven months later, on the eve of another All Saints’ Day. Another candle, another name, more tears. The celebration is out of my reach again this year.
Actually, in 2006, the last of my uncles died. We weren’t particularly close, but he and my mom loved each other and managed to exchange phone calls occasionally, especially near their birthdays, which were only a day or two apart. On All Saints’ Day that year, my daughter and I had gone to visit my sister at her church. They had a very cool celebration, since they were meeting in a church with a belfry and a real bell. So at the beginning of the service, they passed around a clipboard and asked the assembly to write down the names of folks who had died that year. At the appointed time, they tolled the bell as each name was read from the clipboard one by one. But both my sister and I forgot to add my uncle’s name to the list.
Last year, it was Ed. His death in July was like a sucker punch. He was my parents’ age, but it was hard to consider him as their peer. He and his wife Dottie were much more physically active than my folks, and they traveled extensively, sometimes flying stand-by. My folks hadn’t traveled by any mode recently, due to various health issues and annoyances. Ed’s death reminded me that my own parents could die at any moment, but more than that, Ed was my friend and colleague. We served on the team charged with stewardship of our church’s financial resources and we shared the seriousness of that responsibility. We also shared a sometimes wicked sense of humor, and those years serving together were a priceless gift for me. At his memorial, we sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in honor of his love for the San Diego Padres. Sometime later the mailbox slot in the church office was changed, his name removed and the next financial secretary’s name put in its place. The first time I saw it, I burst out crying. Then, hearing his name on All Saints’ Sunday just started the tears all over again.
About six weeks later, in the middle of December, my mom died. She had been ill and hospitalized, but seemed to be on the road to recovery. When my dad called to say she was being rushed to the ER from the skilled nursing facility where she’d been for only a few days, it was a shock. By that evening, she was gone.
So here we are, almost eleven months later, on the eve of another All Saints’ Day. Another candle, another name, more tears. The celebration is out of my reach again this year.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Poor Mom. We've surprised her so many times this weekend, she jumps when somebody knocks on the door, thinking it's another relative she hasn't seen in forever. First it was her brother Jerry, whom she hadn't seen in five years. All of Mom's kids hadn't seen him in 20 years - he doesn't travel west much.
Then yesterday, my girls took their Grandma shopping and kept her out of the house for four hours while my sisters cooked and decorated for a surprise party. Right on cue, she showed up to find 50 friends and relatives standing in her front yard, yelling SURPRISE! Gotcha again, Mom.
It was a great party - lots of laughing and reminiscing. At around 4 p.m., the third surprise arrived - a bunch of Mom's friends from church. We left them in the patio room, with Mom keeping court.
Finally, at around 10 p.m., the last surprise of the day arrived and it was a surprise for me, too. My cousin George, who lives in Washington state, walked in the door like he was just in the neighborhood and wanted to drop in.
We talked for hours - we're all great storytellers and know how to make each other laugh. Maybe that's an inheritance from our Mor Mor (mother's mother), who would tell us stories of her native Sweden and the island she grew up on.
---
We all met at Mom's house again this afternoon. More talking, eating, laughing. George (Buddy) has been researching the family tree and got all the way back to 1730 on the Hammer side (my maternal grandmother). There's talk of a family reunion, the biggest decision being where to hold it.
I remember family get togethers when I was little. Uncle Ralph and his guitar, teaching us campfire songs - he was a kid magnet though he never had children of his own; Uncle Gerry with his quiet strength and gentleness - the little ones all loved him; Uncle Bud (George) who didn't want anyone to know he was old enough to be a grandfather, and who loved to tell us jokes and funny stories; Uncle Art - kind of a cross between John Wayne and Charles Bronson - tough as nails; Aunt Thyra who was gone from Illinois to SD by the time I was six. When we moved to SD, she taught me how to tailor clothing - not just how to sew, but how to measure and cut and make a garment that fit perfectly. I loved her very much, and although she didn't always approve of us over the years, we knew she loved us right back.
Wish I didn't have to work this week - I'd love to hang out with Mom and the gang.
Then yesterday, my girls took their Grandma shopping and kept her out of the house for four hours while my sisters cooked and decorated for a surprise party. Right on cue, she showed up to find 50 friends and relatives standing in her front yard, yelling SURPRISE! Gotcha again, Mom.
It was a great party - lots of laughing and reminiscing. At around 4 p.m., the third surprise arrived - a bunch of Mom's friends from church. We left them in the patio room, with Mom keeping court.
Finally, at around 10 p.m., the last surprise of the day arrived and it was a surprise for me, too. My cousin George, who lives in Washington state, walked in the door like he was just in the neighborhood and wanted to drop in.
We talked for hours - we're all great storytellers and know how to make each other laugh. Maybe that's an inheritance from our Mor Mor (mother's mother), who would tell us stories of her native Sweden and the island she grew up on.
---
We all met at Mom's house again this afternoon. More talking, eating, laughing. George (Buddy) has been researching the family tree and got all the way back to 1730 on the Hammer side (my maternal grandmother). There's talk of a family reunion, the biggest decision being where to hold it.
I remember family get togethers when I was little. Uncle Ralph and his guitar, teaching us campfire songs - he was a kid magnet though he never had children of his own; Uncle Gerry with his quiet strength and gentleness - the little ones all loved him; Uncle Bud (George) who didn't want anyone to know he was old enough to be a grandfather, and who loved to tell us jokes and funny stories; Uncle Art - kind of a cross between John Wayne and Charles Bronson - tough as nails; Aunt Thyra who was gone from Illinois to SD by the time I was six. When we moved to SD, she taught me how to tailor clothing - not just how to sew, but how to measure and cut and make a garment that fit perfectly. I loved her very much, and although she didn't always approve of us over the years, we knew she loved us right back.
Wish I didn't have to work this week - I'd love to hang out with Mom and the gang.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Nanna's Last Trip
My grandmother died in March of 2000, just two weeks shy of a full twenty years of widowhood. I think Nanna chafed under the bonds of Papa’s illness and frailty in his last few years, so when he died on Easter Sunday in 1980, she was free again. She would pack a small bag, (she traveled VERY light) and put the dog in the car, and take off. (By the way, the dog had a carseat that boosted her up to see out the window from a reclining position.) We would answer the phone to hear Nanna say, “hi, I’m in Yuma, I’ll be home in a few days,” or “I’m in Santa Barbara, see you Friday.”
Nanna had some brave and adventurous blood in her veins. Her father disguised himself as a Catholic priest and escaped his homeland of Bohemia (later to become Czechoslovakia) and impressment in the Russian Army. Her mother, from a “rich” family who owned land, came to America against her family’s wishes, selling her long blond hair to a wigmaker to pay for her ticket. The two met in the Minnesota community of Bohemians, where they married, had five children and became naturalized citizens. Nanna was the oldest, and the only girl. She spent a lot of time caring for her little brothers. I think that had a lot to do with her desire to travel at will.
I remember wonderful trips with her when I was a child, mostly quick, weekend jaunts. One time, in October, we flew up to San Francisco for the three-day holiday weekend. When we arrived, we rented a car, something sporty with bucket seats and the gearshift in a console between. We got in the car and Nanna said, “I don’t think I can drive this one.” (This from the woman who, several decades before, repaired her own car’s broken fan belt by rolling off her stocking and tying it over the pulleys.) The rental agent assured her it was an automatic transmission, and we were off. We had a wonderful time, eating fish and nibbling Ghirardelli chocolate. We got home Monday evening, only to discover it wasn’t a holiday after all, and I had missed school. Thank you, Christopher Columbus.
Nanna passed away on a Saturday night at a nursing home, four years after falling and breaking a hip. (Or, did her hip break first, causing the fall? Hard to tell with osteoporosis.) (Take your CALCIUM out there, folks!) The trauma of the break seemed to intensify and accelerate the dementia she was beginning to show, and what turned out to be her final few years were spent in the hazy frontier between yesterday and yesteryear. After receiving the news of her passing, we gathered to “say” good-bye, kiss her cheek.
The following Monday morning, my mom called the mortuary to see if there was any paperwork to finish. The mortuary had no idea why she was calling. So she called the nursing home immediately. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY HUSBAND’S MOTHER’S BODY?!” Needless to say, they were not prepared for that inquiry. They promised to call right back. When they did, we learned the nursing home had called the wrong mortuary. The correct mortuary was dispatched to pick up Nanna’s body from their competitors.
For approximately thirty-six hours, we didn’t know where Nanna was. But we didn’t know we didn’t know. I think Nanna was having a great chuckle at our expense. She just had to get in one last trip.
Esther Anna Doane (nee Blecha) 1907-2000
Love you, Nanna!
Nanna had some brave and adventurous blood in her veins. Her father disguised himself as a Catholic priest and escaped his homeland of Bohemia (later to become Czechoslovakia) and impressment in the Russian Army. Her mother, from a “rich” family who owned land, came to America against her family’s wishes, selling her long blond hair to a wigmaker to pay for her ticket. The two met in the Minnesota community of Bohemians, where they married, had five children and became naturalized citizens. Nanna was the oldest, and the only girl. She spent a lot of time caring for her little brothers. I think that had a lot to do with her desire to travel at will.
I remember wonderful trips with her when I was a child, mostly quick, weekend jaunts. One time, in October, we flew up to San Francisco for the three-day holiday weekend. When we arrived, we rented a car, something sporty with bucket seats and the gearshift in a console between. We got in the car and Nanna said, “I don’t think I can drive this one.” (This from the woman who, several decades before, repaired her own car’s broken fan belt by rolling off her stocking and tying it over the pulleys.) The rental agent assured her it was an automatic transmission, and we were off. We had a wonderful time, eating fish and nibbling Ghirardelli chocolate. We got home Monday evening, only to discover it wasn’t a holiday after all, and I had missed school. Thank you, Christopher Columbus.
Nanna passed away on a Saturday night at a nursing home, four years after falling and breaking a hip. (Or, did her hip break first, causing the fall? Hard to tell with osteoporosis.) (Take your CALCIUM out there, folks!) The trauma of the break seemed to intensify and accelerate the dementia she was beginning to show, and what turned out to be her final few years were spent in the hazy frontier between yesterday and yesteryear. After receiving the news of her passing, we gathered to “say” good-bye, kiss her cheek.
The following Monday morning, my mom called the mortuary to see if there was any paperwork to finish. The mortuary had no idea why she was calling. So she called the nursing home immediately. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY HUSBAND’S MOTHER’S BODY?!” Needless to say, they were not prepared for that inquiry. They promised to call right back. When they did, we learned the nursing home had called the wrong mortuary. The correct mortuary was dispatched to pick up Nanna’s body from their competitors.
For approximately thirty-six hours, we didn’t know where Nanna was. But we didn’t know we didn’t know. I think Nanna was having a great chuckle at our expense. She just had to get in one last trip.
Esther Anna Doane (nee Blecha) 1907-2000
Love you, Nanna!
Friday, October 24, 2008
Birthday Surprise
My Mom turns 70 tomorrow. If you've read in a previous blog about the brain tumor, then you know how grateful we are that she's still with us. That was a very close call.
Anyway, Mom is one of six children, born to Edith and George. She's the youngest, and all but her brother Jerry have gone to Heaven. Since she can't fly for awhile, or at least until her doctor gives her the go-ahead, we were really happy to find out that Jerry and his wife, Elaine, were planning to surprise her with a visit.
It's HARD to keep a secret in my family, but this one was just too good. Mom may have suspected we were up to something, but as she told us later, she thought we were going to surprise her with a cake. The look on her face when she saw her brother - there are no words. They both just hugged and cried. Then we all cried. She grabbed his hand and didn't let go. For hours & hours, we sat around and talked about everything. When we were kids...when my Mom and Jerry were kids...politics...the economy...the war in Iraq...and funny, funny stories. My cheeks are sore from laughing so much. Finally, we decided to let the two snowbirds go back to my cousin Lynn's house so they could get some shut-eye. They'd been up since the crack of Michigan dawn, after all, and here it was nearly 11 p.m. San Diego time.
Jerry and Elaine are going to be here for a week. As I kissed Mom goodnight and headed to my car, I said, "Good night Mom, sleep tight." She told me, "I won't be able to sleep tonight." I asked her why. She said, "Because I'm just so excited - I can't wait for tomorrow." In that instant she wasn't my Mom. I saw the little girl with white-blonde curls, smiling as she waited for her favorite big brother to get home from school. I love you Mom - Happy Birthday!
Anyway, Mom is one of six children, born to Edith and George. She's the youngest, and all but her brother Jerry have gone to Heaven. Since she can't fly for awhile, or at least until her doctor gives her the go-ahead, we were really happy to find out that Jerry and his wife, Elaine, were planning to surprise her with a visit.
It's HARD to keep a secret in my family, but this one was just too good. Mom may have suspected we were up to something, but as she told us later, she thought we were going to surprise her with a cake. The look on her face when she saw her brother - there are no words. They both just hugged and cried. Then we all cried. She grabbed his hand and didn't let go. For hours & hours, we sat around and talked about everything. When we were kids...when my Mom and Jerry were kids...politics...the economy...the war in Iraq...and funny, funny stories. My cheeks are sore from laughing so much. Finally, we decided to let the two snowbirds go back to my cousin Lynn's house so they could get some shut-eye. They'd been up since the crack of Michigan dawn, after all, and here it was nearly 11 p.m. San Diego time.
Jerry and Elaine are going to be here for a week. As I kissed Mom goodnight and headed to my car, I said, "Good night Mom, sleep tight." She told me, "I won't be able to sleep tonight." I asked her why. She said, "Because I'm just so excited - I can't wait for tomorrow." In that instant she wasn't my Mom. I saw the little girl with white-blonde curls, smiling as she waited for her favorite big brother to get home from school. I love you Mom - Happy Birthday!
Friday, October 17, 2008
Rainy Days and Moms
My younger daughter was 10 years old when she decided that living by Mom's rules was more than she could handle and she was MOVING OUT. She packed some clothes, toothbrush, soap, and supplies in her school backpack. Didn't bother to pack the school books - she wouldn't need them if she was living on her own - right? She put groceries in a sack - canned chili, tuna, chips, bread, spaghettios, a couple cans of soda. Grabbed a sleeping bag. Then she climbed out her bedroom window, got the ladder out of the shed and moved - to the roof.
This whole thing started because I grounded her for breaking some rule - I don't even remember what she had done wrong, but believe me it was probably the 100th time I had warned her about it and she deserved far worse than being put on restriction. So, with her 10-year old maturity, she figured that it would be better to be free in the world than to do what her mother told her to do.
I let her go out the window, figuring she would end up at my sister's house a block away. But a half hour later when I checked, she wasn't there. So I looked around the house and yard, in the shed, up and down the street. Hmmm... Standing on the sidewalk in front of my house, I saw what looked like a big bird out of the corner of my eye. Looked up - there she was at the peak of the roof. Sleeping bag spread out and her little roof picnic scattered around her.
"Get down from there right this minute! You could fall and break something!!" I yelled at her.
"No - you're mean and I'm never coming home again."
Puhleeze - you're on the roof dodo bird. You're already home. I didn’t actually call her a dodo bird, even if it would have felt good to tell her how silly she was being.
“OK – fine with me. You can stay up there.” With that I went back in the house. I was really worried about her falling off the roof – it was slanted pretty steeply – I pictured her sliding down and falling into the chain link fence. Should I call the fire department, police, my mom? I peeked out the front window. My neighbors were outside now, watching the spectacle, and I’m sure, discussing that single mom across the street with the bad-assed kids.
Fifteen minutes later, I went back out. “It’s getting late – do you have blankets to keep warm?”
“Yes Mom.” This was said with just the right amount of disgust.
“OK…do you have enough food?”
“Yes – go away! I don’t need you!” Now she was yelling, her piping voice screeching at me.
“Great, sounds like you really prepared for every possibility. So…did you think about the weather? It’s not always summer, sometimes it’s cold or rainy.”
I could see the awareness dawning in her eyes – Mom was up to something. Mom wasn’t yelling, she was being really quiet and that wasn’t a good thing. But my hard-headed little girl decided to bluff it out.
“Go away!” she screamed at me.
I calmly walked to the hose faucet. Turned it on full blast. Walked back out the full 50-feet length of the hose. “Are you sure you prepared for rain?” I asked her innocently.
She saw the hose and knew it was all over. As I began “raining” on her parade, she began tossing her stuff off the roof. She went down the ladder and climbed back in the window, squawking about her mean mother the whole time. Guess she decided being on restriction was better than living on her own after all.
This whole thing started because I grounded her for breaking some rule - I don't even remember what she had done wrong, but believe me it was probably the 100th time I had warned her about it and she deserved far worse than being put on restriction. So, with her 10-year old maturity, she figured that it would be better to be free in the world than to do what her mother told her to do.
I let her go out the window, figuring she would end up at my sister's house a block away. But a half hour later when I checked, she wasn't there. So I looked around the house and yard, in the shed, up and down the street. Hmmm... Standing on the sidewalk in front of my house, I saw what looked like a big bird out of the corner of my eye. Looked up - there she was at the peak of the roof. Sleeping bag spread out and her little roof picnic scattered around her.
"Get down from there right this minute! You could fall and break something!!" I yelled at her.
"No - you're mean and I'm never coming home again."
Puhleeze - you're on the roof dodo bird. You're already home. I didn’t actually call her a dodo bird, even if it would have felt good to tell her how silly she was being.
“OK – fine with me. You can stay up there.” With that I went back in the house. I was really worried about her falling off the roof – it was slanted pretty steeply – I pictured her sliding down and falling into the chain link fence. Should I call the fire department, police, my mom? I peeked out the front window. My neighbors were outside now, watching the spectacle, and I’m sure, discussing that single mom across the street with the bad-assed kids.
Fifteen minutes later, I went back out. “It’s getting late – do you have blankets to keep warm?”
“Yes Mom.” This was said with just the right amount of disgust.
“OK…do you have enough food?”
“Yes – go away! I don’t need you!” Now she was yelling, her piping voice screeching at me.
“Great, sounds like you really prepared for every possibility. So…did you think about the weather? It’s not always summer, sometimes it’s cold or rainy.”
I could see the awareness dawning in her eyes – Mom was up to something. Mom wasn’t yelling, she was being really quiet and that wasn’t a good thing. But my hard-headed little girl decided to bluff it out.
“Go away!” she screamed at me.
I calmly walked to the hose faucet. Turned it on full blast. Walked back out the full 50-feet length of the hose. “Are you sure you prepared for rain?” I asked her innocently.
She saw the hose and knew it was all over. As I began “raining” on her parade, she began tossing her stuff off the roof. She went down the ladder and climbed back in the window, squawking about her mean mother the whole time. Guess she decided being on restriction was better than living on her own after all.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Ghandhi, Prop 8, and Christians
My best friend in the world is a “Fundamentalist” Christian, whatever that means. This woman has been my friend for over ten years. To me, she’s as close to being a “good” Christian as it’s possible for us flawed human beings to be. She has a finely honed sense of justice that has gotten her into trouble with people who think it’s OK to skirt the ethics line when it suits them. She loves the Lord with all her heart, all her soul, all her mind, and everything else in her life flows from this. She’s a wonderful wife, mother, and grandmother. She is my confidante – the person I could tell any secret to and know that it would be safely kept. And she believes that the only way to get into heaven is through Jesus Christ – you must believe that Jesus is your savior. If you don’t believe this, then you are doomed. Period. No ifs, ands, or buts.
I’m an Evangelical Lutheran. I believe that we are saved by Grace. This doesn’t mean we’re free to go out and act like fools. Being saved by grace is a huge responsibility. We must love our neighbor as ourselves – even when those “neighbors” aren’t so lovable. We are responsible to our fellow human beings and everything we do should reflect Christ’s love for us. But when I’m asked if I believe that the ONLY way to heaven is through Jesus, I’m not sure. Who am I to say that Mahatma Ghandi isn’t in heaven? He was a Hindu, and although he read about and admired Jesus as a prophet, he didn’t profess that Jesus was his savior. Does that mean the gates of Heaven are locked against him?
Someone once told me that her husband loves being a Lutheran because he “doesn’t have to check his brain at the door.” We Lutherans do think and talk and debate – a LOT. We don’t always agree on the issues of the day. Same gender marriage has us divided, and it’s not along the predictable lines you might think like the “Under 30s” and the “Over 70s.”
Here in California, the issue of same gender marriage is at the forefront because Proposition 8 is on the ballot this election. I work in a field that has traditionally been accepting of gay and lesbian people. But that was before the California Supreme Court decided that denying same gender couples the right to marry was a violation of their civil rights. Now we’re all trying to figure out where we stand on this divisive issue.
When two of my coworkers recently announced that they were getting married to their respective long-time partners, I was unprepared for the upset it caused. We celebrate all the big life events of our coworkers – new babies, marriages, birthdays. Now we were being confronted with a new reality. For most of us in this workplace, marriage is about love and commitment, no matter the gender of the people who choose to marry. But some coworkers think it’s a sin for same sex people to marry, and they strongly disagree with celebrating this event in the workplace. Some were offended that we signed cards, bought gifts, had a party. We are divided – mostly silently – but divided nonetheless. We must all, with our widely different opinions and beliefs, maintain a professional relationship. It is difficult to reconcile my feelings of disappointment in some of my coworkers with my sense of respect and admiration for these same caring people.
I believe that two adult human beings should have the right to marry whether they are a man and woman, two women, or two men. That’s a basic civil right that should not be determined by religious beliefs.
I believe in the separation of church and state, as outlined in the First Amendment to the Constitution, which states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The First Amendment guarantees that the government will not let any religion dictate the laws that govern all the people. By the same token, it also guarantees any religion the right to exist – be it Lutherans, Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, my “fundamentalist” best friend’s church, and on and on.
But back to my “fundamentalist” Christian best friend. She and I are trying to “agree to disagree” on this issue. I know she’s praying for my soul, hoping that I’ll come to my senses. She’s asked me to listen to a CD of her pastor teaching about marriage and the Bible. I told her that I would listen to the CD and pray about it, but that it probably wouldn’t change my mind. As for me, I pray that our friendship is able to weather this “tempest in a teapot,” because she has been a dear friend and it would be sad if this drove a wedge between us. As I’ve matured (notice I didn’t say “gotten older”) it’s become apparent to me that my women friends are more precious than diamonds and losing the best one would be devastating.
I’m an Evangelical Lutheran. I believe that we are saved by Grace. This doesn’t mean we’re free to go out and act like fools. Being saved by grace is a huge responsibility. We must love our neighbor as ourselves – even when those “neighbors” aren’t so lovable. We are responsible to our fellow human beings and everything we do should reflect Christ’s love for us. But when I’m asked if I believe that the ONLY way to heaven is through Jesus, I’m not sure. Who am I to say that Mahatma Ghandi isn’t in heaven? He was a Hindu, and although he read about and admired Jesus as a prophet, he didn’t profess that Jesus was his savior. Does that mean the gates of Heaven are locked against him?
Someone once told me that her husband loves being a Lutheran because he “doesn’t have to check his brain at the door.” We Lutherans do think and talk and debate – a LOT. We don’t always agree on the issues of the day. Same gender marriage has us divided, and it’s not along the predictable lines you might think like the “Under 30s” and the “Over 70s.”
Here in California, the issue of same gender marriage is at the forefront because Proposition 8 is on the ballot this election. I work in a field that has traditionally been accepting of gay and lesbian people. But that was before the California Supreme Court decided that denying same gender couples the right to marry was a violation of their civil rights. Now we’re all trying to figure out where we stand on this divisive issue.
When two of my coworkers recently announced that they were getting married to their respective long-time partners, I was unprepared for the upset it caused. We celebrate all the big life events of our coworkers – new babies, marriages, birthdays. Now we were being confronted with a new reality. For most of us in this workplace, marriage is about love and commitment, no matter the gender of the people who choose to marry. But some coworkers think it’s a sin for same sex people to marry, and they strongly disagree with celebrating this event in the workplace. Some were offended that we signed cards, bought gifts, had a party. We are divided – mostly silently – but divided nonetheless. We must all, with our widely different opinions and beliefs, maintain a professional relationship. It is difficult to reconcile my feelings of disappointment in some of my coworkers with my sense of respect and admiration for these same caring people.
I believe that two adult human beings should have the right to marry whether they are a man and woman, two women, or two men. That’s a basic civil right that should not be determined by religious beliefs.
I believe in the separation of church and state, as outlined in the First Amendment to the Constitution, which states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The First Amendment guarantees that the government will not let any religion dictate the laws that govern all the people. By the same token, it also guarantees any religion the right to exist – be it Lutherans, Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, my “fundamentalist” best friend’s church, and on and on.
But back to my “fundamentalist” Christian best friend. She and I are trying to “agree to disagree” on this issue. I know she’s praying for my soul, hoping that I’ll come to my senses. She’s asked me to listen to a CD of her pastor teaching about marriage and the Bible. I told her that I would listen to the CD and pray about it, but that it probably wouldn’t change my mind. As for me, I pray that our friendship is able to weather this “tempest in a teapot,” because she has been a dear friend and it would be sad if this drove a wedge between us. As I’ve matured (notice I didn’t say “gotten older”) it’s become apparent to me that my women friends are more precious than diamonds and losing the best one would be devastating.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
God and the tumor
May 2008
“We’re not ready, God. Please, please, we’re not ready to lose her. You can’t have her yet.” I chanted this like a mantra as I flew up Genesee Avenue to get to my Mom’s house. Five minutes before, I had just gotten back to my desk from a meeting and was ready to begin the “real” work of the day. My phone rang – it was my sister Beth. “Ginny – the paramedics are on the way to Mom’s house – we think she had a stroke. I’m on my way over there – you need to meet us at her house.” The sound of my name – just the way she said it put my whole soul on alert – I knew it was bad even before she finished the rest of the sentence.
Grab my purse…tell someone I’m leaving…get to my Mom. That’s all I could do, and pray and cry and pray. I remember calling my friend Sandy, who was at home that day, to ask her to pray for Mom. I called my pastor – same request. Please pray, pray, pray.
Mom’s street…park the car…get out and run up as the paramedics are wheeling the woman who created all of us on a gurney and putting her in the ambulance. She was…my mind freezes. Her arm, limp and hanging over the edge…that vision will be with me forever. Her head rolling…seemingly lifeless, eyes unaware.
Vicki says, “If you’re coming with me, get in NOW!” The world starts moving again. I jump in her car and we head out ahead of the ambulance. Beth rides with Mom – already, silently chosen as the family spokesperson. Vicki has to get gas – the warning bell is ringing. She pumps a few bucks in and we get back on the road in under two minutes.
Vicki yelling at people who have the audacity to drive the speed limit. “Get out of the way! That’s my mom in that ambulance…pull over NOW!!!” She’s tailgating so close to the Lexus in front of us that my breath catches in my throat. I reach over and rub her shoulder. “Sweetheart – first we have to get there in one piece. Just breathe and drive, but please get us there OK.”
We park in the Ace parking structure – like a slap in the face – you have to wait at a gate to get a ticket that will allow us to park and be with our mother. Since the ER is right there, I jump out of the car and leave poor Vicki to find a place to park her truck. Sorry Vicki.
In the ER waiting room, we only sit for a minute before Beth comes out to tell us they’re…what? I can’t remember what she said…I just remember her face. This was bad – I could tell from her face that this was very, very bad. Mom was having seizures and her whole left side was paralyzed. The team was talking stroke, but before they could even make that diagnosis, they had to get her stabilized. The possibility that she might not survive this suddenly blossomed in my mind, like leaving a sharpie marker on a napkin – all the ink being sucked into the white background, leaving a big, black cloud of fear.
Someone comes to get us – they take us to a “private” room, where she introduces herself as BJ, the social worker, and she says a chaplain will be in to speak with us shortly. Why? It’s the question in all of our faces.
Vicki says, “This is the bad news room…why are they sending a chaplain in?” I tell her, even though I don’t know if it’s true or not, that they ALWAYS send a chaplain in when it’s a crisis like this, in case we want to pray. Liar. Sometime during all this I must have called my daughters, because they arrive and find chairs. We’re all quiet, each saying our own silent prayers.
The chaplain comes into the room and tells us that the doctors are working on Mom, trying to get her stabilized. He’s calm and straightforward. I know immediately we can trust him to give us the unvarnished truth. At some point he prays with us but I don’t remember if it’s before or after they tell us that Mom hasn’t had a stroke.
“We have her on emergency life support.” Vicki and Carissa fall into each other and sob. Beth and I, our eyes meet for the briefest of seconds before we focus on the ER doctor, who is telling us that Mom has been intubated and they’re giving her drugs to basically, put her into a coma, so that they can stop the constant seizures. He’s grim, not hopeful. Nobody asks the obvious. Is she going to make it? We can not put that into words because this is our mother, grandmother, great grandmother. The doctor leaves quickly. He’s kind but he has important work to do. They’re doing a CAT scan on Mom’s head to look for signs of a stroke. Beth says something to him as he leaves, “That’s our mom – please take good care of her.”
I feel my control sliding away – please, please God. You can’t take her yet. Oh yeah – this is where the chaplain prays with us. It’s a good prayer, asking God to be with us during this time. Asking God to be with Edith as the doctors work to find out what’s causing her illness. None of that “heavenly father we don’t understand why you’re doing this, but your will be done…blah, blah, blah.” The God I know loves us and wouldn’t cause this to happen, and if the chaplain had started talking like that, I would have shut him down in a hot minute. But this guy, his name is Rick, knows what we need to hear.
We sit and pray, talk, cry. Already the knots that my mother has tied over the years are tightening us into a UNIT. We are all in this together and will stay together, focused only on getting the most important person in our lives through this crisis.
Fifteen minutes later, the chaplain comes back. He tells us it’s not a stroke. He can’t tell us what it IS, but he can tell us that the doctor will be back shortly to give us the news. I study his face, looking for clues. Not a stroke? Is it her heart? She always expected something to happen with her heart and had prepared herself emotionally for that. Has it come to the point where she’ll get that long-promised pacemaker that her cardiologist told her she’d eventually need?
The doctor flies in again. You can almost hear the air crackle as we all zoom in on him. “Your mother has a four centimeter brain tumor in the back right side of her brain.” He makes his thumb and index finger into a circle to give us an idea of how big four centimeters is. FREEZE. All the air leaves the room. Am I going to throw up? No – hold it together as he continues. “We think it’s a meningioma, which is a USUALLY non-malignant tumor, usually localized outside the brain. We’re going to send her for an MRI so we can get a better idea of exactly how large it is. We’ve called a neurosurgeon.” That’s all I remember.
I’m learning already that “hospital time” passes in chunks. You wait, you get a block of information and are told to wait some more. Has it been fifteen minutes or two hours? It’s hard to tell.
At some point, they come get us out of the room and escort us to the family waiting area, with lots of comfortable chairs that are meant for sitting and waiting, but not for resting. By now, my brother Bill has arrived. He holds mom’s hand in the ER where they still have her, and he cries. Mom is semi-conscious, even with the massive doses of drugs. She’s fighting the breathing tube, trying to speak, trying to get up and go home. They let two of us into the ER at a time, and we take turns. Just holding her hand, caressing her hair and face, talking to her to let her know we are all there and she doesn’t need to be afraid. I lie to her, “Mom, you’re in the hospital emergency room. You’re going to be fine. They just have the tube in to make sure you can breathe. We’re all here and as soon as you’re better, we’re taking you home.” Her brow relaxes and I know she can hear me even if she can’t respond. But a minute later, she’s writhing on the bed again, fighting, fighting to get up and away. In my soul I hear a voice tell me that if she can still fight, she will survive this. I’m suddenly calm and very focused.
In the family waiting area, my brother and I hug. My God, he’s gotten old. Do I look that old? He’s still tall, but so thin. How are the boys, how’s Dianne? We haven’t seen each other in over 15 years and there’s much to catch up on, but for now we just scratch the surface, politely asking about each other’s families. We get interrupted and I walk to the other side of the room to talk to my girls. Next thing I know Bill has left – he has to get back to work to a job where he’s left all his tools.
The next hours are a blur. We wait. We talk. I’m amazed at how resilient we are – even now we can tell jokes and laugh during this crisis. I think to myself that we will get through this because we have each other. This is the gift that my mother has given us.
We take turns, two at a time, to sit with Mom. She’s unconscious, but maybe she knows we’re there so we talk to her, stroke her arms, hold her hands. Yes, Mama, we’re all here and we love you. We tell her about the work the doctors and nurses are doing to make her comfortable, to help get her well. Later, she’ll tell us she doesn’t remember a thing after the first seizure started, but right now, watching her vital signs on the monitor, it feels like she can hear us and her heart rate slows a bit.
Beth and Vicki are with her when they take her for the MRI. We wait some more. After the MRI, we meet Mom’s neurosurgeon, with a long name that I immediately shorten to Dr. T. He’s a serious and cautious young man. He gives us more details about the tumor, says they’re planning on surgery sometime in the next few days. We ask for details about the surgery. He pronounces a list of doom and gloom about all the possible complications, starting with death and ending with lifetime seizures. He’s not a man given to percentages or reassurances. We ask about the possibility of malignancy, of the possibility that they won’t be able to remove all the tumor. He tells us that he doesn’t think it’s malignant, but that you can’t tell until after the biopsy, which takes about three days. He says that often they have to leave pieces of the tumor behind if there’s too much vascular involvement. I like this man – he doesn’t dumb it down for us – he tells us the truth so we’ll know what we’re up against. Someone with false assurances we would have seen through in a heartbeat.
More tomorrow...
---------
I wrote the first part of this story right after mom’s brain surgery, and by that time we knew she was going to be OK. Then I closed the file and haven’t looked at it since. Partly, I think, because the emotions that we lived with for that week were so extreme that I needed to step back from the intensity. I needed to just be happy in the fact that our matriarch had survived a life crisis once again. Now I’m ready to pick up the threads of the story and finish it.
I talked about hospital time feeling like it came in chunks. Lots of waiting, then we’d get some information or something would happen, then hours of waiting again. We met with the neurosurgeon on Friday and he told us he would be doing the surgery sometime in the next week; it depended on his schedule. By Saturday afternoon, we were told the surgery had been scheduled for the next morning. It felt right to me that they had planned the surgery for the Sabbath. Like God was telling us not to worry – nothing bad could happen on God’s holy day. Not very logical, but we were all clutching at whatever glimmers of hope we could find.
On Saturday evening, Dr. T came to see her. He did all the usual checks of her vitals, checked the strength of her grip, asked her how she was feeling – was the headache better? Worse? He gave her the list of doom and gloom that he had given my sisters and me the night before. Death, fatal bleeding, paralysis, coma, lifetime seizures, and death, death, death.
He asked mom, “Do you have any questions for me?”
“Yes, just one. Do you have any good news?” Mom asked.
This guy was so serious – like he was warning us that he didn’t expect good results from this surgery. Like he was gearing up to be able to tell us, “I told you this would probably happen,” as we got the news that she hadn’t survived. But he didn’t know our mother. She’s a six-foot tall Swede, and she’d survived worse than this.
The doctor seemed to relent and gave us a short list of good possible outcomes. He actually smiled – not his whole face – just the corners of his mouth. As he swept away, Mom called out, “Don’t go out drinking tonight.”
He stopped in his tracks, turned back, looked right at Mom and grinned. Didn’t say a word, but that smile told me he had made the connection. This was a living, breathing, wonderful woman whose brain he was going to be cutting open the next day. Not just a litany of statistics and possibilities.
Mom was in the SICU (surgical intensive care unit). The night before the surgery my sisters and I were at the hospital, taking turns sitting with her. It was my turn during the still hours, when it’s quiet except for the machines beeping out heart rhythms and warnings that an IV drip needed to be changed. They close the unit to family for two hours between 5 – 7 a.m., for a shift change. But when they ushered the families out, somehow they missed my mom’s bed and I just stayed. I held her hand and watched her sleep. I prayed a lot, asking God to be with Mom, to be with the surgical team and help them to work like a well oiled machine, to guide the surgeon’s hands and help him to make all the right decisions. I pictured the surgeon deciding where to start the excision of the tumor – please God, make him steady and sure when he’s working on my mama’s brain.
She opened her eyes and looked at me. I could see fear. “Are you scared, mom?” Stupid question. She was terrified. But she put on her brave face and assured me everything would be OK. She was facing death and worried more about how her children were handling it.
At 7, my sisters both came in. The grandkids began arriving. The surgery was scheduled for 9 a.m., and the team was already starting their surgical preparations. By 8:30 they were ready to wheel Mom into surgery. I was sobbing – inside – on the outside I was smiling and trying to reassure everyone. My sisters were both crying – theirs was the more honest way of meeting this crisis. All the grandkids were touching her, telling her how much she is loved. I had already said my piece when we were alone during that 2-hour shift change. This overflowing of tears and sadness was too much – I walked away, needing to be alone while I cried. I turned back once and they were moving the bed through the narrow pathway, out the door of the SICU. Now the real wait began – it would be at least five hours before we’d know if we would get our mother back.
We have a Prayer Quilt Ministry at church. I had never given it much thought because I didn’t see how a quilt could help during a crisis. It seemed like giving someone flowers – pretty, but not very useful when you’re sick or in crisis. While we waited for news, Pastor Gloria brought a beautiful prayer quilt with yellow and purple flowers. The threads are meant to be tied while saying prayers. The Pastor led us in prayer, and we all tied knots, in our own way trying to bind Mom to us.
During the long hours, waiting for news, we noticed that our family was not the norm. Most families leave one or two members in the waiting area, sentinels left to hear the news and pass it on to family members waiting at home. We were a unit, no one even thought of leaving. When the news came – good or bad – we would all hear it together. We brought coolers filled with soda and water, and backpacks filled with food. The two great grandkids played on a blanket laid on the floor. To them it was a picnic – indoors.
I think it’s because our family has been through the fire many times – that’s what gives us the “circle the wagons” mentality. We all gather together and hold strong against whatever assails us. We needed to just be with each other, to laugh and tell stories.
Humor was our shield. When I couldn’t remember what the date was, my sister said, “It must be a brain tumor!” That began a hilarious dialogue about all the things we could now attribute to a brain tumor. We concocted a plan to draw a welcome mat and door knob on Mom’s bald head, which had us laughing hysterically. In the months since, I’ve told friends about these conversations and they didn’t see the humor. It was only funny to us. Our way of laughing in the face of tragedy.
Just a little over five hours after it began, I looked up to see Dr. T walking towards our group. He moved like you see TV doctors move – gliding across the floor, white jacket fluttering around his legs. No smile…but his eyes were kind. He was brief – the surgery went well. They got everything as far as they could tell. Not too much bleeding. The tumor had begun to invade the skull so they had to excise some bone but Mom was doing fine. Now, we were told, it would be an hour or so until she woke up back in the SICU and we could see her two at a time. Dr. T flew back out of the room, in a hurry no doubt, to save someone else’s life.
We were ecstatic. There’s no way to convey the feelings of joy and relief. We were just purely happy.
It was nearly two hours before we were told that she was awake and ready to see us. Picture a herd of elephants running up the stairway, everyone chattering. When the SICU team saw us milling in the hallway, they decided to let all of us come in – quietly – as a group so we could welcome Mom, Grandma, Great Grandma back. She opened her eyes and smiled. She spoke – I don’t remember what she said. It was the act of speaking that let us know she had survived – she knew who we were. Becky was holding the prayer quilt and when Mom saw it, she reached out her arms and took it. We covered her with it, all the prayers of the last four days enveloping her. Now I understood the value of the quilt.
It’s been six months since the surgery. Mom has done remarkably well. She’s back to all of her normal activities – a little slower but getting better every day. She takes dilantin to prevent seizures and her doctor has told her that she shouldn’t drive. He didn’t tell her she couldn’t drive but the thought of having a seizure behind the wheel is enough to make her call one of us whenever she needs to go somewhere.
Was there any good that came of The Tumor? Was God in all of this? I believe so. My sisters, brother, and I are all nicer to each other. We say, “I love you,” without hesitation. We had not always treated each other well over the years. It wasn’t sibling rivalry, exactly, more a lack of trust. Families who have experienced intense chaos often become disdainful of each other. It’s like finding out your hero has feet of clay. But we were older and more mature now. This crisis brought out the best in each of us.
“We’re not ready, God. Please, please, we’re not ready to lose her. You can’t have her yet.” I chanted this like a mantra as I flew up Genesee Avenue to get to my Mom’s house. Five minutes before, I had just gotten back to my desk from a meeting and was ready to begin the “real” work of the day. My phone rang – it was my sister Beth. “Ginny – the paramedics are on the way to Mom’s house – we think she had a stroke. I’m on my way over there – you need to meet us at her house.” The sound of my name – just the way she said it put my whole soul on alert – I knew it was bad even before she finished the rest of the sentence.
Grab my purse…tell someone I’m leaving…get to my Mom. That’s all I could do, and pray and cry and pray. I remember calling my friend Sandy, who was at home that day, to ask her to pray for Mom. I called my pastor – same request. Please pray, pray, pray.
Mom’s street…park the car…get out and run up as the paramedics are wheeling the woman who created all of us on a gurney and putting her in the ambulance. She was…my mind freezes. Her arm, limp and hanging over the edge…that vision will be with me forever. Her head rolling…seemingly lifeless, eyes unaware.
Vicki says, “If you’re coming with me, get in NOW!” The world starts moving again. I jump in her car and we head out ahead of the ambulance. Beth rides with Mom – already, silently chosen as the family spokesperson. Vicki has to get gas – the warning bell is ringing. She pumps a few bucks in and we get back on the road in under two minutes.
Vicki yelling at people who have the audacity to drive the speed limit. “Get out of the way! That’s my mom in that ambulance…pull over NOW!!!” She’s tailgating so close to the Lexus in front of us that my breath catches in my throat. I reach over and rub her shoulder. “Sweetheart – first we have to get there in one piece. Just breathe and drive, but please get us there OK.”
We park in the Ace parking structure – like a slap in the face – you have to wait at a gate to get a ticket that will allow us to park and be with our mother. Since the ER is right there, I jump out of the car and leave poor Vicki to find a place to park her truck. Sorry Vicki.
In the ER waiting room, we only sit for a minute before Beth comes out to tell us they’re…what? I can’t remember what she said…I just remember her face. This was bad – I could tell from her face that this was very, very bad. Mom was having seizures and her whole left side was paralyzed. The team was talking stroke, but before they could even make that diagnosis, they had to get her stabilized. The possibility that she might not survive this suddenly blossomed in my mind, like leaving a sharpie marker on a napkin – all the ink being sucked into the white background, leaving a big, black cloud of fear.
Someone comes to get us – they take us to a “private” room, where she introduces herself as BJ, the social worker, and she says a chaplain will be in to speak with us shortly. Why? It’s the question in all of our faces.
Vicki says, “This is the bad news room…why are they sending a chaplain in?” I tell her, even though I don’t know if it’s true or not, that they ALWAYS send a chaplain in when it’s a crisis like this, in case we want to pray. Liar. Sometime during all this I must have called my daughters, because they arrive and find chairs. We’re all quiet, each saying our own silent prayers.
The chaplain comes into the room and tells us that the doctors are working on Mom, trying to get her stabilized. He’s calm and straightforward. I know immediately we can trust him to give us the unvarnished truth. At some point he prays with us but I don’t remember if it’s before or after they tell us that Mom hasn’t had a stroke.
“We have her on emergency life support.” Vicki and Carissa fall into each other and sob. Beth and I, our eyes meet for the briefest of seconds before we focus on the ER doctor, who is telling us that Mom has been intubated and they’re giving her drugs to basically, put her into a coma, so that they can stop the constant seizures. He’s grim, not hopeful. Nobody asks the obvious. Is she going to make it? We can not put that into words because this is our mother, grandmother, great grandmother. The doctor leaves quickly. He’s kind but he has important work to do. They’re doing a CAT scan on Mom’s head to look for signs of a stroke. Beth says something to him as he leaves, “That’s our mom – please take good care of her.”
I feel my control sliding away – please, please God. You can’t take her yet. Oh yeah – this is where the chaplain prays with us. It’s a good prayer, asking God to be with us during this time. Asking God to be with Edith as the doctors work to find out what’s causing her illness. None of that “heavenly father we don’t understand why you’re doing this, but your will be done…blah, blah, blah.” The God I know loves us and wouldn’t cause this to happen, and if the chaplain had started talking like that, I would have shut him down in a hot minute. But this guy, his name is Rick, knows what we need to hear.
We sit and pray, talk, cry. Already the knots that my mother has tied over the years are tightening us into a UNIT. We are all in this together and will stay together, focused only on getting the most important person in our lives through this crisis.
Fifteen minutes later, the chaplain comes back. He tells us it’s not a stroke. He can’t tell us what it IS, but he can tell us that the doctor will be back shortly to give us the news. I study his face, looking for clues. Not a stroke? Is it her heart? She always expected something to happen with her heart and had prepared herself emotionally for that. Has it come to the point where she’ll get that long-promised pacemaker that her cardiologist told her she’d eventually need?
The doctor flies in again. You can almost hear the air crackle as we all zoom in on him. “Your mother has a four centimeter brain tumor in the back right side of her brain.” He makes his thumb and index finger into a circle to give us an idea of how big four centimeters is. FREEZE. All the air leaves the room. Am I going to throw up? No – hold it together as he continues. “We think it’s a meningioma, which is a USUALLY non-malignant tumor, usually localized outside the brain. We’re going to send her for an MRI so we can get a better idea of exactly how large it is. We’ve called a neurosurgeon.” That’s all I remember.
I’m learning already that “hospital time” passes in chunks. You wait, you get a block of information and are told to wait some more. Has it been fifteen minutes or two hours? It’s hard to tell.
At some point, they come get us out of the room and escort us to the family waiting area, with lots of comfortable chairs that are meant for sitting and waiting, but not for resting. By now, my brother Bill has arrived. He holds mom’s hand in the ER where they still have her, and he cries. Mom is semi-conscious, even with the massive doses of drugs. She’s fighting the breathing tube, trying to speak, trying to get up and go home. They let two of us into the ER at a time, and we take turns. Just holding her hand, caressing her hair and face, talking to her to let her know we are all there and she doesn’t need to be afraid. I lie to her, “Mom, you’re in the hospital emergency room. You’re going to be fine. They just have the tube in to make sure you can breathe. We’re all here and as soon as you’re better, we’re taking you home.” Her brow relaxes and I know she can hear me even if she can’t respond. But a minute later, she’s writhing on the bed again, fighting, fighting to get up and away. In my soul I hear a voice tell me that if she can still fight, she will survive this. I’m suddenly calm and very focused.
In the family waiting area, my brother and I hug. My God, he’s gotten old. Do I look that old? He’s still tall, but so thin. How are the boys, how’s Dianne? We haven’t seen each other in over 15 years and there’s much to catch up on, but for now we just scratch the surface, politely asking about each other’s families. We get interrupted and I walk to the other side of the room to talk to my girls. Next thing I know Bill has left – he has to get back to work to a job where he’s left all his tools.
The next hours are a blur. We wait. We talk. I’m amazed at how resilient we are – even now we can tell jokes and laugh during this crisis. I think to myself that we will get through this because we have each other. This is the gift that my mother has given us.
We take turns, two at a time, to sit with Mom. She’s unconscious, but maybe she knows we’re there so we talk to her, stroke her arms, hold her hands. Yes, Mama, we’re all here and we love you. We tell her about the work the doctors and nurses are doing to make her comfortable, to help get her well. Later, she’ll tell us she doesn’t remember a thing after the first seizure started, but right now, watching her vital signs on the monitor, it feels like she can hear us and her heart rate slows a bit.
Beth and Vicki are with her when they take her for the MRI. We wait some more. After the MRI, we meet Mom’s neurosurgeon, with a long name that I immediately shorten to Dr. T. He’s a serious and cautious young man. He gives us more details about the tumor, says they’re planning on surgery sometime in the next few days. We ask for details about the surgery. He pronounces a list of doom and gloom about all the possible complications, starting with death and ending with lifetime seizures. He’s not a man given to percentages or reassurances. We ask about the possibility of malignancy, of the possibility that they won’t be able to remove all the tumor. He tells us that he doesn’t think it’s malignant, but that you can’t tell until after the biopsy, which takes about three days. He says that often they have to leave pieces of the tumor behind if there’s too much vascular involvement. I like this man – he doesn’t dumb it down for us – he tells us the truth so we’ll know what we’re up against. Someone with false assurances we would have seen through in a heartbeat.
More tomorrow...
---------
I wrote the first part of this story right after mom’s brain surgery, and by that time we knew she was going to be OK. Then I closed the file and haven’t looked at it since. Partly, I think, because the emotions that we lived with for that week were so extreme that I needed to step back from the intensity. I needed to just be happy in the fact that our matriarch had survived a life crisis once again. Now I’m ready to pick up the threads of the story and finish it.
I talked about hospital time feeling like it came in chunks. Lots of waiting, then we’d get some information or something would happen, then hours of waiting again. We met with the neurosurgeon on Friday and he told us he would be doing the surgery sometime in the next week; it depended on his schedule. By Saturday afternoon, we were told the surgery had been scheduled for the next morning. It felt right to me that they had planned the surgery for the Sabbath. Like God was telling us not to worry – nothing bad could happen on God’s holy day. Not very logical, but we were all clutching at whatever glimmers of hope we could find.
On Saturday evening, Dr. T came to see her. He did all the usual checks of her vitals, checked the strength of her grip, asked her how she was feeling – was the headache better? Worse? He gave her the list of doom and gloom that he had given my sisters and me the night before. Death, fatal bleeding, paralysis, coma, lifetime seizures, and death, death, death.
He asked mom, “Do you have any questions for me?”
“Yes, just one. Do you have any good news?” Mom asked.
This guy was so serious – like he was warning us that he didn’t expect good results from this surgery. Like he was gearing up to be able to tell us, “I told you this would probably happen,” as we got the news that she hadn’t survived. But he didn’t know our mother. She’s a six-foot tall Swede, and she’d survived worse than this.
The doctor seemed to relent and gave us a short list of good possible outcomes. He actually smiled – not his whole face – just the corners of his mouth. As he swept away, Mom called out, “Don’t go out drinking tonight.”
He stopped in his tracks, turned back, looked right at Mom and grinned. Didn’t say a word, but that smile told me he had made the connection. This was a living, breathing, wonderful woman whose brain he was going to be cutting open the next day. Not just a litany of statistics and possibilities.
Mom was in the SICU (surgical intensive care unit). The night before the surgery my sisters and I were at the hospital, taking turns sitting with her. It was my turn during the still hours, when it’s quiet except for the machines beeping out heart rhythms and warnings that an IV drip needed to be changed. They close the unit to family for two hours between 5 – 7 a.m., for a shift change. But when they ushered the families out, somehow they missed my mom’s bed and I just stayed. I held her hand and watched her sleep. I prayed a lot, asking God to be with Mom, to be with the surgical team and help them to work like a well oiled machine, to guide the surgeon’s hands and help him to make all the right decisions. I pictured the surgeon deciding where to start the excision of the tumor – please God, make him steady and sure when he’s working on my mama’s brain.
She opened her eyes and looked at me. I could see fear. “Are you scared, mom?” Stupid question. She was terrified. But she put on her brave face and assured me everything would be OK. She was facing death and worried more about how her children were handling it.
At 7, my sisters both came in. The grandkids began arriving. The surgery was scheduled for 9 a.m., and the team was already starting their surgical preparations. By 8:30 they were ready to wheel Mom into surgery. I was sobbing – inside – on the outside I was smiling and trying to reassure everyone. My sisters were both crying – theirs was the more honest way of meeting this crisis. All the grandkids were touching her, telling her how much she is loved. I had already said my piece when we were alone during that 2-hour shift change. This overflowing of tears and sadness was too much – I walked away, needing to be alone while I cried. I turned back once and they were moving the bed through the narrow pathway, out the door of the SICU. Now the real wait began – it would be at least five hours before we’d know if we would get our mother back.
We have a Prayer Quilt Ministry at church. I had never given it much thought because I didn’t see how a quilt could help during a crisis. It seemed like giving someone flowers – pretty, but not very useful when you’re sick or in crisis. While we waited for news, Pastor Gloria brought a beautiful prayer quilt with yellow and purple flowers. The threads are meant to be tied while saying prayers. The Pastor led us in prayer, and we all tied knots, in our own way trying to bind Mom to us.
During the long hours, waiting for news, we noticed that our family was not the norm. Most families leave one or two members in the waiting area, sentinels left to hear the news and pass it on to family members waiting at home. We were a unit, no one even thought of leaving. When the news came – good or bad – we would all hear it together. We brought coolers filled with soda and water, and backpacks filled with food. The two great grandkids played on a blanket laid on the floor. To them it was a picnic – indoors.
I think it’s because our family has been through the fire many times – that’s what gives us the “circle the wagons” mentality. We all gather together and hold strong against whatever assails us. We needed to just be with each other, to laugh and tell stories.
Humor was our shield. When I couldn’t remember what the date was, my sister said, “It must be a brain tumor!” That began a hilarious dialogue about all the things we could now attribute to a brain tumor. We concocted a plan to draw a welcome mat and door knob on Mom’s bald head, which had us laughing hysterically. In the months since, I’ve told friends about these conversations and they didn’t see the humor. It was only funny to us. Our way of laughing in the face of tragedy.
Just a little over five hours after it began, I looked up to see Dr. T walking towards our group. He moved like you see TV doctors move – gliding across the floor, white jacket fluttering around his legs. No smile…but his eyes were kind. He was brief – the surgery went well. They got everything as far as they could tell. Not too much bleeding. The tumor had begun to invade the skull so they had to excise some bone but Mom was doing fine. Now, we were told, it would be an hour or so until she woke up back in the SICU and we could see her two at a time. Dr. T flew back out of the room, in a hurry no doubt, to save someone else’s life.
We were ecstatic. There’s no way to convey the feelings of joy and relief. We were just purely happy.
It was nearly two hours before we were told that she was awake and ready to see us. Picture a herd of elephants running up the stairway, everyone chattering. When the SICU team saw us milling in the hallway, they decided to let all of us come in – quietly – as a group so we could welcome Mom, Grandma, Great Grandma back. She opened her eyes and smiled. She spoke – I don’t remember what she said. It was the act of speaking that let us know she had survived – she knew who we were. Becky was holding the prayer quilt and when Mom saw it, she reached out her arms and took it. We covered her with it, all the prayers of the last four days enveloping her. Now I understood the value of the quilt.
It’s been six months since the surgery. Mom has done remarkably well. She’s back to all of her normal activities – a little slower but getting better every day. She takes dilantin to prevent seizures and her doctor has told her that she shouldn’t drive. He didn’t tell her she couldn’t drive but the thought of having a seizure behind the wheel is enough to make her call one of us whenever she needs to go somewhere.
Was there any good that came of The Tumor? Was God in all of this? I believe so. My sisters, brother, and I are all nicer to each other. We say, “I love you,” without hesitation. We had not always treated each other well over the years. It wasn’t sibling rivalry, exactly, more a lack of trust. Families who have experienced intense chaos often become disdainful of each other. It’s like finding out your hero has feet of clay. But we were older and more mature now. This crisis brought out the best in each of us.
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