Mama. Installment #1. What happened?

“Go play the piano,” Mama’d say. She knew it was a good diversion, she knew I could take the frustrations and disappointments of my teenaged life out on the long row of black and white keys. So I’d sit at our antique white upright and let all the pain flow from my heart, into my fingers, as I banged out all the verses of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” or “I Need Thee Every Hour.”

Now, Mama has been gone one month.  The walls of family are gone, too. The pain is stifling, and the only keys I have are short rows of black ones that silently type words and sentences on a lighted screen. I have a voice that has grown edgy and sharp and angry in recent days, and I choose to linger with it for a while and see if it sticks or if it passes. Grief can do that. Especially when new grief comes on top of another grief still in the process of being resolved. I lost a husband to a catastrophic death 15 months before I lost a mother to a catastrophic death.

I have made the following statement and I will say it again: I am going to cultivate some hemlock. On my 70th birthday, if I live that long, I’m going to have a big celebration, and then I’m going to take the hemlock, or smoke it or do whatever it is you do with it and be done with life. This is an ugly world, of horrific natural processes. This is not a world to grow old in. Life ceases to be revered and respected by others when gray hair comes in and wrinkles show up and Medicare kicks in and the body gives in to slow and chronic deterioration. It seems that old people have no value. I’ve been with my mother to doctors’ offices and listened as the staff talked to her like she was a four-year-old. “Here, Honey, sit down now and fill out this paperwork,” they say in a slow, loud, high-pitched voice. And I want to say, “You damn fool, she’s eighty, she’s got four college degrees and is Kappa Delta Pi, she can hear, talk to her like she’s an adult, show some respect,” but I don’t, because society wants me to be quiet and take it, so I just throw a glare over my shoulder, then smile like the sweet Sunday School girl my sister expects me to be so I won’t embarrass her when she has to take our mother back to the same office.

Mama suffered the last two years of her life. Her back hurt, her stomach hurt. We couldn’t figure out what would make both hurt. Was it the concrete block she had lifted in August of 2007? Was it the fall down the step into her den? Doctors couldn’t figure it out either. “It’s my colon,” she’d say. “And it’s pushing on nerves and hurting my back.” I played doctor and set her diet and told her to take Milk of Magnesia. The doctor told me three months before she died that all old folks obsess with their bowels.

One year ago Mama hurt so badly and couldn’t ride in a car because of being bounced around that she didn’t want to go anywhere for Thanksgiving, so we left our 87-year-old mother home alone — the first holiday of her life to not be with family, and sadly her last. The Christmas before that, she was so miserable that she made my sister and brother-in-law drive her home from their house on Christmas morning. So last Christmas, pain or not, we made her take a two-hour trip to be with us at my son’s house. Her pain and suffering intensified and for the last year, it was all we ever talked about till it got to the point that I told her in exasperation, “Mama, you are one big colon. You’re not a whole person any more. You’re just a colon. That’s the total existence of your life and our conversations.”

Her doctor didn’t want to do a colonoscopy because of her age. I called and requested a passive test like a CT scan to rule out cancer or blockage or diverticulitis, but my phone call was never returned. I was enraged and cussed and complained about it but didn’t pursue it because my sister didn’t want me to act unladylike and yell at the doctor or his staff.

That CT scan came three months later, when my sister in desperation took our mother to the emergency room one Friday night. The radiologist’s report said there were worrisome signs of colon cancer, lung cancer, and follow-up with other tests was recommended. This was never divulged to my mother or the family.  Two months later a colonoscopy was finally recommended and scheduled and showed a blockage. Laxatives were recommended.

Mama had dementia, too. It had been coming on a long time. It began as she obsessed with certain issues that bothered her, like Muslim women who were circumcised. Then she began to lose her words. She couldn’t pick out the right word to use in the right place, so every other word of every sentence was “thing.” I couldn’t find that thing that turns on the thing over there on top of that thing. [The remote.] My sister had pushed for two years to get her into a nursing home. I refused. It was my preference to leave our mother at home. If she falls, so be it. If she burns up the house and herself with it, so be it. Hire a part-time caregiver and let her stay at home where she is happy. Let her live out her days and take what comes naturally. We called Home Health for in-the-home care, and they tested her, and said she needed 24-hour care. We had to send her to a Senior Care psychiatric unit for 16 days for evaluation. She’s confused, they said. She only answered 18 out of 30 questions right. They also said she had lung cancer and after a bone scan, we were told she had bone cancer.

So I lost the battle for at-home care and helped my sister put our mother in a nursing home.  When she entered the Home, she was walking, talking, socializing, laughing, strong, peppy, somewhat confused, agitated at times, and fought those who got in her way. In 23 days, she was dead.

Two weeks before she died, she and I had a long phone conversation. She was laughing and slurring her words and not making sense as she talked. “Mama,” I said. “Have you been drinking?” She laughed, and I laughed. “I’m ruuuuuuuum,” she said. “I’M RUM!” Then we spent fifteen minutes simply laughing out loud. My sister said she used that word because she used to drink rum and coke. They were upping her morphine. Quickly, it got to the point that she couldn’t talk at all, and she couldn’t walk at all.

I was with her when she gave up her fight to live, one week before she died. She was lying in her bed, alone in her room, writhing and moving from side to side, moaning, and literally scratching the wall beside her in long desperate strokes. The nurses came in and forced her into a wheel chair and took her to a common room where they tried to feed her sweet potatoes and peas, which turned out to be the last meal of her life. She was uncomfortable in her pants outfit and pulling at it, holding it away from her and constantly moaning, so I asked the nurses to change her into a gown. She slapped at them and told them to stop. Another nurse came in with a shot for agitation and stuck it in my mother’s thin arm. And then this once strong woman who hadn’t been able to find a single sensible word all day quickly found some words and uttered her last sentence and gave up her spirit. “Oh, well, I just don’t give a damn.”

The coroner wrote on her death certificate that she died of lung cancer and bone cancer. But I know she didn’t.

And I am left with questions.

What really happened to my mama? Did she get good medical care? Is this what I have to look forward to in thirty years? Will the doctors ignore my complaints, too, and will my children stick me in a home because nurses in Home Health say I’m confused? Will they put me flat on my back and shoot me up with enough morphine to kill an elephant?

After retrieving Mama’s doctors’ records and test results from appropriate facilities, I learned that her tests were not definitive. They said there was a possibility of lung cancer, a possibility of bone cancer. But the defining tests were never recommended or carried out. So whose idea was it to put her on morphine? Whose idea was it to render her to a semi-comatose state? Was this the only way to manage her pain? And why the hell was she IN pain? My God, nobody ever cared enough to pursue it to an end result and find out! Was her life worth no more to anyone than that? As I said before, old people have no value. Shoot ‘em up, put ‘em in a stupor, lay them flat on their backs, shut ‘em the hell up until they die — that’s the art of medicine.

God, I need some everlasting arms to lean on because I know for a fact how my mama died. She died of massive pulmonary embolisms. I don’t know what caused them. She did have lung cancer. She also died of intestinal infarct — she had a blockage in her colon, and her intestines exploded.

How could this happen?  In the 21st century, is this all we can expect?

Mississippi Delta, River Country

“My country is the Mississippi Delta, the river country. It lies flat, like a badly drawn half oval, with Memphis at its northern and Vicksburg at its southern tip. Its western boundary is the Mississippi River, which coils and returns on itself in great loops and crescents, though from the map you would think it ran in a straight line north and south. Every few years it rises like a monster from its bed and pushes over its banks to vex and sweeten the land it has made. For our soil, very dark brown, creamy and sweet-smelling, without substrata of rock or shale, was built up slowly, century after century, but the sediment gathered by the river in its solemn task of cleansing the continent and depositied in annual layers of silt on what must once have been the vast depression between itself and the hills. This ancient depression, now filled in and level, is what we call the Delta. Some say it was the floor of the sea itself. Now it seems still to be a floor, being smooth from one end to the other, without rise or dip of hill, unless the mysterious scattered monuments of the mound-builders may be called hills. … “

William Alexander Percy

The Butcher-Block Table

It’s surprising, when the person is gone, what objects or possessions have meaning. With Mama, I wanted some of her kitchen things, like bread pans and muffin tins and cookie sheets and a jelly roll pan. I brought home her two dresser lamps and put them in my bedroom. I have a candy dish, an antique sugar bowl she used every day for her tea, and a framed Irish Blessing. I also kept her pink chenille robe. I slipped it on yesterday morning and pulled it close around me, and when I stuck my hand in its pocket, I found a hair net. Mama was big on hair nets and the very sight of it crumpled me.

My son was the first to set his eyes on one particular piece of furniture that best defined his grandmother — a butcher-block table in the middle of her small kitchen.  Mama had it made back in the Seventies, before the grandchildren were born. She took an old desk from the school where she was principal. She painted it and applied wallpaper that matched the kitchen walls to its sides. Then she had the lumber company make a butcher block and glue it to the top of the desk. It was put together with layers of wood and protected with cooking oil.

For forty years, Mama made bread, cookies, pies, jelly rolls, and cakes on the butcher-block. Every meal was either prepared or served here. When the grandchildren began to come along, each one had ample opportunities to stand on a little stool and help Mamaw knead bread or cut out biscuits or cookies. Even my dog had a turn; every time we’d visit, the cocker spaniel would stand with both front paws on the tabletop and watch Mamaw fix each dish.

Mama loved that table and wouldn’t have traded it for anything in the world. Now it is in the kitchen of my son. He removed the butcher block, sanded it, and built a new base and legs. He applied a copper patina basecoat and antique black crackle topcoat. He put wheels on the bottom so they can move it around conveniently.

The butcher-block table has new life in a new home with two new babies. Two more little children to grow up watching their mama and daddy carry on traditions — the passing of the spatula to a new generation.

Things That Go Bump in the Night

Saturday evening at dusk I am sitting on the couch eating a bowl of chili fresh from the crockpot and watching Brady Bunch reruns because there’s nothing better on TV. The dog is beside me, intent on getting at least a bean. I hear a faint noise, a familiar hum that I haven’t heard in a while, and it comes to me that my garage door is opening. I used to listen for that sound every evening about 6:30 when it was time for my husband to arrive home from the office.

How could my garage door be opening? Who is opening it? Why? I can see the interior door to the garage from my spot on couch, I set my bowl down, and I rush through the kitchen to open it and check. Yes, the garage door is wide open and the light is on, meaning that the door has just opened within a minute or two.  I close and lock the door, I race to the back door in the family room and lock it and secure the doggy door. I grab the phone and call my son in North Carolina.

“Something just happened. My garage door opened for no reason. I’m kinda freaking out here. I don’t know if someone’s in the garage or not. Stay on the phone with me, I’ve got to go outside and check it out.”

“Okay. Where are the garage door openers?”

“In the cars.”

I exit the front door into the front yard and look into the still-lighted garage. It is dark in the yard; the spots are not on yet. No movement, no sign of any intruder in the garage. I check all the doors of the car parked in the driveway. All locked.

“Do you see anything?” he asks. “You need to get a flashlight and look around the perimeter of the house and yard.”

“I’m sort of scared, I’ve never been scared here, but I am now. I’m afraid to go in there and look. Should I call the police?”

“I think you need to check it out, but if you’re too afraid, then call.”

“Okay, well, let me go, I’m gonna call Todd and see what he thinks.”

Locked in the house once again, I call the other son in Mississippi. “I was sitting on the couch and my garage door opened for no reason. I’m a little freaked out.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. Anybody who has the ability and the technology to open your garage door wouldn’t be trying to get in your house; they’d be in Belle Meade.”

“Should I call the police?”

“No, I’m sure it’s fine…”

“But I’m afraid…”

“Well, then, just call and see what they say.”

I do and within ten minutes an officer rings my doorbell.

“What’s going on?” he asks.

“I’m a little freaked out,” I say. “My garage door just opened for no reason. I’ve lived here 15 years and that’s never happened before.”

“How many openers do you have?”

“Three. Two are locked in the cars. One doesn’t work and it’s in the house somewhere.”

“Could something have fallen on them?”

“No, they’re attached to the visors. Have you ever heard of this happening?”

“No, maybe it’s just a fluke.”

“Will you please check in my garage for me? My husband died and I’ve got all the stuff from his office stored in the garage under tarps and covers and I’m afraid someone might be hiding.”

“Sure.” He takes his flashlight and looks all around and under things, checks doors, checks the cars, gives it a thorough going over. Nothing. No logical reason for the door to have opened. I try to convince myself it’ a one-time thing.

Later, it comes to me that it was probably mama. She died two weeks ago.

Sunday morning my son calls.

“I’m still alive, the door hasn’t opened again, I figured out it was probably Mama.”

I tell him the story. Decades ago, Mama had told it to me.

Mama had a favorite sister-in-law. Marge. Marge was Bill’s wife and five years older than Mama. They were best friends. When they were young women, someone told the story about two people who were wondering about life after death and thought they’d resolve that question once and for all. They each told the other, “If you die first, you knock on my front door, and I’ll know it is you and that you are still present and able to communicate after you die.” Much later, one got a knock at the door. The other told the story about life after death.

Mama and Marge laughed and scoffed and took up the joke. “Okay, Marge, if you die first, you come and knock on my front door, and I’ll know it’s you,” Mama said. Marge returned the challenge with sarcasm. Marge was a chain smoker and died of lung cancer in November of 1970. I had just married and moved to Texas, but Mama made a point to call me.

“A knock came on our front door the other night. I answered it and no one was there. Your dad and I looked up and down the street and around the house and could find no one. I learned that Marge had died that night.”

“Oh my gosh, she remembered, she came and knocked on your door! Just like you two planned it!”

Then I took it up. “Okay, Mama, when you die, you come and ring my doorbell.”

“Naaa, you don’t want me to do that,” she always said.

“Yes, I do, I really do, you better come. When you die, you come ring my doorbell.”

We laughed and talked about this many times over the years. The last time I mentioned it was about a month ago. But when Mama died, I was at her house with her, and she did not have an opportunity to fulfill that promise. So two weeks later, when I am home alone, and finally still and quiet, she comes…and my garage door opens?

My son listens to the story and then softly replies. “You know, um, you do have a doorbell for a garage door opener.”

I stammer around and attempt to follow his train of thought, and all of a sudden it becomes very clear. Beside the door that opens from the garage into the house is a doorbell-like fixture. You push on the button, like ringing a doorbell, and it opens the garage door, or closes it.

Mama was just trying to ring my bell like I’d told her to. Only this doorbell was connected to a Genie Blue Max garage door opener.

She Deserved Better.

I’m washing her good china in the sink — thick Palmolive suds and fine white china. I have to do something. I can’t just sit. And wait. While the dishes are air drying, I wipe her mouth and lips and tongue with lemon glycerin swabs.

We are close to the end.

I don’t even recognize her now. Her appearance resembles nothing of her former self.

My sister and I have gone through this before, with Dad. We should not have to do it again, with Mama. It’s just so … wrong. Dad died three years ago of end-stage dementia, which means he died of starvation and dehydration. Mama has cancer. And she can no longer eat. It has been 5 days without food or water.

In the back corner of the china cabinet I find a blue pill bottle with PROPO-N/APAP, TAKE 1 TABLET TWICE DAILY FOR PAIN, dated June 1, 2009. Four months ago. This was Mama’s treatment for bone cancer. Pain pills.

Nobody could figure out why she had pain. She went to a handful of doctors over the course of two years with all the tell-tale symptoms: chest pain, difficulty swallowing, cough, congestion, weight loss, shortness of breath. And phlegm. How many times did she complain about that and go to the doctor for that? So for lung cancer she was treated with Benadryl, Chlortabs, Sudafed, Mucinex, Flonase, and other OTCs and prescription drugs.

Her cancer is not only in the lungs, but in the space between the lungs, in the adrenals, and in the bones, and probably in the brain, and now, everywhere. It must have metastasized two years ago because she has been in intense pain since the winter of ‘08. She couldn’t ride in a car because of the jarring of the bones, she has cut the waistbands out of all her pants because she couldn’t stand anything to touch her, she has sat in her chair on a heating pad for days on end.

A few months after I called her doctor’s office and left a message requesting a CT scan to find out what was wrong — and my call was never returned, it got so bad that my sister hauled her to the emergency room one Friday night where she got 2 CT scans and 2 more with dye and X-rays and spent 10 hours and left with a diagnosis of “constipation” and got suppositories. Mama told me the next day that the technician said, “Your lungs are full of stuff!” What stuff, and why was nothing else ever said about that?

That was May 1. And Mama took Tylenol and PROPO-N/APAP (Darvocet) all summer for the excruciating pain of bone cancer. And we kept on taking her to the doctor, asking What is wrong? We didn’t learn about lung cancer until the last of August when we put her in a Senior Care facility and said, Find out what is wrong. We didn’t learn about bone cancer until September 2.

So while I scrub dishes and keep an eye on Mama’s breathing pattern and squirt morphine in her cheek and swab her parched dehydrated mouth, my sister goes to the hospital and gets a copy of Mama’s test results from May 1, the results that were sent to her doctor to be discussed at a follow-up visit.

It’s all there. “Several worrisome signs for malignancy, colon cancer, or lung cancer.” “Minimal left basilar airspace consolidation/atelectasis.” “Something eating away at T12 vertebrae, possibly a mass…” “Destruction of the T2 vertebral body and there appears to be involvement of the right pedicle suggesting that this is a metastatic process…” RECOMMENDATION: A PET/CT would be ideal…A bone scan.”

Nothing was ever mentioned in follow-up visits. Nothing was done to address these findings.

At the very least, she could have been kept comfortable the last years…months…weeks of her life. But she wasn’t.

Now she has hospice, and she is getting good care.

Journeys

Sunday before Labor Day at ten of six I embark on a journey south under moonlight. I’ve always wanted to take a trip in the country under a full moon. The Natchez Trace stretches out before me in curves, over hills — asphalt, grass, a treeline. The road narrows ahead, and an occasional leaf drops in front of me. I don’t see another car for the first fifty minutes. I watch the sky lighten and the morning clouds burn away. A coyote crosses the road, then another, a deer, bands of wild turkeys, vultures on the center line, a hawk flying toward me then lifting. The rising sun helps to clarify the world around me. It filters through the trees and throws its light across the road and lays stripes against the tree trunks. Against the texture of blue-green pine needles, the hardwoods are paling, thinning, and there is a smattering of yellow. Dogwoods are turning red. Sycamores look like succotash. They signal the change to come. Soon winds will whip the dropping leaves across the roadway and into the fields, and there will be cold air and earthy colors, then icy rain and barrenness — the end of the living season.

Bagworms hang on branches, some out over the roadway in my path, snuffing out the life of the tree. I don’t want to experience this ugly invader on my journey through pristine woods, but I am forced to look at these obstacles in my path.

___

Most of my life has been spent on the bank watching the river flow. The rest of my life, I have been knocked about by strong currents, thrown into the rocks. I want to get into the water and manage the flow.

I have a new Heritage Featherlite 9.5. Yellow.

Saturday before Labor Day I christen my new kayak in the Narrows of the Harpeth out near Pegram. At the Narrows you can park in one spot for the put in and take out because here the river makes a five-mile loop and the put in is barely four hundred yards from the take out, yet it’s a three-hour paddle. We launched from a steep ramp and stairs, and there I was. Alone, with a Werner paddle, yellow to match the boat. It’s one thing to be in a canoe with another person paddling. There’s a backup, I could take a break, I could rest and depend. Now every paddle, every obstacle, every strainer, every ripple is mine. We hit rippled water from the get-go. I angle my boat into the V and move with the current, then I hit an eddy and get pushed to the bank. I maneuver, I keep the boat straight, I get the feel of her. She’s a glider, she feels good in the water, she’s easy, I’m in love. The Harpeth River has a gentle flow here at 79 cfs with occasional ripples that bounce and carry me faster. I paddle in circles for practice, in shallow places I get pushed onto rocks, and I get carried toward other canoes and toward the bank, and I learn to rock my hips and keep my upper body still, to paddle in a rainbow, paddle deep, paddle hard, to keep on paddling even when it looks like the flow alone can take me through.

___

I follow the Natchez Trace to Tupelo, then take Highway 6 west to Oxford. Mama has been at the Missisippi State Home for Veterans for six days. For now, she needs heavy pain medication and management. She is still able to socialize and walk around and visit with others.

One year ago Mama was mowing her own yard and weed-eating and taking care of her flowerbeds. Then her pain hit. She has gone to doctor after doctor, from Cleveland to Memphis, and even a chiropractor, and no one was able to find the source of her pain. Actually, doctors don’t look for the source any more. They don’t even touch patients. You go in and tell them where you think your pain is and they give you medicine for that. So Mama presented with colon pain. She was tested and treated. No one thought to look further. I took Mama in and made her pull up her shirt and point to the pain. The doctor said, “Well, that’s not your colon.” So he X-rayed her hip, and her hip wasn’t fractured.

A simple rule I’ve learned over the years is that if you are in pain 24 hours a day and cannot sleep because of it and you are overdosing on Ibuprofen for some measure of relief that never comes, you have cancer.

Come to find out Mama has lung cancer that has metastasized to the bones and to the space between the lungs, and she probably has adrenal cancer, as well. And it might be in her brain. Her pain is getting stronger. She can’t stand any clothes touching the bones in her low back and thoracic area or against her ribs in front. She has cut into the waistband of all her pants to allow for more room. She said a chaplain told her she has three or four months. No one has told me that.

I am unable to cope with her impending death because I cannot get past the fact that she is in a nursing home. She was in pain, she was overdosing, she was unsafe at home, she needed 24-hour care, she got her diagnosis, and she got put in another town 120 miles away, in strange surroundings, among strangers. No one will visit her here, except close family, maybe once a week. No one from her hometown, or from the church where she’s been a member for sixty-three years. My head tells me she’s getting the care she needs.

My heart tells me she needs to be home. Home, where she can look out the front window and see Iva Lou’s old house and two big trees in the front yard, even though Iva Lou is in North Cleveland Cemetery. Home, where she can spend her days wandering about the wegelias, the roses, the hydrangeas, the crepe myrtles and pampus grass. The Carolina jasmine and the daylillies. Home, where she can spend her last nights in the front bedroom where she has slept for sixty years. Home, where she can get peace, comfort, and closure. And die in the same room my father did.

We’ve decided to take her home before the end. She hopes it is soon enough. So do I.

___

I just took a journey through grief after the loss of my husband. I’d been through the rough waters, the rapids, the rushing whitewater pulling me up the river; I didn’t know where I was going, but I got there. I had just arrived in calm waters. I was beginning to laugh and experience life again and to want more out of life. The kayak was a gift to myself, to a new and different, wild and crazy life.

Now this with Mama. And the familiar journey begins again. I recognize that tingling in the backs of my arms, the heaviness of my legs as I try to put one foot in front of the other and walk, the shallow breaths I am forced to take, and the head pointed down, chin on collar bone — the posture of grief. My pain centers in my neck, and I am drawn to the bottle of Ibuprofen, and it doesn’t help much.

___

Once again, I am swept away by the current. I need to remember to paddle.

Bailey and Mama

Bailey

August 6. What a day. It has once again stretched the coping ability, now like old, worn elastic. Please, God, no more like this one.

He’s gone… I’d pushed OK, and this text message lit up the screen of my cell phone. I thought I should check it when there was no blinking light on the land line. I knew this was coming. In fact, I had gone outside and walked around Wimbledon Circle once, twice, then I rode my bike, and then ran. I knew it was happening. I just didn’t want to face it. After I got the text, I walked again around the circle and let the acid and anxiety bubble up to my throat and the tears wet my face and drip to the concrete under me.

Bailey was my “granddog.” His appointment with destiny was scheduled for Saturday, but he couldn’t make it. He was diagnosed with Cushing’s years ago, took the chemo treatment at $80 a month, along with Mannatech immune-strengthening products, and lived longer than most dogs with the disease. Then diabetes set in, then kidney failure. Bailey was suffering and ready to go.

___

She’s in! I could tell my sister was driving. I could hear the road noises as she headed north up 61. I sat at my desk at work and clutched my cell phone tighter. I just left her. And she’s not happy. She was getting her purse, ready to walk out with me. Her voice was strong, a little shaky, but determined. It was a hard thing to do, but she drove down from Memphis and did it.

Our mother was admitted to the Senior Care unit of North Sunflower County Hospital. It has been coming a long time, but particularly in the last month, things have gone drastically awry. Her pain, persistent over the last six months, has intensified; no doctors, no tests have shown anything wrong. Her confusion has increased, she has lost her words, her short-term memory has failed.

She’s the matriarch, she demands to stay in her own house, she has threatened to sue us if we challenge that. She’s a fighter, a wildcat, and everyone understands who and what she is, and we’re all slow to cross her. She has refused help, until now. She knows she’s not what she was.

___

Before Bailey, my son had a wolf, a pure-bred wolf. He kept it in my parents’ backyard while he attended college in the same town…and neglected to tell them it was a wolf. Then he married, the wolf got a home in the country, and the young couple traveled to Okolona, Mississippi, and got this tiny white puffball Maltese. Bailey had to be tough, following a wolf. My son would put one end of a rag bone in Bailey’s mouth and with the other end, swirl the puppy around the hardwood floor like a dust mop.

I took my brand new cocker spaniel to visit Bailey. She was standing in one corner of the living room, and he was sitting on the couch on the opposite side of the room. All of a sudden, with no prompting, he jumped straight up in the air and far across the room, landing ten inches from her, and shouldered roughly into her side with a growl that could bring down an army. She cried. She stewed on it for months, and at the next visit, she watched and waited for an opportunity and took it, barking, growling, snarling, pushing him backward across the kitchen floor, and though he was one-third her size, he stood his ground to make it clear he was the alpha dog.

Dad was alive and healthy back then and rode a bicycle every day — an old one with a big fat seat and a basket on the front handlebars. He was determined to put Bailey in that basket and take him for a ride. “No, Dad, it’s not a good idea,” I said. “He’ll be fine, he’ll just sit there and look around,” Dad said. No sooner than they got to the next block, a Great Dane ran out in the street viciously barking at them. Bailey, all of four pounds, bravely leapt from the basket and chased the monster dog down Deering. Dad dropped the bike and ran after Bailey. “Come back here!”

___

“You come down here and get me or I will hate you forever.” My heart flips over and rolls around, feels like a dog lying on dry grass, scratching its back and kicking its legs.

I never thought Mama would need any help. Last summer she was mowing her own yard and doing all the weed-eating and at 87, was still driving and going to church by herself.

As a girl, Mama lived by and swam in the Ohio River. She joined the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps during WWII; she was making her way to the parade grounds on the army base the day President Roosevelt came to inspect the women, and she stood curbside all alone — three feet from the leader of the free world — and saluted him, and shortly thereafter, he made the WAACs the WACs, an official part of the Army. Mama went to college on the GI Bill, got a BS double major in social studies and graduated with the highest average in her class. She also got a BS in elementary education, an MS in special education, and an MS in Supervision/Administration. She taught school for 33 years. She is a member of Kappa Delta Pi.

She’s always been a strong, independent woman because she comes from a famous pioneer family. Her third great grandfather was a first cousin of Daniel Boone.

“I don’t belong here,” she says. “Tomorrow, you come get me.”

___

The vet arrived at the house and did the deed as the dog lay on the couch in the living room. A half hour later someone from the crematory came. The ashes would be returned in a cedar box the following day, along with a paw print and a lock of hair.

___

How can life take one so vibrant and strong and reduce it to something unrecognizable? True, a newborn baby goes through change after change on the path to adulthood. But then why at a certain point do things start going backward? Why is life so complicated that its processes of movement and growth and flow just stop altogether?

___

It’s time. This weekend I must clean out the drain in the master bathroom. I’ve been putting this off. I can’t any longer. I’ve never had to do this “dirty job” but now I am alone and it falls to me. It is surely clogged with my hair, the dog’s hair, soap residue, debris from plants at its corners, and lint that floats in the air. The tub doesn’t drain, the water just sits there, no gurgling sounds are apparent, like when something bad happens and the breath is knocked out of you and you can’t get air because it cannot come in or go out so you struggle with it and gasp and suck in what you can while you can.

Tired August

Mint is growing out of its bounds and into the fescue. I mow some of it as I follow the defined line of grass, and the scent of fresh, wet spearmint lifts and spreads. The pepper plants are small, but the peppers are long. The tomato plants are spindly, yielding nothing of worth.

The red trumpet honeysuckle vine is thinned out, and there are no trumpets. Ferns that once were on the forest floor of my family land now grow under my stand of old trees and sway in a warm August breeze. The trees are dropping yellow leaves that mix with mulch and keep the flowerbeds from looking neat. Birches have a neverending supply of twigs that they give up willingly. I’ve already said it — I’ll never plant another birch tree. I’m tired of tripping over their droppings and picking them up for disposal in brown paper bags they don’t fit well in.

The rose bush has no leaves. Nothing but thin green arms sticking out like those of aliens. I think the squirrels have eaten the leaves. They do this in August. First they eat the Christmas cactus my mother-in-law gave me years ago to care for. I curse them and bring the plant in sooner than I want. I can’t stop their careless destruction.

The abelia is wild and flowery, forsythias are crazily growing, and a blue wildflower is running rampant through the flowerbed. Nandinas and monkey grass are lush.

The fountain in the pond bubbles anxiously and sends out waves that move as fast as time.

And weeds grow where grass fades.

Tis the Season

High summer, sun and heat, a little rain, and green growth. Tomatoes are full and fat on the vines. Energy pumps through my veins as I watch and wait for them to turn the right shade of red.

I rub a leaf between my fingers, pick a ripe tomato, hold it in my hand, then sniff the distinct smell it leaves on my skin. It’s still warm, fresh, full of juice, packed with sunshine and life-energy surging to it from the vine source.

I slice through a sunburst of yellow and let seeds and juice burst out and run across the cutting board and onto the countertop.

I place two of the slices between two pieces of white bread smothered with creamy white mayonnaise, then sprinkle sea salt and pepper on top. I take a bite and let the seedy, pulpy juice run down my chin. I savor the taste.

Summer in the South is distilled into one sandwich.

I Am the Cup

One year ago today, June 28, 2008, I sat in a waiting room at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and heard those brief urgent words “I’m going, I’m going” — a moment of grace, a meeting of the minds, my husband’s and mine — and then a half hour later the surgeon rushed in and said, “We’re losing ground. Come now.” I’d asked to see my husband one last time, and that request was honored as I was hurried down flights of stairs and into the operating room, placed on a stool, and pushed up to the back of his head.

Arriving home an hour later, it hit me strongly. “Go read the story.” He wrote it two months earlier and put it on his blog, and it was slated to be published in my online journal in two days. I ran straight upstairs, pulled it up on the computer, and read the story of the styrofoam cup that was tossed about in traffic until it found its resting place. I knew immediately that this would be used in the funeral service, as it had dual meanings — consolation that he had found his resting place and some assurance to those of us left behind.

I read the story again yesterday. I understood, after a year’s groping at life, surviving, existing, pressing onward, trying to find me and meaning, that in the hours after his death, he was speaking to me. . . because I am the cup.

Kathy, David Rhodes - Tennessee River in Knoxville

I found my peace at the Tennessee River across from Neyland Stadium yesterday as I released him into the current — freeing him, freeing me. And then an added perk as the stadium, under construction, was open, and I walked in and down steps to a goalpost, threw up my arms and shouted “GO VOLS” and left him there, where there will be cheers and rejoicing and hopefully touchdowns, and I could see and feel him laughing . . . laughing.

Neyland Stadium

And now in celebration of the life of Winston Rand / Charlie Rhodes, I share the story again for me and for all who seek peace.

*****

“Trudging through life, coping with the day-to-day challenges and turmoil, we sometimes need a reminder that we too can survive, even beyond all odds. Those little reminders come in various packages. Sometimes it’s a child with a serious affliction who is happy and smiling; other times, a warm, frisky puppy that has not a care in the world except to please you; and occasionally, it will be the totally unexpected. Such was the case one day last week.

Arriving back at the office in late afternoon, something caught my eye as I walked from the car to the office entrance. It took a few seconds for it to register that I was seeing an empty styrofoam cup in the center turn lane of the busy street out front. There was a push of air from heavy traffic in both directions, causing the little truncated cone to roll in an arc first one way, then the other. The occasional draft of a larger vehicle would move it up and down its chosen lane a few feet. Then more rolling in arcs around its new pivot point until another large draft moved it a few feet forward or backward.

Becoming quickly mesmerized, I stood for perhaps fifteen minutes watching the struggle, the close misses, the movement to and fro. At some point I realized I was cheering the little cup onward in its quest to survive against the impossible odds of the multi-ton monsters bearing down on it from every side. And then it occurred to me how much like life that is. Wishing the dancing traveler well, I went on into the office. Half an hour later after checking email, washing up, and shutting down for the evening, I emerged to find the cup still at it. It had moved about 20 or 30 feet down the turn lane and seemed to be slightly damaged, but not enough to keep it from rolling and arcing, performing its death defying dance. After watching a few more minutes, I had to leave the cup to its unique brand of madness, knowing full well that it would be flattened or completely gone come morning.

Imagine my surprise and delight to arrive back at the office the following morning to find the cup, not squashed by one of the many behemoths that passed this way during the night, but intact, resting gently on the grass a few feet from the street. It had a nick, but was otherwise alive and well. I thought of placing the cup back in the middle of the turn lane for another go, but decided it may prefer the resting place it had chosen and worked so hard to reach. Then I was tempted to take it in and leave it sitting on my credenza as a reminder. But such an adventurer needs freedom and would not fare well in captivity. So I left it where it was, and carried away the memory of its struggles and the lesson of perseverance it taught.”