Dear Ones,
I decided to withdraw from Walhydra's Back Porch Part 1 of "Walhydra's White Slave Adventure." No problem with the story itself, but right now I don't feel like pursuing it.
I had started posting Part 1 late one night last weekend—as I now realize—in order to distract myself from my rising grief over moving Mom from assisted living into skilled nursing care.
Now the grief has broken through...or at least another layer of it has broken through.
I'm back on that tightrope I fell off of during 2007, when we moved Mom from her home to my sister's home, this time trying to maintain the balance between making the practical decisions and allowing the grief to hurt.
You all know about this in your own lives.
We are mortal.
Mother-Father God loves us and lifts us up.
But we are mortal.
Blessèd Be,
Bright Crow
Please see Cat's post Loss on Quaker Pagan Reflections.
Just about everyone Walhydra knows at work, at home and online seems to be hanging by a thread right now.
Between deaths, illnesses, severely increasing staff and budget austerity on the job, loss of jobs, loss of homes, and so on, friends are barely managing—yet still managing, somehow—to hold each other up in tenderness. Forgiving each others lapses and sharp edges, simply because Something keeps helping them to remember that they are all in this together.
Walhydra and Hubby Jim, themselves, have been struggling for weeks with the reality that their Mom, Senior Witch, can no longer live safely in assisted living.
She has fallen five times since the beginning of September, three of those falls in one week, all of them alone in her room.
Three trips to ER, two cuts to the forehead which required stitches, a hospital stay for CAT scans, MRI and ultrasound of the carotid arteries, but no explanation for the falls—except that she is increasingly neglecting food, water and hygiene and probably standing up too fast.
When Walhydra brought Senior Witch back from being stitched up after the latest fall two weeks ago, she knew decisively that it was time to move her Mom into skilled nursing care.
This has been a wrenching experience...and Walhydra is so exhausted that she is letting her amanuensis fill out this post with excerpts from an email exchange with R, JimJim's ex and still a dear friend and mentor for both Walhydra and her hubby.
Here's the gist of it.
Monday, R:
Thanks for the update, how are you holding up sport? Love you muchly.
Tuesday, W:
I feel like I haven't slept in six weeks, since Mom's first fall (Sept. 5). Not constant worry, but constant background worry. You know how that goes.
Lot's of friendly support, good on-going contact with my sister and brother.
Thanks for your love.
Tuesday, R:
Hugs babe.
Wednesday, W:
Thanks, R.
I'm concerned, because I catch myself being tempted by the old lure of depression, that false escape from difficulties. Don't want to go that road again, precisely because it makes it so much harder to act decisively...but I'm sad and tired...and everyone around me seems the same.
Running on faith without the accompanying feelings at present.
The coincidence of autumn and Mom's drastic decline leaves me plodding along. Jim's very burned out, too, from a very heavy work load this semester. And we're struggling at the library due to hiring freeze, budget cuts and, now, seasonal illnesses.
National and global news is not uplifting either.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
[Thanks, Walhydra, for the note of levity. :-) ]
All sounds worse than it probably actually is...but that's the difficulty.
Where did I leave my bootstraps?
:-\
Wednesday, R:
I gladly will loan you my boot hooks to go into your bootstraps, dear friend, and I praise God that you really do not need them.
You are your mother's witch child, and you know the things you must do, even as tired as you may feel.
I can and do send you my energy to share and use just as quickly as you need to. I am with you always and will give you strength to persevere my friend.
"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence comes my help." (Psalm 121:1)
Blessèd Be.
Thursday, W:
Thanks, Dear One.
As you point out, there is that higher order level of awareness which continues to say, "You know the things you must do."
This morning, when the alarm went off at 6:30, I found I wanted to get out of bed at once.
That's progress.
I did my lower back exercises for the first time in weeks. I dressed. I fed the furry brothers. I actually ate breakfast myself, instead of running away from the house in the morning dark and getting just coffee at Starbucks.
That's progress.
Mom doesn't understand why she's where she is now, and she wants me to "take her home."
I know she has to stay in skilled nursing—regardless of how well rehab goes.
Somehow, we all need to help her to understand, at some level, that this new place is safe and wholesome.
Aside from the dementia, there is the dislocation for this very private person of being in a hospital-like room with no privacy, and the noise of other residents and staff (and the beeping of alarms) all around her....
And no room in the room. Just the bed, the nightstand, the cupboard...and the other bed. That bed is now empty, but it stands as a further "threat" to personal boundaries.
Oy!
I hate it myself. When I first saw the room, I felt despair, even knowing she has to stay here. Especially knowing she has to stay here.
I can't tell how demented she is, how much or little of this she normally notices...because when we visit, she is still able to come into focus and present something of the old Senior Witch persona and intelligence.
I can tell she is unhappy.
Prayers for Mom. Inward assurance and peace.
What else can we do?
Love, and
Blessed Be.
Walhydra realized today that this space also reminds her of twelve years "behind the wall" as a prison counselor...watching pairs of inmates share rooms the size of her bathroom.
Senior Witch jokes that, as a child, she distressed her beloved maiden aunts during a holiday visit by singing a song she'd learned on the radio.
It was one she liked the sound of, but whose lyrics she barely paid attention to as she sang them.
Her aunts thought she was singing about staying with them.
Now if I had the wings of an angel,
Over these prison walls I would fly....
Now Walhydra will have to hang the picture of these two aunts over Senior Witch's bed and tease her into singing that song.
Senior Witch does still have a sense of humor...thank Goddess! It's in there...somewhere....
Here's Hubby Jim's response to Walhydra's latest email (which she CCed to him):
I love you very much, Sweet Man. Let’s work together to help her to adjust to the new environment, and to assure her that we will be there when she needs us.
Walhydra says, "Let's all work together to help all of us, to assure all of us."
What else can we do?
Blessed Be.
Another sweet reply from our friend R:
I find so very startling at times to realize that no matter how much I wish to ignore the hard decisions of life, the inner spirit always guides me in the right direction to do the things I must do for peace of mind.
Be at peace with that which has presented itself to Senior Witch as she walks softly into the sunset of her mind for I am convinced that when we may be presented with what appears as confusion, she is in some special mode of recall that allows her to persist in the life and loves she has left in this life.
Confusion to us may be a process of discarding the unwanted and, more importantly unnecessary baggage, to allow for the warmth or grace to seep into the very marrow of her being.
May it be so for her and eventually for us as well.
Selah!
Peace is with you, in you, and around you; stop and take notice of the peace of God.
(Please note that I am in tears because I am preaching to my self as well brother.)
Ahhh, Blessed Peace...
I love you, R
Walhydra's buddy Cat has posted an article, Living in the Kingdom of God, about the death of her friend Abby, over on the Bad Quaker Bible Blog.
As we Quakers say, "This speaks to my condition."
I have seen flocks of birds rising together in a wave, flying so close that wing nearly brushes wing. With invisible signals, they know: now we wheel. Now we soar. Together in one wave they crest and rise and fall, gathered in beauty. To me, that is a vision of the Kingdom of God.
And last night was a vision of the Kingdom of God.
Wheeling and turning, embracing and mourning a friend, we stood gathered by grace and by gratitude into the living presence where there is no loss, there is no death, and every eye reflects back all the love it has been given, fully and without distortion, into the eye of every other.
The Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Joy, the Kingdom of Love is right now, forever, and every minute; if we let it. If we have the strength (or the grace) to find the love, even in the heart of loss.
We do not need to wait for heaven. We live in the Kingdom now.
May God heal all hearts.
And so it is.
Blessèd Be,
Michael Bright Crow
Tonight, Hubby Jim served Walhydra one of his exquisite gourmet dishes, a new recipe out of the current Fall Entertaining magazine from Cook's Illustrated: farfalle pasta with sautéd shiitake and cremini mushrooms and thyme.
In gratitude, Walhydra took JimJim out for fancy dessert at Biscotti's—where dessert and coffee cost the price of a meal.
As they were leaving afterwards, Jim quoted Walhydra's recent commentary:
"I've always wanted to be an Epicurean, but I can only afford to be a Cynic."
:-)
Walhydra didn't mention in "The Dark, again" that Lammas is short for Loaf Mass, which is what the Christians renamed the Pagan harvest festival on August 1st.
In the Irish Celtic tradition, this festival is Lughnasadh. Here's a bit from Chalice Centre for Celtic Spirituality and Western Inner Traditions:
The Celtic harvest festival on August 1st takes its name from the Irish god Lugh, one of the chief gods of the Tuatha De Danann, giving us Lughnasadh in Ireland, Lunasdál in Scotland, and Laa Luanys in the Isle of Man. (In Wales, this time is known simply as Gwl Awst, the August Feast.)
Lugh dedicated this festival to his foster-mother, Tailtiu, the last queen of the Fir Bolg, who died from exhaustion after clearing a great forest so that the land could be cultivated. When the men of Ireland gathered at her death-bed, she told them to hold funeral games in her honor. As long as they were held, she prophesied Ireland would not be without song.
Tailtiu’s name is from Old Celtic Talantiu, "The Great One of the Earth," suggesting she may originally have been a personification of the land itself, like so many Irish goddesses.
In fact, Lughnasadh has an older name, Brón Trogain, which refers to the painful labor of childbirth. For at this time of year, the earth gives birth to her first fruits so that her children might live.
Domi, one of my long-time Crone Thread friends, wrote the following reminder, in response to "The Dark, again":
Lughnasadh is a funeral—that's what Nasadh means, the funeral assembly of Lugh for his foster mother, during the nine days of the barley-harvest.
As we gather in the life-sustaining grain we hold the funeral games and feast, that Lugh consider her sufficiently remembered and honoured and not in his grief and rage manifest as storm-god and destroy the rest of the harvest before we can gather it all in.
This helps Walhydra to make sense of her August 1st experience each year, namely, her awareness of the "thinning of the veil."
Because it reminds Walhydra that around August 1st is the beginning of harvest. And for as long as humankind has relied upon the gift of cultivation, humankind has known that harvest is the beginning of the dying time of year.
The Earth gives her body to give us food.
We celebrate her funeral with games and dance and feast.
Knowing that we, too, will die and go back to the Earth.
Thank you, Domi,
and to all of you,
Blessed Be.
Note: Brian Friel wrote a play, Dancing at Lughnasa, which was made into a movie in 1998.
Walhydra's amanuensis has made his first contribution to the Bad Quaker Bible Blog.
Blessèd Be,
Michael Bright Crow
Walhydra notices something a bit different about the onset of The Dark this year.
Thank Goddess, it's not the psychotic rollercoaster ride of two years ago, when chronic depression actually overthrew Walhydra's homeostatic whosiwhatsis, so that her brain couldn't keep the serotonins in balance. It's also not the long slow decline into the fat-fed lethargy of Winter Solstice holidays...not yet, anyway.
Instead, what Walhydra is gradually becoming aware of is an uncomfortable sense of transparency.
"No, I don't mean that I can see through myself," Walhydra snorts. "It's just that I can...well...see through myself…and others...."
Let's backtrack a bit.
Walhydra tends to get her first annual glimpse of The Dark around Lammas Day, August 1st, the old English festival of first harvest.
She knows that the modern calendar considers Summer Solstice to be the beginning of summer, which would make Lammas mid-summer's day.
For some time, though, it has been at Lammas that Walhydra senses the first whiff of autumn in the air…just as at Candlemas (aka Imbolc, aka Groundhog's Day, aka February 2nd) she senses the first whiff of spring.
After a few years of experiencing this backwards shifting of "whiffs" through the cycle of the seasons, Walhydra finally decided just to go with it.
Now she starts counting autumn from Lammas, with second harvest at Fall Equinox as "high autumn," and third harvest at Hallowe'en (aka Samhain) as the first whiff of winter.
Somehow this widdershins shifting of the seasons helps Walhydra to be better prepared for their changes, better prepared to watch for their subtleties and complexities.
Anyway, this year at Lammastide Walhydra noticed not just the first whiff of autumn. She noticed the "thinning of the veil" between the living and the dead, which Pagan tradition places at Samhain, half a year later. Granted, it took a month or so for her to realize that this was what she had sensed, yet by now the message is clear.
The message isn't an apocalyptic, end-of-the-world kind of message. It is present-moment and down-to-earth.
We are all mortal…now.
The veil between the living and the dead is our own bodies. They are always thin, and they grow thinner by the moment.
"What's going on here?" Walhydra laments.
Until two years ago, autumn had always been Walhydra's favorite season. She loves the crisp air and the fall colors—although Florida…ahem…somewhat lacks the vast forests of autumn-covered hills of Walhydra's Ohio childhood.
Then came the serotonin crisis, actually a physiological over-response to the family crisis of moving Walhydra's mother, Senior Witch, to Florida and beginning the long process of selling Senior Witch's house from 300 miles away.
Last year, after Senior Witch had moved yet again to an assisted living facility (ALF) near Walhydra, there was no chemical or family crisis, yet the taste of autumn had become somewhat spoiled. Walhydra realized that her brainstem was reacting to the shorting days be deciding it was time to feel chilly and to anticipate grief.
This year, autumn has an added taste. Aside from the obvious seasonal changes, The Dark now brings with it a concrete and increasing sadness about mortality.
"But it's not just sadness about mortality," Walhydra explains in a somewhat subdued tone. "It's mortality itself, which feels very real this year. Not just a notion, not just an abstraction from a fact to be dealt with...eventually."
It isn't fear of mortality, either. It's simply knowledge.
"We are all running up against actual, irreversible limits," she says. "It's a basic, visceral reality."
Four Saturdays ago, Walhydra and Hubby Jim were called to the hospital at 2 AM. Senior Witch had fallen in her bathroom. She got nine stitches in her right temple and had to have a huge flap of fragile skin taped back in place on the back of her right hand.
No concussion, no broken bones, so, fortunately, not a major fall. In fact, Walhydra watched bemused as this steadily shrinking old lady joked with the ER doctor about "my poor, ugly hand" and rebounded by lunchtime the same day to gossip with her friends at the lunch table.
But…Senior Witch has clearly moved into the childlike phase of Alzheimer's.
She still remembers people. She is still that sweet person who charms everyone she meets. She still sometimes summons the mental focus for brilliant conversation.
Usually, though, she takes a child's approach, making up explanations and excuses for troubling things that happen…including that fall. And she rewrites her own history, free-associating different real and imagined details to account for events…including that fall.
She is unlearning. The likelihood of teaching her new safety steps is questionable.
In response, Walhydra has had to drag her clinical social worker persona out of mothballs to deal with crisis and follow-up issues with emergency room staff and with ALF resident care administrators.
The certain knowledge of mortality hit home about a week or so after Senior Witch's fall.
This was when each next story of hurt or loss, a bombing in Pakistan or a shooting in the US or a library colleague's family illness or…whatever, became not just another story but visceral evidence that we are fragile, irreplaceable animals with an irreversible mortality.
And the sadness....
Walhydra has begun waking up each morning in sadness. Not the crazy sadness of brain chemistry imbalance, but base-line racial sadness.
She gets booted back into consciousness at 4:30, 5:30, 6:00 in the morning. Staggers into the living room to do some sort of imitation of tai chi and meditation. Flees from the over-focus of meditation back to the bedroom to clasp herself against the warmth of Hubby Jim...who dutifully rolls into playing spoons, even in his sleep.
And stifles the temptation to descend into a serotonin-exhausted grief because she knows that Jim, too, will age and die.
Last weekend, Walhydra took a long overdue trip back to her home in Columbia, SC, to spend a Friday evening with her longest-known and best friend there, and Saturday and Sunday with her father, the Lutheran preacher, and his second wife.
The visit with her friend, whom Walhydra considers her senior Virgo mentor and technology guru, was excellent, as always. It's a relief to escape the mundane world into the saner company another Virgo practitioner.
[Note from the amanuensis: "The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." George Bernard Shaw, Irish dramatist & socialist (1856–1950)...a Leo, but it's the thought that counts.]
The visit with Walhydra's father had a peculiar, frustrating grace.
Her father has Parkinson's. It makes him mumble so much he's difficult to talk with...this man who's been a preacher and teacher for most of his eighty-some years. It makes his handwriting tiny. He's feeble and shrunk down to nothing and bruised and bored.
For decades, Walhydra has struggled with a compounded version of the classic eldest-son's resentment of and distrust toward his father. Despite—or maybe because of—both of them being gentle, sensitive, articulate men, the father-son misconnections of patriarchal cultures have all been painfully present.
All of that was compounded further by Walhydra's being in the closet her first twenty-some years. Compounded yet again by her father's having left Senior Witch for another woman, back in the late1970s.
Still, over the past decade, both Walhydra and her father have been graced with what forgiveness is often really about: the ability to willingly forget past sins.
"It's too important to be together now," Walhydra explains.
"I'll never get an acknowledgement from him of all his 'crimes'...or, most likely, be able to give him my own acknowledgements. But I don't need that any more in order to be okay with myself. What I need is just to be with him in the present."
So that's what they did.
They sat together watching hours of Saturday football.
[Patriarchal culture's ultimate irony: two peaceable men, bonding...as best they can, since they can't speak...by watching other men fight.]
They listened to her stepmother's parrots and cockatoos and canaries talking and making noise out on the sunporch. They shopped for groceries. They had silent meals together.
And talked as much as they could manage...which, though painfully spare, was enough.
On Sunday morning, Walhydra's father cooked lunch and then forced himself to a level of articulateness, in order to speak briefly about how his parents lived into their late eighties, and how his eldest brother is now in his nineties.
"I guess I've got a few more years left," he smiled. They both smiled, Walhydra feeling the hollowness grow behind her solar plexus.
They stood and shared one of the longest, warmest, best hugs they've shared in years.
And, when Walhydra finally let go...her father collapsed backwards like a tree and landed up against the kitchen cupboards.
"Dad! Dad!" Walhydra knelt in front of him with her hand behind his neck, supporting his head.
He looked dazed, then his eyes cleared, and he said, "I'm all right. I'm all right. I sort of blanked out for a moment."
Once she sensed he was okay and had gotten him into his armchair in the den, Walhydra went for her stepmother.
"Did he hit his head?" Stepmother asked.
"Yes."
"Where?"
Walhydra put her hand behind the top of her head.
"Oh. Well, then, he's all right."
Walhydra stared in confusion, used to yet still startled by Stepmother's blunt, practical manner.
"He has a hard head. As long as he didn't hit the bottom of his skull...."
"Oh."
Stepmother spoke to Dad and checked his blood pressure.
The two of them laughed if off, to Walhydra's dismay...though at some level she trusted their humor.
"Did I scare you?" Dad asked.
"I think you hugged him too hard," Stepmother said. "It might have impeded the flow of blood to his brain."
Walhydra nodded blankly, knowing that they were not teasing her but, rather, witnessing to her their daily, moment-by-moment method of coping with...well...their age and mortality.
The three of them spent a while longer reassuring each other, hugging each other (gently), and saying their goodbyes. Then Walhydra got in her car for the long, boringly safe drive back to Florida.
"I hugged him too hard?" Walhydra wondered.
Decades of longing for closeness with a distant father whom she remembered having been very physically affectionate in her childhood. Decades of longing to talk with a private, withdrawn father who now was open to her but could not speak.
And the most affectionate hug they had shared in years—exaggerated, perhaps, by Walhydra's longing—had made him pass out.
"Who's writing this script?" Walhydra asked with tragicomic sarcasm.
Here, then, is how Walhydra is coming to understand her transparency, and the transparency of everyone who crosses her path.
"We are mortal for every moment of our existence," she says. "And, for now, I'm seeing that...not in every moment, yet often.
"We are so fragile. Anything could tear the veil. Yet we stay alive...for a while."
Walhydra imagines a different reading on the Garden of Eden story.
She knows—as many people tend to forget—that Adam and Eve were created mortal, the same as all the other animals. Death is not a punishment. It is merely part of the Creation, about which the Divine One said, "It is good."
But when they ate that apple, suddenly they knew they were mortal, unlike any of the other animals.
The rest is show business.
Now, whenever someone does something that annoys or distresses or angers Walhydra, something stupid or selfish or inattentive...or...or....
Whenever that happens, Walhydra realizes, "Oh, he's mortal. That's his way of trying to cope with or deny his mortality at this moment."
That's how people have become transparent to Walhydra.
Well, maybe not "whenever," of course. Walhydra's own avoidance/denial habits tend to keep her in resentful curmudgeon mode—or, more kindly, in struggling human mode—much of the time.
That's how Walhydra has become more transparent to herself.
It all doesn't feel good...or maybe it sort of does. Like it sort of feels good when you fall backwards, crashing your head against a cabinet door, and then the pain at the back of your head starts to mellow and feel a bit warm.
Seeing in The Dark.
And so it is.
Blessèd Be.
We are mortal.
