on becoming a dick

When I was a baby in sobriety, I used to hit a meeting in Pratt, Kansas, before heading to my parents' cabin at 99 Springs. It was a discussion meeting, not my favorite kind, but the droning of my fellow travelers gave me plenty of time to think. And one of the things I pondered at length was the meaning of a sign on the wall. It said "When you're off the beam, you don't know you're off the beam, because you're off the beam."

Although "the beam" is mentioned several times in the body of AA literature, the sign always struck me as ridiculous. In AA clubhouses and meeting rooms across the planet, there are all sorts of signs plastered on the walls. "Think, think, think" is one. "Don't think" is another. (I know, but it makes sense to us.) I've never seen the beam sign anywhere but Pratt.

To me, the on-the-beam, off-the-beam, sounded silly. And the last phrase, almost a taunt, "because you're off the beam." Nah nah nah NAH nah. So there. Like that.

Just this week, though, I have received from the Universe the perfect lesson in being off the beam, and not knowing it, because I'm ... well, off the beam, and so I couldn't know, could I? As a result, I've lapsed into being a dick. An asshole if you prefer. A jerk if you want to keep it clean.

I have been argumentative, calling others out for their condescending tone or words, while condescending myself in presuming I know better than they do. I have been judgmental, quickly pointing out to others their judginess against those I felt sure couldn't defend themselves. Hellooooo condenscension, my ever present friend. Of course, in my view, I have been on the side of angels, but the truth is I've just been an ass, and worse, I have been smug (oh! I hate smugness!), certain that my own beliefs and experiences are superior to those of others because, you know, I'm right.

I am right. As I write that, I'm hearing the echoes of sponsors past, "Would you rather be right? or happy?" I'd like to be both, please. I want it all, the joyous righteousness of being correct, and oodles of happiness to boot. I want it all, always have, forever after, I always will.

But they were right, those men and women who helped me along the way. If right becomes an argument, there's no happiness there. And why have I been so wrought up in being right anyway? Me, who for years made the case that any version of a Power is fine, that a Power is a Power is a Power and it's our personal definition that's the key, the key to freedom and joy and happiness. I have been the greatest booster of find-your-own-way thinking. What's right for you is right, that kind of thing.

Along with my recognition that I'm off the beam, I've figured out the root cause of my recent dickishness. It's perfectly correlated with Mike's good and bad days. It's my form of projection and protection. All of the anxiety I feel about being unable to help / control / make perfect his health, I project out into the world and I pick fights and by God, if I can win there, then I've won and that would ... oh hell, I don't know. In my new on-the-beam-ness, I see the stupidity in the thing, but who ever said the brain will always make sense? It won't, at least not mine. And picking fights with strangers won't make Mike well. Winning won't make him okay. Or me.

And if I keep it up, things will still not be okay some days (and some days, thankfully, they will) and I'll be a dick for real. Because my dickishness right this minute is a temporary state of being. Like all ugly habits, it could become permanent if I feed it and make it grow and allow it to settle in.

Today I choose not to, and I'm grateful to the Universe for this little lesson, and eternally grateful to the people of Pratt, Kansas for that goofy little sign that captured my imagination 28 year ago. Some of us are slower than others and sometimes I learn things again and again and again before I actually learn them. One thing I know for certain is that I don't want to be a dick, whatever happens to Mike. It's not fun and it won't make the sun shine. It's just a distraction from getting back on that beam, and that, my friends, is the place for me.

little aa world

It's a cold, windy afternoon in Tulsa and I have minimal motivation to accomplish the task before me: to clear out the stuff in this house. In these pre-Christmas days, no one's buying much anyway. I hope the first quarter of 2010 is back to normal. Usually our best of the year in my business, 2009 was absolutely wretched, with sales in January, February, and March over 50% down from the year before. I am so ready to be done with this.

So why write at all? Why not snuggle with the puppies under the blanket, drink more coffee, and read one of the good books I've got going? Because Mike just called from Mexico and his news filled me with such joy that it had to come out. It's such a little thing, but I'll take joy anywhere I can get it these dark days of winter.

What was it? What lifted my heart and made me laugh out loud? When I was in Yucatan two weeks ago, we sat down with a carpenter and worked up plans for doors and windows for our little house. The carpenter was great. Very warm and gracious. He took us to his shop where he works magic with rudimentary tools. We liked the plans, so as usual, we are casting aside all recommendations and putting in hardwood windows and doors rather than the more practical aluminum.

Aluminum won't rust and it looks good and it's reasonably inexpensive. But wood. Wood just feels right, and I know it will take more maintenance, but I think of the cedar-shingled houses of Nantucket which have stood for years in the salt spray, and I think we'll get by. I'll be retired, after all. A little house work won't kill me.

So the windows are in. Mike called to tell me they look incredible. He actually said "incredible," my calm, steady husband, the one not prone to superlatives, the one who never gets overly excited. "Incredible."

And then within a few minutes he called back and he sounded incredible himself. Happy, laughing. What could it be? It's so simple, and it's hard to put into words if you haven't experienced it, but in the course of providing food and drinks for our hard working crew at the house, Mike discovered that our carpenter, who we both fell in love with, and the general contractor from Merida, are in AA.

Not just dabbling in AA. They're long time sober people with years under their tool belts. And there's a meeting just a few blocks from our house in Chuburna. Isn't it odd that I'm writing this at 27 years sober (thank You), sitting here with tears in my eyes, and a heart filled with gratitude, because a couple of guys 2000 miles away don't drink anymore?

I can't figure it out. Some of my favorite people drink a lot and it doesn't bother me one bit. Mike's been having a blast running all over the Yucatan peninsula with people who drink most of the time. I have no problem with folks who drink. My favorite people in the world are drunks.

But there's something about the idea that 2000 miles away, two other people felt the need to live differently, and we met them just by chance. And they were people that we were drawn to and liked a lot. And that just seems very, very cool and it makes me really happy. There's a little bit of old home waiting for me in my future home.

Oh, and even more happiness: I found 15 unapproved comments in this thing when I opened it up after a month. That made me happy, though I'm wondering how it went into approval mode. One of the mysteries of life, just like the way the Universe finds a way to connect AA people. And the way that connection fills a heart with joy.

And you? What's making you happy these days? Tell, please.

what if?

In the her book How of Happiness, Sonya Lyuobimirsky proposes that people writing about how something wonderful might not have happened experience a greater boost in joy than those who simply recount how the happy thing came to being.

. . . People who wrote about how they might never have met and fallen in love with their sweethearts had a bigger jump in happiness than those who wrote about how they did meet and fall in love.

Apparently, contemplating the fact that a key event might never have happened, at all, makes it more surprising and mysterious. Just think how close you came to having a different fate - your life could have gone in another direction, so easily!

For years when asked how I met Mike, I'd tell the long version of the story rather than simply saying "oh, at an AA meeting." The long version is a story of near misses and out-of-character behaviors, all leading to the moment in which he asked and I said yes and so began 17 years of a wonderful life together.

In AA, it is commonly accepted that people with a lot of sobriety are not to become romantically involved with folks who have just a little. It's a wise prohibition, having much to do with vulnerability and discouraging those who would take advantage of that, as well as maintaining a safe space for recovery.

As a relative old timer of nine years, when I met a three months sober Michael, I was friendly, as I am to every other newcomer. Over a period of a couple of months, I noticed that he was unusually happy and excited about recovery. I was too, and so we chatted after meetings, and I sometimes steered him away from the occasional bristling long sober old toads who attempt to steal the joy from another while avoiding the personal work necessary to acquire their own.

In all of my life, I haven't come across anything as exhilarating as watching a real, live, in the flesh spiritual transformation taking place before my eyes. I have shared it here before, but there is nothing that convinces me of the existence of a Power more than watching a hopeless, desperate, dying alcoholic catch fire with recovery. That transformation, the miracle that puts the light back into dead eyes, that puts an end to the suffering of alcoholism ~ to the desperate mental obsession, to the agony of physical craving ~ that Transformative Power is my God, my proof of a Great Reality. It is all I need, and all I need to know, to be assured that there is Something.

Mike had that fire, that electricity that arrives with the gift of a sudden freedom from the horrors of the disease. I have always envied him that, since my freedom came over a period of years, many some of the most miserable of my life. Given that instant release, he was boundlessly joyful. Having come to the rooms of AA fresh from thirty days of treatment preceded by two weeks of DTs and three weeks strapped down in an ICU, he was like a fresh-hatched chick, waking up in a new, perfect, and beautiful world.

This man I love is the worst kind of alcoholic. Physically damaged by the disease with cirrhosis and chronic pancreatitis, physically addicted to alcohol as few people really are, his alcoholism seemed to him to be hopeless. I have met a number of men ~ and a few women ~ like him. Knowing they can't quit drinking, they look forward to death as the only hope of relief.

Mike's pancreatitis and a severe seizure sent him to the hospital where he was told he'd have to be admitted or he could die.

"How long do I have?"
"Not long."
"I can't go in the hospital, doctor. I drink."
"I know."
"No, I drink. A lot."
"I know."

Mike didn't know that pancreatitis is, about 90% of the time, the result of alcoholism. He likely reeked of alcohol, as most physically addicted, late-stage drunks do. It wasn't news to the doctor that he drank, but her matter-of-fact acceptance of it somehow made him feel there might be hope for him.

I wasn't around for all of this, but I know the little miracles hidden within that story. Had he not developed pancreatitis, he would have been able to continue drinking. Had he kept drinking, he'd never have had that seizure and he'd have surely died of cirrhosis. Had he not been delivered to that ER, given that compassionate doctor, he might not have been given a way out.

And then I know the miracle of our meeting. Why would he have chosen that particular meeting in that little clubhouse, from among 300 meetings in this town? Why did I sit in that room rather than the other five in the building? Why did we strike up an acquaintance and find that connection of joyful sobriety?

And then there was the night we really did connect. I was at a Friday 5:30 meeting, one I usually didn't attend. Mike was there with his spanking new little Chevy truck, a nice change from the $500 Goodwill Datsun he'd been driving for five years. It was April 18, 2002, and everyone was talking about Springtime in the Ozarks, the annual conference in Eureka Springs.

After the meeting, Mike was standing outside, talking to four other men. He wanted to go to the conference and none of them were planning to take the trip. I walked by and Mike looked up at me and smiled and said "What about you, would you like to go?"

"Where?"
"The conference in Eureka."
"Oh, I . . ."
"It will be fun and I've got a new truck!"
"Maybe I . . ."
"I'll pick you up, we'll be back tomorrow night."
"I guess I could reschedule . . ."
"Do! Let's go on a roadtrip."

And so we did. I rescheduled. He picked me up that morning and we set out and we never shut up. We talked all the way there. We talked over lunch and between the meetings. We walked the streets of downtown Eureka talking, talking, talking. I never talked so much to any man, ever, and my experience with men is extensive.
It was entirely different, this thing with Mike, from the moment we set out on that trip.

But here's the thing. I'm not one to cancel plans with others. I never went to that Friday night meeting before. I am really not inclined to launch out on the road with someone I barely know, without any means of escape. I'd never gone to that conference, never wanted to. Mike always laughs when he says he'd never have asked me if he'd still been driving the Datsun. Too embarrassed, though now he knows I care little about the material. He just wouldn't have asked.

And so we fell in love almost instantly, the two of us. That evening after the meeting, we ran into each other at a poker game. I played across from Mike and drew the only Royal Flush ~ in hearts, what else? ~ of my life. And it hit me today what a fluke it was and how it could so easily not have happened. Had those circumstances not occurred, would I have met someone else? Would he? I don't know. Don't want to.

I think when everything is right it just happens. Maybe the Universe thought we looked cute together. Whatever it was, whatever it is, Ms. Lyuobimirsky is right. My happiness has increased in telling you why it almost didn't happen. So before I go and kiss my dimpled sweet man, what about you? Have you had a near miss that led to something wonderful? Maybe it wasn't a true love, maybe it was a lifelong friend, a wonderful job, a change of direction in life. Tell, please.

baby jesus

In the upstairs linen closet of my uncle's house, a skeleton reclines behind the blankets, a reminder of happy days at chiropractic school. Just one door away, in the attic room, stand the papier mache black-eyed figures of my uncle's Christmas creche. They're scary, those life-size, solemn beings, silent behind the closed door, painted eyes unblinking in the darkness.

On other Thanksgivings, Uncle Jimmy wiggles his eyebrows and his dimples wink as he laughingly urges us to get sheets and blankets from the linen closet. My sister and I, we run shrieking, racing each other up the stairs to get to the skeleton closet first. Dragging the pillows from the cupboard in the attic room under the flat eyed gaze of Mary and Joseph, of the Wise Men, that is scarier by far than exposing the skeleton as we pull sheets from the closet shelf.

On this holiday, though, my aunt's pain has stolen the play from my uncle. Cancer is eating her alive and no matter how sharp the surgeon's knife, how deep the cuts, no matter how much flesh is carved from her body, the cancer survives. It survives and thrives and the sounds of her pain send us running for the stairs.

We're running from my uncle, from the dead look of his eyes, from his quiet direction to make up our beds. We are running from her, our anguished Aunt Leona, once so beautiful and lively, with sparkling eyes and long, curling hair.

My uncle sits staring just outside her door. He's waiting, waiting for death to bring silence to this house, waiting for death to release him from the torment of watching his beloved wife die.

Faced with his suffering, with my aunt's agony, we wish for the black eyes and emotionless silence of the Baby Jesus. We want the comfort of the inanimate, of Mary who cannot feel, of Joseph, his body unchanged from one year to the next. We run to the attic room and we hide, seeking refuge in darkness, in empty figures of paper and paste and wire.

lily girl

Trying to catch up here, 24 hours into having the computer back. I started at the bottom of my blogroll to see what y'all have been up to, because it seems I always start at the top and run out of time.

I read "The trials, tribulations and jaundiced observations of a gay man over 40 in the shining Metropolis of Los Angeles," otherwise known as World O' Jeff.

As a result, I started bawling and had to quit reading. Blame him. But not really, because Jeff's Lily Girl was completely unexpected and so full of love and emotion and heartbreak that it's still making me weep as I write this. Jeff's tribute to his mother.

living

Went to sleep, woke up in love with my husband again. Amazing how that works. A month ago I wrote a friend that I was thinking about divorce. Just wanted to move out, away, free of entanglements, live in a single room away from everyone I know.

This sleep deal is astonishing. I feel like a new woman, all happy and well balanced and resilient. Again. That's the way I used to feel, but it vanished somewhere in the sleepless nights. I am now officially among the living, thanks to my cute little friend. I'll be catching up with all of you this weekend.

Meanwhile, here's the sweet thing I go to bed with each night:

circle of love

Michael won't look at me. His dark eyes scrunch shut above the white mask and he tenses as I approach. A few minutes and a slit of eye, then a turning of the head. He's furious with me, still, two weeks after I rescued him from certain death and confined him to this lonely room where he must stay until the tuberculosis wracking his lungs is no longer contagious, while he's pumped full of drugs to combat the virus that's destroying him. He hates the mask, he hates the gown, he hates me and this room and he wants his mother and she doesn't want him.

I am angry too. I am angry with this child's mother, a woman dying of AIDS and tuberculosis who refused to give her son the meds he needed to survive. When I took him from her care, it had been 14 months since he'd seen a doctor. His TB was active and he coughed constantly and his T-cells were nonexistent and his viral count sky high. He is five years old and he has AIDS. She says the meds make him feel bad and they do. That's clear in this tiny tiled room on the second floor of a crappy hospital, the only place in the state that would have anything to do with this little boy. Now that he's dosed up, he's lethargic and his tummy hurts and he sleeps all the time.

He doesn't know it, but his mother's in the hospital too. She is refusing treatment and hospice is giving her comfort and care and attention. It's more than her son is getting. I can't be with him all day and the hospital staff can't spare anyone to sit with him all day and this little boy's soul, it seems, is shriveling while his physical health improves and he's watched, but not touched, by the camera in the corner of his room.

I am at my office late that same afternoon when the call comes in from Lisa. That's not her real name; her real name's unique enough that I won't share it here and unique enough that that I am reminded, when I hear it, of a 17 year old permanent foster care child I met in 1989. She was losing her care, her foster parent booting her the day she turned 18. She was an A student, a soft-spoken child who wanted to go to college, to learn to help people as she'd been helped. I spent half a summer with her as I did my practicum in child welfare. We tried to find pre-college housing so she'd have someplace to go. We got her terrible underbite fixed and more work done on her cleft palate. She told me that her mother never wanted her and abandoned her over and over until the state finally kept her. The foster mother's abandonment was just another verse in the tragic song of her life.

I ask this woman on the phone if she's the Lisa I knew from 1989 and she laughs and says yes. She's a social worker now, just finished with her MSW and back from a trip to Africa where she spent two months trying to trace her ancestors. She is full of joy and pride and deservedly so. She tells me she heard about Michael and then she utters words I never imagined hearing: I want him, I want to keep him. I love that child.

Lisa told me that she had provided respite care for Michael through a local agency, then directly, while his mother was in the hospital or was tired of caring for him. She knows about the AIDS, about the TB, and she wants him. Adding to this impossibly good news, she assures me she is an approved foster parent, another gift, as the process of approval takes months. She wants, immediately, to be allowed to see him. I immediately arrange that.

A week later, I am back in Michael's room. Lisa is there. He looks directly at me and smiles. I can see his lips turning up behind the mask and I can see the sparkle in his eyes, the lifting of their corners as the invisible grin rearranges his face. We all look at one another in our hospital gowns with our white masks and we smile and our eyes connect and I feel as if I can exhale for the first time since I met this tiny little boy.

He's working a puzzle with Lisa and I watch them, seeing two children and a miracle in progress. One is a grown up child, a fine young woman, and the other a little boy, desperately ill, but smiling. One is evidence of what hard work and intelligence and resiliency and a little help and a boatload of compassion from a host of social workers can do, and the other is evidence of the immeasurably powerful effect of love.

It's a little trite and certainly a cliche, but that doesn't take away the truth of it: love given freely to others can expand in a huge ever-widening circle, like concentric rings surrounding a single drop of rain in the center of an ocean. One tiny act of love happens and then the waves of it expand and go on and on and on touching others in ways we'll never know. A drop of love, of kindness, compassion, it seems like nothing; yet it was enough to carry one child through a tragic life and into adulthood, buoyed on the tiny waves of love from this social worker and that one, from a teacher, a minister, a therapist, a doctor, even from a summer practicum student. With nothing but rejection from her family, from the pseudo-parent hired by the state, she still thrived on drops, on waves, on the buoyancy and solidity of caring and compassion. In doing so, she preserved her own goodness and the hope that exists in all of us unless it's stamped out by indifference.

She saved herself and turned right around and saved this little boy. Michael is 10 now and he's got T-cells and the TB's gone. He goes to school and he has friends and he has the kind of life every child should have. Five years of neglect and lack and now five years of love and the kind of cherishing that heals and nourishes body and soul. I don't know if one can entirely make up for the other, but looking at Michael's eyes, at his strong young body, at the way he is with Lisa, I can believe.

fathers, forgiveness, love

Tater's remarkable essay about his father.

another sick puppy

Willym's sweet puppy Reesie on the way to the vet and Willym's alone with it because Laurent's out of the country. My Billy is well, so thoughts and prayers for Reesie, please?

better not to know

I'm all about being informed, but some things may be better unknown while my puppy love is confined to hospital and I'm fretting about him. Had I read the description of small Bill's affliction ~ hemorrhagic gastroenteritis ~ while he was hospitalized, I wouldn't have slept a wink.

Billy is home and looking lively. Is there anything as sweet as a puppy practically turning himself inside out with joy? I. Love. Dogs.

Hemorrhagic Gastroenteritis (HGE) starts as sudden onset vomiting and diarrhoea with blood in both the vomit (called haematemesis and in the diarrhoea (see dysentery) described as looking like raspberry jam. Some dogs are already in shock because of blood loss into the lumen of the bowel when they are presented to a veterinary practice. Swollen fluid-filled intestines can sometimes be palpated in the abdomen. This disease can result in rapid death due to shock even if treatment is commenced immediately signs are noticed.

Disseminated intravascular coagulopathy can develop in advanced cases, also leading to death.

fernando and carlos

Finally, a baby of their own. I am sure the new little one will thrive under the care of its two daddies.

how i learned to love a dog, part I

May 19, 2002, my husband tells me he has a terrible pain in his chest, right side. Feels like a muscle pull, maybe, but he spends the night sleeping upright. It feels better that way. The next day it's worse and the next night he sleeps leaning forward over a pillow so he can breathe.

Mike is really sick, has been for two years, but so much worse since October. His weight has dropped to 124 pounds; he's skeletal. His blood sugar's completely out of control and the pain from chronic pancreatitis is constant. Despite all of this, his gastroenterologist started him on Interferon and Ribavirin for Hepatitis C. It's the Hep C that's killing him, making a ruin of every organ in his belly, working out from the liver so scarred from cirrhosis that it's hard and barely working.

His pancreas is nearly calcified, the veins leading into the liver are enlarged and he has portal hypertension, a dangerous complication of cirrhosis. He's swollen with ascites, fluid building up in his abdomen. The spleen is huge and tender and he has gastric varices that are leaking slowly, keeping him anemic and weak and very tired. His platelets are extremely low, making the treatment for hepatitis a great risk. He sees his doc twice a week and has his blood checked weekly. He gets transfusions regularly, but they never help for long.

I mix his Interferon shots every Tuesday, following the instructions precisely, allowing the medication to settle and all of the bubbles to fade away. The drug makes him feel horrible, but he feels horrible anyway. He sleeps for days after the shot, but he sleeps all the time anyway. He can't eat, he's miserable, he's dying. I'm sure of it, that he's dying. I mix his drug every Tuesday. I give him the Ribavirin every day. I check his blood, give him his insulin. Sometimes I knock him out with Ambien if he's in terrible pain and nothing's working. I put him to sleep, I don't know what to do to help so I put him to sleep.

I try to put him to sleep when this pain won't go away, the one in his chest. It grows worse. He sleeps most of the day Tuesday after a terrible night, but wakes up around 6 pm and he can barely breathe. I want him to go to the hospital, he doesn't want to. He's been there a couple of weeks already this year, but the pain's worse, he can't breathe, and he relents.

I give him the shot first, though. The 12th shot of Interferon in this six month course he has to take for Hepatitis C, the result of a surgery in 1982 or maybe the result of snorting coke through a rolled up $20 passed around the table, who knows and what does it matter in the end? One method of acquiring this nightmare of a disease makes him an innocent victim and thus more worthy of sympathy. The other makes him a participant in his own destruction and makes his disease a shameful thing. Innocent or not innocent, he never signed on for this slow death, who would ever sign up for this, this horror?

We're at the hospital and the pain is excruciating. He has a high tolerance for pain, this man of mine. He's already on meds for chronic pancreatitis, now shots of morphine in the ER but they're not working, the pain just gets worse. X-rays, a CT, and a worried doc telling us there's a big shadowy thing on the right side of his chest. He's admitted by 3 a.m. and we spend the next 10 hours in a room with no information, with him fading in and out, he's out of his head, struggling for breath even on oxygen.

He's whisked away to the pulmonary lab at 2 p.m. and more tests. My childhood friend, now one half of Mike's ace medical team, holds his hand through the procedure of having his chest punctured to draw out the fluid from a pleural effusion. Suddenly he's back, he's coherent, alert. Still in pain, but he's back as the result of finally being able to breathe. He looks at me and I can see him. He sees me and knows me and I feel a rush of relief.

Brad tells me what's going on and says that this should help as long as it's not an empyema. Empyema, what the hell is that? It's a big clotted solid mass of infectious crap accumulating in the chest. Not to worry, though, it's something we rarely see and usually just in street people and folks without medical care. We haven't had one in the hospital in over a year. We'll do a chest tube to drain and he'll be fine, he's already better.

Children in white coats come to his room to puncture his chest and attach a pump to drain his chest of fluid. All is well, everyone's cheerful, his daughter stays for a bit while I run home to feed the cat, shower, change clothes. We have had angels from AA at the hospital all day, just there, praying, letting me know they care. At home I find a cooler with food and cards stuck in the door and flowers. It's a comfort to be loved when I'm scared out of my mind.

I'm back at the hospital in an hour, encouraged, hopeful. Mike's smiling, says the chest tube hurts, but he feels a lot better. There haven't been any nurses come by in hours. He needs a pain pill and is worried about sleeping. No nurse. Where are the nurses?

Another 90 minutes and still no nurse, though plenty of promises. He's seeming more agitated and restless. I give him his regular pain pill from the bottle in my purse and he asks for an Ambien so he can sleep. I go to look for a nurse because he doesn't look good. Nothing's coming out of the chest tube and he's not looking good. When I try to talk to him, he's not making any sense. The nurses promises to come. I go back to the room and wait.

This goes on and on and on. Two techs come and check his vital signs. I am watching him, knowing something's wrong. I ring for the nurse and an aide comes, looks at him, says he's just agitated because of the pain and it's almost time for more pain meds, don't worry. It goes on and on and on. I don't know what to do and I don't know if I am crazy, but he looks wrong, he's mumbling and moving around on the bed, when he opens his eyes he has this crazy unfocused look. I try to get him to hear me, to see me, and he doesn't. Something is wrong. Where is the fucking nurse?

Again I go to the desk, now I am agitated and crazy because no one is listening to me. I find the nurse in a side room bent over a chart. It's 2 a.m. and I finally convince her to come look at him. Just look at him. I run back to his room and stand in the door to be sure she's coming. She's dawdling along, it feels like a fuck you to my concern.

She walks in and I'm telling her again this is wrong, there's something wrong and she lifts his eyelid and whirls around and runs to the nurse's station. She runs back. Runs. This bitch I couldn't get to come to the room for hours is running. She has a pulse oximeter and she snaps it on his finger and it reads 50. Fifty. His blood oxygen level is 50.

She yells something over the intercom and suddenly the room is full of people and someone puts a tube down his throat and someone's squeezing a bag and I hear heartrate 196 and someone's on the phone with the doctor and I am standing in the corner watching all of this and thinking even if he lives I have just lost my baby. He will never be the same because I've sat by his bed thinking something was wrong and not knowing and trying to get help but did I try hard enough? and his blood oxygen has been half of what it should be, half, and I have done nothing, I have let this happen. If he lives this has ruined his brain, it's been hours, he is gone and I love him and he's gone and I let it happen, I watched it happen, I sat right here and watched.

Something clenches up in my chest and I feel as if I can't breathe and they take him away to ICU and I ask one of the nurses if he will be okay and she looks away and says I don't know, there's no way to tell, I'm sorry. The clenched thing in my chest shatters and I can't quit crying now and it will never stop, these tears, because I let this happen. I watched.

More to come in "how i learned to love a dog, part 2."

death on pittsburg

Please note: this post includes a graphic description of child abuse in paragraphs 2-4.

Several years ago when I was still doing child abuse investigations and Mike was trying to die on me, I arrived home late after a particularly difficult day spent watching a tortured baby succumb to her injuries.

She was a tiny, ethereal thing only four months old, an amalgam of palest cream and red and deep purple, the combination of her fair and perfect skin and her hideous injuries. She lay in the pediatric ICU absolutely still, incapable of movement as the result of a fractured skull and a massive intracranial bleed. The unrelenting pressure in her head would have been enough to kill her, but she had a ruptured liver and fractures, a battered doll-sized human being.

She died at 4:30 that Friday afternoon. Her wounds were uncountable and included tiny pearl-like toes nearly bitten in two, contusions and bruises covering almost every inch of her tiny body and, of course, the catastrophic internal injuries. Her mother had been "unable to revive her this time" ~ a direct quote I will never forget, implying as it does that there had been many other times.

It was the boyfriend who killed her "out of boredom" ~ another monstrous statement which I have tried and failed to extricate from my memory. His nightly antics with this fragile infant included throwing her across the room, swinging her around his head by one foot, one arm, biting her feet, toes, fingers, ears, suffocating her and reviving her, over and over and over. The inhuman being who gave birth to this infant had found the baby unconscious several times upon arriving home from work. A cold water bath had previously revived the little girl and for the sake of a twisted love ~ of the man, not the child ~ she remained silent.

This was running around in my head, one of the most revolting episodes of child murder I ever encountered, when I pulled up and parked in my driveway at the end of what was a hideous day. Exiting my car, I noticed a pair of downy woodpeckers at the feeder. They were clearly companions, feeding each other suet and seeds, and I immediately decided they were in love which took my thoughts to my love, Michael, sick in bed and not getting better.

He and I have a history of comparing ourselves to birds: the mourning doves nesting on the windowsill one year, beautiful birds who mate for life, caring for one another with such solicitude, reminding us of ourselves. The swans at the lake across town ~ another pair, mating for life, constant companions, obviously devoted to each other. So these small black and white birds hanging out together, feeding each other, fluttering about and notably enjoying life made me think of us in happier times, when our life seemed enchanted, when happiness was a constant and joy a permanent resident in our home.

The birds took off as I approached the front door and I turned to watch their swooping low flight across Pittsburg Avenue. What a stunning thing, to be able to fly, and these two were graceful and lovely, virtually dancing through the air. One swung especially low and POW was smashed by a passing car. The car sped on and the companion bird fluttered to the street, standing by the still body on the concrete making a soft chirring sound, nudging his felled companion with his head.

Having had a close up of this disaster, I found myself sobbing so hard I could barely breathe. I flew up the walk, the stairs and into the house to tell Mike about the bird, to ask him to go and see if there was any hope for the stricken creature in the street. I could not do it, could not look at that small feathered body, and he could not either, being too sick and weak on that day to even get out of bed.

I wept and prayed and raged at God and demanded to know how shit like this can happen. The birds, that innocent little girl, and foremost in my heart, of course, the two of us. How can two people be so completely happy, so joyously content, doing good work, living a charmed life and POW out nowhere comes the speeding car of devastating illness, laying one low and breaking the heart of the other.

This is the eternal question, I suppose, but the universality of it in no way diminished my own heartbreak nor my own fury over the unfairness of it all. All illness is unfair and I'm not one to whine about it as a rule, but watching the love of my life dying every day was intolerable. It was more than I could bear and I don't know yet how he survived or how I got through it. I don't know how people do these things and I will whack the next person who says "God doesn't give us more than we can handle," because I know that He's confused me with some strong bitch, some backbone-of-steel disciplined rigid unemotional wench who can handle this sort of thing because I can't. I can not.

And yet Mike did survive and he thrives and I survived too. That is a gift and I am entirely grateful for it. At the end of another day spent in a good life with my soul mate, I give only a passing thought to those years of illness which are almost beginning to seem like ancient history. There's laughter in this house again, much love and that extravagant joy that sweeps in out of nowhere and lifts up my heart.

I am standing on the restored floor of a life I once thought was completely solid and unbreakable. It's easy to think that when things are so perfect and there's so much love and passion and kindness and affection. The floor is good and strong again, but it has been broken through and will never be 100% and I will never quite relax into this life and this love as I once did.

I don't think of the future much and I have moments when I think "how many more years do we have?" It's sad and it's life and it's okay. We're not guaranteed anything, I know that. We had a spectacular 10 years of heaven and some folks never get any heaven on earth. But then spring comes and the world feels so fresh and new and I imagine for just a moment that we are back in those first innocent years of our life together and I can actually feel my heart expand, physically feel it. I love this man. I love this life. We have this day, just like everyone else and I am grateful for it.

surgery

My father waits for the surgeon propped on pillows in a hospital bed. He looks frail in that ridiculous cotton gown, but the blue of the thing sets off his silver hair and every nurse who peeks in tells him he looks handsome and he does. He smiles at me and asks over and over if he's in Dodge City at the hospital where his sister died forty years ago. The nurse comes to take him away and I kiss the top of his head, clasp his hand in my own, whisper I love you Daddy.

I look into his eyes and see a ring of blue around them. The golden-flecked chestnut eyes I've looked at all my life, the ones I see in the mirror every day, have changed. They are nearly black, ringed in blue. It's startling, this black and blue, and disconcerting.

Those eyes have seen so much and now they're dark and closed somehow. I think maybe they're turning black and opaque to keep the memories in, like keeping the drapes closed on a winter day to hold the warm inside. A lifetime is stored behind those eyes in a brain that shrinks infinitesimally every day.

Each lost cell takes away another moment. But where do they go, these memories? How can the richness of his extraordinary life just vanish? Do the memories evaporate into the empty space where his frontal lobe used to be? Released from the wrecked cells of his brain, do they fly back out his eyes in the same way they got in? I wonder if these dark drapes covering my father's eyes will keep him with us a little longer. Him. Who he is, my daddy. Not the shell he will become.

I pray for God's will to be done with my father. And while I'm at it, I tell Him that dying with some measure of dignity, some remnant of self would be a generous gift to this precious man, to us. Please and thank you God. Please.