Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

I) Water. You just can’t go wrong with a day that stars on or in the water.

Says here that includes one of those little plastic baby “pools”.

2) Bloviate. My brother-in-law, the cardiology idiot savant, was flabbergasted that one of the nurses in the EP lab had never hear the word “bloviate”. You’ve all heard it here, of course, since that’s pretty much what I do each time I sit down to muse. Anyway, Pete defined it as “kinda like when a guy is talking just to hear himself speak.” To which the nurse replied “oh, like mansplaining”.

Pete: “Hm, not really. Mansplaining is more about the listener and how a mansplainer makes her feel. This is more like verbal ‘mansturbation.'”

I really like visiting Peter.

3) Memorial Day. I’m out of town with only a tiny window to sit down and muse. I came across this piece from 10 or 11 years ago, and with only a tiny bit of editing and updating it’s really appropriate for the three couples who have gathered in Vermont to share some time together. We’ve lost two of 4 Dads, and the two who remain are sadly not long for this world. We’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about them all. I always think about my Dad on Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day. Think about him and the stories he never told.

“It’s the stories. The stories matter. Whether they died in the heat of battle or in the cold of infirmity, the warriors all have stories. The stories are all important.

It’s remarkable how difficult it is to get at those stories, though. The ones that were the most formative, the ones that turned that one soldier or that one sailor into who s/he became, they tend to be slow in coming, if they come at all. Yet those are the ones that matter most.

The warriors among us tend toward silence. It’s not so much a secret thing (although there is a small group who simply mustn’t tell their stories) I don’t think, as it is a continuation of the protector role our airmen, sailors, soldiers and marines assume. They don’t so much keep the stories secret as they shield us from the effects of the stories, so powerful were those effects on them when they happened. Yet again, to understand those who remain, and to try to know those who have departed, the stories matter.

I drive by a cemetery filled with the graves of those who fought, some who died while fighting, and I try to conjure their stories. It’s pure folly. Dead men tell no tales, eh? Humanity learns of conflict and war from the stories told about both, and humans learn about each other the same way. Asking to hear the stories is an act of respect. Listening to the stories can be an act of love. Telling the stories is a little of both.

The stories of the men and women who have fought our wars are important.

A friend from my youth, a coach not too very much older than I once broke down and cried over his story. A very junior officer, his story of leadership and loss comes to me every year on Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day. I know him so much better, understand who he is so much better because I heard his story. So, too, is my knowledge of the men and women younger than I who have served and fought and graced me with their stories.

Life is long unless you are unlucky, but even the lucky run out of time. We have no Civil War survivors, no one from WWI to tell their stories. Those few from WWII still here are reticent, and time grows short. Even Korea fades ever quickly to time’s passage. As I write Dad is marooned by his illness somewhere between 1947 and 1974; much of his “time” seems to be spent in Korea at the moment. The smallest of consolations for us, his progeny, is that we may learn his story.

This Memorial Day let us all remember not only those who served and those who died in that service, but let us all remember their stories as well. Let us ponder the lessons those stories teach about not only humanity but also about the warrior, the person we remember. Let us encourage those who still walk among us, especially those whose journeys have been long and must be soon ending, to tell us their stories, all of them, even the ones they wish to protect us from, while they still can. Let us listen to those who know the stories behind each headstone as we gather in their honor. We have much to learn from the stories, about war and conflict, about the people who fought, about ourselves.

The stories matter. Still.”

Grace and peace to the families of those who fought. May their stories continue to guide us. May their memory be ever a blessing.

I’ll see you next week…

1 IF. Imaginary Friends. A new movie titled “IF” will land this summer starring Ryan Reynolds in which his character and that of a teenage girl can see ALL of the imaginary friends of EVERYONE around them. Including, and this is the hook, the imaginary friends that have been left behind. It sounds really promising; I’m looking forward to seeing it.

A tiny little bit of reading today gave some insight into why John Krasinski, the actor and director, chose to make the movie. Did you know anyone with an imaginary friend or two? Or did you, perhaps, have one of your own? Krasinski does not appear to have had his own, but his curiosity led him to discover that imaginary friends do, indeed, befriend youngsters of all ages who are blessed with active imaginations to begin with. But his research led to the discovery that many, perhaps most of those imaginary friends are there to provide their physical friends respite from some type of trauma. Might be physical or emotional, but having discovered this, Krasinski shifted the tone of the move from vaudeville to virtue.

Years ago I “met” the imaginary friends of someone who is very, very close to me. I sensed at the time that this someone was hurting, a sense that was confirmed some time after the imaginary friends seemed to have taken their leave. Had I known that they’d likely faded into the background because they’d done their job, helped my person and allow them to carry on, well, I’d have sought them out to say thank you.

Perhaps they will join me at the movies this summer.

2 The D’s. Dementia, delirium, and decrepitude. These are the realities of the 3-D life we witness each time we visit my Mom. This is the kind of 3-D no one wants. Dementia is the disease in which some progressive trauma is inflicted on the brain and results in physical changes that alter brain function. The bitter irony is that Mom is in this Dimension of D’s for the same thing that sent Dad there, chronic vascular disease.

Delirium is the brain’s response to these traumas, the creation of a narrative to explain any event that is the least bit confusing or new. Delirium can be as tiny as a bit of confabulation or as intense as seeing your 9-years deceased husband interviewed on TV during an NCAA finals. Decrepitude, as we know, is the end-result of dis-use of our physical body resulting in the inability to perform the functional movements of daily life. Mom’s efforts at any type of preventative behavior that might stave off decrepitude ended when my Dad came home from the hospital.

Delirium may or may not be permanent; it is, after all, an adaptive reaction which, although negative, demonstrates the plasticity of the brain. The best one can do with Dementia is hope for a full stop, hope for the cessation of whatever insults are hurled at the brain. There is little one can do over a lifetime, at least little that we know, to steel oneself against the ravages of Dementia and Delirium.

But Decrepitude, ah now that’s a different story altogether. The battle against decrepitude starts as soon as you start to move in a purposeful, planned manner to train your body. To build strength, power, and endurance. These may actually be the magic elixir that pushes against Dementia and Delirium, but we know for certain that if we are more able physically we will be better able to persevere. Imagine how much more is the psychic trauma of Delirium if you cannot raise yourself up, cannot walk away. It’s frightening to watch when the realization that you are unable to help yourself becomes the only thing that you know is real.

Perhaps delirium exists to shield us from that realization. Perhaps delirium is simply an unnamed imaginary friend, sitting next to someone in need of respite.

3 Journey.”Mothers stay behind so that their children can look back and see how far they’ve come.” Ruth, the creator of “Barbie”.

What does my Mom see when she looks ahead toward her four children? Does she, or sadly more to our present circumstances, did she also look ahead to see if her 10 grandchildren have gone on yet further? It’s a bit different from pride, I think. Not exactly “is she proud” so much as if she has noticed how far each of us, and each of our children have come. This is a tricky question–it’s quite likely to always be a tricky question–because Mom, like every mother yet born and having given birth, had very clear ideas not only about how far each of us would go but also how we would get there. I once wrote an essay about this that might have been titled GPS or something to that effect.

For my Mom it wasn’t simply that you reached the expected destination, it was necessary that in doing so you took the exact route that she’d mapped our for you to get there.

How about us, then? We four children and our spouses. When we look back do we see how far we’ve come, or do we look back, take a look left and right, and measure whether or not we’ve come as far as Mom expected us to come? What defines, or will come to define our notion of our own success? It’s really just another version of the classic challenge of whether we are strong enough to own our own goals outside of anyone else’s external goals held on our behalf. Of course it’s also a bit more than “just” because it’s your Mom–OUR Mom–not just some external someone with an expectation.

For what it’s worth, when I look back it seems to me that I’ve come as far as I’d planned to, by and large. Without a single goal toward which to apply monomaniacal effort, the “length” of my journey was always going to require more of a “miles traveled” analysis than a simple “miles from origin”. I have placed varying degrees of emphasis and importance on not just one but several markers that could define a journey. Decisions that favor one domain cannot help but have an adverse effect on another. Spending the extra day at the conference might mean to miss being on the sideline for the conference championship game. Likewise, flying out early from the event to make sure to be there for a holiday with extended family might mean passing on dinner with the CEO who will decide between you and the other finalist for a gig that you really want.

It’s astonishing to finish watching a movie like “Barbie” and spend the next day wondering how far I’ve come. I look back at each step I’ve taken and try to remember how far I’ve actually traveled, not just how far I’ve come from where I started. Does Mom do the same? In the end, who’s to say?

By either measure we all really have come so very, very far.

Every year on Mother’s Day I think about a guy I know whose name is Jim. Once upon a time he was one of my lawyers during a particularly stressful part of my career. As such his was a daily presence in my life for the better part of 1 1/2 or 2 years. There’s actually a lot of dead air during legal stuff. Time when for one reason or another you and your attorneys aren’t really doing all that much of anything but waiting. Sitting around and waiting, mostly.

Most folks I know who have had a drawn out legal whatever come to associate their own lawyers so tightly with the experience that they cannot separate the man or woman from the outcome. Mine wasn’t all that great. The outcome. But during all of those quiet hours with not all that much to do, Jim and I ran out of relevant stuff to talk about and started to share a bit of our backstories. What’s that got to do with Mother’s Day? I mean, two men trying to keep one of them from being destroyed financially isn’t the typical jumping off point to discuss mothers.

I’d met Jim’s wife, but it was a while before I realized that she was his SECOND wife and not the mother of his children. To keep my spirits up Jim and his partner on the case took turns hosting me at their respective country clubs for a round of golf. We must have been playing in May because Jim mentioned that he’d just gotten a Mother’s Day card from his daughter, an annual event. Over 18 holes together he shared the details of a rough marriage that ended in a rougher divorce. The details are not mine to share. Suffice it to say that Jim became a single parent and did such a bang-up job at handling what we all typically think of as the Dad stuff AND the Mom stuff (of girls!), that at least the one daughter thanks him each year on Mother’s Day.

Whenever I am asked I make sure to note that the simple act of becoming a father is 2 or 3 orders of magnitude less commitment than that which is necessary to becoming a mother. We can start with the whole 9 months long thing where your body has been taken over by an alien being and my point is proven without even considering the whole giving birth part. To become a father one must simply deliver genetic material, something which can literally occur via FedEx.

All of this notwithstanding, we are not really talking about the generation of a child when we are talking about Mother’s Day. I mean, if we were, how could you explain Jim’s annual Mother’s Day card, right? Nope, on Mother’s Day we celebrate Moms. Women, and the occasional man, who wake up every day and do the kinds of things that prompt their children to call them “Mommy”. Whether they work outside the home or make their “living” as a homemaker, the women we celebrate are the women who are always and everywhere thinking about their children. Quietly or out loud they suffer and celebrate every bruise and battle won from day one until they are gone.

And that’s the point of today, isn’t it? I mean, we should be aware that Moms everywhere have been living and dying over most of what we did or are doing. I’ve yet to meet a Mom who, deep down, didn’t think their child would benefit from just a bit more parenting from their Mom. Job never done and all.

Where is all this going? I have no idea how often you talk to your Mom. I mean really talk. Pick up the phone or knock on the door talk to her. No matter how tough it may be to do so today you get a pass. You don’t have to think of any reason at all to reach out to your Mom so that you can hear her voice, and she yours. We should certainly do this a lot, right? But today you just gotta do it. For all but that tiny group among us who, like Jim’s daughter, had a mother but not a Mom, today you just find the time to call or drop by. It’s better than any card and sweeter than any chocolate you might send, the sound of a child’s voice on the other end of a Mom’s phone or knocking on the front door.

Because on your end of the call or the visit there is nothing sweeter than to tell your Mom “thank you”, tell her you love her, and to hear her say at least one more time “I love you too.”

Happy Mother’s Day Jim.

You never really know when it’s the last time.

Not gonna lie, I was more than a little bit salty that I was here, at home and on call this weekend, while my siblings and their spouses were gathered in the Low Country with Megan and Ryan. It was a lately scheduled get-together, dreamed up long after our office call schedule had been put together. Unwilling to pull the “I’m the boss” card, Beth and I were home with very little on our schedule save for the usual weekend stuff of early spring. Rather than a couples member-guest golf tournament to follow, the highlight on our calendar would be my first trip to watch two of our grandsons have a golf lesson.

Restless is the way Beth describes me on weekends like this. She is right, and if I’m honest with myself I really did want something to fill our weekend. Not that it would be the same as joining everyone, including Megan and Ryan, just something. Thankfully our friends R and C were up for a last minute dinner out, and my buddy Matt found us a spot at his fully booked restaurant, our favorite, with 24 hours notice. It was shaping up to be a really nice night.

Where do you sit on the “things happen for a reason” continuum? I’m firmly on the end that goes more like “things happen”, reasons or not. My Mom had been having what has become for her a pretty normal week. Days cycling around the dining room schedule, the time between meals spent now mostly in her wheelchair in front of random television shows, or snoozing upright with Alexa playing either Sinatra or Saturday Night Fever in the background. Mom is a big disco fan. Beth gets in to see her almost every day during the week. I try to get in once on a weekday, and then Saturday and Sunday mornings. For whatever reason we both missed Friday.

The first call came to Beth Saturday morning. Mom was really on the struggle bus. She was trying to eat soup with a knife. The staff on duty Friday and Saturday were mostly folks who’d just met Mom over the last few weeks. No one had really seen her in this state. They wanted to ask her doctor to send her to the ER, to do tests to find out why she had such a sudden decline. Now, going to the ER for something as amorphous as “she’s not doing well” almost always ends up the the “she” not doing very well. Tests beget tests, and older folks always have abnormal tests. Bright lights and alien noises create confusion where none exists; in the presence of a person no longer fully present anyway, the ER can be the final step from self which there is no return.

But Beth went in and walked the staff, and Mom, back off the ledge. Much of the discussion centered around uncertainty about Mom’s “final” wishes, questions that Mom and my sister had long ago addressed and handled quite nicely. Another call came later in the day, a few hours before our dinner reservation, and once again we were able to agree with the nurses that Mom was OK where she was. And so it was that we found ourselves at a cozy four-top with dinner on the way courtesy of a typically terrific waitress, telling stories about prior visits with Matt, the owner, settling in for what we all thought would be a typical 3+ hour visit. As our appetizers were being cleared Beth’s phone rang. Call number 3. Beth: “We really need to go in.”

This is where the “things happen for a reason” conversation really got started, and “the last time” thoughts began to tickle around the edges. The first was easy to process no matter where you are on my little continuum; if we’d been in South Carolina Mom would have already been sent to the ER. One or both of us would have been on a plane. We all would have been going to that “last time” place in our minds. But Beth and I were home, and whether or not we were home “for a reason”, we were nevertheless only a 40 minute ride to Mom.

As is so often the case this whole thing has been banging around in my brain since that first phone call. Like Brownian Motion, fragments of ideas, tiny thoughtlets moved through random synapses like so many molecules in a vacuum. Some about us, Beth and our siblings and the whole “Sandwich Generation” thing. But just like the focusing of those randomly moving molecules in a laser tube, everything really coned down to “the last time”.

Would tonight be the last time that I saw my Mom? Worse, was she really as sick as the nurses were telling Beth, and had I already for all intents and purposes seen Mom for the last time when we sat and chatted last Sunday morning?

We’ve already had a few last times. Thinking back you can see them. A few months before she finally capitulated, accepting the fact that she could no longer live alone in my “ancestral home” was the last time I saw the woman who was the driving force at the center of our family. Some time after that, I don’t really recall exactly when, I saw Mom as mostly herself, aware (and concerned) about everybody and everything, fully engaged in every waking hour of her days and nights, for the last time. Sometimes you can’t escape knowing exactly when the last time was. Someone is gone suddenly and unexpectedly, and the memory of that last time is seared in your mind. You are branded by the memory whether it was a good one or not.

This is not a story about regret, or regret avoided. Nor is it a case of the supernatural “things happen for a reason”, thing. Not at all. If we’d been in Bluffton it would have been a version of our Alaskan trip when Mom did, indeed, end up in the hospital while we were, all of us, incommunicado 4,000 miles away. This time, for whatever reason, I was here. I am fortunate to be the sibling who gets to be the one who will be “there” when Mom finally lands after this long, long glide path to the end of her journey finally arrives. Blessed to have such a loving and caring partner in Beth, who as always is carrying the bulk of the load.

And regret? No, I have followed the advice of my close friend Bill, the surgeon, who has counseled for so long that the time to say and do all of the important things is long before the last time, no matter how suddenly a “landing” comes after that last “last time” happened. If I am not there at the beside when her earthly plane lands and her soul

departs I won’t feel as if I’ve left anything unsaid. I have long ago begun saying those four special things I learned to say when the thought of a “last time” is but a notion. I love you. Thank you. Please forgive me. I forgive you. I have long ago begun saying versions of the same to the rest of my family and my friends. I hope, because I love them dearly, that my siblings will feel the same, at least when it comes to our Mom.

There have been many “last times”, and as a son there will be yet one more. I just may not know it at the time. You never really know then it’s the last time until it’s over.