Tag Archives: love

On Dying

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Great title, Ron. What’s the opposite of clickbait?

The rollercoaster that is living with and caring for someone with Multiple Systems Atrophy careened down to the bottom of the track Tuesday late afternoon/early evening. Lynn’s body shut down. And I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. This was late into a long two-day stretch without our normal a.m. help. So I wasn’t in a good place, and Lynn, of course, was in a much worser one.

Then the 5p meds and my amazing dinner kicked in and she bounced back enough to ask, “What would you do?” And so, I told her.

“I’d probably give up. It’s hard to know for sure, but yeah, I might throw in the towel and let nature run its course. You’re way tougher than me. Which is kinda ironic isn’t it, since I often said you were too damn delicate? Yeah, in the end, you turned out to be way tougher than me. Maybe I have some Erwin Byrnes in me.”

Then I told her that a not inconsequential subset of people on the MSA listserv choose death with dignity or they voluntarily stop eating and drinking. Because they want to assert some modicum of control over the downward spiral.

In the past, after reflecting on her mom’s decision to stop eating and drinking in her final two weeks, she’s said she’d do the same someday. That time is not now, but her will to live isn’t what it appears on the surface when she flashes her golden smile. Her will to live is gradually flagging. Hence her question, “What would you do?”

Last night J asked her if she enjoyed visiting with her college roommates online and she surprised J by saying, “Not really.” Having eavesdropped on the conversation, I intuitively knew why. Because she will not be giving a toast at either of her daughters’ weddings. And she will not be traveling anywhere. The roommate’s normal catching up was a painful reminder of things lost and how her world keeps getting smaller and smaller. Of course, they didn’t intend for that, and they didn’t realize it because of . . . the golden smile.

Lynn’s question, “What would you do?” prompted me to think even more deeply about her daily life. Yes, I am a complete mess right now, but I’m going to get better. And I’m going to renew my passport next year, and I’m going to catch up with you hopefully, and add lots of events to my calendar that I’ll look forward to. I am bullish on the future.

What does Lynn have to look forward to? Or maybe, more immediately, what brings her joy? Me, especially when I’m okay enough to joke around. The labradude appearing suddenly under the wheelchair. Picking dead leaves off the tomato plants. SchittsCreek with the hijas. Saturday lunch with the gfriends. Always, Saturday lunch.

For me, I don’t know if that would be enough. If I was her, I’d feel almost entirely like a spectator of others’ lives, not an active participant. I’m not sure I’d feel enough purpose to keep fighting through all of the adversity. To be so damn dependent upon everyone for everything. Again, she’s starting to wonder if it’s enough too.

Whether to passively live as long as possible or more actively speed up the dying process a little or a lot is a deeply personal question upon which reasonable people disagree.

One thing I know for sure however, is that everyone who is dying slowly, should get to decide for themselves what to do, if anything, without any outside pressure. That’s why I keep telling Lynn my probable throwing in of the towel doesn’t matter. That she gets to decide how to live out her ninth inning. Which is one important factor in the move to an adult family home. She will be cared for by pros, not a shattered, amateur, impostor of a caregiver.

In saying I’d prob let nature run its course, I also shared my way of thinking about death which took shape following my dad’s sudden death when I was 33. At first, I was mad at the world that I’d never get to find out where our newly evolving friendship was headed. That he didn’t get to hold Jeanette. That so much promise was cut unfairly short. Then, somehow, I consciously pivoted to celebrating our nascent friendship and all the positive memories I had of him growing up.  

My intentional approach is “choose to celebrate” all the positive memories instead of being eternally upset that the movie cut off before the ideal end.

I told Lynn not everyone lives 64 years. And not many people have as fulfilling a 40 years (38 married) as we’ve enjoyed. I told her that, eventually, I will be okay, largely because of all the positive memories we made. She seemed receptive to my quirky thinking, but I can’t be entirely sure. Equally possible, she thought, “How did I get stuck with a bonafide whacko?”

I just don’t think we can do both simultaneously, we have to choose one or the other. I choose to celebrate. Is it a panacea for softening the blow of loss? Does it speed up the grieving process? No and probably not. Is it better than the alternative? Of being mad at the world? Of staying mad at it? Most definitely.

The Ultimate Litmus Test

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At the end of life, how does one know whether they’ve lived a good life or not? More personally, how will you know if you have? How will I?

Many of us live as if professional reputation, material wealth, and social status are the key ingredients, but watching The Good Wife get closer to the end provides an altogether different litmus test.

Which is this. Have you been a good enough friend, to enough people, long enough, that they’re there for you at the end? Or has a certain self-centeredness and peripatetic life left you mostly alone?

You’ll only know which of these is the case if you die slowly. Some of us will go quickly like a friend of mine who fell over dead on his bike in Italy last summer. Although he didn’t have time for the “close friend” litmus test, his memorial service provided positive clues to a life well lived.

Based on the “close friend” test, Lynn has lived an exceptional life. Unfortunately though, she’s unable to take solace in that knowledge. Because like many of us, she’s incredibly hard on herself.  My unprovable hypothesis is that the built-in feeling of inadequacy began at birth with Lynn wondering, “Why didn’t my mom want me?” Almost certainly, it didn’t help when 45 years later she contacted her birth mom only to learn she still didn’t want any kind of relationship.

Consider the last 48 hours. Yesterday, Lynn participated in a zoom call with her four dear college roommates. “Participated” meaning listened intently and smiled throughout. Today, an hour before Pastor Carol was coming by with communion, Susan texted to see if she could pop in. I said she could join Lynn and Carol, Carol happens to be Susan’s pastor, and the three of them visited for over an hour. I could go on and on. Lynn’s support network has blown my mind. She is being loved and supported by so many people none of whom are the least bit phased by her worsening symptoms like her loss of voice.

Some bring art, some bring pictures, a lot bring food. In the end, they just want to be next to her. And to see her smile. When we’re without her smile there is going to be a painful void in a lot of people’s lives, not just A’s, J’s, and mine.

I intend on honoring Lynn’s eventual legacy by prioritizing friendships even more.

Paragraph to Ponder

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Susan Rothchild in The New York Times:

“My son, Chauncey, died a few years ago of a fentanyl overdose. He was a brilliant, eccentric autodidact, an excellent farmer and chef, but he chose to work as a carpenter and plumber. He was not good at either job. Yet, when he offered to build my new bathroom, I said yes. Now every time I take a shower and see the dribbles of grout on the wall, stand on the still-unattached drain plate or get drenched using the hand nozzle with a mind of its own, I think of him. I will never get them fixed.”

Two Worlds

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Public and private. All of us behave a little or a lot differently whether we’re in public or not. In extreme cases, people live “double lives”.

The dichotomy between Lynn’s public life, by which I mean when friends and family visit, and private one, where I’m the only person around, is so glaring that it got me thinking.

Specifically, I’ve been pondering why she’s not just okay when friends and family are around, but especially smiley (and today, extremely giggly) and physically better than normal. There’s a wonderful lightness. I guess it makes sense learning what we’re learning about the importance of close interpersonal relationships to our overall health and well-being.

But man, the whiplash that comes when friends and family leave is intense. And disorienting.

When home alone she pops boosters between timed meds and her body is off and on, and when on, she’s bored, and she struggles with any sense of purpose. There’s a heaviness.

Why am I telling you this? Not sure. Maybe to help you mentally prep for this phenomenon if you’re ever a primary care giver. Or maybe I’m letting you in hoping for some sort of connection.

Last night, I had an epiphany. A tough one that I was hesitant to share with Lynn because I expected a negative/defensive reaction.

I told her I had an observation I wanted to share with her. “You have a restless spirit.” There, I said it. Fortunately, I was wrong, because she didn’t argue the point. She listened carefully as I told her I missed her, that it felt like all of her time and attention was taken fighting her Multiple Systems Atrophy. That there was no time or attention left for me.

That I felt more like an employee than best friend.

Most people confined to a wheelchair and unable to do hardly anything independently watch a lot of tv and read. Since Schitt’s Creek ended, Lynn doesn’t watch tv and her reading glasses, despite repeated trips to the optometrist, aren’t working well enough for her to read much.

Thus, when alone, if she’s feeling okay, she’s in constant motion searching for something to do. Anything to do. Or she’s laid out on the couch waiting for her meds to kick in. The only time she’s not on the move is when her body completely quits or she’s asleep.

Our convo, mostly about how dying is scary and spiritual malaise, deepened. She cried and said she didn’t know “I loved her that much”. I took in what I think was her deeper message, “I didn’t know I’m that lovable.” I told her lots and lots of people love her.

I told her I was having a hard time dealing with her restlessness and with her constant MSA fight. That caring for her took all my energy, that there was no leftover energy to just hang. And that it would be really sad to spend our final months or years together not really together.

Case in point. Saturday and Sunday nights I throw dinner together for the fam and then sit at the kitchen island with my own dinner while one or both daughters join their mom at the dining room table. Hell, during the week I do it too, leaving Lynn to eat by herself. Yeah, you’re right, I am a lowlife.

While I am a lowlife, I probably deserve a few points for being vulnerable and risking the convo. Sadly, in part, I risked it because soon we won’t be able to have back-and-forth conversations of that sort.

But not being especially centered myself these days, it’s really tough to take on her anxiety about dying, her exasperation at MSA’s relentless progression, and her general unease and utter restlessness. Especially given the cost that restlessness is taking on our friendship. For now.

Postscript: We ate dinner together. Afterwards, there was more slow dancing in the kitchen. The roller coaster keeps rolling.

A Surprise Swing Dance For The Win

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A very good friend of mine has been “unlucky” in marriage. Three divorces. Although the first was so short, and he was so young, he doesn’t count it. A mulligan if you will. So, for all intents and purposes, twice divorced.

Of course, you and I both know luck has nothing to do with whether committed relationships endure.

After his last divorce, about five years ago, he looked in the failed relationship mirror, and really didn’t like what he saw, negative patterns of his own doing.

In no time at all, he fell hard for partner four. So hard, he turned to a therapist to avoid sabotaging it.

No dude in the history of dudes has ever told another dude everything they talk about with their therapist. But my friend has confided in me a bit about his therapeutic journey including his initial question of “Am I an asshole?” I could have saved him a lot of time and money by simply saying “No, you aren’t an asshole. Not even close.” But his initial question was his way of asking, “What’s wrong with me?” Which lead to, “What work do I need to do to avoid fucking up this relationship?”

Relationship Four really warms my heart. I asked him what explains his positivity and joy in this new relationship and without hesitating, he said, “We have fun together.” I herby submit that as a litmus test for any committed relationship.

I don’t know anyone over fifty who has pivoted as much as my friend. The key ingredients as I understand them—introspection, humility, vulnerability, and self-compassion. Inspiring stuff.

Fast forward to a text he sent this morning. And I quote, “And then to top the evening off, I showed M how I had spent the last five weeks secretly learning to swing dance to surprise her for her 50th birthday. Yes, that’s as much as I can manage after five weeks. I can’t dance! And I’m a slow learner.”

The low res video nearly brought me to tears. Just the two of them, swing dancing in front of a big ass swing band in a New York City club. It’s so beautiful. Because it represents so much damn growth. He’s prioritizing her happiness. And so the happiness comes back to him.

On my run this afternoon, I kept returning to the vid in my mind. And all the innumerable podcasts I’ve listened to and “think pieces” I’ve read that lament the problem of boys, and how to raise men, and how to teach masculinity.

My friend’s surprise swing dance is the most manly, most masculine thing imaginable. Because it’s the result of all the intrapersonal work he’s done.

I firmly believe the “boy-man-masculinity” discussion is completely pointless. Instead of asking, “What does it mean to be a man?”, we should ask, “What does it mean to be a decent human being?” Instead of obsessing about getting masculinity just right, we should shift our focus to the personal attributes we want all young people to embody, irrespective of their gender identities.

Especially how to be caring, kind, and selfless. I am incredibly proud of my friend for piecing together an equation that fosters those exact attributes.

Introspection + humility + vulnerability + self-compassion.

How To Stay Together

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My amazing playwriting aside, the Jeff Bezos/MacKenzie Scott divorce is an illuminating tale for people committing to one another for the long haul.

The conventional wisdom is that a lack of money and related money fights explain why so many relationships fail. That’s certainly true, but not the whole story. Even people with money can have devastating money disagreements because everyone has a unique money history and no two people will ever think about it the same way.

The bottom line. Couples don’t explore their “money compatibility” nearly carefully enough in the early stages of their relationships. The key is to figure out whether you and your partner are more similar in your thinking about saving, spending, gifting, and investing than not. No, that’s not particularly sexy, but do you want to measure your relationship by decades or not?

One little complication, by which I mean, huge complication. People change over time. Maybe MacKenzie didn’t know Jeff wanted to be the richest person in the world because he may not have wanted to be until his first or one hundredth billion.

What to do about the unknown? Anticipate that your thinking about money will change over time, not radically, but moderately. Similarly, anticipate that your partner’s thinking will change too. Meaning “money compatibility” is always a work-in-progress. Talk about saving, spending, gifting, and investing with some regularity or run the risk of serious differences creating dangerous cracks in the foundation of your relationship.

Of Mountains and Spain 2019

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Three years ago, in light of our 30th anniversary, I promised the Good Wife a trip to a “Spanish speaking” country. It only took three years to pull of. The GW has always had a passion for languages, Swedish, Amharic, Spanish in particular. Sad isn’t it, that she married such a language loser, but she has to take responsibility for focusing exclusively on looks.

A week or two before the trip, while loitering in the kitchen, she said to me, “Being in Spain with you is going to be sexy.” Hubba hubba! All of a sudden the long distance flights seemed more manageable. But then I regained my senses and said, “Yeah, except for the fact that you invited our daughters.” Correcting the record, she smiled, “Ah, that was your idea.” What the hell was I thinking? Probably that their schedules would never allow it. They happily proved me wrong. We never should have taken them to live for short stints in China and Norway when they were young.

Here are the sordid details you so desperately want. The four of us shared small apartments in Madrid and Seville for eleven days. I was sick as a perro for about a third of the time. In the end, I’m sorry to report, there was very little hanky and next to no panky.

But all was not lost.

David Brooks in a recent piece, The Moral Peril of Meritocracy, contrasts first and second mountain life. He writes:

“If the first mountain is about building up the ego and defining the self, the second is about shedding the ego and dissolving the self. If the first mountain is about acquisition, the second mountain is about contribution.

On the first mountain, personal freedom is celebrated — keeping your options open, absence of restraint. But the perfectly free life is the unattached and unremembered life. . . . 

So the person on the second mountain is making commitments. People who have made a commitment to a town, a person, an institution or a cause have cast their lot and burned the bridges behind them. They have made a promise without expecting a return. They are all in.”

And:

“Over the past few decades the individual, the self, has been at the center. The second-mountain people are leading us toward a culture that puts relationships at the center. They ask us to measure our lives by the quality of our attachments, to see that life is a qualitative endeavor, not a quantitative one.”

I may finally be approaching the base of the second mountain. Why do I think that? Because when the GW asked me what my favorite moment of the trip was, I wasn’t quite able to tell her. Instead, I told her my second and third favorites.

My absolute favorite was witnessing the wave of emotion that came over her as the trip drew to an end.

The last morning in Seville, I rallied and we went for an aimless walk through our neighborhood’s ancient, narrow streets. Eventually, we ended up at the outdoor window of a tapas bar in a small, beautiful, mostly empty plaza. We ordered dos cafes con leche and waited at an outdoor table. Sipping our drinks, she started to cry. “This is exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to sit with you at an outdoor cafe and just enjoy the moment.” Later that morning, the tears continued as she declared her abiding love for the whole dam fam. I can’t remember ever seeing her happier.

That made the lengthy planning process, the marathon plane flights, the expenses totally worth it.

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On Hunger

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I took a total looker to the Hippy Theatre last weekend. Thinking I might get some action, we sat in the balcony, but alas, a few other people, too close for comfort, kept me from making much of a move.

We saw All the President’s Men, thinking of it as a prequel to Mueller’s probable findings.

There’s a pivotal scene early on, when two lowly Washington Post reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, begin reporting on the Watergate break in. A senior editor says Woodward and Bernstein are not nearly experienced or skilled enough for what could end up being a national story (understatement). He advises Ben Bradlee to hand off their initial reporting to some established heavyweights. “They’re hungry!” their direct editor argued. Bradlee, conflicted, bet correctly on youthful ambition.

Cyclists routinely let off the gas after cresting hills. Their pedal cadence slows as soon as they begin descending, sometimes to the point of stopping altogether. “I’ve worked hard enough,” legs say to the brain, “I deserve a break.”

Many reporters and people coast, to varying degrees, once accomplished, however they define that. Of course there are outliers, oldsters who continue to grind well past the point of most of their peers.

As evidence of the fact that I’m not nearly as hungry as my younger self, rewind the tape eighteen months. Shortly before moving, I “organized” an underwhelming garage sale. Fewer than normal people showed because of my half-ass marketing. I hollered something sarcastic at my friend across the street like, “Dig the traffic jam!” To which he astutely replied, “You’re not hungry.” Touché. The truth of the matter was, a bit of bacon wasn’t nearly as motivating as saving a few trips to Value Village, which as it turned out, wasn’t much motivation either.

I’m not nearly as Ambitious as in the past, but I’m still ambitious. I care more about personal improvement than professional accomplishment. I want to learn to listen more patiently, to be increasingly selfless, caring, and loving.

That’s a type of hunger. Isn’t it?

 

 

How To Find a Boyfriend

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In case you’re looking for one. In one word, PowerPoint*. So says Jessica Guzik.

And if you’re looking for one, and are not a serious gamer, you should probably limit your search to college grads. Economist Erik Hurst via economist Tyler Cowen on what young men are doing.

In related news, I’m slowly working my way through The Dance of Anger: A Woman’s Guide to Changing The Patterns Of Intimate Relationships. I think HLerner knew if she pitched it as a “Woman’s Guide” I couldn’t help myself. Savvy. A pgraph to ponder from the early going:

Making a long-term relationship work is a difficult business because it requires the capacity to strike a balance between individualism (the “I”) and togetherness (the “we”). The tugs in both directions are very strong. On the one hand, we want to be separate, independent individuals—self-contained persons in our own right: on the other, we seek a sense of connectedness and intimacy with another person, as well as a sense of belongingness to a family or group. When a couple gets out of balance in either direction, there is a problem.

The Good Wife and I successfully balance that seesaw about a third of the time. Which if we played professional baseball, would make us All Stars.

*nice to know PowerPoint isn’t a complete catastrophe