Aging with intensity

 

I love cut flowers, they feel like such a luxury. Right now there are sunflowers on the dining room table, and another vase of them on the passthrough by the kitchen sink. Roses from Math Man have just made their way to the compost, circling back to...tomatoes or basil.

Much as I love fresh flowers, I am fascinated with watching them age. These lilies were in my study at home, fading and drying, in their own way as beautiful as they were fresh cut. The colors intensify as the petals dry. Curves and ridges appear, reflecting the late afternoon light. And at the last there is a barely audible rustle as the petals surrender to gravity, one following another. When I go down for the day, I gather the fallen petals and pull the last few stems from the vase. Dust to dust.

Like the flowers, I am aging, though not that fast. Wondering if my colors will deepen, and whether my wrinkles will be as interesting in the late day sun. Will I rustle as I surrender bit by bit? (I feel more inclined to shout these days, but that's another post.)

I want to age intensely, intentionally. To offer up, rather than give in. 

When we were young

Several of my siblings have spent hours in the attic of the barn at my parent's house, sorting through boxes of stuff, some of which have been untouched for decades.

Today my brother texted me this photo, taken on a September morning in 1983 in the 5th floor seminar room at UC Irvine. That's me, moments after defending my doctoral dissertation, with a former post-doc from the group who had been a terrific mentor (and who I just had dinner with a couple of weeks ago!). I was 25 — the same age Crash will be on his next birthday.

 I can still remember some of the questions from my defense, it seems not so very long ago.  I still roll up my sleeves when I lecture, still have that silk bow tie in my drawer, though I can't recall the last time I wore it.  My hair is far shorter and grayer, my glasses equally dorky. I can remember the softness of Tom's favorite sweatshirt, tossed on the table while he takes this photo. We had budgeted for a dinner out to celebrate, but by the time we arrived at the restaurant near the South Coast Plaza mall, Tom was feeling ill, and we just went back to the empty apartment, most of our stuff gone on a moving truck to New Jersey.

Things I can't remember - did I use overheads or give a chalk talk? Had I gone to the trouble of making 35 mm slides? Did we drink the champagne right then (it's not even noon as I can see from the clock!)? What was the date?  It's not in my thesis (I checked - there's a copy on the shelf behind my chair).

Less than fours years later, I would be a widow. I would find that sweatshirt tossed on the bed at home, worn to ward off the chill of an early spring morning. I look at these pictures sometimes and wonder, if future me could have warned past me of what awaited her, what would she say? Anything?

Wheeling about

I went to California to see my dad, who's ill and for the moment in a care facility bridging the gap between hospital care and home. Wheelchairs were part of the landscape this trip.  Dotting the hallways, parked in corners, tucked between the curtains in the room. Occupied and not.  I felt tall in this community, where nearly everyone is in bed, or in a wheelchair, some so bent I could not see their faces.

The first night I left my dad's room, but it was late and various doors had been closed and lights turned out. I got turned around in the dark (this would a theme of this trip!) and couldn't find the exit. I walked past a man who seemed to be dozing in a wheelchair parked in the corner.  Suddenly he called out in a loud voice, something I couldn't figure out.  Had he mistaken me for someone else, or this place for somewhere else?  I turned to be sure he didn't need anything, and he looked up and me and repeated firmly, "¡Para alla!" My jet lagged brain flipped a switch into Spanish.  Directions to the exit. He then gave me careful and correct directions, in Spanish, to the main exit.

I came in on Sunday to find a family in one of the corridor alcoves, the elderly mother in a wheelchair, her daughter leaning forward to say, "Mom, you can choose to be happy." Her mother took a breath and replied, "I am sad." I wanted to cry for them both.

And then there was the elderly man in the wheelchair at the end of the offramp for Highway 101 in Salinas. Struggling to hold up a sign, though the inscription was illegible, I had no trouble reading it. Help me. There was no place to pull over and help. Huge trucks came rumbling off that ramp, heading for the coast.  Would they sideswipe him? Who do you call? I had no idea.

My temporary and relative vantage point left me feeling not powerful, but powerless. Reeling from seeing through so many eyes, Christ dancing in ten thousand places, scarred in limb, yet lovely...

_________
As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ

A widow's mite

Graduation, UCI.  June 1980.

It was half a lifetime ago.  Literally.  I was not quite 30.  I will be not-quite-60 this week.

Really, it was such a short time.  We didn't even know each other for 10 years all together. Married, another not quite.  Five not quite six.  This was not half a lifetime even then.  Nor even a third or a quarter. A fraction that grows smaller with each passing moment, sliding through my hands as I try to pin it down.

When can we neglect a term, my students wonder, desiring simple solutions?  When it's one part in five, or one part in ten? One part in a hundred - not something I'll have to face then.  Or the mathematical limit, where the one part in forever becomes nothing.  Somehow there, but not.  Evanescent increments, to use Bishop Berkeley's term.

It will be 30 years on Easter that I became a widow.  And yet I could still have written this essay from a woman widowed a scant three years — young, she suggests, at 36 with a loss that she had 42 days to see coming, where my 29 year old self had less than 42 hours.  I know those odd moments, curiously devoid of grief, where "call Tom to tell him you got tenure" shows up on my mental to-do list.  Or the dreams where you are trying to explain to people that you must rush, because even though Tom is next to you, you know he is dead and will vanish at sunset.  Or sunrise. Or.

I have, too, the memory of my mother confessing she had no idea what to tell me about mourning a spouse. Her friends had not yet reached that age.  There was no pool of experience she could draw on, except one unspoken moment.  Though I remembered then, and now, my mother's voice, whispered words of explanation in a back pew at St. Luke's as a neighbor's coffin drifted down the aisle, followed by a weeping woman in a black coat, "no mother should have to endure the death of a child."  Was it the year she lost the baby, or years later? I can't quite place it in time. Was the neighbor's name Angela? Her daughter baby sat for us, a teen-ager to my seven whose name I can't recall, just how sophisticated I thought she was.

The young widow wonders about remarriage, which overrides the widow effect, the damage being widowed does to your body.  You can't replace a person, she exclaims. True, and yet your heart might open to accommodate another.  Victor has not taken over some spot reserved for Tom, but has his own space in my heart.

It changes you, she says "I think it’s about withstanding a blow that fundamentally changes your architecture."  I would not disagree.  Our check-box demographics can't capture the complex plane of my life, or hers.

---

"And what are these same evanescent increments? They are neither finite quantities, nor quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the ghosts of departed quantities?" Bishop George Berkeley mocks the calculus, and the infidel mathematicians who entertained such thoughts.

Is there something you're not telling me?

Math Man and I intersected in the kitchen tonight. He's working and watching "The Game"; I'm working and not. We both have the munchies. When I said I couldn't quite figure out what I was craving, he popped out with, "Is there something you're not telling me dear?" Uh...no. Meanwhile, I watch as he dishes up some vanilla ice cream, then reaches into the 'fridge for the rest of his snack. Black olives. (I know what you're thinking, and no, he doesn't put them onto the ice cream, but he does eat them together.)

When I was expecting Mike, every week I would buy ever larger containers of black olives at the farmer's market. I was quite visibly pregnant, finally provoking the woman who owned the stand to say, "I'm not sure that all these salty olives are good for you." When I told her my husband was the one with the strange cravings, she had a good laugh.

"So," I asked Math Man, "is there something you're not telling me?"

---

Meanwhile, I'm reflecting on Luke 1:8-20, where Zechariah snorts at the angel announcing his wife's miraculous pregnancy, "I am an old man and my wife is getting on in years." for my column for a couple weeks hence. Is there a connection here?

Fading Glory

Math Man brought me orange roses for my birthday last month. They are still on the dining room table, though long past their prime. They were amazing as they opened, and oddly enough have only grown more beautiful and fascinating - at least in my eyes. Once a single color, they are now striated a deep pink and yellow, as the pigments photobleach and separate. The colors intensified as the petals dry. The texture is richer as well, finely crinkled. Like my skin?

Every day I think I should toss them, then I see them in the soft evening light and decide to admire them one more day...

Caustic Comments

For several years I've had a benign growth on my back (like my need for bifocals, yet another sign of senescence). Today it needed to come off (for reasons I will spare you, but that did manage to gross out the thirteen year old boys at my dinner table, a feat I generally have a hard time managing). So tonight at 6:15, I had the !@(* thing excised, all 3 cm of it. The physician who did it was good and kept up his end of the distracting conversation well. Alas, my attempt to describe what quantum mechanics might have to do with the nifty device that measures your blood oxygen levels while he put in the local was not up to my usual standards. I was mostly doing my best not to faint.

Just as he's getting ready to start the actual procedure, my cell phone goes off. "Better get that now," he says. I snag my purse from the chair next to the table and answer, hoping it's Math Man telling me he's home from his trip to the state capitol and I can turn the home front over to him. Nope, it's Barnacle Boy, making dinner. "Mom, we don't have any ground beef. " "Sure we do, check the top shelf of the freezer, left hand side," I reply, feeling momentarily disoriented as I sat amidst all the medical paraphernalia giving directions for this mundane task. "Thanks. Can you pick up a baguette on the way home?" Argh...is there no way to get off duty?

We treated the resulting 2 inch wound in my back with lunar caustic (silver nitrate to the modern chemist) to cauterize it, no stitches, so I can swim sooner. The local is wearing off right about now and I'm wishing I was in Dublin with a friend there on sabbatical, having a beer!