Life is Perfect, Even When it's Not

Today's post reaches back nearly twenty years to a time when I first started blogging and my husband was still alive. It's always been one of my favorite posts from my caregiver days and I'm hoping you'll enjoy the break from my caterwauling about moving which is the only thing going on in my life right now. With only twenty days left to go before the big move I plan to recycled an older post for the next two Wednesday and (hopefully) real-time posts on the next three Saturdays, then get back into my regular writing routine. In the meantime here's Life is Perfect, Even When it's Not.

At the dentist office today, I took my wheelchair bound, right-side paralyzed husband, Don, to the restroom. It’s a good one with grab bars situated so that he---with my help---can stand up to pee. But first we had to get him out of his coat. Its nylon and is so slippery it would be like holding on to slime, should I have to catch him in a fall. That task accomplished, I got Don’s pants down and held his shirt out of the way while both of us stood side by side waiting for the flow to start. It didn’t. So, I’m humming game show tunes in my head---the kind they play while a contestant is trying to come up with an answer while the clock ticks away. For some reason the wait seemed longer than usual which made me think of our friend who has a ‘shy bladder.’ He can’t pee if someone else is in the room.

“Ron better hope,” I said to Don, “that he never needs help peeing.” Don got the humor in that statement which gave us both the giggles. We were giggling and laughing so hard by the time the pee stream hit the bowl it’s a wonder it found its mark and didn’t cover our shoes instead. The restroom is just a few feet from the receptionist’s desk and heaven knows what she was thought we were doing in there. The look on her face when we came out was priceless. She wanted to ask. Oh boy, did she want to ask but her phoo-phoo manners wouldn’t let her.

As I sat in the waiting room while Don got his teeth cleaned, I picked up an old copy of Real Simple magazine. On the first page I turned to was a Ralph Lauren double-page layout for Polo Black, a men’s fragrance that featured a hot model. And I do mean sexy as in take-off-your-clothes-and-let-me-see-the-rest-of-you sexy! I looked at him, and then around the room trying to figure out if the Thought Police was present. I decided that a dentist’s waiting room was not a good place to have a virtual orgasm, so I quick turned the page. Thanks goodness, the next page was a double-page layout for a Chevy. Cool. Keep those cars selling, we need their pension money. I flipped through a few more pages and came to an ad for Starbucks coffee liqueur which was exactly what I needed after lusting after the Ralph Lauren guy. I’ve never smoked but that guy had me reaching into my purse for a pack of cigarettes and I came out with a stick of gum.

By now I was beginning to think that the Real Simple magazine was nothing but advertisements. Duh, aren’t most of them? And sure enough, the next page was a double-page layout for American Express featuring Ellen DeGeneres. She says in the ad that her life is perfect, even when it’s not. Wow, what a nice thing to be able to say about your life! I think I actually know what she means.

Finally, I came across a few articles in the magazine. ‘What’s the Craziest Thing you ever did for Love?’ was the title of one article, and there were some notable answers like: “take skydiving lesson,” “move into a log cabin built in the 1800,” and “eloped 36 days after meeting someone.” Another article was titled, ‘Portrait of a Family.’ There is humor in this, I thought about reading these two articles back-to-back because my family portrait and the craziest thing I ever did for love could be one and the same. Yup, I’m getting out the oils and easel and painting a portrait of Don and myself. We’ll be standing side by side, leaning over a toilet bowl, expectantly looking down and hoping that neither one of us ends up with pee our shoes. Love doesn’t get much crazier than that, does it? ©

The Shower Stall Mystery

NOTE: This might not be throw-back Wednesday but I felt like sharing a humorous piece I wrote back when I was a caregiver for my husband, after his massive stroke. Back then, I was submitting pieces like this to a site where we'd get paid for each click the articles got. My clicks totaled over a million, but a million pennies does ad up...

THE SHOWER STALL MYSTERY


I wonder if there are any statistics on how many female caregivers stop shaving their legs when we have to start shaving our husband's faces. Time constraints are as good as any other excuse for our apathy about not shaving what can be hidden with slacks or for not applying makeup and perfume. I can't remember the last time I took a leisurely bath where I had the time to lather up my lower limbs and run a razor up in smooth, slow strokes like a model in a Gillette commercial. While helping my husband, Don, in the shower today these were the thoughts that ran through my head as I looked down at my legs expecting to see the natural, European look. I was shocked to see they are bald as a proverbial billiard ball. Oh, ya, I forgot that menopause takes the hair away and it doesn't come back.

I've been shaving Don's face since he went on the blood thinner, Coumadin, even though his occupational therapist wants him to do all his own grooming. But he's so clumpy shaving left-handed and it's really hard to make time for extra trips to ER. Besides, we have a new wheelchair accessible bathroom and the color of blood would clash with the décor and if I let Don do it all on his own, our water bills would be around five hundred dollars.

Our shower routine: I help Don transfer into the shower, shave his face, scrub his back, and pull the curtain closed so that he can do the rest of his shower alone. Then it starts---those sound effects, the kind like Meg Ryan made in her famous movie scene where she's faking an orgasm in the restaurant. The first time I heard Don moaning and groaning I thought, "Oh, God, he's having a private moment and I'd rather not know about." This went on with every shower for a couple of weeks before a voyeuristic moment made me slowly draw the shower curtain back to peek inside. There sat Don, eyes closed, doing his moaning and groaning routine only he wasn't---well, you know what he wasn't doing. He was shampooing his hair! I can be so slow on the draw. It hadn't dawned on me that all Don was doing was an imitation of the shampoo commercial that is imitating Meg Ryan's orgasm scene.

Time to dry off---Don does it all but his tush. But I'm on the creams and ointments committee, so I have to be there. I start with his feet, and work my way up. I apply the Naftlin gel for the toe nail fungus he picked up at the hospital and that his diabetes doesn't want to give back. Next comes the Nystatin for jock rash. That was fun the first time I had to have Don's doctor look at that---all three of us with our noses practically down in Don's crotch. The doctor tells me it's common for wheelchair bound guys to have a perpetual case and it won't go away without air. I've tried to get my husband to sleep commando, but he picks this stage of his life to get modest. Men! Go figure.

Next I apply a coat of Betadine antibiotic to the bruises and scratches on his paralyzed arm that are caused by our lap sitting dog and the Coumadin. Someday I'll probably get investigated by Social Services and I'll have to prove that the bruises are not caregiver abuse---hey, maybe I should knit the dog a set of booties. At this point in Don's routine I think, "Did I miss anything?" No, Don is applying his Stetson antiperspirant to his left arm pit. You should have seen him the time I brought home another brand and his aphasiac brain couldn't tell me in any other way but to throw it across the room day after day until I figured it out. His vocabulary is around twenty-five words and "don't buy this crap anymore" isn't one of his working phrases.

Following the left arm pit, comes his right arm pit royal ritual. No antiperspirant here or the fungus will start back in again. No air gets to the pit when you can't move an arm. So, it's ten powder puffs full of Johnson's Baby Powder. Not nine. Not eleven. I tried explaining the danger to our lungs of inhaling that white cloud in the room but for some reason, Don's aphasiac brain counts everything in tens. Now I just hold my breath and hope that he doesn't pick bath time to start learning to count to a higher number. And people wonder why we take two hours to shower.

After our showers today, we got distracted by a fat cat with long brown hair and four white feet who was stalking the neighbor's bird feeder and all three of us---the dog, Don and me---stopped what we were doing to watch until the cat got bored and lumbered across our back yard. The three of us followed his path, going from window to window until the cat caught Cooper's eye and they tried to stare each other down. The cat won.

Being Saturday, we headed into town to go to our favorite restaurant for omelets. I parked in the last handicapped space, transferred Don to his chair and when we got to the door a waitress barred the way and told us they were doing some painting over the weekend and were closing early.

"If you had just gotten here five minutes ago," she said, "We could have served you."

On the way back to the car I was cursing the cat in the yard and promising Don I'd shoot the darn thing the next time I see it. Damned cat cheated us out of our omelets! Don, he started yodeling at the top of his lungs. The man can't talk but he still finds ways to made fun of me when I get into one of my titters.

We drove to our next favorite restaurant and as I lowered the wheelchair with its Bruno lift, it got hung up on the trailer hitch. While I was trying to decide if there was a beefy guy near-by to help, Don was sitting inside the Blazer joyfully teaching himself the four letter words I had used to describe the cat. I was pleased when he came up with one of his own.

Inside the restaurant Don smiled across the table and I saw the want-to-cowboy he used to be and I thought about how lucky I am that I no longer had to purée his egg rolls and thicken his tea. He's come a long ways since the stroke. I looked down at my plate and saw a couple of tiny cubes that looked like clear gelatin and I wondered what they were. I ate one. Tasteless. I ate another, and then it dawned on me. They were eatable computer chips that program people to drive to their restaurant every time a UPS truck comes down the street.

Back in the Blazer after lunch, Don had to pee. We drove around to the back of the grocery store, before going in, and I pulled up to our regular spot where he could use his urinal. I felt like a male dog that needed to remark his territory as I poured the pee at the base of the 'No Parking, Fire Lane' sign. I laughed, thinking, "If only the people who believe I always live by the rules could see me now." It may not have been a bra-burning march or a stop-the-war demonstration from my youth, but I can still pull off a little civil disobedience.  Jean R. © 2006

Preposted from my caregiver blog From The Planet Aphasia

Veterans in Hats and Bare-Headed Widows

I take myself out to lunch quite often in good driving months and this week was no exception. Often I’m struck by how many older guys I run across who are wearing baseball hats proclaiming that they are veterans and if you could hear the jumble of thoughts going through my head when I see them, you’d probably be shocked. I get the whole proud to have served thing and how the hat elicits strangers to say, “thank you for your service” and how veterans often stop one another to compare service stats but it also makes me sad and stirs up thoughts I’d rather not have. And I wonder how many of these guys are letting their hats proclaim that their few years in the service were the most significant thing that happened in their entire lives. Do you think I’m being unpatriotic or anti-military or disrespectful to question the message a person’s head gear is expressing?

The sad truth is for many veterans of the Vietnam War it was the most significant and life changing thing they went through in their roughly 60+ years of living. The controversies surrounding the war and the dismissive way our servicemen were treated for many years was different than after previous wars. At least in this country. After WWII the French had collective amnesia about their own dark history. Exhibit A of many: The Vél d'Hiv Roundup when the French police did Hitler’s bidding and rounded up their own countrymen---thousands of Jewish people living in Paris including nearly 4,000 children and shipped them off to Auschwitz. The children were separated from their parents before they got on the trains and when the children got to Auschwitz they were marched directly to the ovens. It happened in July of 1942 and it took until 1995 for the country to officially acknowledge the part France played in delivering so many of their own citizens to their deaths.

I suppose the reason the veteran hats bother me is because they remind me that I can’t live in a bubble where everything is a Disney movie. Letting it go when we should never forget might work for many things but not when it comes to the atrocities that follow on the heels of unfettered hate. In our current political climate it's easy to see how intolerance can creep into public policies that, in turn, could lead to unspeakable acts. I guess that’s one of the good things about old men wearing veteran hats, they remind us not forget those who fought for---hopefully----noble causes. Admittedly, the line between noble causes and self-serving lust for power were clearer during the Civil War, WWI and WWII. Not so much with the Vietnam War. We were lied to. We trusted our leaders and our returning servicemen paid a price for those lies. 

I’ve never thanked a veteran for his service. Why can’t I bring myself to do that? I see others do it and it seems so easy-peasy for them---like a greeting and a handshake. Hello, nice to meet you. Have a nice day. I can’t presume to know what that hat represents to the person wearing it or to the person doing the thanking. Maybe I’d presume too much, maybe not enough. A military hat is not a like college t-shirt on a forty year old, balding guy where you can safely guess the shirt presents a carefree time in his life when he had time to play sports and flirt with the campus cutie pies. It’s not like a hat from a concert or a souvenir hat from a place where you left your heart and half the money in your wallet. 

My husband had a large collection of hats with logos and t-shirts with sayings on the front. It was a big deal every morning to decide what mood he was in when he picked out his fashion choices, especially after his stroke when he couldn’t communicate in other ways. But reading a person’s mood by the messages on his clothing never worked with a friend of ours who, when asked about the logo on his shirt replied, “I don’t know what it is. I buy cheap shirts at the Salvation Army so I can throw them out when they get too grubby to wear.” 

I’ve often wondered what message I’d want to wear on a hat, if I could design one that sums up the most significant thing that happened in my entire life. Sexual abused as a toddler, rape survivor later on? No, those things happened to me but they never defined me. Same goes for surviving the death of my parents and husband. Those things helped make me stronger, but they don’t define me either. Caregiver to a stroke survivor? Now, if I could figure out how to put that on a hat that might work. I stepped up to the plate to care for my severely disabled husband in a way that gave him the best quality of life anyone could have under the circumstances and I am proud of those twelve and a half years. If all that would fit on a hat, I’d no longer be a bare-headed widow. ©

Forging Ahead While Glancing Behind

Back in the days when I worked a lot of overtime hours around the holidays---Easter, Valentine’s Day, Memorial Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas---I’d get to work at 8 AM and didn’t leave the flower shop until 8 to 10 PM. With a quick lunch out of a sack and dinner brought in by the boss we never left our work stations. It was a wholesale/retail operation so holiday schedules dragged on for several weeks. Decades later when I worked for my husband we’d be out on parking lots plowing snow for long hours. And during a notable, record breaking blizzard we didn’t get out of our trucks for anything but bathroom and gassing up breaks for three days straight. We’d take turns sleeping in two hour shifts while slumped over in our seats. Where on earth did all my energy and stamina go since those days? 

The past two days I’ve had four things penciled in my day planner with three other events on tap for the end of the week and already I’m dog tired and wishing it was Sunday so I can sleep in. Monday it was to the dentist and The Gathering at the senior hall. As I drove the long trip to a dentist in another county south of town, I made a decision that I need to find one closer to home. Heck, I probably go past 100 others as I drive the dreaded S-curve through the city. I’ve known my dentist for forty years, before he even went to dental school. But on the way back home I made another decision to postpone the idea of leaving my tooth guy. Being around people who knew my husband and me before and after Don's stroke makes me feel good.

Though I have to admit at The Gathering (for people looking for friends) I came close to feeling that same way with some new acquaintances. A woman in the group who has an extensive background in dealing with deaf people got us all sharing our life experiences with disabilities. I was able to talk about my husband’s and my experience going to speech classes with future speech pathologists. For six years, two days a week, I sat behind a one way mirror with a college professor and her class as a series of student clinicians worked with my husband on the other side of the glass. Even though his vocabulary never got above twenty-five unprompted words), my husband often had all of us laughing so hard it was hard to stop and he could intone a single word in a dozen ways in an effort to be understood. The professors kept him at the college for so long because, they said, he taught their students to see their clients as more than just textbook language disorders; that real people with unique personalities are underneath the disability they’d be treating out in the field.

Most widows who were caregivers to our spouses have our battle scars and war stories to tell. Some fought the revolving doors of medical clinics and treatment changes. Some witnessed the slow decline of the mind and/or the body. We caregiver veterans recognize kindred spirits and we seem to bond over being “valued and understood” in that context. I was a daughter, a sibling, an artist, a wife, a florist, and a snowplower and people everywhere understand what those labels mean but somehow summarizing the last twelve years of life with Don up with the single word of “caregiver” seems like it lacks clarity to anyone who has not-been-there-done-that. One woman who was at The Gathering talked about how the local widows group helped her with that. I had been invited by mail to join that widow's group in my first year out from Don’s death, but going meant I’d have to go through the dreaded S-Curved after dark so I passed on the opportunity.

Tuesday I was back to the senior hall for the Matter of Balance class and a luncheon where a Korean violinist entertained us with Bach and a few hard rock pieces that he arranged himself. His talks in between sonatas (or whatever they’re called) made me wish I could find a music appreciation class. That guy could make his two hundred year old instrument sing and he had a wonderful sense of humor as he answered our many questions. Someone asked how long he'd been playing and he took out his phone and said, "About ten minutes." Someone else asked if he could play The Devil Went Down to Georgia and he answered that he can play it but he won’t, adding that all violinists hate getting that request. He didn't explain why but he did explain the differences between a fiddle and a violin—the same instrument held in a different way, one featuring finger work, the other featuring bow work. Being a long-time fan of blue-grass music it wasn’t much of a stretch for me to thoroughly appreciate this solo act. Lunch and a great floor show for $6.00. It doesn’t get much better than that and he made it worthwhile to be dog tired this week. ©

I love this two minute video with its upbeat message about love, death and looking at life. If anyone knows who this guy is, please clue me in. I should know but I've been drawing a blank for days.

500 Blog Entries and Pushing Forward

For anyone who likes statistics, my last blog entry was the 500^th one that I’ve written since becoming a widow four years ago. I don’t know how to feel about that. On one hand, it's hard to be proud of something that came about because of my husband's death but on the other hand, it feels like I’ve reached a cake-and-candles worthy benchmark. Either way, this blog and the caregiver blog I kept while Don was alive both helped to keep me sane when my world was flipped off its axis. Both helped me find my sense of humor again while forging my way through some difficult challenges. And both blogs gave me a sense of purpose, that I might be helping others by exposing my journey to other caregivers or widows who could identify with its ups and downs.

Caregivers and widows have a lot in common, but society seems to judge widows with a harsher eye. With caregivers, others can see the on-going stresses and the changes in life-style and they’re often looked upon as “angels” who buck it up and do what needs to be done. But with widows others look at a calendar and at varying points along its timeline they will send out silent messages that seem to say, “Get over it, already!” Caregivers and widows both tend to feel isolated and feelings of fear, regrets and longings are kept increasingly closer to the vest. For me, being a diary keeper since I was ten, it’s second nature to unpack those feelings in a blog like this. I write mostly for myself, but I'm grateful that people have found it worth reading here from time to time, giving this blog over 224,600 unique views since I started it. For statistics junkies, like me, that averages out to about 450 views per blog entry and viewers have come from eleven countries including 6,038 from Russia of all places. I try to write around 800 words per blog which equals about 400,000 words written in this blog. The most read blog entry---a letter to my deceased husband---has 7,041 views and hopefully Don got to see it, too, where ever he is in the Great Unknown. 

Now on to my daily grind. This week my Red Hat Society Chapter went to our adopted nursing home where we make residents, who were interested, into honorary members of our group---we do a total of four events there per year plus send bags of goodies over on three holidays. Wednesday we served cookies and punch to thirty women and five guys and helped them all hot glue bling onto red visors. A few ladies were disappointed that we didn’t have bingo on the agenda this time. What is it about bingo that seems to go hand-in-hand with aging? With this group, it could be the prizes we hand out. We roll out a cart full perfumes, body creams, socks, books, etc. and it takes the winners forever to pick out their prizes. It would be fun to sneak a pair of sexy, red lace panties in with the other prizes and see what happens, but the World of Proper Decorum can be glad my actions rarely follow behind my mischievous thoughts. 

Honestly, though, it’s a good thing my chapter sisters all wear red hats when we go to the nursing home because it’s getting increasingly harder to tell us from the residents. Four of the ten of us who showed up were using canes and two couldn’t stand long enough to do much besides give moral support to those of us serving and interacting with the residents. And guess what, I finally graduated up to working at the glue gun station. Well, sort of---I only got to glue a few bouquets onto visors near the end. But that’s okay. After working twenty years in the floral industry, I don’t enjoy creativity by committee. As others debated if this flower or that one should go here or there I resisted the temptation to flaunt my two floral design school diplomas to get them to do it my way. But I didn’t do it because being right isn't as important as keeping peace in the valley and letting diplomacy be the star of the show. Mostly, I helped residents pick out their bling and ran it back to the glue station for someone else to marry it to a visor.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m never enthusiastic about going to our adopted nursing home, but my better self always shows up when I walk through the doors. I do my best to make eye contact with the residents I come in contact with and to show genuine interest in what they’re trying to say. One old guy, for example, wanted to talk about the fiddle he used to play and I told him it’s my favorite instrument to listen to. When Don and I first started dating we went to a lot of bluegrass festivals and my honorary Red Hat guy had played at a few of the venues I named. Who would have ever guessed that finding some foam rubber musical notes to hot glue onto a visor could evoke good memories for two passing strangers? But along with the good memories a hint of sadness followed. We could see it in each others eyes. And that’s why after writing 500 blog entries I still may have something to share. My memories of the past, the accomplishments of my present and my dreams for the future still come filtered through a lens known as widowhood. ©