Bad Choices

 Choices.  We all face them.  You get information, you analyze said information, you decide, you live with the decision.  Sometimes those choice are easy, sometimes maybe not.  That’s life. 

Marty and I, like all of you, sometimes got to choose between hitting our thumb with a big ol hammer, or the other choice, hitting our thumb with a hammer, harder.  Living life, sometimes our choices simply suck and either way you turn your thumb is going to hurt.

As a not so young white male growing up in middle class America I admit, I was a bit shocked when I discovered that sometimes, reality hits, and we discover not all the choices we face are good choices.  I was surprised to learn that sometimes you are forced to pick things that you don’t particularly like. 

To top it off, in too many cases, not choosing is not a choice. We run into the rock and the hard place and must pick one of them to continue existing.  Sometimes you just have suck it up and act.  As one of my smart bosses once explained to me after I complained about some inane nonsense to her, “Grieve and get over it,”.

About 3 years into my journey with Marty, while in the hospital for a routine infection, Marty had a bad seizure and broke her right arm, her good strong right arm, the arm not affected by the stroke, the arm she used for everything from support when standing to eating and drinking, you know, the little thing.

We sat in the hospital with two choices, surgery to repair the shattered bone or do nothing and let the arm heel with some level of disability in that arm.  Both choices were clear, both choices sucked big time.

I, we, talked to each other, we talked to Marty’s doctor and the Orthopedic guy we hadn’t seen before the break.  We talked to our kids, we talked to friends, we did pros and cons, we thought, we mulled, we cogitated, there were no good choices, none.  It seemed wrong to make the intentional decision to NOT heal a broken wing.  It was frightening to think we would decide to have Marty undergo surgery and all the associated risks for an unknown result.

We sucked it up and made the decision to not do anything, it wasn’t the best choice, there wasn’t a best choice, it was pick one and live with it.

“Grieve and get over it.”

Did we make the correct choice?  I don’t know.   Marty’s life was not jeopardized by anesthesia and invasive surgery, she did not have to go through the pain of recovery, and she did not face possible deadly infections.  She did have to endure somewhat limited movement in her arm.  That was the choice; it’s the choice we made; it was a choice she lived with daily. 

We, all of us, are consistently confronted with choices, some good, some bad, some awful.  Sometimes, often, we are confronted with a Hobson's choice, we don’t really get a choice; we pick the only real option open to us.  It really is indicative of life, sometimes it all amounts to making the best of what is.

Marty did not get to choose the last 14 years of her life, but she did make a conscious choice to live the best life she, we could.  Life is not about easy choices or even good choices, but it is about choosing.

 

 

 

A Ripple

t’s a ripple. Drop a rock in the water and the texture of the water changes, it moves in mini waves, pushing out to the world in ways you never really see.

You never know. You never really know the effect those ripples make as they go out and touch different people and places.

Marty and I were hard to miss. A big old guy with long messy hair pushing a woman in a wheelchair into a store, a restaurant, a doctor’s office or just walking going down the street; we stuck out everywhere we went and both of us became accustomed to being the anomaly.

I know we touched lives; I know I met people I would never have known before Marty had her strokes. We made big ripples just by being.

We had five or six caregivers who we would have never met. Each of them changed our lives, made us more aware, made us more understanding, made us more grateful for the people around us.

We changed them too. They saw us, they got to know us, they felt the grace my bride gave to all who came in her orbit.

Ripples

We met a server in TGIFridays who insisted she wait on us wherever we sat. We went once a week and ordered the same thing every time. The server liked seeing Marty, her caregiver, and me. She liked talking to us and hearing about how we were living life. It made her feel good, which always made me feel good.

There was the cashier at the Hollywood Jewell we would see every Wednesday. We went once a week, and she was there like clockwork giving discounted tickets and filling our concession stand order. It helps to be a regular. She got to see us living and developed and affection for us. Helping us made her feel good, I know it made me feel good.

Even the broken make ripples, maybe, especially the broken make ripples.

When Marty had to have major dental work, I talked a lot with their office manager and she treated us like royalty. She was so kind, and I think helping us, seeing us, knowing us made her feel good, that made me feel good. Our life, Marty’s courage, my love, our caregiver’s compassion touched her life.

Ripples we create.

I’ve told this story before, if you’ve heard just sit back and know I enjoy telling it. I tell it repeatedly because of the ripple I felt years ago.

Our oldest, back before the turn of the century, was hit in the leg with a discus at school. That wasn’t a problem, the ensuing infection was a huge problem. It was my first brush with my kid being very sick. I don’t imagine I managed it all very well, but Matt, Erin and I had Marty and she knew exactly how to handle the crises.

Matt was in the hospital a couple of times trying to tame the infection going through major surgery and a lot of antibiotics. My boy was bad sick, and we kept hitting wall after wall.

I was home one afternoon after spending time at the hospital and being told the stay would have to be longer than we thought. I was angry and totally depressed at the same time. Sherry Johnson, the true better half of Rev Jimmie and Sherry Johnson, called. We talked, I explained, and she said very simply, “You are loved.”  It was a seminal moment in my life, loved at the right time.

Ripples.

The point is, taking care of others, you get to see the love, you get to feel it and those ripples nourish body and soul. Those ripples make everything possible.

Struggles with Being Part of the Human Race

 

I have in the recent past, in a massive oversimplification, compared the vagaries of life and caregiving to a river.

The imagery is perfect, life is the river and the world with all its people, is moving down the river at various speeds and depths. When you become a caregiver or a care receiver it feels like you are forced out of the river as the water and people continue to roll on without you.

You watch as family members, friends, colleagues, acquaintances continue to ride the river past where you and your cared for pulled off to live a separate life from the rest of the world.

There comes a time when you, as a caregiver or ex-caregiver, start to shove your boat back in the river. Your boat has been beached for a while, so it’s stuck in the bank, and you have to use extra energy to even get it started moving into the river. 

You push off, jump in and start rowing to the middle of the water only to find, after straining with all you have to get there, it seems way too busy and overwhelming for your new entry so you veer off to the side and start drifting because you are scared of the speed and the chaos and you are exhausted because you haven’t used those rowing muscles in years.  You just sit there and drift until your energy, your confidence, your social skills start to revive.

And then of course we have a pandemic.

The pandemic gave, gives a perfect solution to the energy suck of being in the middle of the river with and talking with other people. Covid is the perfect excuse not to get in the deep end, you can’t because you are being a responsible citizen and quarantining. So, you take your little dinghy and put it into the shallowest, slowest moving part of the river and sit, content to ride along watching as the world keeps moving.

It’s taken me a couple of years to figure out what I’m doing. That’s where I miss Marty the psychologist, she would have had me diagnosed and fixed me in a week.

When you are caring for someone in an intense chronic illness situation caring becomes your single focus. Good, bad, indifferent, it just works that way, that’s where all your attention is and belongs. You don’t really socialize outside of very close friends and family, and you certainly don’t accept any obligations that might run afoul of your caregiving duties. You are singularly focused.

Now that I’m back to getting my feet wet and feeling the spray of the water I often find myself feeling a little out of sync and more than a little awkward around rooms of people. I am completely out of shape and out of practice when it comes to interacting and playing well with others.

I’m not a complete idiot, I know not to burp in public, I know which fork to use, but my ability to hold meaningful conversations with people is not great. I don’t have my A or B game, I’m clearly out of practice and to improve I must work those muscles but there’s a whole commitment thing I struggle with, and life is a lot easier if I don’t challenge myself.

Status quo anyone?

That’s where I am. I can sit out at the lake, not asking others to visit and not going anywhere and feel mostly contented. People, and I’m one of those, are pack animals, we need to be engaged with others, I need to be out, I need to be engaging, I need to be open and unafraid to make mistakes.

I would never claim to speak for other people who find themselves in an intense caregiving situation for a long time. These peccadillos may not affect others like it has me. Heck, I didn’t know I was struggling with this stuff for two years.

My guess is, like a lot of things caregivers deal with, this out of shape, out of step, out of the know feeling happens to many. I suspect Covid has exacerbated the whole thing by giving us a convenient excuse not to push ourselves into uncomfortable situations. Somehow we gotta get out there, see and touch real people and start to learn again how to relate to others out of our caregiving role.

It took me a while but with self-reflection and Marty whispering in my ear beyond the grave, it’s clear I need to focus energy on getting back in the river.

I’ll let you know when I figure out how to do that.

Best Parts of Me

 

Not long ago my 93-year-old parents came to visit me at the lake.    My 93-year-old parents got into their car in Mansfield and drove themselves the hour and a half to my home at the lake. 

Personally, I think that’s kind of amazing. 

We ate lunch, talked, and looked at really old pictures for about three hours.  It was the best, watching and listening to my folks remember and try to remember the who, what, when and where of their young lives.

It was a great day.

My father is an engineer and worked for a large utility company making all that wonderful electricity we use.  I grew up in company homes adjacent to power plants in what we called the village.  Those homes are my memory of….home.  Those homes are all gone now.

They were removed a long time ago and I wanted to see pictures to see if my memory came even close to aligning with reality. I had asked my dad if he had any pictures of any of our old houses and he presented me with two boxes of photos in chronological order for the years 1950 to 1980. 

We looked at a lot of those pictures, mostly from the early 50’s, as in 1950’s, as in a long time ago.

I loved watching them remember, debate, and argue about who that was and where that happened only to finally agree it might not have been either of the people they thought.  It’s a gift to see them talk about who they were before they were my mother and father.  It’s a gift to see them as more than parents but real actual people with real actual histories.

My mother for instance, apparently had other boyfriends and went to dances and parties and all kinds of stuff.

Mom has fought macular degeneration for the last 20 years and is to the point she can’t see much anymore, even with a magnifying glass.  What’s bad is she was and is very visually oriented, she has curiosity and wants to see what that thing is in the back.  Her persistence in living and playing through all of that is just one of the amazing things about Bettye Lou.

BL was born a Yankee in Illinois but made it to Texas and she is now will always be a Texas girl. 

She (a BL quote, she has always been very quotable and I have a lot of my mother said stories, any way Mom would say, “My name is not she, use my real name.”) Mom, Bettye not she is, in the highly competitive world of Texas mothers, a top tier Mom. 

Never, not one time, have I ever felt not loved and valued.  Never, not one time, have I ever worried about my mother not accepting me.  And as hard as it is to believe when you see me today a calm cool dude there have been times in my life I have been decidedly unlovable and not very likeable.  I had sullen teenager down to an art.  But I knew my mother would never stop loving me.  That’s a remarkable thing to have in your corner when you are being unlovable.

This good woman used to go with her family of five in a small blue Mobil Scout travel trailer all over the Rockies.  Five of us, in a trailer or a car for two weeks.  Can you imagine the smells, the complaining, the arguing?  And that was just me.

Yet, somehow I remember those trips as fun and because I had the narrow vision of a child I don’t remember all of the work getting those trips together.  I just remember seeing every Indian dwelling in New Mexico and Colorado and seeing The Sound of Music somewhere in Colorado.

This is the woman who typed all my high school papers on her old manual typewriter.  She was my spell check and grammar check.  Imagine typing a research paper with footnotes on a manual typewriter in the middle of the night because the author procrastinated until the last minute. 

IBID baby.

Mom could and did get mad about this kind of stuff.  But I never, not once, worried about being loved.  In fact, that occasional anger, the irregular eruptions of emotions, taught me how to curse eloquently and gave me tools for my own marriage.  It’s okay to get mad and stomp and yell because love, a mother’s love, this mother’s love never, not once waned. 

My senior year in high school my father was transferred to Fort Worth.  My parents let me stay home In Colorado City to graduate.  It was a sacrifice for both.  My dad was awarded the most loyal fan for driving from Fort Worth to all the football games of a pretty bad football team.  My mother was at all those games, and all the baseball games and PTA meetings and plays and concerts and on and on and on. 

My mother was there.

She, Bettye Lou my mother, was there when I cried, when I had a post puberty case of the mumps, when I fell in love, when I got my heart broken, when I needed to suck it up, when I needed to learn to cook, when I learned how to iron, how to do laundry, how to live, how to understand others views, how to accept differences and most importantly how to love. 

I took that one to heart, my ironing pretty much sucks.

Mom is the one who says, from time to time, “We really need Marty here”, when something happens where Marty’s expertise or her brazenness or her intelligence would have been helpful.  It happens a lot.  My mother remembers my wife. It’s a small thing but those thoughts, her remembering Marty with love and admiration makes me happy and reminds me her love extends beyond the here and now.

Every now and then when I say something odd or a tad bit controversial (translate I talk like a democrat) Bettye will look at me and say, “Where did you come from?”.  She just can’t see how I got where I am.

That one  is easy.  I came from her.  I am my mother’s son. 

She taught me all the good stuff.  The stuff you need to know to love and be loved, she taught me to care and be concerned for others and most importantly she taught me that all of us, all of us are the same, we are just regular people.  She taught me the importance and value of basic fairness, she taught me not to be afraid of life, she taught me to love God, to never fear God. 

Truth is my mother taught me the best parts of who I am today.  And I kind of like who I am today.

Thanks Mom……and you know what, I will always love you, that’s what you taught me.