Gone Fishing

 

Dear Mr. and Mrs.

I’m not sure we will meet at the closing or not….you know the whole COVID thing.  Just in case I
wanted you to know you bought a good house filled with amazing memories.

Thirty years ago, when we moved to Waco from little Hillsboro, we were a little overwhelmed by all the options for housing, but we kept coming back to that house on Sandalwood.  It was all blue at the time, blue carpet, blue walls, and blue curtains.  We ended up buying the blue house because it just felt right.

This house has sheltered me and mine for three decades.  When we bought this house in 1990 it was a real financial reach for us, but we did it, at my wife’s insistence.  Like so many things, she was right to insist.  She was always smarter than me.

In this house we have loved, laughed, cried happy tears, and cried sad tears.  Our children both graduated from high school, and college while Marty and I lived in this house.  We saw them both married and start their own amazing families all while the “blue house” was our home.

In this house we celebrated and loved our kids and their friends.  We had more than one big kid’s party or gathering in this house.  We loved having them over to our place, it felt safe for them and it felt safe for us.  Young people spent many nights smiling here.  There were tears and teen age loves and break ups and Halloween parties and church Xmas white elephant gift exchanges and birthdays and communions and just family.  This house sheltered all.

My wife finished her doctorate sitting in the dining room working on her dissertation all night and all day.  She sat and played the piano in our living room for hours at a time.  It was her refuge and my opportunity to sing off key and loud. 

Eventually she had both of her strokes in that same living room.

The “blue house” has long since transitioned to different colors with different carpet and different floors.  Our children left and moved on and we added a continuous flow of caregivers, nurses, and therapists to the list of house guests.  Some of those guests became so familiar to us they became family and this house sheltered and cared for them too.

Luckily, the house on Sandalwood evolved very nicely and provided a perfect place for Marty, my wife, to live.  She was in a wheelchair for 14 years and the house worked perfectly.  Little did we know when we originally bought that blue house it would become our refuge from the intensity of chronic care.

This is where we did that, this is where we lived through the midnight ambulance rides, the evening rushes to the hospital and the natural fears of a stroke patient.  Despite the strokes, we eventually began to find ways to laugh and smile and cry and live a full life.  Marty even started playing that little piano again. 

This house, made of brick, wood, metal and wire, was our shelter against all the storms raging around us.

John Denver wrote and sang a song, “This Old Guitar”.  He sings, “It opened up the space for us to be
What a lovely place and a lovely space to be.”  He wasn’t singing about our home, but it fits perfectly for how I feel about this house.  It was the perfect place for us to be for the last years of Marty’s life.  Being in this familiar space gave comfort to me and my family as Marty found another way of being on May 7, 2019.

It feels like it’s the right time for me to walk a new trail.  I’m happy we lived here; it was simply the right house at the right time in our lives.  I hope you have the same feeling for years to come as you fill it with new memories, with new laughter, new smiles, new tears, new life. 

And yes, you will learn how to 3 point turn out of the garage, or you will knock down the fence.  It’s been done before.

Caregving Upheaval

It was our first Christmas with our first born, Matthew.  We were in Dalhart Texas some 600 miles from our fairly new home in Paris Texas.  Matt was only 3 months old and Marty took the call from our new nanny in Paris.  The news was bad, catastrophic, as any new working parent can understand; the sitter wasn’t going to be able to keep Matt anymore due to some health issues.  Christmas was turned on its head as we tried to figure out child care for our new born baby.

We are going through a similar upheaval with our current caregivers, only this time I’m the one dealing with it.  I suppose its a little payback for that Christmas years ago when Marty took the brunt of the responsibility.

We have four caregivers.  Two, Renea and Nykkie, who are sisters, have been with us over seven years.  They have been with us from the start of this odyssey.  That’s really pretty remarkably in the care giving business.  We have two more, one, Erica, has been with us over three years and the last, another Renee, has been around almost two years.  

When you have to trust the life of your loved one to other people, when you have other people essentially living in your house with you, continuity and consistency are a God send. We have been lucky.

Renea recently finished her PhD in psychology and not so remarkably is going out in the world to ply her new trade for much better compensation.  Marty and I are very happy sad about this.  Renea came to our house when we were in turmoil trying to find our way in our new life.  I needed someone I could trust, I needed someone who I knew would be there to help me, we found Renea and she brought a sense of calm to my life.

 Nykkie has been with us for two stints but is the one who has been working all day most days for the last five years.  She loves Marty, she loves our family, she is a constant in our lives and is like our 2^nd daughter.  Dr. Renea has inspired sister Nykkie to go back to school to get her RN.  She must now work nights only to go through a compressed and rigorous nursing program, more happy sad times for Marty and husband.  

It’s an upheaval.

I have always jealously guarded my personal space.  Its uncomfortable having someone in your home with you 24 hours a day, it makes it hard to run to the fridge in the middle of the night in your boxer briefs.  You have to learn when and how to do that, it takes time to acclimate yourself to the extra body.  Having someone there that you know, that sat in hospital rooms with you,  has held your wife’s hand as she went through difficult procedures, that has given you the confidence you are doing the right things is incalculably valuable.  

Changing all of this, changing the personalities, changing the guard is a big deal.

I don’t mean to intimate that it is the same as losing child care when you desperately need it.  I can cover with Marty, I don’t have to leave the house to work, I can do all of the things the caregivers do, I just can’t do it all of the time and have any ability to take care of the rest of life.  Caring for Marty is not a one person task…it just isn’t.  

Renea, Nykkie, Erica and Renee do more than just watch and bathe.  They are the buffer to my frustration with our life’s situation and keep me in check and they are the people who do the dirty work every day every hour work with Marty.  They spare me, they save Marty.

It’s a big deal when we have a defection.  We have kissed a lot of caregivers to find the four princesses we now have and I’m not sure I’m up to kissing that many new faces to find another keeper.

Fortunately, we have found a cousin to Erica, LaShonda, who just completed her first work week with us.  She came to work, she was cheerful, she was careful, she was on time and she didn’t scare Marty.  She appears to be a keeper.

All the same, it takes time, energy, effort and repetition for all of us to start to establish the kind of trust I(we) need for this to be truly successful.  It will take us days of being with La Shonda, it will take weeks of working with La Shonda and weeks of dealing with Nykkie’s new night schedule to get to a place of comfort and trust.  

Life moves on, people, people you love and cherish, come into your life move on and do different and better things.  We learned from Renea, we will continue to learn from Nykkie and Renee and Erica and now La Shonda.  

We will continue our life with this company of people, people who never would have been in our lives if not for Marty and her journey.  It’s funny how love for strangers can come to you.