Ten Minute Missive

My neighbor is dying.

Actually, they all are, but he knows his death is coming sooner than later. It is terribly sad, a young man and father dying of a brain tumor.

I bumped into him at the grocery store last week and this morning, as I wheeled my cart past where we’d stopped and chatted, I thought about him, our conversation, and hostas.

You see, as much as this young man is my neighbor, before last week, I’d never spoken to him. Not once. He lives a street over and a few blocks south of me and our paths simply never crossed before. His kids go to the schools my kids have attended – his oldest is a year behind my Middlest at school, and I run or walk past his house every day.

And yet I’d never met him. Then, a few months ago people started talking about him. His blog started being posted and reposted on my FB page, Middlest started talking about this little boy in her school who’s dad is dying.

Lives, crossing paths.

I was at the grocery store with Littlest. My neighbor was with his four year old. Littlest was happily distracted with a game on the iPod. As I reached in the case for a tub of hummus, I watched my neighbor try to heft a gallon of milk into his handicap scooter with his little girl’s help. As he adjusted the pile of things in the basket, she skipped away, attention caught by the kiosk of animal cards across the aisle.

My own kids pull away from me to spin that kiosk, reading each and every card that catches their fancy. Dogs in birthday hats, a frog in sunglasses, a cat with an orange-peel helmet. In my world, that kiosk is a source of frustration as I have to read card after card that one or both kids thinks is “awesome Mom!” and then put them back away correctly.

So I stood there, hands on my cart, wondering what I should do.

Obviously, here is a man in poor health. He’s having a bit of trouble getting the gallon of milk in the basket without setting it on the bananas. And his daughter is behind him, oblivious to all the strangers who could so easily whisk her away. I didn’t want to step on toes, to offer unwanted help, to create tension where there might be none. So I hesitated.

And then the milk found its place away from the bananas and she ran up to him to show off the “awesome Dad!” card gripped in her fist.

I turned my cart around and went on with my list.

But then, next to the cereal and boxes of granola bars, he appeared. I was deep into the ingredient list of two different granola bars and fielding advice from Littlest over what sounded best and what on earth would Biggest most likely eat, when my neighbor purred up behind me and reached for a box of granola bars. I was in his way and murmured all the appropriate things.

“I see you’ve got some hostas. You know, if you want any more, feel free to come by my house and get some. I won’t be needing any of mine anymore,” he said, nodding to my cart with four hostas tucked between Littlest and the cart.

It was the start of a lovely conversation about gardening and making plans and living what matters. And it was a conversation that was steeped in death.

As I wheeled back down the cereal aisle today, grabbing a box of Life cereal for Biggest, I thought about my neighbor’s words.

He is a kind man. The kind of kind man we hate to see die young. I am saddened by the thought of his wife and kids saying goodbye to him that very last time.

And yet, perhaps he is the lucky one.

His daughter knows no man more strong or amazing or handsome.

His son knows no man more courageous or protective.

His wife knows no man who loves her more.

My neighbor will die at the prime of his life but he will have all his loved ones surrounding him for that last goodbye.

He won’t die alone, forgotten in a nursing home. He won’t die a broken shell of the dreamer he once was. He won’t die in vain.

He will die, years before his loved ones are ready for him to go and because cancer found him, but surrounded by examples of all the goodness he brought into this world.

We are all dying. Every one of us is here but for a short time really.

I wonder how my own death will come about. Will I be left behind and forgotten, an elderly shell of what and who I once was? Will it be over in an instant? Will it be lingering?

I cannot control the end. But I can control the now. So I hope to do more of  what my neighbor did last week in the grocery store.

He looked around for his daughter. I saw his face wrinkle with concern and then smooth when he found her. And then he turned that motorized handicapped scooter around and rolled up to her. He pulled her onto his lap and then proceeded to read all the cards with her.

He knows he won’t get many tomorrows. So he is filling up each of his todays with as much as he can.

And he is offering strangers his perennials, so that he will live on, in gardens all over our neighborhood.

That’s the trouble with dying…too many leave without leaving a trace, with the todays empty because preparing for the tomorrows took precedent.

This beauty just opened yesterday. So lovely!

It’s that time of year here in the northwest when the flowers and trees are going crazy at a pace matched only by the allergy sufferer’s running eyes and noses. All the stores have their spring flowers out and the remaining hanging baskets from the Mother’s Day bonanza fill the shops. It is a torrent of color and wonderful smells. It pleases me. This time of year always fills me with hopefulness and that great possibility of the what if.

Yes, I love gardening.

Or, to be more honest, I love creating a garden.

There is something calming to my way of thinking when you take a piece of land in wild disarray and turn it into something of beauty. Perhaps you’ve tilled it into a vegetable garden, or sown wildflowers via seed bombs. Or perhaps you’ve weeded a flower bed of the plants choking out the flowers. No matter what, you have created something you find beautiful.

When I bought my first house, I spent many hours one summer turning the square lawn into a space with gently curving flower beds filled with perennials planted with height, color, and bloom times all taken into account and mapped out. (Jenny, if you are reading this, sorry I ignored you while I was toiling away in my garden beds. I suck.) It was hard work under that Minnesotan sun to turn a thirty-year old lawn into sculpted flower beds, but the potential for color and texture and scents was worth it.

Years laters we sold that house and I presented my accurate and to-scale maps of the front and back yards to the new owner who’s eyes glazed over. Finally I stopped yammering on about how the lilies would bloom at the precise time to best complement the bush in the opposite corner and simply asked her to water them.

Thousands of hours of labor and dollars in bulbs and plants, left in the hands of the uninitiated and uninterested.

Now I’m in my third home and I’m back to standing, hand on shovel and pondering xeriscapes. But now my interests lie more in the direction of creating order. Lasting order.

Because now as much as I still want color and texture and scents, and butterflies and hummingbirds, I don’t have the luxury of the time it takes to maintain that kind of garden. So all the bulbs I carefully moved from one area of my yard to another and which grow badly in their new spot…all getting ripped out and given away. In their place, hard to kill and requiring very little attention hostas.

I was collecting newspapers in preparation for this huge project and got thinking about my current love-hate relationship with gardening. As much as I love the act of gardening, the act of creating beauty, I hate maintaining that beautiful garden. My gardens, flower and vegetable alike, serve as reminders of my life: excitement and enthusiasm worn down by the daily drudgery of it all.

I simply cannot maintain things in a way I want. And by things, I mean not just the gardens around my house but the things within my house. In fact, I mean the things even in my own head.

There is so much potential for beauty and bounty within me, but it’s all in danger of being choked out by the weeds that exist within me as well.

So what’s this girl to do? Do I rip it all out and plant only hostas? Or do I embrace the weeds as hardy perennials and mourn the deaths of my more high-maintenance but beautiful plants? I’ve already stopped performing stand-up to focus on writing, but is writing any more hardy than comedy? Do I shrug my shoulders and put all those creative outlets aside until I’m no longer the parent to three young children? The garden in my mind needs a balance between bloom times!

For now, I’m hoping some hard work, back bent beneath the hot northwestern sun, will cultivate not just more tidy gardens but to-scale maps for a long term plan.

For I am a garden, inside and out, begging for tending. I am filled with hopefulness and the possibility of what if. I am a newly bloomed rose bud that will unfurl and then fade away but be breathtaking at least for a day.

I like to be reminded that the world is a mysterious place and its inhabitants are just as mysterious. It seems to be a given. Mind you, I like that reminder to be positive and leave me filled with happy-happy-joy-joy but another given is that those reminders come in all sorts of ways. This past weekend I was reminded, in both joyful and tearful ways, of the mysteries of life.

As folks in the United States know, it was Mother’s Day on Sunday. I had a lovely day with my absolutely favorite four people in this world and that was a lovely gift in and of itself. And then last night, I ran across a link that stopped me for a bit. The story broke of the “Elephant Whisperer” Lawrence Anthony’s death and the apparent mourning of his death by the elephants he fought to protect. The article does a nice job of giving the history of Anthony’s work with the elephants as well as the mystery of how they knew he had died.

I love the times when we recognize that there is much more at work in this world than what we put into motion. Yes, we may have those nifty opposable thumbs and all those other perks to being the type of mammals that we are. However, I think we too easily overlook something powerful just because we can oppose those thumbs of ours.

We are all connected.

I visualize that connection as if all lives on this planet are connected to one another, much like how we can see the root system of a strawberry plant connecting plant after plant after plant. All individual plants and yet all connected by stolons. (In case you are curious, these new plants are actually clones of the original plant.)

Yes, I realize I’m a bit of a softy and I also look for reasons to support my life-long-held belief that all life is connected. But over and over I have found that the ripples of one life are destined to impact other lives. If you are open to seeing the ways we are all connected, you will see those connections. So when I read about elephants traveling miles to suddenly show up at the home of a man that cared for them, I see that as the powerful energy in the cosmos reaching them across their version of the strawberry’s stolon.

Most people I know admit to having some experience where (s)he has felt an odd connection to another person and acted upon it. Perhaps he felt a family member was with him in spite of that family member’s recent death. Or perhaps she reunited with a long-ago relationship because of a dream. In my case (well, one of many), I woke up one morning with a strong need to phone my grandmother. She was dying of throat cancer at the time and I “knew” I needed to talk to her that day. She died not long after that. Experiences such as those remind me that we are all connected at a deeper level even though we often do not act upon those connections.

But in our day-to-day lives we feel those connections as well. We are pulled to other people; we are pulled to connect with other people. Those connections lift us up and help us through our rough patches.

I recently got word that a dear little boy is facing some potential health concerns. Living in the technological era that we do, his mama texted me. I was so thankful I always have my phone on and usually on my person. I spent this morning with her and her sweet boy and was reminded how much I value the connection there – two moms who worry over their babies.

While I spent my Mother’s Day with my happy and fairly healthy kids, she had spent her first Mother’s Day in the hospital. I smiled and laughed several times yesterday. She cried.

This morning, my heart felt so heavy for her.

And yet, I find peace in my heavy heart. Because without it I would have no proof of the connection I have to her. Like elephants traveling the distance, we humans also feel for one another and because of one another.

When I told Littlest that I was going to go be with my friend and her baby this morning, he reminded me of what he had said when I first got the news. “Mama, I will hold him in my heart.”

Which is where we hold all our loved ones, including the ones we love as part of our larger family. We hold them in our hearts and in our thoughts.

They say that elephants have long memories…let it be the same for all of us as well.

Last fall when I dragged my sagging hiney to the eye doctor, I fully expected to be prescribed a pair of reading glasses. Or, to put it another way, I entered the building and wailed, “My eyes are broke, my eyes are broke!” Instead, my contacts prescription moved a bit closer to the “oh my gods you are visually impaired!” and I missed out on getting a pair of glasses hanging around my neck on a beaded chain.

Now I know, I should be rejoicing in this last gasp of youthfulness that my still-unadorned neck gives me. But I can’t. Because I’d totally rock that “reading glasses as an accessory” look more than what I’ve got going on right now.

Because what I’ve got now are…wrinkles.

Read more…

There is a magical collection of milestones people like me amass. They provide testimony of time’s passage and the gifts of that time. For me, that collection includes many, many Ziplock bags of teeth. Those plastic land-fill-unfriendly bags containing bits of enamel and DNA will outlast me and any baby book I may have intended to complete. What I hope for is that the once holders of those teeth outlast me too.

Littlest lost his first tooth the other night. It’s been wiggly for days now, perhaps a bit more than a week.

Wiggly. Like five year olds with their first loose tooth.

Read more…