Why, God? Just tell me why.

A dear friend of mine is dealing with a serious health problem. When she talks about it, I can feel the pain and panic in her voice. It's all too familiar to me.

 

I don't know how to fix it for her any more than I know how to fix my own health problems. I feel extremely fortunate to have achieved the level of functioning I have now. And even now, the specters of more pain and more disabilities lurk around every corner.

 

I wish I could wave my magic wand over my friend. I hate to see her in so much distress. She is such a good and smart and capable and funny and special person. It's just not fair that she should have to carry these  complicated and heavy emotional and psychological and physical burdens. Sometimes I want to ask God, "Why are you letting this happen? Just tell me why."

The Healing Process

Many years ago, a mental health provider advised me to "trust the healing process." In other words, go with the flow. That advice made me want to scream, and it still annoys me. I've been trying to analyze and solve my own and other peoples' problems, and second guessing what other people are thinking and what they want from me, for about 30 years. It hasn't worked well for me. I need a road map for the healing journey. I want it all spelled out, chapter and verse, with detailed instructions and guaranteed results. Although I do know that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I still struggle with this matter of trust. I suspect that this is one of the lessons God wants me to learn in this life. The problem is, I've already used up 60 years of that life. The fewer days I have left, the more precious they become. I clearly need to work harder on this. Or maybe not work on it all...

Immortal

Until I turned 50, I never had a sense of my own mortality. My elderly mother had been reminding me that she wasn’t going to live forever, but somehow I thought that she and I were both immortal despite the fact that I was morbidly obese and troubled by a host of health problems. I had undergone more surgeries, medical procedures and treatments, and taken more prescription medication, than my mother had in her entire life.

In the years that followed that milestone birthday, I lost a lot: my job, my 90-year-old mother, 100 pounds and my old lifestyle. At the same time, I learned there is truth in the old saying, “You’re only as old as you feel.” That truth wasn’t always rejuvenating. I often felt lost and confused. I had attained an age that was unimaginable to me as a 20-year-old. Other than perfunctory contributions to 401K and IRA funds, as a young woman I had made no plans for my middle and later years. That might be just as well, because in truth, my expectations for myself at age 20 were far smaller than my expectations are now, as I hover on the edge of my 60^th birthday.

A few years ago I told a young coworker that I was 56 years old. Now I don’t remember why I shared that information with him, but I hope I never forget Garrett’s response: “You are not 56!”

I offered to show him my driver’s license. He shook his head and said, “You don’t act like you’re 56.”

Although for much of my life my mother had admonished me to act my age, I took Garrett’s comment as a compliment. One benefit of being 50+ is that I care a lot less about what other people think of me, not because I want to act outrageously but because I want to be true to myself, because I trust myself enough now to worry less about the mistakes I might make, and because I know I will learn from them as they happen.

Friends, family, and business associates who’ve known me for 10, 20, 30 years tell me they’ve been surprised by my new lifestyle. I shut the door on a high-paying, high-stress, mostly sedentary business career that sent me all over the globe as I worked 70- to 80-hour weeks and ate myself into obesity. I joined a fitness center; took a low-paying, lower-stress, part-time retail job; wrote and published five books; and recently joined the board of directors of OutsideIN, a new non-profit business that provides jobs and training for chronically unemployed workers who rely heavily on public resources for their survival.

My non-profit work pays me not in monetary income but in what Mom used to call spiritual income. Although we welcome volunteers of any age, I believe I have far more to offer now, at 50+, than I did in my youth. It’s work that draws on all my past work experience and allows me to use my unique talents, some of which had lain dormant for decades. It also requires me to stretch and learn new things. I’m especially happy about that because I believe that the moment we stop learning is the moment we’re ready to go home forever.

The photo below shows me at the fitness studio wearing a favorite t-shirt. Its imprint describes my new identity at 50+ years. One of the most surprising things about being 50+ is that I’ve evolved from being a fearful, pessimistic Miss Rainy Day, to an upbeat, optimistic Little Miss Sunshine. Even as the aging process challenges me, often slows me, and sometimes pains me, I wake up every morning eager for the new day. Perhaps time is becoming more precious to me as my fund of new days dwindles, but for now I’m going to go on believing that I’m immortal.

A Civil Tongue

Mom's response to an argumentative child or a growling dog was, "Keep a civil tongue in your head."  Proper and civil language usage was of paramount importance to her. She would tolerate my career choice of, say, streetwalker, more easily than my desecration of the English language (that's not to say she'd be happy about the career choice, of course).

When I left home at 17 and moved to Great Britain, I sent long letters (written in the combination of English and French that I favored at the time) home describing my new life there.  Mom saved them all and gave them back to me 20 years later with the instruction to turn them into a book.  I dug into the box of letters eagerly, hoping for a glimpse of a younger, more idealistic Jean, and discovered that Mom had corrected my spelling and grammar with her English teacher's red pen.  I would have been offended by that at 17, but at 37, I had to laugh.

At other times, though, Mom's own civil but razor sharp tongue made me wince.  While she was teaching a good-natured friend of mine to sew, I cringed to hear her say, "Don't ask stupid questions.  I only want to hear intelligent ones."

Decades later, I too often open my mouth and hear my mother’s voice come out of it, shooting words like arrows straight to the heart of the target.

Mother's Day

Mother's Day is 2 days away, and I have very mixed feelings about that.

I'm on my way north to make almost-Mother's-Day visits with my mom's college roommate in CT and her sister in NH, and I'm happy about that, but most of the time I feel bereft because both my parents have passed away and I'm an orphan of sorts.

I spent some time this morning window-shopping in historic Winchester, VA's pedestrian mall. Lots of interesting things to see and perhaps buy, especially in a shop featuring gifts, jewelry and accessories made by local artists. I made myself walk out of there because I feel too poor (financially, anyway) to make a single purchase in a shop like that.

I bought myself a coffee and sat down on an iron park bench to enjoy the mild weather and think carefully about what nifty gifty I could buy as a souvenir of this trip. Almost immediately, an elderly, almost-blind, one-legged woman in a motorized cart zoomed up to me and we began to chat. Like so many of the old ladies I deal with at work, Miss Elizabeth is lonely and feels neglected by her family and erstwhile friends, who rarely find the time to visit her. She was vehemently against a Mother's Day get together. She hates the way families take out their old mothers to restaurants and show them off for a few hours before taking them back to whatever lonely place they spend their solitary days.

That's a sad story to hear, but when Miss Elizabeth and I parted company, I shook her hand and told her she had made my day. Not only does she share my own mother's Christian name, she is also a feisty and interesting person. I have to believe that God sent me to sit on that bench so that I could appreciate something I might otherwise have missed in my pursuit of worldly goods. I can't afford to buy $100 worth of pretty handmade jewelry, but I got a priceless Mother's Day gift instead. I got to connect with my own mom via Miss Elizabeth Marshall.

The funny part of this story is that I walked around the block in order to take a different route back to my hotel, and ran into Miss Elizabeth again. She was sitting in the sun smoking a cigarette. I laughed and said, "I can't get away from you!", squeezed her hand and enjoyed the big smile on her face.

LAME

I called my maternal grandmother "Dranny", apparently because I couldn't make the correct "Gr" sound when I was a tiny tot. This set a precedent not only for my younger brother but for the whole family. A family that was well-accustomed to phonetic naming long before I arrived. My mother's younger sister is named Frances, but because Mom couldn't produce the "Fr" sound, my favorite aunt became "Tantis" and later "Tanis". She's 90 years old now and still answers to Tanis. A person and a name I love so well that I wish I'd had a daughter so I could name her Tanis.

But back to Dranny. One of my earlier memories of her is watching her rise from a seated position as she grimaced and groaned, "I'm so lame."

That's not lame in its modern sense of being useless and ineffectual, though there are elements of that sense in what Dranny said. What she meant was, "I'm so lame, so stiff, so painful."

Sad to say, at age 59, I now understand what Dranny was saying. It's important to know that she worked as a private duty nurse into her late 70's, taking care of patients she called old ladies even when she was in some senses an old lady herself. Dranny wasn't a cry baby. Well, she might have cried, but she did it while she was soldiering on in a way that would be incomprehensible in a time when able-bodied people clamor for disability income while doing one-armed push-ups on the sidewalk outside the Social Security office.

The saddest part is that I struggle so much to push my aging body through things that seemed easy to me only 5 years ago. When I get up after sitting for more than 10-15 minutes, I hurt whether I move slowly or quickly. When I bend or stoop to pick something up off the floor, rising again is a struggle because it makes me dizzy and it makes my whole body strain. I can't imagine how I would do that kind of thing now if I hadn't lost 98 pounds since September 2007. For the first time I understand why it took my mother forever to climb up the 3 shallow steps to our porch and one more step into the house. I'm lame. I hurt. As I told a friend the other day, I feel that I'm losing ground every single day. And I'm only 59 years old. I exercise for 45 minutes a day, 5 days a week, and I work a job that requires me to move and forbids me to sit for 5 or more hours at a time. But every day when my hips complain about moves that were easy a year ago, I have to choke back tears. I wasted decades on obesity and immobility. Now I'm a healthy weight, but much of the time I don't feel healthy. I yearn to make up for lost time, but I'm not sure how I'll do that now. Because I feel lame, and I fear that I am lame.

LOSS & INCONTINENCE

At the moment, we have 11 dogs and 3 cats. Nine of those dogs spend time inside the house; the others (who are just too big) are outside dogs. The oldest of them is our French bulldog, Georgie. He is 13 years old and aging fast. He often seems lost and confused (and no wonder, with so many other dogs coming and going). He is incontinent most of the time. He knows he needs to go outside to pee, but the urine leaks out as he hurries to the door. Lately he has lost control of his bowels. The whole incontinence thing is hard to deal with. I suppose we could put doggy diapers on him (assuming he would cooperate and that the other dogs would leave the diapers alone). It may yet come to that.

One of the hardest things for me is that Georgie's incontinence reminds me of Mom's. Like all the women on her side of the family, she had always had an irritable, small-capacity bladder. It wasn't altogether surprising when total urinary incontinence came upon her. The harder part, though, was bowel incontinence.

Mom had been this strong, capable person all my life. Hard-working, controlling, no-nonsense. One day when she and I were "visiting" (her listening to me talk about the dogs; me listening to her talk about the Dutch girl in an old painting on her wall, a girl with whom Mom said she had walked the beach somewhere), she suddenly said, "I think I just shit myself."

The surprised expression on Georgie's face when his bowels let go reminds me of the expression on Mom's face when she made that announcement. I can't say that Mom's loss of control of her bowels was any easier or harder on me than her loss of control of her mind. It's still inconceivable that such a super-competent person should become so lost, helpless and demented. And I wonder if the same fate awaits me.