Welcome to Stony Creek Diaries - personal essays on topics other than education I’ll share from time to time. Thanks to any of you TOOS readers who decide to check it out!
The Age of Grief
My dad seemed to be on his way out exactly a week ago. Shuffling off his mortal coil. After a lovely 93rd birthday party, he woke up with a fever and the assisted living staff was concerned, so they very smartly sent him to the ER. They thought it was probably just a low level infection that needed some treatment. We were not overly worried. I went to the ER that afternoon and he was asleep but I had a strange feeling. He was on oxygen and he seemed too pale and when he woke up he could barely open his eyes and only was able to mumble a hi and a “love you” back to me. The nurse did not seem concerned though, and neither did the case manager. He went back to sleep and I went over to have dinner with my anxious mom.
By the evening, the admitting doctor was talking about septic shock and organ failure. Because that’s how it goes, apparently, with old men and weakened and vulnerable immune systems. He was not suffering, he had been gradually letting go for a while now, and my sister Marie and I knew it could go way worse for him, in so many ways. Like the Queen, he would be socializing one day and gone the next. There are worse fates.
However, twelve hours, a lot of fluids and antibiotics later, my sister found him sitting up in his hospital bed eating breakfast. He’s now happily back in his skilled nursing unit, the nurses and caregivers all glad to see him. My mother is relieved. One more reprieve.
So goes life with the very elderly.
I’m realizing that until a few years ago, when, between my parents increasing decline and the catastrophe of the pandemic raining down so much loss in so many ways, I lived in fear of capital G grief, of The Moment the unspeakable loss would happen and nothing would be the same. I have been incredibly lucky and I have never really lost anyone very close to me to death before now. I now fully appreciate that there isn’t, necessarily, one Moment. If there is no unspeakable loss, the one we fear and hide from, perhaps even psychically backing away from relationships because of the fear of the loss that might ensue either because of our own bumbling or human frailty or because of the caprice of the universe, the losses accrue anyway, no matter how you try to avoid them or protect yourself.
I’ve thought a lot about this passage from Jane Smiley’s 1987 novella, The Age of Grief. (Including the fact that like so much in life that’s changed, I think this age mentioned is probably more like 45 in 2022 terms) Bold text is mine.
“I am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don’t think it is years themselves, or the disintegration of the body. Most of our bodies are better taken care of and better-looking than ever. What it is, is what we know, now that in spite of ourselves we have stopped to think about it. It is not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling that their lives have been meaningless. It is not only that, by this time, a lot of acquaintances and friends have died and all the others are getting ready to sooner or later. It is more that the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and of the rest of the world have broken down, after all—after all that schooling, all that care. Lord, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me. But when you are thirty-three, or thirty-five, the cup must come around, cannot pass from you, and it is the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from. Dana cried over Mrs. Hilton. My eyes filled during the nightly news. Obviously we were grieving for ourselves, but we were also thinking that if they were feeling what we were feeling, how could they stand it? We were grieving for them, too. I understand that later you come to an age of hope, or at least resignation. I suspect it takes a long time to get there.”
So this lack of a barrier, this way of seeing the world, these losses we all suffer, gradually integrate into who you are and how you view the world, if you let it and you are lucky enough to still be here. It allows for the complexity of the bittersweet and not just the fear of the bitter and the clawing taste of only artificial, temporary sweetness that quickly melts away. Some of the losses that accrue aren’t deaths but the ordinary pain like friendships falling away, understanding there are rich periods of your life you’ll never get back, the aches and pains of age that will only increase, the encroachment of mortality and the fact we are all dealing with these realities and how could they stand it?
I always feel self conscious when I talk about my parents around people who have lost parents much earlier, in much more difficult and even tragic circumstances. But one friend said to me, and I found a lot of comfort in this, “it all sucks. No matter when it happens or how it happens. It’s painful and difficult.” True that.
But I think the more we accept the losses and live in it, live with it, the more we begin to fully embrace our real selves and priorities and opportunities begin to open in front of us like spring blooms. I am trying to embrace that.
Traveling Under an New Identity
In October, returning to London for my first real visit since the pandemic that was like my former annual visits to see my niece and her husband and to just hang out felt less like a reunion with a place in the world that feels like home than a check-in, a regauging. Am I still this person who loves this city? Does it still resonate? And if it does, does it perhaps resonate in different ways? When will it feel stale, old hat, too dirty and noisy? Did it retain its central “London-ness” despite the pandemic trauma and will it provide the fodder for consideration and inspiration it usually delivers to me? Tired of London, tired of life, as Dr Johnson supposedly said.
I always enjoy watching the school groups I bump into on my weekday wanderings and there seemed a particular poignance for me this time around. I ended up in the Globe Theater gift shop with a pack of tweens from a girls school all trying to figure out which trinket they were going to purchase. I would wager there was considerably less excitement about the character development in, say, Coriolanus then about the pins, magnets, scarves, t-shirts, pencil cases and costume jewelry they closely examined and showed each other before the mad scramble to the register when their teacher told them it was time to go. The din was deafening. It was unfamiliar but not unpleasant to feel the usual sense of fondness and generosity I always feel around groups of school kids, but not of the same connection to these groups of kiddos or the adults shepherding them, although I did send a silent blessing to the girls’ chaperones who then apparently allowed them into the Starbucks next door to get a treat. That giggling line was not going to move fast.
But it was a loss to not be sure what to do with these observations and feelings, in Smiley’s words, with the information you are getting from the broken down barriers between you and the rest of the world. It’s interesting and scary to contemplate who you are as you move through the world when a central identity is peeled away. For so many years I primarily thought of myself as someone who works with kids, teenagers to be precise. I loved their earnestness, vulnerability, attempted swagger, the desperation for peer connections and the desperate, all encompassing, love for their friends. Their starry-eyedness about the bigger world, even the ones who tried to pretend to be jaded. It was always in the back of my mind when I wandered through London, in and out of museums, theaters, sitting and people watching the bustle of Trafalgar Square or in the greenery of Russell Square, drinking bubble tea in Chinatown, walking across the Thames - the view always seems medieval and Metropolis at the same time, a little glimpse of the eternal.
Usually my contemplation circled back to my work. How did it all connect back to the great, honorable venture of educating the next generation? How do you capture and distill all this… life… and transmit some threads of wisdom to help guide them? How do you lock in on a few insights that might inspire the faculty and staff in doing their work, in engaging in the great parade themselves, find their places in it? How do you keep the seeking fire lit in yourself, in your colleagues?
On this trip, I found this shift a privilege and a kind of overwhelming open question at the same time - how to refocus all that contemplation to focus on yourself and the choices of your oh-so-one precious life instead. That is definitely a work in progress.
Which leads me to the raccoons.
So in contrast to all this grand contemplation comes the very concrete, hey-kids-get-off-my-lawn midlife problem of the neighborhood raccoons.
Here are a bunch of things I did not know about raccoons because at my last house, I was concerned about black bears, not raccoons. (I’d take the bears again any day, in case you’re wondering.)
They really like living near water.
Their paws have thumb like appendages.
They are excellent climbers.
They can wedge themselves in much smaller spaces than you can imagine.
They are supah smaht. (a little Boston for you)
I also read this insane article that said they have the ability to open door knobs and memorize lock codes, and then use a lock code. After I envisioned a raccoon greeting me from my kitchen table when I returned home, had a heart attack and came back to life, I noted the source material here seemed… suspect. They are not, in fact, human. Although sometimes I still wonder.
They are also not adorable,. Trash pandas my eye. I went to Reddit to see if there were any clever raccoon solutions and I found over 42,000 people subscribe to a subreddit celebrating their adorableness. STOP THE MADNESS.
Here are some things my local raccoon gang have done:
Stole an entire garbage bag from inside my shed.
Attempted to abscond with an entire, covered garbage can.
Managed to turn a garbage bin on its head and leave it there.
Squeezed into a one inch opening on a shed door that was held closed by a very tight fitting bungee cord in the wake of the theft of the garbage bag.
Pulled a garbage bag, bit by bit, out the side of a garbage can with a bungee corded lid, never got the bungee off but ate the garbage as they went and left the ragged plastic remains hanging out the side.
I seem to have figured out a temporary solution with cups of ammonia left around the outside, getting really careful with what food stuff I throw away and when and reducing the overall amount of trash. I’m keeping all food trash in one bag and I will douse that thing with ammonia before I put it out in the trash can Wednesday night for the Thursday AM pickup.
I keep looking over at Finn, my rescue dog: food driven, bold, too smart… and somewhat masked. Is he a collaborator? A raccoon in a dog costume?
I have been to WalMart and the hardware store now multiple times looking for raccoon repellant solutions. I am That Lady. The best trash can solution out there is out of stock everywhere, even online. I am hoping this is because of the supply chain and not the growing raccoon army assembling.
This is also making me realize that as a spoiled child from a small family, the Clean Plate Club was never enforced and I feel free to pick up supermarket items I think might Change My Life only to try once and abandon them in the refrigerator for weeks. (I’m looking at you, spinach dip.) Or I have enthusiasms that burn out with a lot left over. (Hello, feta cheese.) So I tend to accrue a fair amount of food waste that I now feel very guilty about but yet can’t seem to stop. WHY did that pesto sauce and maple kettle corn seem like such good ideas at the time?
But basically, the biggest challenge to battling the raccoons is seeing your inner Ted Knight in Caddyshack emerge in full blown, middle aged, suburban home owner form. Sheesh. It’s a lot.
So I got a new hairstyle. I told the hair stylist I wanted something that would both do a longer term effective job of blending gray and be a little bold. I have always sworn to keep my hair as naturalistic as possible - some might say, conservative. (When I was a kid, we were shopping for a gift for my 4th grade teacher at a local boutique and my mom told the sales lady my beloved Mrs. Keith was conservative. Which deeply disturbed me because “conservative” in a liberal house, is NOT a compliment.) And in this area, yes, I tend conservative and this feels kinda out there even though I think in the scheme of things it is not that out there. Is this a midlife cliche? Eh. It’s another way to try and stand it.
Off to vote!
Julie