Saying "Good-bye"

Before I begin, I would very much like to apologize for my irreverance of late especially my last posting. I was extremely overtired and stressed and this lessened my control over my natural irreverant streak, hence the toe-dandruff.

With that said and done, we have had some news of my aunt who is still clinging to life, although hovering so close to death every pause in her breathing must cause her family to almost stop breathing as well. Tears and hand-holding should be the order of the day during this time, as well as the retelling of silly and touching family stories and, perhaps, the singing or playing of favorite songs that have been treasured and shared over the years. Just some thoughts, as everyone's and every family's path through this time is uniquely their own, but hopefully a helpful comment for someone somewhere, nonetheless.

My uncle thought she would be gone before this past weekend was done, but my aunt has not yet fully given in to death. She is still able to respond somewhat to her children and I am sure she is still thinking of things she wishes she could be saying to each of them even now. I hope her only daughter knows how special she is and always has been to her mother despite the ups and downs of their relationship - we all go through stuff like that. I hope each of her sons knows how proud they made her and how blessed she has been by the grandchildren each of her children has produced for her and my uncle to love and share with them. Most of all I hope she had the time to tell my uncle, just that one last time, how very much she has loved him.

My dear, dear aunt! I know my presence would be an unwelcomed interruption right now, but please know that my heart and thoughts are with you and your family tonight. I know the time is soon when you will have to let go whether you want to or not. I hope you are able to take a last, very peaceful, breath knowing your job on this earth has been accomplished to the best of your ability, that the love your family holds in their hearts for you will be part of what keeps you alive in your afterlife, and that we will all be OK, although it will take some time for that to be fully realized. It always takes some time.

God bless you, my loving "Auntie Bert" whose wisdom defied educational credentials and whose compassion was determinedly expressed even though it was often difficult, at least that is how it felt sometimes to me. You are one of the wisest people I have ever known and your counsel kept me away from more self-loathing and self-condemnation than I can begin to explain clearly right now.

I also hope that someone has remembered to tell the story of when your eldest was just a little guy and asked his grandfather (?) for a "clear, cool glass of water." It is during times like this that those stories take on the special significance we do not always realize they carry.

I remember when your oldest grandchild was still just the littlest girl, with those crazy-beautiful red curls and running around in her diapers. Her mother and I were standing in the dining room when she gave out the funniest, trilling laugh I have ever heard issue from any child in my life. I wish I could send that laugh to you now to hear; I wish I could send it to her mother, my cousin, to hear again, too. I know its silly, but it seems to me that those are the things, the smallest and most ordinary things from our mutual lives, that bring the most comfort at these difficult, impossible times. They are the things we can still share with each other, even though one of us is dying and the rest grieving.

I love you.

Good-bye, my lovely auntie,
Izzlebug

From the Subime to the Ridiculous and Back: Aging and the Battle Against Toe-Dandruff

It greatly comforted me the other day to learn that my grandmother had been just as gray at my age as I have become. It made me feel a little less "old," if that makes any kind of sense to anyone else, and it also made me feel a little more hopeful than I have been for some time. I started thinking about all of the signs of aging we each experience in ways unique to each individual, yet still common to all to a great extent, and I began to wonder about toe-dandruff. Is it rampant or, like my hair that felt prematurely gray, is it something only I and others from a similar gene pool are experiencing as they grow older?

Whatever the case may be, I have decided to wage war against my toe-dandruff and have been stockpiling all of the necessary accoutrements for the war to be waged with as much success as possible. Would it be that I had been this engaged and organized about several other life experiences and perhaps some things would have proven more likely earlier than has been the case (sigh, sigh, sigh).

These seemingly ridiculous thoughts may also have a lot to do with the waiting we are all doing tonight as we have yet to hear anything of my aunt. In the stillness and peace of the evening, a winter's beauty for those so inclined to seek it, I wait and think of her and her family. They are together, that is all they can be right now.

May your waits be less poignant, your thoughts more elevated, and your moments more serene than mine have been tonight, although I think my aunt would have understood about the toe-dandruff.

Izzlebug

A Spiritual Departure

This morning, as I woke up, it felt as though someone, or perhaps more accurately something, had departed from my heart or soul, lessening the burden somehow. It was just the sense of a moment and then it was gone as the cares and concerns of the day began to intrude, but still a more refreshing way to awaken than otherwise could have been the case. I of course wondered if it was possible my poor aunt had passed away just then but, not being "psychic" and all that, I will have to wait to hear either how she is (or is no longer) doing today. The cancer has invaded her brain and caused the vertebrae in her neck to crumble. There is nothing more medical science and compassion can offer. What she has left is the love of her family and their presence as she completes the journey of this life into the next stage of existence, for such it is whatever a person's beliefs may be.

My heart aches for her loss but is also strangely comforted knowing she will no longer have to deal with the devastating results of this horrid disease that has caused her decline and death. She will be truly free from all of the pain and burden the cancer has caused her, finally. That said, I know also that she leaves this life with the regret of having to leave it at all. Mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, she still has so much to experience and look forward to, if only her corporeal being would allow it.

There have been many tears shed and many more will follow in the days to come. I sincerely hope I am able to offer some small margin of comfort and strength to my cousins and uncle who have been, and will continue to be, devastated by the illness and loss of my aunt for quite some time. It is one of life's small miracles that, as we recover from our own losses, we are able to help guide others through theirs if we so choose. I choose.

My cousins will have lost their mother, my uncle his beloved wife, and all of us the love and support my aunt tried to continue giving even through times I am certain she must have felt drained of all positive energy and ability to give, especially following the death of her eldest son, who I hope will be there to give his mother a big hug as she arrives; she will not be alone.

Another of life's small miracles is that, even as we are devastated by yet another loss, our family remains. We endure and survive. A small triumph in the face of our many losses, but still a triumph. We are here, we are together, we survive, and our families with us. It is both a comfort and a fact of life, providing one has yielded sufficient offspring to the environment and one's offspring continue to go and do likewise, but it is still a small miracle considering the intense pain we so often encounter during times of loss and injury or illness.

And so, we wait for news of my aunt. We wait for the pain and tears we know will come, and we try to somehow prepare for what cannot be rehearsed; what will always be an unwelcome shock to our beings no matter how "prepared" we may think we have made ourselves. There will be tears.

I love you, my aunt and my friend. I will miss you greatly. I will always remember what friends you and Mom were and that your friendship endured despite all of the failings and pitfalls so common in extended families. You meant a great deal to my mother and to me. I hope there will be no struggle for you. That your passing will be quiet and peaceful, surrounded by your loved ones, comforted and cradled by their presence.

God bless you and keep you, my darling and loving aunt.

Life as a Feral Wind

Although there has been some degree of peace and quiet in our lives for awhile - hence the neglect of my theraputic blogging - it looks like the onslaught is gearing up to begin again.

My wonderful grandmother, at the age of 91, is now finally finding certain simple life tasks too difficult and no longer has the strength to continue taking care of certain things that she has fought so hard to maintain for these past several years. Age and frailty are finally taking that from her, too. It is not so much a shock as a sad recognition that, at a time when we will also be losing a beloved aunt to inflammatory breast cancer, we are also losing our stalwart grandmother who has been there our entire collective lives. Her decline may also be, in part, tied in to the decline of my aunt who, as one of my grandmother's daughters-in-law, has been very much a part of her life and her heart; mother of five of her grand children and as much "daughter" as "daughter-in-law." Perhaps we do, eventually, become too old for grief.

Throughout all of this, my poor brother still hovers, fading slowly as much a prisoner to cigarettes and fantasies as ever, but still very much my younger brother whom I love greatly. I don't yet know how he will handle the loss of our grandmother or our aunt, although I don't think he and our aunt were particularly close given the nature of his illness and the loss of her eldest son to suicide. Her family and ours were all very close in age to each other and Mike and my cousin were similar in interests and temperament in some ways.

I can feel that feral wind of life blowing behind me, growing ever louder, demanding attention and sucking everything dry in its path, as is its tendancy during gathering storms such as the one we are approaching yet again. Strangely, although one might think it would be a fetid wind, as well, it is not. Merely one that draws the marrow from your being and chills you through to the heart of your existence so you feel as if you will never be warm again; never feel life or love again. It blows through a soul and leaves a fossilized heart in its wake, one that used to be warm and beating but that now struggles to merely make note of its existence for others to witness.

Such is life and such is the price of growing older - if you survive you must bear the burden for all of those who do not survive with you.

There is the sound of gently falling water in the background, and the night has grown quiet. I think of all those I have loved and lost and all of those I have loved and still have with me and realize I am very blessed. I may not be quite able to explain it right now, but I know with an inborn conviction that it is so.

May we all know how blessed we are; how fortunate to know love.

Izzlebug

Stranger Than Fiction

When I would get really angry - too angry to want to let myself go and yell all the horrid things I was thinking and feeling - I would picture any one of several scenarios I had created in my mind for dealing with such intense emotions and really let loose inside my head. I would scream as loudly as I could without making a sound. As it happens, one of those scenarios involved a dungeon room with a moat full of acid, chains, whips, cat-o-nine-tails, and antique swords and axes, battle pikes and maces. You know, just your normal, everyday torture chamber garb with a little modern tech in the form of a fire hose - for cleaning up afterwards - also included. This was one of the "rooms" in which I dispatched some of my very intense emotions by imagining, in an implausible way, dispatching those who had inspired those emotions within me. (Don't worry, I usually let them walk away - or skulk off - reasonably intact...imagination can be so much fun!)

So wouldn't you know that today I came face to face with a form of my "ragercises" made real. Some pathetic, vicious, waste of skin and space used an "antique axe" to slaughter a four-month-old baby boy and severely injure his mother after having used that same axe on his mentally impaired sister-in-law. It seems that all of the adults survived. The infant did not.

I have never owned, nor wanted to own, an antique battle axe. My tears tonight have been slow and painful; tired, weary, heart-broken. This man's sick and twisted reality has impinged upon the self-therapy that helped me deal with too many emotions that were either inappropriate or inappropriately intense given the realities in my life that seemed to spawn them. As my heart and mind were able to heal I visited these "rooms" less frequently, finding a new peace and calm within myself once the feelings I could not understand had been dealt with and sorted through; filed properly in the correct spaces of my mind.

Have you ever wondered why someone couldn't have just harmed themself instead of others, particularly those unable to defend themselves from such onslaughts? How do we, as a people, deal with such things within the contexts of our individual lives? Usually we just shake our heads and go about our business but, perhaps, we need to pause for a moment and think about this baby, his young mother, and the aftermath of the actions of a man who claims now to remember nothing of the incident.

Dear God!