Security

What the Commercials Tell Me

September 16, 2017

Today, I sit at the kitchen table at my Mom’s house, the house where I grew up, and listen for the bed alarm to go off in the other room. It is a helpful thing, the bed alarm. My Mom is sleeping now, so I can take a minute here.  But she can wake up at any time, and is so unsteady now, that if she gets up to move to her chair by herself, she could fall.  Adding a broken hip to a brain tumor? That would be bad. It is my second day here at my Mom’s. My sister will be over in a few hours to take over. We continue to take turns caring for Mom, our nights and days running together.

The TV is on all the time now. It is the soundtrack of my days. My Mom needs to sleep, and she wakes up if the TV is turned off; silence seems to bother her.  What’s more, when she is awake, it’s what she likes to do. She used to be a voracious reader, but doesn’t seem interested in books anymore.  I blame the tumor. I try to tune out the commercials that drone on in the next room, but I am not doing a very good job of it. Consequently, I am learning that I have scads of problems that I wasn’t aware of before this immersion in daytime television began.  For example, I didn’t realize that I should feel bad about the skin on my neck and chest, that other women my age are horrified about this, to the point that they have given up wearing blouses that expose their horrific, wrinkly selves.  Who knew that I should feel bad wearing my favorite summer shirts?  Or that I should think twice before baring my legs? There’s evidently a product for the skin there, too, and famous actresses who use it.

Also, there are lots of ads for a nationwide network of plastic surgeons who are running summer specials to treat one problematic area of your body for free! Until mid-September, that is. You could pay to have your tummy reduced and get your love handles done for free.  Or get your sagging chin lifted and have your arms toned for free.  Now that I think about it, my chin isn’t what it used to be. And clearly, there must be additional parts of me that need attention, too, if a two for one special is such fantastic news.

All these commercials play on my fears about growing old.  They command my attention, badger me to act, tell me to invest my time and money in slowing the process.  Through all this, I try to remember that this quest for youth comes from my small self that wants to be loved and esteemed and thinks that wrinkles and fat rolls will get me tossed aside.

The irony is that as these messages drone on, my Mom sleeps peacefully in front of the television.  She is walking through her last days on this planet, and the constant stream of commercials that float around her are just noise now.  They can’t touch her anymore, not that she ever cared much about all that anyway. She is so beautiful now. Her wrinkles are beautiful.  I am so lucky to be here with her.

Being with my Mom is helping me see how misguided that small self is, the one that freaks out about aging, that thinks for a minute about actually buying that wrinkle erasing cream. The truth is that death is meandering toward every one of us.  That used to worry me. Honestly, I’m still not thrilled about it. But it does give me perspective. It helps me realize that it doesn’t matter how much lotion we rub on our skin, or how many two for one plastic surgery procedures we receive. Flawless skin and toned tummies won’t save us. One day, all of us will die– somehow, somewhere. What matters is that as we go through out days, we know we are loved every moment by a Love that is bigger than we could ever understand or imagine. That we are held, and that from our first breath to our last, we are never alone.

Presence

Hope on a Dark Day

September 1, 2017

Here is a small thing.

Outside my kitchen window, there are three finch feeders.  One of my favorite things is to stand at the kitchen sink and watch the gold finches eat and frolic. Today, though, as I worked my way through a sink of dirty dishes, there was a thunk at the living room window, a few feet away. A thunk, and then silence.

I dread that thunking sound. It usually means that a bird has flown into the window.  I have decals on those windows, the kind that are supposed to keep the birds away. These decals are dumb and do not work. I pulled the curtain aside and saw a small finch splayed on the ground. He was mostly still. I hated to look.

This was a little too much for me, on a day when the news from Houston was overwhelmingly sad, the images of water, water, and more water, and people dying as the water kept rising. Also, it was the first time I had been home in two days, the previous nights spent at my Mom’s, caring for her and dealing with the aggressive brain tumor that will most likely take her life. On this day, I did not want to see a beautiful bird dead on the ground by my front windows, drawn to my yard in the first place by the feeders we put out for his well-being. It felt, in a small way, like it was my fault.

It wasn’t the first time a bird had flown into our windows.  They generally die; it’s hard to recover from that kind of blow.   This bird was still twitching, though. Twitching and probably in pain.

Except.

He was breathing. My cat scratched at the door, wanting to go out.

“No way,” I said.  “As long as that bird is out there with life in him, you are staying inside.”

Minutes passed. I kept peeking out the window.  Each time, I hoped that he would be gone, that somehow he would have miraculously improved enough to fly away.  Honestly, I didn’t think this would happen. I kept checking anyway.

And then, during one of my compulsive checks, there was a change. The bird was sitting up.  I looked twice to make sure.  He was sitting up and resting.

That was most unexpected.

I told my son. “The bird that was out there, seemingly dead? He just sat up.”

The best news of all? The next time I looked outside?

He was gone.

Hallelujah and hallelujah.

Now, I know that sometimes birds appear to recover after they hit windows, but still sustain internal injuries, and go on to die later.

I’m going to trust, though, that this bird was different.

I was sure that he was dead. But then, somehow, he was alive again. Which just reminds me that things are not always as they appear, which is good news indeed, and that even when death seems certain, sometimes life sneaks in through the back door.  And honestly? Always, in the end, it’s life that wins. We don’t always get to see it, though.  Today, I did.  I am so grateful for that. Today, for one small bird outside my living room window, life had the last word.