essays on life...by me

Tag: Aging Page 1 of 8

Life after life

My strawberries

My strawberries

Amongst my parent’s generation, there were a few men who, though they had reached the age when they could retire, they didn’t. Their wives had retired already, if they had worked, but not these few men. Their workplace was still willing to have them even though they might have passed their best before date. I assume they must have liked their jobs enough to keep working even when they didn’t need to. My parents retired as soon as they were old enough to do so, leaving behind them jobs that were just jobs and looked forward to doing something that they really wanted to do. But my parent’s friend continued working and kept on traveling to his job every day. If you asked him why he continued to take the hour and a half bus ride in to the city from the retirement community he had recently moved to, leaving behind wife and new friends, he would stare at you with a look on his face of incomprehension. Finally, he said, in a very quiet tone of voice, “If I retire, I am afraid that I will die.” He wasn’t speaking metaphorically. He was serious. He was sure that if he should stop working, the next day or week or month after his retirement party, he would die…of something. He eventually did retire. He and his wife got to spend more time with their kids and grandchildren. They traveled a bit together. They spent time at the clubhouse of their retirement community. And eventually in the fullness of time, his wife died and soon after so did he.

I have worked since I was about 17 – nothing serious until I was about 25, when I got my first job in the field that I had studied in college. Since then I have managed to support myself as an Art Director, Illustrator, Production manager, Board artist, Speaker support slide maker, Website designer, Powerpoint designer, magazine designer and in general, whatever one can do in the commercial art field. I have never needed the typing skills my mother insisted I acquire to help put food on my table – which is a good thing since my typing skills are really not all that much to write home about.

But all that professional working life is now 7 years behind me…and I am definitely retired. Am I dead yet?

I am not completely without things to do. I have 2 pro bono clients for whom I volunteer my skills and knowledge. I basically work for free now. But I get a pension, so I’m OK.

One of these groups, a Writers Festival, thinks I’m great. They love what I do for them. They are fun to work with. The project is something I am also interested in. I feel like I am doing a good job for them. But that little nagging voice that always lives in the back of my head says, “Of course they like you. You are free.” But the important thing is mostly they listen to my suggestions and often do what I suggest. That satisfies my control freak tendencies. So I’m OK.

The other group is a Jewish group working to bring Reform Judaism to Stockholm. It is a group that I have been involved with since before I retired – almost 2 decades, actually – a long time. I feel I know most of those people well. We have been on on the same board of directors together for so long that many of them have become friends. There are a lot of tasks on that board that I can not do. No one in their right mind would ask me to take the meeting minutes – the mishmash of swenglish would be illegible. Neither would I be useful to do anything in regards to religious tasks for my knowledge of such things is extremely superficial, a la carte and personal. To be the contact with the greater Jewish community is also something I would not be well suited to due to my poor comprehension of how Swedish society works and my latent phone fear. My only real usefulness lies in my years of work experience as a graphic designer. So that is what I have been on the board – a graphic designer. I designed their logo, I designed the now very out of date website and made a new one in WordPress. I make whatever graphics they need for promoting the group. And I try to maintain the look of the brand. These are things I know how to do. These are things I have experience in doing. With this group I feel like I am doing something important. So I’m OK.

Unlike my parent’s friend, my concern about my post-working life – and my fear – is metaphorical. I am still walking around. I am still breathing. I am not worried – at least not too much, that I will imminently drop dead any minute now. But…am I still alive? Do I still have worth? Does what I know have any value? And why aren’t people doing what I tell them?

In the summers, I have been spending most of my time at our country house with my husband. We have filled our planters with topsoil and I have bought plants to grow there. There are 3 requirements I insist on for any plants I might bring home: The plant has to be an almost indestructible perennial and need very little care from me, the plant has to have flowers, and finally if it has a wonderful scent that’s great. I have planted two small lilac bushes, 3 mock orange bushes, a flowering bush called Ölandstok in Swedish and two strawberry plants.  I also planted 3 clematis plants to climb up the wall behind the planters. So far none of my plants have died yet and this year one of the lilac bushes had wonderful, scented flowers and my strawberry plant had strawberries. I spend a lot of time looking at these plants. This seems to be my new thing-to-do. It seems to pacify my anxiety about what I am doing with my post-work life. For the moment at least.

I guess with my two pro bono “jobs” and my green, planted friends, I have found my life after my life. I hope, as I work to keep all of these things alive, they will also keep me alive.

 

 

Mindful of one’s nature

It rained yesterday – on and off for most of the day. It was the first rain we have had here in Stockholm and out at the country house in almost a month. In fact, I can’t remember when it last rained but that might be more a problem with my memory than anything to do with weather.

The skies have cleared up. The wood deck is drying. The air is humid and still tanktop-and-shorts warm. I’m glad we planted clover together with the grass seed when we made a lawn. Now, after the rain is over, it’s the clover that has recovered the quickest from the mini-drought. It is lush and green and soft underfoot and sprouting everywhere with globular white flowers. Dozens of bumble bees are hopping from flower to flower, doing what bumble bees do. Together with Håkan, I sat on our discolored, almost 30 year old, white plastic chairs in the middle of all this activity, watching the bees work, listening to the deep hum of their drumming, impossible wings. After a while we got up to have a very late lunch. While I am not complaining about the lack of rain, all the nature around me, has missed it a lot – everything was so dry. I have had to tend my planted babies with a regular hosing down.

I recently posted on Facebook a picture of me, (well, just my legs) lying on an ancient lounge chair, doing nothing but reading and eating watermelon. All the responses were positive, with friends leaving comments such as; Perfection, Sounds ideal, Good on ya, My hero, I second your choice, and more variations on those themes. Everyone seemed to be agreed that it is a good thing to be able to take the time to just lounge around, reading a book, snacking on food, basically doing nothing – thinking of nothing other than the moment I was in. Some people might call that being Mindful. And Mindfulness is supposed to be a good thing.

But is it?
I suppose if one is a true busy extrovert, unable to sit still, always on the go, I guess choosing to just sit down and live in just that moment – doing nothing but reading and eating watermelon, that that is a really good change from what is normal in your life.

But I am not that – a busy extrovert – always on the go. I’m an introvert who knows how to act like an extrovert when I am among people. But I am a sluggard when alone. Sitting and doing nothing is easy for me. Almost too easy. My natural state of being is to be at rest and to let my foggy brain wander, instead of my feet. That afternoon spent reading and eating watermelon was just standard operating procedure. For me. Was I being Mindful, if Mindfulness means living in the present moment?

Now, I’m sitting in the shade, on the small deck outside the kitchen window. For the past 2 months, I have been living here at the house with only brief forays into town. Climate Change or maybe just the weather gods have given us amazing summer weather – dry, sunny, and warm – instead of the normal Swedish summer weather – damp, rainy, chilly, with only brief moments of sunny warmth. It’s the kind of weather where you can spend a lot of time outside – enjoying morning coffee at the lake, eating dinner on the deck, even wearing shorts while gardening. The kind of weather when you invite friends to visit and share food and conversation with, while sitting outside on the deck.

But have I?? Invited friends to join me? No, I have not. I have had very few friends out to join us on our deck, to share a drink or a cup of tea with pastries, to walk down to the beach or even eat a whole meal together. And I ponder…why not?

Do I have no friends? I don’t think that is the reason – I have a lot of friends who I like a lot. Why have I not invited them out to us? Is it just too much work to clean up the house & yard and buy food and serve it? Well, maybe the cleaning and straightening up is a pain in the neck but its not that bad. And I like sharing food with friends.

Or is it just too much work to make a phone call or send an email, to plan a visit? And now I think we are getting somewhere. I have to make that phone call. I have to send that email. I have to plan and schedule my time. Have I mentioned I am a sluggard??

When I think about what kinds of people have been my closest friends I realize that many of them are extroverts, FOMOs (People who “suffer” from the Fear Of Missing Out), people who are always busy – who’s natural state of being is not to be idle but to be active and always on the go and maybe not spending a lot of time being Mindful of the moment. Back when I lived in Manhattan, friends would have to venture up to my apartment on the Upper West Side, ring my doorbell and practically drag me out, Saying, “Put on your shoes, Hilarie. We’re going to the movies now.”

And 40 years later, after so much life lived, I am still the same – I spend a lot of time just thinking about what I am doing rather than going out and doing things. I guess you could call that Mindfulness. But I don’t. I don’t like the term. I need my extroverted friends to come ringing my virtual doorbell, texting my smart phone, writing an email and saying…”What the hell have you been doing kiddo??? Want to meet for a drink/lunch/dinner? Can we come out to visit you at the house?”

After all is said and done, I am an introvert by nature who is usually content to just sit and think. And all this Mindfulness, to my mind, is just a bunch of hooey designed to make busy extroverts slow down.

But I’ve been spending a lot of time out here in the garden, trying to figure out what I am going to be in this next phase of my life. Call me. Ask me to do something…I just might say yes…

New body parts

So…I am now minus another body part and the recipient of something human-made replacing it.

A few months ago an optometrist informed me that I had cataracts. That was the reason my long-distance vision had gotten so terrible and also the reason I suddenly (it seemed) could read again without reading glasses. It was a perfect example that sometimes you win some and sometimes you lose some.  I couldn’t recognize a friend a half block away but I could read labels in the grocery store – as long as I was close enough that is.

When the optometrist who examined my eyes told me about the cataracts, I was surprised and disappointed. I had already spent quite a bit of time looking at all the frames available and had found a pair I liked and was looking forward to wearing them.

“No new glasses for you,” he said. “I’ll write a referral for you to have your eyes checked at a place that treats cataracts.” And so he did.

The eye doctor at the eye specialist place did his own examination of my eyes and confirmed that, yes, I was the possessor of two cloudy, yellowish, thickened lenses through which I was looking and that it was time to have them fixed. Actually they don’t really fix them. Like a broken, worn-out brake pad in your car that needs to be replaced, they just remove the old worn out lens and put in a new one – made of plastic.

Once I started telling people that I had cataracts (because I am a blabber mouth and tell people things like that) I discovered that so many of the people I knew had already had the procedure done. Cataract surgery is one of the most common types of surgery done worldwide and supposedly its success rate is about 99 percent. Cataracts start developing around age 60, and the average age for cataract surgery in the United States is 73. That explains why so many of the people I know have had it done – a lot of my friends are 60+ and it seems that I fit right in that age box, being just one year short ot the average age.

So today was the day. I showered in the morning, made sure to wear clothes not covered in cat fur, scrubbed my face well and refrained from wearing any eye makeup. Håkan drove me to the building where my appointment was. I was actually pretty glad he did that – that way I didn’t have to go out in public makeup-less.

First the nurse comes over and puts drops in my eye and then you just sit and wait. A little while later she comes back and puts more drops in. And then a third time she comes with her small eye drop bottle and waters my eye once more. The nurse then asked me if I would like to have something to calm me. I said yes and she came back with a plastic shot glass containing a tiny slurp of clear liquid – barely enough to swallow. It tasted like grapefruit juice and left a bitter taste in my mouth. By this time my pupil was humongous – could barely see any iris at all.  The waiting room had about 5 other people when I arrived. Most of them sitting there with blue plastic on their shoes and white paper caps on their heads. One of the patients was very chatty and she got us all talking as we sat there with nothing to do except wait for our pupils to expand. I of course jumped right into the conversations through feeling a bit self-conscious with my American accent. Everyone was in my general age group and all were there to have a cataract replaced. It was nice to be in a talkative waiting room – friendly.

Finally after almost an hour of waiting around, the surgeon came and lead me into the operating room. It looked like a dentist office with a big, bright green chair. After scrubbing my face with alcohol they put a sterile cloth of some kind on my face leaving my eye uncovered and went to work. Ultrasound is used to break up the faulty lens and then the surgeon takes out the pieces thru a small incision. Sitting there in the green chair, I couldn’t tell what was going on but as she worked on my eye I was seeing the most amazing psychedelic light show – pretty cool and didn’t hurt a bit. And then she slipped in the new lens, sloshed lots of liquid in my eye and was finally done. The nurse suggested I get a cup of coffee and sit in the waiting room for a bit till I felt ok to leave. Håkan came and picked me up and we drove home.

Since my eye upgrade, I’ve noticed that the color of the world as seen with my undoctored eye and the color seen thru my new lens is very different. I had gotten used to the yellowish tint that the cloudy lens had cast over everything I looked at. My new body part makes everything look bluer and brighter. In a few weeks I’ll have them fix the other eye too. I am looking forward to a bright new world with my new body parts. And a new pair of glasses.

 

Resting in Peace

This was a hard weekend.
On Saturday, my son’s cat was diagnosed with heart failure. He had noticed her breathing strangely and panting a lot on Thursday evening after coming home from work. He texted us about it and I suggested he call the veterinarian that we usually take our cats to – they were still open. He did and was able to make an appointment to take her in on Friday morning to be examined.  The vet there confirmed that Coco’s heart sounded odd and her breathing was labored. But not being an animal cardiologist herself, the vet suggested Bevin take Coco to the large 24 hour animal hospital south of Stockholm for a more thorough and specialized exam. An appointment was made by the vet for a hospital visit an hour later, a taxi was called for them and off they went. At the hospital, it was decided to have Coco stay over night so they could keep an eye on her and do more tests and give her some medicine intravenously. I was busy with something else that day but when our son texted that he was at the animal hospital outside of town, my husband drove to the hospital and picked him up and drove him home. The vet promised to call on Saturday with more information.

Saturday was a long day. The vet kept in contact with my son, telling him how Coco was doing. She had an enlarged heart and it wasn’t doing a very good job pumping blood. But she was responding a bit to the meds they gave her. No test results were back yet. They told Bevin he could pick her up to take home at 8pm Saturday evening.

This was not the first time my son has ever experienced a much loved and critically ill pet. All three of us stood around a veterinarian’s examination table at midnight many years ago as our 20-year-old Findus lay there after having had a stroke that paralyzed his 2 hind legs. We held each other and petted Findus as he slowly passed away from the shot the vet had given him a few minutes earlier. Seven years ago Bevin went with me when I took our Pepsi to the vet after over 6 months of stomach problems that had him throwing up several times a day no matter what we did for him. That day, the vet gave us a room with dim lighting, candles and a big box of tissues, to spend time with Pepsi in, before he was calmly put to sleep. Pepsi is buried out at our country property together with Findus and his sister Tingaling under a grove of tall pine trees. Both these times it was Håkan and myself that made the fatal final decision.

Saturday evening, we picked up Bevin and drove out to the animal hospital. I went in with Bevin. Bevin took a number and when it was called both of us went up to the counter. The girl behind the counter seemed unsure who she should be talking to, sometimes looking at me and sometimes looking at Bevin. I kept looking towards Bevin when she asked a question so that she would know it was him who owned Coco and who she should address. But anyone who knows me knows that I am loud, opinionated, bossy and a bit pushy. I make no apologies for that. Anyway…we were told where to go to sit and wait for them to bring Coco out to us.  Together with Coco, the nurse brought a packet of medicines and more information about Coco’s condition. I asked questions. So did Bevin. In the car on the way back to Bevin’s apartment, he told me that I was so busy asking questions and talking that he was not able to ask the question he had been thinking of asking.

I felt terrible. I felt I had failed my son. I had gone with him to be a support for him and I had failed him!
As a parent we want to protect our children. We put small plastic things on the corners of coffee tables so when our tiny toddlers lose their balance they don’t hurt themselves if they fall against the table. We hold their hands when crossing the street so they don’t run out into traffic. We want to protect them from the pain of life. And we want to be able to continue protecting them from bad things for the rest of their lives. But we can’t. And we shouldn’t. We need to raise them so they can stand on their own two feet.

All day Sunday Bevin tried to take care of his sweet little cat. Checking her breathing. Checking that she ate – she ate very little. Giving her medicines, some of them she needed to be given 3 times a day! She didn’t like getting the meds and she mostly just lay on the floor or under the sofa. On Monday he arranged to work from home – still trying to take care of her. Anyone who has ever owned a cat knows how easy it is to give a cat medicine – not easy at all. And she needed a lot. By Monday evening, he accepted the fact that he couldn’t keep doing what he was doing. It wasn’t working and he made the decision to call the hospital on Tuesday morning and make an appointment to bring her in to relieve her of her suffering – because he could see she was suffering. Shortly after he texted us to tell us of his decision, he texted a photo of her sitting on his lap and said she had just come over to sit with him – to have him hold her. To me, it was as though she was saying thank you.

The next day we drove to the animal hospital. They showed Bevin and Coco and myself to a room – it was dimly lit with a candle and a box of tissues. She lay on a towel half in her cage. If she had been her normal self she would have been going around exploring the whole room but she was content to just lay there looking around. We stood there petting her, not saying much. Eventually we broke down and cried. I held my little boy who is taller than me and told him that yes, this was a very hard thing. The box of tissues were well needed. Finally everything was over. We could leave. They offered to do an autopsy and Bevin said ok. They will do a private cremation and he will get her ashes in a small urn. We can spread them out at the country house where she loved to catch mice.

This was the hardest decision my son has ever had to make in his young life. We can not protect our children from the hard things. We can only try to be there for them as much as we can. But sometimes life is hard and it is sad and we have to meet it as best we can. My son did good this weekend.

Page 1 of 8

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén