Lessons From My Mother On How To Die

a) understand exactly what you want
b) communicate this, over months or years if necessary, to your loved ones. Repeat.
c) continue to learn your options because they change over time and over your health condition(s)
d) keep a sense of humor about it all
e) filing? damn the torpedoes… (actually, no. Don’t damn the torpedoes. Mum’s filing system must have made sense to her, but we are continuing to find surprises)
f) try and keep your marbles; it expands your options (see item c) above)
g) write your own obituary. Ask for help if this seems overwhelming.
h) be clear about who you want to be present, and almost more importantly, who you DON’T want to be there. Appoint a gatekeeper if necessary.
i) let there be ice cream.

What I wish:

Is that she hadn’t told us all not to cry. As Gandalf says, “not all tears are an evil.”

The Call of the Loon

This past week has been very busy with getting things packed up, distributed to various places, visits to lawyers and accountants and funeral homes, all the kinds of things that need to be done and nobody much feels like doing.

We did take a break, though, on Friday morning, to distribute mum’s ashes along with the remaining ones of my father. As we walked silently back to the car, a couple of loons began to call.

Mum kept her sense of humor to the end: writing “sayonara” on her calendar to all future doctor’s appointments, she really left on her terms and on her schedule. I will be making a donation to Maine’s Death With Dignity foundation.

Goodbye

Yesterday we took my mother to Paul’s Marina on Mere Point Road in Brunswick. We sat outside and watched the ospreys fishing, the boats turning into the incoming tide, and my mother greedily eating two scoops of peanut butter pie ice cream.

This morning, she was gone, surrounded by all of us and doing it exactly like she wanted.

Farewell, mum, good travels. I have so much to thank you for. (Not sure who I’ll call now with bridge questions, but we’ll manage.)

Horoscope Reading: A Short Play

M: D, Scorpio, here’s yours: you need a break. [Laughter]

M: A, Virgo: get ready to roll up your sleeves… [interrupted by howls of laughter]

M: Me, Capricorn: get out. [Laughter so loud tears stream down faces]

L'Shana Tovah!

Apples and honey for a sweet new year 5786.

In addition to being Erev Rosh Hashana, today also was the autumnal equinox. This combination seems like a pretty rare event, seeing as how Rosh Hashana moves around from being as early as 5 September to as late as 5 October. I did a little research and found no reliable source to tell me when was the last time this occurred.

Podiatry Visit

I’ve reached the age where regular visits to the podiatrist seem to be part of my life. I can’t successfully cut a few of my toenails and I have a corn which needs to be shaved with a knife and which is in a very awkward place to do myself.

I did go to get pedicures a lot while I was working. Different feel, the podiatrist’s office. I’m glad I’ve made the shift. My feet have a lot of issues and they deserve the care.

The Plumbers Are Coming! The Plumbers Are Coming!

Several weeks ago the sewage backed into our shower. This is awful but at least it was contained in the shower so was easy to clean, plus it had drained on its own, I think because I was running the washing machine. At any event, the plumber came and with the help of a camera determined that the cause of the problem was tree roots that had broken through a bend in the main pipe rather than something clogging the drain. Two large trees (the apricot in our yard and the almond next door) were cut down recently and doubtless the roots of one of them were the culprit.

The plumbers returned today and replaced the pipe, after some jackhammering and arduous work with a pick. A job that was supposed to take about four hours ended up taking over seven, and they still need to come back tomorrow after the cement has dried to tidy it up.

I retreated to the trees outside the Senior Center in order to work on a pitch for a comic idea… I don’t like jackhammers. (But as my neighbor Barbara says, at least they’re better than leaf blowers.)

Blindness in Pets

When we had our two first cats, Diego developed blindness. The vet predicted he might because his pupils (and eyes) were always open wide, potentially a symptom of high blood pressure. He adapted quite well to life in our old house, finding his way to the litter box (well, in the end, a puppy pad), and was able to jump up to the stool next to me and sit on my lap in the morning, a sweet memory that I will always carry with me.

My sister’s dog was recently diagnosed with diabetes and his total blindness has come on very suddenly — within two weeks his lenses are completely opaque, like a glacial lake, and they have both been on a tortuous journey to find the right level of insulin to treat his symptoms (very high glucose levels, monitored with needle prick blood draws, terrible thirst followed by massive drinking and needing to pee long and often, all night, etc.). But he is still enjoying life and today had a great walk on Bartol Island, managing to trot and even lope for part of it.

Seeing the end of a dear pet’s life looming is never easy and my sister won’t prolong it if his suffering seems to be more than the few moments of pleasure he has. This was a rescue dog whose owner had died in hospital and nobody knew she had a dog; he was locked in a house with no food for who knows how long, found eating toothpaste. He has had serious abandonment issues but this dog got her through an excruciatingly painful divorce. It will be a difficult parting.

Bloody Banks

I’ve been needing to deal with several banking issues this week, namely:

- trying to open a bank account in the UK from the US so that my British pension can get paid in, and stay, in pounds sterling;
- waiting for a “suspected fraudulent” check to clear that Numenius had paid into our joint account, in an amount close to what he has paid in every month for years without incident;
- trying to get my mother squared away so that she doesn’t have to pay a $20 fee every time money is wired into her Maine account either from Spain or from the UK;
- trying to get myself added as the co-owner of a safe deposit box with a friend who is leaving the country for a couple of months.

All of these attempts have taken literally hours. It’s exhausting. They all want you to use an app which is, Numenius says, because nobody knows how to design usable websites anymore. I want to hide in a hole.

Catchup

UC Davis held a retirement celebration last night for anyone who had retired since June 30, 2014. I’ve “retired” in that I draw a check from the university every month that is a “retirement” check, but Listen-ink is moving along. I love this new work I’ve chosen to do and it’s a great fit. (I just volunteered, perhaps rashly, to record a session in Spanish at the IFVP Conference in Austin in three weeks. The speaker will be speaking in English, I’ll be recording in Spanish. Translation and translation on the fly. Wish me luck!)

Here’s a list of Things I Know Now. I am so behind with blogging it seems like the only way to give the space to Numenius, who has been gently pressuring me.

• If you wind a warp on a loom unevenly, threads will pop. This is really annoying.
• Hens stop laying eggs reliably when they’re over 18 months old, and much less in winter. The rest of the time you have stroppy pets that make a mess and try and escape at any opportunity. I maybe should have let the hawk keep one of them instead of chasing it off.
• Daily Life for Working Americans consists of a lot of rushing about. It’s been very nice to turn down that spigot.
• If you stop rushing about (to get to work on your bike, say), it’s really easy to pack on the pounds. Forget the Freshman Fifteen; this is more like the Retirement Eighteen.
• Obviously, more exercise and less food is a way to address this. Obviously. Hmm.
• The U.S. confectionery lobby has succeeded in banning Cadbury’s chocolate from retail outlets here on the dodgy loophole that it doesn’t quite count as chocolate. It can still be found, however, in a drugstore in Davis (not telling which one). Obviously, this is not helping with the Retirement Eighteen thing.
• I really hate housework (except mopping floors). It was easy to find excuses when I was working. Rushing about. Now I just have to fess right up here and say I’m a slob, I live with someone who doesn’t see the mess, and though I don’t like it, I’ll tolerate it because I don’t like housework more.
• There is lots of suffering in the world and it can get overwhelming.
• A lot of suffering in the world, and particularly here in the U.S., is inflicted by people of my skin color.
• One small thing I can do is speak up about it. Speak up against even very veiled racism. And start talking to other white people about it. People of color are so exhausted by the futility of trying to educate us, plus it’s not safe for them. We can work to get to a place where we educate ourselves. It’s really important right now