Bring on the liars, lovers, and clowns

Elaine Stritch who originated "little things"

 "It's sharing little winks together,
Drinks together,
Kinks together,
That make marriage a joy."

-- Stephen Sondheim, Company 

 The death of the great American genius, Stephen Sondheim, hasn't so much saddened me in itself as made me nostalgic for all the wonderful musical shows Will and I attended together over 41 years.

I remember a review called Side by Side by Sondheim which played in San Francisco at the Marines Memorial Theatre in summer of 1978.  (I know the year because I have a subscription to Newspapers.com and chased it down in the San Francisco Examiner.)  We would have been staying down the street at the Hotel Beresford, an old place that had special rates for teachers.  While I remember little of the actual show, I do remember the deep enjoyment I experienced being with my sweetheart, listening to the sophisticated lyrics, believing, as I did then, that we were having the same experience as we listened.

Now I understand that we probably weren't interpreting the lyrics or the evening in the same way.  But whether or not our minds were processing the cognitive aspect of the evening in the same way, I know we were enjoying being with each other and the performers.  

Will was never as sophisticated as I thought he was and I was never as emotionally mature as he hoped I was.  Nevertheless, we've always cared for each other, even without understanding what makes the other tic  (sic).  The Sondheim song with which I most identified was another one from Company:  

"I've got those
"God-why-don't-you-love-me-oh-you-do-I'll-see-you-later" Blues,
That"Long-as-you-ignore-me-you're-the-only-thing-that-matters" Feelin".

In the summer of 1981, after we spent time in Los Gatos and San Francisco, we drove to Los Angeles to see Sweeney Todd where it was playing at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.  We were both so excited to see the show with its original cast of Angela Lansbury and George Hearn.  I remember best the moment when Sweeney slits the first throat and raises his blade high as lights blast on to catch the blade and the drops of blood sliding from it as the great whistle blows.  Wow!  And the music, so terrible and beautiful.  I remember at the time being amused that many of the people in the audience were of the same class and power as the folks Sweeney was butchering.

Ad from LATimes, August, 1981

Two other Sondheim shows Will and I enjoyed together were Assassins (Artists Repertory Theatre, 2006, Portland) and Company (Ethyl Barrymore Theatre, Broadway, 2006).  

Will stopped going to the theatre and to the movies in 2014, during our second-to-last trip to New York City. He got sick on that trip and was too tired to go out at night.  I look back now at one decision I made -- to go to a play without him  because he freaked out and thought we were going to the movies but it was a play and "too expensive".  I was so upset with him (because I still didn't understand the dementia) that I let him walk back to the hotel himself.  

That was the last time I let him alone on the streets of a city.

 

Of course my first Sondheim was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.  I overplayed the album I took out from the Los Gatos library. I also and watched the movie whenever it played on television so I had a few of the songs memorized.  I can still perform much of "Everybody ought to have a maid" and "Miles Gloriosus:" the Braggart Soldier.  

Buster Keaton in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

 

 

 

Creative Writing Assignment

 I've been taking some memoir writing workshops. Below is a piece a turned in to Eileen Casey along with her feedback (in red).

 

photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Prompt:  Write a ‘someday’ piece, imagining what it is you most crave is suddenly within reach. Find an object/detail which epitomises this ‘someday’ feeling. How would you react?

 

“Always look on the bright side of death:
Adjust before you draw your terminal breath.” --  Eric Idle

 

I am waiting for the Reaper, that slacker!  Sometimes I picture him as Bengt Ekerot, the white-faced actor in Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal.  More often, I see Death as the John Cleese-voiced puppet in The Meaning of Life:  the Grim Reaper with his pointing skeletal hand.   And I yell at his black-robed, scythe-clutching figure, while tapping my Shinola watch:  “What the fuck!” LOVELY...GREAT VIBRANT OPENING. I'M 'IN'....

He’s late, you see.  Going on six months now.  In December of last year my spouse was accepted into a local for-profit hospice.  In order to get federal funding, they needed to claim he had only six months to live. So now Mr. Death is late for his very important date.  And I’m ready for him. 

I’ve been ready for him since the mid-Nineties, when I volunteered with a non-profit Hospice. For two years I was part of care teams that included a nurse, chaplain, social worker and family members.  Though most of my clients lived only a short time after our teams were involved, my last continued on for six months.  Joe, like my spouse, matured past his hospice sell-by date.

Because of my work duties, I was unable to be with Joe during his last hour.  But as soon as I could leave the college when I was giving a test,  I jumped into my Toyota Corolla and sped across town to Deschutes River Woods.  When I got to the mobile home he shared with his wife, I found the Hospice nurse in Joe’s bedroom.  His old body was completely naked. 

“I just got him undressed.  Would you like to help me wash him?”

The body was thin with knobbly joints.  The skin was very soft, except for on his fingers, rutted from decades of guitar playing. ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS DETAIL He was almost hairless.  As I passed the washcloth over him, I felt his body temperature slowly changing from warm to cool.  Soon rigor would set in but as the nurse and I cleaned the corpse, the joints were still easy to move. 

I wondered if this is what my own husband would look like when he died, though at the time he was only sixty-four.  He is now ninety-one.  Ninety-one going on three.  He has late-stage vascular dementia.

So I am prepared and will use my past experience when the Grim Reaper arrives.  While I know that widow-hood will be hard after a fifty-year partnership, I believe that what we’re currently going through now is harder. 

Well, what I’m going through. 

My sweetheart seems perfectly content.  He is a hummingbird,  living on the sugar in hard candy and clear Ensure.  I don’t think he knows what he’s lost or what we’ve lost together.  He doesn’t wake up and go to sleep with grief.  He probably doesn’t think about what it’s like for me to wipe shit off legs I used to kiss.  He sleeps much of his day.

And I look ahead to the beginning of my freedom.  Look ahead to the horrible morning when I wake up beside a cooling body, smelling the final release of fluids in our bed, a smell I already know.  When I will cry for an hour or two and then wash his body myself, touching with love the great bones that are now barely contained within the fragile skin.  When I will call the Hospice, the Funeral Home, and my Priest.  When I will finally have no one to take care of but myself.

HI Kake, I have to say. This IS among the best pieces I've ever received in all my time on this course. Honestly, I wish this piece were mine, it's excellent. You really won't have any problem publishing Kake, once you decide on what type of book you want to write to full fruition....diary of this time recounted here? I mean I don't need to tell YOU, when you have this much talent, this much courage and inner nous, knowing how to pace, where to take me in the emotional sense, honestly? This piece is of the standard I don't see too often. I can't fault it and in a way I wish I could. For now, I'm a very keen reader of your work, Eileen

 

And now this new thing

 So yesterday morning he was up, getting some hard candy, just before I went into the office.  He said there were children in the bedroom.  I got him back into bed and he was okay.

Then, when I got home, he talked about seeing his niece running around in the back yard, "Elmer and Esther's child."

I did not think hallucinations would be part of vascular dementia.  I thought they were associated just with Alz and Lewy-Body.

Nope!

Destination F&*#d!

(Concept of the destination mentioned above stolen from the brilliant comic, Ozzy Man)

Thanksgiving Thoughts

A meme created by a member of a Facebook spousal caregiver group.  I have Cam McIlreavy's  permission to post.

Bad Theology, Good Laughs

 So my good friend Diana and I shared a laugh on Saturday when I started into my theologically atrocious theory about why Will is so far past his Hospice sell-by date. It's dumb theology because I don't really think the Divine Mystery is an old dude with a white beard nor that Death looks like a Monty Python puppet.  Nevertheless, in my imagination, neither Charon nor the Divine are looking forward to my hypercritical beloved's travel over the Styx or entry to Heaven (yeah, yeah, yeah -- I'm totally mixing up all the texts.  So sue me.)

So here's Will on the boat.  "Yeah, can you steady out your polling?  This is a kinda crappy boat for such an important transition.  Couldn't you have polished the brass a little?  Really, it's kind of a mess."

And here's Will chatting with Gabriel:  "You call this a Heaven?  Warner Brothers created a more interesting heaven in Green Pastures. With better singing.  I mean, yeah, you say that's a heavenly choir but don't you think Jesse Norman did that hymn better? As for halos, I have to say that mine is a little small and it has a couple of spots on it so if you could show me where to turn it in. . . "

Thank you, Diana, for being able to enjoy dark humor with me.

A Strange and Glorious Gift

 At 2:30 this morning we were both in bed awake.  I was trying to get back to sleep after getting up to pee.  He started talking.  

 "It's okay if you go upstairs.  Do you want to go upstairs?" 

I told him, "We are upstairs, sweetie."  I hugged him.

"You're a good person."

"Thank you, sweetie.  I love you."

He had a long visit from Pastor Noah yesterday.  Will was in bed and Noah talked with him for almost an hour.  I didn't listen to much of it but I think there was a lot about the afterlife and about Will being a wonderful person.  Maybe it was Noah who got Will into the lasting good frame of mind.   But what a gift he and God gave me last night.

Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash

 

 

 

Crap

 Don'tcha hate it when a friend turns to a stranger?

I had a really good male friend for four years, someone who I thought I could be a guy with.  Then at one point he tells me I'm beautiful.  Then I get a hard on for the sound of it and go all girly for like a week and tell my therapist how happy it makes me to be thought attractive by someone.  Then we have a brief (two letters, one zoom) flirtation, and then he gets involved with a woman and now he's cut me off.

I thought it was her.

It wasn't.  It was him.  And he actually showed her my letters without checking in with me first.  I would have let him

I believe I've suddenly appeared to him as a slut.  And now he's no longer my friend, after calling me his best friend.

On a day when Will is sleeping or pissing or incoherent.  On a day when I am low and the hours are long and I needed a friend and I lost one.

BUT, I didn't cut myself. I contacted my therapist.  And I texted him proof of his complicity when he started acting (like other men in my life) like he had nothing to do with it.

I'm so sad and angry.  

---------------------------

That was yesterday, Saturday.  It's Sunday morning.  Still crying.

One of the reasons this has hurt so bad is because of the whole slut-shaming thing.  I believe my friend has fallen into stupid patriarchal thinking, of which I thought him incapable, that there is only one type of sex and that female sexual desire is dangerous.  

I feel like Job.  Yesterday was already a bad day.  I'd been missing Birdy so much.  Then when my friend called from the road, on his way to Bend, telling me he no longer wanted to see me, he couldn't see me as a friend now that the whisper of sex had passed between us, it was like someone had shot me up with radioactive salt.

Have you ever had that experience, on the xray table?  I once did.  I forget what it was for (my guts?  my back?) but I had to have some strange fluid pumped into my body first before the machine took its pictures.  For a few seconds my whole body felt locked into a low, hard cold flame.  That's how I felt yesterday.  I don't know what the neurotransmitter load was, but my whole body felt frozen into shakes.  My skin was hot then cold then like metal then like concrete.  My stomach hurt and my chest felt like a rock was pressing down on it.

Oh, well.  I was very angry in texts to my friend yesterday until at the end I forgave him.  I have to forgive him.  He can't help being a dick in this way.  He doesn't have the bandwidth.  After all, he's just had one woman, now a second in the offing and I've had many sexual experiences.  He's in love and love makes people stupid.  

And, as I was writing last week, I am insecurely and ambivalently attached which means that one of my core issues is a violent emotional reaction when someone leaves me.  I have a mental short-circuit that makes rejection feel like the other person is saying to me, "I'm sorry, I have to kill you now."  That is, abandonment raises an invisible background terror based on certain events in my toddlerhood.

The last time this happened to me was with a female friend in 2001.   She was a person I loved and to whom I thought I could say anything.  I was wrong.  She moved out of town and then wrote me a letter saying that I was "too much" for her and she ended our friendship.  Twenty years later and I still feel the hurt beneath that old scab.

Add to all this that I also found out this week, by going to a Christian writing conference online, that to get accepted by a publisher one has to have a "platform" and be a successful writer before one writes.  And that just made me tired.  So tired.  I can't do that.  I don't have the strength.  So I've decided just to write enough for a few friends to see if someone can understand me and accept me as I am.  Or will I lose ALL my friends once I tell my story?

OK.  It's now 6:15.  Will woke up, walked to the kitchen for a handful of hard candies, and has gone back to bed.  I said good morning, he said good morning.  He smiled.  I hugged him.  I asked if he was getting up.  He said, "I don't know."  I told him it wasn't even 5:30 and he should go back to  bed.

And here I sit, on the fucking floor over the fucking heat vent, thinking about how funny it is that my world has BEEN BROKEN once again.  That a reality, a friendship I had believed in and thought solid --

well, EVERYTHING SOLID MELTS INTO AIR.

fucking commies knew something