I returned from a two week trip to Colorado in early April, where I went to spend time with my son and his family as they’d just moved to a new home in a new town. Seven weeks later, I’m now back there again, to help welcome their new baby who will be my last grandchild. This time, I’m staying for a month to help smooth their transition from a family of three to a family of four. I feel fortunate that in my mid-70’s, I’m still able to a significant helper to them in ways that are definitely more physically challenging to me than they were ten years ago. Anyway, today on my 74th birthday, all of us, including the 9-day-old, went out to dinner at a steakhouse. None of us had eaten a steak in what felt like forever, but tonight, all of us ate some dreaded red meat. My strip steak was so delicious I almost licked my plate. I did eat a salad and a potato so it wasn’t a total blood fest. I don’t know when, or if, I’ll ever have another one, but I’m not sorry I ate it. I got a surprise dessert with a birthday song sung by a number of wait staff and ultimately, our entire side of fellow diners at the restaurant. I enjoyed myself, although I missed my Illinois family the whole time.
So what are some of my thoughts on this definitely not-a-youngster birthday? Let’s start with how the advances of technology have altered my music appreciation. I can’t remember the exact date when I started listening to music primarily through a streaming service, earbuds plugged into my head so music can accompany me while I walk, garden and do household chores. Somewhere back in time, the stereo equipment fell silent, subsequently followed by the tape and CD players. I know there’s been a comeback in at least the vinyl industry, but when I’m mobile, nothing works as well as my tapping into that mysterious online space which supplies me with a steady flow of sound which I can tweak instantly with just the sound of my voice or the flick of an arrow. Sometimes, though, I’ll be listening to a song when at its end, my mind anticipates what album track is next and I am continually surprised that I don’t hear it. That predictability can be so great when one of those records you listened to over and over stirs up the emotions you felt way back when, during the days when hours of devotedly listening to music was a conscious activity, not just background company. Sure, individual songs trigger memories too, but they’re transient – the unrelated next track rarely is about continuing a stream of memories created over more time than a two minute song. The other day I decided to load my usually random playlist with whole albums. First up was Bare Trees, released by Fleetwood Mac in March, 1972, about a month and a half before I moved in with Michael. The cover title got air time on the radio. But that was nothing compared to listening to that album over and over again, in the beginning of what would turn out to be the love affair of my life, with deeper cuts on the record like Sunny Side of Heaven and Sentimental Lady becoming enmeshed with all the heady emotions of decades past. Regular revisits to whole albums are now in my streaming rotations. These listening moments are like a trip in a time machine that requires nothing visual to open internal doors that I hadn’t thought about in a long time. I’m hoping to revisit many more of those places which exist in layered, complex places somewhere in my brain before my time on this planet is up.
The storage place for all the feelings connected to music also has me pondering everything I’ll never understand about emotions and memory. This pondering is actually a frequent pastime for me. These brains of ours, with their yet-to-be-discovered mysteries, perpetually intrigue me. I read recently that researchers have determined that the formation of implicit memories, such as the ones associated with infant caregiver recognition, are present within days of birth. Explicit memories, which involve recall, are believed to develop as early as twelve months of age and are more commonly cognitively available at around two years of age, although four is a more common time for remembering. All of them are supposedly stored within the hippocampus, adjacent to the amygdala, which develops before birth. That little nugget appears to be pre-programmed to deal with primal emotions involving fear and threat, but it also evolves over time based on individual life experiences. I marvel at the intricacies of these small structures in our heads, endlessly curious about how to access those moments which may define us but are lost to what is called childhood amnesia. I have some consistent but fleeting memories from when I was about two, but most are just inaccessible. Maybe one day, the keys to those shadowy places will become available. Meanwhile, I’m left to wonder…
During the weeks between the Colorado visits, however, I wasn’t consciously thinking about brain stuff, but rather laboring away in my garden at a fiendish pace. Missing that fleeting Illinois spring which seems shorter every year, is tougher for me than it used to be. As exciting as it is to be part of the new baby experience, I have to admit that being away from my other baby, my garden, is especially hard at this time of year. After the long gray winter days, when the weather warms up, I become single-minded, thinking of what I get to do out there in my yard. One of the few places in today’s world where I feel I can have at least a little impact, being away when the ground comes alive, where I can create a setting that can be both a refuge and a way station for all the pollinators laboring under the duress of climate change, is a big thing to me. I love to see how all those long hours outside translate into real life. I wanted to make sure I planted everything I normally get into the dirt in mid-May through mid-June, into the ground before I left. I got it all done, including ridding myself of more grass to make room for plants that are actually useful instead of just sitting around being green.
My mother, who claimed she couldn’t grow anything and wasn’t particularly keen on trying to, said I was like her mother, my grandmother, the person she sardonically called “the farmer.” Grandma bent herself over from the waist down to clean, to scrub, to plant and to grow. She had a special way with African violets. She was also remarkably physically resilient, dying at 89, not having spent more than a week in a hospital during her long life. That despite a total of thirteen pregnancies, eight live births, and decades of physical labor. She is the one I think about as my forebear when I describe myself as sturdy peasant stock. She lived long enough to meet my daughter, one of her many great grandchildren. Along with those of Michael and my parents, her voice and actions remain remarkably vivid, wherever they reside in my head. And also, when I work in the garden? I bend from the waist, just like grandma did.
Music, memories, gardens and mysteries, all cohabiting together in whatever comprises the interior of me, myself. In the evenings after all that gardening, I was too tired to do any more physical activity. So I turned my attention to the other task that seems to be taking me forever to accomplish, the downsizing of all the stuff accumulated over all my decades on this planet. Shortly before I left town, I pulled my mom’s end-of-life file, now almost 10 years old, and parked it, and myself, in front of the television set for the purpose of thinning some of my papers. I could also feel like I was being productive while actually being somewhat lazy. In any case, I wasn’t anticipating anything more momentous than whiling away a few evening hours before bedtime.
But wow. I was so wrong. Simply by reading over those papers which described the last six months of my mother’s life, a major hole was poked into a pile of PTSD emotions I thought I’d resolved long ago. Mom died at age ninety-one, finally succumbing to the after-effects of a broken hip, after struggling for years through a couple of cancers, wildly uncontrolled diabetes and too many other illnesses to mention. I was at her side through all of it. But reviewing the juxtaposition of her challenging problems on top of Michael’s was almost, almost, just too much.
Between 2012, the year of Michael’s cancer diagnosis and July 2015, the month of my mother’s death, my life was amazingly complicated. During that time I was the primary caregiver for my baby grandson. My mom was showing signs of early dementia. To protect her, Michael and I had moved her into my house, both so she wouldn’t be alone and so she wouldn’t run through her life savings by moving into some sort of extended care facility. That plan failed when taking care of a toddler, Michael and my mom proved too mentally expensive for me. I think the worst part of that time was when mom couldn’t comprehend the severity of Michael’s disease. Her cavalier attitude about him got to be too much for me to share my living space with her. First we moved her into an assisted living facility. That experiment lasted over a year and a half, a little longer than Michael’s first remission. As his condition worsened, so did Mom’s. She began exhibiting escalating signs of the dementia. After a terrible case of the flu which had profoundly impacted her living facility, she could no longer live semi-independently and had to be moved into a nursing home. Michael had more treatment which had bought him another brief remission, but that ended at the time mom was moving into the nursing home. Meanwhile while settling her, we were frantically searching for a clinical trial which might treat his resurgent cancer.
Those months are hard for me to describe. Michael was gradually exhibiting significantly increased tumor growth. Mom was confused about what was happening to her life. She was spending down her last dollars, which I hid from her to minimize her stress. I was chasing down any possible treatment options for Michael while simultaneously trying to get Medicaid to accept my mom’s application. One day in a moment of semi-lucidity, she said, “if Michael dies, how about you and I living together?” I reminded her that we’d already tried that. Life felt pretty surreal. My older brother died that April. As mom’s power of attorney, I made the decision not to tell her of his death. I didn’t think she could survive that news. Meanwhile, Michael’s health was declining. I imagined that he would die at age 66 which seemed impossible at the time, almost 25 years younger than mom at this time. Finally in June, 2015, his oncologist was able to secure treatment with Keytruda, then being used in compassionate care scenarios for the most desperately ill cancer patients. That medication ultimately would buy him more time but at the moment, nothing was certain.
On Friday, July 24th, I was just arriving at our local clinic so Michael could have several liters of fluid drained from his chest. The accumulated fluid was the consequence of a profound immune response to his treatment. Suddenly my phone rang. The nursing home was calling to say my mother was asking for me. She had fallen on a trip to the bathroom twelve days earlier and broken her hip. She had surgery and stayed hospitalized for eight days. Her recovery was poor and after that difficult time, she was returned to the nursing home. I had just completed her application process for hospice on Tuesday, July 21st. I knew that if she was needing me, something was terribly wrong. I never left the nursing home that Friday – mom died the next day at around noon. Suddenly there needed to be a quick funeral. Michael was still alive and struggling to stay that way.
It was an unimaginable time. That whole experience and the feelings about all of it, apparently lies stored along with the music feelings, memories and complex emotions in some small place in my head. The entirety of all the trauma and terror, the sadness and bitterness of having to sort through so many layers of pain, all at the same time, came roaring out of me, requiring nothing more than flipping through a pile of forms and documents one evening with the television droning in the background. I’m still surprised at how raw I could feel all these years later. Just exactly how deep is my memory reservoir anyway and why is everything that happened still so vivid? Michael stayed alive until May 28th, 2017. After all that had happened, that was something for which I will always be grateful.
So ten years past that old person anthem of my youth, the Beatles’ “When I’m 64,” this is me at 74. I’m still needed and still being fed, like the lyrics in that song. Also still wondering a lot, working a lot, still being in the moment, and still remembering the past and sorting through its evolution prism of time. What’s next and for how long? I guess we’ll see…