Do-Over

We leave Sunday for a trip to Florida to stay with our friend John. This is a “do-over” trip.   Last year Joe and I made our first ever trip to Florida (we live on the ocean here…..why bother, right?) and about 3 days in to our inaugural experience we got a phone call letting us know my Dad had passed away. John felt terrible and as a special act-of-love-I’m-so-sorry gift he promised us a “do over”  trip this year.

I’m not sure how I feel about going. The specter of last year’s trip is kind of lurking out there… but the actual anniversary (thankfully) is a few weeks off.  Don’t get me wrong -  I’m thrilled to get out of Dodge, pleased for Joe (who REEEALLLYY needs a break) and I’m even OK with ironing a pile of linen shirts to pack.  I’ve always found ironing to be very relaxing and therapeutic. What’s the problem, then?   I just feel kind of sideways inside.

Physically, I’m ready to go. I splurged on a haircut and matching (we don’t call it “coloring”) and even managed to get my esthetician  to melt a metric ton of wax and do my eyebrows.  I look positively GIRLY.  Luckily, John is an expert at relaxing and entertaining.  I’ll have a really good bloody Mary in my hand within moments of our arrival.  That should help with the mental part, right?

I’m sure it will all come together and be a great week.  Right? Right.

The Schoolgirls of My Japan

In 2004  my husband was president-elect of the local Rotary Club.  One of his “duties” as incoming president was to attend the Rotary International conference  to be held in Osaka, Japan.   (Sidebar – the man who held the office one year after Joe went to Chicago.)  The local club paid for Joe’s airfare, conference registration and a hotel stipend.  We agreed it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for both of us to go  so we swallowed hard and bought my plane ticket and added to the hotel stipend kitty so we could upgrade to a really nice hotel.

(Note:  Okay, I am not a total bitch, but I have rules and standards  about hotels. My feeling was we were arriving in a very foreign country with no guide or tour or assistance and I wanted a sanctuary hotel with a Western toilet, thank you very much. )

To the left of the hotel is a beautiful, multi-level green garden, nestled among the shops and offices.

The Swissotel Nankai at Namba was all of that and more. I could go on for days about the beautiful linens, the marvelous toilet with an instrument panel for swishy warm water (and air) features, or the delicate porcelain of my  morning  coffee creamer  that fit in the palm of my hand,  looking for all the world to be a fragile,  dainty blown egg. I could regale you with stories about how we ventured out unaccompanied and explored  Osaka and Nara and surrounding cities by train, bus and subway.  (We did get pretty horrifically lost once, but recovered quickly and found our way back to Osaka and the aforementioned sanctuary hotel, thank you very much.)

But this is about my schoolgirls.

While wandering through Nara Park we stopped at the  Toshodai-ji Temple where we found a busload of Japanese students all wandering about with little notebooks in their hands, obviously there on an assignment that would enable them to mingle with non-native tourists. Most of the girls  just looked at us, giggled, and shyly scattered.  Once we sat down on  a bench  we were approached by four beautiful girls who, in halting English,  asked us if we could help them with their English lesson.  We proceeded to answer their questions, sign our names in their notebooks, let them take our pictures with them while  all the time giggling madly like 6 year-olds.   (In fairness,  they were giggling too.)  It was all too hilarious – between their halting English and our feeble attempts at the Japanese phrases we learned for the trip, the whole thing was entirely too funny to be borne.  They were so charming and adorable and sweet and innocent.  Their “homework”  provided us with one of the best memories of the trip.

Ikebana

I loved Japan.  Profoundly. Our trip there was like nothing else I have ever experienced.  We wandered up and down streets of towns where no one spoke a word of English, and yet we were greeted and kindly welcomed everywhere we went.  Even in restaurants we managed to point at menus and communicate we were open to tasting whatever they thought we would like. When we got lost or turned around we were quickly rescued by someone who would observe our confusion, hold our map and look at us as if to say, “Where do you want to go?” and we would point at the map and they would point us in the direction we needed to go.

Now it is seven years later and I watch the news reports with a knot in my stomach. When I see people looking for their lost family members  the emotion swells up in me and I feel my nose and eyes  ache and grow warm   with tears.   I feel helpless and sickened and overwhelmed.  I look at our pictures from the trip and the faces of  those schoolgirls  and  I wonder where they are today.  Have they started college by now?    Are they near the worst of the earthquake and tsunami damage?  Are they safe? I think about all the ema we left at every temple we visited, writing our prayer intentions and wishes on them and hanging them carefully among the others.  I brought home a few extras I made and holding them now I close my eyes and  make a spiritual  ema for the people of Japan.  I  pray for their safety,  for the continued  grace they have shown in the aftermath,  for the unthinkable sacrifices made by the Fukushima 50 and their families,  and especially for the well-being of my Nara schoolgirls.

Photo by Ilya Genkin http://www.genkin.org

 

Seriously?

The last two weeks have been a hazy blur, and not in the good way.

Dad suffered a  series of markedly down-turning events that necessitated a very quick trip home.  As a consistent target for TSA bitches  I’m not a fan of flying to begin with – much less when the day has to begin at 3AM to catch a 6AM flight. The TSA’s were manageable on the outbound flights from Boston, no hammer complexes there.

After a few days of hospital roulette (never knowing who the next assigned doctor would be, ever getting an update on some test results, or wondering if the wastebaskets would EVER be emptied) we ended up moving him to a local rehabilitation center.  For reasons known only to fans of the movie Birdcage,  I have nicknamed the place Bob Fosse.  I spent the next few days there with my sisters and brothers trying  vainly  to honor my Dad’s wishes about his health care proxy.

“Fosse” is a Catholic institution that currently has 3 local priests  with a parent/patient currently in-house; consequently the place is crawling with RC priests.  I’m ok with that, my little brother is one of them.  Here is what I am not OK with:  one of them (pretty much a stranger to me no less)  took the opportunity to get all pastoral on my ass at a time when I was trying to pull myself together and say goodbye to my Dad for what well could have been the last time I will see him alive.  I told him three times I was not going to have that conversation with him right now, and that I really had to concentrate on my father.   I understood his deal,   I knew he thought he was being helpful, put he pushed back with a lengthy  fairy tale  about how ” your  Dad’s suffering is  not in vain, his suffering will save other souls and that when he is in heaven there will be people lined up to thank him for his suffering because he saved their souls…..”    and I threw a big, red bullshit flag.

Seriously?  A line of people thanking Dad?  It sounded like a coffee shop in a bad Disney movie.  I am  RC by faith and by grace but what heaven will or will not be is not definitively known to any of us. We can hope, conjecture  and read Catherine of Siena until we are blue in the face but I believe our puny human minds cannot begin to comprehend what lies ahead.  I think it is much bigger and better than anything we could ever come up with and I am content with that knowledge.

Father Get-All-Up-In-My-Grill was shocked when  I threw that BS flag and tripled his horrifically patronizing efforts to educate me on the error of my thinking. It set off an avalanche of reprimand and judgment.  ( I was also told to go to confession.)  He started peppering me with questions, all of which I answered pretty calmly.  Here is a sample:

Father Grill:   Are you married?

ME:  Yes.

Father Grill:  Children?

ME:  No.

Father Grill:  (One eyebrow critically raised)

ME: I had ovarian cancer.

Father Grill:  Oh.  (Evidently that was pardonable)  What is your married name?

ME:  Ciolino.

Father Grill:  Ciolina?

ME: No.  Ciolino – with an O at the end.

Father Grill:  Oh, is he Italian?

ME:  No, Sicilian.

Father Grill:  (Scared look)  Ohhh, Sicilian.  Did you learn to make the pasta?   (SERIOUSLY, HE SAID THAT.    I SWEAR I AM NOT MAKING THAT UP. )

ME:  No.  I don’t have to.  My husband makes it when he wants it.

It went on longer than I ever should have permitted and he left the room wearing more skin on his body than I ever should ever have left on it.  I was angry and shaken and grieving – and all at the same time.   I refuse to dwell on it or give it any more time or thought than I already have.  Instead, I will take that experience and offer the following suggestions for visiting the sick that all of us can use:

1. Speak softly.  Noise in the sickroom is anathema.  Ditto for perfumes and well-intentioned  aromatherapy.
2. Be brief.  The family and the patient are both exhausted.
3. Be useful.  Ask  them if you can bring them water, coffee, dinner – anything. Walk the hall with them.  Anybody need to be picked up at the airport?  Anybody need a ride to the hospital?
4. Be present.  You don’t need to regale them with stories of your own family illnesses and/or deaths, it isn’t a throw-down.  Just be present.
5. Be honest.  Spare them the “oh wait and see, he’ll be good as new in no time, ” especially when that is NOT going to happen.
6. Be cognizant. It is about what they need, not what you want to give them.

I remember years ago when we lost mom and people started showing up at my folk’s house with all kinds of food.  It was all home cooked and all wonderful.  Since there were about 24 of us there at the time (children & grandkids, spouses, etc.) it made meal times much  less difficult. Then, and I’ll never forget this,  someone showed up with a huge box of stuff and just left it very quietly.  It was filled with big packages of paper plates, cups, napkins, rolls of paper towels…. and toilet paper.  It was the most incredible, thoughtful,  useful thing ever.  Who knew?  Someone did, and I’m happy to pass it along.  We should all be so useful.  Seriously.