A Second Home

Here I am snuggled into bed in my apartment.

On Christmas Eve, I slept here for the first time. I know what it means to be a minimalist now. Borrowed items from my sister's kitchen and the electric skillet I received at Christmas can be used to make my breakfast.  

The rooms are pretty bare, the cabinets and drawers are near empty. Strangely, I feel better here out of the clutter I live in at home. I am convinced that my own home makes me sick. I want to clear out most of what is in my house in the mountains. Much of it will be brought here, but not all of it! During the past two years, I lived almost all the time in my kitchen, dining and living area, and bedroom. When my dining room became my office, the clutter began to grow. I soon was drowning in paper. It seemed that my furniture grew or multiplied and my open space shrunk. One bedroom became a catchall space and no one could sleep there now. Clutter is bad for me, and I will do something about it when I go home.

I have two closets here at the apartment and love all that empty space. I brought some clothes and shoes and will leave most of them so when I come down in the future, I won't have so much to pack.

We had a quiet Christmas Day.

My nephew began to run a fever and felt unwell that morning, so his mother said she thought it best if we didn't come over.  

However it was fun opening presents with Gay and Stu and having our dinner here, just the three of us.

I did not get Christmas cards mailed as I have done in the past. I did send out some Email Christmas letters. I love the cards sent to me by friends and family.

It is so nice to be remembered and to hear from them.

I have a friend on my mind tonight. 

She has been taking chemo for the past year. She is in the hospital now and was under Hospice care at home until yesterday when she was moved to Asheville NC under strong pain meds. She is suffering so much.

That is why I support Compassion and Choices. I watched my sweet husband deal with the horrible pain of cancer and I know, if I had a choice, I would want to have a say in how I want to end my life. I think anyone who has watched a loved one suffer knowing there is no cure, would want that person free of pain more than anything. I know I felt that way with Barry. Unless someone tells the doctor what the patient wants and what the family wants, the doctors will continue to prolong the suffering as that is what they think they are supposed to do.

HOSPICE

My friend, Ellen, a doctor who works in a Hospice Center, says many relatives or close family members will insist they do everything possible to prolong the life of the patient even if he/she is suffering great pain and has no chance of recovering. 

Don't we suffer enough just living with our illnesses and aches and pains, with our losses and griefs? Why make us suffer even more at the end of our lives? 

I am grateful for my kind and loving sister and brother-in-law who do so much for me, even providing a relaxing retreat for me. Lexie is not sure she wants to stay here, but she finally decided, if she couldn't go upstairs with Gay and Smokie, she would stay with me. In her own bed, she is curled up and is sleeping away.

ACCEPT AND MOVE ON

I am trying to look at the positives in my life the past two years instead of dwelling on the things that have been tough, and the changes that will likely be permanent. We must accept those changes and move on in new ways to enjoy our lives.

Hope you have escaped COVID and will have a happy and healthy new year.

 

Never too late to learn our history

My sister and I discussed how much American history we are just now learning. Why did we not learn this in school?

A Native American served as vice president 92 years ago.

Charles Curtis was inaugurated as America's first (and only) Native American vice president. Curtis was a member of the Kaw (also called Kanza) Nation.

Curtis was born in 1860 in what was then the Kansas Territory to a White father and an Indian mother. His mother died when he was just three, and he was left in the care of his Indian grandmother.

"He lived with the Kaw people on the reservation," said Pauline Sharp, a member of the Kaw Nation. "He learned how to ride horses, he could speak the language."

But he was sent to live with his white grandmother and that changed his life.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/remembering-charles-curtis-the-first-native-american-vice-president/

I have become aware that our history lessons in school were chosen by white men who wanted us to learn only what they felt was important and necessary. 

In recent years, we have learned about many women who were notable and should have been in the history books. Books have been written and movies made about the lives of females who were important to our world. 

I don't remember hearing of any black people who were worthy of notice when I was growing up and attending all-white schools. 

I am learning now that some of the most important inventions for farming were made by slaves, but they were not allowed to claim the invention. The law at that time stated that because the slave belonged to his master, his invention belonged to his master also. 

Recently Charlayne Hunter, the first black woman to enter the University of Georgia where my sister, Gay, and I were in school, discussed that day in January when she and Hamilton Holmes integrated the college.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/surviving-school-desegregation-and-finding-hope-in-never-again

I have always felt grateful that I lived and was so close to history in the making. It was an experience that helped to make me the person I am now. I became interested in civil rights and realized for the first time that privileged white people were often haters of people they did not know and hated them only because of their race. They also hated people who supported the rights of minorities. 

I didn't grow up in a hateful family. My mother was the most loving and caring person I have ever met. My father championed the underdog and was a supporter of human rights even though he never used that term. 

Gay and I hung out with a diverse group of girls in college. My Indonesian roommate, Rulia, was intelligent, kind, and generous. She had the dusky skin of the Islands and long, jet black hair. A delightful Chinese-American girl, who is still our close friend, was dear to all of us. Also in that group was a girl from Dalton, Georgia. We laughed and enjoyed it when we gathered to cook and eat in the kitchen of the dorm. Rulia cooked food similar to what we find in Asian restaurants today. She also danced native dances holding lighted candles in her hands. So beautiful and graceful.

Rulia, my roommate in college

This is how a sheltered girl from South Georgia learned to care for people who looked different from her and found them interesting and loving. I seem to gravitate to others who can teach me something about their way of life.

We have far more things in common than we have differences. I wish we could embrace the differences in people and live together in peace in this land where immigrants from all over the world come to follow the American dream. 

I hope you are safe and healthy and that you can get your virus vaccine soon. I appreciate your visiting me here and I love to hear from you. 

 

Age is a learning experience that can’t be gained in the best college or university. With age comes wisdom and mature thinking. It is not our number of birthdays that make us wise however, it is the hurts, the losses, the tragedies we face and overcome. It is also the celebrations large and small of successes and how we accept them.


With every loss of someone we love, our lives change in some way. For months I’ve had my brother and his wife on my mind. He died suddenly on a Sunday morning in August and she passed away three months later.

How can my life ever be the same? We die a little bit with the death of our loved ones. But we learn something each time we face the pain. Hopefully we learn something that helps us with the time we have left. In talking with my brother’s daughter, I felt the raw edges of her grief. For months that family watched their mother fighting for her life, tortured with surgeries, and finally she passed away quietly under Hospice care.

The  cremains of this couple, married back in the fifties, are commingled in one urn and  buried in an ancient cemetery near the grave of our great-grandfather under massive oaks gray with moss.

Christmas is coming, but how do the daughters and grandchildren celebrate the holidays with joy when the home their tradition-loving mother filled with light, with delicious family meals, exquisite Christmas trees, and gifts lovingly bought or made, is no longer there. It hits them. You can't go home now because home with Mom and Dad is gone. That unconditional love from their parents is only a memory now.

Wisdom comes with this realization. Once we face the pain ourselves, we don’t judge how others handle grief. Once humbled we realize we have no right to judge. We have had our legs cut out from under us and we barely survived, we feel fortunate to still be here, so how could we judge anyone who is dealing with that pain. Empathy grows in places it never thrived before.

Once I was ignorant about this kind of loss. But I learned as I experienced losses of loved ones. Everyone deals with loss, with mourning, in their own way. No one can tell us how we should behave. No rules apply. No limits apply. We don’t get over it. We go on with our lives, and if we are lucky, we finally have days when we no longer feel that stabbing pain when we think of our loved one. We finally are able to talk about our loss without crying, but that doesn’t mean the hurt is gone. We just bury it deeper inside so we can continue to live in the real world.

Finding a way to reach out and help others seems to work best for healing. Starting a ministry for helping children, using our talents to teach others what we know, supporting Hospice or doing something for others in the name of our loved one gives us peace and comfort. Most of us have a need to keep the name of our loved one alive. “As long as we are remembered by even one person we continue to live.”

As my nieces and their children face life without the guiding light of their strong father and mother, my hope is for healing, and my prayers for peace in their lives are foremost on my mind.