Monthly Archives: March 2010

Neglect


I know it probably seems that just when it appears I am posting daily again, I disappear. I am blogging nearly every day but much of it is for other sites. I wrote a post for Care2 late last week that was a monster hit. Over 450 comments. Of course it was about Wiccan students being discriminated against by Christian teachers. Colossal hit. Out of the park. I love it when the commenters take over and begin arguing points amongst themselves. Deeply satisfying.

A couple of mom posts on 50 Something have gone up recently as well. I know that is only of slight interest to most of you here, but I’ll throw it out as an option if you have been missing me terribly.

This week has been eaten up by the pursuit of blogging for almost no money and homework  for my upcoming yoga training weekend. I am crispy where training weekends are concerned. I attended a workshop or training every weekend in February and have only had one weekend off in between. French-fried would be the state of my mind and some things are still only as “clear as Mississippi mud” as my sadistic high school Algebra teacher used to say. The woman thought I was a step up from dangerously inbred. She used to look at me with a mix of puzzlement and determination that was demonic. She’s dead now. I always planned to dance on her grave but it’s not worth the effort to search around through a cemetery full of moldering nuns to find her.

Friday I have a treat for you only – Friday Flash. I have so neglected my puny attempts at fiction in the last months. I’ve been reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. It’s Henry VIIIth from Thomas Cromwell’s point of view.

Cromwell is normally vilified when he isn’t being portrayed as a toady or a Protestant zealot. He was a commoner who rose to uncommon heights in the service of King Henry. The mastermind behind the Reformation in some respects and probably more than a little responsible for the policies and law that would advance the idea of representative government.

Mantel hints at a romance between Cromwell and Mary Boleyn (The Other Boleyn Girl) and it’s fascinating speculation. Inspiring. So I ran with it a bit. Friday.

But now I am off to town. The older girls are coming out for supper and I need groceries, and I have to catch a quickie yoga class and sit a bit with my teacher, Jade, to see if she can make sense of the class sequencing I have to put together for my homework this month. The anatomy bites and I am still swimming around a drain where external and internal rotation goes. I also have an opportunity to teach a yoga class in the late afternoons after spring break and I need pricing and such advice.

Positive Attitude Gets a Bad Rap


I ran across a blog post of a woman questioning the feasibility of a positive outlook while going through hard or tragic times.

We are often sold a load of newborn diaper doo when it comes to attitude and reality and how one affects the other. The whole Oprah induced “secret” frenzy set the lucky ducks to head nodding like bobble heads in the rear window of a Pinto and made everyone else feel like a colossal failure at best and cursed by the gods at worst.

There is no reason NOT to attempt a positive outlook in the face of disasters, but reality is reality. Sometimes it will bite your head off if you let your vision cloud over in rosy hues.

A positive attitude can concede points to a dismal reality and still be a useful, worthwhile exercise that will certainly take a person farther than pessimism, anger, blame, defeatism and any other favorite shoulder shrugging, curling into a fetal position posture a person might favor in bleak times.

I went with positive in my own situation with the whole dying husband thing. He’d lost his job due to his illness right before we moved into a larger home with its bigger matching mortgage. I made up my mind early that coming out on the other side and being happy (that being relative) was where I had to focus, or I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed every morning.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t complain or despair or stomp my feet. I would sometimes no sooner solve a dilemma – like needing a daycare for my blind, demented 29-year-old husband – when I was confronted with another problem, but I took things as they came, played it where it laid and tried to focus on the long-term whenever I could. It’s not a perfect plan and I employed it imperfectly just as often as I hit the ball out of the park.

What I think is meant by maintaining a positive outlook during hard times is to just try to balance one’s outlook to mostly err on the side of “everything’s eventually going to be okay”. It does not mean ignoring issues or denying that sometimes it’s hard to be upbeat when the world is raining steadily on your parade while everyone around you seems to be walking on sunshine while draped in rainbows. Being sad, upset, and angry happens. It’s better to admit to and feel these things than stuff them away because they won’t stay where they are stuffed no matter how clever a packer you are. But it does no good to wallow in the negative and allow setbacks and tragedy to define your life or person.

Can you be positive in hard times?

Yes, you can within moderation but isn’t that true of all things?

Sunday Morning with Rob and Me


Sundays are lazy. None of that scrambling to your choice of worship theatres for us. Late rising, leisurely breakfast – never empty tea cups and conversation defines the morning for Rob and me.

As we usually do, we share information gleaned over the last several days that hadn’t already been featured as a topic of interest in our conversations. We are news junkies. I mostly Internet and he a combination of the web and talk radio.

Today I brought up a Business Week article by Amanda Bennett where she details the financial end of her husband’s seven-year battle with kidney cancer. It cost $618, 616 to prolong his life with 2/3rds of that expense settling in the last 24 months – when virtually everything that took place, did nothing.

Two things struck me about Bennett’s quite well-written article:

1) She admits that she was unaware of the true cost of her husband’s illness in terms of dollars because their insurance coverage really only presented them with bills for co-pays. It made it seem like a bargain when looking only at their out-of-pocket.

2) Even knowing that the last leg of her husband’s illness – in terms of treatments tried – was a waste of time that probably diminished his quality of life – she wouldn’t change a thing if she could do it again.

Oh, and just as an aside, she writes about dumping an opened bottle of one of the potent cancer drugs he was taking down the bathroom drain after he died. WTF?? Seriously? So wrong. Where was hospice? Obviously not doing their job.

Rob and I come to the terminal illness things from different perspectives – kinda. His wife was able to make her own decisions whereas my husband was mentally incapacitated and all decision-making fell on me. There was a tiny glimmer of hope for Shelley. Will never had a chance regardless.

So Rob can play devil’s advocate to my hard-earned position on illnesses that are inevitably terminal. What do I think is terminal? Anything where the odds are fifty-fifty or worse. North American mindset dictates fight no matter what it costs in terms of money and the emotional well-being of your loved ones, but I think you have to take into account the long-term toll. If you love your spouse and kids, how can you do otherwise?

Of course, I am of the belief that death is not evil, unfair and frightening – which is how it is regarded in the West. Death is. Like life is. I exist in either mode though I am beginning to wonder about what constitutes life really. If I always exist then am I not technically always alive albeit sometimes not corporeally?

Rob and I have some heavy Sunday morning brekkie discussions.

He doesn’t like to show his cards much on this. Shelley fought tooth and nail in the face of extremely bleak odds. A realistic person might say that she never stood a chance at all really. I would not want to say that perhaps her time would have been better spent traveling the world with her husband and girls and making the most of what was left. There is/should be choice.

Will wanted to fight. He didn’t understand that there was nothing to fight with. The only option – bone marrow transplant – would have just killed him sooner or left him as mentally/physically ravaged as he was just before he died.

I was selfish in the eyes of his family and friends because I looked closely at the odds and the long-term and decided that sacrificing the present and the future wasn’t the best option for Dee and I. Will would die no matter what. What was left for me to decide was how much physical hell I would let the medical profession put him through and how much of my life and Dee’s life I was willing to trash in the process. I decided – not much. The whole thing was lose-lose and it was up to me to minimize damage as much as possible.

Had we discovered his illnesses even a year earlier, Will would have decided otherwise. He’d have opted to risk the early death and even the mental and physical disabilities to stay alive. To be with me. To be at least sort of around for Dee. The fact that this would have strained me – even more because he would still be alive and in my care as I type this – wouldn’t have mattered to anyone but me. Wedding vows have hidden consequences.

But it would have been his decision. I wouldn’t have influenced him even if I knew the cost in full.

“I hope, ” I told Rob, “that if I were to ever be in a place where death was mostly likely that I would base my decision on what to do next on what would be best in the long-term for you and the girls.”

I don’t know if I am that strong at present, but I am working on it.