Winters on the prairie were brutal for the early pioneers. During snowstorms a person could get lost just walking from the house to the barn and back again. In order to protect themselves homesteaders planted trees and shrubs of various types around their homes and out buildings so they would form natural wind breaks as they matured. Read Full Article
grief
We arrived in Iowa in time to talk with my father one last time before the cancer overwhelmed him and he was too weak and taking too much pain medication to be conscious of his surroundings. I hadn’t done the death bed thing in a while but it is surprising how similar slow death is regardless of the affliction.
My first husband will be dead three years this coming January. My husband Rob passed the two year anniversary of his first wife’s death this past August. But his experience with last days and final hours exceeds mine. He was with his mother-in-law a year ago when ALS claimed her, and just two months later we sat a phone vigil for her husband.
As we dressed for Dad’s funeral, Rob asked me,
“Do you think it’s possible to get everyone in the family to promise not to die for at least the next couple of years?” Read Full Article
The fall of 2005 found me anxiously awaiting the release of Eminem’s greatest hits CD titled Curtain Call. An odd thing, I suppose, for a forty-something high school remedial English teacher to be coveting. I didn’t really know any of his work beyond the pop-y stuff on MTV. But I sensed an anger roiling beneath his surface which matched my own and being someone who finds music therapeutic I knew instinctively this collection was something I needed.
I’d spent the summer on a hamster wheel of grad school and care taking. By September I was dealing with a new assignment in a new school with children who ranged from merely disenfranchised to criminally inclined, and the nursing home was calling me daily about one new crisis after another. I was pushing for hospice. Death shadowed Will’s eyes. I could see the little that was left of him fading and fighting for release at the same time. He was running fevers the doctor on staff was dismissing as a late summer cold. The enamel had been eaten off his teeth by the Mountain Dew his mother insisted on giving him despite the fact that no one was brushing his teeth in the evenings after she’d leave for the night. Just weeks earlier I had had my second only outburst of temper when I discovered what remained of his front teeth, painful looking and flaking. I don’t know if he could discern the information coming in at that point due to the damage to his nerve endings and the dura matter covering his brain. Maybe he didn’t realize and maybe it was a constant barrage of misery. I’ll never know.
I was tired. I was alone. And I was angry because I was powerless. Impotence does not bring out the best side of my personality.
The song The Way I Am summed up in a sense my frustration about the way the world seemed to be forcing its ideals and expectations of who I was on me without my consent. It said what I couldn’t find words to say for myself.
anniegirl1138 