A Known Fact

The other two heiresses have taken to discussing my death as if it’s a known fact that I have one foot in the grave and the other on a patch of black ice, and as if there are ten years between me and the next youngest rather than two and a half. “When you die … ” they say, as casually as if they were saying, “When it gets to be a little warmer … ” I wonder if they know something I don’t, or if it’s just that the loss of both parents and two out of three uncles has obliterated any former merely theoretical understanding of death. I felt a mild paranoia when my sister casually pointed out that bare hardwood floors can lead to a fall. Do I look tippy?

It turned out that I did feel much better after the ubiquinol cleared out of my system, and it also turns out that the exercises my chiropractor recommended for the vestibular system are proving to be exceedingly effective. I now feel considerably less feeble than I did for a while there. I was having vertigo a lot over the past few months, and now I’m having almost none at all. The exercises require a piece of equipment like a spatula (a thing to look at) and take about five minutes, if that.

I did have one peculiar episode of vertigo, which usually happens when I’m standing up and particularly when I turn. It’s hard to say which direction is the problem because I turn counterclockwise to get something and then turn clockwise to return to my task.

On Monday of this week, I was sitting next to the very handsome roofer at the dining room table, not standing or moving, when all of a sudden a wave of something came over me, not exactly dizziness, but something like that, accompanied by brain fog. It was gone pretty much as soon as I noticed it.

There have been a lot of tears since telling my sister I have decided to sell the house, mostly grief about the loss of my mother and also about leaving my beloved life here. I don’t think that necessarily means it was the wrong decision. I had a long talk with my realtor yesterday. She was delighted to hear about the huge amount of progress we have made toward whatever we’re progressing toward, though she was a bit taken aback to hear that we don’t plan to fix the wet basement. After spending a fortune on the roof and the air conditioning, my sister and I thought it would be reasonable just to disclose that the basement gets wet when it’s wet outside.

The realtor and I agreed that we will do everything else and put the house on the market, or not, and if we do put it on the market and get feedback that the wet basement is scaring buyers off, we can always go ahead with fixing it then.

After I spoke with her, I began calling estate sale places and painters, and then it occurred to me that I could actually just entirely move out of here when I depart in two weeks, whereas I had planned to here a lot this spring and summer, but since the house would preferably be empty for any estate sale and since my realtor said I don’t actually have to be here for anything that happens after that, I could do that, though it would be pretty horrible at the very end, having to get 30 boxes of stuff to UPS along with my grandmother’s big chair, complicated by the fact that I have plans on all three of the days before my flight.

I also liked the idea of just never seeing the house empty and being already gone when my father’s daylilies bloom again, but I think it would probably be too much of an insane rush.

Roshi Joan Halifax: “The wise person slows the process down.”

My roofer, who I’m pretty much halfway in love with by now, came over yesterday to park a big trailer in the driveway. I took a couple of photos of him, which he immediately posed for, but they were kind of blurry, so I told him I had to take a few more, and he smiled winningly from the other side of the trailer. I said, “Look serious, like you’re going to do a good job on my roof,” and he immediately looked serious.

That’s another category where Michigan is hands-down superior to San Francisco: It is completely full of big, strong, handsome tattooed men who drive pickup trucks and can actually make things with their hands, whereas San Francisco is lately full of disturbingly slender men who look like they take extremely good care of themselves and like they never think about anything other than their own glowing, reedlike bodies. They are the opposite of attractive. They jog by on the sidewalk very clearly unaware that there are other human beings around as they try to remember if they took all 75 of their brain supplements before they left the house.

My roofer called early this morning to ask me to move the car out of the driveway. Soon a big truck full of Spanish-speaking workers arrived, plus a couple of individual cars containing the same, plus a giant truck with all the shingles on it, and then my roofer himself. A tremendous amount of racket ensued overhead, and debris began to rain down past the windows. One of the roofers is a woman, which was a pleasant surprise. The foreman of the actual workers said she works hard and gets paid more than a couple of the men.

For some reason, the flurry of roofing activity caused another huge wave of grief (on my part; not sure about the sorrows of the roofers), something about how my mother would have had a beautiful new roof but now she won’t, and how she would have loved the workers and loved the trucks and loved the noise and loved learning all about what roofers exactly do.

Normally I take pictures of everything, and this project is calling out to be documented, but I am sure the Spanish-speaking workers would not enjoy being photographed in the current climate—a lot of people have been taken by ICE in this area, including many people my roofer knows—so I’m not going to let my phone be seen in my hand. The roofer is sending a lot of photos (including one of himself on the roof, which he must have asked someone else to take, probably because he’s halfway in love with me; he looks very casual, but the fact that someone else had to take the photo gives it away) and we’re also going back and forth about the national situation. He pointed out yesterday when he brought the trailer that something we had lately been texting about as an outrageous and worrisome possibility came to pass one day later.

I just opened the window and was dazzled when a beautiful warm, fresh breeze blew in, along with the faint whiff of my roofer’s cigarette smoke—he arrived this morning with a cigarette with an inch of ash dangling out of his face—and the aftershave of one of the aforementioned very capable gentlemen.

And Just Like That

I am here in Michigan as of several days ago. Usually I arrive here on a Monday, but I came on Thursday so that I could go to No Kings III in Ann Arbor with my childhood pal and her husband. 

On Friday, I met with a potential roofer whom I liked a lot and whose quote was very reasonable.

The day of the protest, Saturday, was a cold day (about 40 degrees), but sunny and clear, and minus a stiff breeze. I put on a selection of winter outergarments and brought additional options in my backpack. I drove to my friend’s house, which is just a block from the house where I lived when I was born, and we walked a mile or so downtown.

There were a few speakers, who were concise and even inspiring, and some music, and then it was time to march. The woman right next to me had some sort of a contraption on a little wheeled cart. Wonderfully, it turned out to be a very powerful speaker which she used to blast rap music, which I felt was my reward for having endured a certain amount of folk singing. This woman, who I think was possibly about my age (namely 63) was dressed up like a king, with her face completely covered, and she had a fairly good-sized sign she was waving in the air, and she was pulling this speaker along, and she was also dancing.

I resolved that she was not going to be able to shake me, and I indeed followed her the entire way, also dancing, and full of joy. 

My friend and I had a spot of tea after walking back to her place, and then I stopped by the Argus Farm Stop (“Farmers Market Meets Grocery Store”) on Packard, which carries only things that come from Michigan. (At least, that’s what my friend said. I am not immediately seeing that on their website, but it was a very groovy place. They also have a café on Packard. Between the two is a Zen center.)

The next day, it became so warm that I had both breakfast and dinner outside on the deck. I was having some anxiety about the car, which became my mother’s once my father died. She was the registered owner, and we were both insured drivers.

I renewed the registration last year without any problems, but when I attempted that this year, I got a message saying the car was ineligible for registration; they had evidently gotten wind of my mother’s death. My first thought was to register the car in my sister’s name. However, that would entail also changing the insurance, and then I’d be driving around in a car without proper registration or insurance.

I looked around online and learned that only ten states allow you to register a car in a state that is not your home state, and Michigan is not one of them. By chance, just days earlier I had succeeded in setting up my own DTE (gas and electric) account. I thought I had done this before, but I hadn’t. This meant I could show the secretary of state a utility bill in my own name. I made an appointment at the secretary of state for the day before the registration would expire.

A day or two before that, it occurred to me that I had not really solved the problem; the secretary of state was going to say, “I don’t care where you live—you don’t own this car.” I remembered that, two years ago, they had said something about non-inheriting siblings having to sign off on my inheriting the car. I dug up those forms online and contacted the other two heiresses about needing their signatures.

Monday was a busy day. First I met with a third and final roofer, a fellow who was dazzlingly good-looking, possibly an explicit asset in his role as salesperson. What he proposed regarding the roof seemed reasonable and his quote was not out of the question, being literally twenty-five thousand dollars less than the highest quote I got from the first roofer several weeks ago, but it was well above the quote from the Friday fellow, so I texted the latter and said we were going to go with him.

Then the tree guy came over, mainly in regard to a hawthorn branch that is hanging over the street so low that motorists have to go around it. He looked around the yard and we discussed some other things that need doing. The biggest tree in the back yard is a silver maple. The tree guy said it is becoming vulnerable and that a stiff enough wind could cause it to come crashing onto the house, which would be undesirable. However, that tree is a pretty important feature of the property. I told my sister that if that tree is cut down, I’m not buying this house.

Then it was time to go to my appointment at the secretary of state. I arrived about 25 minutes early. They told me to stand on a certain yellow circle on the floor. Before I could even get properly situated on that spot, they called me over the counter and I gave them my pile of papers. The address was a non-issue. The person asked if I had something like a DTE bill and then I don’t think even looked at it. I couldn’t keep Dad’s license plate, so I indulged in a custom plate: MTLHEAD. (Referring to Darkthrone and Carcass and Paradise Lost, etc., but I guess could also pertain to my grey hair.)

When I left the secretary of state with all tasks satisfactorily completed, it was still one minute before my actual appointment time.

I can’t remember what I did yesterday, but whatever it was, it took all day. One thing I did was to take a walk around the neighborhood to try to pick a color for the new roof, and our roofer also came over with the contract to sign. I asked if we could drive around and look at a few particular houses, so we did that, and I signed the contract and wrote a check for the deposit.

In the evening, I went to Howie’s meditation group on Zoom. As he offered meditation instructions, he began by saying, “The past is gone.” For some reason, even though I’ve heard him say that approximately one thousand times over the 36 years, that landed as if someone had kicked me in the stomach, and I began to cry.

After we all sat together for about 45 minutes, Howie talked about Ajahn Sumedho and his advice to let go, let go, let go. He also talked about Ajahn Chah and quoted at length from something Ajahn Chah had said to a woman who was dying. Ajahn Chah told the woman that dying is normal and natural and that it doesn’t make sense that we cry when someone dies, because what guarantees death is birth. He said something like, “If you want to cry, you should cry when someone is born.”

Howie also said something about how it is what we cling to that causes us to suffer.

(He also said that when our mind wanders, it’s just the mind! He said that we think there’s a little person inside our head doing something wrong, but there isn’t! I realized that I do think exactly that. Funny.)

After the Zoom session ended, something suddenly became perfectly clear. I suddenly knew that I am going to sell this house to someone else. It has seemed unfair that I have to part with all these mementos after I’ve had to part with so much else, but, on the other hand, this has to be easier than what I’ve already done. I was corresponding with a friend who is going through a big pile of hard stuff all at once. She said, “I’ll be okay.” I wrote back, “Without a doubt. You have already been through hell and back. You are a proven strong person.” I can say the exact same to myself.

I know that on some level, hanging onto the stuff is about not quite letting it sink in that my mother is gone. After I realized I will sell the house, I cried and cried.

As mentioned, what has made it anguishing is that it’s optional. But clinging to the house and its contents is not onward leading. I can easily do this, and in fact, it’s kind of already done: The roof will be replaced Friday, the new air conditioner will be installed next week, the spring cleanup of the yard will be one day next week, and the tree work should also happen soon. We will disclose to potential buyers that the basement gets wet when it rains and what we have learned from various people about what might be done about this.

After that, it’s just a matter of an estate sale, cleaning the house, painting, and washing the windows. I have an appointment to speak with my realtor tomorrow, and I plan to call painters and estate sale people tomorrow.

I have thoroughly enjoyed eating on the deck and driving up and down in the car, but there is much I enjoy in San Francisco, too, not to mention my job, which I love. Any number of people have said I can probably get a hospital chaplain job in Michigan, and I imagine that is so, but there is no way I can replicate the perfect situation I currently have. Income-wise, it would be about the same as just retiring, so this decision has also largely turned on whether I’m ready to retire or not, and the answer is that I am not.

I came upon something I wrote down years ago about something Howie had said about making decisions, which is that he starts by taking happiness out of the equation, as he knows that his well-being is not dependent on any particular circumstances. This was very helpful to me, as it addressed my big fear, which is that I’ll make the wrong decision and wreck the rest of my life. I will be equally happy in either place (though my heart is really in Michigan).

I announced this only to my sister and I guess also to the person who reads this blog—you know who you are, dear friend—but I didn’t disseminate my decision any more widely than that, the date being what it is.

And I also told my sister I reserve the right to change my mind. Another reason it’s been hard to get rid of the stuff is that if I did buy the house, I’d be kicking myself for not hanging onto this or that piece of furniture that I don’t have room for in San Francisco. But I like the idea of emptying out the house, painting, re-roofing, making it a lovely blank slate for a potential new owner, and if I then decide that the new owner is me, it will be a different sort of thing than moving into Bugwalk’s Parents’ Museum / Mausoleum.

More Time

I changed my mind about it being sad to be an old lady all alone in the little apartment where she spent the final 50 years of her life. That’s just a story. Now I’ve decided one can hardly think of anything more glamorous. (Another story.) The AARP Bulletin recently did a cover story on solo agers, which is a whole lot of people, and after I was done reading it, I felt optimistic and enthusiastic about being such a person. I’m a Solo Ager!

When I was a child, one way our parents (quite ineffectively) tried to encourage us to be confident and self-reliant was to yell from another part of the house, “Pretend you’re an orphan!” This might happen after a child had yelled a question such as, “Where is the new container of dish soap?” or whatever.

None of us appreciated that thing about pretending to be an orphan, though it was entirely well meant, but now I think it might actually be very good advice. Now I don’t even have to do the pretending part: I’m on my own, family wise, except for Uncle Rick, who has been instructed not to think of dying. (My Uncle David died a week and a half ago. I am down to one person who has known me since birth.)

I was not able to meet with any roofers while I was in Ypsilanti—I am now in San Francisco—but I did meet with two places regarding the air conditioning system the house needs, and I met with several places regarding the basement.

We chose a Mitsubishi air conditioner and I mailed in the signed contract and a deposit. About a week ago, my father got an email from a fellow named Julian who used to stroll by my childhood home in Ann Arbor after my parents had moved to Ypsilanti but before my father sold that house. This fellow really loved the house and yard and would have liked very much to buy it, but couldn’t afford it.

The house ended up being sold to some people who could easily afford it, who then bulldozed all of the landscaping that my father lovingly labored over for ten years after moving out of that house, along with a lot of details inside the house, because he wanted this place that he loved so much to be perfect for the new owners, who, besides bulldozing the yard, put on what I vaguely understand to be a garish and monstrous addition.

My father greatly regretted that he hadn’t just sold the house to Julian at Julian’s price. Some of the landscaping was left over from an Italian count who owned the place 100 years ago and who was the first chair of the University of Michigan’s new landscape architecture department. Count Tealdi. At the bottom of the Arboretum in Ann Arbor is Tealdi’s stunning peony garden. So the current owners of that house literally destroyed history (although I guess literally everything is history and therefore we destroy it all the time).

I spoke with Julian on the phone and we are going to get together next time I go to Michigan. 

He started to tell me what had happened to my childhood home. “The new owners—”

“Don’t tell me.”

“Well, they—”

“Don’t tell me.”

“Well, they—”

“Don’t tell me.”

“Okay, I won’t tell you. It sounds like you’re traumatized by what happened to the house.” 

Julian said he thinks everyone who knew that house is also traumatized.

Julian said that my father was a remarkable person and he said that my father told him a lot about individual plants in the yard, like where the crabapple trees came from. I do not have any idea where the crabapple trees came from—though I guess Julian could tell me—and felt an aching sense of loss, as that is about 1/500 of what I could have learned about the yard from my father had I only asked.

Both of my parents were master gardeners and I did not learn one single thing about gardening from either of them, except that I know you should use proper sun protection and I know that if you’re going to dig up a weed, you should try to get the roots.

Julian told me about the method my father had devised for killing a weed, which requires an eye dropper and is 100 percent effective; Julian now does it the same way. After that conversation, I told my sister about Dad and his eye dropper. She didn’t know that, either. He had a million such procedures.

I mentioned to Julian that we are getting ready to replace the air conditioner in the house in Ypsilanti and he said, “You really should go with a system from Mitsubishi.” That was after we had already decided to do just that, so that was a pleasing little echo from the universe.

Other than which air conditioner to get, I have not decided about anything, but whereas I started out feeling a lot of pressure to decide between buying the house in Ypsilanti or not, and whereas it seemed to be a matter of picking one of two things, and whereas either one seemed sorrowful in its way—I would either be losing my job or losing my wonderful deck with its view of the pine tree—I now feel no pressure at all, and it seems that there are many options and they are all wonderful.

I can stay right here and keep the job I love! I can stay right here and retire! I have asked my sister if she would like to buy the house in Michigan with me. If she is amenable to that, it could be a place I go now and then while retaining the job I love! Or I could buy the house myself and move there and retire. I could buy the house myself and move there and find a job. Or volunteer somewhere.

Even in reviewing all the great possible choices, it’s hard not to have potential losses come to mind, such as my doctor and chiropractor in San Francisco, or such as how seeing people and getting some exercise are built in in San Francisco and would require more effort in Ypsilanti. I do notice a flavor of trying to talk myself into liking being in San Francisco, and I notice my heart tugging strongly in the direction of Michigan. However, on a sunny gorgeous day in San Francisco, such as it is today, I think I’d be foolish to let this go.

The doctor and chiropractor are not trivial matters, as one body part after the other ceases to function without requiring attention, mostly in the form of various stretches and splints and laser treatments and application of this or that topical preparation.

That’s one reason I’m never going to have sex again. “You want to do what??? Oh, sure, I think I remember how to do that. Hold on while I take off my foot brace, my camping booties, my second pair of socks, my first pair of socks, my wrist splint, my sleeping mask and the night guard for my teeth. Let me go wash the arnica and / or the calendula cream off my arm, my leg, and my shoulder. Also, let me detain the cats in the other side of the apartment. Don’t mind that drool rag, or the backup drool rag. Actually, would you mind just going and doing that with someone else?”

The major dental work, plantar fasciitis, knee problems, wrist problems, shoulder problems, jaw problems and arthritis in my right index finger are all more or less manageable, just time consuming. It takes a lot of time to be old! I used to know a woman who was bitterly resentful about all of this. Now I understand why she was disgruntled—it is a good hour of stuff, literally, on a daily basis—but I keep reminding myself that this is what it takes if I’m going to feel fantastic, which I reasonably often do. And let the record reflect that we are not talking about Stage IV cancer.

I read a book where the author said everyone who gets a serious diagnosis wants just one thing: more time. But this is unlikely to be time spent feeling great, and it is time where one will now know what one is going to die of. Therefore, this right now is the more time. Every single second is infinitely precious, even if I do not feel fantastic at every second.

The book is called Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul, by Stephen Jenkinson.

The one bigger thing is vertigo and accompanying dizziness. I nearly fell down in a store a couple of weeks ago, and I did in fact fall down the stairs in my apartment building with all of my laundry a month or so ago, fortunately literally just one step up from the lobby. I thought my cart of clean laundry was following me obediently up the stairs, and instead it fell away from me, onto the lobby floor, with me on top of the cart. Conclusion: I have to do laundry no less often than every two weeks; otherwise, it’s just too heavy. (By the way, there is a washer and dryer in Ypsilanti! Never again would I have to drag thirty pounds of laundry to a laundromat two or so blocks away.)

My chiropractor said he thinks the vertigo is a thing with my vestibular system. He gave me some exercises to do daily.

Then there is the emotional situation. I have lost 30 people in the last two and a half years, or an average of one per month. The job, of course, also entails nonstop loss and sorrow. Between the professional and personal sorrows, there are moments when I feel I simply cannot go on. I feel like lying down on the ground and never getting up again.

Then I remind myself of Dory’s song from Finding Nemo, as passed on to me by my friend Elea: Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming.

I remind myself of something someone once said in a 12 Step meeting: Do the next thing.

I remind myself of Roshi Joan Halifax reminding us, “Remember the law of impermanence.” I feel lousy at this moment, physically and / or emotionally, but I won’t always feel this way.

I remind myself of the difference between sorrow (e.g., tears) and depression (e.g., have been lying on the floor for five days). Sorrow is good. If I’ve been lying on the floor for five days, that’s a problem.

So I just don’t know if I’m in a situation where I physically and emotionally cannot do this work any more and need a perfectly regular schedule with plenty of time for the self-care we old ladies need if we’re occasionally going to feel fantastic or if indeed the vestibular exercises will do the trick and I’m just sad because about 29 too many people have died, and six months from now, I will be saying, you know, I feel better—thank goodness I didn’t quit the job I love, or on the other hand, why on earth did I quit the job I loved when I was in a temporary situation of debility?

Then there’s this: I have given up a lot over the past four years. I am not also going to give up the work I love, unless it becomes truly obvious that I have to. I think if my father could hear me say that caring for him and our mother has tired me out so much that I now need to quit my job, he would be devastated.

Here’s another little thing. I was reading in an AARP publication about taking CoQ10. I went into Arbor Farms in Ann Arbor to get some. The person there said to take ubiquinol, which is the absorbable component of CoQ10 or something. Supposedly this is good for your brain and energy level. I began taking it and in due time noticed that I felt really, really lousy. It turned out that, while CoQ10 makes a lot of people feel great, it makes a small percentage feel horrible. I stopped taking it, with a plan to wait a few months and try it again. After a while, I felt better.

I started taking it again a couple of weeks ago, and noticed on Monday of this week—three days ago—that I felt horrible, so I again stopped taking it, this time permanently. I think I am actually feeling a bit better—the reverse placebo effect?—and may feel better still as the stuff clears out of my system.

I did figure out why the choice about the house in Ypsilanti has been so tormenting. It’s three things, the first being that it’s the only arena where there is a choice. I didn’t have a choice as to whether my father or mother would die, but I do have a choice about selling the house or not. 

The second thing has to do with my memory, which has always been horrible. My siblings remember much more about our childhood than I do. I came upon a photograph of a smiling young woman with long hair. In the photo, she is wearing a blue coat. Her glasses have round frames. 

I didn’t recall ever knowing anyone who looked like that.

However, not only did my siblings easily identify this as being a photo of our mother, they said things like, “I remember that blue coat!” They remember all those things and I just do not.

So the second reason the decision about the house is so hard is that the objects in it are effective aids to memory. Here is the kniffles (“NIFF-luh”) press. Ah, yes, Mom used to make kniffles now and then when we were young, served with browned butter.

The third reason is that it just feels too hard and like too much, to lose an entire house and all of its contents on top of all else I have lost. It feels like I cannot do it.

B-Dry

I realized that what I said about my entrepreneurial great-grandmother could have left the impression that I grew up amid a lot of money. (Three out of four of my great-grandmothers were entrepreneurs, and I’m positive the fourth would have been, too, if she hadn’t died in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1920. That was my mother’s father’s mother. My grandfather’s one sibling died, too, and his father had to be hospitalized. He returned from the hospital to find that his wife and one of his sons were gone. There is a family photograph of that great-grandmother lying dead on what appears to be a table in their house.) 

It had never occurred to me until literally yesterday evening to wonder what became of the money my great-grandmother evidently had, but I am pretty sure my father didn’t inherit any of it. That great-grandmother outlived her daughter by five or so years—my father’s mother—and so perhaps her remaining child inherited her whole estate, or maybe her second husband did.

That first house my parents bought because they were going to have me was a pleasant, serviceable place in a working-class neighborhood. The next-door neighbor was a house painter and the one across the street drove a taxi.

When I was seven, we moved to a fancier neighborhood, but that was due to my father’s own efforts. There a next-door neighbor was a professor at the University of Michigan and the one on the other side was a doctor who pioneered a radiation treatment for prostate cancer. My father was later one of his patients and reported that Dr. L. had a superb bedside manner, taking my father’s hand, gazing tenderly into his eyes, and saying, “We’ll get through this together.”

Because my father grew up poor, it was important to him to live frugally, and by this I mean the bottle of shampoo in the bathroom he shared with us three kids was a container of Joy dishwashing detergent, and we drank powdered milk. He learned about investing and got his offspring started early with saving and investing.

Money is not usually a preoccupation of mine. Every now and then, I run around to the various websites to add up my holdings. Sometimes it’s six months since the last time I did it; sometimes it’s two years. I did it recently and was rather pleasantly surprised. (I guess I have also lived frugally, in a small apartment for a long time, with no kids, no car, no expensive travel or vices.) In addition, though we did our very best to spend every last cent of our parents’ money on our mother’s care, there is a little something left for each of us.

I actually could buy my siblings’ shares of this house I am sitting in and stop working, as well. I verified this by speaking the other day with a financial advisor. However, I can’t imagine I’d have the same carefree attitude about spending I have had in recent years. I have suddenly begun tearing paper towels—the ones that are already only half the size of normal paper towels—in half, and when I leave a room, I make sure to turn off the light.

I also put a cloth handkerchief everywhere I had a box of tissues, but had to rescind that when all my hankies began filling up with blood due to the low humidity.

Today I put on my fleece-lined flannel shirt and my base layer warm pants and tucked my shirt into my outer pants. Earlier in this adventure, I often forgot to do that last thing and regretted it when the cold wind blew right up the front of my stomach. I took my parents’ walk and felt toasty warm throughout.

I think this blog was a little more interesting when it was about people with cancer rather than about whether I took a walk or not, and the decision one oldish lady is trying to make which is of no consequence to anyone else on earth, but here we are; it’s helping me to write it. It moves the energy in some way.

Yesterday evening I felt gloomy, thinking that buying this house is a ludicrous idea: I don’t want to worry about money, and it seemed clear that this is really all about trying somehow to assemble one living parent from the combined artifacts of both, when of course nothing will bring even one living cell of either of them back, and then I cried and cried, which was good. I don’t think there has been enough crying because in some way, after my second parent died, I sort of felt, “I already did that,” but I didn’t, actually.

However, today I feel kind of bullish about this idea again, possibly thanks to my visit earlier today from the retired B-Dry fellow regarding the basement.

Not to make this even more boring, but there are three major repairs the house needs: The roof needs replacing, ditto the air conditioning system, and the basement floods every time there is a good rain or substantial snow thaw. The basement has seven distinct areas and I have seen water in every last one of them, which appears first right in the middle of one large room, which was a bit mystifying until earlier today, when the B-Dry fellow explained that the water is coming in where the floor meets the wall, not following its proper path because the clay tile under the house is somehow compromised, and then popping up through the floor and settling in the low spots.

Only the roof figured in the recent appraisal of the house, so replacing the air conditioning and fixing the wet basement would not mean we could sell the house for more, but not doing those things would almost certainly mean having to reduce the price we list it for by a substantial amount.

The B-Dry fellow retired just within the past year from actively installing these systems, which fix the problem from the inside. He said there will not be a need to dig a trench all the way around the outside of the house, which was good news. He was an absolute font of interesting information, including that once upon a time Lake Erie reached to as close as a block or so from here. He examined the storm drain in the basement and pointed out that it is bone dry: Water is not reaching it. Maybe keeping the basement dry is just a matter of opening the pipes up in the area of the drain; cross your fingers. He gave me the name of a drain place and I have an appointment with them on Monday.

He explained how a B-Dry system works and what installing one would entail, and gave me a ballpark price which is not actually out of the question. At any rate, it was less than half what the first roof place quoted last week; I will meet with two others after the roof is no longer covered with snow.

Furthermore, the B-Dry fellow said he wouldn’t even bother fixing the wet basement. He said just to disclose it to potential buyers. When I said that might be me, he said that even so he wouldn’t necessarily fix it because the water is only seen at the bottom of the walls: The problem is not the eaves overflowing and soaking the whole walls. The basement does not smell funny. There is no sign of mold. The walls aren’t bulging. While water can lead to mold, mold does not grow on concrete or tile. It grows on drywall and wood, so the B-Dry fellow said he would recommend removing the bottom six to eight inches of wood paneling in the one room in the basement that has it; you can see that bottom expanse has been touched by water repeatedly.

I asked about what we would do if fixing the drain doesn’t do the trick and we decide not to spend the money on the B-Dry system. Nothing?? Yes! He said he personally would do nothing, once we remove the bottom of the wood paneling and any items on the floor (ahem) that could grow mold. 

My father long ago set four or five box fans on the floor in the area that most often gets wet, and we turn those on when that happens. I asked the B-Dry fellow if we should upgrade our fans, maybe getting one or two of those powerful fans that blow right along the ground, and he didn’t even think we should do that, though I probably will get a couple of those if we don’t do the big repair and if I buy the house.

I-94

Last night I stayed up way too late fiddling around on my father’s computer; it was nearly 3 am when I lay down to rest, so I didn’t set an alarm, and woke up at about 12:45 pm.

I went over to Metzger’s, which opened in downtown Ann Arbor in 1928, to try their Reuben, as part of my ongoing Reuben Extravaganza. Several weeks ago, I tried the Reuben at Max’s Opera Cafe in San Francisco and was sorely disappointed. It was great looking but bland tasting. If I hadn’t spoken the words “corned beef” twenty or so minutes before the item appeared in front of me, I would have had no idea what the generic meatlike substance in the sandwich might be. It was nothing like the corned beef I remember now and then eating as a child.

I arrived in Michigan last week with a plan to try all five of Zingerman’s Reubens; it turns out there are actually eight. Some of them don’t say “Reuben” in the name, but that’s what they are. Zingerman’s Delicatessen opened the year I moved to California. I never went there to eat until a few years ago, with Amy. Next to the deli is a café called Zingerman’s Next Door. When my parents were first married, they lived in an apartment in the house that is now Zingerman’s Next Door.

I began, last week, with Zingerman’s tempeh Reuben. While I waited to pick up my order, I looked over at Zingerman’s Next Door, at a window in that house: Did my mother as a newlywed gaze out that very window once upon a time? I sat in the upstairs seating area and realized the view outside was of my own former high school, Community High, where I transferred after Huron High shared their (accurate) opinion that I had a drug problem. The Reuben was not very good. Seva’s tempeh Reuben leaves Zingerman’s in the dust, and I almost aborted my project right there, but decided I should at least try their basic Reuben, which turned out to be fantastic. It had about two pounds of corned beef in it that was even tastier than I remembered from childhood. (Unfortunately, even if you eat there, your meal is served in a plastic basket, so I had to bite into the sandwich, as many routinely do, but it caused my chronic TMJ soreness to flare up painfully.)

I did master the route to Zingerman’s and where to park and how to pay for parking. On my third and final trip there, I got the cowboy Reuben, which uses a softer roll, beef brisket, coleslaw instead of sauerkraut, and BBQ sauce instead of Russian dressing. The delicatessen is also a highly regarded grocery store, full of carefully curated and extremely expensive items. The sandwiches are pricey, too. The cowboy Reuben, with a side order and 18% tip, cost nearly $40. Thus I was astounded to find it mainly consisted of the large roll. The coleslaw was not a good substitute for sauerkraut, I thought; too bland. The BBQ sauce was overly sweet. I had tried a sample of brisket over at Ricewood on Packard in the past year and was dazzled by its rich flavor. Whatever that was inside the cowboy Reuben at Zingerman’s, I can scarcely countenance that it was brisket. It was a little flap of mushy, stringy beef that tasted like something you might encounter in beef stew. Not untasty, but not what I was expecting, and there also wasn’t much of it, nor of the other fillings, so this was definitely the most expensive piece of bread I ever ate.

(Zingerman’s, among other things, has a bakehouse where they make really wonderful bread of all sorts. No complaints about the quality of the roll that encased the otherwise unsatisfactory cowboy Reuben.)

Metzger’s, where I went today, is now in a little strip mall near I-94 and Zeeb Rd. It’s full of German memorabilia, including those blue plates of which my mother’s mother had several affixed to her kitchen wall. I had never realized those were German until today. My grandfather was German; his father was born in Germany, but my grandmother was Irish and English, and I had always thought of those as being something to do with her heritage, but I guess they weren’t.

My server was very sweet and the food was fine, nothing special. I will place Metzger’s Reuben above Max’s but several notches below Zingerman’s. The meat did vaguely taste like corned beef. Next week I plan to go to Knight’s and to have the Reuben there, when my father’s high school classmates have their monthly lunch. I’ve had it before, but having had so many other Reubens lately, it will be interesting (at least slightly) to see where it fits in the rankings.

On my way to Zingerman’s or Knight’s, I pass an apartment building on Huron in Ann Arbor once owned by my father’s grandmother. My parents also lived in an apartment there for a bit after they were married and before they bought their first house. They bought the house after they’d been married for two years because they were about to have a baby, which was me. Right across the street from that apartment building is the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, usually just called Rackham. The land it was built on was sold to the University of Michigan by that same great-grandmother of mine, who also ran her husband’s corset factory when he became unable to continue, and she served as the general contractor for a house she had built for herself in a nice neighborhood which now probably goes for two million dollars, though I can’t tell you for sure, because I can’t remember the address off the top of my head, and that’s enough about my forebears for today. My father had deep roots in Ann Arbor. He went to one of the same elementary schools I later attended. (My mother was born in Detroit and lived in Dearborn until she came to Ann Arbor to go to engineering school at the University of Michigan, where she and my father met at a summer job.) (So I guess that wasn’t enough about my forebears for today, after all, but now it is.)

I took I-94 home, which was a hair-raising experience. The Michigander on I-94 in rush hour goes 80 miles an hour even if the car ahead of him is going 50 miles an hour, which I didn’t really have any choice about because the big truck ahead of me was going 50 miles an hour, and what’s the big hurry, anyway?

I had virtuously intended to take a walk after I got home, but it really was miserably cold. I went about half a block and then turned around and came home. It would have been more bearable if I’d had my warm base layer pants on and my fleece-lined flannel shirt, and I guess there was no law stopping me from putting those things on and going back out, but I didn’t. I put in a load of laundry and carried some of my mother’s bins of craft stuff up from the basement and sat on the couch with a comforter over me and read for a while and then passed out on the couch due to my heavy lunch, which besides the sandwich also featured onion rings and German potato pancakes.

Blood Transfer: The Beginning and the End and the Beginning

Today I called DTE, the utility in southeastern Michigan and, for all I know, the entire state of Michigan, to see about changing the email address associated with our account from my father’s to mine. The Probate Department was happy to do this; it required putting the gas and electric services in my name.

I moved from Ann Arbor to San Francisco when I was 20—43 years ago—and had always assumed I would live out my life in San Francisco. I have lived in the same apartment for 28 years, a tiny little place which perfectly meets my needs, and yet it also had started to seem a little sad: A youngish lady in her little studio apartment, then a middle-aged lady, then an old lady, then a dead and forgotten lady who for some reason had six brand-new hinoki cutting boards in a box in her closet.

The city has changed profoundly in those years. It feels a bit alien now, with one driverless vehicle after the other rolling by and Sam Altman just blocks away plotting the literal destruction of humanity at the hands of AIs. (Since they know what’s going to happen, why don’t they stop?)

I have spent a lot of time in Ypsilanti for almost four years now, and have noticed that I feel much more relaxed here. When you step outside (depending on the season), you’re actually outside, where it smells and looks like trees and flowers and grass. When someone now and then strolls past the house, they smile and say hello, unlike in San Francisco, where anyone under 50 appears to be terrified when addressed by someone they don’t already know.

Yesterday I had lunch with Amy at Seva. She asked if I’d been walking. I was temporarily confused and had to think about what she might be referring to. Walking? As in outdoors? Where it’s 23 degrees?

I got here a week and a day ago to find snow on the ground, where it remains, because only once has it gotten as warm as freezing temperature, which was a great day because the block of ice the car’s windshield wipers were encased in thawed enough that the wipers could be used again. It was the 31-degree heat (known elsewhere as the 31-degree cold) plus the warmth of the car’s running engine plus having the car’s heat and fan turned up to maximum that eventually did the trick. I was in Better Health buying some supplements and mentioned that it was 31 degrees out, and the store’s employees got all excited.

So, walking. It came to me that I had in the past asked Amy about the gear she uses for walking in the winter, and that that’s what she was referring to at Seva, where I had the extremely delicious vegan version of their tempeh Reuben. I had to confess to Amy that even the notion of walking had long since ceased to cross my mind, but that actually is a factor in my decision as to whether to reoccupy my childhood territory, now that I think about it, because I don’t have a car in San Francisco and get around by bike or cab, or on foot.

I ride my bicycle to work and to Rainbow for groceries, and I can walk to yoga, so at least some exercise is built in. In Ypsilanti, it is possible that I could not walk a recreational step for six months of the year. I would have to make myself do it, and until today I hadn’t. Indeed, another thing I explicitly love about being in Michigan is driving up and down in my father’s Subaru listening to music. (Pretty much forty percent of the cars in Ann Arbor are either Subaru Outbacks or Subaru Foresters. When I went to Arbor Farms the other day, more or less the Rainbow of Ann Arbor, I parked Dad’s Subaru in a row of four of those two models.)

Amy, in an admirably casual and low-key manner, mentioned how she herself stopped walking for quite a while, and how the day came when she reminded herself that she didn’t have to be ambitious about it; she could literally just walk around the block. I asked her how many days a week she walks, and she said she tries for six. Six days out of every seven?!? At zero days out of two, three or four months, I was clearly falling behind.

I decided to start putting “Walk” on my daily to-do list, even if it was just aspirational, and then I decided, on this very day, to exit the house, walk to the sidewalk some 15 feet from the front door, and come right back inside. But once I’d put on all the gear needed to walk 15 feet in the 23-degree weather, it was clear that I was equally well equipped for a somewhat longer walk, so I went on my parents’ walk, which takes about half an hour, and I enjoyed it: the bare branches of the huge trees reaching into the sky, the mindfully trying not to break my neck on the ice, the fresh cold air, the occasional bird chirp, the two kindred spirits who passed me going the other way.

I went on this walk in the company of my parents a few times. When I first started doing it on my own, sometimes I couldn’t exactly remember the route. Where precisely did they cross this street? Perhaps at this tree? When I pivoted at the tree, I knew for sure that was the spot. Every cell of my body could feel my father doing the exact same thing.

After my mother died, with the next and final big task being to sell the house or buy it myself, deciding which to do took on more urgency, and for a while, I drove myself crazy trying to figure it out with my head. I was in a constant state of gloomy anxiety for weeks, and finally realized ruminating was never going to do the trick, because I could easily and convincingly think one thing and then its exact opposite all day every day.

I set that aside, and a period of great ease took its place: House? What house?
The first time it crossed my mind to move home was in 1989, just seven years after I’d moved to San Francisco. I’ve been stewing about it ever since, for 37 years. I probably can’t stew about it for 37 more years, but there’s also no way I can think of to hasten clarity. I no longer necessarily see myself living out my years in San Francisco. Though I still think cities are generally better places for old ladies on their own than small towns or suburbs are, I’m starting to feel that I do not wish to die on foreign soil.

My friend Lisa M. now and then says: Discover, not decide. That has become my approach. The great current of life is carrying me along in a certain direction even if my own rudder has fallen off. One day I will discover that I still live in San Francisco and work as hospital chaplain. Or perhaps that I live in San Francisco and am retired. Or I live in Ypsilanti and am retired, or work two afternoons a week as a hospice chaplain or grief counselor. Or live somewhere else entirely; my Cleveland associate pointed out that there are a number of places in the United States that are neither San Francisco nor Ypsilanti.

As I walked today, it seemed to me that putting the DTE in my name had been some kind of small but actual step toward moving here. I did not expect to find myself, so close to my end, rerooting where I first sprung up. I also wondered if this whole thing is a psychologically unhealthy attempt to keep my father alive by literally taking up his life: Living in his house, eating my breakfast at his dining room table, going on his walk. I once saw a movie called L’invitation au Voyage where someone important to the protagonist dies. The line I, probably incorrectly, recall is, “If you die, I’ll make you live again,” which the protagonist does by stuffing the body of his dead loved one into the hard case for a double bass and carrying the case around with him.

Another thing I did today was to call the City of Ypsilanti, which I have the highest admiration for, to see if the property taxes would go up when the house changes hands, as my Michigan associate had warned could be the case. When you call the City of Ypsilanti, you immediately are connected with an actual human being, and this person is always friendly and helpful. The friendly and helpful person in the assessor’s office today said the property taxes would not rise because this would be a “first-degree blood transfer.”

I had thought at moments that if I did buy my parents’ house, I would get rid of their stuff and put my stuff in it, but I don’t have very much stuff and I am also not much of an interior decorator. I now think it’s kind of pointless to get rid of a nice antique so I can put my crappy plastic folding table there instead, or to empty their junk drawer and fill it with my junk, when their junk appears to be of the same excellent quality as my junk.

When my parents arrived back at their own driveway at the end of their walk, my father often continued on past the driveway for a bit and went around a nearby roundabout in the street, maybe doing a little jogging. My mother would turn into the driveway; twice she fell there. When I look up the hill at the driveway as I am finishing the walk myself, even though they are gone now, I see them clearly still: My father breaking into a jog,  my mother at the driveway, turning, falling …

74

So, what generally happened is that my father got cancer, was treated for same, went on hospice and died. Five weeks before he died, my mother, with her brilliant, alert mind, and her keen interest in nearly everything, and her splendid sense of humor, had to move to memory care, where she in turn went on hospice and died, two years to the day after my father did.

(I guess I previously mentioned that about the two years to the day. It is a fact that frequently comes to mind.)

(Possibly every post from now on will start with that same news.)

(I had thought that it was lucky that my parents had me when they were so young, because they remained alive until I myself was old: I only have to live without them for 20 (?) years. But then it occurred to me that we were talking about, as Yiyun Li writes, every single day, for the rest of my life. Every single day, for the rest of my life, the two people I love most won’t be here. Not just one. Not just the other. Both. Both! Both!?!)

This entailed 74 flights on my part (so far) between San Francisco and Detroit, and I spent fully fifty percent of my time in Michigan over the course of three and half years (so far), so there may be more to say about all of that, but let’s get on with what happened today!

I had gotten an email in regard to the internet service for my parents’ house in Ypsilanti saying that if I switched the payment method to a transfer from a bank account, I would save $10 a month on the bill from now on.

That seemed good, but also, it seemed good to stop using a credit card, anyway. Not long after my mother died, I walked into a Chase branch in Ann Arbor to tell them the terrible news. They said they would close her accounts, including her credit card, and I would receive notice of this by mail. This of course did not happen, so I called Chase in early December to try again. I had taken the precaution of freezing her credit card online, and was startled when it incurred a charge. It turns out that automated payments still go through even if a credit card is frozen—just one of many very interesting things I have learned in the past three and a half years—the charge was for another year of virus protection for my father’s computer—and so I needed to actually close this credit account.

However, Chase, instead of reporting my mother dead and closing her credit account, reported me dead and immediately closed my one and only credit account, as I discovered two minutes later when I tried to buy a little something online.

This was late on a Friday afternoon, needless to say. Fortunately, I was able to get it straightened out first thing Monday morning, when I discovered that I’d been dead all weekend and hadn’t even known it. (It wasn’t so bad being dead.) The person who helped me mentioned that the difficulties had “trickled down” into the checking account I’d opened for my parents’ trust after my mother died.

I don’t know if my premature but fortunately brief death had anything to do with the fraudulent use of the trust’s debit card that occurred a couple of weeks later, but that unauthorized use caused the debit card to be immediately canceled, and then anything using that card for automated payments had to be updated, which struck me as a time-consuming nuisance until I realized that some things were already using the bank account itself rather than the debit card, so there was less to do than I thought.

So changing Xfinity to use the trust’s checking account itself would also make life easier in the event of future troubles with the debit card. It took a degree of persistence to achieve this: The website was down, or that part of the website was down, or they just didn’t feel like it, day after day. Finally I made the change, and thus was extra annoyed when the next bill proved to be the exact amount it always is.

I briefly considered letting it go, since we were talking about $10 a month, but that is not in my nature, so I went to the website and had a word with Mrs. Chat, who disavowed any knowledge of any such offer and asked if there was anything “else” she could help with. So annoying. The proper question is not, “Is there anything else I can assist with?”, given that no assistance was offered, but rather, “How much more of your time would you like me to waste today?”

Easily finding a customer support phone number is of course a rarity these days, but increasingly, you can’t even email a lot of places. I went online to see how to get a human on the phone at Xfinity. I soon found a possible customer service phone number and the advice to try cursing and using the word “human.” Yes! Well within my wheelhouse, especially the cursing part.

I called the number and when the machine listed the few things I was allowed to say, I said, “I don’t give a fucking fucking fuck what you want me to say. I want to speak with a human. I am angry.” I wasn’t angry; that was theater, at least the first time I said it, but the second time I said it, it was a little bit true, and by the third time I said it, absolutely the case! And voila, about 30 seconds after the machine had answered the phone, I was speaking with a human.

The human asked how I was, and I sunnily said I was quite well, as indeed I now was, and I in turn asked how he was. He said, “You’re the only person who has asked me that.” To make a long story short, I did secure the discount and also signed up for a promotional offer that will last for a year and lower our bill even further. At the end of our conversation, the human said, “I wish all customers could be like you.”

I called my close associate in Cleveland to report this, starting with our customary greeting: “Is this the Complaint Line?” However, the Complaint Line actually was not open, an extreme rarity; my associate claimed she was “working.” I then tried my close associate in Michigan, who evidently was engaged in the same unsavory activity, and that’s why I had to write this entry.

Several weeks ago, I noticed the building next door appeared to be preparing to rent the apartment where the fellow was murdered. I saw workers turning up in the night, perhaps to clean. They set a coffee pot on the kitchen counter; lately a French press appeared next to the coffee pot, and I finally figured out that the people who sometimes appeared in the kitchen were not late-night cleaners but the actual new neighbors, two people so short all I can see is the tops of their hairdos. Also evidently two people who never, ever cook because there has been nothing whatsoever in their kitchen except that coffee pot and now the French press. Not a refrigerator magnet, not a painting on the wall, not a little plant on the windowsill. Nothing.

So I was enthralled today when I saw cleaning products lined up on the windowsill and one of those diminutive persons cleaning away (presumably). I had vaguely discerned that these were a man and a woman, but the one I saw today, whom I had thought was a man, is a woman, so we are talking about two teeny tiny lesbians (I guess). The person cleaning caught sight of me and gave me a blinding smile and waved. I smiled back and waved and gave her a thumbs up.

Then after that, I walked to Noe Valley for a haircut (a tidy bald fade with a two on top), home to take a shower and have dinner, and back to Noe Valley for yoga.

I imagine the two nice very small lesbians don’t know someone was murdered in their beautiful new apartment. They won’t be hearing it from me. I believe a landlord is legally required to disclose such a thing, but since the San Francisco medical examiner inspected a person covered from head to toe with stab wounds, bent into a pretzel, wedged into a hole in the back yard and buried under a ton of bricks (details altered to preserve the privacy of the dead) and discerned that there was no sign of foul play, I guess that absolves the landlord of that responsibility.

No Answers Whatsoever, But at Least Quite a Number of Questions

Some things being pondered today. One is the difference between the general situation and the particular situation. The general situation is that my father fell ill in April of 2022 and died in late 2023. My mother died on the exact same day two years later, which is to say one month ago today. In between, some 30 other people died, including a person of utmost importance to me, two friends, the spouse of one of those friends, the person who owns my building, my uncle, my neighbor (by murder), a fellow who did odd jobs next door (by murder), plus plus plus. 

(After the persons murdered my neighbor, whose body lay in a pool of blood in the back yard for a week, they then moved into his apartment, 20 feet, give or take, from my own kitchen window. I had to put down my shades for the first time ever and leave them down, because I didn’t really want murderers to get to know the look of my face. Was justice served in the end? No. The persons who did this got away with it, but at least they are not 20 feet from my kitchen window any more.)

Or did my mother die a month ago? Who was it exactly who died, given that she began going away a little at a time seven years ago? It seems that I am having to lose her twice, which doesn’t seem quite fair, given that I never wanted to lose her even once. Both losses are painful, in different ways. Sometimes she suddenly comes back to me as she was a decade ago, or two decades, or three, and then a wave of terror sweeps through me: How could that entire person be gone?

Yet the loss of my father feels like the more wrenching one in that he was exactly, precisely himself until about 48 hours before he died. He had been obliged (by me) to take up the role my mother had vacated years earlier, due to dementia, the job mainly entailing listening to a lot of tedious chit-chat. (He was nice about it. Once after listening to a particularly boring soliloquy, my mother said, “I’ll never get these minutes back.”) Therefore, when he died, he was the person I spoke to more than I spoke to any other person on earth.

He was entirely here, and then he was entirely gone. 

My mother, on the other hand, wasn’t quite herself, then was less herself, then this, then that, then even less, and then a final very gentle and peaceful moment. Whoosh. Gone. But who had gone?

So. The general situation is bad. I am overwhelmed by loss and sorrow; on top of everything else, in the month since my mother died, I had to have all four bottom front teeth pulled. I will get a bridge. It is not a catastrophe. I am extremely lucky I can get a bridge, but come on, a whole entire mother and four teeth gone within a few weeks of each other?

I obviously can’t tell all of this to everyone I ever speak to, but it feels weightily present all the time. But what does that weight consist of exactly? If I faithfully remained in just this moment, breathing the way my yoga teacher says to (“Inhale … belly rises … exhale … open your mouth”) and noting the input at the various sense doors over and over (I see … I hear … I smell … I taste … I feel in my body … The emotion most noticeable right now is … ), would there actually be anything other than the specific situation?

I have to say, I have gotten extremely good at sinking into the present moment over the past three and a half years, of necessity, and maybe an intensification of that practice is the entire answer. Or would that be spiritual bypassing: using my spiritual practice to avoid the kind of work one might do, say, in therapy?

Not only can I not tell all of this to everyone I ever speak to, it has often felt that I can’t tell it to anyone whatsoever, partly because it’s too much and partly because I’m increasingly particular about what kind of listening other people do. Being a chaplain kind of makes this worse. Unsatisfactory listening is glaringly obvious. If I tell someone something and then they never allude to it again, that’s not good. But then, if they ask a whole bunch of questions, that’s also not good. If they make a pronouncement about my experience, not good. If they tell me how I should proceed, extremely not good. If they laugh outright, absolutely and completely intolerable, and it is surprising how often that has happened. I have the gift, it appears, of being utterly hilarious no matter how emphatically I tell someone that what I’m about to say is not funny.

The most helpful person for me to talk to has been my Zen teacher, Joshin. We speak every couple of months. His advice has often been spot on, but that is half an hour or an hour just now and then. I haven’t seen my actual therapist often because I frequently end up in a rage during our sessions, but I decided I was overloaded with unshared woes and that I’d better see her regularly again. At our very first session, when I told her about something sorrowful—after warning her that it was sorrowful—she laughed merrily. It is surprising how often that has happened. I did not schedule a second session and concluded I was just going to have to carry all of this on my own? Or, like, share a tiny bit with literally everyone, including random strangers who happen to be passing by as I’m going in or out of my apartment building?

It seems that something needs to be done. It seems to me that the giant weight results in my acting in ways I feel remorseful about later (such as yesterday on the phone with the person at Fidelity). After such moments, it seems that the task is to be a better person. But who is the person who needs to be better? The person who was talking to Fidelity yesterday and, ahem, threatened to move every single one of her cents to Vanguard, or the person who bought her neighbor $100 worth of flowers and chocolate after he lost a parent?

No, I think, as Paul Haller of the San Francisco Zen Center says, that the task is not to be a better person but to reduce suffering. I am sure I did not improve the Fidelity person’s day; she probably underwent some suffering. But I can say for sure that I did. And what is the nature of that suffering? It consists entirely of reactivity, or the fruits of reactivity, the knotted-up stomach and so forth. When does suffering occur? The same time that anything whatsoever can occur: now. The only suffering that can be alleviated is that which is occurring right now, because that’s the only kind there is. The suffering of the past and the future cannot be alleviated.

How, then, does one alleviate suffering? Paul Haller says: By taking refuge, in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. What are these? The capacity to be aware and awake in this moment, and our historical teacher, whether human being or myth. The way things are—the truth—and also the teachings of the Buddha. The community of practitioners: friends and supporters to one another.

The words of Christina Lehnherr, also heard at the San Francisco Zen Center, seem helpful here, as well: Reaction is a way of not fully experiencing. 

So I think the task of alleviating the only suffering I can really alleviate, which is my own, has to do with deepening my capacity to tolerate my own experience in just this moment. There is a thought and memory component, too: Can I recall that it never goes well to call Fidelity or the bank or the wellness director for memory care when I’m already annoyed, and that it probably won’t go well this time, either? Sometimes I can remember that and sometimes I can’t.

But having spoken sternly to the person at Fidelity, shall I forgive myself or shall I not? I think the only answer is that I have to, because having done an unskillful thing + berating myself is, say, 100 units of misery launched into the cosmos, while having done an unskillful thing + warmly congratulating myself for the same is more like 73.4 units of misery, obviously better.

A friend lately said that if she does the latter, she feels like she’s letting herself off the hook. I quite understand that. It seems intuitively wrong to warmly commend ourselves for inflicting harm. What if it was great harm? At the extreme, shall I praise myself for having committed murder? And yet, am I more likely to alter my behavior in an atmosphere of self-hatred or one of self-love? Without a doubt it is the latter. I guess a key point is that this does not in any way foreclose doing everything I can think of not to repeat the undesirable behavior. 

I Still Exist

Written quite some time ago:

A couple of nights ago, Marvin began to shred the mini-blinds for the millionth time. It was the end of a long day, and I snatched him out of the blinds with dispatch, plus uttered a discouraging word or two. I was slightly surprised then to see both cats walk out of the room shoulder to shoulder, not to be seen again until the following morning. At the door, they paused and one of them directed a withering glance at me over his shoulder.  (“I’m surprised he didn’t give you the finger,” said my new therapist, Dr. T. I’m sure he would have if he could get that finger to work independently.) (Not my therapist any more.) (Not for more than two and a half years.)

It genuinely has been difficult with these cats. I assumed that I would automatically love them, because who doesn’t love a cute little kitten? I was dismayed to find that my strongest feeling was irritation, which blossomed into rage. I yelled and screamed and swore. I brusquely pushed them off counters. No little bones were broken and no blood was shed, other than Marvin’s blood the day of his solo accident behind the stove, but this was not good and I felt like the world’s worst person. I knew my neighbors were hearing all of this—hearing the Buddhist curse at her cats—and I was also afraid I was going to have a stroke. Swearing at home became so common that I found myself doing it at work, seemingly shocking at least one co-worker. (Her reaction was in jest, I realized months later, when she used the same word.)

I discussed all this ongoingly with my father, who is the person I’ve talked to the most over the past year and a half, and also with whomever I happened to be talking to, including my new Zen teacher, J., who asked if there was a way I could find the dharma in this behavior. All I could come up with initially was that I was certainly noticing what the cats were doing. I was not tuned out, though I’m not sure a very different behavior, enraged constant reactivity, is therefore automatically a virtue.

I consoled myself with the fact that maybe the global pandemic has caused stress I’m not consciously aware of, making everything harder, and certainly there are difficult things going on closer to home that affect me. I realized that one gift of this period is that I now, alas, really understand how someone comes to hit a beloved spouse or defenseless child—how rage ignites and explodes. If a patient at the hospital were to tell me about engaging in domestic violence, it’s not that I would now approve of it, but I would get it.

Of course I have tried a million things to adjust this dynamic, one vow of better behavior after the other. I don’t want Marvin and Duckworth to be scared of me. I don’t want my neighbors to think I’m an ogre. I don’t want to be the foul-mouthed chaplain. I don’t want to have a stroke. I don’t want to be awash in guilt and remorse.

I couldn’t bore you with the details if I wanted to, as I don’t have notes on all that, there was so much of it, but a few things stand out as having been helpful. Things are much, much better at this point.

It was clear that counting to ten was entirely out of reach, as it seemed that I could go from perfect calm to blind rage in less than one second. It was seemingly completely uncontrollable, but I discovered that I could, sometimes, count to one, which is enough to re-engage the rational brain: The lizard brain cannot conceive of numbers. Counting to one didn’t make a huge difference, but it made a little difference.

When I began doing Dr. Weil’s 4-7-8 breathing, under the auspices of Dr. T., I began to spend more moments each day with my parasympathetic nervous system engaged, even if 4-7-8 breathing didn’t seem to bring immediately wonderful results, and that was a good feeling.

I worked with pausing and calming myself, and then realized that this, while certainly preferable to losing my temper, was actually an attempt to force the anger to go away. I was careening between both extremes, of spewing the anger outward and trying to squelch it—everything but the middle way of fully experiencing it and choosing my actions. I began to try to notice how it really felt inside when I got so angry, and saw that it was largely a sad feeling, actually. From the outside, this practice looked just the same as trying to bury the anger, but the purpose and experience were different.

I have continued with the 4-7-8 breathing, as it does seem to be increasing a general sense of calm, and am doing alternate nostril breathing, as well. My nervous system is in need of repair after this Angry Cat Owner Year (or So), and so is Marvin’s. Sometimes I hold him while I do breathing exercises. (4-7-8 breathing has also fallen by the wayside, as indeed has my whole entire father. It never really did that much for me, but I am finding alternate nostril breathing genuinely calming.)

I began to ponder how I might forgive myself for all of this horrible behavior on my part. People do all kinds of dreadful things and still must live on. There are people who do kill animals, or human beings. Is self-forgiveness really possible? Is it desirable? Is there something wholesome in not forgiving oneself?

I’m reading a cat book in which the author says most cats don’t like to have their bellies stroked and that if a cat presents his belly, it may be pursuant to clawing and bunny kicking she who tries to touch his stomach. The author says that if a cat really does want his belly petted, that is a high compliment, and one that both Marvin and Duckworth offer me nearly every day. They still love me. (They still love me!) In fact, it lately crossed my mind that they may be way ahead of me, enlightened teachers waiting for their idiot housemate to catch up.

One morning I reached down to pet Marvin and it crossed my mind that because he doesn’t have a conceptual notion of the past (I don’t think), he isn’t angry about what happened before. He has, in effect, forgiven and so is happy in this moment, as he waits for my hand to stroke his dark fur. He is giving the world the gift of his own happiness, and that is why she who has yelled at her cats or he who took a human life should indeed practice self-forgiveness: to give the world the gift of a happy person, mostly free from remorse and guilt, and who has learned at least a little something from her actions.

Light

(Click photo to enlarge.)