To sit here and blog because we have to leave for the airport in what sounds like a lot of time, but is actually only a little when you consider it's me having to do the preparing of myself for it. Meaning I'm bad on traveling days. I orbit around, quasi-useless, getting little bits of tasks done and going on to other little bits but not finishing anything.
We are going to Georgia for the memorial service this morning. My dad is not coming. He wanted to but is not. I am reading a statement. Then part of a poem. Not one I wrote. The poems I write are too dark to be read at funerals.
Ruskin scared me this morning by making some sort of weird cat-noise that I've never heard before. Like an exhaled hiss through the nose? With his mouth shut? Not a cough? He only did it a few times but.... I know last night we put more flea topical stuff on them and he wasn't pleased. I think he scratched his head and then licked his paw or something. From having Mike as my decoder-of-all-things-technical-whether-I-wanted-to-know-it-or-not, I learned that apparently Advantage is a nicotine-derived pesticide that is lethal to insects but not harmful to mammals. Or that's what I can remember. He (Rus) also puked in Mike's slippers during the night. Mike says I think he's mad at us. It's true, by 14 years of experience, Rus recognizes the suitcase and is Not Pleased.
I am in the Process of Conserving Everyone. It's like invisible rosary beads where I worryworryworry about them so they will be safe, even though I know that worry doesn't do crap. You can never prepare for what will actually happen or who it will happen to. I can't lose any more cats. I can't lose any more people. No we haven't found Ravi. If we found Ravi it would be a big blog post entitled WE FOUND RAVI.
Yesterday I mouthed off to a few neighborhood drunkards (that sounds like I know them personally but there are so many that they are anonymous to me and it's actually two neighborhoods) who were attempting to micromanage my street crossing and bus disembarkation, and would not take no for answer. I think they might have perceived me as Uppity (Hi Kathi if you are reading this).
I'm doing okay on countering my newfound agoraphobia but not great. I am fallible failing fallen falling. My psyche is slowly falling through space, trying to relocate its tether. If you see my body, that's what's going on inside of it.
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Monday, September 24, 2012
Sigh. #$#$%%^&&*^!!!
I cut my left pinky finger this morning making another scarf and it wouldn't stop bleeding. I have this big dumb bandage on it that makes it hard to type a, left shift, q, w, z. I keep hitting caps lock. Once I hit a mysterious key combination that almost deleted a draft email.
I sent out a submission this morning despite the typing. It's for an anthology whose cause is very important to me. I meant to get it out sooner but with all the stuff going on... I didn't. Now I feel like I have almost zero chance of acceptance b/c of 9/30 deadline coming so close.
There are so many a's.
I want to slap Ruskin. He is being such a loudmouthed bully about food this morning. I curtailed it (the slap) at the last minute and shoved his face, gently, away.
I'm so tired. I have more to say but my hand hurts & I'm impatient with the slow muddled typing when usually I'm so fast.
There are so many emotions.
I sent out a submission this morning despite the typing. It's for an anthology whose cause is very important to me. I meant to get it out sooner but with all the stuff going on... I didn't. Now I feel like I have almost zero chance of acceptance b/c of 9/30 deadline coming so close.
There are so many a's.
I want to slap Ruskin. He is being such a loudmouthed bully about food this morning. I curtailed it (the slap) at the last minute and shoved his face, gently, away.
I'm so tired. I have more to say but my hand hurts & I'm impatient with the slow muddled typing when usually I'm so fast.
There are so many emotions.
Friday, September 21, 2012
Well...
... my mom passed away a little after 5pm today.
It's what she wanted.
But it sucks. It's not what I wanted. I guess that's kind of obvious.
That is all.
It's what she wanted.
But it sucks. It's not what I wanted. I guess that's kind of obvious.
That is all.
How am I doing
So in the middle of all this mom stuff, friends are asking me how are you doing? And I don't really have a good answer for them. I'm working my recovery program. I am alive. I made a tshirt scarf and some cute jewelry this morning to take my mind off stuff. But then this afternoon I wanted to go to Writer's Cafe and I was getting ready and smacked my head on something (aGAIN) and realized that there was no way I could go out today and blend in like a normal person.
Mom was responsive last night though she couldn't talk. Today she is unresponsive and has a fever. They don't have her intubated. I assuming that she couldn't talk because... well... yeah. Okay so they're gonna move her to the hospice care floor soon. I know she didn't want to be in this situation, to go in a hospital. But I think at a point, I guess you just lose control of what happens to you.
K asked me to post pix of the scarf when I was done. So here they are. It's super comfy for the transitional weather we've been having. Lovely and cool but then verging on warm in the afternoon.
Mom was responsive last night though she couldn't talk. Today she is unresponsive and has a fever. They don't have her intubated. I assuming that she couldn't talk because... well... yeah. Okay so they're gonna move her to the hospice care floor soon. I know she didn't want to be in this situation, to go in a hospital. But I think at a point, I guess you just lose control of what happens to you.
K asked me to post pix of the scarf when I was done. So here they are. It's super comfy for the transitional weather we've been having. Lovely and cool but then verging on warm in the afternoon.
Mom update
So my mother is still with us, AFAIK. My Aunt S (mom's sister) flew in last night. I hope she was able to get a snippet of lucid mom. If I were them (Aunt D and Uncle J) I would ask my Aunt S to take care of my grandmother, who at 93 has dementia, and just recently (even thought hey were living in the same house) learned of the seriousness of mom's condition.
Although I bet they left out the part where she's refusing treatment. I guess I might leave out that part too, at this point.
Aunt S and Gran are closer than Aunt S and mom. And I bet Uncle J needs a rest or, conversely, to go to work.
Mom is refusing all treatment, except for pain meds and benzos (which I don't know if she knows she's getting)... which calm her down and suppress the gag reflex. Like I mentioned before it took them two days to convince her to even go to the hospital even when she was throwing up blood.
She even refused the endoscope. I thought maybe she would at least let them do that procedure, because it can't be comfortable having a bleed in your stomach. And I'm guessing (I do so much guessing, with this situation) that the docs can't tell if she's still bleeding internally because she refuses the damn endoscope.
I told Mike Aunt D said mom said she doesn't want tubes anywhere.
[[I'm guessing, again, that IVs don't count. Which is more guessing, which I'm frustrated by because if I were there I would know names, dosages, methods of delivery, how often... knowing facts is one way I cope.]]
Mike said ... but sometimes tubes bring good things.
True that. I don't think mom wants any good things though, besides being comfortable.
Aunt D mentioned that mom was no longer taking any fluids except sips of water, very occasionally. But again, I don't know if they are hydrating her via IV or not. I would hope so. I really think the dehydration route to death is inhumane... though it's done commonly.
I asked Aunt D if I should go down there. I wanted guidance, any viewpoint. I have really no experience with this and it's such a weird and complicated situation. I feel like Aunt D is holding together all these people who wouldn't normally hold themselves together.
Aunt D said that she did not know if I would make it in time, and that it was okay for me to keep the really good memory of seeing my mom when I did, of saying goodbye when I did.
I was so grateful for that. Just... for someone to tell me what to do, for someone to tell me it was okay to preserve the memory that I have of her.
Once, a few years ago, when there was something else up with my mom --which is the only reason my Aunt S and I talk --I told my Aunt S. This family, like rats from a sinking ship. She didn't deny it, but I think she was a little shocked that I said it.
N expressed some raised eyebrows that my Aunt S. hadn't called me --throughout this entire process --to see how I was doing. I said that I was really okay with that, that I didn't want to talk to her, that we don't normally talk, that talking to her would be overwhelming, and that I'd see her at the service.
Aunt S is a devout Catholic. I wonder if mom told her the part where she's refusing treatment.
N seemed... not surprised exactly at my response because she knows this family, how they are. How we are. I fully implicate myself in our disconnection.
I asked Aunt D to call me when mom had a lucid moment so I could talk to her for just thirty seconds, which she did. As soon as I feel it's reasonable, time-wise, I'm going to text again and ask her the same thing for today if possible.
Yesterday when I talked to mom for a moment, she was sort of in-and-out. She tried to say I love you, over and over again, but it wasn't quite coming. Like she was in a fitful sleep and sleeptalking.
Aunt D got on the phone and said, I want you to know she's trying to say I love you. I'd figured it out. Or else, it didn't matter. If we're beyond language, that's okay. Hearing her voice in any capacity... I just needed to. I hope I can hear it again before she goes.
Although I bet they left out the part where she's refusing treatment. I guess I might leave out that part too, at this point.
Aunt S and Gran are closer than Aunt S and mom. And I bet Uncle J needs a rest or, conversely, to go to work.
Mom is refusing all treatment, except for pain meds and benzos (which I don't know if she knows she's getting)... which calm her down and suppress the gag reflex. Like I mentioned before it took them two days to convince her to even go to the hospital even when she was throwing up blood.
She even refused the endoscope. I thought maybe she would at least let them do that procedure, because it can't be comfortable having a bleed in your stomach. And I'm guessing (I do so much guessing, with this situation) that the docs can't tell if she's still bleeding internally because she refuses the damn endoscope.
I told Mike Aunt D said mom said she doesn't want tubes anywhere.
[[I'm guessing, again, that IVs don't count. Which is more guessing, which I'm frustrated by because if I were there I would know names, dosages, methods of delivery, how often... knowing facts is one way I cope.]]
Mike said ... but sometimes tubes bring good things.
True that. I don't think mom wants any good things though, besides being comfortable.
Aunt D mentioned that mom was no longer taking any fluids except sips of water, very occasionally. But again, I don't know if they are hydrating her via IV or not. I would hope so. I really think the dehydration route to death is inhumane... though it's done commonly.
I asked Aunt D if I should go down there. I wanted guidance, any viewpoint. I have really no experience with this and it's such a weird and complicated situation. I feel like Aunt D is holding together all these people who wouldn't normally hold themselves together.
Aunt D said that she did not know if I would make it in time, and that it was okay for me to keep the really good memory of seeing my mom when I did, of saying goodbye when I did.
I was so grateful for that. Just... for someone to tell me what to do, for someone to tell me it was okay to preserve the memory that I have of her.
Once, a few years ago, when there was something else up with my mom --which is the only reason my Aunt S and I talk --I told my Aunt S. This family, like rats from a sinking ship. She didn't deny it, but I think she was a little shocked that I said it.
N expressed some raised eyebrows that my Aunt S. hadn't called me --throughout this entire process --to see how I was doing. I said that I was really okay with that, that I didn't want to talk to her, that we don't normally talk, that talking to her would be overwhelming, and that I'd see her at the service.
Aunt S is a devout Catholic. I wonder if mom told her the part where she's refusing treatment.
N seemed... not surprised exactly at my response because she knows this family, how they are. How we are. I fully implicate myself in our disconnection.
I asked Aunt D to call me when mom had a lucid moment so I could talk to her for just thirty seconds, which she did. As soon as I feel it's reasonable, time-wise, I'm going to text again and ask her the same thing for today if possible.
Yesterday when I talked to mom for a moment, she was sort of in-and-out. She tried to say I love you, over and over again, but it wasn't quite coming. Like she was in a fitful sleep and sleeptalking.
Aunt D got on the phone and said, I want you to know she's trying to say I love you. I'd figured it out. Or else, it didn't matter. If we're beyond language, that's okay. Hearing her voice in any capacity... I just needed to. I hope I can hear it again before she goes.
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Throwing myself back into work
So even while everything is sort of crumbling around me, I find it consoling to work on work. Anyone who admonishes me, oh go ahead, take another pill that'll solve everything has no idea how grateful I am that pills make it possible for me, right now, to not be losing my composure completely as various actions play themselves out in GA. I'm all for "better living through chemistry" as they say. It made my 17-year-old self able to leave the house twenty years ago, and today chemistry is helping me be out of bed, thinking and working, without my emotional core breached and spilling all over the house.
On the DS-HUM listserv, Kevin Gotkin (at UP) shared a film that he produced. To get the most out of this blog entry, you should really go watch it before reading on. It's about half an hour long though, so I understand if you can't go see the whole thing. But at some point in your copious free time, you should.
This film, as I understood it on 0.75 cups of coffee, is about disabilities making possible genuinely and innovative views on, and thus methods for conceiving of, artistic production. Toward the end, this film Rupture, Sometimes focused on a woman, Jessica Feldman, who spoke of her experience with seizures and then being on medicine to ameliorate the seizures so she could function and produce in our larger normalizing society, which she recognizes as "linear." Her own experience before that, because of the disorientation of periodic seizures, had her perceive time as "ruptured." And she says that while she is glad to be productive, she misses the opportunities that "the rupture" offered her in terms of knowing the world differently.
This kind of ties into an idea I formed when writing up a sort of personal artistic statement for Prosody a few weeks back. I never got to include this idea in the show, but I'm coming to realize the benefit, the artistic fruitfulness of what I'm calling creative navigation. For a long time I saw only the obstacles of having a disability (or several). I was disheartened about how there will pretty much always be obstacles. We're not going to transition into this universally accessible society in my lifetime. But now I'm beginning to see that the process of working around / among these obstacles can be incredibly fruitful. It's causing a shift in my own poetics that I can't quite articulate yet because it's still happening.
If you have a disability, you get thrown into the vicissitudes of your own idiosyncratic body, or brain, like, a hundred times a day.
For me, it's like all of a sudden I'm thrust from a situation which is normal for me and my own idiosyncratic body / brain, and then something new comes along to add to my experience.
I am legally blind, have fibromyalgia, OCD, and PTSD. Going out into the world is really challenging. Like, psychologically taxing. Even when the event I'm going to is something that's supposed to ease the burden, like yoga or massage therapy. Simply getting there and back can be so stressful that it almost-but-not-quite cancels out the good that happened at the session.
Just when I think I have my shit together, so to speak... just when I can say, all right, I've reconciled with these certain obstacles, there are new ones. And all I saw, before I paused to reflect on it, was the stress.
In the moment, it feels like someone picks me up, turns me on my head, holds me by the feet, shakes me around until I flop like a ragdoll. Then this "force" plops me back down at, for example, the bus shelter and says, okay kid, back to your regularly scheduled program.
But maaaybe it's worth considering the alternate vantage points that this very wobbly, ungraceful, and out-of-sync journey opens up for me. I don't know the answers yet for myself, on how this POV-shift (from stress to access --and the thing I'm accessing is a different part of my artistic brain) will redefine me and my art. But a shift is coming. Really, it's already happening.
FAVORITE MOMENTS of the film:
Georgina Kleege about "dismantling simple binaries"
Kleege again: "all of the messiness of lived experience is ... wiped out of the philosophical discussions of blindness"
"gradations, shades, and registers"
Kathe Kudlick about "alternative soundtracks"
Amanda Cachia "generative aspects of disability"
Jessica Feldman "time doesn't actually function the way linear history describes it"
[and I appreciate all the music credits as they happen-- new stuff to d/l from itunes]
On the DS-HUM listserv, Kevin Gotkin (at UP) shared a film that he produced. To get the most out of this blog entry, you should really go watch it before reading on. It's about half an hour long though, so I understand if you can't go see the whole thing. But at some point in your copious free time, you should.
This film, as I understood it on 0.75 cups of coffee, is about disabilities making possible genuinely and innovative views on, and thus methods for conceiving of, artistic production. Toward the end, this film Rupture, Sometimes focused on a woman, Jessica Feldman, who spoke of her experience with seizures and then being on medicine to ameliorate the seizures so she could function and produce in our larger normalizing society, which she recognizes as "linear." Her own experience before that, because of the disorientation of periodic seizures, had her perceive time as "ruptured." And she says that while she is glad to be productive, she misses the opportunities that "the rupture" offered her in terms of knowing the world differently.
If you have a disability, you get thrown into the vicissitudes of your own idiosyncratic body, or brain, like, a hundred times a day.
I am legally blind, have fibromyalgia, OCD, and PTSD. Going out into the world is really challenging. Like, psychologically taxing. Even when the event I'm going to is something that's supposed to ease the burden, like yoga or massage therapy. Simply getting there and back can be so stressful that it almost-but-not-quite cancels out the good that happened at the session.
In the moment, it feels like someone picks me up, turns me on my head, holds me by the feet, shakes me around until I flop like a ragdoll. Then this "force" plops me back down at, for example, the bus shelter and says, okay kid, back to your regularly scheduled program.
Georgina Kleege about "dismantling simple binaries"
Kleege again: "all of the messiness of lived experience is ... wiped out of the philosophical discussions of blindness"
"gradations, shades, and registers"
Kathe Kudlick about "alternative soundtracks"
Amanda Cachia "generative aspects of disability"
Jessica Feldman "time doesn't actually function the way linear history describes it"
[and I appreciate all the music credits as they happen-- new stuff to d/l from itunes]
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
In the middle of something
My uncle emailed Mike to let him know that my mom has been throwing up small amounts of blood for the last two days and they finally convinced her to go to an ER to get it looked at. They think she now has a bleeding ulcer. N says I'm barred from looking up anything on the internet dealing with fleas or my mom's condition, so I had Mike look it up and he said they can cauterize the bleeding with an endoscope, which they can do with twilight anesthesia. If that doesn't work, it's surgery, which she will most likely refuse.
I just keep thinking.....
.... but I'm not going to share what I'm thinking because I'm afraid of being judged. I'm judging myself already. I can't even believe this whole situation, Still. Apparently she's been "the same" since I left until now.
I said I wasn't going back there.
They've now informed my grandmother of how serious my mom's condition is.
Apparently that didn't go over so well.
As you might think it wouldn't.
I don't even know if any of them want to see me, including my mother. I think she has mixed feelings. I think the goodbye we had was a good one and I want to keep it that way.
Then the cat got a hairball and I flipped out. Internally. Everything is internal right now. I can't seem to ... I don't know. Finish this blog post, among other things.
I would ask you to pray, if you are the praying type, but I don't know what to pray for anyway. I guess I would say, for a peaceful transition for my mom. And some grace for the rest of us to get through this.
I just keep thinking.....
.... but I'm not going to share what I'm thinking because I'm afraid of being judged. I'm judging myself already. I can't even believe this whole situation, Still. Apparently she's been "the same" since I left until now.
I said I wasn't going back there.
They've now informed my grandmother of how serious my mom's condition is.
Apparently that didn't go over so well.
As you might think it wouldn't.
I don't even know if any of them want to see me, including my mother. I think she has mixed feelings. I think the goodbye we had was a good one and I want to keep it that way.
Then the cat got a hairball and I flipped out. Internally. Everything is internal right now. I can't seem to ... I don't know. Finish this blog post, among other things.
I would ask you to pray, if you are the praying type, but I don't know what to pray for anyway. I guess I would say, for a peaceful transition for my mom. And some grace for the rest of us to get through this.
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