Quotations For A Sunday Evening

{ Excerpts from my journal }

12 Dec 2009 Saturday

I sit beside my Dad having sent my Mom home to rest. Another attempt this morning to bring him out of sedation and remove the ventilator. Unsuccessful.

13 December 2009 Sunday

(Five days of being unconscious)

By his side again - four minutes past 4pm. My Mom got here this morning just before 10:00. The doctor had removed the ventilator at 9:15. Rumor has it he has been a bear all day. His verbal greeting to the doctor and nurses after they pulled the ventilator out of his throat was a raspy, angry "What the HELL?" But my Mom says that he nodded when she asked if he could hear her.

Things have been violent and crazy, doctors in and out, multiple nurses required to keep him down. He's shouting and grunting, mostly slurs. When I got here he had slid down the bed with his right foot on the floor. Ann (the nurse) said he liked that position and they decided to let him stay that way, leaving his legs free while his arms are still tied down.

In the two hours I've been here he has begun to emerge. He is talking - somewhat slurred but mostly understandable. Once he realized I was here and who I am he said (with the most prohibitive dry-tounge lisp you can imagine) "Jeth, do me a favor, bring me a knife. I gotta cut theethe thtraps off."

"Is your leg bothering you?" I ask.

"No," he responds tersely, "but my TIE-DOWNS ARE!"

He tries a new tactic. "Nurthe, if you untie me, I abtholutely promithe I'll be good."

So she did. She told him he could be untied while I'm here.

"Are you gonna feed me ice?" He asks me.

"I don't have any more. You ate it all."

"Yes you do," he accuses, and then demands "go get some more."

In his most imploring abandoned voice he cries "Ohhh pleeease - come on. Can we go home?"

"JESS! HELP!"

"What do you need Dad?"

"COVER ME!"

This he yells in desperation as his sheet has fallen to one side exposing the nakedness he does not know has been his common exhibition over the past four unconscious days. I have tried constantly to cover him as quickly as his restless body uncovered itself, but at some point nakedness ceased to diminish his dignity. His thrashing meant he was alive and that was more joyful than exposure was embarrassing. But not for his conscious self.

"I'm SO frustrated!" he snarls through clenched jaw.

"About what Dad," I ask in a calm and therapeutic way.

He looks me straight in the eye and says "Figure it out."

Touche'.

The nurse asks him - what's your name, your last name, your birthday, how old are you, all of which he responds appropriately to. Then she asks him who the president of the United States is. Uh-oh, I think.

"Uggghhhh," he says.

"Ok, no political affiliations." Ann deflects. "Just asking who the president is."

"Ohhh - baahma," he answers with a slurry sneer.

Disagreeable Harbingers

While we are in the midst of a totally life changing experience right now, and there is much to tell in that vein, I am not yet prepared to leave the words that will help me write about all the things of life that come after death.

Death is no respecter of persons - persons either living or dead. He comes and he takes and he leaves and we reel either way. Part of my reeling is writing. Part of regaining my balance is writing.

{ Excerpts from my journal }

3 December 2009 Wednesday

We are in Las Vegas. It is, of course, too late and I should have been asleep two hours ago. Matthew is left home alone, working feverishly to finish his dissertation for submission by December 31st. It is hard to imagine our life without the task master of "Dad's book." I wonder how things will change - but I can't let myself wonder too much yet.

8 December 2009 Tuesday

My father is at Sunrise Hospital in the midst of open-heart surgery. He suffered what seems to be a massive heart attack while sitting in his chair laughing and talking with us. Holding Cecily and teaching her to say "ta-da."

He tried to drive himself to Quick Care knowing something in his chest didn't feel right and my Mom was at a church meeting. He went to two locations - neither open - came home and called my Mom to come drive him to emergency. There they determined he was still having the heart attack. Right aorta 100% blocked, left aorta 80% blocked, angioplasty unsuccessful. They took him to the OR around 11:15pm to begin a three hour, open-heart, triple by-pass surgery.

This is . . . surreal. I have not cried yet. I am afraid of opening the flood of tears. Chani and Scott came to the house and are staying the night here.

OR doctor called the house during surgery to get my Mom's cell phone number. I asked if he was at liberty to give any information. He said "No, but everything is fine, he's ok."

"So, he's alive?" I asked.

"Yes."

I cannot wish this away. I cannot let myself feel the reality of it.

It is 2:20 am. I go to bed now. My Mom is not home yet. Wait to hear more in the morning.

9 December 2009 Wednesday

Matt will be here in seven hours. I want his presence desperately.

My Dad is ok. Still sedated, still un-present in his current circumstances. We can't go to him, not even my Mom. She went to the hospital and was able to look at him through a window and see him sleeping, but he can't know she is there. He's an agitated fighter - in danger of pulling out all the carefully placed tubing.

I spent the day talking and talking and talking. I took my Mom's cell phone and answered every call that came to her throughout the day. She gave me a list of everyone she wanted to know, none of which she could bear to talk to herself.

What I Wrote Before I Knew

I have things to say about my Dad.

First - I miss him.

Sometimes at night, I cry into a pillow on the couch while everyone else is asleep. I do this because the kind of crying I give myself to, the crying that comes with saying "My father is dead", is not the kind of crying that is easy to do in front of other people. There is an abandon to it that makes other people so unsure of what to do. And the truth is they don't need to do anything. Except Matt, who needs to hold me occasionally while I cry the cry that would be humiliating if it weren't making the tears that fall to my Father's grave.

My journal keeps my memories for me. Once I write down the goings-on in my head, I can let go of them mentally. Thus, it is always a bit of a surprise to go back and read. The details of my life live in the pages far more than they live in my head.

There are a series of entries I will share. They are the spiritual prescience of saying goodbye, while goodbye was still still beyond the horizon.

Here is the first - written just as Jonah was getting over a severe facial tic that seemed devastating at the time:

02 Sep 2009 Wed

I have periodically wondered at the goodness of our life, and how I will react when something threatens that. I fear now that I am fragile, in a way I was not familiar with. This has been only a brush with trial - not actually trial itself - and I have nearly fallen apart. What I know is that I was recovering emotional strength before Jonah was recovering physically. I DO have something in me that can move past fear and carry on with life. I must foster that ability in preparation for whatever hits next.

03 Sep 2009 Thurs

Television is bad.

05 Sep 2009 Sat

Two hours on the strip in Las Vegas reminds me why we make so much effort, work so hard to remove ourselves from the world. Hedonistic indulgence offers me nothing - it cannot persuade me. I am a daughter of God. I am a woman of virtue pursuing something very different.

06 Sep 2009 Sun

Matthew -- tomorrow I regain thy presence. Always a sweet reunion.

What Can Be Built

Wayne Allen Leavitt

November 18, 1949 - January 28, 2011

They say you stood in a hole deep enough to cover your head, frozen in the northernness of New York’s early winter. They say you worked nearly as hard as my Mother all that day laboring the labor that builds a habitat for humanity. A house; cement and wood, and walls to keep the snow out and the babies in their beds.

They say your bones hurt at the end. You returned wanting warmth and the “sussies” that keep you going. Your last pleasure. When the camera caught you your mouth was almost smiling, your right arm pulling Nita in close - her littleness fitting snugly beneath you. You were both clad for keeping cold out. White long johns and wool socks. You were standing in my sister’s house, your oldest daughter. New York was the wake of the first time your heart stopped.

Lonely is the wake of the second time your heart stopped.

My body is lying in your bed, trying to sleep through the wrongness of being here. My husband is asleep beside me, my baby in a cot at my feet. Three of my children, the three that know your name, that have squealed in delight at the mercy of Tickle Grandpa’s tickles are in beds two thousand miles away.

It is morning. February sun glistens in February snow filling your room with winter white and the blue that could be summer if it held the sun higher in the sky. Ewan is smiling while I lay him on your bed to change his diaper. He is smiling and I am thinking how pissed off you must be that here he is - the only grandchild you have not met. You were getting antsy. You were content with New York, but for your little ones in the west getting less little every day. And this littlest one was calling to you. It is the babies that have always fit perfectly up against your chest. I can’t help feeling like our being here is mocking your yearning. I wish we were here eight days ago. I wish you could pull him up to smell the babyness of him, and see the blueness of your eyes in his.

Introductions and reunions for another time.

You didn’t stay long enough to see the house built up around the foundation you laid that day in Rochester’s cold dirt. You would have carried a pencil tucked in your ear, making graphite marks on 2 x 4’s that you would cut as you have ten thousand times before. You would have dazzled them with your know-how, making them think what good fortune was theirs to have this seasoned wielder of hammers and drills and saws building a house for them. As it is, someone else will build the walls that keep those babies in their beds.

Lucky then, isn’t it, that you have already hammered enough nails and to spare to keep your legacy standing for a long time. The legacy you built keeps out rain, and wind, and snow, robbers, thieves and liars. The legacy you built keeps out Satan. It keeps me warm and right. You set the nails carefully and struck countless blows that taught me to know God and know myself.

Here is this nail - upon which the blow will resonate with curiosity, this one faith, this one ears for music, this one voracious reading, this one a fierce love of spouse, children, cousin, sister, brother, grandchild, parent. I am steady and strong, built by your tender intensity. In me you have built a habitat for humanity. My mother, my father, with their heart of gold, have gifted me their humanity.

Getting Rid of Baby

There's nothing like a helium balloon to really put me in a mood.

It started when I was a nanny. I learned that a three-year-old does not understand the worth of a balloon in tears. In a normal world we'll say the loss of an above average, helium filled, purple balloon with a ribbon attached is worth maybe seven or eight tears. We'll even generously double that if the balloon floated off into the blue yonder during the first five minutes of ownership.

But in a three-year-old world one can devote hours of tears to the loss of a balloon. As well as innumerable howls, thrashings, surprisingly conversant epithets, and a good deal of begging.

Of course not all balloons are created equal. Some are the very pedestrian monochromatic, tear drop variety while others are. . .say, giant mylar baby heads.

Evidently if you are a lawyer having a baby, your other lawyer friends give you a giant, mylar, baby head balloon at your baby shower. And if you are a really nice lawyer (which I would argue is more common than some might suppose), and my sister-in-law you give the balloon to my kids.

It's ok.

You didn't know.

How could you know about the balloon calamity of 1995?

How could you know that one balloon and three children is Armageddon? Or that a floating ballon - especially one with a giant head - in a car with three children is a safety hazard in the same way that the space shuttle reentering the earth's atmosphere is a safety hazard?

All this aside, it's kind of a disturbing balloon. Which, as I think on it now, may be why you gave it away in the first place.

My kids adopted this ballon as they might have adopted a kitten; squeals of delight, petting, bickering over who gets to hold it, chasing it, and yanking it away from each other. Cecily darted around the older two yelling "I want the giant baby! Give me the giant baby!"

As we were getting ready to leave the house the other day I told the kids that we could not go anywhere until the giant baby was gone, as it was still floating aimlessly and ever lower inside the van.

They ran out to "take care of " giant baby so we could get on with our outing.

However, when I got to the car all children were quietly buckled into their seats waiting for me to discover this:

"Can we keep it, Mom? Huh, can we, can we."

I'd still like to jab a pin right into one of those giant rosy cheeks.

Santa Struts and Frets His Hour Upon The Wrong Stage

Christmas is different as an adult than a child.

Las year I really created Christmas - in so far as I am able. I wrapped many presents, stuffed stockings, and made a big wall of wrapping paper covering the entrance to the family room which the kids were not meant to brake through until they came to get us. Of course the kids woke up and immediately broke through the paper like wild Christmas bulls and emptied all the stockings before coming to get us.

I'm not much of a creator when it comes to special events. Holidays come, holidays go and more often than not it was just a number on the calendar with a nod from the crowd in our house.

This is not the way kids want to experience holidays. They want the magic of twinkle lights and tinsel. They want the breathtaking possibility that a big fat man in red, or a little Irish man in green came to visit while they were asleep. They want tracks from the abominable Easter bunny leaving evidence of a hurried escape through the spring mud of our back garden. They want to plaster the walls with pink hearts before Dad gets home so he knows it is Valentine's day.

My problem is three fold:

Time

Money

Deception

We'll go with the last since time and money are obvious and boring.

We had some friends over for dinner several weeks ago who asked if we had any Christmas traditions. Aside from peaches and whipped cream on waffles for breakfast and . . . gifts (if that counts), we don't really have any traditions. Our friends were starting a new tradition with their children. A kind of advent activity where the kids open a small wrapped gift each day of December. Inside is an activity for everyone to do as a family, e.g. drink hot chocolate, sing Christmas songs, visit Temple square, read a story, play a board game, have a fire, etc.

This would provide all the magic of Christmas my kids could hope for at their age. It would make up for Caroline's disappointment that there were no packages under the tree with a tag that said "From Santa". Despite filled stockings she is convinced Santa skipped our house.

But the jury is still out when it comes to Santa in our house. I don't really talk about it. I am evasive with their questions. I confirm and deny nothing.

Sometime in December Caroline said to me "Mom, did you know that Christmas is not just about Santa, it's about Jesus too. You never told me that. My primary teacher told me that."

WHAT!?

Yes I did!

And what do you mean too?

Christmas is about Jesus, not Santa.

Except Santa is fun, and the tradition is fun, and the possibility is fun. They just need to have their own holidays. It seems ridiculous and almost impossible as a parent to carry on these incompatible parallel holidays. Either we have a day to celebrate the birth of Christ, and a separate Father Christmas, gift giving day, or we just drop the whole Santa charade entirely.

The Scene:

Four innocent, guileless children sitting on the couch.

Me: Kids, there is NO Santa Claus. He is imaginary. Your Dad and I fill your stockings after you go to sleep on Christmas eve. There is only Jesus, the Son of God, and Savior of mankind.

Kids: Tears.

Truth comes in blows -- as they say.

Why does it have to be one or the other? Because we force them to share a holiday. They've got no business fraternizing. We should not thrust the imminent disappointment of a Santa-less world onto the same stage as Deity.

Matt told me a story (half the details of which I am sure I will get wrong) about a little girl who learned in a short period of time that Santa is not real, the Easter Bunny is not real and the Tooth Fairy is not real. Her next tearful question for the parents she had trusted so well was inevitably "Is Jesus real?"

How can children navigate the nature of our deception?

Should they have to?

I like getting presents.

I like giving presents.

I don't see how it relates to celebrating the birth of Christ.

In light of this Christmas dichotomy I propose a new tradition for my family. I would like to add a day to our celebration of the birth of the Saviour. A day that stands apart from the traditional, commercial version of Christmas. I'm not sure yet how to do this. I'll think on the details and see what emerges in December of 2011.

I'm open to suggestions. Have you figured out how to give your children truth and magic simultaneously?

The Good, The Bad, and The . . . Oh, I Can't Say It

Yep, that's me in the red lipstick.

Is it?

I hardly recognize myself. You might have that problem as well.

Because the truth is, if you were to knock on my door any given morning I would most likely look something more like this:

Surrounded by kids, no makeup, probably not showered, likely in pajamas - depends on if the clock has struck noon yet.

This, of course, is the naked nitty gritty of it:

There has never been a not-beyond-unflattering photo taken of me on Christmas morning (This being Christmas 2006). I have come to terms with this rendering of me. But I like the first one better. The photo of me with the kids is truth, flanked before and after by extremes that are only marginally representative of Jessica.

Our Stake Youth Presidencies - that would be Matt and Co. hosted an incredible evening on Wednesday last. A 1940's themed dinner and dance with special guests from each ward who came to tell us about their own experiences in the 1940's.

Teenagers and octogenarians fraternizing with some middle aged arbitration. No intimation that there were any disputes between our young and old, merely a means of "settling the differences" between young and old. There are a great many 'differences' stacked up in the 70 years between 84 and 14. And there is a great deal of good in throwing these unlikely dinner companions together.

After the dinner we all convened to the ballroom where a live orchestra and some experienced swingers awaited our frisky feet. A whole lot of 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2. Matt swung me round on my red shoes until my smile hurt like the day I got married and my muscles could barely hold my legs up. Our dear Hilda - A German who escaped to America during the war and is now a RoseParker through and through - held Ewan all evening while Matt and I danced. I tried twice to relieve her of the 12 pound burden but she wouldn't relinquish him.

In honor of dancing with my husband I wanted to look pretty:

This is nearly three hours worth of pretty.

Three hours!?

That's ridiculously self indulgent. As is the posting of so many photos of myself. Justified only by the fact that one must keep a record of the day they curled their hair. Which did not translate into curls for a day. Despite using approximately ALL the gel and hairspray I own, these were curls for . . . maybe two and a half hours.

This is me being Chani:

Matt calls it my poser lips.

Chani is a poser. That's why she always tilts the scale toward 'gorgeous' in her photos. She poses good.

Matt is right - those are poser lips - I do not regularly arrange my face thus. But I have a round face and this lengthens it in a Grace Kelly kind of way.

And I had best not go on in this opening of Pandora's Box of insecurities of the common housewife. As if having a round face were something to be ashamed of.

This is me being Grandma Leavitt:

I can see that this is a photo of my face in some particulars, but I have captured the era of Marba Rose in her youth - the mature kind of youth that comes before the mature kind of old.

If you look closely you can see the wrinkles at the corner of my eye.

Matt pointed them out to me a few days ago and said "We're getting old."

I said "You're getting old, I am the ageless Madonna."

He said "Madonna is fifty and nasty."

I said "The other Madonna."

He said "That's blasphemous."

I said "So is pointing out your wife's wrinkles."

Ok, this was not actually the conversation we had. It went something more like this:

Matt: I can see little wrinkles at the corners of your eyes. We're getting older.

Me: Yep.

Because what else do you say to such an inconvenient truth?

But while Matt and I danced, a fresh bloom of a youth who was once Matt's student asked him what year he was born. He was a bit evasive with her question.

"I have a secret for you," I told her, "I am a year older than him."

"NO WAY!" She exclaimed. "You look way younger than him."

It was kind of dark so I'm guessing she couldn't see my wrinkles.

p.s.

See what I mean about the round face:

That is my real smile belying my real love for Matt.