SIXTY

On occasion, someone tells me I don’t look my age. At first I’m thrilled and don’t even stop to consider if the comment is sincere. All such “you can’t be – fill-in-the-blank, fifty, fifty-five, fifty-eight” remarks are meant to be compliments, because everybody knows a woman in her fifties or beyond, a woman of sixty, has passed her sell-by date.
Messages scream across computer and television screens and leap out of mobile devices; a woman’s value lies in her beauty and her beauty lies in her youth. To be able to pop out babies is to be fuckable and to be fuckable is to matter. So I stand in front of my mirror (glasses on so I can see) and waver, a jar of Supreme Polypeptide Cream in one hand and a fistful of vitamins in the other. I am about to turn sixty.
Do I really want to resent every sign of the trip that’s brought me here?
Decades have written stories on me and I on them. If I attempt to erase the furrows appearing between my eyes or the dark spot on my left cheek, or smooth out forehead wrinkles and eye crinkles and a mildly sagging jaw line, I’ll erase brilliant parts of myself. Surviving parts. Thriving parts. Daring, wounded, courageous parts. Scathed, scarred, limping parts. I’d give up the lines and the droops, but not for a minute what I’ve gained in the process of getting them.
Can I have one and not the other?
I pop the vitamins in my mouth, but set the polypeptide cream down unopened.
The I’m-not-actually-an-old-lady-yet raft of my fifties is quickly sinking. In December I will turn sixty. Still, I have more reason for glee than for sorrow. After all, In December, I will turn sixty. Not everyone makes it.
Cancer has burned through a swath of friends and acquaintances; I had to face it down myself. I’ve lost people when an air current suddenly dropped a hang-glider or whitewater rapids overturned rafts and kayaks and sharp curves in roads outsmarted fast cars. I lost a baby brother to the mystery of SIDS and a father to less mysterious heart failure. Sitting with my sister while she died of breast cancer, I took a call at her bedside and excused myself to learn that a fit, non-smoking friend kicked it unexpectedly from a heart attack. And then? Then a soft round man knocked on the door and I stood on my front porch while he told me my missing nineteen-year old son had been found hanging in a tree an hour away.
After the whats and the hows and the are-you-sures, after driving numbly to the sheriff’s office and then to the funeral home, after beginning to comprehend that my son killed himself, I am left where I’ve always been left by the dead, with only this.
I am still alive.
The lines of joy and heartbreak on my face, the long white scar down my abdomen, the remnants of a gash on my leg, the razor thin line at the base of my neck; the whitening hair at my temples, the zing in my knee, the flesh-colored plastic pouch affixed like a bandaid to cover the cancer-caused colostomy on my belly; each of these records the ravages and triumphs of sixty years.
An old silver mine, up the road from the country home in Montana where I grew up, laced our drinking water with lead and cadmium and arsenic, a possible cause of the cancer that came at age forty. My thyroid gave out, perhaps due to the large amounts of soy I ate as a vegetarian and vegan, or the radiation treatment for cancer, or the contaminated water of childhood. A cascade of injuries and illnesses have plagued me; cancer in my intestines, the goiter in my thyroid, mistakenly removed parathyroid glands, a detached retina, shattered ribs, a punctured lung.
Yet I go on.
There’s been work and taxes, male and female lovers, two long-term partners. With my second partner I have parented two adopted children and cared for many rescued animals, mostly dogs. I’ve climbed two fourteen-thousand foot peaks, kayaked rivers and lakes and ocean bays. I’ve eaten tofu and beans and elk and grass-fed beef. Atop Long’s Peak in Colorado, I watched clouds form right in front of my eyes. In Kaikora Bay, New Zealand, my face pinched in distress when I realized the small sleek seal sunning on a rock had a plastic six-pack ring stuck around its neck, slowly choking the life out of it.
“Can’t we do something?” I begged our whale-watch tour guide.
“What should we do,” he shot back with a roll of his eyes, “scare it to death with the approach of our boat?”
“Go back to shore, get a tranquilizer dart …”
“And what of the others?” His tone spewed exasperation; for all he knew, I threw plastic rings in the trash every day. “The ones we don’t see?”
Our boat sputtered past the choking seal, blazing the image onto brain cells.
Some scars live in memory, some snake along flesh as fading white lines, one or two still rage in the blood. My body bears the marks of all I’ve endured and accomplished so far. One day, I’m going to join the kayakers, the hang gliders and the drivers who didn’t make it. I’m going to follow those who have gone – by accident or illness, by mayhem or suicide. One way or another, I’m going too. But not yet, not now. Instead, I am getting old.
In a month I’ll turn sixty.
A combination of fortitude, courage, smart choices, and pure dumb luck has brought me this far. In honor of all that is good and bad, stupid and brilliant, shameful and honorable in the last six decades, I reject sixty-is-the-new-forty. In honor of each beloved who has died, I bow with gratitude because I. Am. Still. Here. I want to do good with the time I’m given, not battle the inevitable changes of this biological vehicle that carries me along.
I’m going to take my vitamins and trot up staircases for exercise. I’m going to sleep eight hours and take a nap when I can. I’m going to climb a few more mountains and see a few more whales and snorkel the coral reefs while they’re still here. One son has died but another still lives. I plan to be here for him in all my scarred, beautiful, wrinkled, fit, thriving, sixty-and-beyond glory.
And if I see another seal choking in a plastic six-pack ring? I’ll use the formidable power of my paleo-vegan, cancer-surviving, vitamin-sucking, mother-rocking, old-woman self.
I’ll take the damned thing off.

Death by Asphyxia

Suicide is an act that appeared incredibly selfish until I stood right next to it.

Three and a half months ago, my nineteen-year old son committed suicide. He struck off on his own, threw away his phone, told no one where he was going. He hung himself in a tree along a roadside about an hour away from home in Portland. A jogger noticed what he thought was someone lurking in the trees. He moved closer where he could see that the body wasn't standing but dangling, toes a few inches off the ground.

After those first moments with the police chaplain on the front porch, after the shock and disbelief, after shuffling around in our living room like ghosts while friends and family floated in on gusts of startled sadness in response to texts and calls, after the chairs had been dragged from kitchen and dining room to make a big circle, after fumbling with the phone and forgetting which questions to ask, after finally tracking down the sheriff who investigated the scene, after learning the facts, I sat quietly in the midst of the crowd. Our desperate boy/man was out of pain even as we sunk to its epicenter.

I swirled (and still sometimes do) in what if's. What if I stopped him from leaving that day when he packed his backpack and included his blue and red climbing rope? What if I required him to see yet another mental health specialist sooner? Not at all? What if I had demanded a brain scan years before when I thought his struggles were more than 'boys will be boys' or 'post traumatic stress disorder' (PTSD) from his early troubled childhood in the foster care system? What if I was softer and more forgiving? What I had been stricter? What if I told him I loved him more often? Less often? I felt guilty and so did everyone I talked to. "I think this is my fault," said his little brother, "I was so annoying." "I should have lent him that bike," a family friend commented with a sigh and shake of her head. "I didn't return his call," his old middle school friend told me after a hug so long I started to squirm. Suicide left us all to do mental math we couldn't possibly compute.

I pressed my fingertips into the letters and numbers carved into the tree where he died: his initials, the date of his birth and apparently of his death (his body was found several days later but the medical examiner determined he had been there a few days). A short video on a camera in his backpack left his suicide note/poem/rap. "Lights out, people," he signed off with a two-fingered salute.

In his short life, my son struggled with demons. Sleep eluded him, food failed to fill him, friends drifted away. His fuming presence at home threatened us, especially our younger son. He used marijuana in an effort to calm himself and balance the moods which swung between dark and darker. He made Herculean efforts to keep from hurting someone or destroying things. We sought out counseling from many sources, for him, his brother, ourselves. He spent fifteen months in residential treatment. Still, in the weeks before he took his life, he grew increasingly distant, huddled in black jeans, black jacket, his head deep inside a sweatshirt hood. He accused us - and everyone - of plotting against him as his brain rattled toward what might have been schizophrenia and was certainly some kind of madness. Even so, his essential heart showed through on occasion. In an orange t-shirt with a smile on his handsome, chiseled, young-man face, he snuggled with the dogs and stroked their ears with control and gentleness. Having failed writing in school, he began work on a novel and peppered it with seeds of creative brilliance he won't bring to fruition.

Nothing shined a light on my son's suffering and despair like the taking of his own life. From the first minute I fully understood that he was really dead, I felt his act of suicide as a twisted act of caring. He ended his despair, hung himself where no one who knew him could possibly find him, he hurt no one else. He removed what he felt was a burden on the rest of us. Given that depression and despair seemed inescapable from the perspective of his black hole, and that all the help we'd accessed so far had been no help at all, he took the step he deemed necessary and pro-active. I cannot say it would have been better for him if he'd stayed. I doubt the darkness would have lifted any time soon, if at all. In a strange and regrettable way, I believe that the most kind and loving part of his tortured soul won a battle.

I still ask myself what I could have done differently, better, sooner. What did I miss that could have altered this outcome? But I never judge my son's action, never doubt his agony, or constrict with anger. When anger comes, if it does, it won't be at him, the one who suffered always. His act wasn't one of selfishness, it was one of unfathomable pain. And so my chest swells with sorrow and my eyes brim with tears as I hear the news of other deaths by asphyxiation, a mother of two young children, a famous comedian. I am so sorry for their suffering. My patched-together heart aches.

Simple Good Things

Nicholai was my Dead Dog Walking. He had lymphoma and a dire prognosis: he would die of the cancer sooner or later and, supposedly, unless he underwent aggressive treatment. I opted instead for easy-going natural treatment and vowed to appreciate each and every one of the predicted few days he had left. Days stretched to weeks, weeks to months, and months to a year. What became the year and half that I walked with Nicholai appreciating each day as potentially his last, became my longest experiment in living fully attuned to the moment. Through the lens of each day on the trails with him still at my side, I gained new appreciation for life’s small gifts.
As I begin to blog again now, it’s with a renewed gratitude for the happiness I experience in life, even amidst loss and hardship. If it seems I am grieving, I am. If it seems death has my attention, it does. Yet it’s clear to me even in the wake of stunning sadness that I have been given a gift of joy that is not always given. While I might claim ‘credit’ for a good attitude and for consciously turning my focus to that which is positive and beautiful and upbeat, mostly I experience this tendency toward happiness as a gift of birth and good early child-rearing and the company of dogs.
The day after a Portland Police chaplain showed up on the front porch to inform us of our son Brandon’s suicide, I got up early, knowing the day would include a drive south to speak with the officer who found him and a trip to the mortuary where his body was being held. I wondered if I should insist on seeing his body (having hung for several days in a tree before it was found) or leave my mind with other, better pictures of the boy who lived with me for almost thirteen years. In the early morning hours, I did what I always do: pulled on clothes comfortable for hiking or jogging, laced up Keen trail shoes, and escorted two loose-lipped, tail-wagging dogs to the car.
Soon the three of us, one middle-aged woman and two youthful pitbulls, trotted along an asphalt trail on our way to the Columbia River. Soft pink wild roses scented the air with a faint sweet fragrance. As my eyes searched out the flowers, I noticed six adult Canada geese escort fluffy brown chicks to the middle of the pond on our left when they heard us approach. The April sun rose low over Mt. Hood which stood sparkling in the distance. I strode along, numb with the news that the boy-man I sheltered for so long, that troubled-child-turned-troubled-young-adult I had so recently entreated to agree to an appointment with a mental health specialist, was dead.
In minutes, I followed the dogs around a locked gate onto the gravel road that would take us to the river. Barney, an energetic and goofy three-year old bounced like Tigger, begging for a toss of his orange ball. I slipped it into a plastic chuck-it and lobbed the ball down the road, Barney racing to grab it out of the air. Kelley, a slightly more sedate five-year-old dog, grinned at me the way dogs do, tail held high and eyes twinkling. In spite of a sadness that could penetrate to the ocean’s midnight dark places where fish need chemicals to light their way, I smiled wide. It was a beautiful morning.
In that moment, I caught a slim thread of understanding why I survive and my son could not. On a few previous walks with the dogs I invited, cajoled, required, or demanded my son’s presence. He was too tired, his knees hurt, his fees hurt. If he agreed to go, he was irritated by the sun in his eyes, he was too hot, he was too cold, there was a rock in his shoe. Mt. Hood or Canada geese or even a soaring bald eagle were out of his reference range and seemed to hold little interest for him. Not even the dogs’ relentless dropping of their beloved orange balls at his feet with a soulful-eyed plea for a toss could break him out of gloom (or wherever he was) and into the moment with anything more than reluctance.
Once, I argued the need for counseling with him, saying, “I just want you to be happy.”
“You don’t get it,” he snarled in response. “I’m never happy.”
He was right. I didn’t get it.
Deep in the cells of both body and brain, I am programmed to experience good things. The sun shining delights me, Mt. Hood stirs a sense of wonder and majesty, fresh spring air caresses my skin, the protective instinct of goose-parents floods me with warm appreciation, and the ever-present joie de vivre exhibited by Barney and Kelley brings a smile to my face in the most unlikely circumstance.
If I could have given Brandon anything, and if he could possibly have received it, the one thing I would have given is this; the ability to see and smell and touch and hear and feel goodness in the simple, daily things all around.
It makes all the difference.

Grief Tides

I found this post, written and neglected. Yet it reflects well the emotional tone of the past couple of years, so here goes.

I sit with elbows on my desk and head heavy in my hands. My eyelids keep trying to slide closed, though I tell myself I have to write. I want to write. But I feel sluggish and weighed down. It's like my internal organs came unhitched from their proper places and sunk down until they're all - heart, lungs, liver, spleen, stomach, kidneys, and the lot - a messy pile in the bowl of my pelvis; heavy on the bottom, empty on the top. I force myself to sit up straight, to log in to t

he blog, to begin to write.

Sometimes I'm nearly swept away by tides of sadness. Which I don't like to admit. I prefer to cop to getting down in the dumps only once I've clawed my way out again, once I've found inspiration and remembered how and why I get happy. The past six months - shepherding my sister over the bridge or through the gate from this life to wherever the heck we go after, and then missing her, and then asking the inevitable 'what's the point of it all' questions - have not made for verdant pastures of inspirational writing.

It was bad enough when my canine pal Nicholai died. So sorry I was that cancer took him away. It was hard not to feel like I'd failed him. After a lifetime on lawns and gardens without pesticides and herbicides, after a lifetime of high quality home-made food, after long walks and heaps of love, I imagined I had given my sweet dog what he needed to avoid the nasty big "C."
I was, of course, wrong. It wasn't the first time.

In 1995, I was a non-drinking, non-smoking, running yoga practitioner, a vegetarian and sometimes vegan, forty years old when I was diagnosed with colo-rectal cancer. It might not need saying, but I'll say it anyway: it rocked my world. I believed I was living a preventative lifestyle. But I was still exposed to whatever toxins float into our skies, fill our water, and linger on the leaves and stems and fruits of our foods. It was desparately difficult not to blame myself, to search my life for possible errors. Only much later, afer I pulled through my brush with the disease that eats us from the inside out, and after my dog died, and after my sister died too, I learned of the Superfund site just a few miles from my childhood home.

I don't know if the heavy metals that leached into the ground water supplying both our well and the Ten Mile Creek that flowed behind our home played a role in the development of cancer in myself and my sister. A brother too, developed tumors and almost all seven siblings have endocrine disorders of one sort or another. Might be genetics, might be coincidence, but a person has to wonder about the arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, and zinc we took in with our drinking water.

At the end of the day, at the end of a life, it doesn't really matter why we get cancer. We'll all die of something and that's the tough reality.

Except...

I suspect ...

Many of these cancer deaths could be prevented. The half of all dogs over age ten who die from cancer, the ridiculous climbing numbers of human cancers - breast and prostate and pancreas and colon and lung and brain and lymph - the cancers in children and non-smokers ...

We'll all die one day and right now, I'm finding that in itself to suck.

But do so many of us have to die from cancer?