Spending time each week in a nursing home feels like foreshadowing. It's a place of divine contradictions. For every moment of magic and connection, there's an exceedingly heart-rending glimpse into a life that is receding, dimming. 


Here's the highlight of your month: the Country Mart, where you shop for donated (admittedly super soft and cozy) socks arranged smartly on a long, laminate table. You've accumulated points for participating in bingo and the shopping is your reward. 
Here's the reluctant, begrudging, apparently non-verbal relative pushing you around the facility perimeter, indoors of course, in your wheelchair for twelve minutes, then leaving so he can check you off his list. 
Here's the grossly underpaid CNA administering your medications, while you involuntarily swat his hand away because your limbs have a mind of their own. He thinks you're resisting. You can't explain otherwise. 
Here's the activity, an Irish song sing-along, that is supposed to make you feel better but instead makes you cry during Danny Boy.
Because you remember, if only for a fleeting minute.  
Here's the fluorescent-lit, windowless activities room that screams "OFF YOURSELF WHILE YOU STILL CAN!"
Here's dinner: inedible and flavor-free, once again. 
Here are perfect strangers with whom you have to live even though their idiosyncrasies make you draw in your breath and avert your gaze. 
Here's another day, just like yesterday and the day before, filled with meds and walls and loneliness and incontinence. 
Here's Aging in America, the chapter you had not read when you were an aspiring soprano, or a Rear Admiral in the Navy, or one in five children whose mother told you in a two-room apartment in Chicago in the late 1940s that you were "one too many." When you thought life could only get better. 
Here's the ninth inning—not a barn burner so much as a slow fade. 
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Here's hoping no one is alone in a room of strangers, but rather, surrounded by loved ones, as she or he ages in place.

Our view from dinner two nights ago. I want to remember, always.  

My sign from the march yesterday. 

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I remember a lot of my dreams. I love to wake up, reach for my dream analysis book (it was a gift (: ) and do the Jungian deep dive on ​what it all means. Certain themes are recurring. Late to the airport. Lost luggage. I'm at a former job feeling like a fish out of water. I'm interacting with long-gone friends, the ones I lost after my divorce. I failed and they bailed. 

I also have eerily prescient dreams. The one a couple weeks ago, for example, where I'm in a car accident with a client and the next day my fiancé was in an accident (he's fine). Or the one where my then friend called me crying about her mother and the next day her mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Or the one where my daughter is attacked by a lion and the next day she was bullied at school by an upperclass alpha girl.  You get the drift. 

My therapist (young, PhD, hip) is keenly interested in my dreams, especially those prominently featuring the lost friends (one of whom my fiancé likes to refer to as "emotionally constipated"), lo all these years later. Often I'm trying to communicate with them, through plexiglass from the backseat of a cab or from a cell with bars, and they can't or won't hear me. 

She recommended that I watch this video:  #sorryifiletyoudown

Her theory is that I have not processed the loss/es because there was no closure. She wants me to let them go. To do so, she gave me homework that I probably should have done a long time ago. "Grief journaling" involves writing three positive and three negative things about each person, along with an "unsent anger letter."

"Develop composite characters if you need to," she counseled.

Not a problem. 

Working title: "It's Personal" or "The A Word." Necessarily fiction.

It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life. -- Anne Lamott

I tend to approach the ocean with a niggling sense of dread (a shark was spotted at our beach last week). Yesterday, it was raining—not tropic-soft but pelting and persistent—and there was the small matter of the high surf advisory, but we put the boards on the bikes anyway. I've grown accustomed to what I call #LifeWithA (my fiancé). He likes to do things that make him feel alive. As fate would have it, so do I—ever since the Scrambler at Adventureland in the western suburbs of Chicago, circa 1973. 

There were about a dozen of us out there, so my fear abated as soon as I got past the beach breaks to join the line-up. Surely, the sharks will go for the others, is always the thinking. It was by far the most fun I've had on my longboard to date and a potent reminder of why we are here: to experience this charged coordinate of epic, raw grandeur. To be baptized, defibrillated, again and again, by the elements.

This would also explain why I agreed to sign up for a triathlon on the North Shore in May even though I can't swim freestyle. (My sidestroke is at once laughable and effective.) It's a sprint tri, so you can basically lean forward and finish BUT the swim is in the ocean and, yes, my primary emotion is fear. I've done triathlons in lakes and I'm hoping that having several hundred people next to me will propel me along. #tbd

Finally, negotiating discomfort would explain why I said yes when my friend invited me to an improv acting class last night—FAR more daunting than head-high waves. It was decidedly out of my comfort zone and, indeed, grist for the feeling-alive-inside mill. which is to say is was a complete mitzvah. So much laughter, discomfort and connection, all in one hour for $15. Better than therapy. Strong recommend. 

To saying yes, that is. 

If truth were a pie chart, everyone would get their piece, especially when it comes to relationships. The pieces may or may not overlap, and the owner of one piece (aka her truth) may refuse to acknowledge or "see" another piece (someone else's truth). This is especially so when past or constructed narratives are cemented in place by way of the stories we tell ourselves to advance our version of the (partial, one-piece) truth over another's. Or when we have an agenda. Revenge, say. Or blame. Or victimhood. Or regret. Or self-interest. Or denial. 

My story/truth today is that I saw my two youngest daughters—both are in high school—last weekend in CA and it was the best weekend we've had in ... ever. Or at least since my divorce. There was more mirth than teen (or perimenopausal) angst. More tenderness than armor. Having been apart for a couple months, I had no idea how it would go. Turns out we all miss each other and enjoy each other's company after what now feels like a healthy separation. They are fine living with their dad this semester. Just as they were fine living with me last semester. I had been racked with maternal guilt because I wasn't focused on the whole pie. On integration. On complexity. On acceptance. 

Their truth was they weren't happy here because they missed their friends (and their dad) and now they miss me. My truth is that I am happy pretty much anywhere and I miss them when I'm not with them. Our truth is that it will all be okay.  

When my ex-husband and I got divorced, our co-parenting therapists (and others with PhDs) told us that if we were okay as co-parents and individually, the kids would be okay. Okay is a relative term, of course, and it fluctuates. But for now, for this day, I breathe in gratitude. 

Life doesn't always go to script. Things happen for a lot of reasons. Some unacknowledged, by ourselves, by others, for a week, a decade or a lifetime. 

The best we can do, as I see it, is try to see the whole pie, knowing in our heart of hearts that each piece—each person's truth, partial, personal or otherwise refracted—is essential. 

My oldest and I were blessed to go to Wanderlust Oahu yesterday. I love that my phone thinks this photo of her was taken in 1998, the year she was born. Missed her so ... .