When An Elder Dies

I took this the day he died. (Jan 2019)

My Uncle died recently, aged 89, a retired Lutheran minister.
His Dad, five brothers and brother-in-law (his sister's husband) were all ministers as well.
My Dad and uncle were very close. I remember listening to their late Saturday night phone calls as a kid. Late, because the long distance rates were cheaper. Saturday because they were polishing up their sermons for Sunday.
They both preached about and more importantly lived their lives in support of peace and social justice. I recall being so confused when I realized how much of the vocal Christian world spews hate. This was not the tradition of Christ I saw, which involved helping other people, all people, no matter who they are. I suppose my first lesson was round age 8 when I picked up the phone at home and some angry man delivered a death threat aimed at my "daddy". Not cool.
I was very close with my Dad, but he died when I was in my 20's, about 6 years after a heart transplant. My uncle came and stayed with Dad for the 3 months he had to stay at the transplant house after the surgery, as my Mom had to go back to work. My uncle and aunt were also there with us at my Dad's bedside when he took his last breath. Both my father and his brother were reverends and I don't mean to be irreverent, but some of my Dad's last words were a fart joke. Which I shall cherish to the end of my days.
Mu uncle became like a second Dad to me, and my aunt a second Mom, and my cousins like siblings. How fortunate I feel to have this bonus family! That puts up with me! I am pretty sure my uncle was teed off at me our last day together, as I was being a bossy doctor type in the hospital. There is actually a picture of us flipping off the camera (sorry--I know this is irreverent), but my son, with whom I shared this picture, and who happens to be in prison, pointed out that while I was flipping off the camera, my uncle was technically flipping off me.
I have a son in prison and I gave the finger with my beloved uncle on my last day with him. Do you guys think I am ready for sainthood yet?
The other thing that happened that day is he almost said he loved me. My uncle (unlike my Dad, who told me pretty much every day of my life that he loved me, usually several times, and I do this to my kids and they find it so annoying, one of them actually threatened to block me on texting) NEVER responded in kind to the phrase "I love you." It just was not in his vocabulary. So after the middle finger incident, I was saying goodbye to him, and I leaned in for a long hug, him in his hospital bed and now both of us crying. I said "I love you" and I'll be damned if he didn't say "me too". Which I shall cherish to the end of my days.
I keep trying to figure out what I have such strong connections to people I love but have not been able to be the world's best parent. Maybe this skips a generation? So my kids will be stellar parents. When they are ready. And out of prison. And stuff. Family is complicated and life is short and biology thinks it is key but I actually don't buy it.
What I learned from my parents, and people like my Aunt and Uncle is this:
Do kindness to others. Fight the good fight. Risk yourself to stand up for justice. Have a sense of humor. Know some good swear words in German. Love like it is your last day on earth, even if the word "love" is a confusing one to you.

When life happens to me, I write about it. So here are two poems. Dedicated to Rex, my Dad, my Aunt, my cousins, my children, and everyone else who might feel inclined to find solace and inanity in the strange beauty of words.

Pantoum on Exchanging Sermons

Brothers exchange sermons
over lemon yellow phone, cord
taut from wall to couch where little brother lies in socks,
cradling the words between shoulder and ear.

Over lemon yellow phone cord
God's Gadflies gather biblical gems,
cradling the words between shoulder and ear,
scrawling ideas in the moonlight.

God's Gadflies gather biblical gems
late Saturday nights.
Scrawling ideas in the moonlight,
while I quietly curl in a chair and spy.

Late Saturday nights,
cost of long distance calls less dear,
while I quietly curl in a chair and spy,
they preach justice, peace, human rights.

Cost of long distance calls less dear,
my pajama arms clutch teddy bear,
they talk justice, peace, human rights,
sometimes in German.

My pajama arms clutch teddy bear.
Only rarely do they swear,
usually in German,
For my sake perhaps.

Only rarely do they swear,
about cancer and war,
for my sake perhaps,
or about that terrible used car purchased on a dark rainy night.

About cancer and war,
so far as I knew,
or about that terrible used car purchased on a dark rainy night,
these men deal in mysteries.

So far as I knew,
they would always be here,
singing "O Canada" in German.
Brothers exchanging sermons.


Old Soul Flying

When an elder dies
Maybe his soul flies
In search of familiar
Smells of waxed wood on pulpit,
Of Mother's bread baking.
Hearing wolves howl
On an icy Canadian road.
Old soul feels sun through the parsonage window
And the heartbeat of a soft baby rabbit
Thudding on hands which brush
Briefly against his sweetheart's when he hands her the gift.
Hands that will brush often over 63 married years,
Wet with grief's and laughter's tears.
Old soul swoons with the top of each
Child, Grandchild, Great-grandchild's head inhaled,
With the hypoxia of mountains scaled.
A piece of old soul resides in India's soil,
And along American highways, convertible top down,
Pulling into a Wisconsin town.
32,485 meals filled old soul
Plus black coffee from favorite waitress
Cup warming hand,
Fueling courage to stand up for peace.
Cracking jokes with youngest niece,
Who feels old soul brush away tears,
A model of life well spent.
When an elder dies,
I hope the coffee is eternally excellent.

Message of Love, Redux

Etymologically, the apocalypse just means revealing something. Maybe it will be something nice?

On our woods run today, Miles was tense. He always is in the woods. You never know what is lurking in the trees, those towering Tolkienesque creakers who on a windy day sound like the sound effect they use for a door in a haunted house. The air carries scents of a multitude of dogs, past and present. Dogs who have trespassed on the kingdom Miles rules and that threaten our very existence. Sometimes a salamander darts by which is terrifying and confusing, and when the horses appear, God only knows if they are actually pestilence, war, famine and death with sneaky riders who say things like "good morning" or "thank you for having your dog on a leash."

Tomorrow being the last day of the year, I keep feeling like I have forgotten to do something. Going through the list:
-new calendar purchased? check
-a couple of scary goals set for 2019? check
-self-review of 2018 bringing new levels of concern about my adequacy as a human being? check

What if 2019 reveals itself to be the best season of Saturday Night Live ever known? I feel like that would directly correlate with End Times.

Lately many of my hospice patients have been younger than I am. Also lately, I keep trying to channel Wendell Berry and find peace in wild things when I worry about the fate of my children but instead I end up waking up, bolt upright in a cold sweat and wondering what I can do to fix everything for everybody including my children, the children at our border and the relative youngsters in hospice.

What if it turns out mindful meditation is the answer but I am too restless to sit still? What if God meets me on the other side and tells me I wasted much too much time worrying but He/She forgives me anyway and it turns out even poodles aren't anxious in heaven so all our runs are off leash?

I bailed on my January marathon but have signed up for one in April. It happens on my Mom's birthday. I will be running it with one of my best friends. Though truth be told he will always be one and one half steps ahead of me. I am not worried though.

Big goals: marathon, piano recital, don't worry so much.

What if I qualify for Boston but don't get in the race because it is so impacted? What if I forget where I am in the middle of my piano recital? I mean I won't forget where I am in terms of my place in space, as I will be very aware that I am sitting on a piano bench at the Morris Graves Museum of Art probably in some kind of fancy dress. But I might forget what comes next in the Beethoven Fugue or the slow movement of Barber, and then what will I do? On Christmas Eve I was playing in church and the veneer faux-ivory top of the A below middle C flew off during Scarlatti and hit me in the nose. True story.

I worry about racism. And misogyny. About government shutdowns, refugees being barred from entry to a safe haven and how on earth any of us will afford healthcare. I worry that people are too mean to each other and miss out on so many beautiful things. I worry that my piano will die and not be a good candidate for resuscitation. I worry that my son won't live through prison, and my daughters will never trust that the world can be a good place to be given that people like Brett Kavanaugh get to act as a life-appointed moral compass for our seriously off-the-rails country. I worry that pushing 50 I may be past all hope of a marathon PR. I am already worried about my next colonoscopy, which is in 5 years.

The weird thing about aging, besides colonoscopies and empty nests, is how the self shrinks but the spirit expands so that the sack I walk around in feels both less significant and more alive than it ever has before. Chrono-astrono-geographically I am but a blip. But what a blip it is/was/might be!

One way or another, the apocalypse is coming. Its a revelatory certainty, with a dash of hope. I am not worried. Tomorrow is the last day and

OH!!! I know what I was forgetting!
Designate a theme song for 2019.

Life may be unkind but I refuse to stay down.
When love walks in the room,
Everybody stand up.

Professor Marathon B. Training's Ted Talk on the Purpose of Living in This Miserable World

My dog and I almost died when he ran through an electrified barbed wire fence and chased steers and was going to get shot and I ran onto the field and got charged, head butted and thrown by an angry steer. Three times.

I do not need a lecture on the idiocy of letting my dog get into this predicament. He got away from me before I could leash him. I should probably be shot and might well have been. I might still be depending on how people respond to my most recent editorial regarding the NRA and their command that doctors "stay in their lane", albeit soaked with the blood and paralysis and brain injuries of their shot up patients. But I digress like a cow digests.

This story is not meant to be funny or cute. I could not talk well for a few days from all the screaming taxing my larynx. I still have whiplash, my ribs hurt, my sternum hurts, my vertebrae hurt, my femurs hurt. I could not do much but cry for the first 36 hours after this event. And me being who I am I was really worried about the steers. Except that one who was taking absolutely no shit from anyone. He will be fine.

And it completely threw me off my planned long run this week. It was all I could do to drag myself to the kleenex box to mop my tears. A twenty plus miler was not going to happen. Runners crack me up. It becomes all about getting the miles in, logging it on Strava and not getting too far off course. We do special incantations to avoid injury, and read essentially the same three articles over and over again in Runner's World (inspirational runner story, how to run your best 5K/10K/marathon, the best shoes of the year). The gravity of near death is only heavier by its impact on the marathon training cycle. Though it might be said that racing around a field, screaming, being attacked by an enormous, muscled, angry animal while people with guns are telling you what a fuck-up you are is one heck of a workout.

Running the last couple of days, finally able to move and breathe and not feeling quite as traumatized, I find myself wondering if I should bag this planned marathon, COWL it quits, STEER myself in a different direction, and/or just take some time to stop and smell the manure.

Marathons are the best, beastly and blessed. They involve just the right number of layers, so that you can start without freezing and shed later to avoid heat delirium. At the end they give you inadequately sized reflective blankets that in my opinion should be replaced by cozy, footed onesies, especially when you have to walk seventeen thousand more miles to get to your gear. Seriously, at the NYC marathon, the volunteers have to cheer people on to keep moving AFTER they finish the marathon for the long walk to the UPS van holding their stuff, which seems to be parked in New Jersey. Marathons teach you patience. How to manage pain. When to push, when to hold back. How to time bodily functions. And how to bore your friends and family to death, talking about marathons.

Once upon a time a friend and I were running in the Palo Alto Hills, back before the trails were paved and highly populated by physically active Stanford polyglots. Back on the west side we encountered a herd of cattle. Every single one of them ceased cud-chewing to fix us in their freaky stare and it stopped us in our tracks. At the time we joked nervously about the danger, but I now know we could well have been stampeded and back then we would not even have been able to post about it on Face Book! Morally I remain neutral on the right of cows to intimidate and attack when you cross on to their territory. Like mountain lions on trail runs or sharks after paddling to the outside, it is just part of the deal. It is not something to like or hate or spend too much time thinking about.

Taking away the hubris of marathon training and the image of guns, human rage and bovine wrecking balls, I am left with what is our common Achilles heel. That is to say, vulnerability. If this was film noir, it is a small child standing alone in an empty place with no clear ground or sky or boundaries or beginning or end. Probably somewhere in Sweden.

If this were a dating website, our bios would all read "attempts to deny being vulnerable".

If this were a poem it would read
I could be dead

Having watched my mother puke up chemotherapy all night then go to work the next morning
And my father get his entire heart replaced like it was some rusty car part
And my son dive into a destructive vat of drugs and violence
And my patients struggle with diagnoses while trying to maintain some semblance of dignity
I sometimes wonder what the point of life is.

When my daughter asked me that very question I answered the only true thing:
To be kind to others.

Running marathons is nice too, mainly because it teaches you stuff, like any hard thing does.

It will be awhile before I can look a cow in the face again though.

Thanksgiving Pantoum

There must be trash bags all across America filled with lettuce.
Escherichia coli has no place
Imagine a gram negative guest face to face
With grandma, head bowed saying grace.

Escherichia coli has no place
Let us pray they go away
With grandma, head bowed saying grace
Holy immunized.

Let us pray they go away
Gram's positive stuffing a turkey is Okay
Holy immunized
By tradition.

Gram's positive stuffing a turkey is Okay
Her daughter is strong and her granddaughter gay
By tradition
Macy's helium parade plays while giblets boil.

Her daughter is strong and her granddaughter gay
Obama served food with volunteers yesterday
Macy's helium parade plays while giblets boil
Kindness seems old-fashioned.

Obama served food with volunteers yesterday
While California dutifully raked its forest
Kindness seems old-fashioned
Like colored Christmas lights.

While California dutifully rakes its forest
Imagine seeing eye to eye
Like colored Christmas lights
Softly blinking.

Imagine seeing eye to eye
Welcoming strangers with no fuss
Except Escherichia coli
In trash bags all across America.

Mouses and Cookies

When you visit your son in prison, you are going to want to touch the electric fence.
You hope the jolt travels
up the tendons of your hands, gripping wire,
to the heart's pacemaker
converting the nauseating irregular flip-flops
to a beat more compatible with life.

You are going to want to know
where the thousands of men could be hidden
while you walk a path that could be
the surface of the moon
if the moon was silent and blazing with heat and smelled of cattle.

You'd want to have worn the right outfit;
it turns out blue jeans are not allowed.
You can't change on prison grounds so you'll use a mortuary parking lot,
anxious in a different way than the parking lot changes you've done
at the beach before surfing.

Your heat-swollen finger won't release your wedding ring,
but the guard lets you visit still.

You'll encounter impatience at your lack
of understanding
of procedure
while other prisoners' families seem to know
to remove their spiked heels and the sneakers of their children
and place them on the desk for inspection.

When you apologize and
tears spring to your eyes,
brown-clad guys with firearms like jewelry on belts
melt and soften. "Have a nice visit."

You'll be placed at a table
too low for legs to rest under.
A prisoner in blues moves three chairs in place.
All prisoners must face
the front.

You'll sit and watch lovers,
families and elderly parents visiting men.
You'll be too nervous to talk for long minutes.
And then he comes in.

You'll stand and raise a hand
like a hundred other times
at the park or the school yard
to show him where you are.

He'll walk to you
and when you embrace for the first time in two years,
the tears finally flow. He is solid
and real with those
same blue eyes.

When you walk across the hot, desolate moon
to see your son
they'll give you two hours.
You'll talk of small things
and he will express remorse and love.
You'll touch his hands
which is allowed
and buy him Gummy Bears
from the incarcerated vending machines.

You rake over him with a mother's eyes,
see the missing tooth and the body
that otherwise looks whole,
the face so young and the tattoos like armor.
One you notice when he turns his head,
nape of neck,
"Sorry Mama".

You'll wish tattoos were
something worth scolding him for. You'll implore
him to be safe. To brush teeth.
In your head you are screaming
"just don't die!"
but what you say is a tender good bye.

A slow walk back
across the moon's cattle-shit scented path.
You'd thought you'd go for a run
but the fatigue
is like that after a marathon
or the end of a forty eight hour shift as an intern in the ICU,
all cortisol and bile and deep aches.

Next day you will run
eighteen miles in a town you don't know,
past nice homes and fire orange trees and the
University's quad.
You'll listen to your book and then some music,
folding prison thoughts into the recesses of your mind.
Your water bottle electrolyte tablet
tastes of lemon-lime.

An old man will walk by you
and chastise you for running with an electronic device.
You'll smile at him
and feel your heart break into a million pieces.
You'll wonder if he'd have hurled righteous advice
or rather just locked eyes and nodded to a fellow traveler,
if he'd known your deep connection to the run,
each and every one.
And that you'd just been to prison
to visit your son.

Hair of the Dog

I am scarfing down strawberry pancakes made from the best ingredients in my beautiful house after a run at the beach. My dog accidentally bit me today when I foolishly put my hand between his raging mouth and some fierce chihuahuas he had a serious problem with, apparently. It was foggy this morning but the sun is coming out. A good friend gets married today. Beyonce's Lemonade is playing on my retro turntable. The puncture in my finger is deep and I am on a couple of immune-suppressing drugs, so antibiotics it is. PSA: If you get bit by a dog and most especially a cat, take antibiotics. I rarely recommend antibiotics, as they are the devil's own work in many ways, but I have seen too many hospital stays and hand function loss from lack of attention to cat/dog bites before they become pus-filled disasters. 

"Sorry human I was just trying to defend you from those chihuahuas"

As a physician, I know these things and so much more. I yield the power of diagnosis and prescribe drafts like herbalist healers of old. I get to wear a stethoscope and in fact feel naked without it. I am paid well and do not suffer hunger or fear that I won't have a roof over the head of my family. I will be paying off medical school loans till I die. I missed many moments of my children's lives. My son once called UCSF Hospital on Parnassus "Mommy's house". My son is in prison now, probably my fault. I am on call almost every day and night. I got called several times on my beach run today. I worry about my patients all the time. I cried at work the other day and I never cry. The flowers the nurses gave me continue to buoy my spirit. 

I am training for a marathon. I love running. Today the fog at the beach was like something out of Edgar Allen Poe. Or Hitchcock. But I was not afraid. I am brave, fierce, the way women can be. When my family doesn't answer my texts, I assume they are dead. It is possible I read too many books. It is possible I have seen too much. Like the guy who got his arm run over by a 747, the gal who threw up blood and spattered the walls and ceilings like modern art, the gallons of ascitic fluid flowing through my catheter to a vacuum bottle while I chat with a bright yellow human being. 

"Hey, did ya see how I chased those birds?"

I can play almost anything on the piano. It is, I suppose, "my gift." When it is flowing right, I can disappear into the music, letting it carry me. There is no effort. I look down at my fingers at these times and wonder how they are doing it. I once dreamed of being a great pianist. Music school had many blessings but it also crushed the soul out of me. Such hubris, such competition. There is only room for a few to use their gift as a profession. My piano is about 70 years old, and parts are not working. I cannot afford a new piano. I get jealous of people who have a lot of money and can barely play their instrument, which can sit gathering dust only it does not do that because the maid keeps it clean. I sometimes stun myself wth my ability to feel aggrieved. Like Melania, I might just be the most bullied person on the planet. Eye. Roll.

I love dogs. When Miles bit me today, it shocked me in the way that life always does. Each moment of life is filled with sharp fangs. Sharp fangs surrounded by golden curls, soft and comforting. And in the center a beating heart that while doing everything in its power to oxygenate you will eventually have to stop, leaving you cold and blue-lipped. Yet the world could end today and I would regret not a minute of it. 

Yet the world could end today, and I would regret not a minute of it.

"What is this regret of which you speak?"

Autumn Grrrrl

Morning Trail Run in Autumn

Dark bones rising
Redwood women line the path
Brown fronds crushed under foot
Releasing molecules
That travel up strong thighs
Along navel, over rise of breasts
Tracing neck and chin
Leaving a taste on parted lips
En route to nostrils and brain
Where the sweet, crisp, musty smell of autumn
Explodes into a trillion memories
Of October runs, but especially one-
A girl child flying through the air
Landing in the soft embrace of
Freshly raked leaves.

J Heidmann 10/11/18
#InternationalDayoftheGirl

Autumn Grrrl circa 1973