I’ve brought some sandwiches today that Mom and I will eat with Dad when it’s time for lunch in the dining area. After moving some chairs to one of the round tables, Mom and I wait for Dad’s tray to arrive, loaded with a yellowy pasta casserole, a bowl of beets, a roll, a piece of yellow cake, a glass of tea, and a glass of milk. Judging from Dad’s expanding waist size, he likes the greenless meals. He eats quietly, scooping the casserole onto his fork, usually dropping food onto his lap as the fork slowly travels to his gaping mouth. Mom looks worriedly over at me, and I return the glance in a way that tells her not to say a word. Instead, she leans over and asks Dad if anyone around here ever offers a blessing before meals.
“Anybody who wants to can pray on their own,” a resident at the next table barks grumpily, “or go into the closet and pray. When Ralph here, who used to be a Baptist preacher, starts praying, that’s where I wish he’d go.”
Grateful for the veteran’s eavesdropping and candor at the neighboring table, I spontaneously break into an appreciative laugh. The man looks momentarily stunned, and looking at no one in particular announces, “It’s good to hear laughter.”
That response feels like prayer enough to me.
THE HELP ME PRAYER
November, 2011 (age 59)—Whitesboro, Texas
“Are you peeved at something?” Mom asks in a distinctively peeved tone.
“No, Mom. I just feel sad.”
Wrong. As soon as I say this I realize I shouldn’t have. Things will now get worse, as I remember from my teen years when living with Mom. Right now, no one is allowed to be sadder than Mom, here at eighty-six years old with her dear husband of sixty-eight years suffering and alone at the Veterans Home. And before this time, how could anyone be more depressed than she was while living with such a physically, emotionally, and verbally abusive person like my dad, who once tried to strangle her during a fit of rage?
“I am grateful for sixty-eight years and holding. Oh, to be together again,” were her exact wistful words that she recently wrote on a pre-cut, construction paper oak leaf to tie onto the Thanksgiving “giving-thanks-tree” I created for a family gathering. After years of woeful living with this demanding husband, Mom has now transferred her sad, bitter, and worrisome refrains about how miserable her life is, to how desperately she misses her now romanticized life-long relationship.
The “Oh” in her words hits me in my gut. That one little dramatic flair is so illustrative of the reconstruction of her life by this obsessive reader of romance novels. Why do I disparage her for this? Mom’s life seems to have always centered on her painful endurance of this marriage. Decades ago I suggested divorce. She didn’t talk to me for an entire year. Her present hopes are to make it to “married for seventy years,” as she wanted engraved on their recently purchased gravestone. She finally came to the realization that simply putting their wedding date made more sense, since they are both still alive and yet two years away from that goal of seventy years of marriage.
By noon, my sadness is full blown depression. Mom feels little compassion for sadness in her children, especially any I might feel while living here with her. First of all, my husband is here with me and hers is not. Secondly, if I feel sad it could also mean she is doing something—or has done something in the past—to contribute to such sadness, and that is something she refuses to consider.
Mom quite proudly, and not infrequently, announces how she long ago taught herself not to cry. Instead, to battle Dad’s abusive behaviors, she fights back with a sharp tongue and behavior so biting it can cut you to your core. She’ll have the last word, by God, the last penetrating stare, or leave a room crisply slamming the door. This is behavior she has polished for over six decades.
“Quit being so damn sensitive with such stupid looks,” she says to me over her shoulder—her expert aim hitting me right in the gut as she coolly exits the room. She rarely says these things in front of Bill and always has kind words for him. That’s probably a good thing.
In high school, my nose would start bleeding during my parent’s arguments or during those I had with Mom. In the weeks that followed, when that vengeful stone-cold silence filled our house, my stomach churned, clammed up, or clattered to the point where we had to schedule doctor visits for an array of problems. Predictably the diagnosis was anxiety. Now my head starts aching and tension moves from my shoulders into my neck until my head feels like it would be better whopped off.
These days I head to the Whitesboro cemetery. The cemetery is on the far edge of town—full of a variety of trees, birds, and interesting names, dates, and occasional epitaphs. Several friends suggested the cemetery might be a depressing place to walk. On the contrary, along with being effectively distracted here, I sense an abundance of soul support rather than experiencing these grounds simply as a container for dead bodies.
Occasionally I walk past my own parent’s gravestone and plot, something Mom wanted to have in order to assure Dad he wouldn’t be buried in Bonham near the Veterans Home, a concern he once expressed. When first driving through this cemetery with Mom, she had pointed her finger toward a sparkling pink granite headstone with large double hearts and announced, “That’s what I want, with one of those little frames in the center holding our wedding picture.” My parents didn’t have a wedding, but someone snapped a photo of them after their marriage at the local Justice of the Peace, right before my dad was shipped off for more WWII battles in the Pacific. So now, here sit the entwined granite hearts with a gold frame of my parent’s eighteen and twenty-year-old, innocent, attractive faces. The stone stretches the full width of a single burial plot, since Dad, assuming he would die before Mom, requested to be cremated and placed inside her coffin, something she reminds her three daughters of frequently. Together forever.
Lord, help me to be kind and compassionate.
Prayer comes easiest to me when I’m walking, especially when I’m feeling sad—like today. Mary Oliver, the poet, likens prayer to simply paying attention while wandering through fields.19 That I do, sometimes singing my prayers, or improvising tunes, tones, and psalm-like verses as I meander through the graveyard. It helps me concentrate and not float into oblivion. When I pray, it feels like I’m talking to God, and when I meditate, I listen for God.
But sometimes all I can muster up is the “Help Prayer” that author Anne Lamott describes, which goes like this: “Help, help, help, help, help …”20
Thomas Merton once said that true love and prayer are learned in the moment that “prayer becomes impossible and your heart has turned to stone.”21 When my heart feels like stone, I turn to the “Help Prayer” and, I swear, even that comforts. The prayer can become slightly more complex when I throw in a “God” here and there, a “me” every once in a while, and inevitably some beseeching “pleases” to help make my point, so the prayer begins to sound like this: “Help me, God, help, help, help, help me, please, pleeeeeease help me, God, please!” When I’m alone at the cemetery, which is often, after a while I start sounding like a coyote yowling and yelping with my helps bouncing across the tops of gravestones.
How in the world do we know when God hears our prayers? I’ve never had a host of angels descend, heard a booming voice sound from the skies, or seen a burning bush light my pathway. Instead, I take a variety of cues from nature as divine nudges.
Recently a coyote scampered across the cemetery amidst my floating help-yelps, casting wary glances my direction while its fluffy coat shimmered in the morning light. Shamanic practitioner Steven Farmer suggests the coyote represents the wise fool who advises us to accept our follies and find the teaching in them.22 Weaving through the tombstones, appearing and disappearing, the coyote seemed a little like a ghost. For an instant I wondered if I were really seeing it, or if it were some kind of apparition—daybreak’s sunbeams somehow teasing me. Simultaneously the coyote and I both became still, momentarily establishing what seemed like a kind of holy reverence for one another’s acknowledged presence.
&n
bsp; There is also a very attentive oak tree I call Faith. Faith ostensibly invites my hands to come rest on a perfectly fitting and flat place on her trunk where, many years ago, a branch was sawed off, or to put my forehead on another smaller leveled scar, just at the perfect place for my height. Standing there, hands and forehead feeling the pulse of the tree, something assuredly happens: my breath deepens, my heart softens, my own roots spread beneath me in a settling and grounding way.
Several weeks ago, on one exceptionally somber morning while spouting the Help Prayer with fervor, I glanced down to see my step hovering above a feather resting directly in my path. Quickly diverting my foot to the side, I bent over to survey the fragile beauty of an owl’s wing feather. Lifting it off the leaves that covered the base of an old oak, I twirled the transparent quill and noticed how its color changed from clear to creamy to a gorgeous silvery brown as my eyes traveled up the shaft. This glistening brown seeped in soft stripes both left and right into the feather’s vanes, its barbs tenaciously yet delicately holding the design together.
“Thank you, God, whoever and whatever you are,” I said, accepting this weightless feather as a gift from what feels like the Divine in my life. I believe numerous paths can lead to what many define and experience as God. My own personal need for God is strong and clear, and that recognition alone sustains my belief.
On this solemn day, however, pacing the Whitesboro cemetery after Mom’s biting accusations this morning, neither feather nor fur gifts await me. Moving here was like barreling down a mountain I didn’t have the skills to ski on. Sometimes what I dare myself to do is way beyond my capabilities. Have I tried to fix what continues to feel wrong with me by keeping myself in a place of constantly being criticized, as well as in a perpetual state of overwhelm? Sort of like a dare: ha, survive this if you think you’re so strong!
Faith, my oak tree, reliably offers her comfort, and I oblige. Resting my forehead on her trunk, I weep in relief for having this tree and for feeling God’s presence in this cemetery. I can’t tell where my life is heading, but my trust in life is strengthening. That, perhaps, is God’s answer to my desperate prayers.
PART V:
Searching for Your Heart
A GOOD VISIT
May, 2012 (age 59)—Bonham, Texas
I bend over Dad’s wheelchair and give him a soft nudge. “Hi there,” I offer quietly with a smile.
Dad blinks several times, wakes, and slowly focuses on me, probably trying to discern if I’m one of the caretakers who has come to move or feed him. He’s sitting here in the dining room, slumped over and sleeping with the other veterans. These are the ones the nurses want to keep their eyes on from their nearby desk, the ones who can no longer physically pull the call cord in their rooms or simply can’t remember how to do it; they are the ones who have alarms attached to their clothes to alert caretakers when they are trying to stand and thus in danger of falling. That’s what resulted in Dad’s last hospital stay, and on his return to the Veterans Home, what moved him into hospice care.
“Hi, Dad. It’s Patricia,” I add, helping him to figure things out in his creaking consciousness.
A smile slowly spreads across his face. “Patricia?” His voice conveys a hopefulness that prompts an ache to spread clear through me. Although I’m relieved for the care Dad is receiving here, for his safety and ours at home, I still have regrets about him living at the Veterans Home. When Bill and I moved to Whitesboro, our hopes were that by living with my parents, neither one would end up in a nursing facility. The last eighteen months have been much harder than we thought they would be, and we have made plans to move back to Colorado. On a fluke, we found something affordable not far from our land in southern Colorado, and Bill is already there doing an electric upgrade in our new one-hundred-year-old home. Soon I’ll be driving another Budget truck cross-country for yet another major move in our lives.
The ache I feel is about so many things: Dad here in the Veterans Home dining room, Mom now situated in her own little apartment in a pricey assisted living facility, and all the mixed feelings I continue to experience about the memories of what happened in my childhood. I started writing my memoir while living with Mom and Dad, have kept on with therapy, and despite wanting what I remember from childhood to fade or even be wrong, my memories simply will not go away.
“Yes, it’s Patricia.” I bend down and give Dad a hug and a kiss on the cheek. He beams. I explain to him that I’m going to push his chair to another room so we can visit, and tell him to lift his feet, since this special chair doesn’t have foot holders. As I push him to a nearby TV room, Dad asks who is pushing him, so I stop and show him my face again, reminding him it’s Patricia.
“You’ve come to see me?” Dad asks, beaming.
“I sure have,” I affirm, as we turn into the TV room. I turn off the TV and position Dad’s chair close to one where I can sit on his level. Dad watches everything I do.
“Did Momma come with you?” he asks hopefully, and I let him know I’m alone. I’m in between morning and evening Sunday services at a Unitarian Universalist Church close by, which makes it possible for me to spend time this afternoon visiting Dad.
Besides, bringing Mom to visit Dad can be painful, having her boss me around, demanding I go ask about things, or to quit rubbing his swollen ankles, or whatever else she fixates on. But the worst is how awful she can be with Dad, chastising him for not being able to answer her questions about what time he went to bed last night, or for telling a story he’s told several times before.
I take the amplifier out of the bag, an alternative hearing aid device that I recently purchased to lug back and forth on these visits to Dad. After two hearing aids were lost, at a cost of over four thousand dollars, the head nurse recommended I check out an amplifier, a contraption with headphones wired to a speaker that allows Dad to hear conversation, for a mere sixty-five dollars. Apparently keeping track of hearing aids is simply too difficult once a patient has progressed into advanced dementia and has no awareness of taking them out or putting them in, or even the ability to do so. Caretakers moving in and out of the room can’t keep track of them either, and I understand, for hearing aids can be slippery, tiny things that are indeed hard to see.
Dad patiently waits as I untangle the cords and slip the headphones over his ears, clicking on the amplifier.
“Can you hear me better now?” I ask, and his eyes widen as he nods emphatically. I wonder what it’s like for him to spend his days in forced silence, no longer able to hear or comprehend the TV and, even worse, not able to read anymore, having always been an avid reader. He still wears his glasses, new ones in fact, but says he just can’t make meaning out of the words in his magazines. I’ve brought one little article out of a recent The Week magazine to read out loud to him later.
But first I sit a while with Dad, holding his hand. He pats our hands with his other hand and leans his head to rest on the back of his chair, closing his eyes. I close my eyes too and allow for this space of amplified silence, breathing deeply.
I recognized some time ago that perpetuating the suffering over things that happened in our past only harms Dad and me. When my memories surfaced, and for years afterwards, I felt some repulsion and hatred toward Dad. Gradually, when the migraines I was having intensified, I suspected that my hatred could be poisoning me more than him, although it was during this time that Dad was experiencing the mysterious infections that almost killed him. I wasn’t moving beyond an experience of resentment and bitterness. I didn’t like how I felt any more than I did as a child when Dad confused me with his harmful, inappropriate attentions and manipulative, controlling behaviors.
In When You’re Falling, Dive, author Mark Matousek interviews a Tibetan nun named Nawang Sangdrol who was imprisoned twice in her life by the Chinese, brutally beaten and tortured for eleven years, then on a second imprisonment, placed in a solitary confinement cage for another eleven years. Matousek quotes Sangdrol as saying, “Hatred does not end by
hatred,” and he goes on to explain that real freedom may very well come from learning not to hate and developing compassion.23
I hear Dad shift and open my eyes to see him looking at me. “Patricia?” he asks again. “Is that you?”
“Hi, Dad,” I answer softly. “I’m here visiting you,” I remind him.
“Are you rich yet?” Dad asks with a grin that has a hint of meanness and anger.
This feels a little like seeing Mom give me the bucktooth face. “No, Dad, I’m not rich,” I answer in an exasperated voice. This goes in one ear and quickly out the other. His smile fades, and his eyes empty. I wonder if his question about money is simply his old familiar focus about what he made, saved, and, at some point, put aside for his daughters. Is there a connection? Remembering how he accused us all of putting him here just so we could steal his money, I choose to not go down that memory lane.
Instead, I tell him I was just thinking about when we used to go out on his sailboat, and he would let me jump in the lake and swim for miles until the wind picked up too much for me to keep up. He looks lost and confused and replies that he doesn’t remember anything about a sailboat. I try describing the big RV he once had, then the little MG sports car, the fabulous telescopes he both bought and built, and last, the fancy Kubota tractor he bought at eighty years old to ride across his land in Cleburne. He looks at me blankly, shaking his head no, then lights up and offers, “I had a bike in Jesse, Oklahoma! I bought it, so I could have a paper route.” I’m curious what he might remember about those years and encourage him to say more. He goes on for ten minutes, talking in detail about when he was ten years old, places he lived, his mom and dad, sisters, and riding that bike while throwing papers. Most of what he describes aligns with stories I’ve heard before, skipping the sordid details of his dad impregnating a local thirteen year old who was helping his mother take care of all their children and the house. Gran’pa, my mom told me, took the young girl for an abortion that the girl’s dad soon learned about when his daughter began bleeding profusely. Her father stormed to Gran’pa’s house with a shotgun and escorted him to the edge of town, threatening to kill him if he ever came back.
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