Bad day and Sugarman

Today has not been a good day…but it is ending well. Beatrix and I had a unique experience. On Netflix, we watched a film entitled “Searching for Sugarman.” It’s the story of a musician who became wildly famous in South Africa in the 70’s – bigger than Elvis Presley there! His two or three albums did not sell at all in the US. He was, and is, unknown on this side of the ocean. He spent most of his life working as a labourer in Detroit. He lives today in the same old house he’s lived in for 40 years!  He’s given most of his money away, and lives on what he makes. He knows the meaning of “enough.”

The film is a documentary, employing interviews with many of the people who knew him in South Africa, as well as his daughters. For the longest time, the South Africans thought he was dead. There were many lurid stories of how he died. An absolutely fantastic tale about being you, humble and gifted at the same time. It’s also about redemption and life’s “meaning,” to use a hackneyed word. See it if you can.

The day that is finishing do well began very badly. We had a snow blow last night, so there was a drift across our driveway and lots of snow everywhere else. I walked at 6 AM, and could only use the roads because the sidewalks were all blown in. Anyway…

I took the snow blower out and 8:30 to clean things up. I was doing well until I noticed my Filipino neighbour struggling to shovel the drift in his own driveway. I wrestled the blower over to his place and blew out a good bit of his driveway. Part way through the second driveway I felt a wave of angina come over me. I slowed down, stopped and waited until it passed…a few minutes. I brought the machine home and went inside. For the remainder of the day I have felt exhausted and unwell. Not sick, just “unwell.” A lesson. I am still learning how to live with this lousy valve. Today was a bit much. I had planned to wash the garage floor in the afternoon, but when Beatrix asked me if we were going to do it, I realized that I simply couldn’t face the job. Drained. No pain, just pooped.

Recovery is a learning process. If you don’t learn, you pay. Today was payout day. At 9:15, I’m about ready to go to bed. Tomorrow, worship in Rimbey. I started working today on Blackfalds in January, but I felt a bit overwhelmed just looking at material. Let’s hope that tomorrow is a better day. I have to spend some time with a funeral family after worship, then home and quiet.

Days like this are frightening. Worse than that, I feel stupid. I went just too far, and I didn’t have to. I’m sure my neighbour is grateful, but the whole thing cost me too much. Dumb.

Searching for a memory

Recovery…it comes in fits and starts. Between those ‘fits and starts’, Symptomatic behavior that has seemed to fade and be leaving leap forward and take charge of our life in a way that isn’t suspected up till then.

Bouts of depression, lasting a few hours, or all day, take charge of your perspective and rationality, so that your outlook becomes dark and cloudy and filled with dread.  One can be overtaken by sudden spasms of anxiety, apparently linked to some approaching doom, but linked to nothing that can be discerned. The experience is of being frightened, twisted in uncertainty, figuratively gasping for breath to ward off…what?

All of these combine in one form or another, with the cruelest of all the symptomatic experiences: memory loss. Everyone reassures you that they forget things all the time, and then they wave it off with a sigh or a chuckle. I’ve stopped trying to explain that while this, indeed, happens to me, the experience I’m trying to survive is the sudden awareness that whole blocks of your life are missing. It might be a chunk from a decade ago. It might be the whole of yesterday. Worst of all, it might be the last four hours, leaving you wondering what, if anything, you have been doing, or have done.

An example: nearly two weeks ago, a courier dropped of a package with my name on it. I opened it, and discovered a jazzy and tiny piece of technological equipment in an apparently indestructible plastic bubble. Some months ago, I had read about this gizmo, and even looked at them in a tech store. After discussing the wonders of this bit of magic with Beatrix, I forgot it…or did I? That was the question that began to haunt me over the next few days. I was preoccupied with trying to find a way to open the plastic bubble short of taking a hammer to it. I was also preoccupied with the possibility that I had ordered this for myself. But I could locate no memory of that event. Not being able to locate a memory is part and parcel of the outcome of a cerebral event. I repeatedly asked Beatrix if she had ordered it, or if she could remember me ordering it. Blanks all around.

Now, for you normal people out there, as distinct from us ‘brain damaged’ folk, it would seem logical to wonder if this package was related to Christmas coming. Such logic rarely intrudes on the thought process of a wounded brain. The focus is narrowed; the search for the needed memory becomes intense, obsessive even. And, of course, this intense internal wrestling inevitably raises the blood pressure – the one symptom you are told to avoid. “Don’t get excited about anything” was the straightforward physician advice I got on leaving the hospital. I quipped, “What, you want me to exchange my personality for a new one?”

Trying to remember, trying to locate an action, or even a decision, that would give a reason for this arrival, is an exhausting exercise, and one that can be marked by blood pressure results. Of course, the search was not aided by the gizmo itself. Cunningly packaged so that a seven year old could figure it out in a few minutes, an old geezer, brain damaged and technologically deficient, worked on for hours. Fruitlessly. The whole thing was like a computer game. If you crack one level, you are immediately faced with an even greater challenge. I opened the bubble! Instructions for further advancement were contained in cryptic sketch drawings of what to do, No language descriptions. (Why would a technologically savvy seven year old need words?) I discovered words on an attached cardboard. It was black matte, with tiny lettering on it in silver ink. Under the strongest light I could find, and with glasses and a magnifying glass, I could read nothing. Not only anxiety and exhaustion, but also a profound sense of defeat, followed by depression. Not only was I unable to remember when or if I ordered this ‘thing’, but I couldn’t access it or understand the directions to access it. And my blood pressure had been ‘up’ for some days.

I did the only sensible thing at that moment. I put the whole thing, gizmo, bubble, cardboard and discs in a large bowl out of my sight. I contemplated, not for the first time, the ultimate action of returning the package, stated that I hadn’t ordered this thing. Had I? Or hadn’t I? I still had no idea.

This lengthy story of a tiny event that became the locale for an accumulation of post-stroke symptoms is illustration only. Recovery proceeds, lurch, stumble, step, pause, then sIt’s like watching a very drunk man try to navigate the street. It’s funny to watch, sometimes hysterically so. Once in my life I experienced that state. Not funny; terrifying. Trying to ‘do the rational, the ordinary’ while attending, with intense focus, on making your legs work the way they did this morning.

Learning, just recently, that the gizmo was indeed, ordered by others for me did not produce a sense of relief. It was more like running face first into a wall. How come I couldn’t figure that out? How could I be so stupid (a word that crops up a lot as you struggle to look normal)? Why didn’t someone tell me this was coming, so I wouldn’t have to spend so much energy wracking my brain for a memory that wasn’t there? It’s bad enough to look for a memory you’ve lost (but did have); worse, to look for a memory that never was there. At the end, you sit there, figuratively gasping for breath, exhausted by the race or the climb, and totally demoralized to learn that there was no race to run, no hill to climb. You were wasting your time and energy on……nothing. For the time being, not a good day.

Virtual Christmas

Christmas is virtually upon us. “Virtually,” for sure. The obnoxious Ads on TV – the woman being handed one electronic device after another as gifts ($4000 worth by my count); the house where every closet is filled with wrapped gifts – depress me deeply. The reason for the season surely is to ensure that corporations reap the greatest profit from the most people, while ignoring the general state of the world we live in.

I feel melancholy about Christmas this year. On reflection, I have had that feeling about many Christmases over the past five decades. A number of factors feed this feeling. For many years, I was on-call Chaplain at whichever teaching hospital currently employed me. Those occasions produced more than a little tragedy. Baptizing a newborn at 11:30 PM December 24, born with kidneys the size of coffee beans, unlikely to live until morning. Two 17-year-old parents sobbing in the arms of their parents. Two nurses, stand-ins for “the body of Christ” in the same state. There are a dozen more stories like this one that colour my reflections on Christmas. I know that somewhere, likely within my own region, this sort of painful time is unfolding for someone else.

The final two or three years of my first marriage were painful as well. The state of my soul was not good, and all around me seemed dark. People tried to fake it light, but it never worked for me in those dark days.

I feel nostalgically sad at Christmas because I have no blood family around me to share the season. When I divorced, I felt sure that I would lose my children as well. In fact, I didn’t. Except at Christmas. In the thirty years since that event, I think I have had kin in my home at Christmas twice…perhaps three times. I lose track. At this season of the year, my loss, or leaving, is driven home for me: mother gets the kids.

In truth, that is probably appropriate. I no longer live in my old “home place.” I am “away.” I am not alone; the children’s mother, and would be devastated is children didn’t come. I’m not devastated, just sad…sometimes deeply sad. But that’s life, and I doubt that will change in whatever time I have left of life.

Christmas was a joy when I was the one conducted the joyful worship of Christmas Eve, where warmth was brimming over. To be in that role now, I would have to endure a couple of one-hour drives in the dark and cold to be celebrant for a small group of people. I have done that many times, but I no longer feel able to manage that. I’m not up to it any longer. I mourn the loss of a role I cherished.

I worked out in the pool last night with a trio of much younger women. More granddaughters than daughters they were. It was fun, but I had to face the creeping angina of trying to keep up with them in exercise or swimming. Not exactly a Christmas problem, but it reminds me of Joseph of the Stable-manger legend. Young spouse, young infant…old Joseph. What might he have wondered as he tried to fulfill the role given him by the angel visitor? I wonder that regularly. ‘Who am I today?’ ‘What am I called to do?’ ‘Is there someone else I should be?’ ‘Besides God, who cares?’

I struggled to help erect a beautiful tree, provided by lovely and generous neighbours. Bones all sore the next day from rolling around on the floor making sure it didn’t topple before Christmas. But it’s up, and the house looks great. Beatrix is crazy-busy, and I am happily cooking so we eat tonight. Who knows, perhaps before Christmas Eve is upon us, I’ll see stars and angels again, and, as it happened in the legends, the angels will sing and I will be dazzled. For now…I wait.

A swarm of winter…

It’s two weeks since I have written here. What on earth has been happening? I’ll tell you what: SNOW. And again, snow! We’ve had wind, sharp cold, heavy snowfalls, and a partial plowing of our street, leaving us cut off from one another by a four-foot windrow of…snow.

Such an overwhelming abundance of snow tends to force its way into your life, to take over time, and concern, as you try to move it, work around it, and avoid it. Such a fall of snow slows everything and everyone down a lot. Moving is difficult, for some, very difficult if they are not experienced snow-walkers, have few winter driving skills, or have neglected to install winter tires on their cars. (“I have ‘all-weather- - I don’t need snow tires!”) Wrong. Braking is done in a much shorter distance with winter tires, and maneuvering an auto is easier as well.

So I have no idea where the past two weeks have gone. All this snow has been a test of sorts regarding issues of recovery and what I can do and can’t to. As a younger man, I reveled in shoveling snow from steps and sidewalks. Oh, like most people, I complained about it. But there is nothing like the rosy cheeks, and deep breathing of frosty air as you walk a snow drift succumb to your efforts and leave with a tunnel of sorts to wherever you are going!

One of the first things the Doctor said to me in preparation for discharge from hospital after a week of rest and diagnosis after my hemorrhagic stroke last March was, “You must not try shoveling snow!” Apparently even wrestling with a snow blower was suspect. When this autumn turned to winter…overnight, as it turned out… I tried pushing the snow, slowly. It works fine if the fall is light. If it is too much of a fall of snow, I fire up the big snow moving machine, and have learned to use it without too much “wrestling” at all! So far so good. Watching a drift disappear into the maw of a snarling monster that chews it up and spits it out is satisfying…but I miss the shovel. Another of those things for which I need “the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”

For all of us, these new little losses emerge as we trundle through life. For some, the loss is sudden and traumatic. For others the losses are small, scarcely noticed, until…they are suddenly in front of you: something you used to do, but can do no longer. I am now in that club, and I know that some of you are joining me. Welcome! Let’s have a party. Whoever can still open a wine bottle, get at it!

Sound of Music…and snow

Beatrix and I attended the local theatre group’s (The Klaglahachie* Fine Arts Society) presentation of The Sound of Music last evening. It was a great three-hour performance. Lots of local young people, a couple of College drama students, a teacher of two – two complete families (mother, father and up to four kids) participated! The evening brought back many memories from the lives of my children, as they were all born soon after the movie came out. I can remember my eldest daughter, as a child, begging for her mother to sing with her the “doe-a-deer” song.

Reflecting on the evening, I had pangs of regret that I couldn’t be involved in such an event, as I have been in the past. The last time I tried, I was so exhausted that I was ill by the end. It hit me: I am well past the possibility of such an enterprise. Even if I had wanted to try, my physician (”Don’t get too excited about things…”) would have forbidden it. As I wandered among the cast after the performance, I picked up the adrenalin high that engulfed everyone. I was awake until 2 AM!

As part of the recovery process from the stroke, I am continually called upon to let go of aspects of my old life, my life as a younger and more fully functioning human being. At times it’s quite painful. Other times, like last night, it makes me wistful, and I happily wander among the youthful cast, sweaty and smiling, bubbling with enthusiasm and joy. It lists the spirit, even if the heart is sad that “those days are gone forever.”

A more sobering reminder, and far less present, awaited me this morning. Some time in the late afternoon yesterday, the local snowplough crew came down our street and left a flattened windrow about a foot deep across our driveway. We couldn’t see it last night, and very nearly got stuck on the way home. I went out to look at it by morning light today. A foot deep of icy snow, filled with salt and grit, and largely frozen in place. With a snowstorm predicted for Sunday evening, I felt like this had to be moved, or we would definitely be stuck on Monday.

So I started chopping at it with our ice blade. I had though it might be possible to use the snow blower to move it, but that was a vain hope. This stuff was rock hard. So I chopped and shoveled for fifteen or twenty minutes before I remembered that the physicians had told me “No more snow shoveling.” I stopped, and realized that the few minutes I had worked left me feeling exhausted. I turned the job over to Beatrix, who “manfully” cleared things as best she could – quite acceptably.

I have felt tired all day, and have pondered the reality of yet another loss. I can no longer take care of my own winter chores without mechanical help. I feel helpless and…old. So tonight I will go to bed earlier, and when it snows on Monday, I’ll fire up the big snow machine and let it chuck the stuff off the drive.

One lesson at a time…sow learner. Reluctant learner…but still alive.

* Klaglahachie is a non-word, which has been described as “probably Scottish…more likely Mongolian” by its inventor!