On Wassup

It has been over a month since I have posted on my blog. My last post was after our trip to Kona, Hawaii, to be face-to-face with our son's Ironman pursuit. Since then I've spent a delightful week in the English Lake District with a side trip to Edinburgh, Scotland, as my birthday present from my husband. I have also been to Florida, with my siblings, to help our mother relocate to an assisted living apartment (she had been in her own home all this time, alone, and she is now 91 years old).

Joy and difficulty. Those two ends of a spectrum seem to characterize much of life.

So wassup? I wish I knew.

I'm progressively more tired, and six times of long-distance traveling (close to 30,000 air miles) in as many weeks didn't help. At times I feel a little trapped by my pulmonary hypertension, not because I'm not usually a homebody (I am) but because of the exhaustion that comes with the disease. I feel alone and am alone most of the time. But I've been a solitary sort of individual most of my life. However, now when the occasion presents itself to see a good friend, something much rarer than it ever was, I get a little giddy with excitement and probably go overboard with talking and sharing.

Honesty matters to me. It always has, but now it's like never before. I don't have time or energy to deal with bullsh**. My pulmonary artery is three times normal size, my blood therefore is not carrying enough oxygen, and my heart therefore is working extra hard to try to compensate. On the Monday after Thanksgiving, I am having yet another eye surgery (this will be my 7th, the 4th on my right eye). Yes, I'm feeling a little depressed and a tad overwhelmed. Losing good health is a hard thing.

Do I have much to be thankful for? Oh my yes! I have a husband who loves me and who looks forward to coming home to me every night. I have two beautiful grandchildren in their adorable preschool years whose development is amazing to watch (almost as if I've never been through it before). I have friends from one coast to the other and many points in between.

So I guess that's wassup: joy and difficulty. Nothing new -- really -- under the sun.

On Ironman

Some folks will tell you that what it takes to be an Ironman is the ability to swim 2.4 miles in the open ocean, ride 112 miles on an unshaded asphalt trail in the blaring sun, and run 26.2 miles -- a full marathon -- in total darkness after you've completed the first two. All three, of course, in the same day and, in fact, in the span of 17 hours, from 7:00a to midnight. That, they say, is what it takes to be called an Ironman.

I have just returned from Kona, Hawaii, where the Ironman 2010 World Championship was held. My son was participating in the Ironman for the second time. He has had four separate cancer diagnoses, a hip and shoulder replacement, and a heart transplant.

The first time he competed (in 2009), he was pulled off the course because the 2.4-mile swim took him seven (7!) seconds too long. Not only must you complete all three events in 17 hours, each individual event is individually timed.

So my beloved son, who faces down all odds, trained and trained and trained. This time when he competed he shaved 20 minutes off of his swim time, emerged from the ocean to a cheering crowd, showered and changed, and headed off on his bike. All of this we could see. The joy was overwhelming. So was the anxiety about what still lay ahead of him.

The rest of it we didn't, couldn't, see.

He got about to mile four on his bike (with 108 miles still to go) when he gave in to wooziness, sat down by the side of the road, and waited for the dizziness to pass. As he sat there, two medics approached him. They took his vitals and found his blood pressure to be 80 over 60 (when it is usually 130 over 85). They laid him down with his feet up for ten minutes, then took his blood pressure reading again. Nothing had changed. He went prone for another five minutes, during which they debated with him about whether or not he should leave the course and give up his 2010 goal.

He didn't want to. They did want him to.

Eventually he was given no choice. He was pulled off the course. We found him in the medical tent, receiving intravenous hydration.

He is supremely disappointed. He feels he has disappointed others. He is sorry for the ruckus. He devoutly wishes the end had been different.

I think he was an Ironman before he even entered the race in 2009, and that he would go back and face it all down again in 2010 just reinforces that truth.

On Coping

Someone recently told me that "coping clocks" run out. She meant that, psychologically speaking, some of us simply can't handle anymore than we're already handling.

I know this to be untrue. All of us can handle more than we're already handling. Of course, most of us don't think so. Or we don't want to think so.

We not only can handle more, we will have to. The troubles of life are unforeseeable, but they will come -- often in downpours. And we will have no choice but to cope.

That doesn't mean we can't allow ourselves the occasional meltdown. A good cry might be evidence of terror in the clutch of darkness, but it also adds to our innate, God-given (and God-driven) ability to cope.

A friend sent me this Buddhist prayer, which he always carries with him. From now on, I'm carrying it too.

May all things be happy and at their ease. May they be joyous and live in safety. All beings, whether weak or strong -- in high, middle, and low realms of existence, small or great, visible or invisible, near or far away, born or to be born -- may all beings be happy and at their ease. Let none deceive another, or despise any being in any state; let none by anger or ill-will wish harm to another. Even as a mother watches over and protects her child, her only child, so with boundless mind should one cherish all living beings, radiating friendliness over the entire world, above, below and all around without limits; so let [us] cultivate a boundless goodwill towards the entire world, uncramped, free from ill-will or enmity.

On Worry

I have worries. I have cares. I have concerns weighing me down. Don't you? Don't we all?

I recently discovered this Chinese proverb some of my friends tell me they were raised on:  "That the birds of worry and care fly over you head, this you cannot change, but that they build nests in your hair, this you can prevent."

I have many friends who help keep the nests at bay. I am so grateful for that.

But my mother was (and still is) a total worrier. There is nothing that doesn't worry her, including the exact time I will arrive when I travel to Florida to see her. God help us all if my plane is overdue. Not only will those waiting with her hear nothing else but her worry about it, when I arrive, I will hear it too...for the next couple of hours. If I am driving her somewhere in her neighborhood, or for that matter anyone is, we have to move to the lefthand turn lane at a certain juncture or her anxiety becomes extreme. She all but grabs the arm that is on the steering wheel. Granted, she is 91 as I write this so some of her behavior is understood. But these are recent examples of a lifetime of worrying that infected my whole family.

And what does worry get her or any of us? Fear. It gets us fear. And most times we become fearful of something that is not likely to or never will happen.

I remember once staying overnight at a girlfriend's house when I was very young. Her father was out of town, but her mother was there. At some point during the night the mother heard a sound outside the house (might have been a car driving by or an owl on patrol). Before I knew it, we girls were up too. She armed us all with heavy pots and pans, and we waited in silence by the backdoor for a long terrifying interlude. This is what my friend lived with all of the time, and in some sense, I did too.

I am the mother of a son who has been ill countless times: four separate cancer diagnoses, hip and shoulder replacement surgery, pacemaker/defibrillator surgery (several times, once because of a manufacturer recall), huge doses of chemotherapy, huge doses of radiation, a bone marrow transplant, and almost four years ago, a heart transplant. Throughout everything, I have worried about his ability to withstand it all and survive. (He did and has.) If he died, I have worried about how I would continue to live a life that didn't include him. (That hasn't happened.)

To me, this kind of anxiety, especially from a mother, is understandable. But I should do my best to keep my concern from infecting those around me. This is a goal rather than an outcome. I certainly am a long way from having perfected that part of me. But at least I know it's a good thing to try to do.

Now, I find it impossible to sweat the small stuff. If I chose to worry about the little moments of my life as well as the big, I would live in a perpetual swill of unremitting, stomach-churning, throat-constricted anxiety. To what end? It certainly wouldn't make my life longer or happier. And it wouldn't make people around me more genuinely glad to be with me.

It's a life lesson. I wish I could transmit it to my mother, but so far, on that score, I've failed.

On Segregation

For a time during my early elementary school years, I lived in Greenville, South Carolina. The Deep South had not yet been integrated. Jim Crow and segregation were alive and well in South Carolina when my family moved there from Illinois.

I once saw an African-American chain gang, dressed in horizontally-striped pajamas, their ankles yoked together by chains with a huge iron ball between every two men, laying the road in front of Summit Drive School, where I was attending third grade. Knowing what we know now, it's doubtful that all of them were actually guilty of a crime. I will never forget this abominable sight. I had never seen anything like it and hope not to ever again.

My sister and I got around Greenville by city bus. The ubiquitous "Colored to the Rear" signs were posted near the driver on every bus. This small child's eyes watched black people follow the ugly Jim Crow commandment and walk past our seats to sit in the far back of the bus. A child like me had more right to a seat than an elderly black person did. In the bus station, there were separate waiting rooms, one designated "White Only." It was brighter and, of course, cleaner. There were separate drinking fountains. The old porcelain fountains that dribbled warm water and looked like no one ever washed them were designated for those with darker skin. The new refrigerated kind just then coming into vogue specified, "White Only."

In movie theaters, I saw separate entrances. Same with restaurants. Same with department stores. At home, we were never ever allowed to use the word "colored" or, God forbid, anything even more pejorative. I continue to bless my parents for raising us to notice and decry such things. At that time, in my family, the only allowable term was "Negro" or "Negroes." To this day I still worry about giving offense through a one-word description of an entire race.

We left Greenville and moved back to the Chicago area while segregation was still in full effect. Now, I know racism existed in the North. But never did I see the shame of it the way I saw it in South Carolina. I'm grateful for our few years there. I might not have become the civil rights activist I became without that immersion.

I took my children to the Smithsonian (American History Hall) so that they could see the same despicable signs I saw as a child. I told them my stories. I wanted them to know there was such a time -- and that perhaps none of us is very far removed from it. Especially if we don't raise our children with the awareness that the USA is not always just, is not always equal, is not always "American."

We must be a hyper-vigilant society, a go-out-of-your-way respectful society, a society that seeks to imbue its newest generations with an appreciation for the wide diversity that makes us the unique country of immigrants we are. Alarmingly, what I see instead is many signs of us heading in the opposite direction.

On Christianity

I am a Christian. Not ashamed of the label -- most of the time.

Fellow Christians sometimes embarrass me. At times I want to distance myself from them. I don't want my beliefs and their behaviors to be equated in anyone's mind. This is particularly true when other professing Christians make anti-human rights part of a political cause and put it in the same category as being more American than thou; I don't believe Jesus ever, ever, not in this world or any other, would have done that. I'm talking about anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-black, anti-Muslim or any other anti-neighbor issue. "Love your neighbor as yourself..." (Mark 12:31). Such linguistic hatred I've heard spew out of some other Christians' mouths!

Being a Christian to me has nothing to do with political issues and certainly nothing at all to do with hatred. It's very simple to me. To be a Christian is to accept Jesus as God's Son, as the Messiah, as the person whose life I want to emulate, continually falling short, but (yes, can I hear a hallelujah?) Jesus taught about forgiveness. And oh, how I lean on forgiveness and God's grace! How can I not then offer the same to my neighbors, of whatever stripe? Grace is inclusive of all, not exclusive to some.

My Lord has not always been knowable to me and still, in many ways, remains unknowable. That is part of it for me: to accept that I cannot define God or always discern his will. In other words, professing Christ does not allow me to play God.

Nor does being Christian make me infallible like God. It just saves me from the punishment I deserve through the punishment Jesus took for himself on my behalf. He paid my price. Why would he do such a thing? Because I am loved more deeply than any earthly being, even those who I know love me, can love me. So is everyone. There is nothing at all special about me in this regard.

But for Republicans, Democrats, or Independents like me? Conservatives, liberals, moderates? Jesus' name has nothing to do with it. I would appreciate it if political causes were not summoned in his name unless those causes are about love and forgiveness and, most of all, grace.

On Marrying Young

I was exclusively dating the only man I would marry at 18, and I married him at 19. I gave birth to my first baby at 21. Am I glad my own children didn't choose a similar path? Yes. Am I sorry that I did? Yes and no.

We met in college. He was two years ahead of me and had graduated by the time we married; we thought this mattered. I'd just completed my undergraduate sophomore year. My parents were against it, but they didn't have much of a leg to stand on. My mother also married at age 19, after her sophomore year. The difference was she dropped out of college, and I didn't.

I lost much of my youth by making this decision. And that included doing fun things, going on fun outings, hanging out with fun people, holding fun memories of my 20s. Instead, I was trying to be a full-time student and still be the kind of wife my parents would be proud of. I made my husband breakfast every morning before he went to work and before I headed out on my long commute to the college town (I always meticulously set the table for breakfast the night before, after I had cleaned up the dinner dishes). I was driven to do wifey well.

I am happy, at this age, to have wound up with the husband I did. But what was the hurry?

For my16th birthday, just two years before I met my future husband, I had asked for money to redecorate my bedroom, which my parents accommodated. That was when I learned I had an artistic flair for decor and interior design. I was still 17 when I started college, and my mother decided she and my father needed extra money for my younger brother's orthodontia. So when I went away to college, she rented out my room to a local schoolteacher. The teacher, whose academic vacations mirrored mine, would not physically be in my room when I came home for the holidays. But all of her stuff was (mine was packed away in boxes, except for the items I carried back and forth in my suitcase).

The room I had labored over had become the most charming bedroom in the house, and someone else -- for money that did not come to me -- received the gift of using it. To my young mind, and because that room meant so much to me, I felt displaced. I felt like I had been traded in. I felt homeless.

It sounds pretty whiny when I read back over this. Many young people have gone through much, much worse (I've gone through much worse). Still, at that time it was a life-changing set of circumstances for me. I decided to get married so I could have, and keep, the rooms I wanted. But of course that hasn't been perfectly executed either. Nothing ever is. And that's where growing up comes in.

On Bosses

On average throughout my career, I have had a new boss every two years. Now, that's not how many jobs I've had (one every other year); just bosses.

The most supportive of my bosses told me I was the best teacher he had ever met in his life; he also repeated that belief, continuously, to everyone within earshot. The "worst" boss I ever had is a toss-up between two of them: the one who straight-out asked me for sex and, when I demurred, found reason to eliminate my job in the next few months (before sexism in the workplace had taken hold of a nation's conscience) or the one who loathed and hated me so much that she did everything she could to undermine me in the eyes of my colleagues and her superiors.

She came to this hatred because I once had challenged her authority, in the sense that I fundamentally disagreed with a decision she'd made. (Why do so many female bosses believe they have to be as authoritarian as the stereotypical male boss of old? Authoritative is one thing; authoritarian is quite another.) But perhaps I should have stayed quiet. Sometimes disagreeing with a boss presents you with a moral dilemma, and within your sightline there is no win-win landscape.

I've had bosses who left me alone to do my own thing, who promoted me with glowing evaluations, who told me I was in charge and then micromanaged everything I did in accomplishment of whatever project I'd been assigned, who were on their BlackBerries every time we went to lunch, who had my back until they didn't, who behaved as if they were in a competition with me, who were unthreatened by me and helped me grow, and who became lifelong, respected friends.

In other words, I've had bosses I did not want to work for and others for whom I would have done anything to help them reach their goals.

I've also been a boss. But that's easy. The trick there is to hire people smarter and more talented than you.

On Teachers

I started life as an elementary school teacher, then moved into higher education where I taught prospective elementary school teachers (and others). My sense of teaching between then, when I started, and now, when my career essentially is behind me, has been turned on its head. I now know that you can't teach anybody anything; all you can do is make it possible for them to learn.

Or as Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) would say: "You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room."

Learning is a quality of being born. All living beings seek to learn; they are born with innate curiosity about the world around them. The main role of human parents is to protect their young children while this learning is taking place, because learning will take place. As all good teachers and parents do, you provide the type of environment ripe for exploration, filled with age-appropriate books and toys, art and building materials, and set them forth -- with healthy and regular doses of positive reinforcement.

You provide conversation and, sometimes, gentle direction. Language should fill the learning space. Children need us to talk to them, and they need to talk to us. This is how they test their assumptions and acquire a rich vocabulary. Nothing is more important in the learning environment than words and hands-on activity. Gaining experience, rehearsing that experience, then sharing that experience with others is at the heart of all learning, even basics like reading, writing, and math.

The teacher who stands in front of a room and talks, without allowing students to also talk, distributes the same worksheet to everyone, and then gives a clearly right-/clearly wrong-answer test has missed the point of teaching. This is something the teacher is doing for her or his own convenience, perhaps out of a need to keep each day routine and therefore more known and less stressful, but it has nothing to do with student-centeredness or student learning. Mentors are good; lecturers are not.

Probably the only things I've ever truly learned -- wholly absorbed -- in my life are those things I've heard my own self say. In this regard, whether their students do or not, teachers should learn a great deal by the act of teaching. Now it's time to hook our students with that same truth and provide them with opportunities to explore its fullness.

By the way, I have not finished with my own learning so I have no clue when wisdom happens, or if it ever does. The world is filled to the rafters with things I do not know and want to learn, and those rafters are as high as the sky. It's a bit hard for me to climb these days, but I can stretch. Heaven help me if and when I can no longer stretch.

On Traveling Abroad

I took my first trip out of country as a young mother, traveling with my mother, to England and Scotland to study one of my favorite ahead-of-her-time women heroes, Beatrix Potter. I thought the sky had opened to bless me especially; I was that thrilled making that initial journey. My joy and zest were uncontainable.

Travel has introduced me to a broad spectrum of cultural experience that I would otherwise never have had.

• A semester teaching in Pusan, South Korea, at a women's college. It seemed while I was there that unlike Seoul, the entire city of Pusan still followed the traditions of ancient times. I lived with Koreans, truly immersed, and stood out as a blond fair-skinned anomaly to Korean children who wanted to touch me as they passed me by.
• Teaching in Africa, namely Ghana and Kenya (and flying a rough version of Ethiopian Air between western and eastern Africa), my husband and I worked with graduate students who primarily came from tribal culture but who wanted to be educated and return to their home villages to help improve life for their people. One student in Nairobi had walked all the way from Uganda, his worldly possessions on his back, to attend our classes, his arm withered where it had been hacked years before by one of Idi Amin's boy soldiers. Children with submachine guns criss-crossed over their shoulders patroled outside the airports.
• Teaching in Santiago, Chile, this time primarily to expatriates (from all over the world), mostly women, whose husbands were assigned to various unknown posts in South America, doing work that I suspect even their wives knew nothing about. Too many lonely women!
• Taking a Brazilian fishing boat on a three-night excursion across the Amazon River basin, including a machete-chopping incursion into the jungle where even our guide got lost, disappearing for awhile with the seven of us sharing this adventure unsure whether he would ever reappear and lead us to safety. It was pouring rain and the now-defunct path filled with water to become yet another tributary of the Amazon, lapping at our ankles, then our knees. We were shivering and frightened, all of us huddled together. My husband and I were the only two Americans. Would anybody ever know what happened to us?
• Teaching in Switzerland and Austria, with side excursions by car to Hungary and the Czech Republic, and visiting little family-owned boutique wineries outside of Vienna.
• Spending a week in the Tuscany region of Italy, part of our stay in a tiny walled village, another part of our stay in Florence directly across from the Church of San Lorenzo, built in 393, making it the oldest church in Florence. And yes, the chianti flowed.
• And many of the world's great cities: London, Paris, Dublin, Edinburgh, Munich, Vienna, Zurich, Sydney, Auckland, Florence, Istanbul, Athens, Vancouver, Quebec, Budapest, Prague, Nairobi, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Seoul, Tokyo.

How fortunate I have been! How grateful I am! If we had waited until we retired to begin traveling and learning more about our planet's amazing and distinct people -- yet they also have so much in common with us -- it would not have happened. My current health would have prevented most of the kinds of undertakings we've already done, often on somebody else's dime (all the adventures linked to teaching, for example).

But as a continent, I've stilled missed Antarctica. We had friends who went on a Russian ice trawler to Antarctica at Christmas. I wonder...

On Daughters

I was a daughter, but I never had one. My sister and mother were daughters, of course, as well as all of my women friends, and most of the friends closest to me also had daughters. I now have two daughters-in-law, and I love them each dearly -- though like my sons, they are quite different from one another. I am a respecter of personality uniquenesses.

What it means to be a daughter is still sort of a mystery to me. My mother is a week away from turning 91, so I know that being a daughter can last for a very long time. I know that when I was growing up, I was expected to do girly things, like get married, have babies, become a homemaker. (I did the first two.) There were no career aspirations for me. In fact, my parents told me that if they only had money enough for one of us to go to college, my six-years younger brother would be the one to go. Interesting -- since I'm the one who has four college degrees, including a Ph.D.

And now I have a granddaughter, just about nine months old, and I think of all the things I want to do with her when she's older: take her to a formal tea service, have lunch with tablecloths and heavy silver, go shopping and buy her whatever outfit she wants, gift her with dolls, play with her with her dolls. It's unknowable to me whether I will live long enough to do any or all of these things with her...or if she will even want to. It also strikes me that my aspirations of things to do with my granddaughter sound too remarkably girly for comfort. Yet those were the kinds of things I did with my Chicago grandmother, not with my own mother, and I count them as some of the most comforting memories of childhood.

I just finished reading When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins. The book essentially starts with my early adolescence (though Collins does not mention me -- ha!). My husband is reading it now and getting more and more sympathetic to me by the page (which is not a bad thing).

Life is so different for daughters now, so filled with possibility. I wonder what it would be like to go through impressionable times of life in this era and not have to fight so hard for everything you wanted to be and do, to not be dismissed out of hand because of your gender.

On Organ Transplants

What need does a person who can no longer live, whose brain function is gone, have for his or her vital organs? Why would a family choose to bury those organs when they can save lives? In Europe, I'm told, you are on the organ transplant list of donors unless you officially say you aren't. In the U.S., it's the opposite way around -- meaning that at the tragic end of a loved one's life, a family must be confronted by some authority, their grief interrupted, who will ask them about donating the dead person's organs (unless, of course, that person already put him/herself on the donor list).

My son had a heart transplant. He was on the waiting list for a new heart for over five years. One of his "problems" was that he had type O blood, which meant O hearts could go to people who did not have type O blood, therefore putting people below him ahead of him if their conditions were worse than his as they all waited. And waited.

He almost died on the list. His blood pressure was 80/40 by the time of transplant. He had had three pacemaker or pacemaker-defibrillators installed (one of which was recalled by the manufacturer while attached to his heart). He would stoop down in front of his refrigerator to look at the bottom shelves and not have the energy to straighten back up. One doctor told him that he could simply fade away while waiting for a red light and die behind the steering wheel.

If more organs had been available, my son would not have had to confront those dire straits. The only way he had a future was with a new heart, but new hearts were few and often too far away to do him any good. Hopefully they did someone else good.

When my son received his new heart, it arrived by helicopter. While he was in surgery in the bowels of the hospital, away from us, when all we had of him were our cruel imaginations, we saw his new heart arrive as if powered by the wings of angels, the helicopter's lights cutting the night sky with a protective aura. As Rosanne Cash has sung, "God is in the roses -- the petals and the thorns...".

Why wouldn't more people actively sign on as organ donors? Anything could happen at any time, today, tomorrow, or the next day. Give life. Please.

On Coziness

To my way of thinking, coziness is essential and carries two dimensions: what it looks like on the outside and what it feels like on the inside.

The photo of me I've chosen for this blog looks cozy to an outsider. I'm wrapped up warm in a comfortable chair with a glass of red wine in my hand. (This was actually at one of my sons' homes, but they've subsequently sold what they always called the "poofy chair" -- alas, alas!) It is a cozy memory, that photo, that I'm very glad I still have.

To outsiders (if there were photos), I've looked cozy on a rainy day in an atrium of our previous home with a book and a cup of tea. I've looked cozy on a snowy day in front of a fireplace, chatting with friends (not so much anymore since we've moved to Southern California). I've looked cozy on a feather bed under a down comforter snuggled next to my warm bear of a husband. Any one of those views would appear cozy to an outsider. They also could be masking inner feelings of wretchedness and grief, and on occasion, they have.

And sometimes I probably don't look cozy at all (in that Norman Rockwell sense) when I actually am. Playing a board game with my children when they were younger was a very cozy feeling for me. Preparing dinner so that my husband walks into a home rich with delicious smells also feels very cozy to me, even though as I stand in my kitchen puttering around, deciding which knife to use, then endlessly chopping, there is no idealized vision of cozy to be seen. It's even felt cozy to me to walk into a sterile hotel room at the end of a long day of working on the road. Shutting the door and hearing nothing but inviting silence can sometimes be the coziest feeling possible at that given moment.

I've sat in hard hospital chairs by an unforgiving sea of beds, but because it was the only place in the whole world I wanted to be, it felt cozy -- especially the night I slept next to my father, jumping up and attending to him as needed, the very last night I saw him alive. But I loved that feeling of being with him, alone, and of the appreciation and love that shone from his eyes. (By then, he could not speak; the ALS had done its thing.)

Coziness in this sense seems somehow related to feeling safe, to doing something important for someone else, to drinking in the kindness and laughter of others, to living fully in the present moment with a sense of joy that is stronger than a sense of loss. Reflecting on the many unsung cozy times of my life provides peace and a stable filled with well-being.

On Vicissitude

Interesting word, "vicissitude." Indo-European roots, or so I'm told.

An instant of change. An accident happens. A diagnosis happens. An argument happens. A rupture happens, as in a relationship. You are one thing one moment (or so you think), and in the next moment you are something or someone entirely different. The world has gone askew, upside down, inside out, completely and devastatingly unknowable.

Vicissitude has entered my life primarily through loss. My healthy teen-aged son is given a cancer diagnosis (then another, and another, and yet another). My rock-solid father is struck down with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). A close relative turns on me, leaving me scrambling to understand the complex emotional world I thought I already understood and what part I've played in a relationship disaster I never saw coming.

To me, these are losses, perhaps losses of innocence or of believing (naively) that I was a part of the "perfect" family: well-educated, close-knit, bound for glory. How does one get through such things? Isn't it too simplistic to say "God"?

And yet I believe in God. And God has been there for me in surprising ways. Still, God also has been absent, unfelt, distant, seemingly disinterested in events that are of enormous import to me.

Agreeing to live life fully and with lightness, or humor, while dark clouds of unknowables hover overhead -- the fact that what you base today on will change, maybe even before tomorrow -- is how I've gotten through. Although, in truth, I'm not on the other side of anything yet. I don't think life allows you to be through with vicissitude.

On Writing Books

Through the course of my life, I have written so many books, it is impossible for me to count, or even remember, them all. That's because only three of them have been published, and only one of them is still in print.

Here are the three (the last one mentioned is the one still in print):

1. Who Will Be My Teacher? (my response to the "A Nation at Risk" federal report in the mid-1980s, in which no mention of teachers was made despite it being a report on the need for education reform);
2. Kids with Character (a book of stories about how to raise children who are prepared to make good choices in life); and
3. Habits of a Child's Heart (with co-author Valerie Hess), a how-to guide for parents on raising children with the classic spiritual disciplines.

I have considered writing a book that mirrors the Book of Job in modern times via my own life but have not yet decided how honest I could be in a book like that. Writing it would involve other people's stories beyond my own. I have considered writing it anyway and not seeking publication, just for the catharsis of it and my own spiritual benefit. This is still an option I'm toying with.

Writing is hard work. It is also very gratifying. All good writers need an even better editor. My favorite editor is Liz Heaney who worked with me on books #2 and #3 above. She suggested I take one story out of Kids with Character that I insisted on leaving in. I have learned to listen to Liz in all things. That story is now my least favorite part of the book. But her friendship is my favorite takeaway from writing Kids with Character.

On Disability

It is a shock, after a long exciting career, to learn that you have an incurable disease that renders you disabled. One day it wasn't there; the next day it was. (Although in truth it probably had been coming on for a couple of years.) The diagnosis: Idiopathic (of unknown cause) Pulmonary Hypertension. Who had ever heard of it before? I certainly hadn't.

It is a disease that scars the lungs and creates high pressures in the lungs. It only involves the heart as the disease runs it course. The heart has to work harder to get oxygenated blood from the lungs and, over time, enlarges. Most sufferers of this disease die of congestive heart failure. It is a rare, progressive, and (as I said) incurable disease, although medical science has made remarkable progress over the last few years in treating it.

"Idiopathic." No one knows how or why I came down with pulmonary hypertension. It's a lung disease, but I never smoked. In life, people encounter difficulties. Mostly I've seen that happen to others, including my own children. There will be more on that in this blog.

Now being permanently disabled, with time on my hands, I am looking back at the full life I've had and reflecting on events, people, and challenges. Ah, life. We should never be disappointed in it. Through the years I've learned to be grateful for all experiences. Each one contributes to who I am and what it means to be alive and human.