Holidays

I will be taking the next few weeks off and will be back at it in 2012.  I hope during this time you will look over some of the "old posts" you have not yet had an opportunity to read. Happy Holidays to all of you. Lillian Hunter

Gift Receiving?

My friend was sick with the flu and a back injury.  We typically walk our dogs together on Fridays and she had been unable to do that for more than a month.  I tried to send her some flowers but that darn internet made it impossible to find a local florist.  So I stopped by a local market that has wonderful flowers.  I had an arrangement prepared and I delivered it myself.  She wasn’t home but her husband was.  I dropped off the flowers with him and left as he was also sick.   Then it happened.  Dead silence.  Stupid things were going through my head like maybe she didn’t notice them or maybe her husband forgot to tell her they were from me. 

It amazes me in this day and age of easy and instant communication how we fail or refuse to communicate.  I never received a text, email or phone call from my friend acknowledging the flowers and/or thanking me for them.  I happened to run into her a few weeks later and she, looking a bit chagrined, told me she hadn’t texted me (no reason why) but she thanked me for the flowers.  It seemed almost like an afterthought.  If I hadn’t run into her would she have ever said, “thank you”. 

Well you might be saying that the giver should not expect anything in return as a true gift is given freely and without expectation.    I agree but I don’t think that extends to a simple thank you.

My feelings were hurt and I wondered as to her character or lack thereof.  For me there is no substitute for an immediate and heartfelt,”thank you".  That may be the best gift of all because it says I acknowledge you and I appreciate you and all you do for me.   The words are so simple but the meaning is so powerful.   .”  So in these days when we are frantically preparing to give gifts to our family and friends, let’s not forget to say, “thank you”   when we receive something.   It means so much. It strengthens our relationships while its absence weakens them.

Grief

I ran into the room half expecting that it wasn’t true.  The room was exactly as I had left it an hour or so earlier.  Brian was resting peacefully on the bed.  I had known for three years this day would come.  It was inevitable.   I ran up to him and put my hand on his arm.   I let out a low, muffled cry.   His arm felt like a stone on a cold winters’ night.  I felt my body shudder.  I remember being amazed that life could depart so quickly.     I couldn’t move.  I stood staring at him. It felt as if the life had gone out of both of us in that room.  I don’t know how long I stood there motionless.   I fell to my knees.  I heard this horrible loud sound.  It sounded like a wailing from some primitive creature in pain.  I looked around the room.  I was alone.  It was coming from me!   Life had returned to me with explosive force.     I wailed rocking back and forth on my knees.  

Q:  Have you experienced grief , over an event in your life, that literally knocks you to the ground?  For me these events tend to surface around the holidays.  How about you?  I find that acknowledging these feelings helps me move past them. What works for you?

Loneliness (Part Four)

An envelope arrived in the mail the other day – just before I left on my business trip.  It had a return address indicating it was mailed from my hometown.   I anxiously ripped it open.  Funny but I still get excited regarding news about my hometown even though I haven’t lived there in 30 years.   I guess for my generation that connection runs deep.  I am sad and relieved that my children will never have that connection.    I opened it to find an obituary.  On top of the obituary was a handwritten note. It was from a friend of my parents.  She was a neighbor of ours and had been their friend since I was about five years old.   My siblings and I had grown up with her three sons.   I always think of her with such fondness.  Just seeing the note from her brings back good memories of spending time with her family.

 “Thought you might be interested in this.  I know you babysat for her for many years,” she said in the note.    I knew from my Mother that my friend had been battling cancer for a number of years.  It had been in remission for a quite a while but apparently it had recently returned with a vengeance.   She was only 61 years old.   We had a deep connection when I was in high school.  After I moved away, I would visit her when I came home to visit my parents.  She always seemed glad to see me.  But our visits had definitely tapered off over the years.   I would contact her but she rarely had the time to see me.    I was hurt that she didn’t want to get together.  She had been someone I could confide in as a teenager and young adult.  We seemed to understand each other even though we were from totally different worlds. Those talks helped me escape the provincial attitudes of the city in which I grew up.   

Why didn’t we maintain that connection?  I wanted to stay connected.  Do friendships have limited life spans?   Do I just care more about other people than they care about me?  Do I value friendships more than other people do?  Am I wrong or weird for feeling that way?  Am I the only one who feels so intensely lonely in 21^st century America?  These aren’t new feelings for me.  I have felt lonely and alienated since I was a child.

I often wonder if our ability to connect is damaged early on in our life whether we can ever completely heal from that injury.  I was driven by fear to seek and also to run away from relationships.   Fear has been my constant companion since childhood.  Anxiety may be a more accurate term but for me the feeling is definitely one of fear.  When I was young I would sabotage close friendships when I revealed too much of myself to the other person.  Was I was afraid they would reject me so I rushed to do it first?  

Q:  How would you rate your ability to connect - form deep and lasting connections- to "friends."  If you want deeper connections what do you think is interfering with your ability to do that?

Are We Lost? (Part Four) ( or Do we live in a compassionless world?)

It was another one of those (typical) days – long, lonely, painful, exhausting.  No more visits from the “angel”, Deborah, or anyone else for that matter, except Nancy, Brian's sister,  and her husband. The phone was silent. The doorbell didn’t ring.   I didn’t have the strength to initiate anything.  And if I did what was I going to say or talk about.  “Hey good morning.  This morning I took Brian to the bathroom.   I wiped his butt.  I showered him. I fed him.  I put him in his chair to watch TV.  I am tired because I was up all night turning Brian in bed, taking him to the bathroom or rearranging his limbs for him.  So what have you been doing today?” I said to myself.   I guess I could have faked something but I didn’t have the energy for that.  My salvation was my time away with Gary at his activities and my visits with Nancy.   That was if I could leave Brian with someone for a little while.

Before he was sick Brian was always busy with social and business functions and sporting events.   He had two or three such events every week.    We went to dinner. We attended weddings. We attended anniversary parties. We went on trips together.  We visited people in their homes and they came to our home.    Brian counted himself rich in friends.   I never knew so many people before I married Brian.  Brian thrived on this type of life.  I would have preferred to have a little less social life.

After Brian was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, he continued to go to the office everyday and our social life continued as before. There was an outpouring of sympathy and support that was unimaginable.  I was touched and a little overwhelmed by it.  As the disease progressed and Brian wasn’t able to get to the office or leave the house, his friends would call and come by.  Brian’s condition worsened.  His body further deteriorated.

 “Hey how is he?   I’m going to come over and visit tomorrow around 10.  Is that OK?” one of Brian’s friends called to say.    “Great. Brian will be very happy to see you and have some company,” I responded.  Brian was waiting anxiously the next day for his visit.  It was 11 and the friend had not arrived yet.  I tried to call him but I couldn’t reach him.    This friend didn’t come the following day either.   He didn’t call to cancel or explain why he didn’t come.  “Hey Brian he probably got busy and forgot,” I said. “Do you want me to call him again?”  I asked.  Brian was silent.   I think he already knew. 

I did call Brian’s friend a few days later.   We chatted about his life and then I asked,   “Did you forget about your visit to the house the other day?”   There were some excuses and evasions.  “What is really going on?”  I asked.  I didn’t want to promise Brian a visit on another day only to have him be disappointed again.  I pressed the issue.  The friend finally confessed, “I can’t handle seeing Brian like that.  It depresses me.  I can’t understand him when he talks. I don’t know what to say to him.”   Other people said the same thing to me during the last part of the illness.  I wanted to tell all of them, “This is not about you or how you feel.  This is about Brian.  He is sick, dying, scared and he needs some support and company.”   But I was silent. 

 I judged and chastised these “friends” even if only in my mind.   Maybe I should have said those things.  Maybe if I had they would have come to visit Brian.   Maybe they just sensed my hostility and that kept them away.  I so wanted Brian to have visitors!   Oh later I understood that seeing Brian reminded them of their own mortality and they did not want to be reminded of that.  Still somehow I wished they could have put their own feelings aside for Brian’s sake.   I didn’t say anything to Brian about my conversation with his friend.  .

In those days I would still call “friends” to ask them to visit.  They said, each in their own way, that same thing.    I stopped calling.   Brian knew that his was not a pretty disease and that his emaciated and distorted body was not a welcome sight.  He was confronted with his own mortality each and every day.  The lack of visitors only drove that point home.   Brian stopped asking me to call “friends.”   He accepted they were not going to visit him anymore.  It took me a little longer to accept.  Maybe I never did.  There was little or no relief from the drudgery and monotony of each day.   Nancy, the “kook” and her husband were the only visitors.   And once a week the hospice nurse came.    The doorbell was silent. The phone didn’t ring.

Q:   What do we say or do for someone we know who is suffering or going through a difficult situation?  Are there any magic words?  How do we show them we care and are there to support them? Being present on the phone, via email or in person may be a good place to start.  Words can be comforting but is there anything better than a hug or a touch of the hand to say you care?  What do you think?  How have you handled such situations?  Would you do anything different now?

Holidays are too much work!

“Oh my gosh!   Janine run and get a small dish and fill it with hot water and laundry detergent!  Hurry!” my Grandmother anxiously said to my Mother.   My Grandmother was holding up a portion of the tablecloth and dabbing it with her napkin that she had just dipped into her glass of ice water.   Everyone was suddenly silent, staring at my Grandmother and the guilty party, me.  You see I had dropped some gravy on the tablecloth.  But this wasn’t just any tablecloth.  This is one my Grandmother had patiently and lovingly cross stitched for over a year.   My Mother arrived back with the small bowl filled with some magic stain remover.  My Grandmother placed it under the spot on the tablecloth and still showing some anxiety she sat down.  We all breathed a sigh of relief and I hoped that this secret formula could remove the stain from the beautiful tablecloth.  I kept looking anxiously in the direction of the stain throughout the meal to see if it was actually disappearing.

My Grandmother would spend weeks preparing for the holidays.  I can remember hearing her and my Mother discussing what food they would serve, where they would buy it and how they would prepare it.   My grandmother would clean the house and spend hours setting the table for the holiday meal.  The table was set with all her best china and crystal.  There were candles on the table that we would light during the meal.   All the silver was polished and gleaming.  All the large platters and serving dishes would be taken down from the top shelves where they had spent the last year.   It was a feast!

All this preparation and anticipation created great excitement on the part of the family.  We understood these were special occasions.  We would all don our Sunday best clothes, behavior and manners.  We had great respect for my Grandmother and all the work and love she put into planning and preparing for the holidays.    At Christmas time she would spend hours cutting little candies up into pieces which she would use to create holly and other Christmas symbols to place on top of the small tea cookies she had baked.  I can see her now in her kitchen bent over the counter concentrating on those cookies.  I couldn’t understand how she could spend so much time on something that someone was just going to eat in a few days but that didn’t matter to her.  It really was a labor of love and it was part of what she believed defined her as a good wife and mother. Who am I to judge that?

It seems each holiday I reminisce about the past holidays and revisit memories of my Grandmother and her house that smelled of gingerbread and evergreens.   Oh it wasn’t all good times but I find the happy memories come to mind much more often than the unhappy ones. 

 My Grandmother has been gone for quite some time now.  As I reminisce about her I wonder what my children will reminisce about in the years to come. I have not had the time or energy or maybe even desire to do what my Grandmother did to make the holidays special.  For a while I let that keep me from doing anything.  I was overwhelmed by the thought that I would have to do all that stuff and I knew I couldn’t.  Still I instinctively knew that I needed to do something to celebrate the holidays and make them special.  When my children were very young, as a single parent, I was totally exhausted with just doing the regular daily stuff of living.  Somehow I forced myself to engage in certain holiday activities that we repeated each year.  Sometimes it was as simple as attending an annual Christmas tree lighting.  It was a way of saying the holiday was special but more importantly it was a way to take time out of a hectic schedule to “tell” my children they were  special and important.  I came to realize, later, that these annual traditions created shared memories and activities that forged a bond between us – helped to shape us into a family. 

Even now I find I want to give up on some of our traditions as they are too much work or take too much time.  Life continues to be ever busy and filled with activities that take up so much time.  I keep thinking we will go out to eat for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner or I won’t decorate the house or tree this year or I’ll just give money as Christmas gifts.   But then I muster the energy and desire and I remember, as we are all standing around the kitchen as I cook and sitting around the beautifully decorated table that these activities bring us together physically and emotionally.  As we eat we reminisce about past holidays and meals and the good times we had back then.   We also tend to remember and focus on the good rather than the bad – maybe holiday traditions help us do that.

 My children are now young adults and they understand the work and effort all of this takes.  But if I hadn’t taken the time or made the effort when they were too young or too rebellious  to appreciate it or understand the work and sacrifice it takes to “have” a holiday I wouldn’t be reaping the benefits now.   As it was with my Grandmother, this is a labor of love – sometimes appreciated and sometimes not – but always a gift of love to my family.  Perhaps that is the best tradition of all that I can pass onto my children – that they are special and loved and we are a family. The holiday traditions we create are a wonderful way to say that.

Q:  What are your holiday traditions? What message do they convey to your loved ones?

Marriage and sometimes even a love story (Part Five)

Brian had pursued me vigorously.  I had been pursued before.   That is not to say that I am so great.  It is only that I am part of the generation where men pursued us and the women protested or played hard to get.    In this case I wasn’t playing hard to get.  I really didn’t want another relationship at least not with Brian.  After my experiences with David I was not the least bit interested in having another relationship.   Brian and I ended up getting married.  But this time I spent a number of years getting to know Brian before we decided to get married.

            “It is your husband on the phone,” the receptionist at my office said over the intercom.  I picked up the phone.   “My Dad is back in the hospital.  It doesn’t look good.  Can you come to the hospital right now?”  Brian asked.    I went to the hospital.  I called the sitter from there, “Can you stay late today?  I will be at the hospital until visiting hours about 8 pm.”  “OK,” she said.  “Let me talk to the children, “I said.  I talked about how their day went.  I reviewed whether homework was done and preparations made for the next day.  I kissed them all good night over the phone of course.   I went back to the vigil by the bedside.  

The bedside vigil went on for at least two weeks.   It was grueling.  Brian and I had been back and forth to the hospital almost every day.  During the course of those two weeks, I had received multiple urgent messages at the office advising me to come as soon as possible as the end was imminent.  This all took place just a month before our wedding.  In that same month I sold my house and moved out.  The children and I had moved into Brian’s house.  Brian and I were making the final preparations for the wedding.   I moved out of Brian’s house when we had a huge blowout and we called the wedding off    I was in court everyday as  lead counsel in a huge trial that was expected to last at least 6 weeks.  Brian and I were both physically and emotionally exhausted. 

“Get your stuff together right now.  We are leaving!”  I shouted as I opened each of the doors to my children’s respective bedrooms.  They didn’t question me.  While they gathered up their stuff I gathered up some of my clothing.  We threw our stuff into the minivan and we drove to a hotel where we would spend the first of several nights.  I drove the children to school the next morning and then I went to court. In a few days we would move into a rental house.  As I pulled away from Brian’s house that night I looked in the rear view mirror.  I saw Brian standing at the front door.  He was still very angry but also incredulous. 

I remember it so clearly.   Brian and I were sitting on the couch in the TV room of the first house we lived in together.  The children were in their bedrooms getting ready for bed.  I have no recollection of what was said.  Brian and I exchanged angry words. I decided I couldn’t marry him. I decided to leave.    I had no idea, at that time, what drove me to do that.  I am sure I convinced myself it was something Brian said or did.   As I look back on it I think I was driven by fear.  I wanted the security and comfort of marriage but I was afraid of what that would mean to my independence and identity.  Brian had very traditional ideas about marriage.  What price would I have to pay to be married?   A huge conflict was raging in me.   It drove me to leave Brian’s house that night.  I was so selfish I didn’t even think about the price my children would pay for my erratic behavior.

QUERY:  Sometimes our emotions are so strong, especially fear, that we forget to consider the consequences to ourselves and others.  Have you ever had such an experience?  Have you figured out a way to deal with those powerful feelings before you cause alot of emotional damage?