What If?

17th November 2011 Thursday

What if?

What if I loved it all? Every moment.

The cool, weak cup of tea with my father that I drink to be sociable?

The odd sound of my car engine at seventy miles an hour - could it be the clutch slipping?

The hot black radish that my husband offers me, that burns my tongue?

The bones of the pussy cat’s spine under his soft fur, under my hand?

The voice of the beautiful Indian healer telling me the truth?

What if none of it was good or bad. It was just so. What if I stopped letting fear constrict my heart? How much space there would be inside me for a soul to flourish and shake its blossoms into the world.

Deep Rooted Like Tulips

16th November 2011 Wednesday

A quick blog - my sister says she has read research about sleep and that it’s good to be in bed by eleven. It’s already past that - I’m tired, but I notice how I don’t want to give up my late nights alone with myself and this writing space.

This morning I spend time with a lovely woman who tells me about my soul journey, over many lifetimes. She says my heart is tender and that I feel everything can be both a gift and a heavy weight. She says there are many possibilities for my husband and nothing is set in stone. I feel lighter and burden-lifted after her gracious and loving healing, releasing old grief and betrayal. And deep rooted in my heart. Like the red tulips I planted yesterday in black earth.

At home I make a call to my father’s doctor who says the pains he feels in his chest at night are most likely to be re-flux and not angina. I pass the message on to my sister who is sitting with my father in his room and she reassures him. I love mobile phones.

I finish making the mincemeat I started yesterday - stir in more currants and cranberries and slosh in more brandy. I cut up brussel sprout tops and leeks for supper and cook the two huge pans of apples that my husband peeled and chopped this morning. He says he likes projects to get him out of bed. Even if it’s just the washing up. I haven’t washed up for ages.

We sit together on the sofa for our ten minute Mindful Meditation and pay attention to the noises in the street outside - a car revving, children shouting, the rain hitting the window panes. And breathe in and out. Intimate moments before we head out into the dark and wet and the womb of the cinema.

An Inbreath, An Outbreath

15th November 2011 Tuesday

Our eyes are closed. My husband and I are sitting in a light, bright room in a building which is part of the hospital. It’s the centre for Clinical and Community Psychology Services. The double glazed window is jammed open with a box of tissues. Our lovely clinical psychologist - he of the exquisite listening - is guiding us through a Mindfulness Meditation technique. It’s about managing stress. Stress as a response to my husband’s brain disease or disability or gift. However you look at it - it’s not going away.

He suggests we practise this simple but difficult exercise for ten minutes a day. Preferably together. Just agreeing to do it feels like taking the first step on a rope ladder, leading up and out of a dark guilt pit. My track record for new routines isn’t great, so after the appointment, eating brunch eggs in our favourite cafe, we discuss how to slot this precious ten minutes into our so busy and so separate lives.

Starting with an in-breath and an out-breath - it feels such a fragile, intimate route to healing.

Elvis And The Echo of Me

14th November 2011 Monday

The house is cold when I come back from my father’s tonight. I pull on my Ugg boots (or rather my cheaper M & S version of Ugg) and several jumpers. My husband leaves for his choir evening and Elvis and I make supper. I turn up the volume of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’

I get so lonely I could die

and start chopping the red chillis and ginger. I take time out to dance to ‘Hound Dog’ -

You ain’t nothing but a hound dog

crying all the time

and strip off a jumper.

The leeks and peppers start sizzling in the pan and I shoot in broccoli florets and the slightly tough kernels of the last allotment sweetcorn, while Elvis croons ‘Love me Tender’

I’ll be yours through all the years

till the end of time.

I stir the pan, swirl in garlic and pak choi, soy sauce and toasted sesame oil and sway and stamp my boots on the kitchen floor to the rhythm of ‘Jailhouse Rock’

Let’s rock, everybody, lets rock.

And while the vegetables in my pan meld and soften into our supper and Elvis thrums in my belly, I hear the faint echo of a woman calling to me. A young woman dancing to her own tune. She hadn’t seen a catheter bag strapped to the thin white leg of her father, she couldn’t imagine explaining to her husband what a drainage survey is. She didn’t know it was the little details that break your heart - and sustain you too.

Like the smile on my husband’s face when he lifts a forkful of stir fried vegetables to his mouth and asks, Is this the sweetcorn I grew?

I say ‘Yes.’

And it’s enough for now.

Moment in a Room at Dusk

11th November 2011 Friday

Today a dear friend reminded me in an email that our lives are felt in moments - and significant moments are simply the ones we remember. When I trawl back through my day to write this blog - to choose a moment or two - I realise how often I’m not even present in my moments or I’m judging and criticising or fretting and complaining.....

A moment I do remember today..... I knock very softly on my father’s door and push it open. The room is almost dark. I can make out his shape in the chair, his head fallen to one side, his legs stretched out on a stool. I can hear his breathing, his sleeping breath. The floor boards creak as I walk towards him, so I stop and wait. He doesn’t wake. I sit down in a hard chair at his feet and look out of the window. Although it’s so gloomy in the room and it’s drizzling outside there is a glowing light coming from the red and gold and yellow leaves of the bushes in the garden below us. And a pale grey sheen in the sky.

I’m afraid the carer will come in with his afternoon tablets. I’m like a guard dog with twitching ears ready to leap up to the door to stop her waking him. I stay like that for a little while keeping my father company while he sleeps. It comforts me to imagine him opening his eyes and seeing me - finding he isn't alone after all.

A Peak in Darien

9th November 2011 Wednesday

Tired tonight - can’t write much. Wish I was a poet and could get to the heart of the matter in a few beautiful words.

My father sits in the wing back chair in his new empty feeling room and looks small and white faced. He says my sister and I look like giants compared to the carer who comes to check his catheter. We know her - she worked in the home where our mother lived the few years before she died - a familiar, friendly face.

He says his only problem is that he can’t remember who

‘looked, silent, upon a peak in Darien’.

It’s a line from a poem which has been snagging at the edges of his mind while he was in hospital. He says my husband would know, at least he would have known - before. But maybe not - he didn’t ever study Keats' poetry. It’s just that my father has this fantasy that my husband knew all sorts of things he never did.

I Google the Keats poem later - it’s called On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.

It was ‘stout Cortez’ who looked at that peak.

I’m sure my husband was not familiar with that poem. But he would have known who Homer is and what stout means.

I wish, like my father, that I could be that easily distracted by poetry.

Right Place, Right Time

8th November 2011 Tuesday

‘You are always in the right place at the right time.’

This is true - living or dying - it’s thinking you could be somewhere else that makes it stressful.

Today I expected we’d move my father to his new home. When my sister and I arrive at the hospital this morning to pack him up the staff nurse says the doctor has seen him and he needs to stay in another twenty four hours. So we repair to the Boston Tea Party for flapjack and mint tea and re-jig the day.

Tonight in misty drizzle I drive up the M5 towards Taunton. Around Junction 25 I think I can smell smoke damage in the air from the accident on Saturday. Inside the Odeon cinema my sister and I wait for our friend - it’s our farewell evening to her. She doesn’t arrive. I call her. She thought it was tomorrow. Maybe there was a good reason she didn’t drive the M5 tonight.

Back home, while my husband is out making his clay creatures, I unwrap a new cake of birthday soap and soak in a scented bath with a glass of red wine. Definitely in the right place at the right time.