the cassandra pages

Thank You

...to everyone who has left a comment or sent an email with condolences. I have appreciated every single one, and been reminded again and again how grateful I am for this online community and for the readers who come here. Your support and caring mean a great deal to me. I haven't been able to access my site or approve comments for nearly a week, and have been sorry not to be able to publish all the beautiful notes I received until now. My apologies to those whose comments didn't appear and seemed unacknowledged.

My mother's memorial service was on Wednesday, and now my husband and I are back in Montréal, where some blogger-friends are gathering this weekend: a wonderful antidote to some of the sadness and self-absorption of the past two weeks. I'm tired and still sad - and I know that grief will continue to visit me in waves, often unexpected ones, for a some time to come - and I don't feel like I have a lot of energy for either talking or writing. But, as my mother reminded me on several occasions, death is simply a part of life, and we have to carry on. She gave me such an example of strength, courage, and grace: I really have no choice but to try to emulate her.

Check back; I'm sure there will be some new posts and new photographs here pretty soon. And thank you all again.

Update

My mother died at 7:30 am today. It was much faster than we expected, but relatively peaceful and very merciful; my father, husband and I were all with her, talking softly to her and holding her, and she was very aware of our presence. Thank you to all of you who have left comments or simply visited here and thought of us; I really do know that I have many friends here who care about me. I'll be back to talk with you pretty soon.

Letting Go

Light after the storm, Madison County, New York, May 21, 2006. The storm was SNOW in the higher places, like Paris Hill. (click on the image for a larger version)

I've been reluctant to write here about my mother's illness because of wanting to respect her privacy -- and because reading my blog has been something she did faithfully. But it seems clear that she probably will not be reading it again, and so I can tell you a little more about where I am and what I've been doing and feeling.

My mother has had ovarian cancer for the past three years. She had surgery when it was diagnosed, and then had chemotherapy, and she has had a very good quality of life for almost all of this time. Around Christmas, the chemo started to be less helpful, and its effect on her body mroe extreme; she began to lose a lot of weight and to get weaker and more easily fatigued. There have been a number of crises in the past couple of months: a blocked bile duct that caused jaundice and was managed with a temporary stent; a serious infection that landed her in the hospital a few weeks ago. After that, her health has declined pretty rapidly, and she has refused any additional treatment other than palliative care. I was here for ten days during and after that hospitalization, then went home, and we came back yesterday. She was glad to see us when we arrived last night -- and today is the first day when she has not gotten up at all. We're expecting a visit from the hospice nurse later this afternoon.

As I wrote to some close friends, this is a very sad time, but it is also beautiful, and strangely peaceful. I remember, lying next to her while she semi-sleeps, holding her hand, the times she was the one next to my bed when I was sick as a little girl. And I am aware, more than ever, of what a great circle life is and how it is both a simple biological pattern, making perfect sense, and a mystery we cannot begin to understand.

I have no idea how much time this process will take, but I will be staying here...I'll write occasionally, when I can. We're all grateful for your thoughts and prayers and love.

Personal Note

On Saturday we made an unexpected, fast trip to central New York to see my parents and try to help out while my mother is in the hospital. We're still here and expecting to be here for a few more days. In spite of the difficulty of seeing people I love having to go through suffering - and being helpless to stop it - I'm grateful to be here, and for the time we're spending together. It has also been one of loveliest springs I can remember. To get to the hospital, in Cooperstown, New York, we drive east over the hills from the Chenango Valley into the Unadilla Valley, and then over another set of hills to the valley filled by Otsego Lake. The road winds and curves around farms and streams and sedimentary outcrops, through hills now green as Ireland with newly-grown clover. Flocks of deer lift their heads in the middle of meadows and keep grazing, unconcerned. The pastoral landscape constantly varies - here a farm with a little orchard and a barn with an old cobblestone foundation; there a barnyard with goats and chickens and a flock of cows heading up the hill after milking; now an uninterrupted stretch of woods giving way to a high wild area with a swamp and a beaver dam at one end. I find myself nearly gasping as one scene unfolds after another, even though it's all familiar from years past, and know I'll never stop loving this particular configuration of rocks and soil and vegetation that will always represent home.

As I walked along the lake this morning, three fat large-mouth bass swam in the clear water just off shore. The sun was so bright, shining toward me from the east, that it made the body of the smallest fish translucent. One fish then turned and lazily swam toward me so that I could see both eyes at once, glinting orange. I waved my arms but the glare on the water favored me; the fish turned again and swam off, unperturbed. This scene -- the shoreline and myself, looking into the water -- are a recurrent dream, and today I felt myself shifting between partially-remembered dream sequences and the real interplay of lake-life and observer. These dreams are sometimes disturbing, and always strange -- I'm quite sure the water represents my unconscious mind -- and I've never fully understood them. I left the shore after a while and walked across the road to the woods, and followed a deer trail through the undergrowth to the edge where the woods give way to a farmer's meadow. The deer had been there last night, from the looks of the fresh scat and scuffled earth under a copse of thorn apples. I backtracked, looking for hepaticas, and found their leaves and some spent blossoms under a tree where they've always grown. I sat down then, with my back against the the tree, and gazed across a sea of white trillium. I was there a pretty long time, long enough for the woods to settle once again into my eyes and heart, creating a strong memory of the white blossoms; the scent of the warming earth under its cover of leaves; the pair of warblers overhead in the budded branches of a hickory, singing the spring.

Solstice

The electricity went off, unceremoniously, at 10:00 am. Our computer power-supplies started beeping, as did the alarm in the hallway outside our apartment -- and the temperature started dropping. When it didn't come back on by 11:00, and then 11:30, J. went out to do some reconnaissance and discovered that there was no electricity for miles all around us. According to the CBC, 77,000 Montrealers on the east end of the island were without power. And it's cold here.

Fortunately, we have a fireplace, so we made a fire and ate our lunch in front of it as it crackled and began to warm the floor and the room. We had already dragged our warmest comforter to the living room couch, and there we stayed for the rest of the afternoon, alternating between the couch and the hearth: brewing tea in a thermos from the still-hot tap water, eating slices of the fruitcake I made a few weeks ago, talking a little, mostly being quiet. I knitted, and played my flute a little, and finished a book -- and watched the light begin to fade shortly after 2:00. The power came on twice, for exactly six seconds (we counted), and then shut off abruptly. We waited, gradually sliding into acceptance and reconfiguration; I haven't had a day like this for a long time, and it was interesting to watch my mind fight it, then settle down.

Toward the end of the afternoon we found ourselves back in front of the fire, with candles lighting pockets of the room behind us, watching the embers glowing and little blue flames playing along the edges of a new log. J. had placed our long-handled Turkish coffee pot on the coals to heat up the last of the morning's coffee. "Does it set off some sort of genetic memory?" I mused, looking into the fire. "Like, maybe I'm in a damp cottage with a peat fire somewhere in the British Isles, with sniveling children whimpering and clinging, and you're in a tent in the desert somewhere in Arabia, with the sun going down..." He smiled at me, and didn't answer, except to say that it gets very cold in the desert too.

At 5:30, the blue lights over the mantle came on, and this time they stayed. Outside, it had started to snow again. Slowly, we got up, looked around, and returned -- a little reluctantly -- to the 21st century.

A Slight Break in Stride

The interruption in posts here actually has an explanation. Tuesday we spent the afternoon and evening with friends from out of town, enjoying food and wine and the city together. We went to bed, and I woke suddenly at 2:00 am, unsure why but feeling vaguely uneasy. I got up to go to the bathroom and realized, four steps into the hallway, that I was going to be sick. I went to the kitchen to get a bowl -- and that's where J. found me, several minutes later, unconscious on the floor. Fortunately he had heard a crash and woken up immediately. Unfortunately he was faced with a sight no spouse ever wants to see. I woke up to see his face close to mine, asking what was wrong -- and then became very very sick. When we saw what was coming up, he got a robe and slippers for me and rushed me to Royal Victoria Hospital, where we spent the next ten hours, a period of time I would just as soon forget. Luckily, maybe, I was too ill to be very frightened; I was losing quite a lot of blood, getting weaker, and thinking, well, if this is the way it is, isn't too bad, you just fade away. Of course they weren't about to let that happen; the very attentive staff was monitoring every vital sign they could monitor, checking my hemoglobin levels, giving me fluids intrvenously, ready to give me a transfusion if necessary.

Around six I began to feel a little better, and the diagnosis, after an endoscopy early in the morning, was the most obvious, simplest, and probably most preferable one under the circumstances - a bleeding gastric ulcer, most probably caused by aspirin. The gastroenterologist told me it should heal up, with medicine and care, in four weeks. I am going to have to recover from the anemia too, and have more follow-up. But with my sense of self returning, I'm pretty sure that's all it was and that I'll be fine. Scared in retrospect -- but OK.

Right now I'm reclining on the couch, slowly eating a smashed-up boiled potato, drinking ginger ale, and listening to Vivaldi choral works. I'm alive. I'm grateful for many things beyond that, too. And will write more later, when I've had a little more time to think things through.

We Interrupt These Serious Proceedings...

Cassandra wielding an airbrush, c. 1986

Since Susan has blown my cover in the comments thread for the previous post, I may as well tell you it's my birthday, and post something silly. That's me in the picture, about 20 years ago, back before digital tablets and airbrush tools.

Last night there was a knock on the door around 6:00; I went to answer it, grudgingly, since I was heading for the kitchen, and who should be there but our former next-door neighbors and close friends, holding a big bottle of wine and an apple pie. I was quite confused - what were they doing on our porch? Then they said "Happy Birthday!" and my husband, who had been lying to me ALL DAY, started laughing and telling me what a dumb look I had on my face - probably about like the one in this picture! When we first met them, in 1982, their son was a baby. He showed up last night for dinner, driving his truck - he's now a college graduate, about to leave for two months of travel in Europe with a buddy. We looked at old pictures, drank wine, ate the good meal J. had sneakily bought and prepared, and the relaxed happiness has certainly carried over into today. I feel so rich in friends, including my parents who, at 81, are just about as vigorous as they were when they were young. May we all be so fortunate, and continue to care about each other, and to laugh!

Anniversary

Stats are down, les gens sont en vacances. I know some of my regular readers are checking here, thinking I might have posted something of interest - but no. In truth, after a day of intense work, and a weekend of deliberate enjoyment and non-work, J.and I are celebrating our 24th anniversary. We just had a Blue Sapphire martini and some excellent cheese, and are headed out for dinner - after I drink some strong tea, skipped at the usual 4:00 hour, but feeling rather necessary at the moment.

Twenty-four years. I remember my parents' 25th wedding anniversary, around the time I graduated from college and moved to New England. Ages ago - and yet, just around that corner we passed a few blocks ago. Better not to think that way, but to simply remember that very hot August day, the clink of champagne bottles in the trunk, the grassy hilltop, the Vermont hills falling away in the blue distance, the short white silk dress I'd made myself, J.'s pink shirt and black beard, a pick-up choir of friends and family singing a Bach chorale, faces of loved ones now dead, now grown, still very dear.

Anniversary

Today is our one-year anniversary of owning this apartment in Montreal. A year ago I wrote the following, as I waited for J. to pick up a certified check from our bank on our way to the closing:

What I found myself pondering as we crossed the wide, wide river, with the Stade Olympique in the distance and Maisonneuve’s “royal mountain” and cross ahead of us, is what will happen to me – to us – in this place. Will we continue to pass in and out of it, or eventually live here most of the time? How will it change me as a writer, and as a person? Who will we meet here? How will the city shape our work, our spirits? What can we contribute to its already-rich life? And how will it figure in the trajectory of these two human lives: will we someday grow old and die here, or will it be a place we live and leave, a stepping-stone on our journey through life? On this humid summer morning there are no answers, just the dampness curling the hair on my neck; the sound of metal clanging on metal; the workers’ appreciative glances at a passing woman’s derriere, and my amused appreciation of theirs; the traffic; the Tudor-style building on the corner with French signs – “á louer” “for rent” – on its black-and-white timber-frame façade. Bienvenue á Montreal.

Some of those questions are no closer to being answered today, and I'm less anxious about needing answers. I think one thing change does, if you let it, is make you more comfortable with uncertainty itself: more capable of discerning what you can answer and what you can control or influence, and what you can't, and more able to let go of the latter. I'm not that good at it, but during a year when I've had to cope with the possibility of many changes in my life and that of my family, I've at least had some intense practice.

But as for being in Montreal...let's see...I've made progress in the language, not as much as I'd hoped, but definite progress. I've learned how to drive in the city, and have developed a pretty good sense of direction and knowledge of where things are. I'm comfortable on my bike. We're beginning to decipher Quebec history and current politics. The winter and the constant travel and dealing with customs and immigration were all less onerous than we'd anticipated. Our pleasure in the city itself and in our place here hasn't diminished at all, in spite of the warnings of friends that the bloom would go off the rose. Not so, not yet anyway. And we've met some WONderful people here, and seem to be continuing to do that. Blogging was our first entrée into social life here, and the Anglican Church was another - in both cases we've met warm, friendly, fun, intelligent people who we hope to count as friends for a long time ahead. (Some of you are probably reading this, and it's a good chance for me to say thanks.) And if I wasn't convinced before about how sustaining it is to have friends who aren't tied to one place, who I can carry around in this box, so to speak, wherever I go - I am now!