Grief and Change

Online people, those like me who seem to share just freakin' everything with perfect strangers on our Facebook feed or here, probably boggle the minds of folks who feel more private.

But it's such a complicated thing.  I even read an article about how FB helps people deal with grief and loss, because of connections that were lost years ago but people who have shared the horrific experiences of life in ways that even your immediate friends may not have.  It's an understanding issue, in part, I guess, because everyone's bad times are their own, the first time they've lived them, and we never know how we'll handle it. 

When my dad died, I didn't really know him very well.  My sisters went to his funeral.  When Andrew's dad was diagnosed as terminal, that hit me hard, but it was still Andrew's family, Andrew's major grief, and I was busy with the kids, who were just a bit over one and it was a bit hectic. 

This Christmas, dragging my mother into the ER because if I hadn't, she would have died within a few days, was tough, but I felt like it was productive.  They helped her.  I was there, and if I wasn't, someone else was. 

Now, she's been in a rehabilitative home since then and she was doing much, much better.  But this weekend, something has happened and I don't know where it's going.  People usually don't die from a freakin' sinus infection, which is what she apparently has, but it's impeding the necessary oxygen, which her body, because of her severe COPD and 50 years of smoking cannot get on its own. 

They sent her to the ER yesterday-- something I was in the midst of trying to set up already from here after I had talked to her on the phone and was worried.  At some time during that, she crashed and they intubated her.  She's also sedated, but apparently, she's also been fighting the intubation so they've had to restrain her, too.  My neice, who has had to deal with this issue very recently with her own father, is the only person who was there.  My sister is on her way, and she will evaluate what we're going to ask happen next.

See, my mom has a DNR order.  And we all agree with it; but for some reason the hospital didn't have a record of it.  The respirator, apparently, is something they shouldn't have done based on that DNR.  While I don't believe my mom lost consciousness, I think she may have if they hadn't acted, and that's directly in violation of the DNR. 

So there you go.  I feel totally helpless and angry at the hospital and had to yell at my husband last night and my eyes are puffy and feel like they have sand in them.  I'm not really in a mood to do anything other than brood.  But writing helps, putting out the story a little bit.  I don't know how it ends, but if you extend any story far enough out, it's a tragedy. 

We'll see how this current act ends.

A Gift From the Universe

You never really know when something will come your way that reminds you of yourself. For a while now, I've been upset by something that I could not control. It relates to a situation that happened long enough ago that I was over it, but then something happened that put me right back into the confusion, disappointment, and most of all, anger, that I felt when the situation first happened.

I wrote that post the other day about hate. It was meant to be funny, but it wasn't, really. I was reflecting on the things we lose, but what I needed to actually lose was the attachment to certain parts of something I never really had to begin with.

Then, today, in the Tech Writing class I teach, where my students are getting started working on their "how to" manual, I was looking for a link to "how to manuals." Just to show them some content they could model their own work on. I found this wiki, and especially, the "How to Be Compassionate" how-to. I started looking at it, drawn in by some things I have been forgetting.

Every time I assign this project to my students, I also do it. It's an exercise to remind myself how much work it actually takes, how to actually do it, so that I can judge the students' work fairly & accurately. So I decided that I would do my sample manual based on this guide.

I started looking at graphics, websites. Formatting the "found text" into a manual format. These are all tasks that I have done before, and I have to say I'm a big nerd about these kinds of projects; I love fiddling about with graphics & fonts & white space & page numbers. All the little things that go into this kind of project.

In the meantime, I was also finding quotations about being more compassionate. Practicing acts of kindness. Being more spiritual. Meditating. Keeping one's mental state in a healthy place.

This quotation is important: "Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin" Frederick Buechner. I don't know who Buechner is-- I may have to research that.

However. The point is this. The event that has happened which has made me wallow in my own misery lately is tiny. Insignificant. A blip on the radar of the universe. I was forgetting that, and because of that, as Yoda says "anger turns to hate, hate turns to the dark side." It's a feedback loop and I have decided to practice letting that go. I think I've made a big step in just thinking about it and realizing what an unhealthy mental pattern I had thrown myself into lately.

And when I forget, I'm going to look at the spiffy manual I'm making. Reminding myself that "How To" be compassionate is far far more important than any small place, any small thing, a day in the life. And to live in the somebody's skin who I was so angry with, to think about what must be going on in that world to make such things happen, well. I don't want to be stuck there forever, but I forget that I am a happy person. I am not bitter, nor angry, nor petty. Not normally. And I will not be. I am practicing kindness to myself, first. Then I can practice, til I get it right, on everyone else, too.

This day was truly a gift. Thank you universe. I was forgetting.

Tasers & Law Enforcement

I come, as some of you know, from a place of not-privledge. A place where cops were sometimes called out to handle "domestic disturbances" nearby. Family & friends were involved in these events. This means that one could suspect that all of the people I know would have a bad attitude about police. If you come into contact, on the wrong side of the law too often, you can feel a little oppressed.

But it's not true, though. My family was always respectful of the crazyhard job, the danger, that good cops face every day. And the fact that sometimes they are hurt the most when you would think people would be grateful for the help. I've known many good, good cops. And my husband has always been more of the cop type than the bad boy type.

I say all of the above because I'm collecting my thoughts on several recent incidents. The New Year's death of a young man in Oakland as the cop fired, point blank, into his lung as he lay, facedown, on the ground (some say the cop thought he held his taser as though that explains what happened). I say, SO What if he did? Why was he tasing a man that was cooperating? I've seen the grainy cell phone video... it doesn't look right to me. Then there's the young man in New Orleans who was killed, also on New Year's eve. He was sitting in someone's car. If it was a drug bust, possibly, but the sheer volume of bullets fired into a running man's BACK just seems amazingly wrong.

I don't think Tasers should be allowed to be routinely used especially on people who are not fighting, who are subdued already. If the first incident was indeed an accident, the overuse of tasers caused the death of a young man who, according to witnesses, was pleading with his friends for cooperation. The second incident just sounds like execution, period. Even if the guy was a drug buyer, he didn't deserve to be shot in the back like that.

I know that the police have to sometimes act on sparse information. They have to protect themselves from those who would do them harm. But both of these cases seem sooooo wrong. I know I don't know everything, but what I feel about the violence now erupting in Oakland and the outrage that people feel towards the policeman who killed two fathers of two young children, who took lives on the New Year, with what looks to me like very little justification.

Well. I feel heartbroken. And angry. And I feel like something needs to happen to stop these kinds of "accidents". I just don't know what.