Words From One Of The Carrots In The Stew

We've never met in person,  but our virtual friendship is entering the twenty year mark, long enough for both of us to forget we never actually met in person. But that's the internet and I am grateful that it brought us together that day on a long defunct literary discussion list. From fifteen women, we are down to a handful. Literally a handful. We can count each other on one hand.

Over the last couple decades we've shared our lives with thousands and thousands of words. They've described love, life, death, rebirth, the good, the bad, the indifferent, and tears of joy, of sadness, of despair, and of loss. We've grieved the death of our literary sisters. We've lamented, cursed, and screamed at growing old, not for vanity or the loss of our youth, but because it takes away those we love. If you live long enough, you become a survivor by default and it's often a sad place to be. There is no victory in it, just the whimsical nature of time and the hand you are dealt.

And sadly now, my friend is in her final weeks. Last week she decided to end all further attempts to heal her and is instead focusing on what she calls "the end game." We've both lost enough friends to breast cancer in the last decade to know it's not a fight to lose because she never picked cancer as an opponent. It just happened to her as it happens to far too many women. To call it a fight implies a loss or victory to the opponent. No. It is simply a change, a transition from living to dying. She's a purist that way. Throughout it all, she's focused on living and not on dying. She's wanted to be addressed and acknowledged and loved as a living human being, not one who is dying. Victory to her means her friends and those she loves are able to forget what is going on in her body and focus on her the way they always did.

She refuses to be called brave because she says she is not. She does what the doctors tell her. She listens to what her body wants and does not want. As another of our friends who died last year said, who she is becomes far more important than what is happening to her. Rather than brave or courageous or strong or winning and/or losing, she prefers the term "growing." I have loved watching the process of her coming into her own as a woman, as a friend, as a delightful human being.

Yes, the sadness over eventually losing her is often hard to feel, but honestly, the same can be said for all my friends. Once you hit those later years, the sixties, the seventies, losing friends becomes far more common than we ever realized. We become better at saying goodbye. We become better at helping. We become better at cutting through the crap and learn to just be with each other.

While I really believe we have become better as a culture at accepting that death is an inevitable part of living, there are certain issues that still need perfecting, and one of those is pain management. There is absolutely no reason my friend or anyone should have to suffer pain at the end of their life. And yet they do. I've asked my friends in the medical professions how this is possible, how is it that with all our advances, the only option for pain management at the end is either suffering so you can stay conscious as long as possible, or such heavy doses that you are virtually in a coma until you transit from here to some other reality.

I've heard many answers and the most common seems to be our dance with morality. We are taught certain drugs are bad and unbelievably there's still those who would deny the full range of pain medication to the dying because they don't want to make them addicts. Seriously. I'm not joking. There are moralists who would rather see someone in pain than risk making them addicts just before they die. This is just fucked up in so many ways.

Then there's the whole money/research issue. Life is for the living and so we focus the funds on helping the living and not the dying. Medicines are developed for profit and pain medications are relatively cheap compared to chemo drugs, so the dying get filled up with those and have to suffer in pain. My friend has learned to be insistent to not feeling pain and also not being out of it until it's time to be out of it.

This worked well until a couple days ago when she lost the ability to speak and can barely type. Now she is dependent on what others think is good for her instead of what she needs and wants. This is in spite of reams and reams of last wills, living wills, final directives. At some point, the "team" takes over and the patient is no longer a willing participant.

But we've been through this before, so her pain is less than others in her situation. She has people fighting for her, family who understand her wishes completely and are ferocious in the face of those who try and go against them.

And yet, dying is a complicated process, especially in this digital age. We thought we'd covered everything, the eventual message on her blog, her Facebook page, her twitter account, and for the most part we have. But there's always loose ends, personal things you forget to tell people, things that matter to you but didn't realize mattered to you until you lose access to them. This happened with her twitter account. Because she could no longer type easily, she let it go for a few days and a well meaning friend closed it down for her as he mistakenly thought those were her instructions. He feels terrible that he misread her instructions, but it's too late to get it back. It's gone.

So today I've contacted some of the people she was following in an attempt to at least give her access to the progress of people she cared about. It's a surprisingly long list. I'm not trying to recreate her account but merely becoming a conduit from them to her via me and my account. Most people have been completely understanding and others are suspicious and required some reassuring words before clicking that little follow button. Others, mostly from her community of breast cancer women, appear to have fallen off the radar. Their last posts were weeks ago and they don't answer my requests. It's not for me to ask her why these people matter to her but they do.

So here's my reason for writing this. For those of you who are support, family, friends with someone who is beginning the end game, please remember there are people like my friend. You may not understand why she needs to keep in touch with people who are strangers, you may not know about the many emails she received from complete strangers moved by her blog describing her path and the lessons learned and unlearned, you may not know she also has people she followed, read and connected with on a level only those who are going through such a thing can understand, but they matter to her.

I have promised to keep her virtual family connected with updates. It doesn't take much, just a few moments to post on her blog that she is with us but unable to type, that she is transitioning and wishing everyone love and happiness and the spiritual and personal growth that develops us as human beings. It doesn't take much and yet it means so much. There is a middle path to protecting the cherished privacy, the final intimate moments of life with those we love, and yet not losing touch with those who have come to care about us.

We, at the heart of ourselves as human beings, tend to measure everything on a personal level, so if we don't understand something it somehow becomes less in importance. And one thing we often fail at is understanding why and how someone cares about us. If it isn't a personal lover, a close friend, a familiar family member, we don't always see how much we matter to someone else. That's our last obstacle to overcome as members of the upright species: learning to accept there are those who love us, who care about us, even if we barely feel them inside our hearts. Our lack of awareness doesn't lessen what they feel. It just makes our planet a more lonely place for all of us.

So today I will contact more from the list of twitter friends and help make the world a less lonely place. And one day I hope my friends and family will do the same for me because we all live in this stew together, no matter how much we cling to our individual carrot or potato self.

Lavender Skies Print by northwest_photograph
Shop for Boulevard park Posters online at Zazzle.com

Words From One Of The Carrots In The Stew

Hanging With Dead People

For the last couple months or so I've been helping Maria, Ryan's daughter, go through his sister's journals and emails. We don't really have a method or a purpose other than wanting to organize what she left behind. Since she burned most of her writing and deleted a good deal of her emails, we both figured the stuff she left behind had some meaning we've yet to determine and that she left it deliberately for us to find.

It's fascinating reading until I remember how much I miss her and the confusion that made up the year we spent together as friends. Even now, after all this time, no one has come close to the pure honesty of our conversations. She had a way of putting things into words that was both a talent and a fierce determination to preserve the truth before it was polished into an acceptable memory. She had this eerie ability to stand outside a situation, look at it with the keen and brutal eye of the unvarnished observer, and lay it out in all its bare and hideous honesty.

I was often horrified at what I perceived at the time as her callous objectivity, and she was equally horrified at what she called my Pollyannish approach to the world. And yet, we both came to know the roots of those points of view and learned to respect their validity in each other. It makes reading her words now so much easier. I understand them more than if I didn't know what drove her to write them. And I know that when it came to altruism, Anna made Pollyanna seem like a self-centered little twit. My heart is a lot more open from knowing her and I thank her nearly every day for such a precious gift.

The emails Maria sent me today were mostly about her relationship with men, written in three different languages. Hard as they are to translate exactly, what comes through is that like so many intelligent women, she was absolutely stupid when it came to men. She preferred a certain type: intense, brilliant, and totally lacking in social skills. Of course, they made her miserable. Of course, she returned the favor. Of course, she believed if there was no passion, no pain, no remorse, it wasn't worth the effort. Of course, I understood this side of her completely.

For Anna, relating to anyone was a series of stripping away the dishonesty. I was always trying to get her to come to parties, to have dinner with a few close friends, to come dance or go see a play, anything to get her away from the dark world that had become her life. But she would see through everyone so completely with just a few email exchanges, a two minute phone call, a brief meeting in passing, that after a while I began to completely dislike everyone I knew. I had become friends with them through my heart and she forced me to look at them with my eyes. It wasn't always a pleasant awakening.

She had a tiny circle of trusted friends and an appreciation for what was then the forerunner of social media that was way before her time. This was 1989 into the early 90's. Instead of Facebook we had bulletin boards where we logged in and typed back and forth to each other. And email when we didn't want to make our conversations public with the other members of the community. And it all took so long and required so much patience and dedication.

She also had a wicked sense of humor and a chameleon like ability that allowed her to assume several personas and carry them all off credibly. One time she created two characters and had them relate first to everyone and then to each other in some weird sort of schizophrenic dialogue that as far as I know, no one figured out they were both her. There was no reason for it other than she could. And when I expressed some discomfort over it, she just shrugged and said there were far worse things to get upset about in the world, that it was a way for her to get to know what people were really like before she met them in person.

Anna would have loved Facebook. It was the world she imagined when she thought of the future, an online world community that was limited only by the individual desire to connect. Even with a computer that had less memory than a cheap calculator and a modem that screamed when it  finally connected with some duct-taped contraption in another part of the world, Anna was able to accomplish so much it is astonishing even now to read about it.

And reading her emails, the why of it all starts to make a strange sort of perfect sense. She had a focus that was driven by compassion. She truly cared about people and took an interest in the lives of people she would never meet but who touched her in some way. As she always told us, the electronic universe can be one helping big hand for humanity if you opened your heart.

And her hand helped so many. I am awestruck by how many people she was able to help. I always knew she gave away a very large fortune, but I never knew all the details of exactly what she did with the money. I know she paid my hospital bill even though she never admitted it. But other than that the pieces have had to wait years to fall into place so we could at least see some of the results. She never felt the need to explain or get any credit for it.

Somewhere in all the old diskettes that are being transferred over to online storage systems, there's probably a list of them all. She was that way. She would have kept track, if only to make sure there was a way to prove the recipient was entitled to the money and help. But for now, we can only guess until we find the actual files in the thousands that exist, or we find the occasional email we run across that explains how she was going to help the person writing to her, or the occasional legal document that spelled out the details. Few of the documents and letters are in English and so the process is more difficult to untangle. But Maria and I manage with our combined limited knowledge of several languages and some great online translators.

We know they were mostly women, mostly in countries that were at war or had been devastated by wars. She once told me everyone had their price, so she was able to accomplish things that were impossible because she used that uncanny ability to size people up to find whose palm to cross with some silver. There was always a palm and she had lots of silver. Ryan once joked that his sister helped enough people to populate her own village. I think even he would be surprised at what the final number will probably be.

The contrast between reading her emails and remembering her kindness and willingness to help those less fortunate, and the selfish rich and callous little asshats that are so prevalent today often leaves me bordering on extreme depression and anger. I find myself asking why more people can't be like her, why can't they set aside their selfish little needs and help someone, give to others, share what they have, and help make the world a better place. She was able to do it with an ancient modem and an antique computer. It was so simple and yet so effective.

The world now has so many more options and yet, even with something like Facebook that can be and is often used for good, it often seems that her efforts were somehow different, somehow larger and more sincere. Maybe because it was more difficult. Maybe because she had to log on to her computer instead of just moving the mouse. Maybe because it took time to communicate with someone in another country, to learn their language, their culture, what made them special and unique. Maybe because it wasn't so easy to see how much evil there was in the world and so the effort didn't seem so worthless. Maybe it was simply because she knew one woman acting from the sincerity of her heart, really could change the world.

And when I mention that evil in the world, if anyone knew about evil it was Anna. You can't spend the majority of your adult life as a therapist for war victims and not hate what passes for humanity in so many parts of the world. But as much evil as she saw and tried to heal, I think she would be appalled and disgusted at the utter meanness and selfishness that is so prevalent nowadays. And yet, she would be the first to say stand up to it, fight it, don't let it win because you are better than evil, you are better than selfishness. Don't let the mean people win. You are better than they are. Own it.

I know that for certain because I just read it in an email she wrote to me in early 1990. It's one she didn't delete so she expected me to find it. In her own amazing way, she somehow knew how important it would be for me to find it now just when I was starting to let myself get discouraged, just when I was starting to feel like the mean people were just too mean for me to take on anymore, that I was too old to do battle for the planet, that it was the realm of the young, the strong, that the future belongs to those who have one. Reading those words today let me know there's still a fire burning in this old soul and a whole lot of fight still left.

Burning Love Fire by Crazy_Card_Lady
Join Zazzle's art affiliate program

Hanging With Dead People

Legacy of Beauty

For the last few weeks my time has been spent writing emails back and forth, texting, and chatting with a woman I've known for about 15 years. On January first we started at the beginning of our lives and are now about mid-point, with multiple detours to explore issues that threw themselves on the path knowing we couldn't just step over them and pretend they weren't there.

Like her dying. Lydia is in her mid-40's and was diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer in late December. Time at that moment became compressed into something small enough to hold in her hand. We'd always shared a lively dialogue by email a couple times a month, but from that day it took on a new urgency and now it's a need, an obsession,  a daily practice that sometimes takes up several hours of the day.

We started at the beginning because it became important to remember, to go back over all the small details of first meeting. She was the youngest member of our writer's group that met once a month to camp out together in nature and write. We shared a common bond of either being immigrants or first generation, and Lydia was also the newest to the country. She married an American that she once thought she loved and realized that it was something far more complicated. By then it was too late to change her mind as there was nothing left to go back to, so she stayed with him.

Neither of us remember exactly how we started writing to each other after the group ended. The excuse was that she needed to practice her already perfect English, but it was actually that we understood something in each other, that we had some need to communicate ourselves through the written word that couldn't be expressed any other way.

We're both talkers when there's something to talk about, but with a keyboard, we've solved the world's problems hundreds of times over, we've created wonderful new worlds, filled them with people, formed governments for them, and used it all to define what perfection means to us when everything else is stripped away to the bare bones of idealism.

For Lydia it's beauty. Not the physical beauty of a human being,  but the beauty that is Nature. We're both Atheists and it would be a mistake to assume we've merely substituted the natural world for the mythical world. The truth is much simpler. We do not see ourselves as separate from Nature. We are as much a part of it as it is of us. Or as Lydia so aptly put it "You do not worship self unless you're a total, clueless asshat."

And that's just one of the reasons we're friends. When we hug a tree, we do so as equals. There's very few we could write those words to and be immediately understood. For both of us we've had to defend such a simple thing to people who refuse to accept its simplicity. They want us to believe in something as if believing in our own selves, our own ability to perceive the wonder and connectedness of nature is not enough. Lydia describes the religious as hungry people who are never full because they eat air. It makes perfect sense when you think about it.

Neither one of us are the delusional type. We're often pragmatic to a fault so we're not even remotely in denial as to how all this will end. Of course we went through the first few weeks of devouring every scrap of hope on the internet, of exploring every option, every possibility. And then she wrote me and said enough, that she wasn't going to waste one moment more on arguing with the inevitable. She wanted instead to spend the time she had left wallowing in beauty.

So I started sending her photographs. I'm by no means a professional photographer. I'm an amateur who has an ordinary camera and loves to take photographs primarily to share with others. I adore Facebook for this aspect of it. My page is a community of people from all over the world who sometimes don't speak each others languages very well, but we can all hold a camera and capture a moment to share. And in this way we make a village of the vastness of the world. We come to know each other in a way that language will only approximate. We share what we see with our eyes and gift it with our hearts to each other. "Oh the places we've been!"

And so I started sending even more photographs. I've taken thousands over the last three years. I live in a very photogenic part of the world. It is so beautiful that all you have to do is aim a camera at it and it returns itself as something awesome and special. They help her get through the hardest part of treatment, the treatment that won't save her life but will hopefully give her a few extra months.

 That's all she can hope for now, a few more weeks here, maybe a few more there. It's her tapestry of hope to weave those moments, those days, those weeks into more time. To get there, she travels into the images as her physical body is being treated and so for a few moments at a time, she has a bit of a reprieve, a break from the hardship and pain that is her life now.

But rather than succumb to the despair, the feeling of hopelessness, Lydia decided to live differently. She surrounds herself with beauty in being and thought. She has banished the negative, the mean, the judgemental from her life and lives only with the ultimate sense of honor and love and peace. She wrote me that everything has two sides and you can choose to focus on the positive or the negative side of it and she was choosing to look only at the positive. Let them laugh, she wrote to me. What can they do to me? I'm already dying.

So she has created a world for herself where there is music and art and beauty. It is a lovely and peaceful existence. She printed out many of my photographs and taped them to the walls of her tiny house. And she wrote me that the more she looked at them, the more she looked at the photographs of my friends on my Facebook page, the more she realized that they were a shared language.

We were brought together by words and so it makes sense that we have progressed toward photography as language. She wrote me at the beginning of February and said she wanted something from me, she wanted me to help her leave a living legacy of beauty. We endlessly discussed how this could be done, how it could be created and shared and finally came to a solution that works off what I already do.

In January of each year, after the holiday rush is over, I usually open a new store to fill yet another niche I saw that I wanted to create for. But this time the primary requirement that it be profitable did not enter into the picture. This time it was just to share beauty, to encourage others to share beauty, and to learn each other's languages in a new way.

So I opened up a photography store on Zazzle Northwest Photography. It's not the kind of store that will ever make a lot of money. Sure, I'll probably sell a couple cards or magnets or something now and then and that will be wonderful, but the main purpose of it is to serve as a role model for my friends who speak the same language of photography. Here's what you can do with all those pictures you take every day, those wondefful and awe-inspiring nature scenes that we all share with each other.

And think about it, you have an endless supply of cards to send for every occasion, swag for your businesses, gifts for everyone on your shopping lists and they all came from you. I realize this might seem like an overwhelming task for those of you who aren't that comfortable with the learning curve that opening an online store will require. So why not just print out some of your photographs yourself? Why buy some generic card when you can send beauty?

And as both Lydia and  I and many others believe, why support the corporate world of importing cheap impersonal gifts from some mega-factory when you can make your own and support each other too? After all, we speak the same language when we post our photographs on Facebook. This is just another way to pronounce the words you already know.

Golden Sunset by northwest_photograph
Browse Photography Cards

Legacy of Beauty