Out of the Box

I may have made some resolutions last New Year’s about adopting healthy habits. My body and subconscious mind have been keeping up this campaign in various ways in the months since. I regularly get twinges when I am about to race out of my apartment to drive on an errand when I could easily walk. More often than not, I rethink transportation and choose a different pair of shoes. Recently, a book I haven’t touched for years seemed to call attention to a health issue I have been thinking about. It extols the benefits of maintaining an alkaline-acid balanced diet. It almost jumped off my bookshelf.

So, I asked myself, how should I follow up on this little message from the universe? A juicer, I thought. I’ll get a juicer and smoothie my way to better health.

I checked out Craigslist and did some general web research to see if I could pick up a used one at a reasonable cost. Then I decided, for this kind of appliance, new was the way to go and I kept scouring the net. On the Jack Lalane website, I saw a special promotion. Buy a Power Express juicer and get one free. Oh goodie, I thought. I could gift a friend a high powered carrot pulverizer when I got mine.

After I received my email confirmation, I experienced a few moments of buyer’s remorse. I remember thinking, “I sure hope for $169.96 (the second unit was free but the shipping on it wasn’t), the appliance wouldn’t end up, untouched, on top of my refrigerator or in the back of some kitchen cabinet.”

I imagine everyone, at some time in their lives, has bought an exer-cycle, or ab-arranger, or some Ronco-Popeil device that ended up in a garage or closet. Getting started with a new appliance can be intimidating. You have to read the instructions, sometimes even look at black and white diagrams. Excited about the idea of juicing if not the reality of shopping for and stocking fresh fruits and vegetables in my house, I paid $9.00 extra for express processing.

As it turned out, I did not open the appliance box until five days after the men in brown dropped it off. I briefly looked at the recipe book. It featured attractive photos of berry margaritas and recipes covering cool muffins you could make with residual pulp. I also decided to watch the “helpful hints” video on their web site. But I was still afraid to actually touch plastic and keep my hands safely away from sharp blades – and read anything that resembled “instructions.”

When I finally opened the box, I disassembled, rinsed, and reassembled the four main parts as I saw in the video. Then I tossed some cantaloupe and honey dew pieces down the feeder tube. The motor hummed easily under my touch. I poured the oddly colored gray-green concoction into a glass.

“Oh my God,” I thought. “Is this good!!!” My Power Juicer was not hard at all to operate, or, I discovered soon enough, to clean. Next time I make cantaloupe and honey dew juice, I decided, I’ll throw in some fresh ginger too. I started looking excitedly through the recipe book again.

Just about the time I ordered my juicer, I tested out my online shopping skills with another purchase. Last Christmas, I gave my 25 year-old niece a Target gift card. A big fan of slow cooking, as anyone who has sampled my jambalaya would tell you, I suggested she use it to buy a crock pot. “I really planned to buy a slow cooker,” she told me just the other week, “But, when I go to Target, I always end up buying paper towels and cleaning supplies.” So, inspired by my juicer madness, I bought her a well-rated, four quart model online, to be shipped directly to her in Knoxville where she is attending grad school.

While I continued to peruse my Jack Lalane Power Juicer recipe book, aroused by the unusual combinations of fruits and vegetables they recommended for cold soups and salad dressings, I thought about her opening her package and seeing how easy it will be for her to make pulled pork or crock pot meatloaf, or something else she’s wanted to try. I got giddy about the experience we were sharing.

Enjoying something right out of the box is no small thing.

Resolution

My mother died last Friday. Several people have since expressed shock about her passing. I think, though, she had been in the process of dying for a while. And now I am in the process of trying to understand my feelings about our relationship and her passing.

I know my experience of my mother was different than that of any of my older sisters, different than her friends, and different than the ladies she’d entertain with her singing at Tease, the beauty parlor she frequented.

About three years ago she began having falls. The first happened while walking from the driveway to my sister’s front door for Thanksgiving dinner (We bandaged and wrapped my mother’s head until appetizers and main courses were served as she didn’t want to miss them). The second occurred in the Oak Park Temple parking lot before a Friday night Sabbath service. The third occurred as she walked from her parked car on her way to Tease for her weekly hair appointment. She tore some ligaments in her hand during that fall, necessitating hand surgery and physical therapy and giving my sister and I had a good excuse to retire her car keys and sell her low mileage tank, i.e., her beloved beige Buick.

After that point, I started making regular Sunday visits to spend a little time with her and take her to the grocery store. Her hips were starting to hurt. With her mobility weakening, she could barely walk without a cane or walker, but she loved to push the shopping cart up and down the aisles of the Jewel. She leaned on the cart and didn’t have to put much weight on her legs. After several months of shopping this way, I decided to change our routine. It was a very time-consuming way to shop. I would take her to the store, sit her on the bench near the registers, pick up all the items on her list then call her to the check-out specifically to sign the credit card receipt. Around October, she didn’t feel like walking any more, and I started to take her credit card and bank card and do her shopping and banking for her, signing her name when required.

My sister and I started exploring the possibilities of hip replacement surgery in the fall. Her right hip seemed to be the biggest source of pain for her. She stopped walking altogether mid-December and while she was waiting and waiting and waiting to have her “surgery,” (she was scheduled and canceled three times), we hired home-care workers to stay with her 24/7.

While we re-directed our energies into discovering and, ideally, medically correcting whatever was standing in the way of replacing her worn-out joint, we learned that our mother had bone metastases, lesions of cancer, from some unknown source. My mother, sister and I then began a different journey.

Barbara, who was not very involved in my mother’s life prior to fall of last year, became chief internet researcher, physician interrogator, and coordinator of homecare staff. I kept up with my visits and shopping duties, although now I was also trying to keep mom’s house in Doritos and Coke for her contracted posse whose main job was carrying her to the commmode. Both my sister and I talked to the physical therapists and homecare staff that visited our mother and compared notes. My sister and I were talking more often and about more meaningful topics than I can ever remember.

Four weeks ago, we got her new oncologist to admit her to Rush University Medical Center so that we could have other tests done as an in-patient. They performed the hip surgery we had tried for so long to see her through -- only now the medical experts did it so that her right leg bone would, literally, not break. My sister and I placed her at a skilled nursing facility for required rehab.

I took her back to Rush for a day of outpatient follow-up visits just over a week ago. The next day, after observing shaking and vomiting, the nursing facility sent her back to the medical center by ambulance. I met her at the ER. She was x-rayed and hydrated, put on oxygen and asked if she knew where she was by a flurry of good-looking young residents. Eventually she was admitted. Over the next few days, as I realized her “confusion” was more than confusion (Each day, she lost more of her ability to communicate.), specialists conferred with me on all range of treatment options, none of which came with a guaranteed result or benefit. My sister, our family’s chief medical officer, was on a cruise ship in the Grenadines. I was on my own, wanting to do the right things.

Two days after being admitted, when it was clear that she was going through multi-organ shut-down, I placed her on hospice. The next day, when my sister and brother-in-law got back to town, they pretty much headed directly to the hospital. Once on hospice, where she was given a potent IV cocktail for relaxation, her involuntary jerking movements stopped. That made me feel it was okay to invite her fourteen year-old granddaughter to see her.

The four of us spent last Friday afternoon and evening with her. I swabbed her dry lips with a sponge tipped, water-soaked stick. There wasn’t much more I could do. We left my mother’s room at 8:00 and caught a light bite near the medical center. Not two hours after I got home, her floor nurse called me to say that she had passed away.

I have an odd appreciation for how things actually worked out. What most people want, I think, are “happy endings.” The best we can hope for and what we can’t help but receive if we’re willing to embrace life as it is – are perfect resolutions. And aren’t all resolutions perfect?

In her dying from kidney failure instead of experiencing the advance of her bone cancer, my mother found an exit strategy that probably was more kind. My sister who had been pulling extra duty in service to my mother, my youngest niece and her husband badly needed a vacation. She completed hers as planned. And I needed to feel like an adult.

Marveling at the process of life, including death, is no small thing.

Truth Beyond Facts

I have a dear friend who seems to be programmed to see the worst in everything. If the traffic he encounters coming to visit me is not horrendous, he will point out the abundance of pot holes, waiting for him, at the corner. If he spends an afternoon jamming with musicians he had never played with before, he’ll feel compelled to comment on shortcomings in their musicianship. Or, if they’re skilled at their instruments, he’ll grouse that the group had no plans to perform; they lacked direction. People and experiences seem chronically disappointing to him. His remarks almost always include a “but.”

I don’t consider myself to be a Pollyanna, or someone who radiates false sunshine, but I consciously try to see the good in things. And I think, at least, I am pretty accepting of the ups and downs that are simply part of life. For the most part, I try not to take things personally. I suppose I have worked on this for years. I don’t automatically assume a less than desired outcome was caused because I lacked something, because forces exist in the universe simply to thwart me, or because of someone else’s stupidity or laziness.

For all the arguments he has made questioning my optimism and promoting a more “realistic” view of the world, I have countered with my understanding of how our perspectives are mostly a matter of choice. “What harm would be caused by choosing a more neutral or positive view on things?” I would ask. “We all like to be around the energy of positive thoughts. You like to be around me, not because of the color of my eyes, but because I hold a good type of energy.” Even after my best pitch, he would stand firmly unconvinced. He wanted science. He wanted facts.

Many years ago, an energetic healer I knew, introduced me to the work of Masaru Emoto, a Japanese scientist who wrote a book called The Messages of Water. I think it was featured in the movie What the Bleep. Emoto conducted experiments on water crystals, documenting how they formed and changed under different energetic influences. Water from fresh, natural sources tended to be beautiful. Crystals also seemed to morph into more beautiful and complex structures when exposed to classical music, prayer, and even words of gratitude.

Great, I thought, perhaps, I had found a scientific argument for positive thinking. I scoured the Internet for pictures and more articles on Emoto’s work. I was often touched by the photographs. For me, they went beyond facts, beyond words, to explain the power of energy, the potentially transforming power of our own best thoughts.

On the Internet, along with articles on Emoto’s experiments and web sites offering blow-out deals on his videos, I saw essays by other scientists denouncing his work as being deficient in methodology. Damn. I can’t direct my curmudgeonly friend to consider Emoto’s work in defense of positive thinking now. It would not be scientific enough for him.

Then I looked at the photograph of a water crystal that was in a jar labeled “thank you.” I knew inside of me the truth in its message. I knew that I feel different when I’m around love or gratitude.

Maybe this knowledge, this recognition of truth beyond facts, cannot be shared. Maybe this awareness is just a gift we all can come to own when we are ready. Imbibing the truth beyond facts is no small thing.