Not the Worst Way

Carolyn B Healy

The first time it hit me was a Sunday morning in April, the year my first-born son was a junior in high school. My husband and I were on our usual outing, grabbing bagels for the kids and time for coffee and conversation on our own. There was no hurry as both kids were still sprawled in their beds, sleeping the sleep of the adolescent - truly exhausted and deeply entitled.

We sat in the middle of Einstein’s Bagels and idly discussed our recent college visits– the schools we could picture him adapting to, or not– when the earth tilted and I understood for the first time that he would really leave – and break up the happy home I had poured my heart and soul into for all those years. The tears started, right in front of anyone who chose to look, mine streaming and his only welling up. After minutes of trying to stop, I left, and stumbled out into the next phase of life – the Letting Go era.
I have snapshots burned into my memory documenting the journey from that moment to the actual goodbye –the swirl of red robes at graduation, heartbreaking trips to Bed Bath and Beyond for the essentials of dorm life, my son happily sorting through shower totes and bedspreads, me searching the eyes of other moms to see if they were adjusting better than I was.

Finally, the three of us drove to Brown, leaving a disgruntled younger sister at home to start the school year under Grandma’s supervision. In a Cape Cod hotel lobby I witnessed a scene that said it all. A young mom was leaving for the airport, briefcase in hand, as her little boy followed with his dad. He called, “Mommy, here I am! Wait for me.” He couldn’t imagine that she was going without him. I could relate. My son put his arm around my shoulders and said, “Oh no. Oh Mom,” with a chuckle, and shot his dad a helpless glance.

At the freshman dorm, when all the excuses to stick around were exhausted, we left. In the courtyard we passed another couple standing in a wordless embrace, the mom with her eyes closed, the dad clasping his arms around her. That scene held all the hopes and agonies of getting your precious child this far and having to step aside.
More stories came our way. There was the sixty-ish dad who tearfully recalled his son’s departure fifteen years before, a mom who drove the long trip home because dad was too broken up, a new acquaintance who reminded me that there are worse ways to lose a child.

I know now that a river of inevitable grief runs just underneath family life, waiting for us to be tossed in. But 10 years later, having long ago climbed back out, I like this new era that I dreaded so much. My son is in Barcelona this week, my daughter the banker is coming out Thursday, and I am growing used to suiting myself rather than focusing on other people’s needs. We will no doubt be thrown into that river again, but we are practiced now and can look ahead with hope to the rewards we can’t see from here. Life is good, after all.

CBH 11/08

Interrogating My Stuff

Carolyn B Healy

Last year, my questions were all about why grief strengthens some people and weakens others. Before that, my questions were about how to multitask 24/7. This year, they are all about my stuff.

I used to move at least every five years. The usual young couple-upwardly mobile-growing family thing allowed me to upgrade from college apartment to rented bungalow to great duplex to actual own home. That took 10 years, and then began the parade of houses, all of it spanning three towns and another 10 years.

Stuff was never a problem back then. Each new place opened up new storage options, so any new item I acquired easily found a spot. Plus, with each move it was easy to jettison the things that had outlived their usefulness. It was a tidy self-cleansing process, kind of a regular stuff enema.

The trouble began 18 years ago just before Christmas, when we bought the current house, an across-town move from a much smaller one. We quickly stashed our stuff, hosted Christmas for the extended family and got on with family life. The next time I looked up, a couple of months ago, I was surrounded, hemmed in, trapped, drowning in extra stuff which occupied nearly every nook and crevice in this once roomy house.

To understand my issues, you have to understand my marriage, a good but not easy match. Without me, my husband would probably prefer life in a sterile box devoid of any decoration save a decanter for his bourbon, a copy of This Old Cub, his favorite DVD ever, and his big screen TV.

Without him I might have inched closer to hoarder heaven. His unwillingness to tolerate visual clutter has helped me contain most of mine to my home office where I covered nearly every square inch of wall space with meaningful photos, my collections of suns and moons, a wall cabinet filled with mementos from my parents’ era, and well, you get the idea.

What he may not know and the casual observer would miss is that I also have stuff cleverly hidden in strategic locations elsewhere in the house – in antique trunks and painted chests, under the bed, and under the other bed. Meanwhile, he somehow gained custody of the upstairs closets where he can spread out his wardrobe so that each shirt has breathing space. He didn’t pee on the boundaries of his closets, but he protects them like he did. My move was to seize the basement. And fill it. As the years went on, we reached this stuff stalemate until nothing new could enter the house without something old leaving.

We lived like that in relative harmony until we recently decided to redo my office and the room next door, our bedroom, and finally remove the aqua carpeting that had come with the house and the blue paint we had added in our first year here.

Right now, the painting is done, the walls a calm beachy tan color, the new carpet is on order and the rooms are completely dismantled. Which brings me to the point where my questions kicked in.

Carrying box after box, bag after bag and stack after stack out of that office, I had my moment of truth – my stuff was unmanageable. I had to do something different to recover my freedom, my space, my lightness of being. My stuff had taken on a life of its own, like a kudzu vine wrapping itself around everything in sight. I had to take control. I resolved that I would conduct this project like a move, questioning the right of each item to re-enter the room when I move back in.

I started with my books, which are relocating to guest rooms where they will provide a gracious background for visitors. They will have a happier life there on their own, and I can visit them whenever I want.

The rest of the process will be more difficult. The interrogation will go like this. Each item will have to answer three questions to get back in:

1. What do I need you for?
Are you about the past, the present or the future? Given that, why do you need to stay?
Is your appeal practical, emotional, or spiritual? And so what?
Will I use you never, occasionally, all the time?

2. What do you say about me?
Do you reflect my whimsical side, a sad or serious time, a quality I have, an opportunity I missed?
What need were you to fill; do I still have that need?
How do I feel when I see you?

3. Would I buy you today?
Do you belong with me at this point?
Is there something else that should have your spot instead?
Is there someone else in the world who would love to have you?

Feeble answers like “But you’ve always had me,” or “You’ll never make it without me” just won’t cut it.

I have two giant boxes, in the basement of course. One will be for donations, the other for my upcoming Museum of Things I Can’t Stand to Get Rid Of But Don’t Need to See Every Day, another place I can visit if I feel the need. With this plan, I feel better already, sure that next year’s questions won’t have to have anything to do with my stuff.

Ultimately, figuring out which questions to ask when just may be the key to the life we all want. In my case, it is now too late, but I could use a do-over on some of my earlier efforts. Instead of asking how to better multitask, what if I would have explored how to become more mindful 24/7? Maybe that’s what’s coming next.

CBH 10/08

Writing the Book on Picky Eaters

Carolyn B Healy

Some people remember certain classics from their childhood bookshelves – Black Beauty, Green Eggs and Ham, The Velveteen Rabbit. For me, it’s the little-known Cheese, Peas and Chocolate Pudding by Betty Van Witsen, last published in 1971. It tells the story of a little boy who would eat only those three foods and nothing else. Thanks to my mother I heard it hundreds of times. When I get hooked on something, I stay hooked. At least I was until I joined the Weekly Reader Book Club and got started on The Pink Motel, No Children No Pets, Leader Dog and the like. And then Nancy Drew came into my life and I put childhood things aside.

By the time I needed it again, Cheese, Peas and Chocolate Pudding was long gone, out of print and available only in my memory. One miraculous afternoon in a pediatrician’s office, I found a copy in a stack of tattered children’s books. I persuaded the receptionist to let me take it home overnight to copy.

Unlike Catcher in the Rye and Dick and Jane, which I have re-read with disappointment, C,P and CP held up over time. (SPOILER ALERT: there are currently no copies available on amazon.com, but just in case you experience a serendipitous discovery like mine and get to read the book on your own, you may not want to read the rest of this paragraph.) It had tension – earnest parents try to get him to eat. It had drama – he sits under the dining table refusing dinner. It had climax and resolution – a scrap of his older brother’s hamburger drops into his mouth and he finds it delicious. And it had realism – after that, he only eats cheese, peas, chocolate pudding and hamburger.

In a twist that suggests that the universe has a sense of humor, I gave birth to that little boy in real life, in the person of my daughter Katy. While gobbling her way through boxes of rice cereal and jar after jar of baby sweet potatoes, she spit out all meat products and anything green. As a toddler, she graduated to a monochromatic diet of grilled cheese, macaroni and cheese and applesauce. No candy, no cookies, no meat, no frills. I could have written a book. If the term picky eater didn’t already exist, I would have had to coin it.

It wasn’t that she didn’t experiment some. She liked fish sticks until she found out that they were made of fish; same with tuna salad. She was briefly willing to try hot dogs as long as they touched nothing else on her plate, until someone (I suspect her older brother) told her they contain things like rat lips and cat brains. And she was the only child in America who hated chocolate.

Just like the book, her story has a happy but realistic ending, as she finally ventured out into Grandma’s Cheesy Potatoes, cheese pizza and the other Grandma’s mashed potatoes and eventually, the occasional pasta and chicken breast. While the color palate remained the same, she could enjoy much more variety.

Once, well into adulthood, that same brother took both of us to an Ethiopian restaurant in his neighborhood. She tried to like it but her revulsion was real and at the end of the meal, she went straight across the street for the biggest slice of pizza I’ve ever seen.

I have a copy of Cheese, Peas and Chocolate Pudding set aside for her once she gets as far as parenting. I know she will bring special insight to its reading. In honor of her, here is one of her breakthroughs, Grandma's Cheesy Potatoes. CBH 09/08

What I Found in the Bargain Bin

Carolyn B Healy

When I was growing up, a great day out for my mother and me was a trip east down 111th Street from our apartment in Morgan Park, past the high school, two neighborhoods over to Roseland, home of Gately’s Peoples’ Store. Gately’s was kind of a combo department store and discount store before there was such a thing.

The southernmost neighborhood in Chicago, Morgan Park was a leafy hilly place, site of a private school with a handsome campus, and of a limestone library that we could see from our second floor apartment. Roseland was plainer, with its modest houses and tidy lawns set in a firm grid, the home of our rival high school. But it was one of our favorite haunts, thanks to Gately’s.

There was nothing fancy about the store. I remember squeaky wooden floors and glass-topped counters, and a giant center staircase. It had all the typical departments – ladies dresses, hosiery, fabrics and notions, childrens’ clothes. There was even a crowded lunch counter with tall skinny stools, I think in the basement, where you could grab a Coke if your shopping wore you out.

We’d look for whatever was the excuse for the trip – a dress for a special occasion, play clothes, a pattern and fabric that would make it to the living room closet but probably not into production. We always had more ambition than follow-through.

The best part was located in the center of the first floor – the bargain bins piled high with turtlenecks, mittens, sweaters, blouses, pajamas, socks. We’d leave with a dark green bag with Gately’s written in yellow script, as satisfied as hunters dragging home their prey.

On the way home, we’d stop for dinner at White Castle on 111th just west of the store. Nestled next to the multi-story YMCA, it had an Edward Hopper Nighthawks quality. We’d order sliders, those mini-burgers steamed and covered with onions, each tucked into its own cardboard box, and then for dessert, lemon meringue pie. As we ate, we’d rate our bargains, reliving their pleasures as golfers do the great putt on 14.

Money was not a big issue then in my life, just a means to ends like turtlenecks, food, fun, something to spend as little as possible of but not to worry about. I know now that my single mother was doing the worrying while successfully hiding it from me.

Since then, I’ve had my run-ins with money – the bounced checks for my $5 a week expenses once I went away to college without a clue about how to balance a checkbook, for instance. And much later the midnight anxiety about how on earth I was going to make payroll when I had my own business and my customers didn’t pay me on time, or at all.

But my modest start did me a favor – my financial setpoint is firmly and permanently fixed nice and low. I definitely love bargains more than I love spending. Nowadays, on the rare occasion that I overdo it on one big purchase or a flurry of smaller ones and take myself over my long-established threshold, I’ll be sorry. Even though I can afford the splurge now, I feel a little sick and a little guilty, as if I had eaten the whole lemon meringue pie myself.

I’ve transferred my allegiance now to consignment shops and outlet malls, but the thrill of those outings with Mom is long gone. I’d give a lot to wander back through Gately’s aisles for an afternoon with her and see how much of what I remember was actually there.

Do other people have Gately’s memories too? Apparently they do if my discovery of http://www.gatelysstoreinroseland.blogspot.com/ is any indication. The next time I get an impulse to shop, I think I’ll explore there instead. Think of the money I’ll save.

CBH 8/08

No Longer Worth Living?

Carolyn B Healy

I slid into the pew. It was a Tuesday night and I went alone. There were about twenty of us, an assortment of silver-haired elders with a smattering of younger people like me, one still dressed for the office, most more casually, as if they’d stopped in on the way to the grocery store. Each of us carefully avoided eye contact with the others.

In the back, a table was covered with tall stacks of pamphlets available for a small fee, “The Right to Die,” “Special Issues in Alzheimer’s Disease,” and other titles. The stacks were so high that it suggested a miscalculation – either another hundred or so people had been expected, or each of us was to grab multiple copies to pass out to our friends and neighbors. In either case, it made the evening seem like a failure before it even began.

The three speakers whispered together in the back of the room, watching the clock. At exactly seven-thirty, the tall lanky mid-forties man in jeans and a plaid shirt strode to the front, while his colleagues slipped into seats in the first row.

He discussed the founder, a British journalist who had assisted his wife, at her request, to end her suffering from bone cancer by brewing her coffee laced with deadly medications. When his career later brought him to the States, he and several others, including his second wife, founded the Society in 1980 in his garage in California, to bring the “hopelessly ill” news of their right to practice “self-deliverance” and of methods to achieve “hastened death.”

The next speaker was the stocky kindly-looking woman, gray-haired and dressed like Kathy Bates in Misery. Her voice was strong as she presented the public affairs angle. As she covered court rulings, right-to-die legislation and subsequent legal challenges, her outrage grew. She spoke against the restraints on people who simply wanted to determine their own time and manner of death, and the penalties for those who might assist them.

When she got to the part about famous snuff-meister Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the defrocked doctor who claimed to have assisted 120 people to die, her conviction that he was a martyr to the cause leaked out among her facts. The first death he helped accomplish was a fifty-four year old woman who had Alzheimer’s. His last was a lethal injection provided in 1999 to a fifty-two year old accountant with ALS, which led to his conviction for second degree murder.

I set the pamphlets down next to me to give me some distance from heroes who bring death to your door. I had a client once whose religion taught that bad spirits attach themselves to objects, and won’t go away until the objects are discarded, or better yet, destroyed. The issue that had brought her to counseling was guilt and anguish that had plagued her for months after the end of an illicit relationship. She proved her theory - all her symptoms evaporated as soon as she burned the notes and trinkets left over from her lover. If she was right, these pamphlets might sweep forces into my life I wouldn’t be able to control.

The third speaker, the calm man dressed in chinos and a buttoned-down shirt, outlined the practical assistance system. The wanting-to-die person, while still of sound mind and body, explains his reasons for wanting to end it all. If he passes muster, convincing them of his seriousness and emotional health, he is assigned a guide, a volunteer who promises to stick with him throughout the course of his illness, continuing to discuss the conditions of mind and body and intention. The Society becomes the last matchmaker you’d ever need.

Questions bombarded me. Who are these people, these guides? Survivors of a parent’s excruciating death by cancer? Anarchists looking for the cracks in the social order? Well-meaning humanitarians? Libertarians looking to kick government out of our personal business? Does it even matter what their motives are, as long as the person who wants to die gets to? Is wanting to die enough?

The lecturer, a serene man who wouldn’t worry you a bit if he sat next to you on the subway, laid out the long-recommended method of – well, since they refused to call it suicide– hastened death: a particular cocktail of medications that could easily be prescribed by a sympathetic doctor over time and stockpiled for the final day. They would then be crushed and mixed into applesauce which the individual could feed himself. If he could feed himself.

A newer method was gaining support as well, he explained, that involved helium and a plastic bag over the head, secured with rubber bands or panty hose. The hope was that this method would provide a reduced chance of unintended survival.

Had the woman sitting next to me sucked in her breath at that revelation, or was that me? There seemed to be too little air in the room, too little movement to account for twenty-some living creatures.

As one who has spent a career trying to stand between suicidal people and their permanent solutions to temporary problems, I had negotiated dozens of deals, even written them down so my client could sign them, “no harm contracts” they are called: “I won’t act on a suicidal impulse unless I call you/go to the ER/ call the hotline.” What an optimistic endeavor, to make rational agreements with people subject to irrational and overpowering impulses. I sometimes wondered if I helped keep people alive by tipping them off to how devastated I would be if they did kill themselves. Maybe the point is to know that someone cares that you are still here, that your counselor is awake at two a.m. hoping that you haven’t pulled the trigger.

But this, it began to dawn on me, was entirely different. These people had permanent problems, terminal ones. It also became clear to me that while the suicide decisions that I had tried so hard to prevent can teeter on thousands of precarious and temporary impulses, the decision necessary to a end a life as the Society laid it out is made day after day, over a period of time, and involves planning and long-lasting intention. And courage. And help.

My neighbor offered me a mint. I accepted. A few audience members spoke of their own situations – a spouse with a painful disease, a parent who had asked their help – most did not.

Meanwhile, across town, my mother sat, watched over by assisted care staff. She was at once no longer herself, yet unmistakably and indelibly who she had always been, in the moments when she would still surprise me with a joke or gaze at me with undiluted love. When on earth would her moment have been, when she would have thrown in the towel, declared her life no longer worth living? Should I have asked her that? We were certainly past it now, a relief of sorts.

She would have been, I told myself, of two minds: she would support the right of a person not to live out her days in dependency and diminishing faculties. But she was also one to let things run their natural course. She would survive as long as she could because life was good and she was part of it. Realizing that, I could breathe easier.

As I stood to go, I looked again at my neighbor and smiled.

“Good night, dear,” she said. She patted my hand and stepped into the cold night. I folded my handouts and followed.
CBH 07/23/08

My Amazing Metamorphosis

Carolyn B Healy

As a therapist, I’ve been in the business of change for a long time and have learned to distrust the quick turn, the sudden conversion. It is too good to be true, and you know how that usually turns out.

The actor goes on a racist rant and suddenly is moved to meet with civil rights leaders to make the world a better place? The prospective bride or groom suddenly turns in the religion of their youth for a more convenient one so they can get on with the ceremony? I smell expediency.

Instead, I believe in slow, grinding change, the kind that takes place when rivers wear down rocks. The kind that has finally happened to me.

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, a non-Irish, non-Catholic only child. I didn’t meet the profile. I needed some way to belong. When friends began to veer even further away from me into movie magazines and home permanents, I found my niche. I became a White Sox fan.

I chose Luis Aparicio as my hero, number 11. I bought a white sweatshirt and painstakingly sewed his name and number on the back using bias tape, and wore it to every game I could talk my mother into attending, always with several friends in tow.

We would wait outside the fence after the games, angling for autographs. One winter, I subscribed to the St. Louis Sporting News, and scoured every issue for news of Little Looie and his teammates. I had it bad.

And then came the 1959 season and the pennant. I was in heaven. I spent all my babysitting money on a transistor radio with an earphone that would allow me to hear every minute of every game.

Our defeat at the hands of the hated Dodgers took a lot out of me. I hung in for the next few years, but then the waves of adolescence took my attention to other matters and I virtually stopped reading the sports page, a fallen-away fan.

Once I embarked on a mixed marriage with a life-long Cubs fan, I didn’t do much to hold up my end of the debate. I was a little puzzled at the vehemence of my new relatives’ feelings on the matter, but was sure they’d feel better once they racked up a pennant of their own, which was bound to happen soon.

In the meantime, I watched the occasional game and developed a lasting affection for the endless optimism and lack of bitterness in Cub nation. No matter how painfully disappointed the fans were by the end of the season, every spring they came back for more, year after year. Their glass remained half-full.

And that’s all I noticed until last week, when I was watching the Cubs-Sox game on ESPN with my never-wavering husband. In fact, he noticed it before I did.

“You’re rooting for the Cubs?” he said.

“Oh, I guess I am,” I said. “Wow.”

Now, that is real change – when it sneaks up and surprises you, when it descends on you without being summoned. Sorry, Sox, I’ve gone over the fence.

CBH 6/08