Sandi Kahn Shelton

My friend Carol has more energy than most people. She’s written several books, about a million newspaper and magazine stories, AND she’s flown off to all parts of the world to make full-length, incredible documentaries. Plus, she volunteers in the school system and runs the Fairfield Writers Workshop where she teaches three classes a week. All this, and she’s a fabulous cook. Oh, and she’s the mother of two teenage boys.

I long ago gave up trying to figure out where she gets all her energy, never mind trying to keep up with her.

Recently, she let me in on her latest project. She wants to have a cooking show for teenagers, because (1) she’s noticed that quite a few teenagers are left to figure out their own meals while their parents are at work, and (2) that usually means they eat a lot of fast food, and (3) that’s also perhaps why the levels of childhood obesity are so high because kids don’t know the first thing about nutrition and how fun and easy it can be to put together a healthy meal all by themselves.

So she’s made this wonderful You Tube video as a promo to her first show (while she’s waiting for people to send her vast sums of money to finance this worthwhile project)…and she sent it along to me, and I thought it was great, so I’m sharing it with you.

Go watch it. Naturally I can’t embed it into the text here, because wordpress and you tube are not friends…but here’s the link. Enjoy! And let me know what you think, and I’ll pass your advice and comments along to Carol.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5dB442T5mc

I write about how much I’m going to re-train myself to love the summer–all the good and the bad it has to offer–and then today I get bitten by a Lyme tick, a huge thunderstorm warning comes up in the afternoon, AND my sunburn starts peeling.

Summer obviously is not going to pander!

My mother has been dead for over three weeks now, and I am getting used to the idea that I can’t just go to the phone and call her up whenever I want to tell her something.

But early this morning I had the strangest dream about her.

She just showed up at my house, smiling, looking her best. And she was just so amazed about this dying thing that had happened to her!

“I can’t quite believe it really happened,” she said. “It’s not bad, actually. I’m fine and all that. But there were some things I wanted to tell you before I went that I didn’t get to say.”

And then we just discussed the whole experience. I wanted to know if, during those last few days when she couldn’t talk, if she could still hear us talking–and she said, oh yes, she’d heard everything. “I squeezed your hand,” she said. “That meant I could hear you. I thought you’d get that.”

Oh, right. I thought so.

Then I told her I had blogged about her death, and she said she wanted to see what I’d written.

Well, that felt weird, I don’t mind telling you. I stalled a little bit, but she said she absolutely insisted on reading what I wrote about her, so I finally went and got the laptop and showed her the website.

In real life, she didn’t know a thing about computers and was only dimly aware that I had a blog or a website, so in the dream, of course, I had to explain everything to her. She sat there and read everything I’d written, and then she shivered.

“This is kind of strange, to read about my own death,” she said, but she was smiling. “Especially when here I am, back in the world just temporarily.”

“How long do you have?” I asked.

She said she wasn’t really sure. I told her her ashes had arrived in the mail and that I’d put them in a safe place until I could sprinkle them, and she said, “You know, I don’t really want to talk about the ashes part of things,” and I felt like maybe I’d been rude to bring it up. Of course! Who would want to be reminded that they’d been cremated?

But she didn’t dwell on that problem. Mostly she just wanted to sit there, smiling. She looked out the window and said things looked so beautiful, much more beautiful than she remembered. “Everything is so different,” she told me.

I told her I missed her a lot, and that it was hard knowing she wasn’t always there, and she nodded.

Before I woke up, she leaned over and said, “Don’t worry about me, or feel bad. Everything happened just the way it was supposed to.”

And then I woke up. It was so strange how it felt the same as when I had just finished a conversation with her. I closed my eyes again, trying to fall back to sleep, but she didn’t come back. The dog, though, came over to the side of my bed and licked my hand.  

Today I noticed that I was feeling much better.

I worked on a newspaper story about the New England Wild Flower Society, which I visited yesterday in Massachusetts. Then I met my friend Jane at Panera, and I told her stories about my mother. I told her what it had been like to be present with her at her death, and for the first time in talking about it and describing the way my mother wanted me to say my name for her, I didn’t burst into tears.

Jane and I agreed that, as deaths go, and if they have to happen, this one was almost story-book perfect: gentle and loving and peaceful.

Later, the mean lady from my mother’s apartment complex called to give me a hard time about my mother breaking her lease. (Yes, even if you die one month after signing a year’s lease as my mother did, apparently you owe for the months you signed for.) And I took great delight in just staying silent on the phone, letting the business office lady squirm there, both of us knowing that I am not going to have to pay the lease breaking fee, and that my mother has no estate that will pay it either.

We sat on the phone for quite a while, during which I could hear her sputtering with little half-words that couldn’t quite make their way to the surface. Normally I would help out in this type of circumstance. I would say, “Is this what you mean?” And, “Explain to me what you’re trying to say and I’ll listen very carefully.” But I didn’t. I just stood there in Panera, staring out the window with my cell phone up to my ear. I sipped my iced tea, and waited until all the sputterings were done. And then finally she said, “Well…goodbye…” and I said, “Goodbye” as well. When I hung up, I was so proud of myself for not saying thank you or I’m sorry or any of those social phrases that can make awkward transactions go better.

Tonight there was a severe thunderstorm warning, but it didn’t come. We ate pizza with some friends on their deck, and around us, the fireflies lit up the woods like little stars. And, although I know that grief is still right underneath the surface, and that I probably will still have to fight with the lady at the apartment complex, and that perhaps tomorrow I’ll weep when I think of my mother asking me to say my name for her… still…today I felt better.

You see, sometimes it seems that you can just sail through bad times. You can work on being present and grateful, and you can say prayers and keep reminding yourself of how wonderful it is that things aren’t actually WORSE than they are ( “Wow, wouldn’t it have been truly terrible if I’d had a broken leg while all this was going on!”)…and somehow you’ll slip through unscathed.

And then you don’t.

It turns out that my mother died after five weeks of knowing she had cancer, and I talked to her on the phone every day of that five weeks, and then sat by her bedside all through her last hours–and you would have thought I had explained it all to myself enough times so that I really knew it was true, and yet still twice this weekend I have started toward the phone to call her up and tell her something, and been blind-sided by the realization that I couldn’t.

First I wanted to tell her about the snake skin that has recently appeared on the porch ledge RIGHT NEAR THE SPOT WHERE I USUALLY SIT TO WORK ON MY LAPTOP (okay, it’s on the other side of the screen, but still). She hated snakes as much as I do, but somehow, in her later years she had become sort of blase about them, even “live-and-let-live” about them, and I needed to hear her try to reassure me that a garter snake skin doesn’t mean my life is in mortal danger, and that I shouldn’t put the house on the market.

Then later I wanted to make banana pudding–the kind she loved, with the layers of vanilla wafers and bananas and meringue–and I wondered why the pudding doesn’t melt and turn to liquid again when you put the it in the oven to brown the meringue. So maybe you don’t brown the meringue? Or maybe it was whipped cream that goes on the top and not meringue after all? Why wasn’t I paying attention to these things?  

Both times this happened I felt almost a dizzying feeling of grief, of the OH MY GOD, I DON’T HAVE MY MOTHER ANYMORE variety. And yet…and yet…most of the days I feel fine, perfectly fine. My mother was 76 years old, after all. She’d had a full, fun life, she never worried about anything, and then for five weeks this spring she was ill and she died the way she wanted to, and she did not suffer, and people who loved her were with her…and what could be so truly terrible about that? I talk about her easily with other people. I can even talk about her final days and final hours. I describe the funny/sad things that happened. I tell people about the trip I made to her old home town after she died, the way I found the house where she grew up and stood outside on the lawn, looking at it and remembering being there when I was a small child.

It’s only later, when I’m alone, that I’m consumed with wishing that I had thought to make that trip to Starke when she was still alive, with her by my side. Wouldn’t that have been something, walking down those little streets and seeing places I’d not seen in so many years, and hearing her tell me about the people who lived in those houses? Maybe she could have answered some questions, like who WAS Aunt Piney, anyway? And Aunt Scooty? And who gives people names like Piney and Scooty? I know they weren’t really relatives, so why do I have these names engraved in my brain pan?

It’s as if my mind is constantly whirring in the background, filing its memories with this new knowledge that she’s gone. It’s work, this grieving and sorting and reassessing and rethinking.

It will recede, I know that. I have had many losses, and I know how they become background noise after a while. I know how the sadness is sharp for a long time, and then takes its place as a dull ache that lives just underneath your main thoughts. I know that I will be okay, that I AM okay.

This weekend my children all came home, and we sat and looked at the old photographs and told stories. People have sent us flowers and brought dinners over, and we sat on the back porch in the candlelight and laughed and ate banana pudding and key lime pie that tasted like shaving cream, and pizza that tasted like garlic and olive oil. I didn’t point out the snake skin on the other side of the screen. I didn’t point out that the pudding should have had meringue.

I just smiled at them in the candlelight and loved hearing their memories of their grandmother, before those memories fade away, too. And I thought about how much she would have wanted us to laugh. And to forgive ourselves for anything we didn’t get to do while she was still alive. She didn’t believe in worrying about the past.  

My mother passed away on Friday morning at 6:30 a.m.

But first, thank God, there was Thursday.

That was the day that I came into her hospital room and there she was, sitting up in the bed, smiling and talking to the aide. After days of being pretty much unresponsive, unseeing, and with only fleeting smiles on her face, here she was, talking and smiling! 

“Hi,” she said to me. “This is very, very strange.”

Hospice had given me a little booklet about death, in which there was a section called What to Expect for the last days before death is imminent. Often, it said, just before the end comes, people rally. They sit up in bed. They invite people over for dinner. They chat about old times. I remember reading that little piece of information days before and thinking, “Impossible!” And yet, there was my mother, commenting on the strangeness of everything.

“What is strange?” I said. I sat down next to her and took her hand. I felt so happy to get to talk to her again.

“Dying,” she said. “It’s so much harder than I thought it would be.”

“I know, it’s very hard,” I said.

Then she settled down and closed her eyes. After a few minutes she said, “Please tell me your name.”

But–here’s the thing: it wasn’t as though she didn’t know my name. She wanted me to say it.

I said, “My name is Sandi,” and she got a big smile on her face. She said, “Oh, such a pretty, pretty name.”

“You gave me that name,” I said, and she smiled again.

“Pretty, pretty name. Pretty girl.”

We sat there together for a long time. She kept saying that my name was pretty. I told her about how her dog, Bear, was doing, and what the weather was like. I told her that Jim, my husband, was on his way–as was her brother Butch and his fiancee, Dixie, and Butch’s daughter, Stacy, and her husband Bill. Reinforcements! Family members to gather around the bed! No more need for the hospice people and nurses to come in the room and see me sitting there and say, ”Oh, honey, are you all alone with this? Do you need some support?”

And so it was that everybody came a few hours later, and we gathered around the bedside. My Uncle Butch is funny and so is my husband, and we all talked and laughed and told stories. We gave her a foot massage. We kissed her over and over again, and she squeezed our hands and smiled. She settled back into the quiet sleep state she had mostly been in for days. I asked her if she was in pain, and she whispered, “No.”

A minister came and said the 23rd Psalm, and she moved her mouth, as though she were trying to say it, too. Butch and Dixie and Stacy and Bill and Jim and I went out to dinner. We went to a place where I had once gone, a year ago, with my mother and eaten crab legs and key lime pie. She had gotten so full that night that she had to go sit outside because she couldn’t bear to see anybody eating food anymore, and when I came outside later, she laughed and said, “I see you survived.”

After dinner, we went back to the hospital, and I was shocked at how much she had changed in just that few hours. She was sleeping with her mouth open now, and she looked hollowed out. She didn’t move when we told her goodnight. Her breath made a rattling sound now. I kissed her goodbye, and she was hot to the touch, spiking a fever.

The next morning I woke up at 6:30 and lay there in bed, thinking about her. And then the phone rang, and the hospice worker said she had just passed away. I called Butch, and we all went back to the hospital and said prayers around her bed, and held hands and kissed her goodbye.

I am okay. Sad, but okay. And very much moved by all the comments and love and support coming through to me.

There have been many funny and moving and sad moments, many conversations with people who loved my mother and many who want to tell me stories about her. It’s been nice to be with my family members again. There are things I shall write about later on, when I have sorted them all out. Right now I’m sitting in a Panera, where they have a wireless connection, and I am on my way home from the memorial service.

I would like to say one thing: there is humor to be found, even in these times. In the hospital room, after my mother was gone, we had to ask her roommate if she wouldn’t mind turning down the ever-present television set. She agreed, and the minister said the prayers. We held hands and listened.

And then just as he finished, the TV set suddenly blared back to life, and from the speaker came the theme song to The Jeffersons TV show…”Moving on up!”

You couldn’t arrange that, even if you tried.

Much love to you all!

I was born in Florida–and so being back here is familiar to certain cells of mine, cells that agree that moss is supposed to hang from trees, and that grass blades are meant to be nearly one inch thick, and the air is supposed to be heavy with moisture.

In the same way that the air is familiar, it also feels familiar to be sitting beside my mother. I’ve lived away from her for years now, and it feels perfectly real and natural to be sitting on a chair, looking at the curve of her cheek and the way her blond hair lies in bangs across her forehead, and the way she purses her lips because she has false teeth that were installed in her when she was just 23 years old when an unscrupulous dentist pulled all her teeth out. 

It is one of the main stories of her life–along with the story of Marcus, the boy from her high school that she always thought she would marry, only he played with firecrackers and went blind and had his right arm blown off. And the story of how she then went on to meet my father, who had just gotten his first job away from his home in Charleston, and when he went to a boarding house to apply to live there, my mother was the tenant who opened the door–and she had coral-colored toenails, and he had never seen toenails like that, and so they got married two months later, and I was born eleven months after that.

These are just some of the stories that were cornerstones of my childhood, stories she told and acted out and dramatized and analyzed over and over again, and I never tired of hearing them, even though the lessons and morals of the stories changed. The firecracker story, for instance, went from being a story about why one should NEVER EVER go near fireworks to being a story about how you shouldn’t forsake your true love just because he lost his eyesight and his hand. And the story about meeting my father went from being a delightful mother-to-daughter story about How I Met Your Father to being a cautionary tale about how men who haven’t seen coral toenails before are probably too innocent to be let loose on the world, and how in fact, my father was still in love with his plain-colored toenails girlfriend back home, and even though he married my mother, he pined for someone else–and so their marriage ended in divorce 13 years later. (Lesson: pay attention if the guy keeps mentioning an old girlfriend before you invest in the wedding dress.)

But now there are no stories being told. I arrived in Florida on Tuesday, after having talked to my mother on the phone on Saturday…and was shocked to discover that she is, to use the technical, medical term, out of it. She is, in other words, in the end stages of cancer, all this one month after being diagnosed with colon and liver cancer.

Last week she asked me on the phone, “How is it going to happen that I’m going from being the lively person you now hear speaking to you to being a dead person? I do not know how that is going to happen!”

I didn’t either.

But now, seven days later, she cannot speak or see. She won’t eat or drink water. She mostly lies unresponsive, except that she squeezes my hand as I sit beside her. Every now and then a fleeting smile crosses her face, a smile that’s almost like a newborn’s.

I am stunned by this. How could we be here so soon? One day last week she dictated her obituary to me, told me how to spell the name of her high school, reminded me of what year she graduated, said she wanted to be cremated, and told me where the ashes were to be sprinkled. She had made arrangements for her dog, Bear, to live with her neighbors, and she told me to take her jewelry and her flatware and her Bose radio. The rest, she said, she didn’t care what happened to it. Sell it, give it away, burn it…whatever.

And then she went silent. 

When I came down here, I thought we were just having one of a series of visits before The End, that we would sit and talk and visit. I pictured driving her to the ocean, so she could once more see a sunset. I thought perhaps we would go out to lunch. Lobster bisque sounded good. Some ladies from her apartment complex wanted her to come and visit her old apartment.

Instead I find myself talking to hospice workers who say that according to their best estimates, she has about a day left. She shows all the signs, they say, of someone who is spending more time in the other world than in this one–and those fleeting smiles, the nurse told me–it’s as though she’s gone inward and is communicating with perhaps those who are waiting for her on the other side. I was as surprised to hear a nurse talk like that as I was to think of my mother going away.

If I call her name, if I get close to her and say, “Mom!” she opens her eyes but does not focus. She squeezes my hand but cannot answer a question. She clamps her lips shut if I try to give her water or food.

But this morning the hospice social worker said to me over my mother’s bedside, “Tell me about your mother. Let’s let her hear you talk about her..” and so I told a few edited, happy stories about my mother’s life–how she’d been a cheerleader, and about how one must never play with firecrackers and how a man who hasn’t seen colored toenails must be avoided at all costs, especially if he already had a girlfriend back home–and I looked over, and my mother, with her eyes closed, was smiling a big, wide grin.

And when I said, “I love you so much,” she squeezed my hand as hard as she could. 

And now I must get back to the hospital, because I don’t have much longer to see those fleeting smiles, that sweep of blond bangs, and to see if I can’t remember something else to tell her.

Seen on a bumper sticker today:

At least the war on the environment is going well.

Every day lately my life changes three or four times.

Ever since my mother was diagnosed with inoperable cancer three weeks ago, one of the very worst, worst parts has been that none of us seems to know what is supposed to happen next. We just can’t get a handle on it.

Here are the firm decisions that have been made and unmade in the last two weeks:

• She and the doctors agree that she is too ill to live alone anymore. I give the required 60-days notice at her apartment complex that she will not be returning.
• Then she decides that she wants to return to her apartment after all. (I do not un-give the notice, because…well, I am learning already that I must wait and see.)
• Then the hospital where she’s recovering calls to say she’s far too sick to live on her own, and in fact, she may be in the end stages already, since she’s refusing to eat. (Good thing I didn’t tell the apartment she is coming back.)
• But then she eats an entire plate of spaghetti, a hamburger, and drinks an entire Coke, and decides that she’d like to come and live in Connecticut, near me, but not in my house. She would like to live in a nursing home here, where she would have professional care but where I could visit her.
• Then–no! She wants to stay in Florida, so she will go and live near my cousin, in a nursing home there, down the street from my cousin.
• The cousin says this is fine, but says she can’t bring her dog with her because my cousin has two dogs and she can’t handle one more dog in her life.
• My mother’s neighbor, outraged by this, says she will take care of my mother, and my mother can stay in her own apartment and this neighbor (who is a retired nurse) will watch over her AND the dog.
• My mother says no, she’s too sick, and anyway, she should be with me, her family, at such a time. So she decides she wants to come to Connecticut, but not to live in a nursing home. She wants to live in our back bedroom.
• Then the social worker calls, says my mother is once again not eating and is refusing her physical therapy, and can’t stay there any longer if she refuses therapy one more day, and so perhaps I should come and get her immediately before she can’t travel anymore.
• Her doctor says, if she is not eating, she is probably within a month of dying and would be eligible for an inpatient hospice facility here. We are all shocked, stunned and horrified by this.
• My mother responds to this news by eating a plate of chicken, potato salad and green beans, goes back to physical therapy, says she DOESN’T want to come to Connecticut because it’s too cold here, and besides that, damn it, she’s a FLORIDIAN, and what the hell does she mean even THINKING of moving when she is sick and tired and has no energy? She loves me but NO NO NO to Connecticut. Exact words: “I will not get on the plane.”
• I call hospice in Florida to see if they will help her if she stays in her own house.
• They are having a meeting and letting me know tomorrow. (They were sure she was coming up here. Perhaps they had thrown her file away.)
• The neighbor, meanwhile, says she knows aides who can come by in the morning to help, and the neighbor herself will be glad to do all the nursing care, and she thinks Medicare will pay, and I can pay some, too, and so can my mother, out of her social security check–because, after all, what else is it going to be needed for now?

So that is my life. It is no wonder I can’t write a blog post. I hardly even remember where to find my computer. I have no idea what I am doing EVER again.

She says something tonight on the phone that almost makes me laugh. “I’m not afraid of the unknown,” she tells me. “I’m just afraid of not being in control of it.”

Yeah. Me, too.

Let me just say at the outset that it is weird to be in somebody’s apartment, staying there, when that person is not there. Especially when it’s your mother. 

She and I haven’t lived together for many years, and in the interim, she has single-handedly kept the American silk flower industry afloat. And, oh yes, the basket manufacturers as well. Her apartment is filled with sentimental paintings of dogs and flowers, of glass vases of all colors and shapes, baskets tacked to the walls, and everywhere, on every surface, multiple arrangements of silk flowers.

Somehow it works, decoration-wise. You walk into this otherwise white condominium in Florida, and every wall is covered with bright-colored pictures, and every tabletop has glass ornaments and silk flowers, and the couches are pink and the furniture is white wicker…and somehow you feel you’ve stepped into a kind of Disneyland of an apartment. A bright, cheerful amusement park of a room with big pillows to sink into.

But my mother is not here.

Tonight she is five miles away, spending her first night in a “skilled nursing facility” after being discharged from the hospital. She is sleeping in a gray room with a beige tile floor, right next to the nurses’ station. She will be there for weeks while they try to get her stronger after her cancer surgery.

Here, in her apartment, I walk around and look at her photograph albums. In her closet hang caftans and muu muus and jeans with rhinestones on them, and bright pink shirts. In the refrigerator she has apple sauce and orange juice and dill pickles and mayonnaise and nothing else. Her silverware looks like bamboo. She wants me to take it home with me.

“It’s the prettiest thing I can leave you,” she says. “Take it, take it before someone else does.”

Sometimes she talks like that, as though she understands the cancer has spread throughout her body and that she can’t care for herself anymore and won’t be coming back here. It was she who called in the hospice people and signed the living will and the Do Not Resuscitate order. But then sometimes she looks at me and says, “I think I’m going to get a second dog. And I want to let my hair grow longer, and don’t you think I should get a second-hand car?”

I bring her the Intention to Vacate form from the place where she lives, and she signs it without a second thought, and then says, “It was such a nice place to live, wasn’t it?”

I say, “It’s very sad to leave,” and for a moment, we sit quietly together, both of us dry-eyed. I do not tell her that the place wants to charge her an $660 lease-breaking fee…just because she had signed the lease two weeks before she was diagnosed with cancer. When I asked the administrator if perhaps that charge could be waived if I presented a doctor’s note, the woman said it was impossible.

“But she has terminal cancer!” I said. “Sure they don’t intend for her to have to pay a penalty.”

“Well,” said the woman, “she should have gone to the doctor before she signed the lease, shouldn’t she?”

I’ve been in Florida for five days now…and for much of that time, I’ve had the sense of being on automatic pilot. It feels as though it’s someone else who is talking to the hospice people, making arrangements with social workers, skilled nursing facilities and nursing homes, who is talking on the phone to family members, ending leases and turning off telephones. It is someone else who spends at least ten hours a day in the hospital room. 

Every day there is a checklist, and every day this Person Who Is Not Really Me works her way through it, going through the necessary telephone calls and preparations. Although I am usually a person who cries easily and can keep up tears for quite some time, I find I don’t feel like crying at all. Here I am, being with my mother who has just learned she is DYING, and I am dry-eyed. What does this mean?

Maybe it just means that I am not in crying mode yet, that I am settling things that couldn’t be settled if I were in tears, and that later there will be the release that comes when everything else sinks in.

Or maybe it’s that, sitting here in this apartment every night after spending the long days with her in the hospital or in the skilled nursing facility, I just feel connected to her spirit somehow. I feel sustained, buoyed up in a way I don’t feel when she and I are talking. Here, amid the white wicker and the bright orange sheets and purple pillows on her bed, I feel her bravery and her unwillingness to have this be a time of complaining and sorrow.

Tomorrow I fly back to Connecticut, and saying goodbye to her is going to be very, very hard. But I will come back in a month and try to see her settled up near my cousin in Jacksonville, which is where she wants to go.