Sandi Kahn Shelton

I was interviewed by Cindy at WALK 97.5 radio, and she sent me a podcast of the interview!
So here it is.

In these days when the financial markets have gone to hell and everybody on TV speaks in apocalyptic terms, I have decided to do the daring act of buying a pair of jeans.

It’s not much, I know, but I am doing my part for the economy. I am sacrificing my sense of well-being by going into a store, seduced by an ad I saw in a magazine that says there are jeans out there that actually make you look thinner. I am already mostly thin, I know that, but–let’s face it–there is a stomach pooch issue. There is ALWAYS a stomach pooch issue if you’re over the age of, say, thirteen. And when you have let your body give house room to three babies–well, let’s just say, there is enough poochiness to warrant attention over a pair of jeans that promises to do away with your belly.

I didn’t know that buying one pair of jeans was going to become nearly a full-time job.

The first pair I buy seems to fit great in the dressing room, but once I get them home, it turns out that they don’t allow a person to sit down. They come up all the way to my waist, a site that does not want to be constricted with fabric ever, ever again.

I take them back and try on 35 pairs of jeans–all the same size, mind you–some of which are baggy and make me look like I’ve put on my husband’s pants, and others which constrict all my blood flow in my legs and would have to have about 6 inches cut off the bottoms. I put on some that come down so low on my hips that they would slither off if I made any sudden moves. And other, "boot-cut" types were so wide at the bottom that I could have smuggled a couple of toddlers underneath.

When I come out of the dressing room, holding all the rejects in my arms, another woman is staring at the sign over the piles of jeans. The sign that reads "CUSTOM-FIT JEANS. PERFECT FOR EVERYBODY."

She laughs. "Ha! Have you ever found a perfect pair of jeans?" she says. "Ever, in your life?"

I say, "I have never even found a pair of jeans that I can stand to keep wearing after dinner."

She hands me a pair that she says seem as though they might fit me. I hand her one of the pairs from my stack that I think might fit her. We meet at the mirrors.

"These actually feel pretty good," she says. "I think I can settle for these."

I loved the pair she handed me. They come just below the belly button, and yet they hang on for dear life. Not too tight, not too loose. They feel kind of like leggings. They’re not the color of jeans I usually buy–they’re much darker–but I can live with that. The dark blue is actually rather…well, slimming, I told her.

We shook hands and headed for the cash registers.

"It’s been nice working with you," I said. "Ten years from now, when I’m done with these, I hope I run into you again."

"September 2018," she says. "I’ll be here."

I swear that I’m not simply going to keep feeding you You Tube videos…actually, I’d planned to write about the lovely hostas in my garden that look like girls in big skirts, but then my friend Beth sent me this wonderful video of a man who, in my book, is a genius. Genius trumps hostas every time!

I wonder if this trick works on babies? Jenny, Amy, Allie…I’ll bet you would hire this guy in an instant!

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.