English


I am a clock


My pendulum ticks from madness to genius and back again


in precise, unending, merciless movements.




My face melts, a cacophony of random numbers --


a twelve-tone row gone mad.



The mirrored pieces of my heart


reflect light without speech.



Only those who understand dreams


forcibly surrendered to loss


can see their ghosts hiding behind the mirrors,


still daring to breathe in the pendulum's balance.



Freedom is a clear, but distant memory.


For now, the clock sits in a forgotten room,


unable to move,


unable to do anything


but listen to the pendulum tock my mind


from hope to nothingness.



I wouldn't wish this coma on even the smallest insect in the universe.




Spanish


Soy un reloj


Mi pendulo garrapatas de la locura del genio y de regreso


en forma precisa, sin fin, los movimientos sin piedad.



Mi cara se derrite, una cacofonia de numeros aleatorios -


una serie dodecafonica se ha vuelto loco



Solo aquellos que entender los suenos


se rindio a la perdida de la fuerza


pueden ver a sus fantasmas escondidos detras de los espejos,


aun sin atreverse a respirar en el equilibrio del pendulo.



La libertad es un claro, pero recuerdo lejano.


Por ahora, el reloj se encuentra en una habitacion olvidada,


incapaz de moverse,


incapaz de hacer nada


pero escuchar el tac del pendulo mover mi mente


de la esperanza a la nada.



No quisiera entrar en coma al este, incluso el insecto mas pequeno en el
universo.



French


Je suis une horloge


Ma pendule tiques de la folie au genie, et vice versa


en termes precis, sans fin, des mouvements sans merci.



Mon visage se fond, une cacophonie de nombres aleatoires -


une rangee de douze sons alle .. folle.



Les pieces en miroir de mon coeur


reflechir la lumire sans la parole.



Seuls ceux qui comprennent reves


remis a la perte de force


peuvent voir leurs fantomes se cacher derriere les miroirs,


encore oser respirer dans l'equilibre du pendule.




La liberte est un clair, mais lointain souvenir.


Pour l'instant, l'horloge se trouve dans une piece oubliee,


incapables de se deplacer,


incapable de faire quoi que ce soit


mais ecoutez le tac du pendule mon esprit


de l'espoir a neant.



Je ne voudrais pas de ce coma, meme sur le plus petit insecte dans l'univers.

Alzheimer's gives him a child's voice now. He calls out for his family in
Poland in an almost gibberish Yiddish. He survived 15 German death camps,
including Aushwitz and Buchenwald. Marrying beautiful Ina 58 years ago, he
calls her Mommy.

We visit him every day, and Elliot sings the old songs of Poland. He smiles.
Ina stays with him 24 hours, seven days a week, making sure they take the
water out of his lungs regularly and that his urine is passed through a
catheter, so she can clean him immediately and prevent infection. She holds
his hand and sleeps in a chair near the bed so she doesn't have to let go.
He never lets go.

When he was better, he gave talks about the camps, where he made a face of
disbelief and belief at the same time and said, "We ate anything we could
find off the floors, insects, dust, anything." From his tone, the images
flood your mind. Contrast that to the laws of kashrut, and the horror is
like a knife penerating your heart.

So I came for this second day and held his other hand. I stayed with him
while Ina went to the bathroom.

"Where am I? In a hospital? Mommy!"

"It's Barbara, David. You are in a hospital, and Ina is in the bathroom. She
will come back very soon."

The nurse came in to give medication, and I took off David's oxygen mask so
he could take his pills. He also has a habit of taking off the instruments
that monitor his vital statistics, so I put the rubber half-finger on to get
the pulse monitor working again. When Ina came back, she gave him some apple
juice.

People are going to San Antonio for her to make sure she always has enough
kosher food, because if she doesn't feed him by hand, he won't eat.

When you reach the end of life, it seems you remember your deepest wishes,
which have nothing to do with society's expectations.

Even though Ina "can never leave David," as she says, he sometimes forgets
who she is. David's true wish is to be a boy again, with his whole family
alive, singing Jewish songs around the kosher dinner table before the Nazis
defiled his life.

His bass voice contentedly sang the Eagles song, as it played on the car radio. I knew it was the last time I'd hear his beautiful, soft voice. He was leaving me. I cried as we drove down the road in surreality.

Nurse Ratchett me took everything out of the environment that would hurt him, gave up an inheritance, a career, a life to save her red-haired boy. He wanted his madness and sin back. He wanted his mother back. He was going crazy in Georgia, so he left. "Bye, bye, Sweet," he said and walked out the door to the moving truck his mother paid for to bring him back to Connecticut.

Next day, he'd already forgotten his medication. I fedexed it to him. He can't seem to get the insurance card to go through. He started smoking three minutes after he left. He thinks he'll get by on lithium alone, since that is the cheapest drug, and that's what his mother will pay for if they can't figure out the bureaucracy. He was on atypical anti-psychotics for violence and somatic delusions with blood tests every 2 months. There is no internet in the art shed in the million-dollar home where he lives now. His mother has to ask her husband for it, but she bought him a bed and a king-sized mattress, and he's eating well.

I took his stabilization to the limit, with my life, with my heart. He called me the other day, crying, saying that he cries for me, "How could I have done this to her?" But then his mother says, "Oh, Barbara will be OK. Sometimes the only life you can save is your own." Well, God's justice will reign down upon them if he becomes destabilized, and God will have to save them, too. I wonder how soon they will put him away.

I took it to the limit. The beautiful voice of the human being that was created with constant attention to stabilizing the chemicals in his brain will disappear there. He won't be able to hide it forever. I guess he'll take it to the limit, too.

It was carpal tunnel syndrome, or a repetitive stress disorder. I had to turn down 22 hours of work for $15 an hour for 10 because 2 hours a day was all I could do at moshi. My brain could do the work, but my hands weren't following me, and I had to take 3 days off with no notice because the pain was shooting up from my wrist to my elbow, and if I didn't stop, I might have needed major surgery. With no health insurance, that was not an option.

I have since gotten two good braces, take an ibuprofin every day, wear those braces most of the day, rest a lot. I did habbo for 4 1/2 years and nothing happened, but the combination of moshi and habbo killed me. Not my brain, my hands.

I can't be a marine anymore. My income went down another $1000 a month. I have to find another job that is not repetitive stress related, or ask my friends for help.

One month moshi paid late and I showed Becs my bank statement with all the returned bills, and after Debbi at habbo fired me for a timesheet fraud I did not commit (she compared the wrong time zones), and Emma came to my defense and made Debbi apologize. Becs hired me 2 days later. Then this injury. It's been a rocky time. Becs doesn't want to worry about me anymore because it's too much for her with the stress in her life, and I understand. I wrote her a nice note. I think she's still my friend. The fact that she didn't fire me is a miracle, frankly.

There was one month I couldn't afford my zoloft and clonezapam, so my behavior was erratic.

I'm turning 50. My body won't work like I'm 25. I got a pen tablet, goldtouch ergonomic keyboard, braces, doing yoga, doing repetitive stress exercises, that's why I haven't been writing so much. But my hands are MUCH better than they were. I will not need expensive surgery. I lost 40 pounds, so I need 1 blood pressure pill a day instead of two. My main problem is the anxiety disorder, and having to work at home so I can't advance in a career, especially now.

To someone who was always the warrior princess, as Wanda says, this is tough for me. But I guess I'll survive this, too. Preventive medicine, diet, exercise, rest, healing regime, aromatherapy baths and prayer is the way I'm dealing with this.

People think they are so cool when they say they are unaffected by 9/11, and we should all be over it by now. That's why humanity forgets history, only to repeat it again.

I got up this morning, jogged at about 6:00 am, turned on CNN Live Video, which only had cameramen, no mind-spinning fat commentators, who belong on the Wal-Mart spaceship in WALL-E more than they belong in front of thinking people. I put on my father's medal and a necklace that could be a cross, not traditional, and I held them.

The Irish music of the New York City Fire Dept started about 8:40, and then it came. 8:46. The first moment of silence, when the first plane crashed into the North Tower. The moment when we all looked up, and our world changed because someone's religion turned to poison.

Any religion can turn to poison, so I have no intention of judging anyone. This is a day of mourning, when 3000 people from 95 different countries died together. Twelve members of First Presbyterian Church where I sang for 8 years, and whom I knew from coffee hour, died that day. People from Iran died that day. There were no arguments. There were just human remains mixed in with the dust of those falling towers.

Many people jumped. From far away, they looked like birds, only they couldn't fly. One man held a woman's hand. How did it feel to have his foot on fire made worse by the wind, as he knew he was going to die? This is 9/11. In that moment of astonishing hatred, two people remembered what it was to be human and found kindness.

The people who volunteered to clean up have health problems the insurance companies and government won't pay to solve. Michael Moore had to make a movie about it.

Look what they did to my city. My home town, where my Russian Jewish grandparents escaped the Cossacks, the 1900-equivalent of the Janjuweed today. After days on that boat, they saw the Statue of Liberty in 1906, with the hope of the world in their eyes. Same place.

What we saw 95 years later, what will we see in 2012 when they say the rebuilding will be complete? Will other immigrants come and see the Statue of Liberty without hope because they know those new towers are the same target of hate they are fleeing from?

At 10:29, the last bell rang because that is when the South Tower fell. I held my father's medal and cried for the fourth time. I couldn't take it anymore. Video went off, and I went to bed until 4:00 pm.

As I was sleeping, and then half-sleeping, I thought, "You have to emerge." So I'm up now.

But 9/11 is not cool to be distant from. We have to look at it straight in the eye. We have to face that all those loved people jumped, and a man and a woman held each other's hand.

After Auntie Sylvia died, I couldln't live within Sean's boundaries anymore of what the Irish think is acceptable and unacceptable. I'm an American, and I had to write her a love letter before she died. So I did.

-------------------------------------

Dearest Kathleen,

My Auntie Sylvia just died, my mother’s sister. She died at home, with her daughters holding her hands. She was 85.

It occurred to me that it might be time to tell all the people I loved in my life how much I truly loved them. Sean told me that he didn’t want to tell you about me because of the way you understood the world. Your paradigm did not include divorce. It would hurt you. For that, I truly apologize. I only divorced Sean. I never divorced his family, but I’m American, and we just are a different breed than the Irish. It’s ok.

I left because, before we were married, Sean made me abort our child. I looked at my abusive mother and if he said he’d leave me, I would have had no choice but to expose my baby, an innocent soul, to the pain my mother would cause. I cried on the operating table. The doctors said, “Are you sure?” And I said, “Yes,” to save the child from the pain of an unstable life. I still cry. And after 7 years, I left. I think it’s called post-abortion trauma.

At the time, I forgave him with my heart and married him anyway, but my body raged. Hormones are funny things. I wish we didn’t have them. Life would be so much easier.

I left for California because I wanted to make a dream online community, but the person who made the genius installation for me was bipolar and very ill, so my dream died, and I ended up saving him. Much happened since then. When he married Laure, I told him let her have a baby. “Don’t do to her what you did to me,” I wrote him. I hope they have many children.

I am in South Georgia now with James and 8 animals, our darlings. I garden. The soil is amazing here. Magnolias, Japanese hibiscus, pink dogwood, pink cherry trees, giant red amaryllises, all kinds of lilies, peonies. Roses. Roses are work, but I do it. I work in the online gaming industry as an online community manager, and do not look 50 by any means.

But upon my Aunt Sylvia’s death, I couldn’t help myself. I had to write to you and tell you that you were one of the most beautiful people it has ever been my honor to meet. I have your pictures everywhere. I am thankful for the time I knew you, and will always love you.

I wanted to tell you that while you were still alive and well. Mary, too. I loved Mary, and Robert, Lorraine, Peter, Lora, Leo, and Tom, of course.

You don’t have to write back. Don’t trouble yourself. I am very well, and will keep you in my heart always.

With eternal gratitude for your existence… Barbara

So much has happened. I had breast cancer. Miaomi died suddenly. I have a mental illness, but that is on the back burner. This is my lovely Miaomi, who I miss so much. She died of old age and of not taking her medicine. Evidently she was spitting out her Methimazole behind the furniture, and probably threw a clot. One hour she was with me, the next she was gone. She died quietly and that is good, but I sure miss her. More on the other thing later, and how I survived it.

I was sitting in Roy's office. He's the accountant in the house next door, an older Southern gentleman and Primitive Baptist. I don't know what a Primitive Baptist is. There are so many versions of Christianity here that the mind dizzies, but I'll leave my ignorance in bliss for all of them. I miss First Pres in New York. I'm High Church, but my opinions on the relationship between Judiasm and Christianity can be left for another post.

Anyway, he was telling me about his nephew demanding his sister buy him an $85 pair of shoes in a mall, getting loud, unruly. His nephew is bipolar and unmedicated. She doesn't have the power in the relationship to make him take the pills. He knows James is bipolar. He said to me, "I see James. What did you do?" So I explained. "I've heard that pain before," I told him.

And as Southern tradition dictates, we told each other our life stories. I like the South. There are caretakers here. People sacrifice for others because religious training puts a morality into them that doesn't exist in rich places, where the master of the family fortune will only do for others what benefits them. I am very happy in Georgia.

Roy listened to what I sacrificed -- inheritance, betrayal, career because I can't get to an office, because you don't leave someone you love who is sick to die -- and then he said, "You'll be rewarded for this."

I smiled. I made a friend. I told him, now you know what's going on in my house, because he saw all the financial records.

I think Max wanting to be in my life is the reward Roy was talking about. Max looks almost exactly like James and wears headphone radios. It is emotionally overwhelming that he wants to see me. I can't even believe he remembers my name. God works in mysterious ways. I'm seeing Josh August 13-18, then flying over to Burbank August 18-20, then going back to Reno on the 20th, and going home on the 21st

I'm going to see Max and Josh, what a miracle. My two boys, my two blessings.

My cousins never even called me. Well, they hate my guts. She died a month ago at 85, in her bed, with her daughters by her side. This means she had a successful life. Max had to tell me.

I mourn her deeply. I remember when I was a child and she loved me, protecting me from my mother's abuse. I remember 28 years of scheming between the two of them to get Auntie Sadie's money, the money that went into my inheritance, the money that paid for Ariana's college. I remember her taking me aside after my mother died and saying, "You are a woman of means now. Ariana has no one in her life. Be in her life." After a lifetime of teasing my mother and I as to when we could see Max and Daniel, I was surprised at this. The whisper of the manipulator. But I didn't care.

When I asked Sylvia and Judy to put their names on my safety deposit box with my jewelry in it in Monterey, they complained about how tired they were, but those forms were filled out and sent on time. When I gave her my masters degree diploma from NYU to put in the drawer with her daughter's diplomas, she was more excited about the gold frame I got her from the Metropolitan Museum of Art gift shop, but Judy gave her a look, and she caught herself.

When I was in California making lots of money, I was welcomed, given Ariana's room to sleep in, talked to, admired. When I lost the house, suddenly everyone was busy and I was a burden. There was a conversation I had with Sylvia, master of the schedule, asking whether Judy and Ariana could come visit me on Connectucut. She said no, it's too far. I said, "Well, if they can go to England to see Judy's friend, why can't they come to Connecticut?" "Uh," and the voice stopped on the phone. I cought her in a lie. I nailed her. She was not used to being nailed.

When I arrived at Judy's apartment, inbetween California and Connecticut, she kicked me out of Judy's house. Afterwards, and before Judy invited me to the Indian restaurant for the famous, "We can't help you" aria. What transpired between Sylvia and Judy in that conversation the night before? What question did they think I was asking? To stay with someone for two days was help? If I were family, my presence would have been a comfort, not a burden. The only answer I can come up with is that they thought I'd ask for the money they used to protect Ariana, the money Sylvia and my mother schemed to get for 28 years. How would that be possible after all the sacrifice I made to save James?

But Sylvia was sexually abused as a child by her grandfather. I have a picture of her and my mother in a boat. Sylvia is frowning, my mother is obliviously smiling. I have a feeling that picture was taken by the grandfather. Or Sylvia was just abused recently. Did my mother know? I will never know. There were no child help lines during the Depression among Russian Jewish immigrants. That unprotected child, a crime victim, is who Sylvia was until the day she died.

This is a huge death for me. The last of a generation. She loved me once. I loved her with every bit of my heart. I will love my memories of her, from when I was a child, forever, and miss her dearly. If she saw me, after my mother died, as a profit and loss statement, from a twisted, tortured place of fear, then I will forgive her for that. She is in heaven now, with God. I hope God has taken the pain of her abuse away, and she has found peace at last.

Judy sits in her apartment alone. Dirty carpet. Too-small bathroom. Roaches in the kitchen that come to the table where she eats. A long, narrow dark hallway with old linoleum floors is lit by a small uncovered red lightbulb. She lived her life by Sylvia's imagination, not by her own, as I did. Max told me her friends have died. Her daughter moved out. Living your life by your own imagination takes a courage I don't think she has. At 62, I see her sitting at her table with a confused soul, in tears.

Pain is relative. The experience of pain is a shifting landscape of strange sensations. Is this a 5? More? Less? Do I hurt as much today as yesterday? Gradations and perceptions that move slowly. It's like the transition from spring to summer, despite the official pronouncements, we move gradually from the cold of winter through the mildness of spring into the heat of summer. In summer, you look back at winter and shiver. But from Monday to Tuesday to Wednesday, as the world swirls from one distance to another relative to the sun, it is far more subtle.
I struggle with a concern that I'm somehow imagining the pain. I'm afraid that the tests will come back and there will be nothing.
I remind myself that I felt that way when I was getting increasingly ill from the effects of my fibroids. Nobody knew I had them; none of my symptoms pointed to such a profound dysfunction in my reproductive organs. I was anemic and asthmatic. Martha was afraid that it was cancer (we'd had a cat with brain cancer and chasing the effects was a truly awesome yoga).
I remind myself to talk to Martha. She points out that I've acclimated myself to turning my whole body to look left or right. She points out that my pain is real and when I reject the painkillers out of a fear of addiction that my pain prevents me from performing the most basic of functions. Emptying the dishwasher becomes a horrible labor of agony. Walking the dog becomes a hideous experiment with rage. My doctor assures me that my conservative use of drugs is not up into the danger zone for addiction.
Today, I'm filled with radioactive calcium; later they'll scan my bones and see where the uptake is high. Those areas are arthritic or cracked.
It's weird but not impossible. With Martha on my side, I have a better chance of navigating the system and discovering what is going on and what options I have for managing my pain.