A long hard week...

  Love is all there is.  And the older I get, the more I know this to be true.  In the end, all we have is each other and family is everything...and friends are family and life is hard sometimes.  I'm feeling very blessed this week to have people in my life who show me again and again that I am not alone. Some of these people are my family of origin. Some of them are my AA family. Some of them are my cyber-family.  

  Sometimes sacrifices must be made for things to come together the way they should. I think we all have had times in our lives that were so painful and so difficult at the time that we couldn't possibly see any point to it. Or maybe even see that we could possibly survive it.  But we do. And there is.  And eventually the grief passes and the pain lessens and we are left with a gaping hole in our hearts that takes longer to heal.  But heal it will. And learn we will.

  At least that's been my experience.

  This past week, my brother's 19 year old grandson was found dead of a heroin overdose.  It seems that heroin use is on the rise again among our young people.  We have known that this boy and 2 of my brothers sons (and one of my sisters daughters) have been messing around with it.  At one point (maybe 6-7 months ago--maybe longer) at my brothers request, I got involved in a bit of an intervention and took one of the boys to a treatment/rehab/evaluation place.  Of course, they aren't all boys...the one I took is in his 30's I guess.  They sent him home.  They said he was a recreational drug user and not qualified for treatment. He wouldn't have stayed anyway.

  That's how these things go.

  One of the brothers went to rehab. He seems to be clean.

   The other brother got treatment for depression and seemed to be getting better and was off the stuff.

 The dead boy got pulled over for speeding and they found paraphernalia and arrested hm. He did 6 months and got out a couple of weeks ago.  I think we had all hoped it would have been enough of a scare (or kick in the butt) to make him stop using for good.  It wasn't.

  And now he is dead. No more chances, no more options, no nothing.  And his family is reeling. And the devastation is acute. And my family is left with that gaping hole where young Cody used to live. It is senseless, it is tragic, it is beyond grief.  Allegedly, the dealer and his girlfriend picked him up, took him somewhere, they shot up the dope and they took him back to his house when they saw he was od'ing, and left him there to die. And the outrage of everyone involved  leaves me thinking--well, what do you expect? That's how these people live.  And I had to say the words more than once--He made the choice to use.  It was Cody that called them, went with them, shot up.  He is not a blameless victim in this.  And my words fall on deaf ears, because they all want this to be someone else's fault. Of course they do. Because when something like this happens, everyone feels so guilty. If only...we could have done this or that or MORE.  Because they don't understand the nature of addiction.  It doesn't make it all any less wrong, or tragic...it only leaves us with no one to blame really.  And lots of unresolved issues and no chance to say goodbyes  or I love yous or anything.

   Yet, life goes on.  This boy's baby cousin turns 1 year old today.  The party has been postponed.  People have to go back to work and take care of their children and live their lives.  Mothers and fathers have to get on with their other children. Sisters and brothers have to learn to live with the ghost of a boy who won't be at the table come Thanksgiving. And maybe everyone will pull each closer and be reminded for a time that we desperately need each other in this life.  And that we have to take every opportunity we get to say I love you and to pay attention and to live the best lives we know how.

  And maybe that's all there ever is anyway. 

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  And my garden keeps me busy, with too much solitude and too much time to think. We have been harvesting and freezing edamame this week. Drying tomatoes. Planting...green beans and kale and lettuces, radishes, carrots. I still haven't made the jalapeno jelly. Sat with my neighbors husband 2 days last week and am helping a friend with her grandchildren tomorrow.  I plan to get my fridge cleaned out today if I don't do anything else. The front yard needs mowing drastically and I may do that or save it for the Irishman who gets home around 4 today.  My knee has been hurting pretty badly, so I may forego that job. 

   Well..not a very upbeat post today, but I feel a little better for having verbalized some of this and gotten it out of me onto the page, so I guess that's certainly worth something. 

   It's been lovely weather lately--no rain  :(  but temps only in the 80's.

   I have some dishes to clean up and a little other stuff to do. I have started reading Carson McCullers The Heart is a Lonely Hunter...hard to believe I haven't read this before now, but if I did, I sure don't remember it.

   I'm feeling a little heavy and taking it slow.  And that's a good pace for a quiet Sunday morning...

Namaste.

Another hot day...

  The temps hit 102 again today, but the good news is the AC worked all day.  Yesterday it was 106 and it quit right around 2 o'clock.  The outside line on the compressor froze up and it wouldn't blow cold air. By morning it had all defrosted and it made it through the whole day. Hallelujah!  Right now at almost midnight, it is still 80 degrees...and feels like a sauna out there.

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 The Irishman left for Wisconsin today, and a family reunion. He called me around 5:30 to let me know he'd arrived safe and sound, and that he hit a storm around Bloomington and it was only 70 degrees there.  lol He wanted to know how it was here and did I call Todd and was everything okay ?  (Todd is our HVAC guy).  We chatted a bit and I went on with my day.

  Was out watering the garden early, around 7.  By 10:30 or so I had picked green beans and was getting ready to go back out and pick blackberries.  It was already getting hot. I got most of the berries picked and will finish the rest tomorrow when my niece arrives. She's dying to pick blackberries, lol.  We have done this every year since she was about 2. It's our THING.  lol

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  Got news that a woman I know died last night. She had cervical cancer which had spread to her entire abdominal cavity. By the time she was diagnosed and they tried to treat her, it was too late. They had given her 3 weeks to a month to live. It made me sad, as she has a 6 year old daughter, as well as 2 other daughters and a son. who are grown.  I am grateful her suffering is over, but it seems like a tragic waste of a young life. She was a very good hearted woman and she will be sorely missed. .She was 45.

  Then I got news that another friend of mine's dad died today. His wife is devastated and my friend and her family are all gathering around her to try to help her through this. I know they're very worried about her. 

  2 deaths in one day are a little too much for me.  RIP, Christine and John...

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  I am tired. Had a nice evening/supper with my son. He grilled and I fixed potatoes and corn on the cob. We watched some goofy tv and now I am whipped and ready for bed. I had the Irishman put our old window AC unit in the bedroom just in case there was no air today...figured if all else failed, I could just stay in bed all day with a book. lol  SO it's really nice and cool in there...I am going to take my book and read a minute before I pass out. I have all my chores done--dishes, chickens, cats and dogs, litter boxes-- so there's nothing stopping me. I'll get up in the morning and do it all over again.

Namaste.

The fragile nature of life...

My phone's message alert went off as soon as I turned it back on this afternoon. I had been in a meeting, and when I came out there it was. I answered it and a very serious voice asked me to please call her as soon as I got this-it was important.  I called, and was told that a friend of mine had died that morning. A relatively healthy 40 something alcoholic who could not stop drinking and stay stopped to save her life.

 She had lived here for a little over 6 months, out in the studio apartment, while she tried one more time to get sober.  She did alright for a while, and then, as usual, she as back on another bender. After a couple of these, I asked her to please move out, as I could not have that here. Our agreement was that she could live there as long as she stayed sober.

  She managed to quit drinking a couple of more times since then, only to have some catastrophe or crisis send her back into the bottle again.  She lost her last in a string of temporary jobs. Her son wanted nothing to do with her.  Her boyfriend that she had a love/hate relationship with, told her to get out of his life...he couldn't take it any more.

I am deeply saddened by her demise. She was a wonderful human being when she was sober. I knew a side of her that was all soft and loving and breakable. The outer persona was brittle and brutal and sometimes  mean. Always keeping her guard up. Always such a child in there. 

Unfortunately for people like her, and like me, and like so many I know....this is what we get.  If we drink, we die.  We absolutely cannot drink for any reason , of any amount, in any way. Complete abstinence is our only hope. We crush the people who love us, we do things we would not normally do, we hate ourselves with such a ferocity it is unimaginable.

If we are lucky, we find ourselves in a life and death situation where recovery is the only option.  I am so grateful that I had the shit kicked out of me by life one last time, right after I got arrested for druink driving.  I am so grateful that there was no where else for me to go. I suspect that if there had been one more shot, I would have not made it here. Like my friend, I would have kept hitting myself in the head with that bottle until finally my head split wide open (metaphorically speaking) and all the life drained out of me.

  I have known so many people these past 20 years that have died. Because they could not live with alcohol or without it.  Because they could never be convinced they were worth saving.  Because they had to chase that high, that buzz, one more time. Because this might be "the" time they got the relief they were looking for.  And they are dying of things that don't look like death by drugs or alcohol...but they are. Things like seizures and respiratory arrest and cerebral hemmorhages. Things like massive heart attacks. Things like intestinal bleeding.  People who are worn out and used up and oh so tired of the tragic comedy they have been living for far too long. People who have only 2 choices left to them. Live. Or Die.

I am feeling so bereft tonight. I know that there is nothing I could have done differently. I know that none of this has anything to do with me, really. But I also know that in my heart I will continue to wonder if there wasn't something I could have said  or something I could have given her that could have prevented this.  It is all so tragic. Her 17 year old son will continue the rest of his life without his mother. Her parents and step parents have lost their daughter. And I have lost a friend...

 At last, she has peace.

 RIP, M.R.

May 17, 2011

Namaste.

Sunday January 10, 2010

The big 7 birthday cake ...cool effects compliments of Swayze the cockapoo, who insisted on helping me.
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Whew! It was a long and wonderful day...I left the house around 11, stopped to get the oil changed in the car and by the store to get a birthday present, and then headed off on an adventure to Southern Illinois, for my niece's 7th birthday. It's about 2 1/2 hours from here to there, so it's a commitment to go there for me. lol But I wouldn't have missed it for the world. This baby girl was a long time coming...her folks (my baby brother) were trying to conceive for years and couldn't, even with all the help modern medicine could offer. Then suddenly one day (after they'd thrown in the towel) bada bing, bada boom! Our little darling appeared. It was a rough and scary pregnancy, and she was born way too early. She had breathing problems (lungs weren't developed quite enough) and she had leg and foot problems, and she had to stay at the hospital way too long for our liking. But she finally came home and she was beautiful (all of our babies are beautiful!!) and she had to endure a lot of surgeries and casts and things little tiny baby girls should NEVER have to endure (so says her bestest aunt). And today (and for a few years now) she is healthy and happy and runs and hops and jumps and skips and marches to her own beat. And I adore her. She is funny and sweet and cries easily and throws fits. She draws and she writes me poems and songs. She is smart as a whip, and I am teaching her to grow up and be a wild woman. lol

So, I got home around 10 PM and am recuperating from the drive.


I finally found a car wash that was open for business today (most have been closed because their water supplies were frozen). I got my little red car cleaned up (it was practically white from salt and road goo) and you can even see out the windshield. lol We had absolutely balmy temps of 20 degrees today. 20!!!!!!!! It felt like the tropics.


My surgeon appointment is tomorrow afternoon, so I am heading to bed soon to get a good nights sleep. I just got off chat with a girl from NC who stayed with us for a few months after getting kicked out of a halfway house. Her granny is preparing to leave this world, so if you have an extra little prayer of condolence and comfort for J--, I would appreciate it. Her granny was more of a mother to her than her own mother ever was, and this is a terribly sad time for her.


Life is a beautiful mystery that unravels for us moment to moment.... don't forget that today is a gift...that's why they call it the present.



Namaste.

Sultry Sunday

A day of off and on rain and overcast skies...made for napping and reading and laying around with one's leg UP. lol

I got a call this afternoon telling me that one of our lambs had gone off to be sacrificed. It was the sponsling of one of my sponslings...dead of an overdose, leaving 2 small boys without a mommy. It breaks my heart, and yet I know how she struggled and couldn't ever seem to "get" this thing... I guess now her struggling is finished and she is done with all this pain of a life lived in the grey areas.
Again I am blessed that my Creator saw fit to pull me out of that seemingly hopeless state of mind and body..once I was so beat up and hopeless that I had no where else to turn. Blessed to be teachable today, when I watch the lessons others take on for my benefit. Blessed to be able to say a prayer for the departed and the broken family left behind.

The MRI is early early tomorrow morning. I am off to bed.


Blessed Be.

Woeful Wednesday

Ah...I have just learned that one of my blogger friends has lost her husband almost 4 weeks ago...as I read her blog, the tears were streaming down my face. It was sudden and it ws quick. Thank God for that. She hadn't posted in a while...I thought they had taken a trip or something. I had no idea.

You know that my sponsor from NC recently passed. The week before that, my ex-father-in-law passed. 6 months ago, one of my sponsees lost her husband. All these deaths leaving a spouse to stay behind, trying to pick up the pieces of their lives. I don't know how you keep putting one foot in front of the other at these times. I don't know how you sleep in that bed ever again, or sit at that breakfast table. Or empty out those drawers and closets of clothes. Or walk past his shoes still sitting by the door, because you can't bear to move them...marking the truth of it all.

And yet the indomitable human spirit prevails...and one tiny step at a time, we go on. We manage to get out of bed and to brush our teeth. We are somehow able to get dressed. Somehow able to smile and say thank you to one more person who offers their sympathy and condolences, when what we really want to do is just scream. Time passes and we can choke down food again, getting it past that huge lump in our throat. We can wash the dishes and tidy up the house. And one day, we notice that spring has come again and the trees are starting to leaf out and the grass is greening up all over. And the times when we feel as though we have been physically punched in the gut come less and less. And we are able to be okay out in public. And somewhere down the road, we can go shopping and buy a new hat. Or a pair of gloves.

And life begins again.

But the hole in our heart never heals. And we put our grief away. like the medals from an already finished war. And we steadfastly and resolutely hold on to our famillies and our friends and our God...and we look at the world through new eyes. And we cherish every waking moment of our lives, forevermore.

Namaste.