Bridget Allison's Blog

December 7, 2018

FIRECRACKER

My sister Eileen was nine years my senior. We were never close until she began her long crawl on bloodied knees towards death. Her prognosis from the time she was diagnosed at stage four was six months. It took almost three years for Inflammatory Breast Cancer to kill her. I held her hand throughout it, until she slapped mine away and ran toward death in a fit of anger. I knew her best and at her worst, and I hardly knew her at all. Eileen was dark Irish, seven inches shorter than I, funny and quick tempered. Despite her unpredictable fury, I was always drawn to her company because of her scathing but humorous sarcasm. As a family, the one thing we have in common is that we are willing to pay a steep price for wit.
I was closest to Eileen’s daughter and then her husband Paul. Erin came to stay with me as a child in the summertime. With Paul, I shared conversations about books and a cigarette now and again out on my parents’ porch. Literature was a topic Paul and I never exhausted.
Paul’s was kind, slow to anger, and he adored Eileen. I don’t use that term lightly. It was adoration, unmistakable even if he had not brought her coffee in bed every morning for over 28 years and put socks on her feet so that she, stepping lightly from her slumber would not suffer the agony of cold toes. I made fun of him for that “Oh!” I would say drily taking a draw before passing back his cigarette. “By all means protect her from “de agony of de feet!”
Paul loved being married to her, even when he was shaking his head sadly when I asked if he had bought that stereo he had an eye on saying, “Eileen won’t let me have one.” He was proud to have a woman who could deny him something even when he could deny her nothing.
Although Eileen was closer to another sister I was the one she told first when she discovered the inverted nipple.
In my family I am the keeper of unspeakable secrets. I am the one with whom they test the words aloud. I am not the one who is loved the most, sometimes I know their love for me is tinged with resentment, but I am the one who actively and passionately puts my love for them into action, protection, the one least likely to accept their fates as inevitable.
I don’t love my siblings because they are all kind, or easy, or even because they love me back. I love them because they are mine. My love is piercing, unrelenting and sometimes as unwelcome as a stage light. I don’t love everyone who crosses my path, but my love for them is not a choice.
When Paul died it was because he couldn’t face a life without his bride. I am certain of this. We had recently returned from NIH. Eileen and I had gone alone to Washington and secured a hotel room so that we could toss sleeplessly in some modicum of comfort and await the dawn. Finally we tore ourselves from the sheets at five a.m. for further tests for victims of IBC who were stage three.
We were exhausted, but there was a current of jubilance to it. We were smug with confidence. She could be cured. After all, we had made it this far, earned a second trip. They wouldn’t drag her in from South Carolina twice for nothing.
We understood that this visit was all about fine tuning the treatment. At about six p.m. we were ordered to report to the bowels of the hospital for a brain scan instead of the top floor where we had been told to expect our trial schedule. We shrugged and raced to the elevator. Time was everything. Being on time for each examination was another kind of test it seemed as we raced through the hospital maze.
Eileen used to love “The Amazing Race” on television. I despise reality TV and particularly any shows where contestants are eliminated. Years later, I am finally able to watch snippets of “Amazing Race” and I recognize the successful contenders’ expressions as I remember ours. The race? We were IN IT. It was grueling but we were winning. Even when we were lost we righted ourselves with astonishing alacrity and earned the right to advance to the next level. It wasn’t a race against time as much as a race for more time for Eileen.
We finished the bran scan and made our way from hell toward heaven. That is figurative of course, but the unexpected delay was underground and salvation awaited us on the top floor.
We were directed into an office. Instead of one physician it was crowded with four. They were good looking and pleasant children in lab coats. They showed no signs of distress as they delivered the news and we were polite as we were pronounced stage four. Eileen was the patient, but by that time I was so involved in her care I didn’t know any longer where she left off and I began.
Our mother reared us well. We shook their hands, we thanked them, we may have even smiled and they looked gratified that we weren’t going to reenact any of the stages of grief with them. No denial, anger, or bargaining; we left the office calmly and made our way to the elevators.
As we drew closer I heard a terrible sound, a keening moan, an angry choking. I did not realize right away that it was us. Alone in the elevator alcove we slipped to the floor as we made the unearthly guttural sounds of women who never learned the art of weeping.
Eventually we recovered ourselves, stood up and without speaking pressed the button for an elevator to come and carry us away.
We were supposed to check out in the morning with a treatment schedule, but with this reversal of fortune I knew Eileen didn’t want any part of that hotel room, not for another second. She stayed in the car as I packed our suitcases in a fury. I drove all night to deliver her back to Paul.
Within weeks my sister heard Paul in the kitchen chiding their little dog then the sound of a mug shattering and a thud. Paul was on life support for three days before she let him go. We sat in the waiting room, all of her sisters and brothers and Mom. We heard her from that waiting room as the machines were unplugged and he slipped away. The sound she made was beyond any grieving cry. It was the desolate howl of the wolf that lost its mate, the sound was chilling and supernatural and larger than anything a woman so small should be able to make.
Once Paul was buried I became nearly everything to Eileen. I was her mother, her sister, her nutritionist and friend. Her world had always been so small. She had one other friend, a daughter and her other siblings. Our mother, more firmly in the grasp of Alzheimer’s every day, was no longer a comfort. Eileen told me one morning she had thought about what to have for dinner. She asked herself “What would Mother want me to eat?” But the image that flashed in her mind was of me. It made me sad; I already felt I had become my mother’s keeper, now I was her usurper as well.
I bought Eileen’s groceries, made her eat tomatoes and drink aloe juice. She would never drink the aloe unless I took a swig of it first. “Tastes like horse piss,” she would remark mischievously as I swallowed it.
My mother was sometimes aware that I had been away with Eileen. Mom asked why I tried so hard. “If you were ill,” she said, “you’d get a card.” The brutal truth of that was eviscerating. Even now as I type it my breath catches. Alzheimer’s disease is a thief, but not often a liar. Not often enough.
But the other hard truth is that I wouldn’t want anyone to do for me what I would do for them. I am introspective enough to question my own motives, wonder if it is a martyr complex, or ego, or that I need to be in charge.
Maybe all of that is true. But what it all comes down to in the end is I am the willing one. I’m not the only willing one sometimes, but I am my father’s daughter. When he died I became this woman who could not be a spectator anymore. It was a compact made in silence as I helped Mother with him in his last days. "I will take care of Mother," I told him, ushering him toward the light. Still he did not go. His eyes were insistent as I tried to figure out what would make him allow this unspeakable suffering to end. As I was wetting his lips on his last day I amended my reassurance: "Mom will never go into a nursing home. I will take care of all of them."
And so I take over, almost jealously guarding the crises. My foolish heart is a wellspring of cockeyed optimism hued with unfounded ego. I believe my fervor can make the difference. I attempt to prove a doctor wrong before he even drafts his sentence, wrest his pen away and rewrite it.
And so I take over, almost jealously guarding the crises. My foolish heart is a wellspring of cockeyed optimism hued with unfounded ego. I believe my fervor can make the difference. I attempt to prove a doctor wrong before he even drafts his sentence, wrest his pen away and rewrite it.
That did happen once, Eileen's doctor told us a year before her death that she had mere weeks left. He showed us on the computer screen where the cancer had infiltrated her lungs. "Lit up like a Christmas tree" he pronounced. It was a jarring analogy considering what it meant. I wouldn't accept it and I argued with him. Eileen was not dying that fast, she could still walk her dog.
I drove her to Duke with the file where Dr. Gretchen Kitchens took a look and said "That's pneumonia, get her back on chemo immediately or she WILL be dead in a month." We would have been none the wiser if we hadn't visited Duke. I will always be grateful to them for seeing her so quickly, for revising her fate.
Eileen died angry with me after discovering I had begged for a visit from someone for her. She was deeply wounded and humiliated. She called me, she cursed me, she screamed that she was a burden and we were tired of caring for her. She wouldn’t allow me to be with her for days. When another sister found her she had been crawling on the floor to get food, medicine, to throw up. Her skin was as dry and brittle as leaves in late Fall. Her hands bled.
The family swarmed in, they were heroic, but I was still a pariah. She did not want me. A kind sister-in-law told me later, "She was mad because you let her down. You come in when there's trouble like a savior. I've always thought she really believed you could save her."
At the end, still furious with me, she did permit me to take her to her last doctor’s appointment. After all, I had her file. I still have her file. She tired easily by then but could walk. She would not let me take her arm. She had only agreed to my request to accompany her to the appointment through an intermediary, a brother.
It was late June. The doctor suggested Hospice in front of Eileen, despite the agreement we had made long ago and at her request never to tell her the ugly truth. It had become obvious he was tired of that game, “You don’t have much time left,” he told her, "I want Hospice to start now.”
Eileen looked away as I began to bargain with him. There was rumor of FDA approval for a prostate cancer drug that seemed promising in IBC trials; could we keep her alive until they released it in January?
It was a desperate and irrational question he answered with an annoyed look. The chemo was making her heart-stoppingly weak, there were no treatments left. Once again he gave her less than a month. My brother was out in the hall. I stepped out and advised him of the doctor’s pronouncement.
The agreement to allow me to go to that appointment was no truce; it was simply a very brief détente. Eileen allowed me to stay as the family organized themselves around the hive that a home becomes when hospice arrives. As soon as she got in the hospital bed she began dying at an accelerated pace. My brother Greg and I stared at one another in horror as she chased death. “What the Hell?” he asked and wordlessly I shook my head.
Eileen did not allow me back for most of the days she had left. She was stubbornly convinced that the call I had made meant I wanted her off my hands, that I was tired of her.
She did not so much die as storm out of life. I suspect she died hating me. I will never recover from that.
But before that there was so much richness, laughter and strange commonalities. One of those was our discomfort with our tears. I do not cry when I am sad, she only cried when she was angry. We both found humor in the dark. We alone out of the sisters took a perverse pleasure out of creating awkward moments for those unlucky enough to reveal their prudishness. I am no prude but she delighted in going further and further with inappropriate remarks until she found my own Achilles heel. When she bemoaned her lack of a sex life to her doctors I was mortified enough for her to make it part of every visit.
Once she asked me quite seriously if I could contact the “Make a Wish Foundation” for her. She would like to have sex once more and wanted me to see if they could arrange it. I explained that the foundation was for children but I would gladly make any request for her if only to liven up the “Make a Wish” staff’s day. We cackled, we rolled, we crossed our legs to keep from wetting ourselves. We considered the image of some kindly middle-aged woman accustomed to opening teenaged requests for celebrity visits only to find Eileen’s plea for a one-night stand.
The things we talked about were interesting only in the fact that they were infused with humor and they never were about any expected topics. I did not wonder if she believed in heaven, I know she felt Paul in the room when she heard a sound. “Do you think it was Paul?” She asked hopefully, “Yes,” I said nervously toeing her dog out the door. “Yes.”
We never discussed movies, although I wish I had taken her out to some. She had never learned to drive so I always already knew from daily phone calls what had transpired in my absence.
​Eileen didn’t read novels often and was a horrifying cook. She liked TV more than I did. There was a notebook where I wrote down everything her doctor said but we didn’t talk about it. We were sick to death of cancer. She didn't want to talk about the appointments; she only wanted to know when I would be there again.
I had told her at the beginning that no matter what she did to me, said to me, I would never leave her. She tested that sometimes. I always came back until the end.
I was not there at the end.
She died on the 4th of July.

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Published on December 07, 2018 19:23

February 14, 2016

Valentines Day

When my daughter had her first heartbreak at a tender age I cast about quickly for consolation, but I didn't have to cast my net wide. I took her into the study and pointed at all the bookshelves.
"I know what you are feeling seems like the loneliest and most eviscerating thing in the world," I said, "But if it weren't for the pain that accompanies love and the loss of it we wouldn't have most of the poetry, books, music, films and art that have made the world a more tender and enlightened place. You think no one has ever felt like you do, but look around."
​We began with Edna St. Vincent Millay and later pondered Tennyson's poem "In Memoriam":
"Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." Long after she had become a poet herself, winning prizes at Duke University with her work I think about that line of Tennyson's and it still strikes me as the most profound and universal truth.
​When you love someone, if it is true, you have given them a great gift and whether they were worthy of it or not it was given. More importantly, you had the courage to relinquish all sense of self preservation and leap. 
​Love is its own country, and to become a citizen of it your passport is a willingness to move. The landscape of love is never certain and your surefooted passage is not guaranteed. You are a refugee from a place filled with plans and dreams for yourself and you cross over into a territory where your heart is your only compass. 
​When you love there are no assurances, no warranties, no transport back to where you were before. Whether your love was returned or not you are changed and that old passport doesn't resemble you anymore.
​It is always better to love. Love will thrill you and comfort you and put you in such a place of exquisite pain you can only long for it again. It makes you tender and breaks your heart wide open. It is the closest we can come to God.
 I have loved many people and been hurt by many of them to some degree. Only the people you love know how to hurt you best. I have loved people who were incapable of loving me back and I still think of them with tenderness.
​I have never forgotten anyone who loved me.
​Love makes you vulnerable and incredibly powerful with an inexplicable alchemy to it that is more magic than science. It never has to announce itself, but is revealed in every silent sacrifice.
​One of the greatest compliments I have ever been given was when I was told that a relative had put me down as his emergency contact when he went abroad. His wife confided he chose me because "if something happens to me Bridget will not wait for word, she would be on a plane in a second."
​And I would. I would split the world apart to find him, them, any of them.  Real love makes you powerless to be anything but powerful.
​On this Valentines Day I hope you'll celebrate the loves you have known, those you kept and those who left you. Exalt in the fact that you have such a heart that expanded, broke and still beats to the one emotion that transcends time and place and reason. 
​Your heart is art. It is Kintsugi, made more beautiful in the breaking and the mend.






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Published on February 14, 2016 08:40

March 2, 2015

Maggie

For twenty years I have been a wildlife rehabilitator. I trained, I apprenticed, I was taught how to diagnose and administer appropriate medications. I ran IV's and transported birds of prey to the raptor center. As rehabilitators, our main goal is to return young to the nest. We watch and we wait. If the mother boots the animal again it is not because it was touched by human hands, but because the mother knows it has a defect. She cannot put braces on her baby with a malocclusion, she cannot take her infant in to have a heart defect surgically repaired. If she repeatedly rejects the infant we raise it and hope for the best. Sometimes things are fine and it remains a mystery what she deemed a flaw. More often as they grow we detect over time what she knew immediately.
Nine days ago I got a two-day old squirrel. No one can do the job of a mother like a mother and I wanted her returned to the nest. The people who turned her in were lovely, but said the squirrel came from a neighbor who wouldn't comply with such a reunion attempt.
I am slightly superstitious, I usually don't name the animals until they are "out of the woods". But for some reason I did name Maggie.
Maggie was acutely dehydrated and I could hear the pneumonia in her lungs. She did have spunk though which sparked hope in me.
I wish for less ordinary wildlife, but when they are in my care they all become extraordinary.
I laugh at myself the way I eagerly watch for the rise of a chest as they sleep or listen for the click-click-click of pneumonia. After all, I'm not safeguarding the life of a white rhino. But I keep the youngest ones in the bedroom until they can regulate their own body temperatures. I get up over and over to heat weight appropriate quantities of formula and electrolytes.
I tell myself I have to earn a living, that there is no shortage of (insert common mammal's name here) and that I need sleep.
But in the end, it is a life and something about it becomes sacred.
Maggie started trying to die in earnest by day four. She still ate a little, I increased feedings by adding shifts of pure fluids between formula feedings. By 4 a.m. of day 5 I looked in on her and she had propped herself up in the tiny corner of the box that was unheated. I call this "moving off the mat", this little suicide. I touched her and she was ice. I picked her up and was rewarded with the slightest of twitches. Without thinking twice I unbuttoned my blouse and held her against my heart. She began to move to warm, to nose and nuzzle against the beat. Once she was moving in earnest I took her into the kitchen and one-handed, filled a syringe. I almost fell asleep, hand over my chest, palming her there for hours. By the time I staggered over and returned her to her box she was breathing, but I was surprised to find her alive a few hours later when I had to get up for work. Later that afternoon she was gasping and moving off the mat again. And I held her against me again. I fed her, she struggled against it. I held her to the rhythm of my beating heart; she took more. I knew she was fading. I remembered another squirrel I had revived over and over but it had taken a toll in brain damage. Still some compulsion made me hold her, flesh to flesh, for one night more. When I put her in the box her mouth stayed mostly open. I expected her to be dead by morning. She lasted until noon.
I waited an hour of so and then took her to a little hollow at the base of a tree where she would be food for some other animal, cold and hungry...finding her like a sorely needed present. A present the Lord made.
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Published on March 02, 2015 06:54 Tags: bridget-gallen-allison, environmentalism, squirrels, wildlife

March 1, 2015

The Date Rape Boyfriend

I went to see a woman I will call Christy who is quickly becoming a friend, although we have actually only had two intimate conversations and one was about her house and finances.
Christy and I discussed our childhoods for a moment and I mentioned I had been molested as a little girl and how I look upon that as a moment when my parents became heroic. When I tell the story of who I am I have gone from never telling that story to sharing it quite freely. It was a pivotal moment in my development and defined my standards for truly noble and selfless parenting on the part of my mother and father.
When I finished explaining this, Christy blurted out: "I was date raped, well hardly that--it was completely my fault. I had too much to drink and I didn't know him well. He was the friend of my ex-boyfriend's and we got reaquainted at a party. He asked me back to his place and had sex with me even though I was crying and asking him to stop. But he was so apologetic and horrified by his actions I went out with him a couple of times afterwards. So it wasn't really rape."
"You were raped," I said. "Of course you were raped: you went out with him because you wanted to change your own narrative."
The strangest part of this was that I had just been wondering about this as I went about some mindless chore the day before. I wondered exactly that: "How many women are raped by someone they know, but in an effort to alter their own story they go out with that person afterwards?"
But if you look at the lead the truth is there. Before the disclaimers and qualifying remarks it begins "I was date raped."
It seems to me that by sequestering rape into "rape and "date rape" we are taking even more blame off the rapist and casting deeper shadows on the victim's actions. The women become somehow more culpable and room for "misunderstanding" is allowed.
That may not be true but it feels true.
I have listened to stories of date rape from the victims often enough that I have grown increasingly alarmed by the way they frame their own stories. It becomes an "I was sort of raped" story and often begins--"I was stupid."
It may have been three years ago, thirty years ago, they may have been initially attracted or the worse for drink or unconscious. But they didn't say yes. They struggled or they were unable to say no. They didn't want to have sex, they did not want to have been raped, and they didn't want to think of themselves as raped. They kept their own counsel or shared their stories immediately with people who asked questions they couldn't answer.
And so I think they sabotage their own defense. They try to stomach the story of "You are just so sexy I couldn't help myself" or "I thought you wanted me too," or like Christy's rapist simply "Oh my God I am so sorry."
It is troubling enough that young women get to campus security, their own "friends" or acquaintances of the rapists who dissuade them from reporting sexual assaults to the police. It is really disquieting that some find the prospect of being a rape victim in this society so abhorrent that they feel forced to collude with attackers.
Which leaves me to wonder not only; "What are the real numbers?" But, "When are we going to start supporting our daughters when they fight back? When will we stop being content with merely derailing a rapist's college degree?"
I suggest we begin with all the support we can muster for these women to be heard. We must talk to not only our sons about their responsibilities toward any young woman who seems to be in danger, but to our daughters about groups such as "The Collective Carry." We must teach them how to keep their friends from letting their own shock and unwillingness to see themselves as victims into a determination to replace the "Date Rape Boyfriend" with "Defendant."
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Published on March 01, 2015 18:46 Tags: date-rape, the-collective-carry

February 25, 2015

The third book

Everyone talks about the follow-up when they read an author's first book. In my opinion, when a series is concerned, it is the third book that says so much. 

I think I have made "Maid in Waiting" a monster. It is, after all, number three in the series, and that is the one by which I judge a writer. I know that I am guilty of examining "Waiting" too much -- for formulaic writing, for patterns, for evidence that I am going to be cheated by increasingly watered-down versions of the first book. I simply do not want "Maid in Waiting" to be that. 

Unlike my first book, which I tossed up on the internet with a certain defensive carelessness, the series has become important to me. Not letting you down by accidentally uploading a draft (as I did in my virgin foray into self-publishing) has become something bigger. I don't want to disappoint my readers with anything that would disillusion me. When I talk about Ben in Yemen, I want to know everything about it. I want to know so much more than I need in order to set the scene for you.
While Gretchen is with Elizabeth in London, I want you to feel it, see it, love the people she loves and want to come and visit with them again. And this is perhaps how I turned "Maid in Waiting" from book three into book "Oh My God I So Want Every Fan to Be Completely Happy."


That is a ridiculous goal. 


I wrote the first two books for me and created a world with a character I understood and wanted to reveal to you in all her damaged glory. Now I am back to doing just that again. In order for you to have Gretchen again, she has to be mine first.

I am so grateful to all the people who have been so patient and continue to wait. Now the reviews have been pushed aside (as much as I appreciate every single one) and Gretchen can stretch, breathe, grow, and get to you more quickly.

Thank you all.

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Published on February 25, 2015 09:39

February 24, 2015

The third book

Everyone talks about tje follow-up when they read an author's first book. In my opinion, when a series is concerned, it is the third book that says so much. 
I think I have made "Maid in Waiting" a monster. It is, after all, number three in the series, and that is the one by which I judge a writer. I know that I am guilty of examining "Waiting" too much -- for formulaic writing, for patterns, for evidence that I am going to be cheated by increasingly watered-down versions of the first book. I simply do not want "Maid in Waiting" to be that. 
Unlike my first book, which I tossed up on the internet with a certain defensive carelessness, the series has become important to me. Not letting you down by accidentally uploading a draft (as I did in my virgin foray into self-publishing) has become something bigger. I don't want to disappoint my readers with anything that would disillusion me. When I talk about Ben in Yemen, I want to know everything about it. I want to know so much more than I need in order to set the scene for you.
While Gretchen is with Elizabeth in London, I want you to feel it, see it, love the people she loves and want to come and visit with them again. And this is perhaps how I turned "Maid in Waiting" from book three into book "Oh My God I So Want Every Fan to Be Completely Happy."

That is a ridiculous goal. 
I wrote the first two books for me and created a world with a character I understood and wanted to reveal to you in all her damaged glory. Now I am back to doing just that again. In order for you to have Gretchen again, she has to be mine first.
I am so grateful to all the people who have been so patient and continue to wait. Now the reviews have been pushed aside (as much as I appreciate every single one) and Gretchen can stretch, breathe, grow, and get to you more quickly.

Thank you all.

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Published on February 24, 2015 20:59

February 12, 2015

The Third Book

Everyone talks about a follow-up when they read an author's first book. In my opinion when it is a series, it is the third book that says so much.
I think I have made "Maid in Waiting" a monster. It is, after all, number three in the series and that is the one I judge a writer by. I examine it for too much formula writing, for patterns, for evidence that I am going to be cheated by increasingly watered down versions of the first book and I simply do not want "Maid in Waiting" to be that.
Unlike my first book which I tossed up on the internet with a certain defensive carelessness, the series has become important to me.
Not letting you down by accidently uploading a draft as I did in my virgin foray into self publishing has become something bigger. I don't want to dissappoint my readers with anything which would disillusion me. When I talk about Ben in Yemen I want to know everything about it, I want to know so much more than I need in order to set the scene for you.
While Gretchen is with Elizabeth in London I want you to feel it, see it, love the people she loves and want to come and visit with them again.
And this is perhaps how I turned "Maid in Waiting" from book three into book "Oh My God I So Want Every Fan to Be Completely Happy."
That is a ridiculous goal. I wrote the first two books for me and created a world with a character I understood and wanted to reveal to you in all her damaged glory.
Now I am back to doing just that again.
In order for you to have Gretchen again she has to be mine first.
I am so greatful to all the people who have been so patient and continue to wait.
Now the reviews have been pushed aside (as much as I appreciate every single one) and Gretchen can stretch, breathe, grow, and get to you more quickly.
Thank you all.
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Published on February 12, 2015 12:06

November 20, 2014

Letter to a young lady on her confirmation

(My friend called me tonight to talk about this letter and she said she wished it could be published. I thought I would include it here because it is my perspective on my friend's faith and how much I admire her. She is a sister to me in the way women bestow kinship on other women by the simple virtue of the fact that they are the ones you want to call when something is beautiful and when something is terrible.)

Dear Maddie,
Your mother and I have been close friends for over twenty years. We have carried each other’s pain; we have been the vessels into which we have poured our joy, sadness, loss, memories and pride. But without question the most significant journey I will ever take with your parents was their quest to find you. And because I know your mother best I will tell you your story through the lens of my friendship with her.
Your mother and I were young women when we met as we waited for our first born children to emerge from school to tell us how we were doing. That is what your first child becomes, a gauge by which you judge your fitness as a parent. We stood outside the school anxiously hoping that Brook and Chelsea would come out with broad smiles and without yellow cards. We chatted and compared notes those first few months through every twist and turn on that exhilarating ride that is parenting. And it is quite a ride my love, filled with highs and lows you can never dream of until you have a child of your own one day.
We were much more relaxed with our second children and our conversations broadened. One day as we stood outside the school waiting for my children and your brothers I looked at your mother and asked “Do you ever wonder if God exists?” It didn’t take her a moment to respond; “No, I actually haven’t ever questioned it.” I knew the truth of that as soon as the words were out of her mouth. Your mother’s delicate frame houses a faith that is unwavering and pure and genuine and it humbles me.
I still think of that day so often because I felt a wash of envy come over me.
I looked away and then back at her and shielded my eyes from the sun and said. “I am always questioning.”
There was a brief silence before your mother replied. “It’s never occurred to me to question it. Should I?”
“No,” I said. “No.”
It is not in your mother to question God. While I search and pray and ask for God your mother is listening to Him. And because she did not question or doubt Him you were born. I was an observer to that journey for you and sometimes a companion and I can tell you that it would have been much more of a struggle for anyone else. While most of us would have finally doubted that quest or reminded ourselves of the good and healthy children we were already blessed with, your mother persevered.
Maddie, your mother was not looking for a daughter because mothers are supposed to want one. She was not trying for a third child to cement her role as a mother or because she could afford to, or because she didn’t know what else to do with her life as Brook and Ethan grew older. She felt God’s call and she knew you were out there and it was her mission to press on past impatience and frustration. Sometimes she may have wondered why it took so long and sometimes she may have been disappointed as months rolled into years without you, but Maddie, I never saw her stumble.
Almost anyone else would have given up and said “It isn’t God’s plan for me to have this child.” But there is no one else like your mother. Though years of friendship and child rearing I have seen your mother grieve, I have seen her in anger and confusion and self doubt but Maddie, when it came to having you, it was faith that brought you here.
I am writing to you today because I have loved you when the only evidence of you was God’s voice in your mother’s heart. You have been a blessing not only to your mom but to your brothers as you taught them from your bassinet what it is to nurture. I’ve seen from your infancy new dimensions in your father of an astonishing tenderness when he looks at you.
You have and will touch many lives as you continue your own journey in the Catholic faith and that faith may be tested. And so, of all the things I could wish for you; a life filled with joy and laughter and dreams that always come true, I do not wish for those impossibilities. My hope is that you have your mother’s faith in God. A life well lived is filled with both darkness and light. But it is faith that will illuminate your way.

Love,
Bridget
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Published on November 20, 2014 23:11 Tags: catholicism, confirmation-letters, faith, infertlity

August 8, 2014

Slumber

I forgot to buy more sleeping pills. Slumber is as difficult as capturing a hummingbird. Have you held one? So elusive. So unexpected. Such a miracle in its stillness, the pause of wings and that panicked beating which halts because you have caught it within your gentle grasp. You expect a little death from the immediacy of its surrender. In your hand it changes from force to fragility. You let it go because to have held it and to have stopped its frantic beauty at all is to arrest nature. It is a cruelty too large to commit oneself to for more than a moment. I held one once and couldn't even bear to study it. I felt as though I had stolen something from God.
My sleep is not filled with frantic beauty but the panic, yes the panic, I do recognize.
I surrender unwillingly and only aided by a fistful of Benedryl.
I awaken with an anxious start as though I have been carelessly cast from the dark grip of a less than gentle hand into unknown and rarefied air to fly or flail. My eyes open in a flash, my mind flutters, my heart pounds. My first thoughts are "Am I too late for something? Who have I let down? What do "they" need?" They all need something. They need me to love them harder, tell them everything will be okay, or that it will be someday. They need me to lie to them, to tell them they are strong until they believe it and that little blown seed of a lie takes root and becomes truth. They need me to hide all signs of my own delicacy and vulnerability and be a force.
I am a hummingbird hidden in the guise of a falcon.
For them, every morning I force myself aloft.
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Published on August 08, 2014 11:03 Tags: anxiety, demons, dependency, family, fear, insomnia, love, maid-in-waiting, nature, panic, parenting, sleeplessness

July 2, 2014

Firecracker

My sister Eileen was nine years my senior. We were never close until she began her long crawl on bloodied knees towards death. Her prognosis from the time she was diagnosed at stage four was six months. It took almost three years for Inflammatory Breast Cancer to kill her. I held her hand throughout it, until she slapped mine away and ran toward death in a fit of anger. I knew her best and at her worst, and I hardly knew her at all. Eileen was dark Irish, seven inches shorter than I, funny and quick tempered. Despite her unpredictable fury, I was always drawn to her company because of her scathing but humorous sarcasm. As a family, the one thing we have in common is that we are willing to pay a steep price for wit.
I was closest to Eileen’s daughter and then her husband Paul. Erin came to stay with me as a child in the summertime. With Paul, I shared conversations about books and a cigarette now and again out on my parents’ porch. Literature was a topic Paul and I never exhausted.
Paul’s was kind, slow to anger, and he adored Eileen. I don’t use that term lightly. It was adoration, unmistakable even if he had not brought her coffee in bed every morning for over 28 years and put socks on her feet so that she, stepping lightly from her slumber would not suffer the agony of cold toes. I made fun of him for that “Oh!” I would say drily taking a draw before passing back his cigarette. “By all means protect her from “de agony of de feet!”
Paul loved being married to her, even when he was shaking his head sadly when I asked if he had bought that stereo he had an eye on saying, “Eileen won’t let me have one.” He was proud to have a woman who could deny him something even when he could deny her nothing.
Although Eileen was closer to another sister I was the one she told first when she discovered the inverted nipple.
In my family I am the keeper of unspeakable secrets. I am the one with whom they test the words aloud. I am not the one who is loved the most, sometimes I know their love for me is tinged with resentment, but I am the one who actively and passionately puts my love for them into action, protection, the one least likely to accept their fates as inevitable.
I don’t love my siblings because they are all kind, or easy, or even because they love me back. I love them because they are mine. My love is piercing, unrelenting and sometimes as unwelcome as a stage light. I don’t love everyone who crosses my path, but my love for them is not a choice.
When Paul died it was because he couldn’t face a life without his bride. I am certain of this. We had recently returned from NIH. Eileen and I had gone alone to Washington and secured a hotel room so that we could toss sleeplessly in some modicum of comfort and await the dawn. Finally we tore ourselves from the sheets at five a.m. for further tests for victims of IBC who were stage three.
We were exhausted, but there was a current of jubilance to it. We were smug with confidence. She could be cured. After all, we had made it this far, earned a second trip. They wouldn’t drag her in from South Carolina twice for nothing.
We understood that this visit was all about fine tuning the treatment. At about six p.m. we were ordered to report to the bowels of the hospital for a brain scan instead of the top floor where we had been told to expect our trial schedule. We shrugged and raced to the elevator. Time was everything. Being on time for each examination was another kind of test it seemed as we raced through the hospital maze.
Eileen used to love “The Amazing Race” on television. I despise reality TV and particularly any shows where contestants are eliminated. Years later, I am finally able to watch snippets of “Amazing Race” and I recognize the successful contenders’ expressions as I remember ours. The race? We were IN IT. It was grueling but we were winning. Even when we were lost we righted ourselves with astonishing alacrity and earned the right to advance to the next level. It wasn’t a race against time as much as a race for more time for Eileen.
We finished the bran scan and made our way from hell toward heaven. That is figurative of course, but the unexpected delay was underground and salvation awaited us on the top floor.
We were directed into an office. Instead of one physician it was crowded with four. They were good looking and pleasant children in lab coats. They showed no signs of distress as they delivered the news and we were polite as we were pronounced stage four. Eileen was the patient, but by that time I was so involved in her care I didn’t know any longer where she left off and I began.
Our mother reared us well. We shook their hands, we thanked them, we may have even smiled and they looked gratified that we weren’t going to reenact any of the stages of grief with them. No denial, anger, or bargaining; we left the office calmly and made our way to the elevators.
As we drew closer I heard a terrible sound, a keening moan, an angry choking. I did not realize right away that it was us. Alone in the elevator alcove we slipped to the floor as we made the unearthly guttural sounds of women who never learned the art of weeping.
Eventually we recovered ourselves, stood up and without speaking pressed the button for an elevator to come and carry us away.
We were supposed to check out in the morning with a treatment schedule, but with this reversal of fortune I knew Eileen didn’t want any part of that hotel room, not for another second. She stayed in the car as I packed our suitcases in a fury. I drove all night to deliver her back to Paul.
Within weeks my sister heard Paul in the kitchen chiding their little dog then the sound of a mug shattering and a thud. Paul was on life support for three days before she let him go. We sat in the waiting room, all of her sisters and brothers and Mom. We heard her from that waiting room as the machines were unplugged and he slipped away. The sound she made was beyond any grieving cry. It was the desolate howl of the wolf that lost its mate, the sound was chilling and supernatural and larger than anything a woman so small should be able to make.
Once Paul was buried I became nearly everything to Eileen. I was her mother, her sister, her nutritionist and friend. Her world had always been so small. She had one other friend, a daughter and her other siblings. Our mother, more firmly in the grasp of Alzheimer’s every day, was no longer a comfort. Eileen told me one morning she had thought about what to have for dinner. She asked herself “What would Mother want me to eat?” But the image that flashed in her mind was of me. It made me sad; I already felt I had become my mother’s keeper, now I was her usurper as well.
I bought Eileen’s groceries, made her eat tomatoes and drink aloe juice. She would never drink the aloe unless I took a swig of it first. “Tastes like horse piss,” she would remark mischievously as I swallowed it.
My mother was sometimes aware that I had been away with Eileen. Mom asked why I tried so hard. “If you were ill,” she said, “you’d get a card.” The brutal truth of that was eviscerating. Even now as I type it my breath catches. Alzheimer’s disease is a thief, but not often a liar. Not often enough.
But the other hard truth is that I wouldn’t want anyone to do for me what I would do for them. I am introspective enough to question my own motives, wonder if it is a martyr complex, or ego, or that I need to be in charge.
Maybe all of that is true. But what it all comes down to in the end is I am the willing one. I’m not the only willing one sometimes, but I am my father’s daughter. When he died I became this woman who could not be a spectator anymore. It was a compact made in silence as I helped Mother with him in his last days. "I will take care of Mother," I told him, ushering him toward the light. Still he did not go. His eyes were insistent as I tried to figure out what would make him allow this unspeakable suffering to end. As I was wetting his lips on his last day I amended my reassurance: "Mom will never go into a nursing home. I will take care of all of them."
And so I take over, almost jealously guarding the crises. My foolish heart is a wellspring of cockeyed optimism hued with unfounded ego. I believe my fervor can make the difference. I attempt to prove a doctor wrong before he even drafts his sentence, wrest his pen away and rewrite it.
That did happen once, Eileen's doctor told us a year before her death that she had mere weeks left. He showed us on the computer screen where the cancer had infiltrated her lungs. "Lit up like a Christmas tree" he pronounced. It was a jarring analogy considering what it meant. I wouldn't accept it and I argued with him. Eileen was not dying that fast, she could still walk her dog.
I drove her to Duke with the file where Dr. Gretchen Kitchens took a look and said "That's pneumonia, get her back on chemo immediately or she WILL be dead in a month." We would have been none the wiser if we hadn't visited Duke. I will always be grateful to them for seeing her so quickly, for revising her fate.
Eileen died angry with me after discovering I had begged for a visit from someone for her. She was deeply wounded and humiliated. She called me, she cursed me, she screamed that she was a burden and we were tired of caring for her. She wouldn’t allow me to be with her for days. When another sister found her she had been crawling on the floor to get food, medicine, to throw up. Her skin was as dry and brittle as leaves in late Fall. Her hands bled.
The family swarmed in, they were heroic, but I was still a pariah. She did not want me. A kind sister-in-law told me later, "She was mad because you let her down. You come in when there's trouble like a savior. I've always thought she really believed you could save her."
At the end, still furious with me, she did permit me to take her to her last doctor’s appointment. After all, I had her file. I still have her file. She tired easily by then but could walk. She would not let me take her arm. She had only agreed to my request to accompany her to the appointment through an intermediary, a brother.
It was late June. The doctor suggested Hospice in front of Eileen, despite the agreement we had made long ago and at her request never to tell her the ugly truth. It had become obvious he was tired of that game, “You don’t have much time left,” he told her, "I want Hospice to start now.”
Eileen looked away as I began to bargain with him. There was rumor of FDA approval for a prostate cancer drug that seemed promising in IBC trials; could we keep her alive until they released it in January?
It was a desperate and irrational question he answered with an annoyed look. The chemo was making her heart-stoppingly weak, there were no treatments left. Once again he gave her less than a month. My brother was out in the hall. I stepped out and advised him of the doctor’s pronouncement.
The agreement to allow me to go to that appointment was no truce; it was simply a very brief détente. Eileen allowed me to stay as the family organized themselves around the hive that a home becomes when hospice arrives. As soon as she got in the hospital bed she began dying at an accelerated pace. My brother Greg and I stared at one another in horror as she chased death. “What the Hell?” he asked and wordlessly I shook my head.
Eileen did not allow me back for most of the days she had left. She was stubbornly convinced that the call I had made meant I wanted her off my hands, that I was tired of her.
She did not so much die as storm out of life. I suspect she died hating me. I will never recover from that.
But before that there was so much richness, laughter and strange commonalities. One of those was our discomfort with our tears. I do not cry when I am sad, she only cried when she was angry. We both found humor in the dark. We alone out of the sisters took a perverse pleasure out of creating awkward moments for those unlucky enough to reveal their prudishness. I am no prude but she delighted in going further and further with inappropriate remarks until she found my own Achilles heel. When she bemoaned her lack of a sex life to her doctors I was mortified enough for her to make it part of every visit.
Once she asked me quite seriously if I could contact the “Make a Wish Foundation” for her. She would like to have sex once more and wanted me to see if they could arrange it. I explained that the foundation was for children but I would gladly make any request for her if only to liven up the “Make a Wish” staff’s day. We cackled, we rolled, we crossed our legs to keep from wetting ourselves. We considered the image of some kindly middle-aged woman accustomed to opening teenaged requests for celebrity visits only to find Eileen’s plea for a one-night stand.
The things we talked about were interesting only in the fact that they were infused with humor and they never were about any expected topics. I did not wonder if she believed in heaven, I know she felt Paul in the room when she heard a sound. “Do you think it was Paul?” She asked hopefully, “Yes,” I said nervously toeing her dog out the door. “Yes.”
We never discussed movies, although I wish I had taken her out to some. She had never learned to drive so I always already knew from daily phone calls what had transpired in my absence.
Eileen didn’t read novels often and was a horrifying cook. She liked TV more than I did. There was a notebook where I wrote down everything her doctor said but we didn’t talk about it. We were sick to death of cancer. She didn't want to talk about the appointments; she only wanted to know when I would be there again.
I had told her at the beginning that no matter what she did to me, said to me, I would never leave her. She tested that sometimes. I always came back until the end.
I was not there at the end.
She died on the 4th of July.
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Published on July 02, 2014 19:02 Tags: breast-cancer, death, family, grief, holidays, ibc, sisters