I know. I have been away for a while.
It seems that, since my forced retirement, in 2011, I have worked in what may not be an entirely other field--after all, as a prosecutor of unethical lawyers, one might say I was doing "God's work"-- but now definitely my toil is more in the line of "works of mercy". I wish I could say that I have embraced the tasks thrown at me. I have done them. I have done them with my brand of passion. But I have felt a level of anxiety that I thought I would no longer be impressed on me after I left a regular job in trial management.
I helped wrap up the estate of one friend. I found myself sustaining several friends with a listening ear and/or more substantial material assistance over the last two years. I have nearly as many files as I did as an attorney, even though I am doing work that non-attorneys are permitted to do to help families and friends. The legal background has helped me navigate the morass of bureaucracy that is pretty much any government agency, federal or state. I cannot imagine what it must be for people without my training--as it has been the devil enough for me.
The latest, and I admit to hoping, the last of my tasks was to facilitate the physical and emotional shift of an elderly friend, from her upstairs, non-elevatored apartment of who knows how many decades to a Catholic nursing home. It had to be Catholic, not because I have anything against the secular or other religious versions, but because this is someone for whom the faith is as much as oxygen for her soul as the real thing is for the lungs. I can say that, for all my running around, and it was at a 'Roadrunner' pace, it was definitely Providence that placed her where she is, among nun administrators and more caring than I have ever seen anywhere else of its kind. It is paradise compared to the Dante hellish rehabilitation facility--better than most if you have had the misfortune of comparisons--that helped her to get back on her feet just over a week ago after a fall.
But it is a nursing home, which means that the residents are in various stages of decline. My friend is actually more functional than most, although she seems not to realize it as she reminds her visitors of how ill she is. Objectively, though, she is less ill. I have begun to think that what she is unable to describe is something more existential. She has said it many times, and not in a form of depression, but in the fullness of her belief, that she waits for the Lord to take her to be with Him. Her earthly body is just worn out and she stands on the precipice, or in the waiting room of Heaven.
Me? I realize that I am sort of in the outer room of the waiting room of Heaven. And sometimes, I join my friend in the waiting room, along with the others. Despite the outbursts, and the stone stares and the nearly crying of some, I find that I am not sad. I think of Shakespeare and the Bible and those verses about the reality of age since the beginning of time, which I only paraphrase, without mind, without tooth, without everything, being led by others where they do not wish to go, and still, I am not sad. I am, in a way, arming myself, wondering which one of these I will be if/when I make it another 30 or so years. Will I be the woman with the two stuffed animals unable to speak but whose eyes refuse to surrender? Will I be the woman who blurts out the funniest malapropisms with utter seriousness? Will I be the one with my head leaden on my chest asleep?
Or, will I be like my friend, whose memory is failing her suddenly and apace, singing along with the blues tunes and country and western songs, and trusting in God?
Not sure how "Puff the Magic Dragon" got in there. Kind of folk/country. And there I was the baby boomer right behind the generation gathered in that activity room singing along with my friend.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=8&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CEEQtwIwBw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DY7lmAc3LKWM&ei=vl0wVbbqBYjLsASbj4DYDQ&usg=AFQjCNEqy7qyEExAZPhOJi3qLBmrHiGSIw&sig2=YPXF_kaUVoTnbUzBhDRfoA
And, here is the thing, I was enjoying it. Maybe I was enjoying the fact that I am young enough to get up and walk around, to play with the cocktatiels hooting in their ample cage, where the others mostly could not. Maybe it was realizing that if you don't embrace the present moment, it is gone and the present can become a kind of prison. There they are in this bucolic setting, but they cannot go outside on their own, if at all, and enjoy the wind, the sun and the birds. Or the view.
I never seem to get it, that I don't have much time to seize the day, to seize the moment. If this doesn't get me there, not sure what will.
My friend says, often, amid her loop of stories, "Life is just a breath". I was maybe 14 when Puff the Magic Dragon was a hit. Now I am over 60. I have had a good life, but I have feared too much and so limited myself. There is still time. Isn't there?
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