life goes on

I.

beached whale

tall ladder

big man

wet tennis shoes

foot slips

hand grasps air

floor hits hard

lungs empty

minutes lag

prone on linoleum

walked it off, he says

hours pass

nausea hits

vision blurs

ears ring

sweat puddles

race to trauma center

rush hour traffic

endless tests

morphine smile

fractured vertebra

fractured rib

hematoma

beached whale

blessed percocet

life goes on

  

II.

bourbon

nightmare fears awaken me

broken bones and bourbon cakes
                                                                                             

i dare not move

no creak of bed or shift of blanket

baker must rest

to heal fractured rib and vertebra

           

bourbon cakes must be baked

ingredients purchased and kitchen leased  

ingredients purchased and kitchen leased

bourbon cakes must be baked

to heal fractured rib and vertebra

baker must rest

no creak of bed or shift of blanket

i dare not move

broken bones and bourbon cakes

nightmare fears awaken me

III.

winter break

winter break calls

with time at home to gather shards

from life on edge, from ladder falls

winter break calls

no painful fractures, no hospital wards

no cakes to bake, no holiday cards

winter break calls

with time at home to gather shards

Ticking Clock

I chose a weekend my husband was off backpacking with his father. I suppose I should've enjoyed the neat, solitary space knowing that soon my tiny home would again be cluttered with camping gear, dirty clothes and excessive testosterone. But I didn't.

Instead I decided it was time to sort my closet. For years I've organized my clothes as fashion experts advise - pants, skirts, dresses, tops, jackets - each in neat groups and sorted by color left to right, light to dark. A bit obsessive, but at least I could find stuff in my tiny closet.

What I couldn't do was pull together a decent outfit in the time I allowed myself each morning, time usually cut short because I spent too much of it scribbling in a notebook as the clock ticked on, oblivious to my dilemma. Despite my obsessive organization, I still wasted several precious minutes trying to figure out what to put on as my carpool partner waited on a rainy dark street corner. Poor gal has waited far too many accumulated minutes in the past two years. When fall quarter began this year, I decided it was time to make a change.

I pulled each article of clothing from my closet and started putting together outfits on every flat surface in the house - bed, kitchen table, sofa, dining room table - trying to find just the right combination of pants and tops. A huge puzzle of clothes. I figured if I could make ten decent outfits I'd have it covered for two weeks. I'd donate whatever I hadn't worn for a year to charity and stuff everything else into a storage closet. Then at the end of a two-week period, I could reshuffle the outfits and restock my wardrobe.

I'm happy to report that I actually came up with twenty outfits, now all lined up like perfect little soldiers waiting to march off to work each morning. A month's worth of outfits. Pull one out, put it on, out the door I go. No more cold, wet carpool partner. Unless, of course, I keep writing, oblivious to the ticking clock.

Sinner

A day of glorious sun and gentle breeze, a breeze pregnant with thoughts of death. A short week of mountain hiking, Spirit Lake and Mt. St. Helens an arm’s reach away, death at my fingertips. Another few days of biking the San Juan Islands, empty roads, beach picnics and tired muscles talk to me of death.
 

The car heads home, my husband and I dirty, exhausted, ready for the comforts of warm shower and soft bed. But first we stop to visit my mother. We find her in her tiny bed, in her tiny room, in the tiny world of a dementia care facility we now call her home. It is 4:45. She opens her faded blue eyes. Is it fear I see there? A plea for help? Resignation?

“Do you want to get up, Mom?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says. It is the only word she speaks during our visit.

I find a caregiver and ask why my mother is in bed at 4:45 on a Thursday afternoon.

“She rest after lunch,” she tells me in accented English as she follows me to my mother’s room.

Is it a whine, a gasp, a moan that escapes Mom’s lips as the caregiver straightens her legs and pulls her to a sitting position? Mom clings to my thumb. Tight.

A death grip, I think.

If only, I think.

You’re wicked, I think.

I pry my thumb loose and step aside to allow the first caregiver, now joined by a second, to wrap a lifting strap around mother’s thin frame. Together they hoist her into her wheelchair. Dead weight.

As I wait, I check the hospice notebook kept at bedside. The hospice nurse visited the day before at 4:00 and found Mom in bed. She expressed no concern, did not question why my mother was still in bed so late in the afternoon.

Is this the new norm? I ask myself.

I remember the opposite end of life, my daughter as a young child. I remember how each time I adjusted to a new behavior pattern – eating, sleeping, tantrums – it changed. Sometimes the cycles of change were shorter, sometimes longer, not always the six months mentioned in parenting books. The only thing certain was that just as Tom and I got used to our little girl acting in a particular way, she changed. There was a new norm.

“I don’t think she’ll last the year,” Tom says as I wipe my tears on the way to our dusty car, still full of camping equipment, still crowned with bikes, still holding the magic of hilly island roads and majestic mountain trails. Still haunted by thoughts of death.

I do not believe in hell or heaven. Sitting up on a fluffy cloud drinking gin martinis – nope, don’t think so. Nor do I believe that my mother will meet up with my father and sister when she dies. Death would be so much easier if I could believe, but I cannot.

What is death? In my mother’s case, the body is slowly shutting down, the messages no longer passing from brain to spinal column to muscles. When the messages no longer make it to the heart, the heart will stop and life will end. The body, my mother’s body, will be nothing more than a shell of the vibrant, strong, beautiful woman she once was.

But that woman is already gone. What is left is already a shell with no memory, no recognition, no pleasure. My mother is living her own death but her body does not die. When it does, nothing will remain but the memories of her held in the hearts of her loved ones and that genetic piece of her carried forward by each of her eight living children and numerous grandchildren.

I am guilty of wishing my mother’s death. I carry that wish on mountain trails and along island roads. I carry it to writing practice, to movies and readings, to college classrooms. It is a death wish that I cannot release, that I will not release until my mother is dead. I wish for one strong stroke to stop the endless stream of insidious mini strokes that have, over the last ten years, stolen my mother’s words, memories, recognition, small motor skills, and finally large motor skills. Unlike watching my daughter’s growth, my mother’s new norms are not joyous celebrations of new skills acquired or stronger struggles for personal independence. Mom’s new norms are nothing more than the dreadful stages of a body moving at a snail’s pace towards an inevitable end. So if I am a sinner for wishing my mother’s death, I claim the title.

The Betty Plays by Pamela Hobart Carter

“How would you like to guest blog?” Arleen asked. Give me an assignment and I’m there. Maybe I like assignments as much as I do because so much interests me that it helps to have external forces constrain my natural desire to go off in all directions at once. So here I am while Arleen meets her self-imposed deadline to complete a draft of the second novel in her trilogy before the next term begins.

Recently, I gave myself and three other playwrights an assignment. The four of us love the work of a particular actor friend who has a raft of physical issues that make conventional roles impossible. She can no longer march and stand and jump for hours on end as she did in Mother Courage only a few years ago. Wanting to see her on stage again pushed me to come up with our pending production and to produce for the first and last time in my life. When I described the idea to the others, they set aside some pressing tasks and started writing for this one. We each wrote Betty Campbell a short play through which she can sit. We dubbed our project, “The Betty Plays.”

I’ve written for Betty before. The first time, I didn’t know I was writing for Betty. Director Paul Mullin (another of “The Betty Plays” playwrights) cast her as the matriarch, “Joan,” in my play Rondo and I came under her spell. On our ride home from the Rondo reading, my husband said, “Everyone should be writing for Betty.” I took his words to heart.

Over the last couple of years Betty Campbell has become a muse, my “Joan”: I want to hear her deliver my scripts. I imagine her voice reading my speeches as I jot them. I hear the mixture of power and fragility. A couple of weeks ago I had the enormous pleasure of hearing her read through all of the scripts for “The Betty Plays.” I know Betty is a marvel, but she blew my socks off. She was funny, sharp mysterious, and credible.

Stylistically distinct, the four plays demonstrate Mrs. Bet’s versatility. One playwright set Betty in the old west as Mrs. Primgarten, grande dame of a mining town. She gets to preside from her parlor chair as she addresses their lawman. Betty is a psychiatrist on a mission to save a young man in my play. I don’t want to give too much away, but in another play, Betty perches on a rock on a sea-swept island. The fourth short puts Betty in the cockpit of a small plane under dire circumstances.

The assignment panned out. Betty will be on stage for three performances this fall.

“The Betty Plays” directed by Julie Beckman

4 World Premiere plays

presented by Theater Schmeater  

1500 Summit Avenue  Seattle, WA 98122
(206) 324-5801

The Shipwrecker by Scot Augustson, Clochettes d’Argent by Paul Mullin, The Prescient Dr. Primrose by Pamela Hobart Carter, Leo and Kat are Flying by Jim Lapan and Paul Klein and “Lethal Cotillion,” a short film by Scot Augustson

September 23, September 30, and October 7, 2012, 4 p.m.

Ticket Prices: $10 in advance. $12 at the door.

Death Penalty

It’s interesting the unexpected bits that readers pull from your work, the bits that hold meaning to some and are passed over by others. When I mentioned my opposition to the death penalty in my memoir, The Thirty-Ninth Victim, it was in passing, an explanation to my lack of objection to the plea bargain offered Gary Ridgway – life in prison without parole in exchange for a full confession.

The crux of the matter lies in one's beliefs about the death penalty. Since I do not believe in institutionalized killing, in 'an eye for an eye,' since I do not believe that we can justify taking another human life, except perhaps in self-defense or the defense of those we feel compelled to protect, I do not see any justification for killing Ridgway or anyone else on Death Row. 

 (The Thirty-Ninth Victim, p. 173)

There were some who were extremely supportive when they learned of the publication of my memoir of my family's journey before and after the Green River Killer murdered my sister, Maureen. But once they read the book and learned my position on the death penalty and on the inefficiency of the Green River Task Force, they vanished into silence.

Now, four years after publication, two new groups have found their way to my book and contacted me – those advocating the repeal of capital punishment in Washington State. (For more information, visit www.sjawa.org and www.ejusa.org.)

With advances in DNA technology, the identities of additional victims might be learned. Should science reveal the identity of victims that Ridgway did not confess to murdering and should evidence be brought to bear his guilt, he could be tried for these crimes and the death penalty would be back on the table.  

I thought the horror was behind me, but maybe it never will be. I was opposed to the death penalty before my sister was murdered in 1983. I am opposed to it now. I don’t know at what age I first learned about capital punishment, but I clearly recall sensing an inherent contradiction even though I was too young to understand or articulate my feelings. Instead, I turned to one of the many saying that my parents used as tools of parental instruction: Two wrongs don’t make a right. And I wondered how the death penalty could be legal if two wrongs never make something right.

As I got older, as I learned of the inequitable, biased, racist application of the death penalty in the United States, as I learned of its total failure as a deterrent to violent crime and as I studied the financial costs of the endless appeals and legal processes that precede any execution, my conviction that the death penalty is just plain wrong grew stronger.

Then my youngest sister was violently murdered at the age of nineteen. For twenty years her killer was at large. For twenty years I questioned my belief system. But when push came to shove, in the face of the painful loss of a sister, my opposition to capital punishment remained solid. Killing Ridgway would do nothing to appease my pain or bring back my sister. All it would do would be to keep him in the limelight of media attention and in the process add interest to his life of incarceration while at the same time costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses and assaulting the friends and families of the victims with ongoing, unending news coverage.

I cannot but wonder how Maureen would feel about it. Would she want the death penalty for her killer – a punishment of retaliation but not justice? I don’t think so. Maureen was young when she was killed, but her sense of right and wrong was formed at a very early age, just as mine was, and I don’t think her beliefs differed much from my own. No, I don’t believe Maureen would have supported the death penalty, even for her own killer. And neither do I.

Hamburgers or Pancakes?

At dinner Saturday night, I offered my sister-in-law a spoon. "Eat the apples," I said as I pointed to the broth in her bowl of steamed clams."They're really good with the onions."

My brother stared at me. "What did you say?"

"Tomatoes. I mean the tomatoes. They're really good." I said trying to cover my mistake.

"Do you do that a lot?" he asked.

"More often than I'd like," I said. "I can't help wondering if Mom knew when she was beginning to lose words."

"You could get the test," my sister-in-law said.

Would knowing that I was cursed with my mother's dementia help me face the inevitable? Or perhaps the odd substitution of words that slips from my lips now and again can be chalked up to stress, age, hormones, or any of a variety of causes we tossed over the Formica table top the other night.

If it weren't for another linguistic swap that has entertained my husband and daughter for years, I'd be terrified. I've used the words hamburger and pancake interchangeably for as long as I can remember. Is it because of their similar round, flat shape? The way they both fill a skillet by threes or fours? Or could it be that my childhood fondness of hamburger dinners and pancake breakfasts around the big kitchen table muddle the two words? Maybe that loose language conduit has existed for years and simply shorts now and again to taunt me.

What is memory? As my daughter and her boyfriend began planning their first European adventure and worried about how they were going to pay for it, I encouraged them to make the trip, to gather experiences and memories, regardless of cost. They'd be returning to jobs, they'd be frugal, they'd figure out how to pay it off. Gather the memories and hold them tight, I urged. In the end it's those remembered experiences that make us who we are.

So who are we when our memories are gone? Who do we become when we no longer remember our own names or those of the people we once cherished? Who is my mother now as she wastes away in a wheelchair, her memory a blank?

As my daughter wanders the streets of Dublin today is she walking the same path that my mother and father walked decades earlier and in some way recreating the memories that my mother no longer holds? What memories do the streets of Dublin hold? Do they remember the footsteps of my daughter's ancestors? Is she innocently exploring streets that her grandfather's grandfather once struggled to escape? I don't know the stories and cannot pass on those memories, that family history, to my daughter, a girl named Erin to honor her unknown ancestors. In the void of family history, my daughter builds her own memories and history.

As I sat surrounded by cobalt walls in the fish market restaurant confusing the words apple and tomato - both round, red fruits enjoyed either raw or cooked - I thought about memory and dementia, time and relationships, life experience and family history. I wondered, as I often wonder, if I will know when to end my own life before I suffer the fate that my mother now suffers, the fate of losing all memory of life and love. And if I am able to recognize the clues, will I have the strength to avoid the inevitable?

As Erin gathers memories on the streets of Dublin, I hope she buries them safe where they can never be stolen.

Hadiyah Joan Carlyle's Torch in the Dark

In September 2002, Seattle writers and teachers Jack Remick and Robert Ray began a year-long memoir writing program at the University of Washington. Those first weeks and months I was so buried in the story I had begun to write I was blind to my classmates and their stories. Hadiyah Joan Carlyle was one of those classmates.

We wrote and read together in the same classroom for months. At break time I would usually wander off by myself lost in thought. I'm not sure what the others did. I do remember the day Hadiyah stopped me in the hall and pinned me to the spot with her piercing blue eyes.    

"Come to Third Place Books with me," she said. "There's an open mic. It would be good practice."

"Are you reading?" I asked.

"No," she said. "But you need practice."

A few weeks later I was standing before my first audience with trembling hands and shaky voice, reading from a very early draft of The Thirty-Ninth Victim.

Since that winter of 2003 when Hadiyah refused to read at Third Place Books, she continued to work on her memoir. Torch in the Dark is now in print and I couldn't be happier. What I didn't know until recently was that throughout her struggles to get her story on the page and in print, Hadiyah was coping with the long-term effects of a brain injury sustained less than a decade earlier. She was riding her bike when she was hit and left unconscious at the side of the road. Doctors told her son she'd never recover. But Hadiyah proved them wrong just as she'd done earlier in her life, the life she explores in her new memoir.

Torch in the Dark takes the reader inside the mind of a young woman struggling to build a future on the brutal foundation of sexual child abuse and incest. Hadiyah headed for Haight Ashbury in the 1960s, a time and place that allowed, even endorsed experimentation, and freed her of incarceration in a mental institution - the place her father knew would seal away her (and his) secrets forever.

Torch in the Dark is as unique in Hadiyah's use of language as it is in her life experiences. As the first female welder in the Bellingham shipyards, torch in hand, hidden behind a welder's heavy mask, she found the strength to face her past and build a future for herself and her son. In a direct voice, and with unflinching honesty, Hadiyah Joan Carlyle tells her story.

I hope to see you at one of Hadiyah's upcoming readings:

Elliot Bay Book Company

1521 Tenth Avenue

Seattle, Washington 98122

Sunday, June 3, 2012 @ 2:00PM

Village Books

1200 11th Street  

Bellingham, WA 98225

Thursday, June 14, 2012 @ 7:00PM