Last week seems to perhaps been one of those watersheds. It started innocently enough on a typical Sunday evening at our little “cabin” (actually just a rather ordinary 1970s house) at Lake Almanor near Mount Shasta in Northern California. My wife was tired and went to bed early, I went to the basement to write a bit before heading to bed. At about midnight I woke with my wife desperately attempting to open the door to the bathroom, but instead was clawing at the window. I thought perhaps she was asleep, but it quickly became evident that she was awake but totally confused. As time went along her behavior became more and more bizarre, leading me to call 911 to fetch the local emergency crew. They took one look at her, packed he up for transport in their ambulance, heading to the local airport to meet the life flight helicopter for a ride down the mountain to a local hospital. It took me awhile to catch up with her because I had to close up the house, take care of our dog so I could leave him behind, and then drive down the mountain.
By the time I got there my wife had a major seizure, had been tested in many ways, and moved to her hospital room. The good news was that it wasn’t a stroke, and not a heart attack – but obviously something pretty dramatic was taking place. The next two or three days were pretty scary, and sobering. She continued to move erratically, alternating between sleep and periods of attempting to get out of bed (obviously without any conscious goals), removed the tubes and wires to the monitors, and remove the covers and all of her cloths. She would finally settle down, and the nurses would replace those things for the time being, until another “spell” came and the events were repeated. During these spells she talked about her hallucinations – perhaps it is better to say that she talked to them, obviously having no means of distinguishing “our” world from her hallucinations.
My role was pretty clear, it was to sit and observe. Whenever I attempted to assist, to get near her, to calm her it just caused her to flare up even more. My assistance wasn’t assisting, so I just sat and watched – and thought. I was convinced that the likely outcome was either she was going to die right there and then, or she would be permanently in her newly inaccessible world. This was quite a scary, sobering, and compassion filled few days. I wondered how how I would react to these outcomes, how I would find a new way through my world – and how could I help my wife get the best from whatever was in the future. I had plenty of time to think of our life together, plenty of time to remind myself of how much I have loved her over the past fifty years, time to think of our children and my failures with them… all of those thoughts of love, sorrow, fear, hopes and memories that attend an event such as this.
An interesting event happened when our daughter showed up on the evening of the first day. My wife was totally “out of it”, non-responsive and apparently out of connection with the world. When our daughter walked to the side of her bed my wife all of a sudden was perfect! She sat up, smiled, talked, joked and looked as if nothing had happened. She just popped back into our world for about five minutes, then she slipped away again for the next couple of days. It was an amazing and instantaneous transformation – giving me a little bit of hope that my wife was still “in there” someplace.
On the morning of the 3rd day she was talking, eating solid food, walking to the commode, and back to being a whole lot more modest. By the 4th day she was walking the halls, had finally had the final MRI test (they couldn’t test her before that because she kept moving too much). All of the tests came back “normal” – there was nothing measurably wrong with her – so they discharged her to my care. Four days later and she is doing pretty good – rather “foggy”, sleeps a lot, and unsteady in her comprehension, but oh so much better than a week ago at this time.
Now that the emergency is over I find that perhaps it wasn’t all bad – perhaps there is a bit of a silver lining to be plucked from the week’s adventures.
On the last night of her stay I left her side 8:00pm, the end of visiting hours. She was provided with a full time, 24 hour, “watcher” who sat next to her bed to make sure she didn’t do something weird (and dangerous). That meant that I felt confident in her safety, and could get some rest at night. The hotel I was staying at featured a “sports bar” where I could sit at the bar, watch whatever game was on the big screen, and have a glass of wine before heading up to my room for another restless night.
On the last night of her stay at the hospital I once again decided to have dinner at the bar. The place was mostly empty, with perhaps a six to ten customers. Seated a couple stools from my spot was an “older” guy (probably 15 years younger than me). We sat watching the screen for a little while when he spoke up, laughing that the other people in the room were cheering on “their” team, but the game was a re-run from weeks before. Apparently there is a dead time for sports in the middle of summer – not something I would know about since I am not a sports fan.
The “conversation” slowly built up, with a word or two from one of us, a long pause, and then a reply. By the middle of the second glass of wine we had become fully engaged in conversation. Talking about sports, gambling, hotels, his job as owner of a small publishing company, my background as a safety engineer, tales of carpentry, and other things. The conversation just seemed to flow smoothly with interesting twists and turns. Eventually I started telling little travel stories from my adventures. He shared his, and we wandered mentally around the world.
I found myself watching myself totally enjoying telling my stories – so much that they washed out the fear, anxiety and stress of the week. On several occasions I stopped and apologized for dominating conversation with my stories – but he coxed me on, saying that they were interesting and fun.
Two hours flew by, and I excused myself to return to bed. Thinking about it in the morning I realized that we hadn’t even exchanged names or enough personal information to allow there ever to be a future meeting. Based upon the little bit of information he gave about the publishing business I did a little Google search and found the most likely connection to be the CFO of Penguin Books – he looks like the guy I met and he recently moved to Penguin from a small publishing company called Scholastic Books. I am probably wrong about that connection, and it really doesn’t make any difference to me one way or another – I was just curious to see if I could find a small publishing house of K-8 text books, and this one sounded like his descriptions.
While this was a fun evening, upon thinking about it I realized that this was an example of my very favorite, most happy times. I travel a few times a year for business, traveling alone while my wife takes care of the home front. I am usually gone for a few days at a time, trying to stay in places were there is a bar-and-grill where I can sit at the bar, watching games that I don’t know about, winding down from the stress of the business day. Often I find myself in conversations very similar with the one I just described. There are often men, or women, who are easy to talk with and we share stories, ideas, philosophies and knowledge. These are magic times to me. They don’t always happen in bars, sometimes these kinds of encounters occur in other places. A common one is when I have gone on some sort of “spiritual retreat” with my Native American friends or others. It seems that these kinds of retreats allow people to relax, open up, and pay attention to each other. All of a sudden our shared humanity comes to the surface and we can enjoy ourselves and each other instead of remaining in our self-protective cocoons.
I had the realization that one of my very favorite things to do is to talk with strangers at a level of what is important in their, in our, lives – not just polite chit-chat, but actual conversation and sharing. These are rare events, but worth the price of admission (to life). I have always felt vaguely guilty about having these secret, deeply felt, encounters with people without sharing them with my wife or others, but the reality is that they have to be one-on-one focused encounters to connect to the magic of the moment. A second thing that I realized that evening was how much I like to tell stories, and how positively people react to them. I like to tell true stories, and people like to hear them – imagine that. Who would have thought. I regularly find myself teaching engineering/technical classes which are uniformly failures. People think I would be a great teacher, they come to my classes full of expectations, and I just drop another dull boring class in their laps. Perhaps I need to forget the technical “engineering” stuff, and just tell stories about my adventures in my profession over the past 40 years or so. I am going to try that and see how it works.
Toward the end of the evening the other night, my companion asked if I had ever read Carlos Castaneda’s books. I replied that not only had I read, and re-read them – but I have spent a good portion of my life trying to figure out, and perhaps experience, some of what he talks about. My new friend said he had decided that Carlos’ books are pure BS, but interesting. I felt slightly insulted by this opinion, but quickly just let that go. He then said that if I was interested in Castaneda’s books I should read some Tom Robbins, particularly Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Jitterbug Perfume. Once home I read the book about Cowgirls, and am well on my way through Tibetan Peach Pie. I don’t see a connection to Castaneda’s books, perhaps I am missing something important – I wish I could talk to him again to see if I could find out what he was thinking when he made that recommendation. However, Robbins’ books are written in a style that really intrigues me. It is loose, personal, imaginative, and connects to a part of me that reminds me of the good old days of youth, the summer of love, my brother’s years as a beatnik bohemian living in Berkeley. It seems to re-connect me to parts of my life that have lain dormant for many years. Maybe that is what he was pointing to.
Robbins’ books are giving me a little courage to give it a try. If he can ramble, twist, skip around in time, sometimes us analogies that don’t seem to make sense – maybe I can do that too. Maybe I can write some stories from my past that aren’t important in any way, just glimpses of life – maybe something interesting will unfold. What is there to lose? I don’t have to share, I don’t even have to let on that I am doing it. I can do it in the middle of the night, in the quite of the dark in the middle of the Sacramento Valley – but maybe something more will come of it. I am getting pretty excited to giver it a try. Not like Robbins’ writes (I hear he takes forever agonizing over every sentence until it is just right), I don’t write like that. I write faster than I think, my first encounter with my writing is when I read it emerging from my computer screen. I am a reader of my writing just as you, the reader, not know what is coming until I read it. But perhaps that works too – I don’t have to follow anyone’s model or approach.
While thinking about writing, I started to get a little bit of guilt for doing that instead of doing all of the “things” that I “should” be doing. However, last week’s adventures brought me to a new point in my view of life. I really don’t have any reason to do any of those other things unless I want to do them, unless they are fun, unless they bring meaning with them. I am actually free to do whatever it is that I want to do – and if that means spending too much time writing, or listening to my wife, of hunting down out of the way bars in the hopes of meeting up with magic – so be it. As long as I am not harming anyone, it is my life – and I feel like tons of weight have fallen from my shoulders. Sitting with my wife as she lay on the brink of who knows what gave me time to let all of those things go. What a marvelous gift, what marvelous gifts, I received last week. It doesn’t help that my wife is now up and around, cooking cookies for us to share, working on a puzzle in the living room.