Losing a Parent

It’s tough losing my dad, even when I’m a senior citizen myself. I will always be his oldest daughter, his writing collaborator and his biggest fan. I never tired of saying how blessed I felt that at the ripe age of almost 68 I still had both my parents in my life. I could see them helping my husband and I celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary in three years. But that didn’t happen. He checked out two weeks before his 71st anniversary.

As my mom’s caregiver, he was the healthy one. He was adventuresome and would be very active. However, my mom, whose comfort zone is a table in her kitchen, didn’t want him going anywhere. His job was to take care of her. I had big plans for traveling with him after my mom was gone. But life is like that sometimes. He’s gone. She could live to be 100 and she doesn’t like it one bit. But here we are.

Logic says that it was his time. He had a good life. He was almost 92. Logic isn’t worth a crap at a time like this. He’s gone. I miss him and I have this hole in my heart. His four daughters all miss him terribly, but we honor him by doing everything we can to take care of our mother and make sure she is safe, physically and financially.

My dad: the editorial opinion writer, the book publisher, the diehard Republican. I was honored to be his editor for his books and articles, and set up his conservative blog. I disagreed with a lot of things he wrote, but I was thrilled with his determination to keep trying to sway people to his point of view. The last thing I wrote for him was his obituary.

He was cremated and we will hold a party to celebrate his life. My dad had many friends. It should be well attended. We will talk about our favorite memories. My nephew will sing a song he wrote for him. A Quaker minister will deliver a homily. And we will release butterflies so my dad can again soar into the heavens and fly, his greatest joy.

Ringing in a New Year in Style

Resolutions aside, the New Year is a great time to give thanks for all our blessings. In addition to the wonderful people in our lives, our relative ease of livelihood and great experiences add richness to our lives and make us feel very fortunate. This year, we watched the New Year ring in from around the world and celebrated our familiarity with all those places:

Times Square, New York: Probably the quintessential New Year’s Eve venue, we celebrated it there last year to commemorate our 45th wedding anniversary. We were probably the oldest people there, crammed in with over a million of our close personal friends.

Memphis on Beale Street: We spent three delightful evenings there this past October while at a professional conference.

Key West, Florida: Several times on diving trips, we spent time in Key West on the waterfront, eating seafood and watching an amazing routine of cat tricks. Who knew cats could be trained?

Dubai: Brilliant fireworks from the Burj Khalifa reminded us of our trip to Dubai and looking down from its observation platform. Also, last year in Times Square, we met a man from Dubai who came here to celebrate!

On a cruise ship in the Caribbean: We did that one better. At the turn of the Millennium, we were on a cruise ship in the South Pacific, watching dawn over Pitt Island, the Southernmost inhabited island. Then we crossed the International Dateline and did New Year’s Eve #2!

We know at some point, these adventures and other gallivanting around the world will come to an end, but I will never feel cheated from life. We have shared a richness with other cultures that continually makes me feel awestruck at the diversity on this planet. And, while strife goes with the territory, I feel I’m a better world citizen for having traveled to faraway places and soaked up the culture, not expecting it or wanting it to be “just like home”.

Taking Charge of Your Treatment: A Breast Cancer Two-Timer Shares Her Experience

The diagnosis of cancer is a highly charged emotional event. It can throw us off for days before we can begin to think clearly. The inclination may be to follow whatever the person delivering the news tells you. Not always the best idea. As a nurse/medical writer who has breast cancer twice, here is what I recommend and live by:

1. Don’t accept the first treatment recommendation you receive. Get a second and a third opinion, and listen to the reasons for each one’s recommendations. One doctor may recommend less treatment than you think you need. Get as many opinions as you need to feel comfortable about your decision. You don’t have to decide today.

2. Ask other cancer patients, friends, and people in the medical profession for names of doctors for second and third opinions. Don’t use two doctors in the same practice, and make sure they are not affiliated.

3. Set up your appointments as soon as possible, and get copies of all your medical records to them in advance. Create a paper trail. You should have a complete file of any surgical or biopsy reports. They may be needed years later and be difficult to track down.

4. Do your own research-but wait until you have all the facts. It will help you ask the right questions. If you don’t have a feel for the reputable medical websites, make friends with a health professional. One of mine was upset by my diagnosis and said she needed an assignment. I asked her to research the relative risk of recurrence with and without chemotherapy for my type of cancer. When she had the information together, we sat down and made a list of questions for me to take to my appointments. I felt more in control, and she knew she had really helped me.

5. Take someone with you to the appointment or tape record it. When dealing with a highly emotional issue like cancer treatment, even nurses don’t always hear everything. A second set of ears or a tape will allow you to re-hear it in a more neutral environment. None of the doctors I saw: my surgeon, radiation oncologist, or the medical oncologists had any problem with taping our session.

6. Ask them to put chances of recurrence with various treatment options in a way that makes sense to you. For me, percentages worked. If surgery plus radiation and tamoxifen has an 85% cure rate, and chemotherapy would only add an additional 2-3%, is it worth the trauma and side effects of chemotherapy? That was my situation and I could live with a 2-3% risk. Another woman I met in radiation, a stockbroker accustomed to taking risk on a daily basis, was in the same boat. She opted for chemotherapy because she needed to feel she was doing everything possible. That’s the point. What is right for you may not be right for someone else.

7. Don’t give away the treatment decision to your doctor. It is your body. For any treatment to be effective, it must have your full mental and emotional support. Your immune system will not be fooled. Only you can decide your risk comfort level. My first oncologist had declared that I needed six months of chemotherapy in addition to the radiation and tamoxifen. I thought I would die either way. Both the second and third opinion physicians felt that chemotherapy was not even clearly indicated in my case. And because they both agreed, but for slightly different reasons, I felt comfortable going with my gut feeling that chemotherapy was not really right for me. It has been 13 years since that second diagnosis.

Trash Collection is Site-Sensitive

Picking up trash can be fascinating, seriously! I have the blessing of living in two different places, one way up in the mountains with very little trash, and one in the heart of a major city with beaucoup trash, so plentiful it seems to come up out the ground instead of grass. So I have different approaches to my dedication for keeping my world cleaner.

In Colorado, I have a friend who is always training pack llamas, so when we do our adopt-a-road trash pickup, we take a llama along with saddlebags to hold the trash. Then we climb down and up ditches, picking up what tourists flying by have decided to jettison. They don’t live here; why should they care?

Rattling the saddlebags and stuffing trash gradually gets the llamas used to packing and we don’t have to carry all of it. Win-win. Plus, with a llama, people always slow down to look and sometimes notice we are picking up trash, which gets them to thinking about not leaving any!

My city home has a real dearth of pack animals, so I have my own mantra for that: if I see a discarded plastic bag (and who doesn’t daily in the city?) I was meant to pick it up and fill it with trash before depositing it in a proper receptacle. That basically means, every time I leave my house, I will be picking up trash, but that has a finite limit, as does the bag. Then I can continue on my way, enjoying the walk, the day and any flowers.

Imagine my surprise one day during my mountain time while sauntering down a dirt road gawking at the new snow covering on the mountains, when an empty plastic bag drifted in front of me. Here? Okay, same pledge holds, so I picked it up and started filling. Because of our paucity of trash, I walked a lot farther toting it before it was full. And my surroundings were once more pristine.

Can I invite you readers to do the same? Minus the llama, in most cases, I know, but be aware and help out our planet a little.

Getting Fired by Your Friends


Well, I have reached the point in my life where I’ve been fired by two long-term friends. We’ve all had to re-evaluate relationships as we realize life is too short to spend in one-sided non-productive “friendships”, so we just stop calling those people who always are up for something if we call them but never reciprocate.

This is different. These were friendships I really wanted to keep. One just stopped interacting because she said we no longer have anything in common. She and her husband have very tight money issues after their investments tanked in 2008. We have done all right and can continue to travel. While I try to focus on family when we’re together, and not travel, she still knows and doesn’t feel we have enough to share. I still continue to send birthday and Christmas cards with warm thoughts for their continued well-being. She’s still MY friend.

The other one is a sad case: a brilliant woman with many talents but deeply scarred from her life. Adopted and neglected, the break-up of two marriages have left her bitter and feeling the world is out to get her. I tried to be a friend to help her focus on her talents and encourage her. She lives alone in a hermit-like existence. We were doing fine until another person treated her unjustly in a group email. All of us who got it thought it was tacky, but because we all just discounted it, none of us rallied to support her. Unfortunately, because she can never let go of slights or assign them to the other person’s issues, anyone who sees that person is slamming her and can never be a friend again. Although I had apologized, it wasn’t enough. I was forever tainted.

This has distressed me, but as another friend who does counseling says, “She made that choice. You offered friendship. She wouldn’t accept it.” Even this compassionate person knows that sometimes it’s not within our power to help another person who doesn’t want it.

The personal benefit out of all this is that I look at my relationships and my demonstrations of caring more critically, and try to increase them with every encounter. Am I being the best friend I can be to those who matter to me? Am I guilty of distraction and lack of support when things come up in my life, or am I able to be in the here and now when people need me? Truthfully, not always, and I will work on that for the rest of my life.

Figuring Out My Life’s Work

As I watch my mother, who is almost totally blind and has mobility limitations, sit and do nothing all day, I ache, not just for her, but for everyone who doesn’t have something that gives her life meaning. Looking forward to my ever advancing age, I feel an urgency to have a life’s work that I can do at some level while I still have breath in my body. Deciding on one thing is driving me nuts! Consequently, I spend more time than I should doing crossword puzzles and reading.

While enjoying our deck time high in the Rocky Mountains, my sweetie and I have had this discussion. He says his life mission is to no harm and to always be open to new experiences. That’s fine, I say, but what are you actually doing? I volunteer long-distance while in Colorado and in person in St. Louis with the Red Cross, but somehow that doesn’t seem to be enough. I do volunteer writing and editing for a couple of organizations and look for people to mentor. Again, not enough.

Arianna Huffington said it best in her new book Thrive:

1. Make small gestures of kindness and giving a habit, and pay attention to how this affects your mind, your emotions, and your body.
2. During your day, make a personal connection with people you might normally tend to pass by and take for granted: the checkout clerk, the cleaning crew at your office or your hotel, the barista at the coffee shop. See how this helps you feel more alive and connected to the moment.
3. Use a skill or talent you have—cooking, accounting, decorating—to help someone who could benefit from it. It’ll jumpstart your transition from a go-getter to a go-giver, and reconnect you to the world and to the natural abundance in your own life.

By the way, I would heartily recommend this book. It teaches us how to be mindful in our lives so we experience every moment of every day of this oh, so brief existence.

Family Dynamics

A 105-year old vivacious lady once told me that the secret to having a happy aging was not being encumbered by family. Instead she cultivated male and female friends who were much younger than she was and found they kept her challenged and engaged.

Family certainly keeps us challenged in every sense of the word. My husband and I have a full life, sometimes too full with our part-time jobs, travel and friends, and then the family issues. My 90-year old parents, still living independently, are starting to struggle with health issues and the logistics of staying in their home. My sisters and I know that when they must move, it will be crisis management on our part, since my mother declares that the only way she is leaving her house is in an urn. We honor their independence, but find that better health care decisions could be made if they were more savvy and assertive with providers. That won’t happen, so we dance around issues to try to improve their care.

Our son and daughter-in-law have busy lives and keep our darling granddaughters way too scheduled to spend time with us, something that distresses us deeply.

Then there are the health scares and threats to our generation, especially my sisters, without whom I would be lost. Two of us have had cancer twice, and now a third may be battling something worse.

Herein lies the challenge of living well: being concerned but also paying attention to the joys that surround us and making sure we communicate that joy to those we care about. Although trite to say, this message bears repeating: we have but one life to live. Live it grandly and with joy. Don’t miss the daily gifts we are given while caring for those around us. And laugh. Laugh long and lustily. Joyous noise that is contagious.