A Pilgrim’s Digression

Its dark now when I arrive at work at 6:30 AM.  Was it just last week that there was still faint, gray morning light this early?

Last week, too, I started wearing a jacket in the morning.  This week, I need a jacket and a long sleeve shirt.  The mornings and evenings are chilly, but the afternoons are hot, as is typical of October.

Back in West Virginia, October is squirrel season.  The hunting season always used to come in around my birthday in the middle of the month.

Sometimes I would go hunting after school.  My Mom or Dad would take me to my maternal grandma’s place in the country and I’d go off into the wooded hills and hunt until nearly dark.  It would be hot when I started, so that I would carry my camouflage jacket, wearing only an olive drab tee-shirt and light camo pants probably bought at one of the Army surplus stores where my Dad bought most of our hunting clothes.

By the time I came off the hill at dusk, I would be wearing the jacket and glad to have it.

My grandma died about three years back, in November.  The son-in-law who took over the farm moved a double-wide trailer onto the hill for his daughter and her family; my cousin Ben and his wife and step-children live in a trailer where my grandma’s house used to sit.  My uncle owns horses and their hunger, combined with my uncle’s need for firewood, have cleared much of the woods and underbrush from the hills where I used to hunt.

My Dad tells me that one part of the woods where I particularly liked to hunt is now cleared, and my uncle has placed a camper, picnic table, and fire pit in that area.  There used to be the remains of a house there, what my grandma called the old Griff Place–just four large stones that formed the foundation and occasional junk scattered about.  I once took a metal detector there and found only old, square-headed nails and other bits of scrap iron.

Now the stones are gone, and so is the outline of where the house stood, and probably the junk too.

When I was a kid, my Mom used to watch a soap opera called “Days of Our Lives.”  It may still be on TV, I don’t know.  The only part of it I listened to was the theme music, because I could make no sense of it.  On the screen would appear a large hour glass, accompanied by a flute that sounded like the tick of a clock, and the authoritarian announcer proclaiming, “Like sands through the hourglass, these are the days of our lives…”

Like sands through the hour glass.  I know what it means now.

My paternal grandma is sick with pancreatic cancer.  She’s been having treatments for 14 months now, which is longer than many people survive with this type of deadly illness.  My son and I drove up to West Virginia to see her this weekend, only to discover that she was in the hospital for, of all things, gallstones.  She had been in the hospital since Wednesday, but because each day she expected to come home, only to have that hope frustrated, she had told grandpa not to tell anyone and cause them worry.

I sat around all day Saturday expecting her to come home–the doctor kept her one more night.  Then Sunday, B. and I had to start home, so we stopped by the hospital in Charleston and visited her and grandpa in her room.  She looked thinner than when I saw her in July, and she was jaundiced because of the gallstones, but otherwise she still much the same.  I admit I am biased, though.  I still see her the way she has always been, not the way she is now.

I did notice how thin her hair has become.  It was very noticeable, since she couldn’t do anything with it to make it look fuller, lying there in her hospital bed.  She is worried about her hair, as she always has been.  She’s from that generation of women who go to a hairdresser weekly, and who wear a net over their hair when they go to bed at night.  In the hospital, it lay flat and sparse on her head.

I noticed how her veins seem to be standing in relief against her sallow skin, as well, as if the radiation has made them glow bright purple.  The veins stand out particularly on her head.  Perhaps it is her weight loss that has made teh veins more noticeable.

Even so, she’s still the woman I’ve always known, and she still looks surprisingly good all things considered.  She keeps saying she thinks she is going to end the chemotherapy after the next treatment; she has been saying that almost from the beginning.  But she keeps going back for more treatments, as long as the cancer isn’t growing.

I think she’s afraid of death, and I know how she feels.  She’s only 76.  I never thought that would seem young to me, but now it seems entirely too soon to die.  She could have another ten or fifteen years, if it weren’t for the cancer.  She could see B. graduate high school and go to college.

Grandpa seems afraid, too, though you’ve got to know what to look for.  When he came home from the hospital without her Saturday, I could tell he was depressed.  He kept talking about her, and when he described the pain she had been in from the gallstones he squinted as if he were going to cry.  I think he knows that the pain of the stones is but a prelude.

Grandpa had to call everyone he knows and tell them that she wasn’t coming home, and why.  The doctors had put a stent in her bile duct to allow passage around the gallstones, and it had allowed the stone to move and some bile had leaked into her bloodstream.  Also, her potassium was dangerously low, a recurrent problem that seems related to the chemo.

Then, when he called me Sunday, after I arrived home in Virginia, he sounded so happy to tell me that she was coming home at last.  He sounded like he was probably as happy, if not more happy, than grandma.

So, I think we are all a little afraid.  Death is the most serious thing we confront in life.  A painful death from cancer…well, I don’t know what could be worse.  Maybe it won’t be painful, since hospice care emphasizes comfort.  But it will be painful in other ways.  Grandpa told me the only thing he can conceive of as being worse would be dying of Alzheimers.

The sands seem to be sifting faster now, flowing downward with the perception of an increased rate of speed.  It has to be perception, right?  I seem to remember something from Physics in high school about everything falling at the same rate of speed.  But the perception is of an acceleration of time.

I’ll be 35 this month.  The past seems so current, but rationally I know it was a long, long time ago.  I suppose this is how my elderly landlady feels.  A. is 94, and I wonder, does she look back to the 1920’s and feel like it wasn’t so long ago, yet know what a gulf separates her from her childhood?  Yet still, how close we are to our childhood, especially in our dreams.

So many deaths she has experienced, most recently the death of her best friend of fifty or more years–again, a death from cancer.  I talked to her about it and tried to sympathize.  Because they are both elderly, they hadn’t seen each other in ten years or more, but they kept in touch via phone.  The last time she spoke with her was the day she told A. that she had cancer.

A. cried as she told me, “They’re all dead now.”  Her family, her friends, her husband, all dead.  Only her children are left, and they fight amongst themselves, as they have since they were young adults.  When they were kids, they were all the best of friends, she tells me.  Now, when she dies they will probably all go their separate ways.

Life is about learning to live with loss and disappointment.  For all the happiness we may find in the world, there is a shadow just behind us that we try not to see.  Eventually the sun begins to set, though, and the shadow comes forward.  The leaves turn colors and fall from the trees.  The early morning air grows cold.  Young families light candles in jack o’lanterns to ward off the shadow.  Yet still the shadow lengthens its reach.  The pumpkins rot and have to be tossed into the woods to finish their decomposition out of sight.

None of us want to regard life as briefly sunny, followed by depressingly cold, yet sometimes that seems to be how things go for us.  I could probably quote some17th century English poets who said as much, if I put my mind to it, although the days when I studied poetry are long past.

“And at my back I seem to hear / Time’s winged chariot, drawing near…”

Or some such expression of fear.  There’s nothing to do but try not to think about it too much.  Or if we do think about it, try to accept it.  Eventually, the sand runs out, whether we accept it or not.