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Clothes Sniffing and Other Stages of Grief

Here are some thoughts on what it’s like in the first weeks after a loved on has passed away. I hope they might prove useful to people experiencing something similar.

A few days ago we traveled to a hospital in Barcelona for Susan to receive some routine medical treatment. When we got there, I was horrified.

In front of the single open entrance to the hospital there was a guard checking passes and printed appointments. We hadn’t realized that we would need to print her appointment schedule, so that was a problem, but the far more serious problem was that there were hundreds of people passing in and out of one bottle-necked entrance. When you go to the supermarket, folks are spaced at least 2 meters apart, calmly and patiently waiting to enter. When you go to the hospital, on the other hand, WHERE THERE ARE A LOT OF FUCKING SICK PEOPLE, it’s a rugby scrum where no one, NO ONE, is separated at all. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Needless to say, I was pretty upset by the time I and my immunocompromised wife got to oncology. We sat in the waiting room. Seats had been marked off so that there was an empty seat between each patient. Susan and I sat next to each other at the end of a row in two adjoining seats. A few minutes later, two doctors passing by stopped as though slapped and glared at us in horror and outrage, ordering us to separate immediately. So instead of sitting next to my wife, with whom I’d recently shared a bed, a car, a kiss, and whose ungloved hand I was at that very moment holding in my own ungloved hand, I moved from roughly 90 cm away from an elderly cancer patient, whose immune system was no doubt weakened, to about 45 cm from him. Made perfect sense.

Susan’s morning appointment wrapped up around  8:30, and her next appointment wasn’t until 12:30, so we got in the car and started heading up into the hills. Almost immediately a police car pulls up next to us and indicates that we should roll down our window.

“There are two people in your car,” the cop driving says to us. I immediately launch into an explanation of how we had gone to the hospital, and my wife can’t drive, and her appointments…. Until the passenger seat cop leans over and explains that if there are two people in the car, the passenger has to be in the back seat. And we should both be wearing masks. Oh, okay, no problem there officer. They glower at us and drive on.

We pull over so Susan can climb into the back seat. Now, I can understand (somewhat) the reasoning behind this, and for taxis and public transport and such, distancing makes good sense. But I might note again that my wife and I had recently shared a bed and a kiss, held hands, and were at that very moment in the enclosed confines of a car. How was moving her to the back seat going to protect either of us? Perhaps if she rode on top of the car…but hey, whatever, she can move out back if necessary.

Anyway, by this point I was feeling angry, sad, frustrated and, since my wife is in a lot of pain and the only thing I can do about it is go to the pharmacy to get her more meds, helpless. But since we had a lot of time on our hands, we drove through a gorgeous spring morning into the hills above Barcelona and parked at the Can Coll Center for Environmental Education, which has access to some really lovely walks.

Now, having to go to the hospital under lock down has advantages and disadvantages. On the minus side, it exposes you and your loved ones to the toxic cocktail of illnesses to be found in hospitals (1.7 million Americans develop hospital-acquired infections each year, and 99,000 die from them), you risk run-ins with police, and you have to leave your kids at home alone. Oh, and, you know, cancer.

On the plus side, you get to leave the house and go somewhere – anywhere, you can potentially find a place with no one around where you can sneak off into the forest, and you get to leave your kids at home alone.

While Susan sat in the car and had a snooze (windows open, a wildflower-scented breeze blowing through), I grabbed my binoculars and headed out on a trail. I can’t even begin to describe what that did for my physical and emotional well being. I’ve written quite a bit about the health benefits of being out in green spaces, but I believe those benefits have grown exponentially with each day I’ve spent indoors. (And we’ve all spent a lot of time recently learning about exponentiality.)

Iris, alyssum, cistus, wild garlic, cherry and dozens of other flowering plants dotted the fields and forests, and I followed a path that wound through meadows and mixed woodland, past a small pond, and along a tiny burbling stream in a spring-green valley. I surprised a little owl perched on a post, listened to a woodpecker drumming for a mate, heard a hawk keening above the trees, and stretched out in a meadow to revel in sunshine and birdsong.

I swear I could feel my cortisol (the “stress hormone”) levels dropping.  My frustration ebbed away. My NK cells (“natural killer” cells, crucial to the immune system) multiplied like mushrooms after rain, and I found I could concentrate on my immediate surroundings without worrying about what latest evils America’s orange monster was perpetrating, or how many new infections there had been in the state of Maine, where my 85 year-old mother lives, or whether at that moment curves were flattening around the world.

But of course at the time I wasn’t thinking about cortisol, or NK cells or “mindfulness” (And let me digress slightly here. You tell me you’re going on a ‘mindfulness walk.’ I’m not sure how to feel about that, but if you have to consciously bring your attention to your present surroundings and situation, if you have to focus your attention on being conscious of your consciousness, you’re maybe not doing it right. I don’t know. Look around you. Turn over logs and stones to see what’s under them. Smell stuff. Feel stuff. Eat stuff, if you know it’s safe. Check shit out without being mindful of your own mindfulness. But hey, that’s just me going off on one.), I was just hanging out in the woods. And it made me feel a lot better.

Which brings me, I suppose, to the whole point of this bramble of a ramble. At some unknown point in a truly unknown future, all of us are going to go outside again. It is my dearest, most fervent and heartfelt desire that when we do so, we choose not to flock back to the shopping malls, to the MegaMarts, to line up for hours in front of the sleek minimalist wonder of an iStore for the latest iDevice. That we don’t purge our weeks or months of isolation with an orgy of consumption. That we don’t heed our leaders who tell us the best way to get back to ‘normal’ is to go shopping. What we’re going to need most, at the end of all of this, are open green spaces, trees, flowers, plants, clear-flowing rivers and clean seas. We will need to reconnect not only with the people we love and have missed but with the natural world around us.

Here in Spain children have not been allowed to leave their homes for over 5 weeks. I think that has been a grave mistake on the part of the government. Everyone needs to get outside, needs to feel a connection with the natural world – even if it’s only on tree-lined city streets or in public parks – for their mental and physical well-being. I feel that sensible measures could have been taken to allow this to happen. But what’s past is past. What we need in the short term is to get out into nature, hopefully with new-found affection and appreciation. What we need in the long term is only to change the entire way humans think about, use (and abuse), and interact with the our planet, its resources, and our fellow inhabitants. That’s a pretty tall order, I know. So let’s just start with a walk in the woods.

So in these days of lock down you might imagine that I feel somewhat, well, defeated. Since we live smack in the center of our city we no longer have the luxury of outdoor spaces; there are only beaches that we can’t go to, parks that we can’t stroll in, and forests that are tantalizingly close but impossible to visit.

More or less complete lock down, as we have here in Spain, is an entirely different prospect when you live in a city-center flat rather than, say, a house in the suburbs. In the suburbs you can sit on your porch and nod at your appropriately-distanced neighbors, have a barbecue on the deck, set up croquet on the lawn, prune your trees, paint the trim, putter in the garden. (Man, if I had a yard I would have gardened the bejesus out that thing by now.)

That said, it’s not entirely true that we have no outdoor areas – we do have a small courtyard, roughly the size of a walk-in closet, where we daily kick the football around for ten minutes or so until the futility of trying to play football in a walk-in closet becomes patently clear. We also have – and I believe this is what has thus-far preserved my sanity – a roof terrace.

For a few hours each day, weather permitting, we become roof dwellers. Granted, there are no green things – no plants, no trees, no moss or grass, not even a swatch of lichen up there –  but there are views of the sea, the sky, the mountains, and, of course, of everyone else out on their terraces and balconies. And these days, it seems that everyone who has access to even the smallest slice of outdoor space is utilizing it.

There’s the couple, I would guess in their mid-fifties, who sunbathe daily on the roof next door.  He’s apparently going for the more-or-less-all-over tan, shedding his clothes and wedging his underwear well up into his cracka-doodle-doo. The wife, in the bikini she bought in her teens, starts hitting the vermouth mid-morning and by mid-afternoon is swaying to the music they both play much, much too loudly. She caught my eye yesterday mid-sway and blearily inquired, “La música es buena, ¿no?” I wanted to respond, “Si, si, muy buena, but “Hotel California” actually sounds way better at a decibel level lower than that of a rocket launch.” But of course in the interest of rooftop harmony and solidarity I simply smiled sweetly and gave her a somewhat ambivalent shrug.

There’s the young woman who lives across the narrow street on the other side of our building, who spends a couple of hours each day on her terrace working out in leggings and a tiny exercise top. I sit, ostensibly reading my book but actually just pretending that I’m not watching her do squats. She and her family also play music, mostly of a Latin-American strain, and are frequently in direct and simultaneous competition with Hotel California on the other side of the building. Makes reading challenging at times.

There’s the kid from my son’s football association who tries to play on his terrace, which is a good 6 meters long but probably only two meters wide, and contains a table, chairs, various plants, and a laundry drying rack. It just doesn’t work, obviously, but his desperation is plain. He generally quits after a few minutes and resorts to gazing wistfully at the street below. There’s a lot of wistful gazing going around.

Then there are the pacers, the people who walk for kilometers in a space not much bigger than a swimming pool. I watched a guy the other day walking the rectangle of his roof, going round and round for hours like a captive elephant in a state of melancholy madness. I wasn’t sure what was more disturbing – the relentless pacing or the fact of me watching it.

Which brings  me to another, rather uncomfortable point. I’m peeping in on the lives of my neighbors. I’m photographing them for chrissake. If I weren’t the one doing it I think I’d find that pretty creepy. To be fair, I’m not looking in their windows or attempting to see anything that isn’t already on full public display, but it still feels a little, I don’t know, intrusive. (I wanted to bring my binoculars up the other day to watch the birds, but thought that a middle-aged guy on the roof peering through binoculars might appear pretty pervy.)

And there are a surprising number of birds – I’ve counted ten species thus far. Since it’s spring the ledges are filled with horny pigeons and collared doves, strutting and cooing and having quickies, but there are also parakeets and seagulls, blackbirds and blackcaps, house sparrows and wagtails. They have the skies to themselves; there are no airplanes anymore. This is a busy flight corridor, and under normal circumstances there would be at least half a dozen planes in view – and earshot – at any given moment. Now the skies are silent except for birdsong.

When this whole thing is over I think I’m going to miss that silence. I think I might miss spending long minutes watching a tortoise lumbering across the neighbor’s garden 5 stories below, or contemplating the fact that the young 20-something, childless couple in our building have Elmo underwear on their drying rack, or seeing whether I can make a rooftop dog bark at me simply by staring it straight in the eyes.

We’re in the midst of a unique global social experiment, the likes of which have never been seen before, and we haven’t the faintest clue how it’s all going to turn out. But one thing is certain – we’re in many ways all in this together (even if we must remain spatially apart), and it’s nice to have a friendly (if somewhat oddball) community high above the empty streets. So to all the sunbathers, workout fanatics, music lovers, captive children, rooftop marathoners, nappers, readers, eaters, and wistful gazers, I say it’s nice to have you around. Take care of each other, and I’ll see you up on the roof.

Chapter 3: The Book I’m Writing

So I’ve been plugging along on this book off and on for a year or so now, interrupted by hospital stays, lethargy, and life in general. I’m now on chapter 9 or something like that, but I thought I’d share a bit I wrote some time ago. I’ve already shared Chapter One and Chapter Two, so here’s the next installment. Please let me know what you think. 

 Chapter 3:  Being an Expatriate

A month later I…

When Enough’s Enough: Decisions about Treatment for the Terminally Ill

I know, I know, I’m always going on about my wife’s cancer. This one isn’t about her cancer. Well, yes, I suppose it is, but it’s somewhat more universal than that, more about the human psyche and what punishments it can endure.

So if you’re new to this, here’s the long story short: My wife Susan was diagnosed with colon cancer roughly four years ago. Since then we’ve been sailing a ship with…

Behind the Door: Teen Privacy, Monitoring, and Trust

Round about our son’s thirteenth birthday, doors started closing. Any room he occupies, if that room has a door, that door is closed.

The bathroom, of course, I have no problem with. Shut away, my good man. But his bedroom, the study – there’s always a couple inches of wood between my boy and the rest of the family. To be honest, it irritates me a bit. What’s he doingbehind these closed doors…

Times of Calamity and Confusion: Coping with Uncertainty

I’d like to say that I’ve learned to embrace uncertainty. But that would be untrue. I don’t have so much as an arm around uncertainty. We don’t fist bump, high five, or even shake hands. What I would say is that I’ve learned to cope with it just a trifle better.

Needless to say, our days, our lives, the world around us – all are in a constant state of flux. From little things – the slice of pizza…

Why I Share My Photos

I have a portfolio on Shutterstock, a platform for buying and selling stock photos. I recently got an email informing me that they were having something of a competition. You could explain (in 500 words or less), why you use Shutterstock, and if your ‘story’ were chosen, they would promote the crap out of your portfolio on their website and social media outlets. So I figured, hey, why not? What…

Killing Us Softly: The Food Industry and the Death of Home Cooking

Why not try your meaty puds? A: It’s microwavable meat in a plastic container. B: It’s available in only 2 delicious flavors. C: It’s “food” that contains the word ‘pud’.

So you’re pressed for time (who isn’t?) and you decide to make a simple sauce to throw on some pasta for dinner tonight. Easy, fast, economical. You sauté a bit of fresh garlic in olive oil, maybe some chopped onions, pour in a…

How Do You Talk to Your Kids When A Parent is Seriously Ill?

He freaked out.

We were having our weekly Pizza Picnic Party and movie, and my wife had chosen A Monster Calls, a “very touching story about a boy who feels very damaged, guilty and mostly angry.”

The boy is about 12, an excellent artist and bit of a loner, and he’s struggling with his mother’s terminal cancer – yes, you might see some parallels. A few minutes in my immediate thought was that the…

Susan’s DOs and DON’Ts for Supporting Someone with Cancer

Well, here is the first-ever blog post by my lovely wife. Although I always make it sound as if this is a joint project, the fact is she’s never contributed a single word until now. I wish it were on a more enjoyable and encouraging topic. Anyway, I’ll let her get to it. 

Tears are not an uncommon sight in the oncology ward. Less a regular fixture than the odd bad wig or non-elderly person, but…

Chapter 2: The Book I’m Writing

Well, I realized it’s been quite some time since I posted Chapter 1, but here’s Chapter 2. Hope you enjoy, and feel free to critique!

END of CHAPTER 1: 

So at the end of the week I packed a few bags, my fishing pole, a selection of books. I locked the front door of the house, put the keys in the mailbox, got in the car and drove away. It was time to get going.  

Chapter 2:  Certifiable

But first…

Make America Safe Again

I wrote this back in 2013, after Sandy Hook. I guess it’s time to repost it. Again.

If you think nothing can be done about gun violence in America, think again. If you think we shouldn’t politicize this, you have to realize that this is a political problem, with a political solution. Reasonable, responsible legislation is required to address what is a public health/public safety issue. Let’s be…

Naked Bodies and Bloodshed: What We Let Our Kids Watch

We had a bunch of kids over at our house to stay with a babysitter last New Year’s Eve while the adults went out to get appropriately inebriated. They were to watch a film, and as I was slipping on my coat one of the girls, aged 7, asked me if we had “Paddington 2.”

And I simultaneously realized several things:

One, we did not, in fact, own “Paddington 2.” Two, the cinematic interests of girls…

Rusty Pettis is dead.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Rusty Pettis was the associate pastor at the United Methodist church in New Hampshire where my father was pastor, and he sexually molested me when I was a kid. (For all the lurid details, you can read more here.) After I wrote a post about my experiences, the New England Conference of the UM church decided to investigate the matter,…