Dear O.:
I am so sorry that we never got to have an entirely satisfactory conversation while you were here in the U.S. over Christmas holiday. I find that since the heart attack last August my ability to do more than one thing at a time has almost vanished, and during this holiday we had so many things all trying to happen at once. Yesterday my daughter returned to her University for the Spring semester and immediately the house has been thrown into quiet. Unfortunately, this was also the weekend you returned to Spain and your Real Life, so we will not get that time to speak. So, I will write you a letter. Right now it is 5:05 a.m. The sun hasn’t yet appeared, but I am full of the thoughts that intrude upon sleep.
I have to speak about my health because it currently colors all my thoughts and actions. Thank goodness I was a healthy person to begin with, and had quit smoking and worked to eat healthy foods and keep exercising. For 15 years I’ve battled the growing symptoms of something becoming very wrong, while being put down by doctor after doctor. Finally one night I had the heart attack, though I was convinced in those minutes it was probably just me being psychosomatic. I didn’t wake my husband; I went back to bed, thinking I might die but maybe I wouldn’t. They tell me one of the arteries that feeds my heart is 90% blocked, the others are 30%-40% blocked and none can be fixed by stents or surgery. So I am taking “very aggressive” medications to try to stop or maybe even reverse the damage that is there. Being the offspring of people born 100 and 110 years ago, I am made of some very old DNA, and that can’t be helped. I am told that what is happening in my heart is also happening in my brain. I have cardiovascular disease and also peripheral artery disease, which basically means I’m silting up like the Mississippi River, if you can visualize that. I don’t think I will be able to live very many more years, but the drugs I’m taking are pretty wonderful so I might be surprised.
It is weird to be able to at the same time remember feeling robust and limitless while constantly running into barricades. One day it took me all day to change the sheets on three beds; I used to build museum exhibits! I used to walk for miles for pleasure; now it’s an effort to make a trip around the mall. I can feel how fragile the tissues are that are holding me together. The image of a footprint being made in thin snow, the pressure reducing it to a wet dark shape comes to my mind as a comparison. However, I have been told by a woman who lived through this that it might take a year or two but I might feel like myself again, eventually. There are good days when I think that will be so.
So here at age 60 and against this backdrop of ‘falling apart’ I will fill you in on details.
My daughter just turned 20 on January 4. She is so amazing to me, such a delight. She is making straight A’s in college, now in her Junior year. We think she may be able to finish the four years in three, and go straight into a Master’s Degree in Sociology. We did a great job of saving the money for this, so we aren’t suffering through paying tuition like some families. Two of the four friends who started in her first year have had to drop out and attend community colleges while working, because of the economy.
Our house has been on the market, this worst possible housing sale market, since last summer, right before the housing slump hit. We’ve had to keep it looking sort of perfect for months, ready to be shown at a moment’s notice. It’s had a lot of traffic through but so far no offers, so we have taken down the sign until the Spring: enough, already. There’s a wonderful little house up on Bent Mountain that we’d buy in a heartbeat if this one sold. It was built as a little Blue Ridge Parkway lodge with three guest rooms during the 1940’s, and has a stone foundation and fireplaces and a breathtaking view of the Valley and mountains over several counties. It’s the kind of house that you can visualize having a painting studio and writing desk and is very creativity-inspiring. I'm decorating it mentally.
Over the holidays I reconnected with a lot of family tree ‘limbs’ as I am similarly motivated as you are to know those people finally and have them know me. I discovered that www.Facebook.com is a wonderful way to do this—it is sort of like a little website where you can have thoughts, photographs, even videos stored, and can check in with others frequently. I will send you an invitation soon to join it. It’s something that young folks started but I now have a whole group of my contemporaries—as well as family members that I keep up with all over the world in this way.
Late in the game I’ve found out that families are subject to that Newton’s Law which says All Goes to Entropy: Families fall apart much more easily than they stay together. It seems that is almost more the natural order of things. I married into this big family and bought 14 place settings for dinners at holiday time, and now I barely need six place settings. So, I’ve decided to go out and hunt them each down and do what I can, selfishly, to reconstruct some of these relationships. You can count on me to keep you roped into my group of relatives, in-laws and former in-laws.
Well…it is almost sunrise. I am actually going to crawl back into bed and snooze a little while longer. I can hear my dear husband riding the exercise bike downstairs, so it will be easier to sleep without the movements of someone else in the bed. I’ve already had coffee, fed the dog and cat and miniature hamsters, and written this to you so it’s sort of insane to go back to bed…but my life is full of little naps these days. Very luxurious.
I am actually a very happy and lucky old woman. I have white hair but still have great skin and am not too awfully fat; sometimes old guys give me the eye and a nod and a “howdy”, which is kind of fun. They can’t turn my head too much, though, as I have a terrific husband who seems to adore me no matter what, and you can’t beat that.
Love to you and best of everything in 2009.
Linda
