Fear of Quarantining

Photo by Rostyslav Savchyn on Unsplash

How, I wonder, do the imprisoned survive?

Covid quarantines are giving us a new appreciation for jail time. Me, at least. Personally, I just would not make it. Going to jail has always been low on my list of reasons to obey the law, but lately it has risen to the top. I do not handle isolation well, to put it unreasonably mildly.

Early on in the pandemic, when the geezer house in which I live was totally shut down, I had a doctor’s appointment. On my return I was told, by management people who without prior notice had been transformed into wardens, that I would need to quarantine in my apartment for the next two weeks. Maybe this had been posted somewhere before I left, but it had missed my notice.

TWO WEEKS?” I shrieked. “In this very apartment? No quick trips to the outdoor restaurants? No walks in the parks? For TWO WEEKS?” It was not a pretty scene. Five days later the warden revisited to tell me I was cleared to leave the premises. During the interim period I had received three meals a day delivered to my door, done a good bit of pacing and totally caught up on emails and writing projects. But I had also felt myself going a little nuts. In five days. To clarify this absurdity a little further, I have a lovely 1600-sq-ft apartment with a balcony looking across San Francisco to the San Bruno Mountains, and a western view of extraordinary sunsets – something few jail cells boast. Still, I feared for my sanity throughout five long days.

Half the people I know are self-quarantining somewhere or other for up to two weeks, for the pleasure – or often the necessity – of traveling these days. For the most part, they seem to be suffering in silence, and I appreciate the fact that they are doing this to protect you and me. It’s slightly less common now, unless you’re doing international stuff; but because the Covid virus, in one variant form or another, is likely to be with us for many months ahead, quarantining is also likely to remain.

As I wimped my way through five days of isolation I experienced at least a half-dozen of what the Mayo Clinic identifies as symptoms of anxiety, including tension, restlessness, nervousness and “having a sense of impending danger, panic or doom.” This was the worst moment of all: an ice cream truck set up shop on the street below, midway through a warm afternoon. Almost pushed me over the edge – or off the 7th floor balcony. That truck was just below my eyes, and I was forbidden to go downstairs and buy a popsicle. It would not have helped to think about people in prison who don’t see ice cream trucks outside. I survived by remembering I had a Haagen Dasz mini in the freezer.     

If you suffer from anything similar to the above, I strongly recommend against visiting Hong Kong. A young friend of mine, an American who has lived and worked for four or five years  in Hong Kong, recently came to the U.S. for a visit with friends and family. When we met for a brief reunion I asked if she would face quarantine on her return to Hong Kong. Whew. She will be escorted from the airport to a hotel not of her choosing, where she will spend 21 days in a room with bath. She will wear a bracelet tracking her every move, and if she leaves the room she will be faced with huge fines – and possibly worse. She will be able to order food and necessities but they will have to be left outside the door because no one will be permitted to enter the room. She will do her laundry in the sink. “Does the government foot the bill?” I asked. “No,” she said; “it will all be at my own expense. Travel is considered a luxury in Hong Kong.”

My visiting friend did mention, as we urged her not to leave her cellphone on the far edge of the outdoor table, that she is not the least afraid to walk home alone in Hong Kong at 4 AM. Autocracy has its privileges.

But I’m going nowhere near there. Or anywhere else, without my KN95 mask.  

Ten Top Reasons for Masking Up

Photo by Jacek Pobłocki on Unsplash

The delta variant, no surprise, is felling our fellow citizens left and right and here we are back in the middle of the mask mess. Full disclosure: this writer is fully vaccinated but still pretty freaked about the possibility of becoming a break-out victim. That I probably won’t die is small consolation; the variant is seriously messing with my life.

Because I’m unlikely to get the virus from someone wearing a mask I have compiled my ten best arguments for masking up. Set aside the small detail that infection and death rates are going up at the rate of about 100% every week or two, most of which could be avoided if everyone were simply to get vaccinated and wear a mask. That seems not to matter to the unvaccinated and unmasked. So herewith my arguments:

Coronavirus has no race.

1 – Why not? It’s just a piece of paper or cloth. Some of them are pretty nifty.

2 – That brings up the fashion aspect: today’s masks can be downright elegant. I have one that’s studded with faux rhinestones; putting it on equates to getting dressed up.

3 – Plus, the mask is today’s easiest way to make a statement (Go Green! Vote for My Person! Etc)

4 – I deeply regret the politization of the whole business, but some current opportunities for expressing yourself via mask are still pretty good. I recently passed a stout gentleman whose  mask read “Because I’m keeping you from getting sick and possibly dying. What’s your reason for NOT wearing one?”

5 – And before I retreat from politics here, masks seem to offend Rand Paul. Offending Rand Paul is reason enough to mask up any day.

6 – Fall and winter are just ahead. Masks keep noses warm.

7 – You might want to make plans. Or at least not interfere with others’ plans. My poor niece, a doctor in a major urban hospital, has postponed her wedding multiple times. If her patients had been wearing masks they wouldn’t have become her patients, and she would not now have covid – and looking at possible postponement once again.

8 – Also, you might be protecting yourself against all manner of invisible evil. One scientific study estimated that the air we breathe contains some 1,800 bacteria. This was before the coronavirus joined them.

9 – Masks are today’s contribution to history. Sort of like the flapper dresses of the 1920s, history will look back on the 2020s as the Mask Age. Unless, that is, those pathogens and their viral colleagues carry us all off before the 2120s. Which brings us back to

10 – Why not? People are needlessly dying, every hour of every day. If we all just put on a mask maybe a few of us will survive to remember them.

Solitary Confinement in Covid19-Land

Prison gridI brought this on myself. Not by committing a crime, I hasten to point out, but by leaving the building, which is forbidden. Two months behind on a medical appointment, and confronted with signs of problems ahead, I broke out. And the policy of the geezer house where I live was thus: leave the building, return to 7-day isolation. Solitary confinement.

There are limitless varieties of isolation these days: young singles working 12-hour days from within tiny apartments; frail elderly trapped in inaccessible homes; wheelchair-bound and disabled – we’re all in this together, but alone. My own isolation is embarrassingly fine by comparison: three meals a day delivered to the door, a sunny balcony with lovely views, plenty of music with which to interrupt the nonstop news on TV. But total isolation, for the vast majority of us hopelessly social creatures, is tortuous.

This is a commentary on solitary confinement. There is a reason why solitary confinement is employed as an ultimate punishment, and I think I have a tiny glimmer of insight into what that’s about. More relevant to the outside world, and to these days: all those mentioned above are facing today’s viral version of solitary confinement. It’s not intentionally punitive – though it so feels punitive – but this corner of Covid19-Land is a world unto itself. What follows is a report from inside Solitary.Insomnia - sheep

Day One: On first closing the door behind me, there is a shock of desolation. I grab a glass of water out of the refrigerator, sit down at the computer and find myself in tears. I cannot imagine what it must be like to hear the cell door bang shut, but I have a sense of what isolated others felt on first hearing that Stay Home order. When talking on the phone later with a working-at-home friend she uses the term “unmoored,” which feels particularly appropriate. We highly social creatures are moored to each other just as are boats tied to docks; cut loose, we tend to drift, and the seas feel turbulent and full of danger.

Day Two: For someone who has seldom been bored, I feel myself fearing boredom. I consider calling my friend on the second floor, a noted poet and retired professor now totally blind, but there’s no way to phrase a question about boredom to her without seeming cruel. And as to my unmoored working-from-home friend, a union organizer/justice warrior – her workdays can run well past 12 hours; I think she’d welcome a little boredom. Still, it looms.

Day Three: Zoom and FaceTime have their benefits, but in some ways only heighten the yearning for real-time human interaction. Isolation leads to lethargy, which manifests as physical. With absolutely nothing wrong, I still feel unable to eat. I fix a bowl of plain rice; comfort food is comfort food. I wonder if any condemned prisoner has ever specified plain rice for a final meal? Also: why should anyone start wondering, ten minutes after a nap, when it will be bedtime again? Thankfully, the Rachel Maddow rerun – if I skip the 6 PM (PST) broadcast in favor of PBS NewsHour – sails unmoored boats, now reminded of real problems in the real world, straight into 10 PM.

Covid-19 greenieDay Four: The interesting thing about lethargy and unmoored-ness is that they are interspersed with moments of anxiety. It’s an unspecified anxiety, but then, that may be how anxieties work. As I am one whose moments of anxiety usually happen about once a decade, I can’t say. All I know is that solitary confinement comes with anxieties. In addition to having generally been anxiety-free most of my life, I have also always loved periods of solitude. The difference between chosen solitude and enforced solitude is equal to the difference between night and day. Chosen solitude = peace, beauty, tranquility. Enforced solitude = anxiety.

Day Five: I feel myself having tipped over into something that would probably just give any self-respecting psychotherapist the creeps. Or the shakes. In five days, I have morphed from sane person to blob. I have, however, been firing off a lot of pathetic emails to the Resident Care Director and the Executive Director, they who are in charge of my case. They show up, together, at my apartment. They tell me they (presumably with the approval of the Virginia corporation which owns this plus several hundred other geezer houses) have re-thought this policy. If someone goes from Point A (here) to Point B (doctor’s office) using maximum caution (latex gloves, outside shoes to change, mask, hand-washing at either end, clothes washing on return) one need not be isolated. I resist pointing out how nice it would’ve been to have reconsidered that policy five days ago, because I am way too happy. And besides, I’m in a hurry to go down to the exercise room.

I think it is not irreverent to hear Martin Luther King Jr’s voice booming in my ear, “Great god a-mighty, free at last.”

Arctic - bird on water

This essay appeared first on Medium.com, a good site for which I’ve been writing for several months. You might want to check it out.

 

 

 

Stuff That Really Matters — or maybe not

Covid clusterEarly on, I worried about my fingernails. My fingernails, you see, tend to split perpendicularly, making the simplest tasks like folding socks or making beds a nightmare that leaves me with sometimes bloody fingertips. This affliction struck when I was in my 40s – which was a very long time ago. About 20 years ago (I’m in my 60s by then) my physician gave me her blessing to go get the fancy silk wrap manicure. I think she mainly wanted to get me off her back, having patients with somewhat more severe issues than splitting fingernails. Anyway, you can dig in the dirt with these fingernails. For the past 10+ years they have been gracefully administered by the lovely Little Yen at California Nails. Little Yen is so designated because there’s an older Yen at California Nails. Little Yen is a beautiful young woman whose eyes, when she smiles, which is frequently, crinkle into merry little upside down crescents with accent lines springing outward like fireworks. She has two beautiful children, Rachel and Randy, who are U.S, citizens as I hope Little Yen may soon be. And as a manicurist she is without peer. One springtime she painted little flowers on my nails, just for fun.Fingers There is not a day that I don’t worry about how Little Yen is surviving; I can’t find her to ask, or to help. A silk wrap manicure by Little Yen will last for three weeks, maybe longer – at some point the dig-in-the-dirt layer will grow itself out and my ridggedy, problem nails will be on their own. I am somewhere past that point just now.

But we are indeed at an interesting, maybe a tiny bit hopeful, point. Early on in the U.S. chapter of the Covid19 saga I heard a pundit optimistically punditize, “American innovation is going to be the thing that saves us.” Yeah, sure, I muttered. But it’s beginning to look like a wise observation, and perhaps a truth. People are whipping out masks & PPEs on their sewing machines, or making shields and who knows what else with 3-D printers, and creating ventilators from CPAP machines – while every lab in the country is racing to come up with therapies or, some day, a vaccine. One guy in San Francisco’s North Beach district even devised a way to hand out free coffee to his neighbors via a Halloween mechanical gorilla arm; his five-year-old son came up with the idea. Despite being essentially without a left brain, I study every new report of a new lab report like a maniac.

Most of us are a little jagged, because life everywhere was interrupted by the coronavirus. And who likes to be interrupted? My own life was interrupted midway through cataract surgery. I have one new, cataract-free left eye; the right eye was scheduled for Monday, March 16 – well, so much for that eye. Since March 16 I have been sheltering in place with one good eye, one foggy eye and a pair of glasses that have no idea what they’re supposed to be correcting for.

Hugging Charlie by Clover_1Something else has been more universally interrupted. When my late husband Bud turned 75 I threw him an OGTAB party, to which invitees were to bring a statement of One Good Thing About Bud written on a business card or similar note. Virtually nobody paid any attention to that size suggestion. I wound up with 8 by 10 framed declarations, posters, canvas paintings and one wind-up music box playing an original message. A lot of the OGTABs referred to martinis, but even more of them said Hugs. Bud was a 6’4” bear of a guy who never met anyone – especially a female anyone – whom he didn’t want to hug. Sometimes perfect strangers only newly introduced. Bud would make Joe Biden look like a cold fish. I don’t know about Biden-hug recipients (who are likely to be few and far between from here on out), but Bud-hug recipients simply knew they were huggable. Who doesn’t want to be huggable? This nation was built on hugs, for heaven’s sakes. Handshakes, at a minimum. When this is over may we please touch one another again?

Which brings this essay back to where it started. Some things matter, and others not so much. We can figure out ways to deal with home manicures – even home haircuts although I think I’m going with pigtails. We can pick up lives where they were interrupted, and most of those interruptions will be found to matter very little.

What matters are the people who are suffering. Very few manicurists have savings accounts. I have been down every possible road, without success, trying to find Little Yen just so I could send her a few dollars. Multiply her by a few million and that’s how many people we somehow need to reach, and help. What matters are the innovators and the front-line people they are trying to help.Hug

And eventually, the hugs.

 

 

 

This essay appeared first on Medium.com, an excellent site for the exchange of ideas and information, on which I’ve begun posting. You might enjoy visiting it too.

Quarantined in the Geezer House

Clouds 3.21.20
West view from 7th floor

“Six die, 53 ill at nursing home,” reads the San Francisco Chronicle headline. It follows a similar, recent headline, “Coronavirus: 27 test positive at Orinda nursing home,” and seemingly endless others: “New cases in Alameda County facility,” “Another death at Gateway Manor”. . .  These are the sorts of headlines that the management of my particular senior housing community most fears, and that strike a little dread in the aging hearts of my neighbors and myself. I live in a 12-story assisted living building near downtown San Francisco. It includes some 90 apartments housing singles and a few couples with a median age of, say, 87. That is a random number, chosen only because it puts me in the younger half. I generally refer to our place as the Geezer House, but the marketing materials use slightly more refined wordage. Those materials do not lie: this is not the ritziest senior living place in town, but it would fall in the “upscale” category.

There are hundreds of senior living facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area, ranging from minimum-care to rehab to lifecare to nursing home; all of us are, to one degree or another, the scariest target populations for COVID-19’s quiver of poison arrows. At the center are the nursing homes, source of the horror stories that seem to increase daily; my community is somewhere around the second ring out from the bullseye. Though we are somewhat less vulnerable than nursing homes, if one COVID-19 virus particle managed to sneak into our building it would be Katie-bar-the-door. We’ve had practice runs, with flu or norovirus, but those moved in slowly, two or three new cases per day until the mini-epidemic retreated. With COVID-19 we’re staring down a mystery virus that, in neighboring senior facilities at least, seems to move in and take over in a blinding flash.Covid cluster

Extreme measures are underway to prevent that from happening in my building. Think San Quentin, but with better food. We began with Mayor London Breed’s shelter-in-place decree on March 16; this being San Francisco, Mayor Breed got a three-day jump on Governor Gavin Newsom’s March 19 statewide order. Life in geezer houses took a sharp turn toward confinement at that point. I encountered the new reality head-on when innocently heading out to drop some mail in the box across the street. “If you step out that door,” my friend the concierge remarked, “you must first sign this document.” He handed me a paper declaring that I “understand that by departing (the facility) I am violating Public Health Order No. C19-09, enforced by the San Francisco Police Department” and that I “may be excluded from (the facility) and not re-admitted.” I thought better of mailing my letters.

Birds in treesThere is a stillness here. Sometimes it’s eerily pleasant, the silence broken by birdsong in nearby trees. But often it is ominous. Having worked as a hospice volunteer and with other end-of-life organizations, I know the sudden stillness that is death, and others here have experienced it when losing a loved one. So here we are, in a place where most of us have come planning to stay until we die – and we’d just prefer not to be thinking about it in the middle of a pandemic. Listening to the stillness, watching the quiet streets no longer bustling with cars and people – manages to equate with death and become just a tiny bit stressful.

Life in confinement turns out to be something for which many of us were remarkably ill prepared, and there’s little comfort in knowing we share that woeful lack with millions of fellow citizens and certainly the Trump administration. Comfort is in short supply under social distance guidelines. Most of us here were children during World War II, memories of which have a certain nostalgia: there was shared sacrifice then too, but it felt noble rather than resentful. And there were Mr. Roosevelt’s fireside chats.

FDR 1936
FDR in 1936

I don’t remember the first of these, which was given a few months before I was born, but I well remember some of the last, during the war, when we’d gather around the big Philco radio to hear that deep, cultured voice. Grammatically perfect, unfailingly calm and reassuring. It’s hard not to yearn for such a voice when listening to our current president’s egotistical bombast and vulgar, vicious divisiveness. I think the memories of very different times accentuate the vague feeling among residents of senior living facilities that we are imprisoned against our will.

On the upside for my fellow inmates here and me, our fortress is pretty posh. Three good meals delivered daily in compostable containers, creature comforts like views of the San Bruno mountains to the south, or the San Francisco sunsets from our west windows. On the downside, it is possible to spend days at a time without seeing another human being, other than the masked person who shows up every day to take your temperature. For those of us still mobile there are decidedly other upsides: a small exercise room with treadmill, weights etc, and an outdoor terrace on the second floor (barred gate at the bottom of its stairs.) Walking from one end of the terrace to the other requires 180 steps. The exercise room being too small to accommodate more than one socially-distanced person, I get my best exercise walking from the 7th floor to the 3rd to see if anyone is on the treadmill. Eight or ten of us are also known to go walking at the same time, appropriately distanced, and thereafter to hang out for also distanced but at least human-to-human, conversation – though it does include frequent remarks in the “Did you see who that gurney came for?” category.Treadmill Some of us are more obsessive than others about checking the case/death numbers posted every morning at 9 by the San Francisco Department of Public Health; everyone talks less and less about when the country may “open up.” Or about politics at all, for that matter. Political discussions pretty much begin and end with “What about Trump saying . . .” This place is not a bastion of conservatism.

What’s not heard a lot? Complaints. If we chafe at confinement, we’re grateful to wake up without a fever. Most of us have friends or family in New York, Atlanta, New Orleans or Seattle and we worry about them far more than they need worry about us. All of us have friends or family who are doctors, nurses, first responders and others on the front lines. Somehow, gratitude seems to edge out the fear in our geezerly hearts.

Gratitude - sunrise

This essay also appears on Medium.com, a fine site committed to the exchange of ideas, knowledge and perspectives, on which I’ll be posting in the future. But I’ll still be holding forth right here on franjohns.net. So stick around!

Could We Use a Little Logic in Virus-Fighting?

This space tries hard to avoid overt political issues. But today, with the novel coronavirus sitting in front of our eyeballs on waking and hanging out in our brains throughout the day – whether we happen to be infected or not – it’s almost impossible to avoid how politics impacts the reality of the pandemic. The following is offered just because it seems such a ridiculously obvious way to address the problem.

Recently, this letter of mine appeared in the New York Times:

“At 86, I am absolutely fine with dying — although I’m healthy and active and would not turn down another five or 10 years. So if I wind up with Covid-19, give the ventilator to someone else.

“What bothers me is that if our national leadership had just a fraction of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s brain, they would follow his very rational advice to send all available ventilators to New York until the curve begins to bend, and then ship them to the next crisis area. Under that system, San Francisco would get an adequate supply in time for my neighbor and me both to survive.”

Covid-19 globeAbout that “give the ventilator to someone else” line. I should say up front that this is not some lofty altruistic declaration. Ventilators are not a lot of fun, and many older patients (one physician friend suggested a scarily high percentage) wind up dead on them anyway. Even for just a few days, lying still with perhaps a hole in my windpipe and for sure a tube down my nose for nutrition approaches torture, in my considered opinion. Lying still would additionally involve being unable to write, communicate or do anything else that makes life meaningful. Thus, compromised with a dangerous virus and probably soon dying alone without loved ones of any sort nearby – no thanks. Shoot me with all the morphine on hand and let me go.

I am a grateful and enthusiastic board member of End of Life Choices California. As such I’m a firm believer in Medical Aid in Dying: the right of terminally ill, mentally competent adults to ask their physicians for life-ending medications. Now legal in nine states and the District of Columbia, MAID will, I hope, eventually be “best practice” for the medical professions. Refusal of a ventilator falls in the category of mechanical aid in dying, of sorts, and why not?

The second, less esoteric issue addressed in my brief letter is simply a plea for national response to the next pandemic – which Dr. Anthony Fauci, may he long survive and prosper, tells us is likely to come with a reappearance of the novel coronavirus in the fall. Assuming it doesn’t start somewhere they’re still convinced it’s a hoax – hello, Mississippi? – maybe we as a nation could adopt a fast and sensible strategy: throw everything we’ve got at the first peep-through, and try to snuff out subsequent peeps-through as fast as supplies can be diverted from the first. My degrees are in Art and Short Fiction, not medicine or policy, and I admit to having only a rudimentary left brain. But how does this not make sense?

I’m just saying.

For more about MAID, and a lot of other good information you can use, I encourage you to visit https://endoflifechoicesca.org/

 

 

On Covid-19, Flexibility and Compassion

Covid-19 globeI don’t know about your neighborhood, but Covid-19 is making life interesting here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Difficult for many, devastating for some, and interesting for the rest of us. As of this writing (I recommend the CDC site for accurate data on other areas, other updates) we have sped past the first hundred confirmed cases in the state, and who knows how many of the 10,000+ Californians in self-quarantine are also my Bay Area neighbors.

This little virus brings with it a large bunch of life lessons. Some of them are shared here, as a public service.

First off (I hate to bring politics ever into this space, but what can you do?) if you ever believed anything said by our commander in chief, this is a good time to mend your ways. Covid-19 is not a Democrat hoax, it is not going to disappear in a short time, you really shouldn’t go to work if you’re sick, a vaccine is at best many months away, and good luck finding those test kits that anybody who wants can get. This is only a life lesson in the sense that, in today’s crazy information-overload reality, Truth is hard to find. So, Life Lesson #1: Seek Truth. Read several newspapers if you still read news. Otherwise, visit the CDC site and scroll through more than one mainstream news source, please; do not believe Facebook will give you Truth. Watch PBS and occasionally Fox News; if one disseminates truth, the other reinforces your neighbor’s version of truth – and we’re all in this together.    Covid-19 greenie

Other life lessons are happier, and equally easy to learn. For instance, at my church we very quickly learned to replace hugs and handshakes with fist bumps and peace signs. Not as much fun, but whatever. The ushers are equipped with bulletins and hand-sanitizer. Choir members last Sunday spaced themselves three feet apart, which looked rather elegant – but they sounded the same, i.e. gorgeous. We also learned translations of the word Covid into Hebrew and Yiddish, which I have already forgotten, and which doesn’t matter anyway since the name was chosen by the World Health Organization thusly: Co and Vi come from coronavirus, D stands for disease and 19 (as in 2019) = the year the first cases were seen. To connect all this: I belong to a Presbyterian church that is heavy into hugs, scientific truth and interfaith understanding.

As to flexibility, this viral pandemic is teaching us, wisely, not to be so rigid about stuff. I was dismayed when the San Francisco Symphony cancelled a concert on my regular series that I really wanted to hear; and the political roundtable at the Commonwealth Club, a favorite regular program at which I always volunteer, similarly disappeared. But symphony season will resume in good time, and do we really need to talk politics late into the evening when it invariably produces nightmares? Sleep is better. That long-planned trip to Tucson in a couple of weeks? Probably not the wisest thing for my octogenarian cardiovascular system. Purpose of trip, however, was to join my daughter for a visit with a childhood friend of hers (whose mother, lost to cancer decades ago, was a good friend of mine) – and they can definitely have a ball without me.

So take deep breaths and wash your hands. We and the planet will survive in good time.

Moon & clouds
 

Cycles of Living and Dying . . .

Sebastian entered the world eight weeks ahead of schedule, weighing all of two pounds. His lineage is Korean/African American/German, which may offer an insight into how determined, individualistic and utterly beautiful he is. He had emerged from NICU (the neonatal unit at Kaiser) and gotten his fighting weight up to nearly six pounds when he first came to visit my husband Bud.

Bud w Sebastian 1.3.19
Sebastian (unimpressed) meets his honorary grandfather

That was about mid-January. In early February, about the 11th, Bud’s congestive heart failure of many decades took a sudden downward turn, and by Valentine’s Day he was in his last hours of life on this planet. Sebastian came to visit – well, he brought his parents too, but they are not central to this story.

His mom plunked Sebastian onto Bud’s chest, as he lay breathing heavily on his hospital bed, red balloons snagged from the downstairs dining room floating around. The last deliberate movement I can associate with my husband as he died was his left arm making a sort-of patting gesture toward the tiny pajama-clad bundle of new life on his chest.

We should all sign up for this: old life ending as new life begins. Seeing life as a natural continuum might not make much difference as we enter, but it could help us take more control of our exit – simply by confronting the fact that we will indeed exit. I like to think that my husband’s last moments were somehow heartened by the certainty that life does, and will, go on.

Bud was fortunate in other ways. Having reached his 90th year, he had been vocal about his readiness to die and had expressed his wishes clearly in writing. There are many good options now: hospice or palliative care, enforceable documents like DNRs and POLST forms (Do Not Resuscitate, Physicians Order for Life Sustaining Treatment,) etc. POLST formAnd in a growing number of states there is a right to confront mortality by hastening one’s dying. In California where I live there is the End of Life Option Act which gives terminally ill, mentally competent adults the right to ask their physician for life-ending medication. For many, that is a way to meet life’s end with extraordinary peace.

A relatively new organization, End of Life Choices CA, is part of this continuum, this big picture of Birth/Life/Death/Peace. EOLCCA provides information and personal support re  California’s End of Life Option Act and all other legal end of life options. It is among several nonprofits dealing with critical aspects of end-of-life care – and helping us all see more clearly that death, like birth, is a universal experience.

When training, recently, to be an EOLCCA volunteer I met a remarkable fellow volunteer named Lori Goldwyn, who may understand both ends of this continuum as well as anyone around. After earning an M.S. degree in Education and working in women’s health for several years, Lori had a homebirth 30 years ago that led her to become a childbirth educator and labor doula. “I came to believe in the value of supporting the natural process as much as possible,” she says, “for both the mother’s and her baby’s sake. A woman in labor contends not only with the pain of labor,” Lori adds, “but with the intensity of realizing that there’s no way out. She can’t escape, quit or divorce this one. The only way out – as is true with the rest of life – is through.”

Eventually the link between natural birth and natural death became clear. “While being with my mother in an inpatient hospice in 2010,” Lori says, “I was struck by the similarities between the birthing and dying experiences.” That epiphany led to her working in hospice and palliative care, as an End of Life Doula, and now also as a volunteer with EOLCCA. Her website, Comings and Goings, reasserts the validity of this continuum with this subtitle about Doulas: Caregivers to those on the threshold points of our Earthly existence.Moon & clouds

“When we get that terminal prognosis, or as we lie dying,” Lori says, “there’s no escaping this reality, this ultimate inevitability.” She quotes the Italian director Federico Fellini: “All we can do is try to become aware that we are part of this unfathomable mystery. We are a mystery among mysteries.”

As he grows, I think Sebastian will also understand this mystery, this continuum, as well as anyone. Sebastian started off in a softly-lit incubator watched over by his mother, a nurse. Weeks later, his honorary grandfather was leaving the planet. And they were able to trade greetings on their journeys.

 

 

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