Tag: friendship

America Collection/End-of-Life/General interest
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Holiday Report: One Fine Day

by Fran Johns

GRIEF, FRIENDSHIP, JOY AND A COLONY OF CORMORANTS. WHO COULD ASK FOR ANYTHING MORE?

Cormorants and friends enjoying the sunshine (Author photo)

Hope your holiday was this fulfilling. This full of Life.

I hadn’t actually realized it was Labor Day. Just wanted to visit a friend who’s dealing with Bulbar ALS. Another mutual friend had lost her widely beloved husband several weeks ago and agreed to make the quick trip from San Francisco to Southern California so we could all do a little grieving — and a bit of talking, laughing and more — together.

This meant booking an early morning flight on Friday, beginning with figuring out how to summon a Lyft from Judith’s house to my place and thence to the airport. OK, everybody else in the world knows you just click on that little plus sign and a ‘second stop’ line appears. But those of us who grew up using a dial phone to call a taxi have to figure this out. By Googling “How to call a Lyft with extra stop,” watching a couple of bewildering, more-than-you-ever-wanted-to-hear videos made by people talking too loud and too fast — and finally discovering the little plus sign purely by accident.

It is not easy being Elderly (me, not Judith) in the Age of Technology.

It is, though, a wonder and a delight to discover a travel soulmate. We both just love airports. We know it’s weird. But we have loved airports forever. Judith, because she traveled alone when young and thus quickly learned to slip into the restroom, apply lipstick and go from there. Me, because airports have been associated with pure joy and adventure from the first one I ever met — a quonset hut in a Richmond, VA field — regardless of whether I was there for a harried business trip or a vacation in Amsterdam.

So we began with a leisurely latte and airport-special snack — gag, if you must — before taking off for a flight along the California coast. If a flight along the California coast doesn’t do your heart good, something is seriously wrong with your heart.

Early morning sunshine above San Francisco (Author photo)

We found our friend, who weighs about as much as two cormorants (more about them later; they don’t weight a lot) looking like she just stepped out of a fashion photo, and with a smile to match the sun.

In case you’re unfamiliar with Bulbar ALS, it robs you of the ability to swallow and, eventually, talk or eat — little things like that which would diminish enthusiasm for dressing beautifully, or smiling, for that matter, for most of us. My friend Lynne is not most of us.

Can you find anybody who looks sick? Or bereaved? (Author photo)

We had a brief visit in the sunshine of Lynne’s garden before heading to our hotel in La Jolla. Which brings me to the excuse for this brief essay, other than showing off my gorgeous friends, mentioning a lovely dinner with the two people who make End of Life Choices CA work, and sharing the view from Seat 34-A:

How can you not share a photo such as this one with the waves breaking toward nonchalant cormorants? Not to mention the other hundreds of nonchalant smaller birds on their own adjacent bit of beautiful coastline?

So impressed was I with my photographic skills (thanks, iPhone 16) that I looked up the species to make sure these are actually cormorants. (If they’re not, please do not deal that crushing blow in the comments.) Cormorants, of which there are about 40 species, go back to roughly the beginning of time as we know it. They are just about everywhere on planet earth they can hang out, dive underwater for their dinner (just about any kind of fish, including eels thankyouverymuch) and sun themselves at their leisure.

Although Wikipedia informs us that “the origin of the family is shrouded in uncertainties,” cormorants have been around since at least the Early Oligocene or the Late Paleogene, whichever came first — I’ve already admitted that it took a long time to figure out how to order a two-stop Lyft; I will not go into how ignorant I am of paleontology.

But what I do know is that these fascinating birds have populated the planet since long before we humans started warming up their oceans, and will in all probability be around long after we have all washed away. Or turned to dust, whichever you choose.

It is somehow comforting to think how little it matters that stupid men build golden monuments to themselves, or cruel men seek to dominate their fellow humans when Mother Nature, or the divinity of your choice, ordains that there will always be deep blue oceans crashing gracefully onto endless shorelines. And always, cormorants soaring above.

The rest is just noise.

* * *

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General interest
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On Getting Through the Worst Day

by Fran Johns

JUST WHEN YOU THINK YOU’VE HIT BOTTOM, HANDS REACH DOWN TO PULL YOU UP

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

My beloved friend Bob left the planet recently.

It was time. He was done with all this. We have a good law, the California End of Life Option Act, that offers the choice of Medical Aid in Dying if one is a mentally competent, terminally ill adult. So after many years of battling cancer — most of them wonderfully good and productive years — he didn’t so much surrender as choose to leave the battlefield. We should all have the grace, and the good fortune, to make such a choice.

Still.

A few days earlier he’d called to say goodbye. I declined; we settled on See you around. Then on that morning after I awoke to an email of two hearts in my inbox from him; another two, later, from his wife. (Though he and I had loved each other deeply for years, she understood. I’m pretty sure I was not even close to being his only extra-marital beloved.)

I had gone to bed that night before, after sending off my own hearts, with a heavy one of my own. The hearts in the inbox helped, but the heaviness was slow to lift; loss takes its own time to wear itself down. As Anna Quindlen concludes in her poem “Old Friends” — which also references earthquakes and tsunamis and terrorist attacks — “Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.” So I poured a cup of coffee, thought sorrowfully and fondly of his family, and wondered how any of us would get through the day.

And then these things happened:

A new photo of my one-month-old great-granddaughter popped up in a family text stream. Her father, my grandson, is shampooing her hair.

A neighbor of Bob’s — who knew him only casually but knew of our friendship and his illness — sent an email saying she and her husband were walking by his house this morning and thinking of how often they enjoyed the lovely music coming from his piano. She hoped things were okay and just wanted to send a note.

My daughter-in-law called to fill me in on family lives, and discuss some technological issues she has offered to help me with. If dealing with technology won’t take your mind off your sorrows (and/or replace them all with rage and frustration) nothing will.

A neighbor in my building sent a text saying how much he was enjoying the new flower arrangement outside my door. As it happened, the flowers in my building’s lobby were to be replaced in the morning,

New arrangement of aging flowers (Author photo)

so it was legal to snatch a few (the white ones, dahlias perhaps?) late last night. I poked them into a vase with some hydrangeas brought by dinner guests two weeks ago. Who needs new flowers, when aging ones bring community joy?

A political activist friend emailed an invitation to a fundraiser for some national candidates I greatly admire. She knew I couldn’t afford the big bucks initially advertised, but a few cut-rate tickets had quietly been made available. (Or so she said.) Maybe these folks aren’t as big a draw as we’d hope? — at least it meant getting to meet and greet a few heroes, and in lively, fancy company!

Some old Substacks and Medium posts generated thoughtful comments, some of them funny, all bringing just a tiny fragment of someone else’s soul.

At lunch I visited with a group of old friends; we talked causes and politics and trivia. After dinner, another old friend came for a visit and to use my shower, because she has no hot water. Life in senior living facilities does not always run smoothly. But her trouble was my gain.

In my reading pile are several unfinished New Yorker’s and Atlantics, Ann Patchett’s new Whistler and (audiobook version) The Odyssey. Miss Mabel K. Whiteside, who taught me Greek 101 an antiquity ago, would be proud.

Just another day on planet earth. Minus the physical presence but not the living spirit of one treasured soul, and still peopled with others — 

Each one reaching down a hand of friendship.

General interest/Optimism Collection
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Treasures With A Thousand Faces

by Fran Johns

WHAT MATTERS AFTER ALL: ALMOST A CENTURY OF FRIENDS

(Written in response to a Medium.com invitation to write about one’s treasures)

What would you grab if you had ten minutes before a coming disaster?

In earthquake-prone, wildfire-wary California, this is a sometimes parlor game. More than once, I’ve used it as an icebreaker or had it come up in conversations with friends and strangers alike.

I think: My passport? My laptop? My cellphone? But invariably, I go back to the now-famous Guest Book Collection. I would grab the guest books.

When I married my Final Husband, sometimes referred to as the Last Best Husband, a few decades back, I moved from a lifetime on the east coast into the San Francisco Victorian he had bought twenty years earlier. He had had no siblings or close relatives, and though he’d been married before had never had children. But he had friends around the globe. I had more relatives — children, grandchildren, sisters, cousins — than could be easily counted, plus friends scattered everywhere myself.

We needed space. So the first major project we undertook was to convert the ground-level area behind the garage into a guest room with a small kitchen and bath. It was seldom empty for the next quarter-century.

A favorite niece started this tradition: as a wedding gift, she personalized a small notebook, transforming it into a guest book. It began life in the upstairs extra room of the Victorian, moving happily into the downstairs mini-suite within a year.

Guests were invariably greeted with a hug and an admonition: “If you leave without signing the Guest Book on the coffee table, you may never be invited back.” To a person, our guests obeyed.

They also quickly got creative. The book became the repository of reflections, photos, poems, cocktail napkins, ticket stubs, playbills, and more. As soon as Guest Book #1 was filled, it was succeeded by #2 — and by the time we downsized, the stack had grown to include Guest Book #6.

The little books came to tell the story of a happy marriage: illustrations by grandchildren, notes from favorite friends — they also grew to include pages for parties or special events, when I would invite everyone to sign with a name or a comment. My son and daughter-in-law came for my MFA graduation. A Parisian friend pasted in a photo from a trip we’d shared . . .

They’re just books, most costing less than $10. But they hold images and remembrances of literally hundreds of people I love.

And having those people in my heart? Priceless.

caregiving/Death and Dying/End-of-Life/Family and Friends/friendships/General interest/geriatrics/Lifestyle/Optimism Collection/seniors/USA/Women
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Loss, Love and Loyalty

by Fran Johns

broken-heart

Several decades ago a close friend of mine lost her only son in a senseless, tragic accident. He was in his late teens, on his motorcycle, on his way to work at a part-time Christmas season job. All of which added to the unspeakable sadness: a promising life cut short amidst the merriment of a season of joy.

Her friends gathered around to do what we could. We brought food, made lists of callers, tried to keep track of daily needs. My friend’s daughter, a best friend of my own daughter, suddenly found herself the middle child of three girls, all bereft of the one brother they had so loved.

In the large, shifting, changing, sorrowing group of those who came to the house  were a number of young men also in their late teens who had been friends of the one now gone from their midst. They said to the bereaved parents, “We’ll always be here for you. We’ll always remember Mark, and represent him in your lives.” The kind of thing people often say at such times.

These were teenagers. Ordinary kids starting out in life – who had been in their own share of ordinary teenage mischief. In the ensuing years they had their own share of ups and downs. But as it turned out, they were true to their word. They were there for Mark’s parents at Christmas and New Year’s, graduations he would have shared, special times he would have been a part of.

Time passed, Mark’s friends matured as his parents (and this writer) aged.

Recently, Mark’s father died. I happened to be back in town at the time – though like many of those young people I had gone on to life elsewhere – and was happy to be able to be with my old friend and her daughters at his memorial service. It was a bittersweet time: he had lived a full and honorable life; old friends had come to celebrate that life and talk of the good times we had shared. My daughter, still best friends with Mark’s sister although they live on opposite coasts, was there with me.

As I looked around the gathering after the service I slowly began to recognize middle-aged men I had known all those years ago. Several had married women I recognized — also from all those years ago. They were now telling stories of their own children who are starting college or launching their own new lives. They were Mark’s representatives. The stand-ins for their long-ago friend whose memory they would not let die, whose presence they would certify to the mother who lost him so long ago.clouds-stock-image

How to make sense of it all, young life cut short, long life come full circle? How, indeed, to make sense of life and death and loss and continuity?

Mark’s friends, I think, help answer those questions. Out of loss and tragedy come love and loyalty. Out of singular death comes communal life. Out of anguished sadness comes humanity. We all come and go, but we’re all in it together. For a few years or a few decades – but together.

 

General interest
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Things that matter

by Fran Johns

My daughter, having survived intact when her truck was totaled on Christmas Eve, mourned the absence of her pit/Great Pyrenees puppy, who took off when the truck flipped. Apple the dog apparently decided things might be calmer in the wilds of suburban Atlanta. (Flo the very old part-Lab, opted to stay put; a two-dog loss might have been too much for Mom.)

Apple’s disappearance was the bad news. Here’s the good news: the outpouring of support, in the form of e-mails, Facebook postings and offers from childhood friends who hadn’t been seen in years to go search local pounds was overwhelming. It gets REALLY hard to stay forlorn in the face of love and support from friends, family and people you never heard of who are offering comfort and help.

At Nancy Pelosi‘s annual January gathering there was another kind of support in evidence — and for me another reminder of the value of lasting friendship. I got a quick hug from my favorite star Democrat, California senator Mark Leno, who is often talked about as a potential successor to Pelosi. He gets my vote: Mark Leno is smart, level-headed, perceptive and impeccably ethical. (We could do with more politicians who’ve had rabbinical training.) He is also still graciously loyal to his life partner Doug Jackson, who died of AIDS decades ago in the early years of that grim time. Doug was the son of old friends of mine in Decatur, Georgia, so my affection for the good senator goes far beyond politics.

The bad news is that wars and sadness are everywhere. (Though Pelosi listed her priorities: jobs, safety — read: gun control, immigration reform and overturn Citizens United; that would spread joy.) The good news is that friendships are more powerful than all of the above. And if you hang onto them you can nearly always get a hug when you need one.