The Strongest Man I Knew

It’s Christmas Eve in the ICU and they tell me my father is dying.   There is a small spray of pine branches in a glass vase my mom brought from home perched along the windowsill.  His childhood stocking with “Chuckie” sewn in yellow thread with felt appliques of trains and teddy bears is pinned up on the bulletin board.  Otherwise, you wouldn’t know it was Christmas.   It’s the one floor where they don’t pipe holiday music through the hallways or the Rock-a-Bye-Baby nursery rhyme over the intercom after a birth.  It’s the floor without clocks on the wall and with a conspicuous Kleenex box at every bedside. 

I glance around room #5423 and wonder if it will be that last space my dad will inhabit.  The sterile white walls, the tan checkered curtain ripped in several spots along the track – the last objects he will see.  The scent of bleach wipes and cafeteria meatloaf – the last he will smell.  The endless beeping of machines and the suctioning serenade of his oxygen mask - the sounds that will escort him to another realm. 

His body is tired.  Years of depression and mania and heart disease and Parkinson’s and now embolisms and pneumonia.  Decades of pills rounding out square plastic compartments:  red ones and oblong blue ones and tiny yellow ones and white ones so oversized they’d have to be quartered so he can swallow them.  He’s been leaving us a little bit at a time for fifteen years - his presence slowly dissipating like the air from a carbonated can.  After I graduated from college, his first bout of clinical depression reduced him to a life inhabited within the confines of the basement.  His bed became a 5-foot navy and burgundy sofa.   The two obscured glass block windows, his only indication if it was night or day.  As our worlds as his children opened up, his became more and more compressed.  As we moved out, started careers, got married, and had babies, he aged, atrophied and began to evaporate.   

It’s surreal really - for him to be dying in the same hospital he was born in.  Charles Raymond Dressel - ushered into the world on Sunday, September 11, 1949, a day that would fifty-two years later be marked with unprecedented tragedy.  My grandparents saved the hospital bill.  $49.00 for a week’s stay.  Five dollars a day for the mother and two for the baby.   Now, we are all sitting here waiting.  My mom, sister and brother, politely rotating chairs and giving each other futile hand pats. I can’t remember the last time all five of us were in one room. The nuclear family without the grandkids, without the spouses, without my 90-year-old grandmother.  Just us.  Watching him sleep.  Checking the green neon vitals on the monitor.  Each one of us, wrestling with our own regrets, sorrow, pity, and place in the world without a father or spouse. Coming to grips with the fact that an axis is shifting underneath us.  Coming to understand that a man’s life is ending at 66 and that his grandkids will scarcely remember him.  Time feels heavy, suspended like an old movie reel that might spin out at any point and turn the screen blank.

Growing up, my dad epitomized brute athletic strength.  He was Chicago’s high school senior athlete of the year and went on to play three sports at Princeton.  He was a heavyweight wrestler, a defensive end, and shot put thrower.  Soon after, he was the dad who did push-ups whenever we piled on his back in a giggling heap.  He could scale the climbing rope in our backyard in 10 seconds flat and he did chin-ups with us hanging like monkeys from his ankles.  He transformed the laundry room into a workout pit with weight plates the size of car wheels and I’d spy on him sometimes from behind the furnace.  I’d stare, half-terrified of the bulge in his eyes and the puffs of air that would escape his lips as he’d hoist the bar above his head and then back on the rack.  In the summer, he’d dive underwater in the pool and propel us up into the air with our feet balancing on his palms. “Standing on the hands” he called it and we perfected it to the point that he could eventually balance us on only one hand. Simply put, he was the strongest man I knew.

The day before we admitted him to the hospital three weeks ago, he stood on his own for the final time attempting to get from the couch to the toilet and fell against the bookshelf displaying our childhood trophies. Softball, wrestling, volleyball, basketball, baseball, football.   All brass-hued plastic badges of our athletic prowess as youngsters, a shrine of long-forgotten accolades.  I remember how proud my dad was of each of them.  The MVP orange and black Princeton football that was presented to him during a senior match against Colgate sat squarely in the middle of our figurines on pedestals.  And they all came crashing down around him.  Miniature bats and feet and balls snapped off.  Name plates came loose.  Dust danced in the air.  

Afterwards, I went to assess the damage and figured they should all just be tossed out.   I picked up the fragments of cheap plastic and turned them over in my hands.  They all meant something.  I couldn’t help but think of all the teams he coached, practices he instructed, stands he cheered from, and endless evenings he spent under our backyard lights, squatting on a bucket in full catcher’s gear, tracking my curve ball.  That was what my dad excelled at.  Sports.  And it’s what we did together.  Those trophies exemplify his prime.  His purpose.  His offering as a father.  His happiest memories.  And I realize as I stare at him, lying helpless as an infant, labored and listless, that they were also some of mine. 

The buzzing of machines and the ringing of a phone in the nursing station startles me back to the present.  I stare at his little pine tree.  Christmas Eve.  In my head, I hear him singing, “Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”  One of his favorite carols.  I wonder if in his dreams he can run again – catch a football, move, dodge, scale a rope, pin an opponent. I wonder if he can swing us around like dolls and do standing on the hands.  I wonder if in his dreams, he is a man again. I wonder if he might dream about teaching his grandchildren to hit off a tee, round the bases, and throw with their shoulders turned the way he did for me thirty years ago.  I hope he can see it.  Their smiles. Their first-hit-out-of-the-infield victories.  Their exhilaration.  Their trophies.  I hope it brings him some peace as he drifts in and out of consciousness in this somber room, #5423.   I can only hope that they will be the last thing he sees.  

**After rallying overnight, my dad was transferred out of the ICU into a different room on December 26th. He continues to have good days and bad days, but we are hopeful for forward progress.  The pine branches and his stocking came with him. 

A Do Over

This spring at a hotel in Chicago I watched Stanford sophomore, Emma Rose Coleman, take the stage in red-rimmed glasses and perform slam poetry - an evocative and lyrical piece about her life on campus.   It was one of many inspirational moments amidst 400 fellow alumni at Stanford Connects, a day propelled by discussions on everything from black holes to robot ethics to climate change. Thirteen years separate me from The Farm and yet that afternoon listening to scholars, students, and faculty share their passions and pursuits, I time-traveled.   Emma’s poem settled over me like morning dew.  I was catapulted right back, bicycling feverishly through the quad, ponytail swinging - The budding writer.  The quintessential Fuzzy - brimming with promise and expectation and a touch of naivety.   I prickled with undergrad electricity.  I was infused with an almost manic energy.  I felt like I could take on the world.  And by mid-day, the four years  I spent at Stanford seemed palpably fast, short and insufficient.  I knew I had lived it.  I knew I had loved it, but I was a bit envious of Emma.  I wanted the chance to do it again and this time, with more gumption and boldness and conviction.  I wanted a do over.

I longed to sit down with that lanky freshman girl who abandoned her creative writing seminar that first fall because she felt young and timid and exposed.   I wanted to tell her to stay.  To tough it out. To whisper in her ear that she was good enough.

I yearned to comfort that devastated senior who moped around for weeks following a break-up.   I needed to show her a few snapshots:  Her, standing barefoot and beautiful in her wedding dress. Her, cartwheeling along the surf of the Arabian Sea. Her, interviewing for her first job.  Her, watching her three-year-old pedal a tricycle down the driveway.  I ached to show her how large the world looms.  I wanted her to know heartbreak, but understand that it would not break her.

I wished to tell that sluggish sophomore who slept until noon to get off her butt.  To go to that tennis match, to that lecture in MemAud, to her professor’s office hours.  I wanted to remove the net, lift the fog, shine the beacon on the fact that she was living in one of the most innovative places on the planet.  A place teeming with opportunities. With ground-breaking research.  With humble brilliance. A place inhabited by the world’s coolest nerds.   I wanted her to immerse herself in the campus’ heartbeat.   I wanted her to be worthy of her admittance.   I wanted her to have the courage to fail.

As much as I enjoyed the networking and the quirky micro-lectures that day in Chicago, I struggled too.  I listened to the almost farcical acceptance rates and staggering statistics of qualified applicants and was reminded what a rare privilege I had been given.   I reflected on my journey since graduation and what really stung was what I had not yet accomplished.  

Today I have a sales job that affords me the ability to work from home and spend quality time with my kids, but it is not at all what I thought I would be doing.   I had big plans.  Write a book.  Attend law school.  Climb the ladder.  Do what Stanford students do.  Excel.  Succeed.  Inspire.  Set the bar.  Instead, my life seemed a little less glossy, laden with diaper blowouts, lukewarm macaroni and cheese, and mad dashes from swim class to tot camp and back to my email inbox.  I found myself doubting.  Have I contributed enough?  Challenged myself enough?  Have I given back and done myself proud?  Have I pursued my passions?  Am I a good enough mom?

    

Looking back, there here is no denying my Stanford experience was exceptional.  In high school, I was robotic. Like many of my fellow classmates, I studied compulsively, played sports and followed the rules. But, in college, I let my hair down. I was still serious, but relished interludes of pure adolescent fun.  I went out for greasy Jack-in-the-Box fries at 2am - on weekdays!  I tried my hand at polo, mastered pool on a wobbly dorm table and took up jogging around Campus Loop - albeit slowly.  I took an epidemiology class for non-science majors and got to hold an actual human lung.   I traveled down the coast during breaks, camped outside for 6^th Man basketball tickets, and rang in my 21^st birthday in Vegas with three friends and $76 in my bank account.   I let myself be flawed.  I flirted.  I flourished.  I fell on the ski slopes.  I fell in love.  I fell off my rusted, sea-foam, Schwinn ten-speed bicycle, on several graceful occasions.  I fell hard for Stanford. 

So, yes, I would do it all again.  But, as the day drew to a close in Chicago, I realized, not at the expense of my present.  Last week, I got to see my eight-month-old crawl for the first time.   I was witness to it because she made her inaugural move on our living room rug during my lunch hour.  I recognized that the choices I made, the mistakes I committed, all perfectly paved the most imperfect path to my current life.  I know any minuscule shift in whom I met, what I studied, where I sipped my CoHo Frosty Mint on some innocuous Tuesday morning could potentially have reconfigured an entirely different outcome for me.   I am old enough to embrace the fact that you can never really go back.  I am wise enough to recognize that the honey-drizzles of nostalgia can make the past taste sweeter than it actually ever was.

My college experience was meant to be lived once and while I was young.  It was meant to catapult me into the world and mold me into an adult.  It was meant to be lacking and languid at times and exquisite and emphatic at others.   Still, I would like to challenge my thirty-five-year-old self to some slam poetry from time to time.  To get out of my comfort zone and think again.  Dream again. Let my hair down again because the gift of the present is that everything is forward motion.  I have nothing to regret yet - except if I were to ever indulge in another nocturnal French fry binge.  Because, let’s face it, no one has the metabolism of an eighteen-year-old. 

These Hands

I promised to savor her smallness.   To let her nap on my chest, curled up like a mollusc, and allow the laundry to pile up.  And so, I carry her into bed with me in the early amber hours of morning as we stretch and purr and sluggishly shed sleep’s skin.  I attempt to memorize the contours of her face, the pucker of her lips, the ripe plumpness of her cheeks.   I inhale the honey sweetness of her breath. I know this is our last baby and her hands make me cry.  They are flawless and minuscule.  The delicate nails, the quaint dimple of her knuckles, the distinct pattern of her fingerprints.  She will have these hands for eighty, ninety, perhaps even one hundred years and they will do a lot of living.

These hands will soon begin to grasp and thump the floor in rhythm with her knees.  They will clap, yank hair and assault her sister’s Barbie house.  They will learn to tie laces and doggie paddle in the shallow waters of Michigan summers.   These will be the same hands to tug on my sweater at the park when I am chatting with another mom and she is desperate to show me her cartwheel.  And the hands that will refuse to unravel from my neck the first day of school.  These hands will ravenously flip the pages of a Harry Potter novel, clutching a flashlight under the covers, flinching at the sound of my footsteps. She will let me hold these hands through parking lots, on escalators, and in crowded department stores.  These hands will need me.

These hands will cover her face, soaked in tears, and shoot up in elation after a soccer goal.  They will perspire during spelling bees and freeze on the sledding hill.  They will clench the steering wheel in white-knuckled uncertainty that first trip down the driveway.    They will give me the finger when my back is turned behind the kitchen counter and they will wave goodbye when we drop her off at college, just as my own will suddenly feel as though they have been severed from my wrists. These hands will grow independent.

These hands will encircle cups of Italian roast coffee and drape over stemmed glasses of burgundy. By day, they may steady a scalpel or draw a bow across a violin.  They will taste-test the world and uncover her talents. These hands will tentatively reach out and touch the arm of a stranger.  They will caress the face of a lover and gingerly adjust the knot of his tie.  These hands will be enfolded in another’s.  These hands will one day wear a sapphire ring. 

These hands will grip the rails of a hospital gurney during labor and envelop a swaddled infant.  They will learn to be a mother’s hands – tender and sturdy.   These hands will work hard.  They will callous.  Scrubbing, mixing, typing, diapering, comforting, teaching.   They will tuck in toddlers, apply Mickey Mouse Band-Aids, twist hair into French braids, and scour the clay out of softball socks.  These hands will make countless bologna sandwiches.   These hands will nurture.

These very hands will get singed while taking a lasagna out of the oven and sliced while chopping carrots for Christmas dinner.  They will ball-up used wrapping paper, wipe tears from little cheeks, and trim tulips from the garden.  They will endure numerous paper cuts, splinters, and knicks and knocks and one broken pinky on the ski slope. They will tire, rub throbbing temples, and wearily plop down on pillows with the lights still on and the evening news rattling on the TV.  

These hands will travel, touching pyramids and pink sand and the leathery backs of elephants.   They will call me on Sundays and carry in my groceries.  These hands will expertly swing a golf club. They will wrinkle and cradle the heads of the great-grandchildren I will never meet.  These hands will quiet.   These hands will find serenity.  

These inconceivably tiny hands that I have held since her first day will be the same ones decades from now to reach across my worn-out body and squeeze my own.   And as I lay here now, staring at these hands I have known for only sixty days, I think there isn’t another pair I would rather hold on my last day.  These hands are mine for such a short, fleeting, delicious wisp of time. 

My Moons

A Miss Piggy doll.  A wire rabbit hutch.  And throwing up in a sea-foam green bowl.  Those are pretty much the only watered-down memories I have of my life before 3 ½ when my sister, Amy, arrived on the scene with pudgy knees and a portly chin and clinched us a family of four.  As determined as I may be, I can’t rustle any images of my mom’s belly gradually ballooning out or of my grandparents taking me to the hospital, or of the time I apparently extracted Amy from her cradle by the neck and dumped her in my mom’s shoe closet.  Truthfully, I don’t really recall my sister as a baby at all.  I’m sure I squeezed her cheeks too hard and wrestled away any toy she got her chubby hands on, but I am also quite certain I must have loved having someone to boss around.    

Naturally, my sister and brother, who arrived two years later himself, are entangled in all of my childhood memories.  They are the constant characters in my own time reel, the major moments and the minuscule ones.  My playmates on our trips down to Bluffdale Farm to ride horses, collect warm eggs for breakfast, dig for toads in the ravine, and terrorize the glut of cats that sauntered about.   My fellow salesmen, peddling Girl Scout cookies while propped up on peat moss bags behind the check-out line at our family hardware store.   My companions on those drizzly afternoons, playing dress-up in the basement while listening to The Isley Brothers on our brown and orange Fisher Price record player.  My partners in crime, scrambling up the stairs and plunging under the covers when we spotted mom’s headlights in the driveway when dad let us watch an extra hour of TV.   My devotees on those airless summer Saturdays at the ballpark, teaching Blake how to trade softball pins and coaxing grandpa into buying us snow cones that stained our teeth blue.   And they were there, my siblings and fellow survivors, in the ravaged aftermath of Hurricane Andrew.   That surreal night under a massive violet Floridian moon that we leapt butt-naked and screeching into the floating tangle of palm fronds and roots that littered our condo’s pool like a cauldron of soup   - our childlike glee reverberating over an island awash in darkness and muzzled in stillness. 

For decades, my siblings have been the ones who could annoy me to no end, bruise the deepest, and cut to the very core of my insecurities with a single line.  They’d be the first to tell you I slept with a diaper until I was at least six, that I asked why we needed Austrian currency in Vienna during our family’s 1996 trek through Europe and that I just recently pronounced ‘Dolce ‘ in Dolce & Gabana like the milky caramel dessert.  Just like any other family, we are simply three random human beings who happened to be thrust together in this journey.  Throughout our childhoods, we evoked equal measures of anger, jealousy, fun, humor, and compassion in each other.   To this day, Amy and Blake are the only ones who can truly relate to the endearing madness of my mom’s deliberate one-fingered phone dialing or comprehend all the repercussions when I mention dad is acting manic again.   They were the ones who shed tears with me during my most stark moments of grief and let me babble on in nauseating euphoria when I was falling in love.   They are my constants in a world that shifts and swivels comrades, cities, careers, and circumstances.  They are my huge violet moons.  

In roughly a month’s time, my own little family will welcome its fourth member.  My parents will accompany Bridget to the hospital and she will parade through the door, wearing the pink Big Sister Shirt I bought her and greet her new baby sibling.  She will walk through that door with her little toddler legs, curious, expectant, and perhaps a little mystified, and her life will never be the same.  She will leave behind the only reality she has known thus far, as ‘The Only’.    But, she will enter the only reality she will ever recall.  

This tiny squirming infant in my belly right now, jutting out arms and legs and hips and elbows, is the stranger waiting to complete our family.  He or she will be with all us for the remainder of our lives.  Whatever broken bones, family vacations, Christmas mornings, gymnastics meets, flooded basements, flu seasons, and brown bag lunches await us, she or he will be there.   Right now, Bridget is adoring and animated.  She gives my belly hugs, coos ‘I love you’ into my stretch marks, and softly encourages the baby to go to sleep and stop kicking mommy.  She claims she will share her stuffed dinosaurs, tickle her or his feet, and sing Twinkle Twinkle whenever the baby is crying.    She is adamant upon naming her sister or brother ‘Watering Can’ and is anxiously waiting to introduce him or her to the magnificent taste of lollipops.

I have no doubt there will be hiccups to this honey-sweet version of life after baby.  I predict some tantrums, tears, and impressive bonks on the head.   (Although, I am hoping we can avoid a shoe closet dump).  I expect hair-pulling and “I’m not touching you” taunts and squabbles over the front seat.  I anticipate some awful door-slamming crashes, vicious screaming matches and black and blue bashes , but I also know there will be love.   There will be love and inside jokes (likely at the expense of Brad and me) and volcanic laughter that bubbles over for hours.  They will grow in tandem, witness to every intimate detail of one another’s lives.   Her proudest achievements.  His devastating heartaches.  For decades, they will be together for every birthday party, graduation celebration, and pancake breakfast on listless rainy Sundays.   Later on, they will stand, side by side, at one another’s weddings and in turn, gaze on as their children chase seagulls down the beach.  They will more than likely, be shoulder to shoulder at Brad and my funerals, shaking hands and smiling at all the small snippets and stories they had never heard about their parents.  They will live more years with each other than I will ever get the privilege of claiming with either of them.

My hope is that they will be each other’s pillars, their asylums in world that can often be harsh and shrill.  My hope is that they will be each other’s sanctuaries, that they may exhale and know they are home, recognized, accepted, and loved.  My hope is that my children will simply become each other’s moons.  

Small Days

I think I mostly used to live for the Big Days.  The tropical vacations, the international getaways, the lavish 10-course meals that ashamedly tallied up close to a mortgage payment.  Before our daughter, Brad and I had a lot more of those.   He caressed the binding of new edition Lonely Planets and I scoured the gastronomic menus at all the North American Michelin stars.  I was addicted to the planning, the anticipating, the sheer adventure of escaping from the daily grind.   I loved my life.   There were big days with lychee martinis, passport stamps, and inventive camera poses while scaling rocks, eating seaweed, and perching under street signs written in Arabic. Now there are Small Days with milk dribbling out of sippy cups, twisted car seat straps, and deranged-looking dinosaurs drawn in purple bath crayon.    Yet, it didn’t take me long to make peace with that.  My new reality may not be big, but it’s bountiful.  

Last month, however, I found myself in a bit of funk.   I was dreading the cold this winter, bracing for the gray monotony of piling on layers of wool, gripping frigid steering wheels, and drying out wet socks on the radiator.  I wanted to travel.  I wanted to go somewhere fabulous.  Somewhere exotic with fruit I didn’t recognize and sand that felt like powdered sugar.  A place that required three planes, a boat and an ATV to get to.  And then, one morning I made the sluggish trek down the hall in my fleece robe and slippers to pluck my toddler out of her crib and she greeted me with those words I had been waiting two years to hear, “I love me, Mama.”  (Well, close enough).  And I felt the sweet rush only a small day can provide.  Never mind that she then proceeded to squat down and poop.  I was smitten.   I am slowly learning as a parent that life is actually the meat in between whatever big days we are granted.   It is our sustenance.  And it is delicious.

That is what makes today, December 14^th, an otherwise small day in my life, a day of such profound sadness.  Today marks the one year anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting.   As a mother I cannot help but feel gutted about the events of that day.   I remember staring dejectedly at the news that week, shaking from my safe perch on the living room coach, tangled with conflicting emotions: feeling lucky, terrified, outraged and yet, bloated with empathy.   For several nights I laid in bed, confounded that something like this could happen.   I wrote a blog entry in attempt to mourn the profound loss I was feeling after grasping how little control I actually have over the safety of my own child.

Twenty-six lives were taken that day at Sandy Hook.  Twenty of them children.  7300 small days.  Simply stolen.  7300 nights without a pajama-clad child brushing their teeth over the sink while pretending to slay dragons and 7300 mornings of zipping coats and tying shoes by the door that were denied existence.  There were no trips to the library or underdogs at the park or running after the ice cream truck in bare feet, waving a dollar.  There were no puppet shows or twirling in dress-up clothes or building forts out of sofa cushions.   I am guessing the anguished parents of those children felt the most cheated by all the small days they had missed.  All the minuscule moments; the bony hugs after soccer practice, leaps over sidewalk cracks, kissed-away paper cuts, cookie-batter licks, and sleepy yawns at bedtime that patch together a day. I am guessing they most miss the mundane.

The Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America movement isn’t calling for a moment of silence on December 14^th at 9:30am EST.  They are organizing gatherings all around the country to make noise.  They are convening the masses in three dozen states to ring bells in honor of those who died at Sandy Hook and to the 30,000 others who lost their lives to gun violence this past year.   They are gathering to mourn, but to mourn with purpose and resolve.  Something must be done to provoke continued progress in the legislative fight against automatic assault weapons.  Something must be done to reform gun control and secure universal background checks.  Our children are dying.   Twenty-six school shootings have occurred in the 365 days since the tragedy in Newtown. CT.  Twenty six.  One for every life at Sandy Hook.  

Moms around the country are demanding action.   So I am making noise.  With my daughter by my side, I am ringing my bell today.  In a small way.  In my small house.  On an otherwise simple, single, small day that is anything but mundane. 

One Cup of $5 Tea

Next Wednesday, Sept 25^th, I will turn 33.  There was never any question in my mind that I might not reach this age.  That I wouldn’t be married, settled in the suburbs with a toddler hanging off my hip, scrubbing crusted spaghetti sauce off the inside of the microwave.  I am certain I have managed to take for granted most of my 12,000 plus days here on Earth and I have done so with the careless comfort of believing that death was something you fumbled upon in your 80's and even 90's.  I have had other vital matters to attend to.   Like fretting over the zit that perennially forms in the crease of my chin and those flights that were delayed over two hours due to tornadoes in the Oklahoma Panhandle and the nor’easter in Maine, and my beloved houndstooth sweater that shrunk in the dryer, not once but twice.    I have been aimlessly distracted, attempting to recall ridiculously devised computer passwords, hunting down parking spots, burning frozen pizzas in the oven, and making sure my daughter didn’t rip the pages out of all the Dr. Seuss books.  For the past 33 years, I have had that pleasure.   This past year, however, everything was jarred.   Shaken up and stirred. 

 

I found out a year ago this past July that my best friend from college’s sister-in-law had been diagnosed with Stage 4 Lung Cancer at 28.   She was a star volleyball player in college, a newlywed, a gorgeous and avid athlete, and a person who had never once touched a cigarette.  Her name is also Emily.  And I guarantee you she would have given anything that summer to worry about marinara in her microwave.

Emily’s good friends started a blog last year (http://embenkickscancer.wordpress.com ) to help keep those who cared for her informed throughout her journey.  She endured multiple rounds of chemo out in Los Angeles, which led to a complete lung removal surgery in New York this February, followed by 28 unrelenting radiation treatments.   With her family, a buttress of steel behind her, Emily has battled, fought, persevered, and maintained her lovely sense of humor and gracious spirit with gargantuan grit and guts.  She is officially NED (No Evidence of Disease) as of this spring, and is gaining her strength and stamina back little by little with the support of streaming Netflix, electrolyte water, daily walks with her pooch, and her loving and devoted husband, Miles.  Likely not in that order.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of being a guest in the audience when Emily made her television debut at a taping of the Steve Harvey show here in Chicago. The producers had flown her in from the West Coast so that she could surprise and thank her mentor and hero, Bonnie Addario, Founder and President of the Bonnie Addario Lung Cancer Foundation, who has raised over $10 million for research, medical support, and awareness to eradicate this devastating disease.  There was Steve Harvey’s perfectly-positioned couch.  And there was this breathtakingly beautiful girl with long brown hair and a poppy red dress, poised and postured with her ankles crossed under the glare of the studio cameras.   The gasps in the audience were audible when it was revealed that she was in fact the face of lung cancer.  This bright young woman, oozing with the promise of a giant life yet to live, sitting there, confiding her brutal battle to simply survive. 

    

I was shocked at how neglected lung cancer funding is when I did some digging online.   It is the most lethal cancer, and yet it receives the least amount of funding from the National Cancer Institute.   It garners a fraction of the dollars that go to breast cancer, for example, and yet is second only to heart disease in cause of death.    There seems to be a stigma associated with lung cancer as a smoker’s condition that is self-inflicted.  However, more and more young non-smokers and especially women are contracting it.  All the while funding is desperately needed to aid these patients and educate the public on belying the myths of lung cancer.   Even the ribbon signifying the disease was formerly clear, giving subtle reference to its invisibility and lack of deserved attention.  It has since evolved to white and I will be proudly wearing that ribbon next week when I run in the Your Next Step is the Cure 5K in San Francisco with Team EmBen.  Did I say run?  Okay, jog… well, powerwalk for sure.  I will cross that finish line though, despite being embarrassingly out of shape and floppy in various key places. 

Which leads me to my 33^rd birthday.  I’m not in the habit of buying lavish birthday gifts for my compadres, but who doesn’t love splurging on a draft pint or classy cosmo for a friend, toasting to their companionship and to another year of warding off grey hair?  Pretend I am that friend this week….. that you are treating me to a steaming cup of earl grey (decaf for those who really know me) and a long overdue chat, and instead toss some change to the Bonnie Addario fundraising site in honor of EmBen.   I even put the website here to make it easy for you.   

http://yournextstepisthecure.kintera.org/faf/donorReg/donorPledge.asp?ievent=1064916&lis=1&kntae1064916=0EBB876A6D3E43699289AFB2F4BB336F&supId=389755678

And remember to set your DVRs  this Thursday, September 19 to watch a poignant story of survival and support unfold on the Steve Harvey Show (NBC).  Never mind that it comes after a teen sexting segment, I promise you will be moved.   I promise you will turn off the television and not care that you forgot to buy the orange juice at the supermarket.     And I hope you may just feel inspired enough to “take me out” for a $5 tea. 

We OWN it!

If you look at the numbers, I suppose Brad and I have unofficially achieved 66% of the American Dream.  We are 1.5 kids, 1 cocker spaniel named Millie, and a ½ picket fence short, but last Wednesday we officially became home-owners (disgruntled property tax payers.)   And it only took us a combined 75 years to get there.  I will not miss our lousy landlord or the shared driveway.  I will not mourn the silverware drawer you have to pry open with an athletic stance and two hands only to have it litter our muffin tins with toxic sawdust in the cabinet below.  I will not grieve for the prehistoric centipedes that scamper out of dark corners when Brad is not home – god help me; I am utterly creeped out by those repugnant legs.  I will not pine for the crumbling front step or purple toilet seat or pink toilet seat or even the marigold-orange toilet seat, despite the fact that is it unquestionably the most tasteful of the three.


There is a lot I won’t miss about this house, but it has been witness to two of the best years of my life.  This will always be our transition house when Brad and I sort through our stash of various return address stickers that we ordered in bulk, but haven’t thrown out because we are both certifiable hoarders.  It was our trial rental suburban house to ensure we could handle the quieter, simpler life nine miles from downtown where drivers actually halt at stop signs and kids do cartwheels in front of lemonade stands.  The house with the crazy mail slot in the downstairs powder room beside the aforementioned purple toilet seat.  The house, three blocks down from where I grew up, that lovingly welcomed our hefty nine-pounder after she was born and the house she practiced her first wobbly steps in.  The house where we warmly hosted family, friends, neighbors, plastic Fisher-Price gadgets, Baby Einstein clutter, Evenflo thingamajigs, as well as a Rody, red tricycle, used cozy coupe with a gimp wheel, wagon, and thirty-seven stuffed animals in a span of twenty-four months.  As I learned from our last move from the city two summers ago, a home is a merely a decorative shell for all of our shit.  And, perhaps, a vessel for the moments that captivate, inspire, surprise, sadden, amuse, anger, and delight us as humans….but we can have those anywhere.   Still, there is some melancholy as we leave Bonnie Brae.

As with any kind of change, this marks an end of a chapter for us.  And that closure makes me feel old in a way, forcing me to acknowledge with pristine clarity that two years have simply whizzed by.  That there is nothing I can do to get that time back even if I wanted to. That the unknown awaits us as well as a giant lawn that will require weekly mowing in 90 degree heat.    Now that our savings account smacks of a sieve, we are busying ourselves with painting and planting and prettifying (that is actually a word) to create the most hospitable “shell” possible to live out the memories that await us.  I know there will be disappointments and setbacks in our new abode.  I am anticipating some toddler mega-meltdowns and decibel-deafening teenage tantrums from behind slammed doors.  I accept there will be a leaking faucet, some nail polish stains on the rug, perhaps a summer baseball through the back window.  I will even permit the occasional spider or even a spring infiltration of ants, but I refuse to cohabitate with those prehistoric, heinous centipedes.

In contrast, there will be lovely moments too.  Many of them.  And then, there will be a few really exquisite ones.  Moments so rare and gorgeous that the house itself may even smile.  And they will all be ours.  We own it.  Along with our 1000 new self-sticking address labels.