loss – Hindsight

2021, Covid-19, hope, loss, Racism, Sadness, Sunshine, uncertainty

Half Staff or Half Full ?

April 2, 2021April 2, 2021 Susan Greco

I’m baking cookies, fulfilling two orders I just picked up. My Spotify’s Quiet Songs playlist is rumbling in the background with Paul Simon’s April Come She Will, Dawes’ Nothing is Wrong, and more ahead.

Sitting at the table between batches and a CNN alert hit my phone with the headlines: Two Officers Wounded at US Capitol Attack, and a little later, Gunman Killed at US Capitol Attack, and now, 1 Officer Killed, 1 Wounded, Attacker Dead at US Capitol. Three mass shootings in less than a month, and now this, another Capitol attack.

Earlier today I learned my old neighbor’s sweet daughter, all of 21 years, passed away. My kids grew up with her right across the street from our house, swimming in her pool (she was an expert swimmer from early on) and hanging out while the parents drank wine and talked of future neighborhood fun for the kids — pumpkin carving parties, pool parties, parties for no reason at all. A heart attack and two strokes slipped her into a coma and then a few days ago into an untimely death.

It’s a sunny day here, a nice break from all the rain of late, and I’ve been thinking of all the tears shed already this month, already this year, last year and the one before, wondering if you collected them all in a big bucket what a shiny reflection today’s sun would cast. My mind is stuck on the enormous swath of people left behind wrestling with it all, trying to sort it out, slipping into the past remembering, and fast forwarding through the pain of the present in an attempt to carve out some semblance of a future, now with a gaping hole at its center. Wives, parents, sisters and friends, all left behind in this bizarre Covid-spiked world to keep going. But there is hope. There is always hope. We have vaccines way ahead of schedule and I like to imagine grandparents hugging their kids and grandchildren after this long year of isolation. What a pure delight that costs nothing. We all crave these kind of things but some of us don’t seem to find them.

I feel like I am supposed to be learning important nuggets from this set of years. I am supposed to come out the other side that much stronger, wiser, grateful for what I have, but instead I feel sad for it all. The Asian community and the hate they’ve experienced, the families of gun violence who get to relive their pain after yet another mass shooting, and the ongoing trial over George Floyd’s death. I watched witnesses walk up to the stand and after just a few questions, break into full on sobs, flooded back to that moment, the moment when you desperately want to help but you are pushed aside, forced to feel the avoidable horrific struggle spiral beyond control. 2021 was supposed to bring with it an enormous relief.

I am appalled and ashamed of these people behaving badly and disheartened that we still haven’t seemed to learn anything. Where are the gun laws that will protect these innocent people and spare their families so much pain? I don’t see the progress I need to see. Instead I see people laughing at our First Lady who didn’t pronounce “Si se puede” right. I see bullies and social media flexing its muscle for all the wrong reasons.

The cookies are cooling now, and there is India Arie’s I Am Light swirling through the kitchen.

I am not the mistakes that I have made, I am not the pieces of the dream I left behind, I am not the color of my eyes, I am not the skin on the outside, I am not my age, I am not my race

My soul inside

I am a star, a piece of it all

I am light

And next, Ruth B’s Slow Fade offers up its own wisdom:

The light has disappeared the dust has settled here. Was it always like this, cause now it’s always like this?

I’m not sure what the rest of this year has in store, but I am thinking we all have to find some light, harness it, be it.

Be well, find some sun, and if you’re vaccinated, go hug someone who could use it.

Love,

breast cancer, Empty nester, hope, loss, Uncategorized

Scar Tissue

March 16, 2021March 16, 2021 Susan Greco

I started physical therapy to restore range of motion in my shoulder and arm, left tight and knotty from a recent lumpectomy and radiation. Being able to reach behind and scratch my back easily and pain-free is a new goal, as is securing a bra clasp. Over a year since surgery and nearly that long since treatment, you’d think by now the healing would be all done, but seems the tightness has only increased. The tissue under my arm feels like fabric sewn with too tight stitches and all we need is a seam ripper to break through and pull the threads loose.

You’d think by now the healing would be all done.

Like you do when telling an infant’s age, I used to talk in months – I’m three months post chemo, six months since radiation, etc. – but thankfully now I can talk in years since all this started up in late 2019. My surgery and treatments have graduated out of their infant stage and into a toddler stage, with tantrums arising as this little blocked lymphatic circulation mess I must now clean up.

The physical therapy office is close by, convenient and calm — nothing like my last PT experience several years ago where the incongruously L O U D radio was routinely tuned to the unholiest of trinities – The BeeGees / Gerry Rafferty / Air Supply – and my physical therapist’s brash order-me-around style certainly didn’t fit my idea of a first-string player you’d pick for your healing team. Last week at my initial session, I was assigned an Emory student, a no-nonsense tucked-in clean-shaven guy who, after moving me through several stations working my arm and shoulder, moved into a deep tissue shoulder massage miraculously landing on all the tight unyielding spots which, albeit stubbornly, gave way. I left with a sheet of homework exercises, most of which I completed except the one involving a Theraband. Surely I own a Theraband, but, alas, where is it? Still haven’t brought myself to enter a Target or Walmart since the pandemic began, so opted against purchasing. I know, Amazon.

At today’s session I worked with a petite young lovely woman who moved me through various stretching and strengthening stations. The therapists toggle between several patients, like busy chefs minding multiple burners, careful to tenderly sauté and not let a rolling boil erupt or a pan sit unattended and burn. They move between patients rolling their laptops around on wheeled lectern style desks.

I might have blurted out to my therapist that the roving desk setup she maneuvers reminded me of the SNL skit with Melissa McCarthy playing Sean Spicer rolling her podium on the streets of New York. She humored me with an amused/mortified smile, probably not so happy she got assigned the clown who wants to inject humor into all of it, breaking up the calm focused room she and her colleagues have cultivated. I joked now she won’t be able to shake this visual and she smiled again realizing the truth of that unfortunate circumstance.

This weekend we went for a Sunday drive, winding through various parts of Atlanta — Edgewood, Inman Park, Poncey-Highlands. Other than looking at house paint colors for inspiration, my primary goal was to score a canelé, a small striated cylindrical French pastry flavored with rum and vanilla with a soft and tender custard center and dark caramelized crust, which I found at Ponce City Market’s Saint-Germain bakery. I’m working on not consuming much sugar, but occasionally the urge is real, and I’m increasing trying to locate something exceptionally good vs the first filler sugar I can get my hands on. By the looks of things in the Food Hall, but for the masks covering most people’s faces, you’d never know we’re in a pandemic. Throngs of loud-talking particle-spreading people filled the hall, the din of noise so visual and loud I nearly abandoned the much-anticipated sugar errand. I got myself a canelé and Joe a palmier, his favorite, plus a coffee éclair and raspberry and passion fruit mousse little round cake for later. We nibbled on the canelé and palmier and meandered through neighborhoods studying houses’ paint colors from our car for our some-day repaint.

Driving through Edgewood, I noticed a ramshackle of a church with a sign out front and the message, “Your Grief is Valid.” We live in a world full of dichotomy – help is on the way with stimulus checks about to drop into accounts and Covid vaccines increasingly common, yet still there are long lines for those waiting for a bag of food to feed their family and scores of people pre- and post-Covid cloaked in a stuck-on heaviness they can’t shake. Last week, the TV networks broadcast highlights looking back on the full year since Covid was proclaimed a global pandemic. How do you bundle so much loss into a news segment? It was admittedly well done, but so sad, too. Smiling faces now gone leaving behind families who don’t know where to begin to climb out of their despair. Exhausted doctors and nurses, their virtues extolled, in search of a reset or second wind or both.

Your grief is valid.

We each heal in our own time. And time, for the most part, heals all things. But for those of us stuck in the middle between our hurt and our healing, and with a pandemic thrown in the mix, every morning can feel like Groundhog Day, a familiar rotation without much hopeful change in sight. Circling back to the church sign, your grief IS valid, despite however fresh or old, and the way you move through it is your choice. But until you feel well on your way, please don’t stoically go it alone or hide until your best self magically shows up. Because we all know things don’t quite work out that way. Instead, walk with someone, grab a coffee or a canelé and take some time together, comparing notes, taking notes, or soaking in the simple and reliable beauty outside. One day when you aren’t looking, you will feel it, a little less heavy and moving forward with a slight change that happened, when things starting looking brighter, sharper and you saw a shiny glint of hope in the distance. Try and break up the days, infuse them with connection. Sure, physical therapy can mechanically do it, but being together also melts scar tissue, and is what opens up space for all kinds of goodness.

breast cancer, loss, self care

Flying High

January 25, 2020February 20, 2020 Susan Greco

Some days take a turn for the better and seems it happens when you’re not still looking. Stare at a day all day and will it to change and what do you get? The same day you started with. Get out, make plans, busy yourself with something other than that day you weren’t thrilled with and what do you know, you have a new day on your hands.

Yesterday I was sitting at a counselor’s office – the free one you get with the diagnosis – bemoaning the fact that I’m terrified of losing my hair not helped by the fact that the wig lady at the hospital doesn’t have any openings in the near future. Folks, the hair is dying on the vine, ready to drop at any moment, and this girl needs a wig. Stat. Hearing my frustration, my counselor told me of another place. I got up, dried my tears and called them on my way out. Within a half hour, I heard back. They could see me within the hour.

Stopping for fifteen minutes to inhale a few fish tacos at my very favorite westside hole-in-the-wall, I next found myself in their chair trying on the only blonde wig in the room. It’s got bangs and is cut bizarrely short, yet in its defense, it’s just a demo for color and fit, both homeruns. With it on, even with my own frayed dying rat tails for hair dangling underneath it, I felt oddly good, like someone had wrapped a warm, high quality blanket around me. Yes, I realize with this “do” you could call me Florence Henderson, give me a fried drumstick in each fist and send me off into my own Wessonality commercial, but the real wig’s hair will be longer and by the time it comes in, my own dead hair will be history. I feel bad for it as it’s tried so hard to hang in there with me and stay in the game, but it’s just had enough. We knew chemo kills hair and we were right.

Yesterday was a roller coaster ending on a high note meeting this woman who will help me finish out this hair chapter. I went to leave and she asked for a hug, like a mother pretending she needed it, but knowing it was me who did. She also had some health thing years ago and knows firsthand what it’s like to be on a hunt for hair. Not just hair, good hair.

Today I woke up with a plan. Feeling the dreadlock clumps my hair has morphed into, barely hanging on yet now void of any life, I up and ordered the wig. Check. Later on I had tentative plans to see a movie with a friend, which I kept, and we ducked into the dark theater, each with our own bag of popcorn. Decadently perfect. I felt so normal to be carefree and out at the movies with a girlfriend. I am normal.

Returning home, I walked into the kitchen to the most divine smell. And saw this. Another friend had said she’d make me a pot of her lovely kale white bean soup, and here it was, lovingly prepared, marvelously delicious and still warm, waiting for me in my refrigerator. Who gets this? Evidently, I do.

I’m beginning to trust how this all works. We inherently want to help each other and just need to know how or on the receiving end, need to trust that others will prop us up when we most need it. Need to ask them to and then let them. We can’t begin to presume how a given day will go, and there are nice surprises in store when we stop giving a day the reins and sit back only to watch it paralyze us. When you let people really see you, the sky’s the limit as to what you can accomplish, what you can give and what you can receive.

Lean into people if you need help, let them know how you’re stuck and what you need. We’re not here together to just fly solo when some days call for an entire fleet of copilots. Because sometimes there is turbulence.

hope, loss, Uncategorized

9/11

September 13, 2019November 6, 2019 Susan Greco

The day is done. I woke up early this morning and went outside and saw the start of a murky sunrise, a smeared light-polluted attempt at dawn. Bats circled overhead and a nearby train whistle sounded, as a few jets criss-crossed the sky. It’s September 11^th again, a day studded with sorrow and remembrances, what ifs, and what nows, a day so many shared but now wished hadn’t come at all.

Eighteen years ago and four months pregnant with my second son, I had a busy career and on this particular morning, a meeting with an important TBS creative director. The Techwood Drive office lobby was bustling as I stood waiting, staring up at multiple TV monitors. One news clip showed tall towers in Chicago – Hancock and Sears – with a breaking news ticker scrolling along the bottom. Nervous enough about this meeting I’d worked months to get, what on earth was happening in my sister’s city? With no time to learn the relevance of the story on various steel towers’ breaking points under the duress of heat, I was called in and began my spiel presenting our portfolio of logos and brochures, annual reports and point of sale. The TV was on in his office, like everywhere in the building, and I noticed him pulled into the screen as I was, both of us realizing something enormous was unfolding. There was a knock on his door and a female colleague said people were asking if they should go home. He motioned yes but said he’d be getting with her in just a minute. Horrified and now with the sound turned up, we looked at each other unable to speak, and I started to pack up when he directed me to continue. I tried for a moment, but it felt terribly wrong, clamoring for business here, now a ridiculous idea with the relentless evil that was surrounding us, taking over.

A day studded with sorrow and remembrances, what ifs, and what nows.

Petrified driving home, radio on with accounts of planes crashing and towers falling, I was concerned more still was ahead. Atlanta of course would be next on this random hit list, and I worried my route home on Dekalb Avenue was a mine field. What kind of monster was this new world that my innocent baby would soon join? No streets felt safe, but somehow, I got myself home to my toddler and husband, quickly getting inside, shutting the door behind me. The next day as if on autopilot, I drove to Sak’s to find a bathrobe, and left with something beautiful, a soft charcoal grey with a scalloped shawl collar. How bizarre and inappropriate to be shopping the day after, but I must have needed this soft wrap to envelop my baby and me, a cocoon to be safe inside. It would be years before I could part with this safety blanket, and only then when it began to noticeably fray did I finally.

Everyone remembers where they were that day as clearly if it were last week, yet I know my story isn’t unique. Our own memories combine with the reel of news broadcasts and over the years they weave a changing mix of sadness and strength and hope we carry forward. If our thoughts of this day fill us with fear and sadness, can you imagine what it’s like for the families of the thousands lost? It must be an unfathomable deeply private and personal layer to wrestle with, on a day that is forever public, the mourning of that morning we together share.

My older son, at the time not even two, now lives in New York. I imagine the makeshift memorials, the candles, the music and memories, and wonder if he notices, his head full of school work and subway schedules and college sophomore stuff. The younger son I carried that day is himself headed to college in a year, and for them both, 9/11 is something they didn’t feel but rather grew up knowing about, from us, their parents, and even learned a little in school in APUSH class, studying the United States’ response to 9/11.

When we visited the 9/11 Memorial Museum years ago, I worried about how this sensitive topic would be treated and hoped there wouldn’t be any hint of commercial flavor to this ticketed experience. When we arrived, we immediately felt the striking architecture, bold yet sensitive, and found the way finding minimal and helpful. If you could somehow gather every burnt, broken and twisted artifact left behind to tell the story of this unprecedented tragedy, this museum had done just that. Every detail, display, recorded voice, everything down to the varied lighting installed on different floors created a serene silent scene, and carefully, respectfully led you through that long dark day. Our tour docent spoke in a measured voice and presented a vivid account of this monstrous attack on US soil. Afterward, I thanked her for providing such detail that made it almost seem as if she herself had been there. She paused a moment, and then softly replied, “I was.” Tears rushed into my eyes and knowingly, she put her arm around me, comforting me, the New York tourist and she, the one who’d made it out of hell. I leaned into her for a moment, full on crying now, and then left to go outside in the sun.

Edgar Woody, pictured with a bourbon (and his dry humor)

My own September 11 started ten years earlier in 1991, the day my father died, so this day holds something additional. This year, I’m realizing, marks the halfway point. I was 28 then and now at 56, I’ve lived as many years without him as I have with. It doesn’t intensify the loss or anything, but interesting for me to realize nonetheless.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s this: you’re here today, so keep going, keep building, keep learning and loving. Stay in touch with people and make plans. There’s lots still to do.

I leave you with a timeless poem published in 1844 and sounds from the memorial bell tower erected a year ago in Shanksville, PA.

Peace and love.

___________________________________________________________

The Day Is Done

The day is done, and the darkness
Falls from the wings of Night,
As a feather is wafted downward
From an eagle in his flight.
I see the lights of the village
Gleam through the rain and the mist,
And a feeling of sadness comes o’er me
That my soul cannot resist:
A feeling of sadness and longing,
That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles the rain.
Come, read to me some poem,
Some simple and heartfelt lay
That shall soothe this restless feeling,
And banish the thoughts of day.
Not from the grand old masters,
Not from the bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time.
For, like strains of martial music,
Their mighty thoughts suggest
Life’s endless toil and endeavour;
And to-night I long for rest.
Read from some humbler poet,
Whose songs gushed from his heart,
As showers from the clouds of summer,
Or tears from the eyelids start:
Who, through long days of labour,
And nights devoid of ease,
Still heard in his soul the music
Of wonderful melodies.
Such songs have power to quiet
The restless pulse of care,
And come like the benediction
That follows after prayer.
Then read from the treasured volume
The poem of thy choice,
And lend to the rhyme of the poet
The beauty of thy voice.
And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares, that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8zVVmetepE

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hope, loss

Seabirds, Sadness & Sunshine

April 17, 2019April 19, 2019 Susan Greco

gannet on beach
Walking on the beach recently, I saw a beautiful, unusually large seabird. He wasn’t flying overhead in search of dinner or migrating with his flock. He wasn’t flying at all actually. He was on the sand, sitting, feet tucked under him, staring out at the ocean like the other beachgoers scattered along the water’s edge. We approached slowly and saw he was nervous, barely flapping his wings, and we could tell he knew he wasn’t going anywhere. The tide was coming in and he just stared as if lost in thought. I have to assume seabirds think.

We worried about him but after all the wing flapping gave him space and walked further down the beach to lunch. A few hours later, we returned to find the scene mostly unchanged except the tide moving in and our bird now drifting out. I went to him again, talking quietly, and after a few attempts he let me stroke his white feathered back. The tide kept on with its work and I rolled up my pant legs to begin my own. His long beak meant no harm as he turned his head to look back, feeling my hands cupping underneath him. The tide continued and so did I with two more rounds of gently carrying him further up the beach to dry sand, trying to outpace the tide. We knew we couldn’t just leave him to drown, and thankfully call after call finally turned up a rescue who said they were on their way.

We sat with him for an interminable hour wondering when help would come, scanning the beach for someone resembling this bird’s hero. Eventually she walked toward us, an older woman with long dark grey streaked hair and tanned outstretched hands, loving and worn, ready to help. She told us our bird was a gannet and thought the strong northeast winds had tired him out and kept him from migrating. Before she took him, I talked to him again, stroking his back, endless layers of stacked white feathers, soft as rose petals. He turned to look at me as if he knew, knew I loved him, knew I was rooting for him, knew I had his back.

The rescue assured me they’d update us on his progress and texted the next day to say they tube fed him right away and he had enjoyed a fish before bed. Our boy, however, didn’t make it. She told me I did the right thing and could tell right away he was weak. She said they usually give a struggle and a loud “aakk, aakk, aakk” and try to bite. Our bird had only sat quietly looking ahead.

Structures and bodies weaken and give out and we are left behind remembering how things were and imagining how they will be. My friend’s adored pup died recently, and I see my own rapidly aging before me. A family friend is divorcing, and I remember his wedding and the bridesmaid’s dress I wore. A dear girlfriend has suffered unimaginable loss with her husband’s abrupt passing. Even Paris once again is hurting, this time it’s her centuries old Notre Dame who is forever changed, but who will rise again. As I write this, millions of dollars have already been raised to rebuild her.

footprints

With every event, every loss, every tear, you can see love emerging and growing. As if there’s a rheostat and the dial has unlimited clockwise turns, unlimited brightness if you should want or need it. Nearby friends and those far away appear and gather and support each other, people connect as they lean in to help, and we remind each other that we are here for one another, here where we’ve been all along.

It’s not just the bird. When things happen, as they do in droves sometimes, I can’t turn off my impulse to dive in headfirst into the vast sadness, to rescue, repair or reverse whatever has gone so terribly wrong, and I’m disheartened and still surprised to find how little control I actually have. There is no pretty bow you can tie around pain or loss. You go through it and, if you’re fortunate to be surrounded by love and support, you come out the other side stronger. Nor is there a recipe for supporting someone in pain. Showing up and listening are probably the first two ingredients.

There is a time to be born, and a time to die. And in the pain, through the tears there is sunshine. Sometimes the shadows are thick and the shade feels cold, but the cycle keeps on, the sun shining, the rain falling. I think back to our bird, our sweet gannet, and remember there was something we could do. We could sit with him, reassure him, protect and hold him, feed him what he needs, make the smartest choices we could and release him. I’d like to think he’s flying overhead high up in heaven reunited with his group. I think they all are.

The point is I guess, the reason we are here together, is… love each other, love each other hard. Sit still in the moment, stroke your dog’s head, rub your partner’s shoulders, enjoy some good food in your belly before bed. We can’t know how much time there is, but we can look around and do something now. Instead of adding insult to injury, maybe the sadness that seeps in after a loss is a reminder of the love? A reminder you are still here. Wherever you are right now, with the people around you and the people you remember, you have made and still are making a difference. To love and be loved: that’s a whole lot.

gannet 2