because shtick is the last system to go

This time it’s constipation. My parents are out of town for a week, and this time my grandmother is so stopped up she’s worried sick. Well, she is sick, actually, but I’m not sure that constipation is one of the symptoms. And I highly suspect that she already had a large size value bottle of Metamucil stashed somewhere in her apartment, if somebody only bothered to look, if she only bothered to ask, even, but that's not nearly as dramatic. But anyway…

I call her this afternoon to say “hello.”

“I’ve been thinking about you,” she says. “Just now, even.”

“Oh really?”

“Yes,” she says. “I’m so glad you called. You see, it’s been two whole days and I haven’t gone to the bathroom and I was trying to figure out who could possibly get me some Metamucil and some of those suppositories.”

Of course I’ll get it for you, I tell her. She’s sick after all, dying even: her systems are starting to fail, one by one. But not to worry, she’s still got shtick.

“Of course I don’t tell your parents anything when they call,” she says. “I just tell them everything’s fine. But it’s not fine.”

“Of course not.” It never is when my parents are out of town; something always, inevitably must go wrong.

Outside the Walgreen’s in my grandmother’s neighborhood an obese woman in red reindeer ears stares at the silent bell by her side as she slumps into a metal folding chair and talks on her Bluetooth headset. In front of her is a sign that reads “Salvation Army”. She doesn’t even mutter some innocuous variant of “Season’s Greetings” as I go by.

The pharmacy attendant directs me to aisle 5. There he and I and the shelf stocker and the head pharmacist all discuss the nuances of my grandmother’s conditions, the ins and outs of constipation in a 91 ½ year old woman. Loudly.

Lazy reindeer woman glares at me as I pass her by on the way to my car. This time she rings her bell, a bell that now signals the collective guilt of all creeds.

“I don’t know what I would have done without you,” my grandmother says when I call to tell her the stuff is on the way. As if it’s some kind of drug deal: phylum husks and stool softener disguised in a Walgreen's white plastic bag.

“Be sure to drink lots of water,” I tell her before I hang up the phone. “And remember, my parents will be home Sunday.”

“You know, I don’t tell them how much I suffer,” she says. “I only tell you. You're the only one. I tell you everything. But after I’m dead you can tell the rest of them. Then you can tell your father and your uncle and everyone how awful it was for me.”

And then the wolf actually appeared

So it turns out that my grandmother doesn’t have hemorrhoids, and that her visit to the doctor in my car a few weeks ago was not simply another in a long string of her cries for attention. Some tests and a second doctor visit later, and it seems she has cancer on one, or possibly both, of her kidneys. They’re not entirely sure, since a precise diagnosis would entail a biopsy, something that they think has more risks than benefits for someone of her age (91 ½) and general health. Besides which, no one – including my grandmother – is recommending any sort of treatment for her. The cancer isn’t bothering her aside from the blood in her urine (she was initially confused about the source of the blood…). It might or might not have spread to other organs or systems, or have been caused by them. It might just kill her, if something else doesn’t first. Or she might live for another year, or more. Cancer doesn’t move nearly as quickly in old people as it does in the vibrant, strong and young.

My cousin Alicia, my grandmother’s other granddaughter, died of breast cancer on August 1 this year. She was 28 and so full of life and promise, accomplishments, beliefs and hope. She fought valiantly, admirably against horrible odds for a year and a half, diligently pursuing every treatment possibility, enduring incredible pain so that she could finish a doctoral degree while still working full time in an attempt to give back to the world as much as she possibly could, and so much more than most anyone else I’ve ever known. All the while, my grandmother kept wishing she could trade her life for Alicia’s. Sincerely. If she could have, she certainly would have without a second thought or regret. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way.

But my grandmother is not Alicia, and she acknowledges that. She is on intimate terms with survival: ten days in a coma when she could hear the doctors telling my grandfather that she wasn’t going to live but couldn’t speak back to protest, when she saw the bright white light and floated above her body and came back. Rehabilitation, learning to speak and walk again. A broken back. Three more strokes. For the past 25 years, she’s been Sisyphus constantly pushing the boulder of her body up that hill, gradually losing to the handicap, the limitations of a world constantly closing in on someone who was so athletic and active, a world traveler by nature, even back in the day. Someone so social, needed and trusted, a caretaker for her family and friends, she gradually lost companionship when her husband then her closest friends and all died, one by one. Now she’s a mind, still agile and clear, trapped in an increasingly rigid and fragile body, in a small apartment without even the companionship of a dog. She’s lonely now, extremely lonely. As much as we say it and tease her about her manipulative machinations to get attention, none of us really do understand what her life is like at this point.

The doctor said he was amazed at how accepting she was of her diagnosis. “I’ve had a good life,” she repeated to me, again today on the phone. “I had good time. I was loved.” Not only does she not want to treat the cancer, she seems to see it as a relief: finally, something to end her suffering. She’s not afraid to die; to the contrary, she’s almost cheerful, even. “Whenever it’s my time, it’s my time,” she told me. “Whenever that happens to me.”

It’s true for all of us: we never know exactly when or where or why or what. But most of the time we go along too busy with living to really appreciate life.

“Everyone has to die of something,” my uncle the doctor says. For my grandmother it could be this cancer tomorrow or three years from now, it could be another stroke, or a heart attack, or she could be eaten by the wolf down the hall. And any way she looks at it, she’s fine with it.

“I don’t want you to mourn me,” my grandmother has been telling me this for years. “Do for me while I’m alive. Be with me now. Then, after the funeral, I want you all to go out and have a nice dinner and enjoy it, laugh and tell stories. Remember, I’ve had a good long life.”

Big Sur or bust

Some encounters at (and near) Esalen during last week's yoga retreat:

1) The fasting quasi-resident German who, while he was still wasting away, joined the workshop for a few days, just in time to protest both the use of yoga mats (“I don’t like plastic”), and the much needed fly strips, an attempt to thin the steadily rising swarm inside our yoga practice room (“I simply cannot abide by that. What did those flies ever do to you?” Aside from landing on me in the most annoying places during all the difficult poses, not really all that much... )

2) The elephant seals whose barks echoed along the beach and up the cliffs as the males slammed their thousands of pounds of blubber into each other in their annual mating ritual.

3) The all-women’s erotic dance yoga class where we learned to “shake your tailbone up and down and feel more like a girl.”

4) The cliffs basking in morning light. Every day was simply stunning.

5) My friend, “call me JC. Those really are my initials, you know." A burly guy with tattoos and tales of hard living and massively dysfunctional families (“Addictoholics” he said, “all of us. Addicted to anything and everything."). This wasn't his virign yoga voyage. In fact he had met his girlfriend at a prior Esalen yoga retreat (although when he retold the circumstances of their cute meet in front of her at dinner he managed to throw every single detail of the story into dispute). This JC didn’t take anyone or anything too seriously, including himself (or anyone else). I tried to position my mat near his, this “token Australian” who once was an actual American cowboy, to ensure, if nothing else, that I got a good laugh during class. And as a bonus, he paid enough attention to manage partner work (unlike the fasting German who on the first day of the retreat tried to argue with me about where the top of my hip bones actually were; he, having never studied anatomy and having ignored that morning's lecture on anatomy, was convinced that they were somewhere near the bottom of my ribcage).

6) An observer as I sat down to write in the cafeteria one afternoon.

7) The yogic instructions: “Squeeze the block between your legs, hard,” the teacher yelled at us one afternoon. “Squeeze harder. Imagine it is President Bush’s head.”

8) A glimpse at some migrating monarchs.

9) The naked guy who lay on a massage table as he played his didgeridoo into an empty bathtub for all the spectators to hear and then contemplate, meditate, or simply fall asleep. The concert lasted for over an hour. Hrmmrmmmrmmmrmmm...

10) The windy day that Rummy resigned when I tried to go to the beach with my Esalen roommate. A cold front skipping along the coast blasted us with waves and sand.