The Way I Live Now
Thoughts on Covid-19, uncertainty, loss, and stubborn goodness
I am glad another March is over. March is always the toughest month for me.
My mother died on March 3, 1982, when she was 56 years old and I was 28. I was married the previous March, and that marriage quickly failed. On March 19, 2014, my brother Mark died. He had been as much a son as a brother to me. He was 50 years old when he died, and I was 60.
Then last year, on March 23, I was supposed to fly to Avignon, France, where I planned to live for a year. But instead of being in Avignon, I spent the last year at home, near Seattle, Washington, absorbing the deaths and losses of the pandemic, which continue on a pace and scale that numbs the soul. Anything before last March now feels like prehistory, before we were all banished from the Garden of Normalcy.
So this is how I live now: I think every day that I could have one more hour or 30 more years to live a healthy life, a kind of normal life, and the same is true for everyone I care about. I’m 67 years old, and I really think about this every day.
Here’s my first memory of death: I was six years old, and my mother’s father, a jovial Lutheran minister, died of a heart attack at 68 years of age. I didn’t go to the funeral with my parents. Instead I stayed with a family that was in my father’s parish. My father was also a Lutheran minister, a career he chose after meeting his future father-in-law and being smitten by his magnetic personality and fierce faith. What I remember most about my grandfather’s death was that the family I stayed with had a record player, and I had never seen one of those before. I sat in front of it for hours playing and replaying the same record, by Alvin and The Chipmunks, while my parents were away at the funeral. I remember nothing of my mother’s grief.
Growing up in the home of a minister meant that we children — there were four of us, two older sisters, Mark, and me — became familiar with the common narrative of illnesses, hospital stays, deaths, and funerals. Sometimes it was unexpected, such as when a boy in the neighborhood died in a motorcycle accident, or when a girl in my high school developed bluish-green bruises all over her pale skin and died soon after from a disease with a strange name, aplastic anemia.
Sometimes the deaths were expected. I remember an elderly man in our church who died after a long illness. My father had visited him many times in the hospital where they would watch baseball games together to pass the time. After he died his wife gave his dress shirts to my father. They were monogrammed on the breast pockets with the letter O because their last name was Olander. She thought my father could wear them since our last name is Olberg. My father brought the shirts home — they were on hangers, starched and pressed by his wife — and tried one on. The collar dropped wide around his neck and the sleeves came down over his knuckles. We laughed about it. “She’s going to watch for you to wear them, you know,” my mother said at the time, smiling, talking about Mrs. Olander. I don’t remember whether my father ever wore any of those shirts.
At about the time of Mr. Olander’s passing my mother slipped a disc in her back and had a new kind of surgery, a spinal fusion. For the resulting pain she began to take Percodan, an opioid that ruled our lives for many years, along with Valium and other medications. My mother became addicted to these drugs, and they made her periodically psychotic and vicious. She attempted suicide at least twice; I only remember the two times, once with pills and the other in the garage with the car engine running.
My mother’s addictions transformed us all into hostages. It was how we lived then. Later, when I was 19 years old, attending community college and living at home, my father and I would sometimes take turns staying awake, in case my mother tried to wander outside in her nightgown or take the car. One night he and I passed in the dining room as he was going to bed and I was taking over the watch. He looked at me and said, “we have been through a lot together,” and he was almost crying. It was one of the only times the veneer of his steadfastness showed the smallest of cracks.
My mother died about a decade later, at home, with my father and brother by her side. In addition to her other illnesses, she had congenital heart problems, and in the end she died of congestive heart failure. Just before she died she’d had the flu, and we talked about it during our usual Sunday night telephone call. She was weak and not vicious at all by then. She was just dying.
It was at about this time when my brother’s voices were born and his life with schizophrenia began. He was 17 years old and I was 28. His voices told him that our mother’s death was his fault. They told him that everyone heard voices but no one was allowed to talk about them, and that they would kill him if he didn’t do what they asked him to do, such as to stop eating for days at a time. My father took him to new doctors, transferred his caregiving from wife to son, and he was again unwavering in his care.
To help me deal with my mother’s death, I went to a therapist for the first time. We talked about my upbringing, my mother’s illnesses, Mark’s schizophrenia, and my faltering marriage. He told me it takes about 18 months to get over a major loss, such as the death of my mother. I think he made up that time period, 18 months, but it has been helpful to me. I clung to it over and over again.
In therapy we tried hypnosis as a way of unlocking memories of my early childhood. While hypnotized I remembered a few things from before my mother’s illnesses, about riding bicycles with my sisters, learning to cook with my mother, and listening to my father’s extemporaneous bedtime stories, such as the one about the centipede that couldn’t keep its shoes tied. Those had been sunny times, entirely, and I think my therapist was a bit disappointed by that.
In the fall of 1986, after my divorce was final, I got my first passport and went on a month-long vacation to France and Italy. It was glorious. On my way home to San Francisco, at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, I called my father and learned that he had prostate cancer, which had already spread to his bones. I cried all the way home. He died the following year, and it was an almost impossible loss.
As happens in any life, the losses started to pile up. There was the fatal shooting of a colleague’s boyfriend during an argument over a parking space, the sudden death from liver cancer of a young friend, another friend’s growing addiction to heroine and cocaine, job losses, my brother’s mental illnesses, and other challenges. Don’t get me wrong. There were also good times — more international travel, including trekking in the Andes for my fortieth birthday, professional accomplishments, romances, and even some gratifying times volunteering at San Francisco Suicide Prevention where I took calls on its crisis lines. I was a natural at that work. It was another kind of engagement with mortality.
When my drug-addicted friend, Nick, died of a drug overdose in 2001 I was stunned although I should not have been. He was 47 years old and living in Florida then. He was thinking of moving back to San Francisco, where he had been able to stay clean in the past. He had recently relapsed, badly, after several years of being drug-free. We talked on the phone often, sometimes two or three times a day. He was working as a lawyer and doing well professionally while maintaining his drug use. Nick looked fit and healthy much of the time, as do many addicts. His Narcotics Anonymous sponsor said, “he looked like a fucking choir boy.”
On the day Nick died I called a friend, who rushed over with his partner to care for me. We drove to the beach and ate sandwiches together. They showed up, and I was so grateful.
My brother Mark’s death in 2014 was another loss that should not have been a surprise. He had led an extraordinary life in spite of his schizophrenia. He graduated from college, lived independently, and was a well-known peer counselor and educator in the mental health community where he lived in Northern California.
He was also a great brother. For at least the last decade of his life we talked on the phone a couple times a week about family and friends, baseball, my house and garden, and more. After I was laid off from my job in late 2008 at the age of 55, just as the economy melted down, he called me every day. Like our father, Mark was at ease talking to people in need. He understood the power of just showing up.
By the time he died, Mark had been a smoker for decades, and he had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and diabetes. He had been hospitalized for any number of ailments, mental and physical. Why he didn’t go to the hospital when he became ill with the bad flu and pneumonia that killed him I will never know. One of his colleagues said he seemed run down during the weeks before his death, that he was pulling away from people. Perhaps we should have been more attentive to his health. Perhaps he should not have lived alone. Perhaps I should have called him every day to check on him. I am not sure any of that that would have helped, but I can’t help thinking about it.
I went back to therapy after Mark died. It helped incrementally, but I was well versed in the grieving process by that time. With my eldest sister and her husband, I cleaned out his apartment and gave away furniture. I took care of his bank accounts and taxes. We gave his car to one of his friends.
About a year after Mark died I retired from full-time work, and my colleagues assumed it was because of his death. That was a reasonable assumption, but it wasn’t true. I had been planning to retire for several years. Mark and I had talked about it, and about road trips we might take after my retirement, maybe to Minnesota to see our cousins there. We even talked about going on a cruise to Alaska together.
Since my brother died seven years ago I have been trying to write a memoir about him, and that is proving to be more challenging than I expected. The boundaries of his life and mine, our mother’s early loveliness and the drug addiction and psychotic years that followed, and my father’s saintliness — these realities force themselves into what I am trying to write about my brother. And then there is his schizophrenia, his accomplishments in spite of it, and his stubborn goodness. The memoir will take me a while to write.
Those friends who came to take care of me on the day Nick died? They have both been hospitalized recently, together as a matter of fact, in the same hospital room. While one was recovering from the side effects of chemotherapy, his husband was being treated for a post-surgery infection, a bad one. They’re both recovering at home now.
Here are some other ways I live now: I set goals every January, and this year’s primary goal is Don’t Get Covid. My other goals for the year are to finish the memoir, lose some weight, and get dressed by 8 a.m. every day. All doable, all a way of showing up for myself.
I continue to take French lessons, too. Someday I’ll go to France again and attend the Festival Avignon. It’s in July every year. I’ve always wanted to do that.
###
