The Third Gift

After the excitement of yesterday, I am ready once again to speak of love.  Thank you for your kind indulgence while I pulled myself together.

You are probably sick to death of me going on and on about my recent brain tumor experience.  Well, too bad, because it was a very big deal and I am still processing it.  Also, I have not yet finished listing for you all the amazing gifts it brought me, love gifts which I have done nothing in particular to deserve.

The first gift I managed to tell you about was the free treatment, including ungodly expensive but free to me expert resection surgery, courtesy of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The second gift was, of course, a gift I already had, but which was revealed to me in new levels of beauty, and that was the wonderful trustworthiness of my true love.

Now, for this Love Thursday (albeit a day late), it is time for me to tell you of the third gift:  my family, specifically my fabulous sister and mensch of a brother.

It's hard for me to know what to put in this post and what to leave out.  See, my siblings and I, we come from a wonderfully unique, fairly privileged but also severely damaged (and damaging) household.  I don't really want to hash all that out here, only partly because under no circumstances do I want to purport to tell my siblings' stories.  They can tell those themselves, if they want to.

Also, I don't think my sister and brother want you walking up to their houses and pressing your noses against their laundry room windows, not even metaphorically, and I don't really want to subject them to that.  But I really need to tell you how great they've been to me lately, how completely unexpected -- yet welcome! -- their help was, and to do that I have to put it all into some kind of context.  It's a little bit delicate, this undertaking.  I hope I can pull it off and let you know how much their presence in my life at this time has meant to me, how amazing it has been for me to feel their love for me just now, love I genuinely did not know existed and still don't really understand.

We all saw each other at my niece's wedding in September.  When I had my leg cut off almost five years ago, they were told it was going to happen, and they supported me however they could through that, from California and Nebraska, but I didn't ask for anything because there was really nothing for them to do.  I didn't need them here, and they would have been in my way if they had come.  I did need loving and supportive phone calls.  After getting completely screwed into utter financial devastation by insurers contracted on my behalf by my then-employer Whole Foods, I did need financial assistance getting our car adapted for my use by the time I was ready to drive again, and my sister came through with that as a 41st birthday present, courtesy of some tax repayment scheme of Gov. Schwarzenegger, she insisted.

(Okay, that's weird.  The automatic spell-checker on my Windows-controlled PC, the one that underlines in red every word it doesn't recognize, has not underlined the name Schwarzenegger, but when I wrote to my friend K. today about some muffins I'd made, it did underline the word streusel.  And there, it did it again.  What's wrong with this picture?

Um, sorry.  Back to the tale at hand.)

The last time I talked to both of them before then, in fact the last time all of us were in the same room together, was after my mother committed suicide.  I don't even remember what year that was -- 1991, I think?  I only know this by adding her age at the time she died to the year of her birth.  Really, I was so very shell-shocked, but that's beside the point.  The point is, between then and now, my brother got on with his life in the Air Force, moved to Nebraska, raised his daughter, mustered out of the Air Force honorably, and began work in the private sector.  My sister continued raising the two children she'd adopted within six months of each other a couple of years before, who had appropriately become her entire life for the next 18 years, plus she continued running her financial planning business and her home.  I went my own way, stayed married to the wrong man, unable to get away until rescued by my true love, then gone forever to Massachusetts pretty much without a word to either sibling.  I couldn't imagine it would matter to them.  And honestly, whether they knew where I was in the world or not didn't really feel like anything that should matter to me.  I wanted no help, no drama, no advice, nothing.  I just wanted to get away and get my new life with my true love off the ground in peace and safety, even if it meant completely orphaning myself.

A few years later, my sister noticed I was gone and got in touch with one of my oldest friends now living in Missouri and bullied my address and phone number out of her, threatening to hire a private investigator if she didn't cough 'em up.  I was angry at the time, angry at my friend.  After all, appropriate etiquette when someone is looking for someone you know how to find is to take down the seeker's contact information and give it to the sought one, leaving it up to the sought one to decide whether or not to make contact.

My friend understood that, but really felt this was different.  The seeker was my sister, after all, not just anyone.  Based on my experience of my family at large, I could not tell what difference that could possibly make.  And honestly, I still don't know.  Actions speak louder than blood to me, always have, probably always will, and there had been no action of any kind passing between us in years.  But as I have had to admit to both my sister and brother, there's a lot of stuff other people are born understanding that I have to have taught to me.  This -- the instinct for family connection -- is just another one of those things.

So let's not dwell on old arguments.  Let's fast-forward to a month ago.

A month ago, as you know if you've been reading this blog for at least a few weeks, I found myself physically incapable of literacy, unable to remember stuff like my true love's last name, freshly diagnosed with a big ol' brain tumor, and jacked up on a steroid named decadron that made me very, very tense.  Though doctors assured me they did not think this would kill me or ruin me immediately, they could not guarantee that I would come out of this experience unscathed.  I needed surgery, and soon.  They could not guarantee that after surgery I would be able to recognize written language, read, write, speak, or see, or that even if I could do all these things, that I would be able to do them as well as I could, oh, say, back in December.

I panicked, but not so much over the potential loss of words or sight.  Sure, the idea of that made me very sad.  These things pretty much define me, or so I always thought.  But I was surprised to find I panicked most over the potential loss of people.  I have friends, family, and assorted correspondents I deeply love all over the world.  They are mostly very, very literate people, and shy nerds like me who prefer safety and quiet and thinking.  And how do we stay connected?  Nay, how did many of us connect in the first place?  Not by telephone, no.  And in many instances not in person, not at first.  It all happens or kept happening by the written word.  I have entire relationships which are made entirely of words typed into computers.  If you are reading this, you probably do, too.

I panicked over the loss of these relationships.  I panicked over the loss of these people in my life.  Some of them live as close as the next town over from mine, and yet they probably didn't even know I had stopped being able to read their e-mails a month before because I had been waiting for new eyeglasses that I thought would help me read better to write and tell them.

So the very first day I could read and write after being put on decadron, which did reduce the swelling in my brain to allow some improved language function fairly quickly, I decided to compose a big e-mail informing everyone whose e-mail address I could find of what was happening to me, what might happen to me after surgery, and imploring them not to lose touch with me.  (And remember, I had a brain tumor, so if you didn't get a copy, don't assume I don't love you; I just couldn't find your e-mail address and/or remember your exact name that day.)  I included my phone number, which many people had never been given before -- because there was no need!  Because we wrote everything we had to say to each other!

I couldn't just call people myself because I couldn't operate a telephone.  I couldn't read the buttons or remember them by touch, and the LCD screen was practically invisible to me.

I included my brother and sister in the mailing.  I argued with myself briefly over whether to do this, because...I don't know.

First, I really hated dropping this news into anyone's mailbox; no one wants bad news, and if you care about someone, hearing that s/he has a brain tumor is bad news, right?  Really bad news.  It's especially bad if the person can't tell anyone more than the sheer fact of it, no particular prognosis except that no one expects him/her to die of it, not even a name for what kind of tumor it is, but that there's this possibility that s/he won't be able to read or write ever again after it comes out, that this might in fact be the last correspondence s/he is ever able to send you and that if you reply in writing, s/he might not ever be able to read it.  Kind of a lot to dump on someone out of the blue, right, especially when other people have their own sh*t to deal with, sh*t of which any given correspondent may be entirely unaware?

And it seemed just so ridiculous to sweep all of a sudden back into my siblings' lives with this huge stinking drama, or potential drama that might not even be all that big a deal in the end but was certainly terrifying for me.  It felt kind of like something my mother would have done, just for attention.  She was really big on drama, and did often enjoy making mountains out of molehills.  A brain tumor is not a molehill, but my siblings didn't really know me as a person.  How would they know I wasn't just pulling a Mom-like stunt of some sort?

I think I was also afraid not that they wouldn't care, but that they...I don't know.  Maybe I feared that they would reject me or even just treat me coldly and distantly.  What had I done for either of them in the last twenty years, after all?  I was sure they would be sorry for me -- well, no, I wasn't completely sure of that, either.  I didn't know what to expect.  So I expected nothing. Maybe there'd be a note from one or each saying, "Oh, sorry!  Let me know if there's anything I can do," and nothing more.  I didn't even expect that, though, truth be told.

This is not what happened.  None of this is what happened.

And just so you know, if I were actually speaking to you in person, I'd be choking up and dripping tears at this moment, just because I am still so completely overwhelmed with gratitude over what did happen.

Okay, I am choking up and dripping tears, but I can still type.

My sister called that same afternoon and offered to fly out here.  She says my true love actually came right out and asked her; I remember that she offered, and we gratefully accepted, but I had a brain tumor, so either story could be true, or some combination of both.  Regardless, she canceled a trip to Cabo with her husband, which was supposed to be a conference related to her business but also a nice little vacation for the two of them, and sent her business partner instead.  Then she booked a flight that would bring her to me two days before my surgery, partly so she could help my true love, but mostly so she could just spend time with me while I was still/again (thanks to decadron) sort of myself.  Her husband had the flu, so she went to her GP and said, "Look.  Let's forget for a minute everything we know about how antibiotics don't do anything against viruses, and you give me what they give people who work for the government to protect them against anthrax."  (At least, I think that's what she said when she was telling me this story.  I only heard this part right after my surgery when I was still a bit cloudy.)

And then she came here and was my mother for a week. 

My brother, to whom I hadn't spoken more than a tiny, tiny bit on very specific occasions in possibly almost 20 years?  My Republican, ex-Air Force brother, with whom I really thought I had absolutely nothing in common except our parents and some bad family road trips?  He called me on the telephone that very day, too.  In fact, he called me every single day, usually on his lunch hour, and talked to me (or rather listened to me ranting, at speed and often shouting pitch) for over an hour just so I wouldn't feel lonely, bored and scared.

Every day.  Every day 'til I told him I was better.

Since my sister couldn't stay indefinitely, he also made arrangements to come in the event my true love and I still needed help after she'd had to leave.  Yes, he, too, was ready to drop everything and come to Massachusetts in bare and frigid early March just to help take care of me, and my sister was ready to foot the bill.

When my sister got here, after only a brief rest at her hotel, she started by hanging out with us and being generally helpful and cheerful, and then the next day, she also babysat me for awhile after my true love and I had concluded our hospital testing-and-paperwork appointment so my true love could get rest and have a period of silence.  (Babysitting included at one point walking her tiny Californian body all over the grounds of the DeCordova in stark, still frozen, early March eastern Massachusetts for the last two hours before dusk just so I could work off some of my fear and also maybe look at one of my favorite places the day before my surgery, just on the off-chance that I might not be able to see it as well ever again).  When our landlord told us he could only get a plumber to come fix the water mysteriously leaking from our bathroom onto our downstairs neighbors' heads on the day of my surgery, she's the one who liaised with him to make sure nobody accidentally let our new/used cat back out onto the streets from which he'd finally allowed us to rescue him.  She bought and/or cooked for me all natural, completely plain and organic food (like poached salmon and masses of steamed vegetables) so I wouldn't have to eat hospital food.  (I never do, but that's another post for another day.)  She ran interference with nursing staff as appropriate.

When I woke up from surgery, she was the first person I saw who didn't work for my surgeon.  When my breathing was severely impaired by lying in one position for about 18 hours straight after surgery, she guided me through some yoga-based stretching exercises to help open my lungs back up.  (I was too cloudy post-surgically to think of this myself, and also I was completely crazed on the double-dose of decadron they had given me during surgery.  One of her most constant instructions to me during this session was simply to "slow down."  Heh.)  Finally, she was the person who was there to get me checked out of the hospital as early as possible after my doctors had agreed to release me, not to mention walking me around the ward while we waited for the very busy nurses to have time to do things like pull out my IVs and brief her on my meds.

All through this entire ordeal -- and make no mistake, even with the wonderful outcome, it was an ordeal -- I only cried once.  I didn't cry when I heard I had a brain tumor, though it chilled and shocked me, nor during the many long hours I had to myself to do nothing but think about it with no actual information about the situation other than the bare fact of it and no way to reach anyone in the outside world because I couldn't even have operated my cell phone if I'd had it with me.  I didn't cry over what or whom I might lose, though thoughts of them made me very sad.  I didn't cry with nerves (I laughed) or frustration (I screamed and cursed and sometimes also laughed).  I didn't cry when I couldn't understand what people were saying or read signs on the wall that I knew were written in English.

You want to know when I cried, finally?  I cried when my sister was leaving to catch her flight home.  I was trying to thank her, but I started to cry instead.

"I didn't think you'd come," I told her, "but I'm so damn grateful that you did."  And then I hugged her while blubbing uncontrollably.

A conversation I had with my brother the day they discharged me from the hospital -- where he had continued calling me daily to keep me company, keep me from being bored, and keep me from being scared -- went rather similarly, though of course he was in Nebraska so there was no hugging.

"And I still don't know why you would care, or come through for me," I told him.  "I have done absolutely nothing to deserve it.  Nothing."

"But you're my little sister," he told me.  "I will always be here for you.  I have learned that nothing in this world counts more than family.  Nothing."

I have no idea how he learned this.  It certainly wasn't from our family -- except maybe a bit from my sister.

And you know what both of them said to me, over and over again?  "We're just so glad you asked us for help this time."

("Heh -- I like to save it up for when I really need it," I told each of them separately. 

"Well, I guess so," each of them replied to me separately.")

"We're just so glad there was something we could do this time."

Dang.

Okay, so this might get me beaten or killed (metaphorically anyway), but you want to see these gorgeous people?  Right, here you go.

This is my mensch of a brother in a Christmas greeting photo which I originally thought had been taken around the time I last saw him -- before the wedding in September, I mean; back seventeen years to when our mother died, or maybe a little earlier -- but which it actually turns out was taken in 1985.  (Read the back, Sara; duh.)  Honestly, I am shocked at how much time has passed since I received it.  The little girl in the picture has given her parents four grandchildren by now.

This next one you'll have to click to enlarge.  This is one strip from a contact sheet I printed while still in art school, age 19 or 20, which is comprised of shots from one of the last little adventures my sister took me on before our freezing walk around the DeCordova grounds this March, maybe 25 years later.  Oh, and the hilarious canoe excursion we went on this summer when she visited me for a day.  Are you detecting a boating theme?  Everywhere we've gone together in my life, if there have been little boats to rent and mess around with, we've usually tried to get one.  There was just that 25-year hiatus.

I was living in L.A. at the time this particular little boating adventure took place, visiting my sister and her husband, cat, and dog for a weekend in their adorable, small Berkeley house.  She decided we should go to Lake Merritt in Oakland for the paddle-boating and a petting zoo that used to be there -- and might still for all I know.

Once upon a time, we were all young and beautiful and fully able bodied.  We're none of us young anymore, not really, we each have our infirmities -- heck, I don't even know if I can paddle a paddleboat anymore with just the one leg -- but I see more beauty in each of my siblings than I ever have before.

As much as we fought and fought bitterly as children, our parents did always say we would get to this point, but I never believed them.  As years have gone by, I have found less and less reason to believe much of what they told me that wasn't about art, music, or basic cooking -- and even some of that I'd challenge them on if they were still around.

They were right about this one, though, weren't they?  Okay, guys.  I'll give you this one.

Comments

[Dory]

Wow. Wow wow. AWESOME post.

I'm going to nominate your post for Five Star Friday at Schmutzie's next week. I'll star it in google reader so I don't forget!

[Sara]

Hey, Dory! I have no idea what "Five Star Friday at Schmutzie's" is, but it sounds like a compliment, so thanks! :)

Of course the "wows" shouldn't be for my writing; they should be for the gift of themselves which my siblings have given me, and so far continue to give me (though they might not after they read this).

[kathy a.]

this is very lovely, sara.

[The Goldfish]

This is indeed a beautiful post.

Although my close family are a pretty wonderful bunch, I've seen too many examples to believe there's anything magical about blood-ties. I know plenty of families who remain in close proximity and heavily involved in one another's lives yet without really seeming to *care* at all.

However, you three clearly do care about one another, and it is a wonderful thing to have learned through this near-disaster. This is a wonderful tribute to them both.

[Dee]

Sara, this made me cry, too, but that's just me - I cry at Hallmark commercials!

I don't think your siblings will be angry; this is a very moving and heartfelt thank you for all that they've done for you. Thank you for sharing the story!

I often wonder what I've done to deserve gifts like that . . . I think it has something to do with American culture (I'm anthropologist) and its emphasis on individual responsibility, you know, that "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" kind of idea. It's almost like our culture makes you afraid to ask for help from other people. This may, actually, be at the root of why our country does not have socialized medicine. We're not supposed to ask for help from others. We're supposed to do it on our own. Frankly, this emphasis on individualism sometimes pisses me off. Why shouldn't we work for the good of all instead of just our individual selves? To make our country better together instead of making it so I, and only I, profit from whatever choices we make.

Okay, this could turn into a rant. This misses the point of your post. I just want to say thank you for sharing!

[Dee]

Oh yeah, that little side note about the spell checker asking you about streusel but not Schwarznegger was too funny!

[Michelle]

Tears here as well. I'm so glad your parents were right.

[bipolarlawyercook]

What blessings out of darkness.

[Sara]

Thanks, everyone. Of course, it's not my writing but the gift of these people in my life that is the beautiful thing here, just more proof that I am the luckiest woman alive. And I should probably stop going on and on about that, because the Evil Eye is gonna get me for sure, but I can't help but share my gratitude. I also think it's important to share what real love looks like, which is part of why I play the Love Thursday game in the first place. Popular culture obscures and romanticizes love, and that aspect exists, too, but for the most part I think love's finest hour comes either in the midst of all the quotidian drudgery that we perform for each other or when things are really quite nasty, maybe involving not very pretty, not very telegenic bouts of real sickness from stomach flu and head colds all the way across the pooping, pissing, pustulant spectrum of disease, not romantic at all. And it (love, I mean, real love) seems to happen even to people like me who are so imperfect, not always kind or sensitive to the needs of others, not exactly an "A" students at life and relationships. And that's freakin' miraculous, and not to be glossed over or brushed past.

So far, my siblings haven't chided me, so either they haven't read this because they're busy having lives or they aren't mad. Either way is good.

But anyway, I can't respond to each of you individually on this one, because it's too emotional a topic. But thanks for coming and sharing in my gratitude.

[leslee]

Yay! So happy for you! (Sorry this is late - just read it last night.) Families can be such a mixed blessing, but when things are good, it's incredibly - I don't know - grounding, I guess. Blood ties are amazingly strong, regardless.