thoughts at SFO
Thursday, September 18, 2008
I haven’t written anything all summer long. Looking back on the entire summer I almost wished that I had. I look at the history of my life in fragments. There are times that I remember my summer when I was in high school and I don’t feel all that different from the person I was at sixteen. But then I look at the person I was at twenty-one and I don’t even recognize that girl. My summer of 2007 was so completely different than my summer of 2008. I don’t understand how that is the case but it seems to be true. Maybe the years archive themselves in jumbles and therefore the years I’ve just lived seem so drastically different than the previous decades.
At the end of June 2008 I left working for Vintage Faith Church. Not for any major reasons other than I knew it was time for me to move on from my ministry of administrative support there. I could feel the tug of life pulling me into a different direction for some time and found myself meditating on the possibilities of moving on from my church community. Within a week of doing so I saw that a +job posting had come from one of our sister churches. They were looking for a person just like me with the ability to speak Spanish. I phoned and asked for a few more details, and decided to submit my resume. Within a few days they had phoned for me to come and interview. The job offered me a bit more money than what I was earning at Vintage, same part time hours with benefits, and it was only 6 freeway exits from my house. The maximum it takes me to get to work is twenty minutes. I got the job within one day and knew that this job was the right place for me to be. After I had interviewed and left the grounds, I immediately heard ‘healing grounds’. I am not sure what that means, but a tear came out of my eye.
At the same time it was so hard to think of the possibilities of being outside of Vintage Faith. I grew super close to several people on staff and felt a great struggle with the knowledge that I soon was going to leave. It was hard to let go. Very hard. I had spent over four years in the ministry at the church and had grown into it so much that it was a part of my identity. There was hardly a day that I wasn’t in church or doing something for the church or hanging out with people from church.
My last day at Vintage was the last day in June. I ended up spending the next week at home celebrating my grandmother’s birthday and resting from the hectic schedule I create for myself. The entire summer my only desire was to hibernate. To breathe. To sleep. To enjoy all the movies I’ve wanted to watch. To eat all the Thai food my tummy could handle. And to work on some of the personal art projects I’ve been salivating to get my teeth into. Did any of that happen? Not really!
Old projects got shelved by new projects. Weddings, photos for the paper, and life in general. Yes, life in general. Not sure how general the summer was but it was from one event to the next and so on. Much of it is stuff I don’t even want to recall or write about but since the history of time, it appears that it’s beneficial to write down the order of events.
I can’t even recall the order of how it came to be. I am sitting at an airport terminal at SFO trying to figure it out again chronologically and I don’t think I’ll be able to do it anymore. I’ll just tell you the stories as they come to mind and hopefully at the end it will all make sense.
There was one week where my grandmother had a terrible cough that turned out to be pneumonia. My mother and I took turns being up with Mama all night long. As soon as she would lay down she would begin to cough terrible. So we tried so many methods. We sat her up with a whole bunch of pillows on her bed. We tried letting her recline in my dad’s lazy boy recliner. We finally ended up propping her up on the sofa and that seems to work the best. We bought the vaporub breathe easy room stuff. We gave her meds on the hour. We gave her plenty of soup and veggies. And yet it took forever to bring her back to normal. One day my grandmother has a fainting spell from her cough, and we had to bring her back from that. The next minute my mom stops breathing because her throat swells from an allergic reaction to Alka-Seltzer plus. I call the ambulance to come and get her. Shortly after she leaves with the ambulance Mama gets another coughing spell and almost faints again. So the same paramedics that just came and took Mom away came back to help out Mama. Turns out Mama was ok and they didn’t feel the need to take her to the doctors.
Through this whole thing my grandfather closes his eyes, raises His hand and asks God for help. He looked so worried and tired. I am flipping out in Mama’s bedroom so know one sees me. Tears are just pouring down my face. Yvee is weeping to because she saw my mom being carried off in an ambulance. I am rushing around with both sets of paramedics figuring out medications, and what each one of them had for lunch. Pat comes running over to help me out. Cynthia walks in and helps by making dinner. Yvee’s family comes rushing in and helps with Mama too. But I felt drained. Felt the very last of my spent and squeezed to exhaustion.
No one ever preps you in school and says one day your mom will age. Or one day your hero, Tata will be so old that he will shrink to a size shorter than you. Or that Mama will have a stroke and never be able to crotchet again. Or that one day your sister and brother in law will go on a long needed vacation only to come back from it paralyzed. There is no amount of preparation one could ever do for such things. It happens. There is no amount of preparation that can prepare us for the life surprise.
All these experiences have changed me. What’s important to most isn’t to me. I don’t know how else to explain it.
At the same time that this is happening Cynthia is figuring out what is the best method to take care of her mom. Her mom had severe issues with her diabetes and was on dialysis and receiving special wound care therapy for her feet. We had found a great nursing home that we thought she would really like and Cynthia was spending her days at work and her evenings visiting her mom. It wasn’t easy for her to deal with this balance. How to maintain her job and life and at the same time offer care to her mom. It was also really hard to see how her mom deteriorating from that evil disease of diabetes. She would come home at night so tired after visiting her mom all day long. I visited Ofelia several times in the hospital and she was beautiful as ever. She always had bright eyes and a very charming smile. She could woo the horns off of the devil she could. Three weeks ago, she passed away. She passed away in Zulma’s house on a hospital bed, surrounded by her children and granddaughters. The night she passed several of her loved ones stood, sat, cried, coughed, prayed, and breathed, by her bedside. The nurse, Cynthia, and Zulma prepared Ofelia for her last moments with us and carefully placed her hands over her tummy. I watched her grandchildren weep so very hard and hold her until they could no longer. You could hear the wails coming from every corner of the room at the lost of their mother. All I could do was pray and stand ready for whatever the family would need. I’ve missed Ofelia since she’s passed. Funny thing is that I never spent that much time with her but I have known her since I was fourteen. That’s a lot of “hi, senoras” She was a woman you’d never forget. The memories that she gave us were good ones, and sad ones, and f*(&ing confused ones too.
Days later from the passing of Ofelia, my grandfather gets these terrible stomach pains. So much so that he just wants to curl up and fall asleep. A cold chill comes over him and he just sits and shakes. He grows pale from the pain that he’s trying to withstand. My mother takes him to urgent care; they draw some blood work and send him home. Hours later my mom puts the phone on my ear and it’s the nurse from urgent care.
“Please take your grandfather to the emergency right now; we’re going to admit him”
I get up and run. Grab my keys and then Cynthia offers to drive us instead. I stayed until 3am with Tata at Stanford. They were so good to him there. So wonderful. The waiting room even has wireless set ups since they know that loved ones are going to be there forever. Stanford kept my grandfather for 3 days and finally discovered that he had close to two dozen kidney stones in his system. They had removed them all, but wanted him to be very careful. Thank God that they figured out what it was. Thank God they were able to take care of it.
The stories just go on and on. And in all of this I wish I could tell you about me and my summer. What I was experiencing, how I’ve learned, my physically ailments, etc, but I can’t even recall. I was in such a 911 adrenaline mode all summer long that I’m barely finding a chance to breathe this week. To close my eyes and just breathe. I am preparing to go on a flight right now, and I am so looking forward to that moment when the airplane flies right over the clouds. I am going to leave a bit of me there. A bit of the sorrow. My goodbye to Ofelia. My goodbye to the summer. My goodbye to the yuck of it all. I am going to leave it there on that cloud. Never to be picked up again.
More later…..
I haven’t written anything all summer long. Looking back on the entire summer I almost wished that I had. I look at the history of my life in fragments. There are times that I remember my summer when I was in high school and I don’t feel all that different from the person I was at sixteen. But then I look at the person I was at twenty-one and I don’t even recognize that girl. My summer of 2007 was so completely different than my summer of 2008. I don’t understand how that is the case but it seems to be true. Maybe the years archive themselves in jumbles and therefore the years I’ve just lived seem so drastically different than the previous decades.
At the end of June 2008 I left working for Vintage Faith Church. Not for any major reasons other than I knew it was time for me to move on from my ministry of administrative support there. I could feel the tug of life pulling me into a different direction for some time and found myself meditating on the possibilities of moving on from my church community. Within a week of doing so I saw that a +job posting had come from one of our sister churches. They were looking for a person just like me with the ability to speak Spanish. I phoned and asked for a few more details, and decided to submit my resume. Within a few days they had phoned for me to come and interview. The job offered me a bit more money than what I was earning at Vintage, same part time hours with benefits, and it was only 6 freeway exits from my house. The maximum it takes me to get to work is twenty minutes. I got the job within one day and knew that this job was the right place for me to be. After I had interviewed and left the grounds, I immediately heard ‘healing grounds’. I am not sure what that means, but a tear came out of my eye.
At the same time it was so hard to think of the possibilities of being outside of Vintage Faith. I grew super close to several people on staff and felt a great struggle with the knowledge that I soon was going to leave. It was hard to let go. Very hard. I had spent over four years in the ministry at the church and had grown into it so much that it was a part of my identity. There was hardly a day that I wasn’t in church or doing something for the church or hanging out with people from church.
My last day at Vintage was the last day in June. I ended up spending the next week at home celebrating my grandmother’s birthday and resting from the hectic schedule I create for myself. The entire summer my only desire was to hibernate. To breathe. To sleep. To enjoy all the movies I’ve wanted to watch. To eat all the Thai food my tummy could handle. And to work on some of the personal art projects I’ve been salivating to get my teeth into. Did any of that happen? Not really!
Old projects got shelved by new projects. Weddings, photos for the paper, and life in general. Yes, life in general. Not sure how general the summer was but it was from one event to the next and so on. Much of it is stuff I don’t even want to recall or write about but since the history of time, it appears that it’s beneficial to write down the order of events.
I can’t even recall the order of how it came to be. I am sitting at an airport terminal at SFO trying to figure it out again chronologically and I don’t think I’ll be able to do it anymore. I’ll just tell you the stories as they come to mind and hopefully at the end it will all make sense.
There was one week where my grandmother had a terrible cough that turned out to be pneumonia. My mother and I took turns being up with Mama all night long. As soon as she would lay down she would begin to cough terrible. So we tried so many methods. We sat her up with a whole bunch of pillows on her bed. We tried letting her recline in my dad’s lazy boy recliner. We finally ended up propping her up on the sofa and that seems to work the best. We bought the vaporub breathe easy room stuff. We gave her meds on the hour. We gave her plenty of soup and veggies. And yet it took forever to bring her back to normal. One day my grandmother has a fainting spell from her cough, and we had to bring her back from that. The next minute my mom stops breathing because her throat swells from an allergic reaction to Alka-Seltzer plus. I call the ambulance to come and get her. Shortly after she leaves with the ambulance Mama gets another coughing spell and almost faints again. So the same paramedics that just came and took Mom away came back to help out Mama. Turns out Mama was ok and they didn’t feel the need to take her to the doctors.
Through this whole thing my grandfather closes his eyes, raises His hand and asks God for help. He looked so worried and tired. I am flipping out in Mama’s bedroom so know one sees me. Tears are just pouring down my face. Yvee is weeping to because she saw my mom being carried off in an ambulance. I am rushing around with both sets of paramedics figuring out medications, and what each one of them had for lunch. Pat comes running over to help me out. Cynthia walks in and helps by making dinner. Yvee’s family comes rushing in and helps with Mama too. But I felt drained. Felt the very last of my spent and squeezed to exhaustion.
No one ever preps you in school and says one day your mom will age. Or one day your hero, Tata will be so old that he will shrink to a size shorter than you. Or that Mama will have a stroke and never be able to crotchet again. Or that one day your sister and brother in law will go on a long needed vacation only to come back from it paralyzed. There is no amount of preparation one could ever do for such things. It happens. There is no amount of preparation that can prepare us for the life surprise.
All these experiences have changed me. What’s important to most isn’t to me. I don’t know how else to explain it.
At the same time that this is happening Cynthia is figuring out what is the best method to take care of her mom. Her mom had severe issues with her diabetes and was on dialysis and receiving special wound care therapy for her feet. We had found a great nursing home that we thought she would really like and Cynthia was spending her days at work and her evenings visiting her mom. It wasn’t easy for her to deal with this balance. How to maintain her job and life and at the same time offer care to her mom. It was also really hard to see how her mom deteriorating from that evil disease of diabetes. She would come home at night so tired after visiting her mom all day long. I visited Ofelia several times in the hospital and she was beautiful as ever. She always had bright eyes and a very charming smile. She could woo the horns off of the devil she could. Three weeks ago, she passed away. She passed away in Zulma’s house on a hospital bed, surrounded by her children and granddaughters. The night she passed several of her loved ones stood, sat, cried, coughed, prayed, and breathed, by her bedside. The nurse, Cynthia, and Zulma prepared Ofelia for her last moments with us and carefully placed her hands over her tummy. I watched her grandchildren weep so very hard and hold her until they could no longer. You could hear the wails coming from every corner of the room at the lost of their mother. All I could do was pray and stand ready for whatever the family would need. I’ve missed Ofelia since she’s passed. Funny thing is that I never spent that much time with her but I have known her since I was fourteen. That’s a lot of “hi, senoras” She was a woman you’d never forget. The memories that she gave us were good ones, and sad ones, and f*(&ing confused ones too.
Days later from the passing of Ofelia, my grandfather gets these terrible stomach pains. So much so that he just wants to curl up and fall asleep. A cold chill comes over him and he just sits and shakes. He grows pale from the pain that he’s trying to withstand. My mother takes him to urgent care; they draw some blood work and send him home. Hours later my mom puts the phone on my ear and it’s the nurse from urgent care.
“Please take your grandfather to the emergency right now; we’re going to admit him”
I get up and run. Grab my keys and then Cynthia offers to drive us instead. I stayed until 3am with Tata at Stanford. They were so good to him there. So wonderful. The waiting room even has wireless set ups since they know that loved ones are going to be there forever. Stanford kept my grandfather for 3 days and finally discovered that he had close to two dozen kidney stones in his system. They had removed them all, but wanted him to be very careful. Thank God that they figured out what it was. Thank God they were able to take care of it.
The stories just go on and on. And in all of this I wish I could tell you about me and my summer. What I was experiencing, how I’ve learned, my physically ailments, etc, but I can’t even recall. I was in such a 911 adrenaline mode all summer long that I’m barely finding a chance to breathe this week. To close my eyes and just breathe. I am preparing to go on a flight right now, and I am so looking forward to that moment when the airplane flies right over the clouds. I am going to leave a bit of me there. A bit of the sorrow. My goodbye to Ofelia. My goodbye to the summer. My goodbye to the yuck of it all. I am going to leave it there on that cloud. Never to be picked up again.
More later…..
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