Finding My Way

Four years ago today, I was presenting - for the first time in my career - at a national conference.  I had spent the first part of the week with my family at my sister’s family’s house in California and had flown from there to Minneapolis to go to the conference.  My husband and my daughters had taken a flight from L.A. back home where I planned to meet them in a few days after the conference had ended.

Things were humming along.  I actually remember walking out the door of my house to leave on the trip to go to L.A.; I wouldn’t normally remember something like that from years ago, but there were two things that have made that memory stick in my head.  I remember feeling a little more jittery than I typically do when I leave to go out of town, because this time I was traveling in a triangular pattern, first for pleasure and then for business, and I was nervous that I was forgetting something that I would need on the trip.  The second reason that I still remember leaving my house that day four years ago is that I got a concerning text message from my dad just as I was getting into the car to go to the airport.  As it turned out, that was the last text that I ever got from him - but that's not why I thought the text was important at the time I received my dad's message.

When I heard the ding on my phone indicating that I’d gotten a text, I grabbed my cell phone out of my purse so I could read the message as my husband drove to the airport.  “Met with grandmom’s dr to sign hospice papers.  Hope the girls take news ok,” Dad had typed in his typical shorthand form of texting.   As usual, I was able to read between the lines to understand what he meant despite the somewhat cryptic qualities of his message: At the age of 90, my grandmother (his mother) had been very ill for over two years. My parents had just met with her doctor to discuss her plan of care because of health problems she had been experiencing.  She had been moved into a nursing home a couple of years before due to significant cognitive decline, and at that point she had severe swallowing problems and progressing overall physical weakness.  In the meeting, I found out later, my parents had been told that her condition was continuing to worsen and that she likely only had a few weeks left to live.  My dad, acting as her representative for medical power of attorney, agreed that adding hospice services to supplement the care she was getting in the skilled nursing facility was in her best interest.  As his message conveyed, he was concerned about how my daughters and the other grandchildren would take the news of Grandmom's worsening condition.

Although I could tell what he meant by what he had written, what I realized I didn’t know as I processed the news was how he felt.  Like his mother, my dad was never very touchy-feely; there were many occasions in my life that I witnessed him keeping a stiff upper lip so as not to show his emotions and several other times when it seemed like he was just more of the mindset of “Let’s get this over with” than “Let’s think it over and share how we feel about it.”  As he liked to say: “It is what it is … because what else would it be?”  But on this day, as my husband drove down the interstate, I felt like I needed to somehow acknowledge the emotions I thought it was safe to guess that he was experiencing, and so I texted back, “You are a good son.  Your mom knows that you love her, and you are doing all the right things to care for her.”  I don’t know why I chose those words or even why I decided to say something that sentimental to him at that time; it isn’t usually how we communicated, and that’s why that moment sticks in my head.  Well, that, and the fact that, as I realized later, in what seemed like such an ordinary instant when I walked out of my house and closed the door behind me that day, I was stepping into a life so different from the way I had known it to be.

When I was about ten years old, my dad entered me into one of the first road races I had entered as a runner, and, for reasons that escape me now, it was one of the few times in my running career that I ran in a road race in which he didn’t also run. 

Like many of the races I participated in during my childhood, this one took place in a small town in Mississippi.  In my mind, the scene at the starting line that day blurs into the hundreds of other scenes like it, but what happened over the next hour stands out as a memory all of its own.  In this race, to my surprise, I found myself in a small group of runners that had broken away from the rest of the field about at the first mile marker.  Or, I should say, about at the point where I thought the first mile marker should have been.  For the first seven or eight minutes of the race, there was silence amongst the four other runners and me except for the sound of our breathing as we ran.  Gradually, each of us realized that we had probably covered a distance of more than a mile, and one of the other runners asked if the rest of us were sure that we were going the right way.  None of us were; we had counted on being able to follow signs or directions given by volunteers along the way so that we would know when we had passed each of the mile marks and where to turn on the course.  As we found out later, though, we'd passed by the first turn faster than the race director had expected, and so there was nothing/no one there to tell us to make the turn and we had continued to run straight down the street.  By the time we realized that we were probably off the course, we were well over a mile past that place where we should have changed direction.  We kept running and eventually saw an old man watering his front lawn, at which point we slowed to a jog and one of the other runners shouted to him, “How do we get back to the community center?” which is where the race finished.  The man looked at us like we were crazy and then pointed back over his shoulder in almost the opposite direction from the way we were running.  For some reason, the five of us still didn’t stop running; without speaking, we all hung a right at the next street corner to head in the direction the man had indicated, and eventually we found our way to the finish line.

Since October 23, 2010, the day when the cancer in my dad’s brain was discovered, in many ways I have felt like I did out there on the course in that race so many years ago: lost, confused, exhausted, and in a state of disbelief as to how the whole thing even happened.  But, also like my experience in that race, I am comforted by the fact that I am not having to cover the distance by myself, and somehow that gives me the strength I need to continue along the course.

And that, I guess, is one way that I have changed, in increments over the past few years: I have come to see and to believe that it is human tendency to adjust despite pain and loss – and that resilience is born of character and nurtured by love and connection.

Lessons

Life, for the most part, is full of the mundane, the predictable, the obvious, the day-in/day-out routine.  We get up each morning, get dressed, eat breakfast, go to work or school, run errands, take care of the kids, make dinner, clean up, and go to bed.  Repeat.  It is easy to become complacent, to take it for granted, and even to sometimes complain about the little things without realizing what a blessing things around us really are.

And then, in the blink of an eye, everything changes.  We are jolted out of our reverie, forced to refocus and to reevaluate pretty much everything.  And even as much as we might wish that things would go back to the way they were, things are changed.  We are changed.  And, for better or for worse, so is our perspective.

In a way, the holiday season was part of the repeating loop for me over the years.  Certainly the joy and the excitement were there, especially seeing the wonder and the happiness in the faces of the children in the family.  Looking back from this vantage point, though, I can see that I spent too much time worrying leading up to and during the holiday season each year.  I worried about when and how the Christmas decorations got put up, I worried about having the “perfect” gift for everyone on my list, I worried about what I would prepare for holiday get-togethers, I worried about getting a photo for the annual Christmas card and getting the cards addressed and mailed out in a timely manner, and I worried about making sure that my kids had an action-packed, memorable (at least what I thought was memorable at the time) holiday season.  A lot of the stress I felt during the season was admittedly self-inflicted.  And, as I see it now, a lot of it was unnecessary and unproductive. 

 As I got out the Christmas decorations this year, I thought about years past when I did the same thing and I thought about when my dad was sick.  The hustle and bustle was still present that year - it was just focused on a different set of priorities.  My kids did most of the decorating at my house that year; I was out of town helping to care for my dad a good bit during that the time.  I did 100% of my Christmas shopping online, much of it late at night in between conversations with Dad.  Some of the gifts did not get wrapped, and a few even got left behind in the transport between my house and my parents’ house, where my extended family gathered on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, taking shifts being with Dad who was in the hospital in the ICU at that point. 

I will never forget how awful it was being in the hospital that Christmas.  The hospital cafeteria closed after lunch on Christmas Eve, and families of patients in the hospital had to fend for themselves for food for the next day and a half after that.  The roads were icy and travel was precarious, and everyone in my family was so, so sleep deprived and concerned about Dad and about each other.  None of us cared about opening gifts or celebrating; the only thing we really wanted to do was to spend time together and to do whatever we could to try to help Dad.

I thought about that a lot as I lifted each string of lights and each ornament out of the boxes again this year, and here’s what I realized:  As tough as things were that Christmas, not for one second did any of us lose sight of the value of being there together.  No one in the family ever said anything like this isn't fair or I'd rather be somewhere else or doing something else.  Together we struggled through my dad’s illness and death and together we have struggled through the grief since then, the day-to-day routines as well as the holidays that have come since then now colored in a very different way.  The lessons I learned from all that we went through that holiday season are things that I am certain will never leave me – things like how it’s more important to focus on the joy and togetherness of today than to worry about the details of tomorrow, especially when much of tomorrow is out of our control.  Like how it’s important to ask for help when help is needed and how stuff is just stuff.  Like how when one of us is sad or exhausted or discouraged or sick or hurt, we are strong as a whole.  And like how, even in the midst of the everyday, it's possible for perspective to reflect the riches that we are fortunate enough to hold in the moment.

The Marker

Before my dad went on ahead, I’d never really considered the way that the birthday of a loved one can transform from something that fills you with anticipation and excitement to something that seems so sad.  It seems so odd to me the way that happens; certainly I still want to recognize and celebrate the birth of one of the most important people in my life, even when he isn’t still here to celebrate himself.  I think for my family, the sense of enhanced sorrow and grief that comes with this week is exacerbated by the fact that it was the same week that he was diagnosed with the brain cancer that took his life only ten short weeks later.  That, as much as his absence, makes it seem counterintuitive to celebrate.

For me, in fact, it feels like salt is being rubbed into a wound, and a lot of the emotions that are usually just hanging out beneath the surface on a typical day seem to be bubbling up and threatening to erupt with the week when everything changed for my dad, for my family, and for me.  The annual marker, which I prefer to avoid thinking of as an anniversary since I tend to think of anniversaries as happy and worthy of celebration, approaches without hesitation and haunts us without regard to our ongoing pain. The week represents such a major shift - an ending of things as they were and an awareness of what should have been.

I long for just one more hour, one more conversation, one more hug, one more anything with him.  I want to push through the pain and focus on the importance of the day of the year on which the man who means so much to me came into this world; the challenge to do so is far greater than I ever imagined it would be. There are so many things that my dad will not get to experience now, things he would so love to be a part of or to know about or to see.  His presence in my life continues to shape me on a daily basis, and I do celebrate that fact as much as the grief will allow. Sometimes though, especially when I can’t avoid the what if, the should have, or the should be kind of thinking pattern, I am overwhelmed by it all, missing him so much that I struggle to move through the ache. The only thing that seems to be of comfort to me when I think about those things is to remember the life that he led that I know he considered to be a great one, to recall the way he was filled with such joy and gratitude, and to recognize the fact that I know if he knew anything at all for certain during the days of his illness it was that he was loved.  Happy birthday, Dad; you are loved and you are missed.

The Bizarreness of the Beginning – and of the Ending of 19 Years on a Job

Nineteen years ago this month, my husband saw a listing in the newspaper for an opening with the school district for an occupational therapist.  I was working for a company that was sending me to various nursing homes in the area at the time and was looking for a job change.  On the phone that day, Kevin wove his way through the maze of people on the other end of the line and eventually got connected to the director of the district’s Special Education Department, a man who, when Kevin told him that his wife was an OT with experience in pediatrics, said he wanted to hire me as soon as possible.  Kevin wrote down the man’s phone number and told him that I would call him the next day, which I did, at which time we set an appointment to meet early the next morning at a Perkins restaurant before I had to report to work at the nursing home that day.

On the day of the meeting, it was raining.  Hard.  One of those torrential downpours that makes it difficult to see the road in front of you when you’re driving.  As I pulled into a parking place right in front of the restaurant about ten minutes early, I took a deep breath and told myself I was going to have to run through the rain to get inside but it didn’t matter that I would probably look like a half-drowned rat; hopefully my resume would speak for itself and I would get the job anyway.  Before I could open my car door, though, a man in a car pulled up right beside my car and looked over at me and made the “roll down your window” gesture that I was luckily old enough to know the meaning of.  I thought the man was going to ask me for directions, but it turns out it was the man I was supposed to be meeting, asking if I was me and then, when I said that I was, asking if I could just come over and sit in his car for the interview since the rain was coming down so hard.

I looked around – there were lots of cars in the parking lot and it was a public place right there out in the open – and decided to go for it.  I figured I could unleash my crazy and/or jump out and run if he ended up being a creep.  I went around to the passenger side of his car, and he leaned over and opened the door from his position in the driver’s seat.  I saw some forearm crutches leaned against the front seat from on the floor of the car and figured out the reason that he'd parked in a handicap-accessible parking spot - and why he'd asked me to get into the car with him instead of trying to navigate through the flooding parking area.  We awkwardly shook hands across the center of the seat; I handed him my resume and he tossed it up onto the dashboard without looking at it.  He asked me a few questions in a chit-chatty manner and then asked me how soon I could start.  And right there, in the car of a man I had just met, in the pouring rain, in a Perkins parking lot, I decided to embark on a new leg of my career. 

One of the many things that I learned from my dad over the years is that no job is perfect; even a great job has parts of it that aren’t great.  This job has been wonderful, though, for me and for my family.  It has allowed me to develop so many relationships with so many people, many of whom I have known for well over a decade and many of whom I have come to care about on a very personal level.  I have been inspired and have learned something almost on a daily basis; no two days have been alike, and I feel that my creativity and my knowledge base have been challenged and expanded regularly.  I have been allowed the freedom to develop my professional interests and to improve upon my strengths – and guidance through several supervisors over the years, a few of whom have become valued mentors.  The children and the families with whom I have had the opportunity to interact have each left a mark on my life in some way; so many of them have touched my heart and impacted my life that I am forever changed because of those interactions. 

And so it comes as no small challenge for me to figure out how to make the change that needs to be made at this time, how to gracefully turn off this road onto another one as I head into another phase of my career and of my life.  But an offer has been made to me that I cannot refuse, an opportunity that, for me, at this time in my life and at this point in my career, feels exactly right.  And so I am taking the plunge.

Last Friday, letter of resignation in my hand, I drove to the school district’s central office, the actual entrance of which has recently been moved from the county’s school district building to the building that was formerly owned by the city’s school district.  As part of the merging of these two entities, the entrance was moved to the building next door.  I parked near the new entrance and entered the building, where I discovered that a little more than the usual check-in process was now involved: instead of showing my employee badge and signing in at the front desk, this time I had to walk through a metal detector and submit to having the contents of my purse searched.  “State your business,” the police officer manning the door said to me in a grumbly voice.  I told him that I needed to see someone in the Human Resources Department, although, like many of the administrative offices of the district since the merger occurred last month, its official title had been changed to something that seemed so ambiguous to me that I wasn’t sure the department to which I was referring was the right one.  To get to the Office of Human Capital & Talent Management, as it was now titled, the officer told me, I should go down the hallway to the right, take a left through the doors into the breezeway, and look for the door with the sign indicating the office about it.  Clutching my letter of resignation in my hand, I took off down the hallway and pushed through the glass doors into the courtyard-like area between buildings, and the doors closed behind me with a loud metallic clank.  I walked across the concrete area to the door directly across from where I’d exited and pulled to open the door.  Locked.  Thinking that I must be trying to go in the wrong door, I walked over to the next door and tried again.  And to the next one, and to the next one.  All were locked.  Thinking that I should return to the cop at the front door and ask again for directions, I turned around and walked back to the door where I had come out.  Locked.  Shit. 

It was nearing 100 degrees, and there was no shade or breeze in that so-called “breezeway.”  Like a total weirdo, I peered into several windows of the building, thinking I would be able to get the attention of someone on the inside and get them to let me in before I died of a heat stroke out there, sadly with my letter of resignation in my sweaty hand.  There was not a single person to be seen anywhere.  “Oh, I know,” I thought, in a quasi-eureka moment: “I’ll call them and tell them I’m locked out here so someone at the front desk can let me back in.”  I dialed the number and listened to the series of rings on the other end, one after the other until more than a dozen rings had sounded with no answer, as I began to wilt on the outside and on the inside.  I was nervous about quitting; after all, I hadn’t quit a job in almost two decades – and now I was locked out.  Or in.  Whatever.  I felt like I had done something wrong.  I paced a little more, trying to figure out what to do next, and then I heard the squeak of an opening door from across the courtyard.  I ran (in heels) to catch the woman who was carrying a big stack of papers and who hadn’t noticed me at all until I shouted, “Excuse me, Miss?”  She looked at me with part confusion and part annoyance and, after I’d explained what had happened, eyed me suspiciously and said, “You aren’t supposed to be out here at all since you’re unauthorized.”  I swallowed the response that was fighting to come out and just waited her out.  “Well, since you’re out here, I guess I can let you back in the way you came,” she said.  NOW THERE’S A GENIUS IDEA, I thought, but I keep that to myself too and followed her back to the door where my little adventure had begun.  She swiped her badge and moved to the side so I could enter the building.  I went inside and turned to ask her for the actual directions – but the door had already closed and she had turned and was briskly walking in the other direction.  NO WAY was I opening that door again, especially considering how quickly it apparently closed.

I went a little ways down a hallway to the side and saw a woman coming out of one of the offices there.  When I told her I was lost and gave her the name of the office I was trying to find, she gave me different directions – these included some twists and turns that were thankfully all indoors.  After a few more minutes of walking, I looked up and realized where I was: inside the “old” county district HQ building.  Familiar turf.  I turned one more corner and saw the sign for the Made-up Office Office of Human Capital & Talent Management.  I went in, found the person I needed to see, and handed her my letter.  She thanked me and wished me a good day.  I retraced my steps down the hallway and noticed that I was about to pass by the doors that had been the entrance to the building throughout my 19 years of employment, the doors that I had walked through at least 100 times over the years and the doors through which I had come to sign the paperwork on the day I was formally hired to start in this position.  "Full circle," I thought, and, throwing caution to the wind, I swiped my badge in front of the sensor (it worked!), pushed through the door, and strode through the lobby.  As I reached up and pushed through the glass doors to leave the building on my way into the parking lot, I heard a voice calling after me, “Excuse me!  You’re not supposed to be here.”  "I guess not," I thought, and I walked to my car and drove away.