Tag Archives: cancer

Learning to Die #4: practicum

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Elizabeth, Justin and I

Elizabeth was ten years old when I was born; nevertheless, I regarded her as my contemporary. We had a satisfying relationship. She got on with her duties and was seldom ill. She had been there all my life. She helped me through the war. She was a soldier, herself. When she and I were young,…

by joyceahowe/hood

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: personal reflection

Went to a post-op appointment with my surgeon, said, “I’m so grateful that you and the Trillium Hospital System were able to do the mastectomy so quickly despite Covid and give me a chance at a longer life.” He said, “Not if you don’t get this heart workup.” Hum! On the day, Oct 1 when…

by joyceahowe/hood

BACK TO THE FUTURE: the stalled novel set in 2120

According to the news hound in my family, Peel County where I live in Mississauga, west of Toronto, Canada, had the longest lock down on the planet. I don’t know. I do know it was very long. It began when our premier told those over 70 not to leave home. Eventually I discovered that chewing…

by joyceahowe/hood

My ex-husband Blake and his young second wife came to visit me after I had the carcinoid surgery. That was the week before my brother rescued me. I still couldn’t eat and I was too weak to get out of bed. They had come from our high school reunion. Blake and I were high school sweethearts. Presumably, she had registered as me, since I couldn’t. They brought me my key chain souvenir and showed me pictures of the old gang, the drama club. They were very much changed. Blake had the same lean physique – see above -. He was still diving at the yacht club to check the moorings in cold early May. She was just a year older than my daughter. Very kind of them. (What am I not saying? Well, at least, I was a very thin, if pallid 65.)

Some years later both of them were diagnosed with cancer. Both of my malignancies were no longer detectable. Then, suddenly, she was so ill that we were making last visits, and then she was gone. Blake’s stage 4 diagnosis didn’t worsen even then, although he nearly walked the legs off his shiba inu pup up and down Toronto’s river valleys. My sister folded him back into her family as she had me. “Should have stuck with the old girl,” she quipped.

Blake asked me to be his executor. Here’s a hot tip: no matter how much you want to make sure your own children don’t get cut out of the will, never agree to be an executor. I did. I know.

In the spring, Blake found himself too busy to answer our invitations. Too busy was blonde and young and hung around the yacht club. They were teaching disadvantaged teens to sail. Blake and I had lunch together or sometimes dinner that I cooked, so I could keep up. I had to drive him to make a will, dividing the estate into three parts, two for our adult children and one for his step-daughter.

In 2018, I had spent several months in southern California helping me daughter, who started out with stage 4 kidney cancer. The diagnosis changed weekly with every new test. Tuesday it was cancer. Thursday it was angiomyolipomas. Or was the kidney tumour something else? This involved two surgeons, one in Santa Clarita and one in Bakersfield, wandering surgical dates and, as it turned out, a brilliant pain specialist. (Never get an angiomyolipoma in your sciatic nerve. But if you have to get a tumour, at least, it’s not malignant.) I got home after three months in early January on the last night time flight, walked into my apartment, took off my shoes, went into the kitchen and broke my little toe. (Something else: never break a toe, even a small one, in winter.)

My son, who had not wanted to worry me before, phoned to say his father was in a bad way.

For the first week, I just called Blake. Anyway, he said, I couldn’t visit him because the house was a mess and Christy didn’t want visitors. I was well on the way through a whose-house-is-it sermon before I could stop myself. Finally, I limped to the car after getting him to agree to meet me at the door when I called to say I was there. I couldn’t see into any of the main floor rooms, nor the second-floor bedrooms as we two invalids climbed to the top, his lovely bedroom with a sunny balcony. Only it was no longer lovely. There was no sun. The windows were heavily curtained. The place smelled of very old dog, territorial cats, very ill master and the remains of several meals. He had a small frig and a microwave. “Christy brings up food when I call her,” he said. the en suite hadn’t been cleaned in maybe 5 years. The self-cleaning kitty litter was in there. (Never believe that marketing line.) When I started scooping out the smelly bits, he yelled angrily, “Don’t do that. You don’t know how. Christy will get mad.” I went to the door and stared at him. Had I taught high school for 30 years and was I now afraid of Christy? Or him, come to that? That was just the beginning of the fun.

The entire house was a hoarder’s delight and beyond dirty. The second floor office was jam-packed with Amazon packages still, packed packages. “Wait till you see the garage,” my son, Daniel whispered. We crept down past the dragon in the living room. (That’s where she slept, having decamped from a perfectly good second-floor bedroom. Too near Blake, I assumed. She had declared, “Old men disgust me.) Daniel opened the door to the garage.They had dealt with recycling by standing in the door way and flinging it. There was a foot of airspace near the ceiling.

When we started cleaning, Christy yelled we were only doing it to sell the house out from under her. I assured her, we were trying to avoid being charged with elder abuse. Blake thought it was funny when passers-by intervened when Christy cussed him out in the grocery store. I asked where the clean sheets were and she thudded back up the narrow stairs and flung a lump of rolled up cotton onto the bed. Later, I saw that was how she stored them in the linen cupboard.

It was obvious that Blake was at the stage where he needed home care, but that department wouldn’t even talk to Daniel or me, only to Blake, who couldn’t remember from one minute to the next that we were trying to get him a home hospital bed and a visiting nurse to monitor his pain and pain meds.

Just when I was getting a handle on dealing with dragon-Christy, she suddenly changed and began phoning me in hysterics because she couldn’t handle a new development. For some reason, she always did this while I was grocery shopping. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise to tell her I couldn’t talk. I would huddle with my face against the cereal boxes shouting ‘quietly’ to get her to stop talking. My default advice was always, if you can’t handle it, call the para-medics. She did. Often. They would carry him in a chair down the winding stairs and take him to an emergency room. Hours later, she would Uber him home. Or he would be admitted over-night. Or she would Uber him to the hospital. Having done that once and been admitted for the foreseeable future, he demanded to check out against orders. She called Daniel who showed up in a car and found himself the getaway driver.

It was the pain and Blake’s howling response that got to her. No phone call necessary.

The getaway stay had been in Toronto Western. His home hospital was Mt. Sinai. But sometimes he got stretchered across University Avenue – winter or not – for more scans – or even to Toronto General.

I was gobsmacked by how his mind worked. He muttered that he was leaving an awful mess. Well I could see that -two defunct vacuum cleaners sat in his closet blocking the sliding doors. But no, not what he meant. Later I learned he hadn’t filed a tax return since 2015. Later I learned that he owed about $40,000 in tax. Later I learned that Miss Younger Blonde – who WAS NOT a gold-digger, thank you, had enjoyed $380,000 he had borrowed on the house.

My daughter decided to come from California and her two sons, one in Dallas and one in L.A. decided to come as well. It was intended to signal to Blake that he didn’t need to hang on in misery. Blake was home that week and able to go out for lunch. My grandsons sat with him and recorded the sad story of his evacuation from the Blitz to Canada. A whole boatload of children had been torpedoed earlier. I had fallen for that hook when I was 16 and I was quite sure I was not the last woman to do so. They looked at all his photos. When the three of them left, I was devastated.

Then he finally got a place in the hospice in Grace Hospital. Christy came in waving the power of attorney for health. What were they going to do to treat him? “No, no,” I said. They had to take her away to a private area to explain what a hospice is.

Daniel, the step-daughter, Christy and I took turns sitting with him. The three of us tried hard not to overlap with Christy. She shouted at the nurses and the porters and even the lunch ladies. There was another dying man behind the curtain, not to mention the kind patient carers who watched people die every day. Blake slept more and more until he was unconscious all the time. One day, I fled to corridor to cry and Daniel came out and put his arms around me. Up until his father got worse, Daniel had not spoken to me for years. Something I had said really annoyed his wife. Now I saw the boy I had known, for in his father’s angriest days, he had quietly tended to him.

I dealt with this phase more easily. I read Rumi poetry to Blake and recited the 23rd Psalm. Blake had pretended to be an atheist and I had told him he was in for a big surprise.

The last day was that same anguish. He had been moved to a single room. The four of us sat around his bed, reminiscing, even laughing and crying of course. The chaplain came. The on-duty doctor came. I had my marching orders from the head nurse. There was no mortuary there, so I had to notify the undertakers pronto. Blake took those last suspenseful breaths just before dinner. We sat silently crying..

When I stood up, I found I had forgotten how to walk. The step-daughter scooted around me to get the nurse. Once in the hall, I couldn’t remember how to use my phone. I leaned my weight against a wall and I heard myself report that Blake Durant had passed on at Grace Hospital. I had already signed the contract.

It couldn’t be true, I thought. It couldn’t be true that my Blake was dead, my other half even after all these years. The five-year-old on the ship in the middle of the Atlantic, watching the destroyer on the port side. The 18-year-old who rode a green Raleigh Racer and captured my heart.

When I got back to the room, the others were gone and not-Blake lay with a gaping jaw. And it wasn’t Blake and I couldn’t stay to keep him safe.

Two days later, St James Mortuary phoned to ask if I wanted Blake to be cremated in his hospital gown or some other clothes. I wish I could say I asked myself what Blake would say, but I didn’t. I died of shame and tearfully replied the gown would be fine.

That evening still in his blue gown, he made a flying visit through my sister’s living room. After that I kept seeing him back in his jeans and sweater, rushing to a physics lecture with an iPad. It seems as if he is going on to economics next semester. Bernie Sanders is going to need help with that living wage idea.

I will pass over the day I took possession of the house. Sufficient to say the police were involved. Christy went back to her own apartment, which Blake had paid for all those years and $27,000 in hand.

It took me a year and a half of aggravation to settle his estate. I paid myself an honorarium and my increased taxes took half of it.

Blake still sleeping

When I Get Older-: the hundred year old man who climbed out…

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It was 1967 and like all good Canadians, my husband and I had set out to show our 100- year-old country to our young children. We were on our way back from the east coast when we stopped at my grandparents’ farm is Quebec. The next afternoon, we got a call on the party line: could my 33-yr-old husband go up to my great aunt’s farm to help get the last load of hay in before the threatening storm broke. He set off, eager to give himself a workout after days of driving.

While we were eating supper a few hours later, he burst through the door from the woodshed. “You’d never believe it,” he cried. “There was an 88-yr-old woman driving the tractor. A 78-yr-old woman up on the hay wagon and a 71-yr-old man pitching the hay up.”

We turned to stare in incomprehension. Yes, and …

That was my grandmother’s sister, Eva, driving, not an actual tractor, but an very old stripped down Ford pickup, my other grandmother’s sister, Betsy, building the load and her husband, Ralph, pitching up. They hayed every year. Evidently, an outsider regarded such work as beyond the elderly.

I never worried about having to work hard when I got old. I never expected to get old. I almost exited when I was two weeks old, and again when I was starting school at six. That was only the beginning of my almost ends. Then, suddenly, I woke up one day to discover that I was almost as old as Aunt Eva, the tractor driver. The young husband, no longer mine, was even closer to Eva’s age. What’s more I found myself in the unlikely role of caregiver to a 90-yr-old friend. When she handed me a beat-up copy of Jonas Jonasson’s novel, The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared, she said, “I couldn’t get into it.”

The hundred-year-old man is Allan Karlson, a Swede – the novel is translated – who was born in 1905.

My grandmother, Eva’s sister, was born in 1900, and much to her chagrin, she lived to be 96. For at least 20 years, she went about wondering out loud why she was still here. I found this alarming, but I couldn’t convey to her how she was the center of the world for me, and, I suspected for all the other grandchildren she was so fond of enumerating. Not having her would be like not having the earth’s axis.

She lived within the same ten square miles her entire life. She never traveled farther away than 500 hundred miles. She had five children, three of them were born after me, her first grandchild, and two of these were twins. When she was already a grandmother, she had three babies. Diapers had to be washed then. She had no electricity, a tin tub with a wash board and only a clothes line for drying. Or – when she got desperate – she hung the damned things over the wood stove.

Allan Karlson, the Jonasson’s hero, who lived to be 100, had a much more exciting life. At the age of 10, he went to work in a nitroglycerine factory and taught himself to be an explosives expert. So much so, that he ended up helping out, in a strictly informal if significant way, at Las Alamos. He had already met General Franco in the Spanish Civil War before he met Harry Truman on the day President Roosevelt died. He went on to meet Churchill, de Gaulle, LBJ, Stalin, among other heads of state, and to intervene, however inadvertently, at crucial points in history. He learned many languages, spent long periods in various prison camps, walked across the Himalayas and blew things up just to be helpful. In short, he had the fabulous adventures that only a character in a satire can have. On the last page – spoiler alert – he finally overcomes the forced castration he suffered in his 20s.

The Hundred Year Old Man Who... is the work of a vivid and quirky imagination but it also contains insight: “The following spring he would be seventy-eight, and Allan realized that he had gotten old against all odds and without having thought about it.”

Exactly.

Meanwhile, my ninety-year-old friend has had her car keys confiscated. I’m pretty sure she had been driving for awhile with no idea of which dial was the speedometer. She is not happy to have her independence curtailed. Me neither. Everyday, I find myself driving her wherever her whim takes us. My dear friend with her sparkling blue eyes and her ready wit has to have me identify friends we meet in our forays, and all our conversations are conducted at the top of my lungs. Don’t talk about hearing aids, please. They are tiny, the batteries are impossible to change and they have feedback. She dreads the loss of her short term memory. Too late.

My once young husband has run through every treatment for his stage 4 cancer in the last ten years, and reports that he is unaccountably tired. He speculates that he may have to give up flying to Miami for Caribbean cruises or at least stop zip-lining in ports of call.

I have never been robust (see exit above). Unlike my friend and my ex-husband, I have spent my life not feeling up to par. I have numerous vertical and horizontal scars. I have to eat carefully, exercise carefully and rest half of every day. Yet here I am, completely unfit for the task, but still pitching hay.

Thanks Giving in Buffalo Wallow

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Of course, I’m not really in Buffalo Wallow, which must be somewhere in flatland. I’m up here on a pine mountain in the ancient land of the Chumash, who regarded it as the center of the world. Apparently, a Chumash trickster spirit, Coyote, or whatever he calls himself has been toying with us, so my gratitude this day is a little skewed.

I am grateful that Ikea’s designated delivery company finally delivered the bed. I bought it on Oct 23 by phone while I was still in Canada. I was told the first delivery date possible on this remote mountain in California was Nov. 8. This remote mountain is 40 minutes up the I-5 from the Ikea distribution center in El Tejon. While I slept on a mattress on the floor, my bed sped past me down the I-5 and came to rest in a warehouse south of Los Angeles, where it sat in a tight roll and disassembled pieces. Meanwhile my 82-year-pld body lay in a tight roll trying not to disassemble in agony. I missed the delivery date – they had been phoning my Canadian landline, but I am grateful that they delivered it on Veterans Day. I am also grateful that my daughter’s good-man-good assembled it with only minimum  damage to his body. So he says. I try to believe him.

It is 10 days later, my body is beginning to unwind.

Meanwhile, Mr Coyote’s trick involved a whole raft of medical specialists – general surgeons, radiologists, ear, nose and throat fellows, urologists, neurosurgeons, pain specialists, and a raft of CT scans, x-rays, MRIs, blood tests, cell cultures and biopsies. The diagnosis was kidney cancer, then metastatic kidney cancer, then benign tumor and early stage kidney cancer, then two benign tumors, one kidney, with a dissenting vote from the radiologist, who’s still got his money on the big C.

Update: a neurosurgeon has removed one tumor and it seems as though years of sciatic pain and months of insomnia have been cured. So thank you, Dr. Liker and all those friendly nurses at Henry Mayo.

Next stop, the urologist.

 

 

 

The Crying Chair

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This is the crying chair. It sits in my entrance way on a tiled floor. Good rocking there and tissues at the ready.

I saw it first at Christmas 1960 when I dragged my extremely pregnant body upstairs to my mother-in-law’s attic. She was storing it for a friend, but I could have it to rock the baby, temporary loan.

It was cream colored then. At some point, my husband painted it antique green. (When was the era of antiquing?) During a desperate teachers’ strike, our house became the place for coffee break. Deep winter. Constant arguing. Months of poverty. My two children unschooled as well, of course. To avoid insanity, I carried it down to the basement and stripped the paint off and oiled it. I loved the chair. It saved me.

I rocked my large self in it through most of a dark January 1961. When she arrived, my daughter, like her mother before her, cried. If she had cried for Canada, she would have won the gold. My father slept with his foot out of bed rocking my cradle. I rocked her in the big, comfortable chair.

Her brother arrived a year later. By then his sister was noshing on pureed food, so her colic had cleared up. Anyway her real live doll-brother made her so happy, she didn’t need to cry. He, in turn, was fascinated by her -his own non-stop performance artist/teacher, and calm by nature. Still I rocked them both before bed and at teething time, one on each knee, singing every song I knew including ‘House of the Rising Sun”

Some nights, however, I cried as I sang. Their father taught day school, night school, took night courses and tutored on Sunday. We had dinner together. That was it. A quiet, tasteful time, full of conversation. No. Two babies who needed to be fed while Daddy tried to sort out the evening lesson plan.

I had studied English & Philosophy and Drama. I was the only female survival in the Logic class by third year. I had two years of teaching English under my belt as well as teacher training. I had subdued 50 hormone-ridden grade 10s in a classroom with 48 seats. Now I was washing six dozen cloth diapers twice a week.

I started reciting Shakespeare as I bathed the kids together in the big tub.

Eventually, my husband intervened. “What would you do right now, if you could do anything?” he asked. “Put on my navy suit,” I said. “Where would you go?” he asked. “Cedarbrae Collegiate,” I replied. “You want to go back to teaching,” he said.

How could I? It was 1963. My job was to nurture these priceless babies. It just wasn’t done. But before we got up from the grey card table that functioned as our dining surface, we had the plans underway. We would hire a nanna, carefully vetted. I would get a job easily. Populations were booming and my clever husband could stop working all the time. My terror and relief could be soothed only by more rocking those bigger and bigger babies.

The rocking chair went with us to a new house. We were now making almost $12,000 together. It was an ideal place for growing children, a hill, with a flagpole and a martin house, wilderness, gardens, fences and eventually a pool. There were parks galore and a very high cliff above Lake Ontario for risking young lives. Not that we worried. They had bicycles. They had each other.

The rocking chair sat in the corner of the rec room beside the sliding door and in front of the fireplace, which any of the four of us could choose to light. Nanna kept it swept free of ashes.

Then the crying chair came back into its own. I was the one in it. It was 2 a.m., where was my husband?

The chair and I set out on our travels. Sans the others. We moved to Heyworth Ave., to Main St., to Fishleigh Dr., to the town of Zephyr, to Mississauga, to Evans Ave., to Stephen Dr. and back to Mississauga. I can picture where my chair sat in each of these places. All except 3 had my name on the deed. One had my sister’s and two I signed leases for. A good deal of rocking and crying went on in those 40 years.

Meanwhile my ex-husband had lost his much younger wife to cancer. He had been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer the same year, 2010. We welcomed him back into the family at Easter 2012. (“Should of stuck with the old girls,” my sister greeted him cheerily.

He and I had lunch last week. A two hour lunch tires out this 82-yr-old retired teacher, but he seemed to want to come to my 14th floor suburban apartment. We did have to talk over a few details concerning his estate. There have been no bad tests recently but…

I pointed out the crying chair. This sent him into a reflective mood. He always cried easily-just maybe not over me. Intimations of mortality can bring that on. He regretted our son had not continued his painting and sculpting. I thought that a youthful art career is like a teen-aged rock band. Most people grow out of it.

Hubby, for example had chosen math and physics, over art. Even got to work with a nuclear reactor. (Is that significant?)

Anyway, grief is always the same, not so much about loss as the f-ups that we regret.

So the chair waits invitingly, inevitably.

Feel free to drop by and cry until you’re done.

 

 

 

The Cure for Fear

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Okay, I should be asleep. I need to be. I want to get up early. Things to do. May actually be getting something, (When am I not?) But I have this great opportunity, which I am going to lose tomorrow. I am uncertain and afraid. Tomorrow I will call my oncologist. If my appointment is moved forward to next week instead of the week after, I know the lump that we’ve detected needs further study.

Blake and I were sitting in Starbucks in the lobby of Toronto General, gazing back at the Art Deco facade of Princess Margaret Hospital from which we had just jaywalked.

“Even if I do get an immediate call-back it could still be A or B. That would have to be determined,” I say.

“Or it could be C,” Blake quips.

“Oh, it could very well be C,” and I have to laugh.

Yes, well,  we have just spent two hours waiting to hear Blake’s test results with regard to C. They weren’t bad, but then they weren’t good either. It’s the usual seesaw game of prostrate cancer. Knock down the PSA score and the testosterone with hormones. Ease off. Watch the PSA rise again. Today, it was decided that it was time to go back to the heavy ammunition. Not easy news for the manly Blake, but excellent news in that the drugs have improved since last time and he is line to get this extremely expensive medication for free.

Not many men in the clinic bring along their ex-wives probably, but Blake’s young second wife was carried off by cancer two years ago. So he and I are embarked on this mutual study of mortality.

Much else has been happening this week. My brother Rob underwent knee replacement in Brussels. My daughter and her husband declared bankruptcy and their home is about to be foreclosed on. True this “disaster” has opened up their lives and led them to a prospective mountain home. My grandson, Leo, who has to get his driver’s license or lose his job, has his own test redo to deal with. I had enough fear to go round.

So I kept up my mantra, “I love you and I trust you.” Initially, I just mouthed the words, but gradually I realized what they meant. Driving down to the hospital today, I found it had morphed into, “I love you. I know you are pure love. I trust love.”

Blake and I, out of nothing but pure love, created a home, two children and careers that supported us. An excellent foundation for this present project.

At home, afterward, I read Rumi’s poetry (Rumi: The Book of Love, trans. Coleman Barks). One section is called “Tavern Madness” and the poems in it are about the ‘drunkenness’ of the overwhelming contact with the divine. Dinners in our home were full of such non-alcoholic ‘drunken’ conversations, full of revelation and confidence in our vision of life.

Rumi says: I didn’t come here of my own accord
                  And I can’t leave that way.
                  Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

I love the way, poetry lets you work things out for yourself. And I love the idea of surrender to the steady shoulder that is capable of supporting my staggering self.

In another poem, Rumi says, I am the clear consciousness core of your being,                                              The same in ecstasy
                                             As in self-hating fatigue.

And so, I came around to an open heart and fear dissolved.

Mortality and Christopher Hitchens

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In his recently released book Mortality, Christopher Hitchens tells the story of how British journalist John Diamond chronicled his battle with cancer in a weekly column. Hitchens confesses like many other readers, he quietly urged him on from week to week. He says,

But after a year and more…well, a certain narrative expectation inevitably built up. Hey, 
miracle cure! Hey, I was just having you on! No neither of those would work as endings.
Diamond had to die; and he duly, correctly (in narrative terms) did. Though – how can I put this?- a stern literary critic might complain that his story lacked compactness toward the end.
Hitchens’ own story was more elegantly structured. He told it in 7 essays published in Vanity Fair and now collected posthumously in this small book.

Mortality describes his initial collapse in a New York City hotel room during a tour in support of his latest book, Hitch 22, in early June 2010, saying of the emergency responders:

I had time to wonder why they needed so many boots and helmets and so much backup equipment, but now I view the scene in retrospect I see it as a very gentle but firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.

He dislikes the use of the metaphor of battle, fight or struggle to describe what ensued after he was diagnosed with metastatic oesophageal cancer. He says

Myself I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of being a gravely endangered patient.

But sitting “while a venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you.” And yet his dispatches from the Land of Malady are full of his customary wit and irony. His wife, Carol Blue, reports in the book’s Afterward that he wrote the jottings now collected as chapter 8 in bursts of energy and enthusiasm, his computer perched on the food tray of his hospital bed. He continued to hold court whenever he was hospitalized, “making a point or hitting a punchline for his “guests”, whom he treated like “participants in his Socratic discourses”. He had always been a great raconteur, as well as a bon vivant. He had an encyclopedic knowledge and a rapier-like intelligence. And he could hold his liquor. After an 8 hour dinner, he would rise to toast the assembled motley crowd with “a stirring, spellbinding, hysterically funny twenty minutes of poetry, limerick reciting, a call to arms for a cause and jokes. ‘How good it is to be us’, he would say in his perfect voice.”

I started reading him in Vanity Fair, after many years of avoiding his work and like many others, I was immediately won over. I avoided him because he had betrayed me. For many years he had espoused causes dear to my heart, workers’ rights among them, what might be called leftwing views, but then after 9/11, he made a sharp turn right and supported the war in Iraq, believing the now disproved weapons-of-mass-destruction premise. Not to mention, he dissed Mother Teresa and rounded on Salman Rushdie, when Rushdie, under fatwa pressure, published “Why I have Embraced Islam”. I read the rebuttals that his friend Martin Amis wrote and imagined, in my innocence, that Amis was actually alienated from Hitchens. I was wrong. Amis remained his great friend, Rushdie was at Hitchens’ memorial and Mother Teresa – well that goes without saying.

Hitchens was a famous atheist, author of god is Not Great, and on his last Thanksgiving Day in November 2011, he was in my town, Toronto, debating his point of view with Tony Blair, the former British prime minister and recent convert to the Catholic Church. Hitchens arranged Thanksgiving dinner for his family and friends here and by all accounts carried the day in the debate.

His reaction to the Christopher Hitchens Day of prayer on September 20, 2011 involved wondering exactly what was being prayed for – his survival, his redemption? He examined the nature of prayer -the importuning of an omnipotent being to suspend His laws of nature for personal benefit- and found the practice specious. He noted that certain religious zealots had pronounced that his illness was God’s punishment and in short order analyzed the ill-logic and cruelty of that by citing blameless children suffering from cancer. He said there would be no deathbed conversion and told of Voltaire being badgered as he was dying to renounce the devil, whereupon the great thinker replied, “that this was no time to be making enemies”.

The best gift that Hitchens gave me, besides many good laughs, was the realization that I can listen to a point of view I don’t agree with, indeed that I might find contrary and wrongheaded although, of course, he said much that I found true.

He concluded an essay on The Great Gatsby by saying, “It remains ‘the great’ because it confronts the defeat of youth and beauty and idealism and finds the defeat unbearable and then turns to face the defeat unflinchingly”.  He died on December 15, 2011 at the age of 62. HIs unflinching voice goes on.

108 Moves in the Right Direction: tai chi or NOT

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The Tao Te Ching begins by telling us that the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao. That is true of many things, your love for your spouse or children, for example. Try putting that into words. And it is certainly true of tai chi.

Anthony left a request on my book Never Tell‘s Facebook page asking me to write about tai chi. I replied I would think about it. I have done, for several weeks and I still don’t know where to begin. So I’ve stolen the motto of an international tai chi organization and I’ll see what I can do.

If you follow my blog, you know I am ancient of days. (not The Ancient of Days note. That’s another dude, who, presumably is a tai chi master Himself.) But, TA DA, drum roll please, I can stand on one leg and luffa the other foot, I can lie down on the floor and get back up with no help, (shut up chair), I can get out of the car without lifting the outside leg with my hands and so much more. I have survived 2 malignancies, one for 13 years and the other, completely different one, for 10. So much for the score sheet.

It is also true that I am one of those lucky people who are earning their wings through suffering. My body thinks it’s amusing to be in one kind of discomfort or the other all the time. It scrolls through a punishing list of pains and aches on a regular basis: bowel spasm, back spasm, leg spasm, indigestion, dizziness, feeling faint, feeling faint while sleeping (!), fatigue, exhaustion and, my personal favourite, diaphragm spasm and weakness.

Now Body’s objecting that much of this is caused by me or Mind that keeps shoving stuff down into flesh and muscle and organ and bone INSTEAD OF PROCESSING IT IN A MENTALLY HEALTHY WAY. OK, stop shouting. I hear you.

And so I do tai chi.

I started 20 years ago, but I began serious study only 15 years ago. As late as 10 years ago as I was recovering from major surgery in So Cal, I still couldn’t do the whole set up in Kenneth Hahn park without a plastic-covered cheat-sheet on the picnic table. When I was more or less better and back in TO, I started going to class more often and ended up instructing beginners for 8 years.

Listen, you don’t want to start tai chi. It’ll take over your life. You’ll get addicted to all those endorphins. You muscles will ache at first and you’ll have to consult your teacher about whether you need to correct something to stop it. You’ll be in trouble at home for being out so much. Just when you think you’ve got it, your teacher will let you know you haven’t. Then you’ll feel as if you can’t do it at all. There is absolutely no end to it. I’ve heard people say it will take several lifetimes just to get one move at the end, call it “Turn to Sweep Lotus” down pat. Face it -there is no “down pat”. There is no perfection. Never. You can go on learning forever.

OMG, you actually like that last idea!

Well, you wouldn’t like that feeling of calm that settles on you during the set, once you have  learned it enough to follow. You wouldn’t like the group energy that gets going when you follow each other well. You’re an individual aren’t you? You’re a North ‘Merican if not actually an ‘Merican. (No apology needed Ozzies as you know. You’re even more so. And that 1 German viewer same diff.) You don’t want some tai chi master correcting you. Good grief, all the instructors in my club are volunteers and we are supposed to maintain our own club building and run the damn place. “This is not an exercise club”, we are told. Charitable works, open hearts! Come on!

Of course, you may be able to find a tai chi club that espouses closed hearts, uncharitable works, etc. Good luck! Your club may just charge you a high fee and let you go your own way.

I have to confess that last Saturday, at the good old volunteer-based tai chi club, when 7 of us foregathered in a work party to lift and drill and clean and eat a delicious lunch that an  someone had brought unbidden, then I was carried back to my childhood and the church hall with the women setting out the chicken pie supper. I loved that group co-operation and getting things done.

Doing a tai chi set later, a group of 6 just like doing it in a group of 35 or on occasion in a group of 700, has that same feeling, many-fold.

I hesitate to recommend tai chi to you. It’s a serious decision. You’ll be frustrated at first. You don’t want that. You may hurt sometimes. You’ll never actually know whether it’s the tai chi that making you limber and strong and keeping you alive. And all that peace that comes of a moving meditation, how’s that going to jack you up?

Better not.