Barely promoted

Decluttering

This cotton coverlet has been sitting on top of a pile of crap in the upstairs hall for several months. It's in a trash bag now.

Every time, every time I see it, I think, as I believe I have every time I've seen it since 1977: "Wow, the stripes are gorgeous, but I HATE the llamas, the red could be blood and the stamping is so coarse."

This was my bedspread, on the unfinished-furniture platform bed with drawers and a thin foam mattress, in the one-bedroom apartment my foster father had to move to, from Jane Street to just north of Fourteenth, so that I could have my own room, the foster car agency said he had to.

The room where I'd hear him listening to me, after I went to bed.

The room I went back to, the summer after ninth grade, the Ghostbusters summer. HOW DID MY MOTHER AND GRANDPARENTS LET ME DO THAT? Of course it was fine -- I was too old for him by then.

A couple of years ago I started re-setting the photos in an album of my mother's---I couldn't take the roach bits stuck in the tape and binding. She had some black and white prints of pictures my foster father took of me, probably when I was twelve. I'm wearing clothes -- but have been made to feel ashamed that I needed to keep them on. The expression is rage, just utter futile rage.

I took it college as well; somehow I didn't realize I'd need warm blankets. My paycheck from what Anthony Abraham Jack calls "Community Detail," a week spent cleaning dorms before freshman year started, paid for one --- and also for my textbooks, my eating out, my being part of the community. I haven't been able to read his book. Of course, if it worked for me, that doesn't mean it's not awful for other people, or even wrong in general. But it worked for me, it was a lifesaver in fact.

I quit three-quarters of the way through first year; one friend from high school got a bad chemical burn, and enough other workers had already quit that the gaps between cleanings grew -- and the bathrooms got truly disgusting before I got back to them. The rest of my campus jobs were grading, teaching, libraries (sorting microfiche cards!), and offices. I was paid more per hour than students at my current employer are paid now -- and it was enough.

I don't know how long the tears have been there. Years. I just safety-pinned across. I feel like since 1987, but that can't be right.

The stains are just stamping errors. I think. Not blood.

One more link: Girasol wraps. Never worked so well for me ---linen all the way, or Didymos at least --- but so, so lovely.

Interior soundtrack

From mid-April: What was stuck in my head as I make that first latte:

• Hold Me My Daddy, XTC ("Hold me tight, hold me, like you was the baby...")
• Your Mother Should Know, The Beatles ("Let's all get up and dance to a song that was a hit before your mother was born, though she was born a long long time ago... Your mother should know, oooooh-oooh, your mother should know.")
• These Days, Nico ("These days I seem to think a lot about the things that I forgot to do...")
• River Man, Nick Drake (actually, I looked up the lyrics and I had them all wrong. Nick Drake is like that.)
• Hard Day, OMD ("When I walk I walk I walk all the time. I talk I talk about nothing at all. See I say it's hard to explain what I mean, to say... it's been a hard hard day, in my life. It's been such a hard day, for me.")

Late May: The Magnetic Fields are on Spotify, and I have just listed to The Wayward Bus for the first time in probably a decade. First: I hope it reprograms the interior soundtrack, which, thank God, has gotten a little less ominously Freudian lately. Second: this album maybe contructed what nostalgia is for me---gave it its passive-aggressive coloration, showed me how to revel in the stories of the flaws of the people in my early life.

Hello again. I am grieving. Let me tell you why.

Ha! Quick post! Ha!

Ray's sister sent ashes, which are still in the shipping box. I'm supposed to scatter them in Central Park. I will someday.

I did end up breaking into Ricky's apartment, once, after Marina had convinced him to sell a painting to some vampire art dealer she met at a nursing home. Ricky has gout and hep C and deep deep sadness, and I've paid $250 towards his rent this month and last month; I paid his 2015 tax bill, too. We have a little agreement that the payments all get tallied towards the nice paintings at $2000 a pop. Only one has come back to Ohindinois so far; a little oval portrait of a Civil-war era old lady. It's hanging over our clawfoot tub.

The kids are well. My gosh! They are well. They are beautiful and smart and growing like weeds; I give it two months until the older one is taller than I am. Beaker is well too, although he had a terrible health crisis in 2014; his physical recovery took months, and I was more traumatized than I realized.

Around that time my "service commitments" increased drastically, and the whole damn campus started going to hell. (Coincidence? I think not.)

A couple of months after that last post, I sent DNA to Ancestry and everyone else who would take it. I convinced Ricky and his brother to send in samples too. No close matches for a long time. I built out a huge tree for my mother's family.

Ancestry sold a shit-ton of kits over Christmas 2016; they're still processing them. Three weeks ago I got a close match who didn't match my uncles and had a tree. I recognized enough names from other weaker matches' trees to focus on a particular grandparent of hers.

Turns out that grandparent had another grandchild with exactly the common name my mother claimed my father had: let's say, William Taylor. Two years older than my mother. I built out a tree. After three days, I had more DNA matches traceable through that little tree than through my mother's. I found matches through all four of William's grandparents, even the medium-late immigrant lines. (He only had one grandparent in common with the initial match—they are half-first-cousins.)

Google told me that William died about 10 years ago, when he was 66. His wife died about 3 years ago. He has a brother and sister still alive, and a daughter; I couldn't tell whether the wife was her mother but it seemed somehow unlikely. He'd started at two colleges (the first one quite good), lived in several cities, never really seemed to hold jobs for long. He was a journalist, but it was achingly difficult to find any clips. (Do you see where this is going? I saw the shadows, but.)

Quite quickly, my new DNA match contacted me. She's lovely and kind. She understood the DNA evidence; she also saw that the biggest missing link was whether William had been in New York at the right time. She talked with her cousin, William's sister, and then she sent me the sister's e-mail address.

The sister, Linda, is unsentimental and direct. (My kind of potential aunt, especially since we had to meet like this.) She was: well, not unconvinced. And invited me to ask questions about her brother.

I first described my mother's mental illness, and then said I hoped I was ready to hear just about anything—but also understood that some things are too hard to talk about.

Linda confirms that William was in New York at the right time. She is sure because she visited him at Bellevue, where he'd been taken after having a psychotic break; diagnosis of schizophrenia. From what she's told me so far, it sounds like he never decompensated as badly again, but always had trouble living independently; he finally moved back in with his widowed mother when he was about 50. He was consistently difficult to get along with.

Let me be clear: My parents probably met as psychiatric patients. They both suffered from major mental illnesses.

I've been pretty torn up the last few days.

I asked for pictures. One evening, as I was hacking away at a necessary memo that will anger many of my dear colleagues, Linda kept sending them, one in each e-mail, every five minutes, for a couple of hours.

I finally cried at a picture of William's proud and tentative young mother holding her tiny newborn baby. Was he a bit of a preemie? Did his mother look just like my younger daughter? Did she die as exhausted and bitter as my mother's mother did, after decades of letting her dreams for her oldest child drift away?

Let's not mention the Lewis Carroll obsession

I am supposed to write something for an "homage" that Ray's sister is sending out -- in place of a memorial, or anything like that.

I am totally blocked. It's not really clear who this is for. His siblings, the one co-worker who's still alive? His life proceeded in disjoint episodes, and so little followed from one to the next. I was one of them. My mother was perhaps three.

His sister and I spent two days at his bedside, talking while he gasped, apparently unconscious. She's an ancestry.com fiend. She located both his ex-wives almost trivially; figured out that the four-year-old son who drowned had been in Santa Monica, not New York; and so on.

While procrastinating I have poked around enough to be moderately certain that one of my great-great-great-grandfathers died about 10 mines north of Granolaton, in 1852 -- about a year after he'd arrived from Ireland. And my grandmother's aunt, from whom she'd been estranged for forever? Buried in the same Catholic cemetery in the New York suburbs. Oh, and the patents on early (I am not making this up) toilet bowls -- joint between a great-great-grandfather and a great-great-uncle. It feels like there's a lot more on line than there was the last time I tried, probably two years ago.

I haven't joined Ancestry yet. It's horribly tempting. But then I hit the: I can only ever know half, right? wall.

I've also been thinking about 23 and me. Beaker sent in samples a few years ago (why yes, he is a delta f 508!). Are there any third cousins I don't know about? Is there a wide enough sweep yet? Both my mother's parents were only children, and ended up cut off from their cousins. Again, not to mention the brick wall on the other side.

The contrast with the death of my mother has been hard. Then near strangers were overcome with sympathy -- it was my mother, after all. And all that word carries. But when I tell people my foster father died? What must that mean to me? No one can guess. (Of course, I don't really know myself.) The condolences are minimal. I change the subject.

Miss T. is the same age now as I was when I went to live with Ray. That's overwhelming.

I have not cried over Ray. (I think his sister disapproved.) But I have been vague and spacey, and been getting choked up over some painfully obvious pop culture artifacts: the end of, and the epilogue to, Knuffle Bunny Free. A Music Together song about how the people who take care of you (they are scrupulous not to limit that to parents -- I think that may be the precise element that makes the cheer so sinister) will come back, "because they always do." Good Christ, I am getting choked up even running the lyrics through my head now.

Stretched

My foster father Ray is dying. In a nursing home in a small city in northern California. He is demented and cancer-ridden. He started hospice yesterday.

I am planning to fly out there on Wednesday. His (much younger, half) sister Colleen is discouraging the trip. He probably sexually abused her two daughters -- certainly took pictures of them in their panties when they were in elementary school, which some would already consider abuse. I think Colleen was present, though. (Fuck the seventies.)

Marina left Ricky a few weeks ago -- and good for her, but he is falling apart. She waited until he'd paid off his multiyear debt consolidation loan, then disappeared, with all her stuff, while he was at work. She's living in Queens, presumably with friends. I have refused to give him money to pay his rent. I am sort of seriously considering going to New York and breaking into the apartment while he's out driving his taxi (70 hours per week) to save -- no, to take, they're his according to the will -- the family pictures: little miniatures on porcelain of my grandmother's grandparents, and of her as an infant; photo albums from when her family was rich.

testing ... testing...

Ahem?

Geez! It felt like I had to break into my own account! What the &^%* is all this new Typepad %$#&?

We are well.

Viola Jane Maple was born on May 24, at a stunning 8 pounds 11 ounces. A smooth and fairly rapid unmedicated and midwife-managed hospital birth -- with a moment of shoulder dystocia, rapidly resolved, for extra excitement.

She is now a solid little chunk of muscle who wants only two things in life: MORE NUM, and to learn to walk.

And otherwise? We are all well -- although the end of my leave is coming up. First re-engagement with the world: a conference in California, mid-January, that may involve seeing both my doctoral advisor and my frail and fading foster father.

Random bullets of desperation (except without the bullets)

My grandmother died on Wednesday morning, as I was traveling.

Beaker drove out on Friday with Miss T. We held the funeral mass on Saturday.

Everyone who came to the wake was either a neighbor (they all cried) or an old, old, old as in high school, friend of Ricky's.

I am very frustrated by my uncle.

So is Marina. She, however, is married to him. I give it less than a year; she's someone who falls on her feet.

They're going to try to keep the apartment. I give that less than a year, too.

There's a will. It's exactly as hellish as you might expect from my family, particularly since there is no money -- which is all that Ricky wants -- and the only thing I want, namely family pictures, records, and memorabilia, goes to Ricky. He's executor, too. Oh my God.

I'll go back out next week to try to put things in order. Ha.
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It is easy to make excuses for why I was not closer to my grandmother. She was a very difficult person; she held herself back from everyone, emotionally and physically, and she could lash out viciously with little provocation.

For the last seven years, Ricky was living with her, and I found it very difficult to visit -- both because of his presence, and because of how they played off the worst in each other.

But I let that gap grow.

Ricky's high school friends remember me as a toddler running around the House (the one lost in my grandfather's bankruptcy); my grandmother took care of me then. I don't know if my mother was even around much. In her papers I found a couple of poems that seemed to have been written after she'd been caring for me as an infant, and then my mother took me back (one time that ended up with me with pneumonia, my mother back in the hospital). I remember so little of those years -- but my grandmother was the one, I think, the one who was there when I was small.

But after I was taken away from her over and over again -- by my mother, repeatedly, by my foster father trying to keep me, by the custody fight, by my growing up and moving into a wider world -- she was too hurt to let me in again. And I didn't fight it.

The only reason I saw her so often this past year is the IVF cycles. I didn't even go for Thanksgiving last year --- we were going to have a big dinner in January to make up for it --- and then the January cycle sucked and I got depressed and Beaker and Miss T. never came out to New York.
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Ricky seems to believe that my family and I will continue to visit regularly.

On the one hand: what the FUCK?

On the other hand: they all hated each other for years, and what good did it do? Why should I carry on the tradition? (Plus, he could be a really effective anti-drug message, just being his lovely self.)
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I am nominally nine weeks pregnant today. I feel and look pregnant. Nausea, huge sore breasts, a belly that's moderate in the mornings but balloons out through the day. Inability to concentrate. Fatigue. All just like last time at this stage.

It is killing me that it is all, almost certainly, meaningless -- the hormonal effects and physical displacements of a hard-working placenta, doing its best to support something fatally flawed. I can never really believe during the 2ww that the symptoms are meaningless -- but this is multiplied a thousandfold.

Tomorrow I go for my first ultrasound since seven weeks -- that was the bad one. Beaker is driving me, because I can't imagine getting myself home if the news is what we have to try to expect.

Redoubled vigil

At the end of Monday, things didn't seem too bad, all in all. I'd gotten through my grading. As long as I managed to scrape together two midterm exams on Tuesday -- when I wasn't going to be teaching -- I'd be okay at work. I hadn't talked to Weatherwood since Friday, but in the absence of news I assumed things were keeping stable to slight improvement, as they had been. And my boobs were still sore and my eating highly disordered, so I could still pretend I was sort of pregnant, you know?

I slept horribly, though. Shivered down to sleep, then woke up in a sweat: I'd dreamed that Ricky had called to tell me that Nana had died. I lay awake for a long time, then drifted in and out of more bad dreams: nearly losing Miss T. in a train station, over and over.

Then, while it was still dark, the phone rang.

Nana wasn't dead -- and still isn't, so far as I know, as I type on a plane on Wednesay morning -- I just called Ricky from the airport -- but she took a turn for the worse, much worse, in the small hours of Tuesday morning. Her airway is collapsing to nothing. Her oxygen saturation is unmeasurable -- both because it's low and because so little blood is reaching her fingers. She has not been conscious; she shifts slightly, occasionally, and sometimes grimaces. They've given her a little morphine, a little Valium; Ricky tells me the last thing she said on Tuesday morning was that she couldn't breathe. "Her hands are ice cold."

The doctors and nurses have been saying consistently for nearly 30 hours that she only has a couple of hours to live. A priest came in to perform Last Rites yesterday morning.

They do have her on full oxygen now. I think the doctors are trying to decide what a DNR means here; I don't know how much help Ricky is with that. He's been with her round-the-clock since the crisis began.

I spent Tuesday working desperately to get myself free for the rest of the week. I wrote my exams, corralled colleagues into proctoring them, sent flagrantly ashamed e-mail to my classes explaining that I'd be away, here are the arrangements, we'll figure out how to make up the cancelled meetings later... every hour or two I called Nana's hospital room and Ricky told me that nothing had changed. "They are telling us now that it is the TB that's doing all this. Her X-rays looked just TERRIBLE. Now they're telling us that. She does have some pneumonia, but it's really the TB."

I found a miraculous one-way ticket: under $300, to the suburban airport, and only one stop -- 3 hours in Philadelphia! (I could have paid $800 to go via, say, Denver, if I'd been less lucky.) I'll figure out how to get home when -- when it's time to go home.

I scarcely slept at all last night. I'd brought a cordless up to the nightstand, and I couldn't believe it wouldn't ring.

Ricky keeps saying, when I talk to him, that "she's waiting for you to get here, man." He also keeps talking about how "she was the best mother that ever lived, and it was a gift, a gift, that I got to have her for so long."

I won't get an ultrasound on Thursday. I thought about trying to get Cornell to call in an order -- heck, the hospital my grandmother's in has a maternity department, so I could just go downstairs, right? -- but: I know it won't make a difference to the outcome whether I get one or not. So I'm going to wait until I'm home.

Guarded

I talk to either Ricky or Marina every three days or so.

I call Ricky in the late afternoon, as he sits in my grandmother's hospital room. It's an isolation room, with double doors and (I presume) negative air pressure. It feels drafty and she is always cold. If he puts on the heat it quickly gets too hot. He sees climate control, and making sure an appropriate order gets put in with dining services, as what his job is right now, why he's there every day from 10:00 to 6:00.

Marina calls me in the late evening, usually as I'm trying to get Miss T. to sleep. Marina is exhausted. She works all day, then goes up to relieve Ricky at the hospital for a couple of hours. She tells me how frail Nana is, and how bitter; how she tries to refuse treatment, even things that might make her more comfortable. She doesn't think Nana's really about to die -- except for moments every now and then.

Nana is too weak to talk. I haven't spoken to her directly -- my God, since I was there in August, actually. On Thursday night her oxygen saturation went down into the 80's, and they wanted to put on a face mask of 100% oxygen -- she's had tubes in her nose the whole time. She refused, and Ricky supported her. He stayed that night and about four hours later her levels went back up, "after she calmed down some," he says.

They gave her a blood transfusion last week. I think they were planning two, but she spiked a fever after the first, so they stopped.

Ricky has started crushing all her pills into applesauce or pudding, since she was having a hard time swallowing them.

It sounds like the plan now is that once they're sure the drugs are working they'll move Nana into a regular hospital room and keep there until she's stable and stronger. Because of the TB, it sounds like a nursing home is not really seen as an option. When they let her out for real, she'll get 9 weeks of a home aide covered, but no more beyond that.

Both Ricky and Marina tell me not to come now, to protect myself and my family from the possibility of contagion. (They got chest X-rays on Thursday, but haven't heard the results yet. Both will need to be on drugs for a long time regardless, given the positive skin tests.) I never told them I was pregnant, so there's no need to tell them that soon I won't be.

Direct flights from Rust City to the suburban airport nearest to them have been discontinued -- just this week, in fact, and I didn't know until I searched on the airline web page and was offered itineraries that included e.g. eight hour stops in Pittsburgh and cost $2000. Of course I can fly to one of the main New York airports, but that'll be a huge pain, especially since I want to rent a car -- it's hard to see how I'd be useful as a visitor if I didn't, now that they've lost Ricky's free taxi access.

It is, of course, exceedingly unpleasant to contemplate the possibility of starting to miscarry on a plane. From what I've read on line it seems like I'm pretty unlikely to just start bleeding all over the place for a couple weeks yet -- if and when anyone offers me a D and C I'll take it -- but still.

Also, I don't think I should take Miss T. along -- but I don't want to leave her. She's had a horribly scattered couple of months, with the travel for the IVF cycle, and moving to a new room at day care, and Beaker having a couple of business trips, and now Mama being tired and sad, and the stress is showing. She really doesn't need for me to disappear for a couple of days.

So: I am risking not seeing Nana because I don't want to travel. There are several reasons,  all of which should be trumped by the possibility of her dying soon. Yet here I am this weekend in Ohindinois, grading away in my office.

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Directions from Cornell: "Keep taking the progesterone as long as there's a heartbeat." Well, that phrasing makes certain assumptions, doesn't it?

Reanimation

My grandmother has tuberculosis. Not unheard of in the very elderly, although more common in immigrants. Generally it's a reactivation of a previous primary infection. Since, in cases like this, it was acquired, say, 50 years ago, it's not usually drug-resistant.

I asked my grandmother 3 years ago, when Miss T. was small, if she had nursed her three children. Yes for my mother, her first. No for the other two. The doctors had told her not to, since she tested positive for TB. That would have been in 1947 and 1952.

My uncle told me tonight that my grandmother had had a friend at high school (a tiny Catholic girls' school in the midwest) who died of TB. "She was just fifteen. She sat next to her in class every day! There were just twelve girls in the class, and the rest were pallbearers." That would have been in about 1930.
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My ultrasound yesterday went well. No heartbeat, but that's unsurprising at 5w6d. One gestational sac with fetal pole and yolk sac, placed high up in the uterus just like it should be. Perhaps the ghost of another, a quarter the size. "You might get a little spotting with that."
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I promised myself that I wouldn't even look at maternity clothing until after we see a heartbeat (it's sort worth worrying about: I have a midwestern winter of teaching coming up, versus the California sabbatical of last time). But then Garnet Hill sends me a catalog full of stuff like this and this. What are they thinking?