For What Binds Us There are names for what binds us: strong forces, weak forces. Look around, you can see them: the skin that forms in a half-empty cup, nails rusting into the places they join, joints dovetailed on their own weight. The way things stay so solidly wherever they’ve been set down — and gravity, scientists say, is weak. And see how the flesh grows back across a wound, with a great vehemence, more…
I was reading an email from my long lost friend where she said she caught up with another friend recently who told her a story about a memory of my friend’s father. It was such a touching story and one that this woman had kept dear for over three decades. It is what I hope to do with my own mother. The other day, a friend called early in the morning and asked how mom…
I was pulled into the world of MySpace because my nieces and nephews were incapable of just sending an email or picking up the phone to call. I then went over to Facebook because that was the new new thing, and suddenly I found my own friends as well as my family alive and well there. But increasingly with my busy schedule, the emails would filter in from Facebook and annoy me – whether it…
Yesterday, when mom was asking me to put out her imaginary cigarette, I told the nurse – oh, and she also smokes. Mom looked over at her and said “Triple whammy.” Kicking Cymbalta, alcohol and cigarettes ain’t easy.
I was trying to soothe my mother’s anxiety by prodding her into telling the nurses about her wardrobe and about how she had won beauty contests when she was younger. A week ago a friend had written and said that she remembered my mother fondly. And I try to focus on those aspects of my mother, the ones where people know the big hearted woman, who was as fragile as a flower. Later, that same…
I was sitting in the hall waiting for the bed linens to be changed when I was standing by two people who were catching up. One was an elderly gentlemen who began talking about his days in Cuba with the other guy’s father. I joined their conversation reminiscing about Havana and post Castro and whatnot. The elderly gentlemen said in some ways Cuba has progressed further than us in medicine and education, and yet they…
When a friend of mine was dying of AIDS, he was surrounded by his friends who sat hospice with him and helped care for him in his final weeks. His family was almost restricted from being there as they were of no help. One of the many things he said during moments of lucidity and not was that he was a detective, a gumshoe, who would always got his man. At 3AM this morning, my…
My mother was prescribed Cymbalta for her peripheral neuropathy and depression two months ago. You have to love a drug that says on the front page of its website, we don’t know how the drug works. But what about a doctor who prescribes a medicine that clearly states you should not drink alcohol with it – prescribed to a woman who is an alcoholic. He says she told him she quit drinking. Side effects: When…
Monday morning and I slept like the dead last night and woke into some groggy clarity that I had been through a hump – in the midst of what should be a summer lull there have been too many deaths, too many festivities, too many problems with my mom – so I sort of woke this morning and took a deep breath. Loca and I were on our typical walk through the park when we…