A Sumtyme Blog of Knowthing

We went camping one time up in the White Mountains. From the California side of the continental divide its hard to believe that Mt, Washington at 6,288 feet (1,917 m)  has some of the worst weather in the contiguous United States. The treeline is about 4400 feet leaving about 1800 feet of bare mountain. Its not uncommon to be above the treeline hiking in July or August  in a short sleeve shirt and the temperature drops and snow may even appear. There are little huts around for emergency shelter, still  some hikers often run into trouble  every year.

When I was young in the 1950s  on a family vacation  we drove up the Mount Washington road to the observatory  on top. In high school we rented a cabin and spent weekends up there skiing. Years later living in Boston I hiked the area a few times.

Sometime in between I lived in Maine  and on a clear day I could see Mt Katadhin. One late afternoon the mountain was  burning a brightest orange and I thought how arrogant it looked as the sun went down. The next day I learned that three hikers up there  had been attacked by the almost instant appearance of cold. The three had taken off their jackets and shirts because of the warmth of the day. Two had stored them in their backpacks and the cold came so quickly they did not have time to get them back out. The the single survivor was grateful to having his jacket wrapped around his waist and was able to get it on quickly.

As I have previously mentioned reading these words is the entrance price to seeing the images.

I think good people get by because of each other and in spite of  leaders, the good things some people do keeps the world moving along. But this week I wake up and think Knotoday” and then I get up, and in the words of Jackson Browne, “and do it again.”

One of the things I  “do again” is to spend lunch with mom. With all due respect to everyone, sometimes a picture is worth more than the words, mom is dying, slowly, even though two weeks ago the docs said 4-5 days when they discharged her from the hospital, and still she goes on, her days in fear, pain and anger and I can only let God chose her time.

She has to be fed pureed food and thickened liquid with a spoon little by little, byte by byte, and she hates that, she wants to feed herself, but can’t and she is hungry at every meal and is angry and afraid. Not much I can do but be there. I go most every day but my wife also takes turns, mostly she goes two or three days a week but when things are real tough  for mom I need to go everyday, at least to make an effort to make these last days less unpleasant.

There are many in a similar situation, many financially less fortunate than my mom, but where ever such people are to be found when there are others who take time out of their daily life for them, that is good.Watching a family member die is not a  pleasant experience, but it is a privilege and an honor to have such an experience.

Below she  is in better times with my wife—in the past three years and five months she had plenty of good times and in her life she never went without food or shelter and when she did not have things she wanted it was so that she could do something for her children.

Still sometimes I get up and say “knotoday Steve,”  and then I do it again.

Mom had a stroke and the result included not only significant memory loss but aphasia. Since September 15, 2008, she has not been able to have a verbal relationship with people. It must be very frustrating for her. I can tell when, after verbally expressing herself and then she sees that the other person does not understand her, her face forms into an attitude of disgust—“How can you be so stupid as not to understand something so simple!!!”

Just little everyday things, like hello, how are you doing, I need to go to the bathroom, I would like to eat, I feel pain in my stomach—she has not been able to express any of these things for over 44 months,  Of course we can tell when she has pain, she expresses it by her behavior but often we cannot tell what the problem is. It could be she has to have a BM or she sprained her wrist or she has indigestion or in one case a hip fracture which required an operation.

I think this image expresses what she must often feel inside. All I can do about it is whenever I see her to try to create/share one “normal human experience” with her, perhaps looking at ikebana or going outside and seeing trees or just a few words that makes sense to us both. As she gets older it gets harder and harder to do this as her life increasingly becomes an everyday struggle full of things over which she has no control, they just happen to her often at the convenience of someone else—such as eating, changing her diaper, being put in the wheelchair, me visiting.

She has not choices in her life, and yet often when she is being fed there are times when she will struggle with you to feed herself  preferring to lift  an empty spoon to her mouth because she cannot scoop up the food or using both hands to guide a glass for a drink, Sometimes she would prefer to et with her hands to being fed with a spoon. She never gives up no matter what, always attempting to find one thing she can do by herself whenshe chooses  to do it. And that is what I try to help her find every time I see her. Even if its just 5 seconds long, its a moment when she can feel pride and dignity in herself.

When I was young I used to work at an antique store on the Post Road in Darien, and one day Roberto, the owner, bought a cabinet about eight feet tall, about four feet wide and about two feet deep, MADE OF SOLID OAK, with mirrors permanently attached to the back and the bottom and glass on the sides and front . It was very antique, probably made for some gigantic room in a castle somewhere in Europe with pineapples and lion heads carved into the columns on both sides in front and back and took three people with strength who knew what they were doing to move it.

Roberto bought it , and “the three boys” —Uldis, the Saturday high school kid and myself— took the truck out to pick it up. With great effort  the three of us  got it on the truck, fastened it to the side and drove back to the store. Roberto thought it would be sold right away. The plan was to leave it  in the truck and take perspective customers  out the back door to the truck and show it to them. So we took a polaroid of it, posted it on the counter and Roberto would show the picture to perspective buyers and then one of the boys would  take the interested customer to the truck parked in the back, they would have to climb up into it to see it and while they were always very interested to see such a  unique piece of furniture, few people really had a house with a room that was appropriate for such a monster piece of wood and glass. The plan was that the thing would sell quickly,  however after more than two months with not an single nibble, during which period every time we took the truck out the cabinet came along with us. When we picked up or delivered furniture we had to work around the monstrosity always being careful not to damage the glass sides, break the mirrors or chip the wood.

Finally one day Roberto bought a whole estate, at best two truck loads with an empty truck and so the decision was made to take the monster cabinet down off the truck and put it in the store. The backdoor was too small to bring it in that way so one Saturday, as that was the day we had the “third boy”  we drove the truck around to the front, up over the side walk and backed it right in front of the front door, and after about two hours we got the thing down off  the truck and just inside the front door.

It was a hot muggy summer day,  Roberto bought us drinks and as we were standing around, sweating, drinking the cold sodas,  in comes a customer who immediately bought it and wanted it delivered that afternoon. Roberto charged him a $60  delivery fee from which he gave us boys $20 each (this was about 1965 so it was good money then). And again,  as I mentioned once before on this blog,  Roberto—Robert Escott—was a great employer who always had a sense of concern for his employees and I learned a lot about antiques as well as polished so much silver and silver plate that I learned to tell the difference simply by looking at it, or touching it  and of course by the smell.

Dog and Buddha is a question hundreds of years old (see Mumonkan by Ummon, Koan One, 12th Century) .  Dogs are like Bodhisattvas, they could have lived in their natural enlightened state as wolves, but they chose to help people through their times of separation from the Buddha-mind, sharing the suffering of people  at whatever cost to themselves.

Could Buddha have done any better?