I saw the man first.  He rode his wheelchair in the street the way people do when there aren’t adequate curb cuts in the neighborhood.  His state-of-the-art wheelchair looked like an elliptical machine, and he sat in its midst like Captain Kirk in his captain’s chair.

I put his age at close to 70.  He wore his hair in a crew cut, and that, along with his horn rimmed glasses, evoked another era.

He rolled along the street, and eventually he moved into my full view – at which point I realized he was walking a dog.  The dog he walked, however, was not the dog I would have imagined for this large, rectangular man.  Rather, moving with the perkiest trot imaginable in front of the wheelchair on a nearly taut leash pranced a toffee-colored West Highland Terrier.

If ever a gait could communicate sheer delight in being alive it was this dog’s.  Watching them together, I felt happy.

When I was 15, two-thirds of the way into a miserable sophomore year at West Albany High School in Albany, Oregon, I flew to San Juan Capistrano, California to live with our family friends, the Pitskers, and finish out the school year.  I had never been to southern California before, and I was entranced.  It was warm and sunny, which contrasted greatly to the soggy, cold Willamette Valley winter I’d emerged from.  My first full day there, my friend, Amy, and a friend of hers and I rode horses all day in wide, flat, dry irrigation ditches.  Orange trees grew in their yard, and kids wore flip-flops to school in March.

One of the ways I demonstrated my deep pleasure at being in this tropical paradise was to play the Beach Boys’ double-album set, Endless Summer.  Yes, I played it endlessly.  I’m not kidding.  Every day.  Several times a day.  Something about the boppy beat, the twangy guitars, and the bright harmonies captured southern California for me, and the hope I felt about my life just being there.  I only stopped (or at least toned it down) when I heard one of Amy’s brothers – Paul or maybe Jack – say to their mom, “Why does she keep playing that?”  Polly made some terribly compassionate reply, but I realized I’d been annoying others who might not want to hear “Surfin’ USA” one more time.

Fast forward 37 years to this morning: snow day, no school.  I have already heard “I Get Around” three times and “Help Me, Rhonda” twice.  But I don’t think Paul or Jack would feel vindicated.  I love it.  I love hearing the songs again, I love remembering all the different ways those songs meant something to me when I was a teenager, and more than that, I love that they mean something to my kids right now.  I’m having a fresh new experience, hearing the songs through fresh ears that haven’t been hearing these songs for 40-plus years.  It is one of the great gifts of having children: something old becomes new again.

A client of mine in her late 20’s showed up for her session half a year ago and said she planned to begin a year of buying nothing.  Excluding food and seeds for her garden, she planned to go for an entire year without buying anything.  No clothes, no tools, no appliances, no books, no iTunes.  If her clothes started to wear out, she’d patch and/or repair them.  If she needed a tool, she’d borrow it (from a neighbor or a friend or from the Tool Library).  She’d repair the appliances, use the library, and do without new music on her iPod (actually, I don’t think she even owns an iPod).

I was inspired, and now Garth and I are toying with a similar idea – kind of, Buy Nothing, Lite.  We plan, for six months, to try and buy Nothing New.  We have some exclusions to that goal.  Food, of course, is icky if previously used.  I also want to be able to get my kids new shoes, and if we can’t find a needed used jacket or the like in our kids’ sizes, we’d like to be able to get it new.  Besides that, nothing new is the goal.

Yesterday, I realized that what appeals to me about this idea is the way it has the potential to reset us.  Just like some people try to reset their relationship to food by going on a fast or a “cleanse”, our hope is to do the same with buying stuff.  We have too much stuff already, and for me, at least, I fear there is some creeping immorality that comes from getting myself almost anything I want.  I want to reconnect with the self that delights in the simple.  I remember reading Little House on the Prairie for the first time.  Christmas that year felt tenuous because Mr. Edwards was bringing gifts, and he had to ford a river that had risen past its banks.  Of course, he makes it by the skin of his teeth and offers to Laura, Mary and Carrie a peppermint stick and a shiny penny each.  I was entranced, reading this as a 10-year-old.

Since when do I need a shiny something new in order to be entranced?

Not to mention there is also the not-so-creeping impact on our environment from all the unnecessary stuff that so many of us buy.  (If you haven’t seen The Story of Stuff, here is the link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLBE5QAYXp8.)

As for my client, so far, so good.  She is loving the way her year of buying nothing has stretched her.  It has helped her to see she is more capable than she ever imagined, and she knows she is taking steps to lessen her impact on the planet.  Buying nothing has helped add to her confidence and her sense of integrity.  A lot of people would pay big bucks for results for that.

During the time after Simone’s diagnosis, everything felt heightened – including my gratitude.

Simone was readmitted to the hospital on a Wednesday – the day when she thought her chemotherapy treatment would begin, but which turned out to be the day she learned she was beyond treatment.  I planned once again to spend the nights at the hospital with Lauren and Simone so Lauren could sleep.

For some reason, I thought I’d have trouble making my way up to the hospital alone that first night back.  OHSU is up on The Hill, as we say in Portland – and is a world unto itself.  It’s easy to get lost if you are not familiar with it.

Less than a week before, I’d come to the hospital three days in a row, but now I worried maybe I’d been too discombobulated.  And hadn’t my dad driven me that one time, so had I paid enough attention?  And it was dark this time – almost 11:00 pm – where every time before I’d come when it’d been light.  So I was anxious.

As it turned out, I made my way to the hospital and parking garage for Simone’s building easily.  I got in the elevator.  The doors closed, but then the elevator sat there, even after I pressed the button for the floor I wanted.  I pushed the button to open the doors; I pushed the button to close the doors.  I pressed the floor number again.  Again it sat there.  Again, I pushed the button to open the doors.  I got out, thinking it wasn’t working.  I let the doors close and pressed the Up button, but the doors to the elevator I’d just been in were the only ones that opened.  I got in, did my whole routine again – and finally saw the sign that indicated the elevator didn’t operate from the parking garage after 9:00 pm.  I was going to have to find another way into the hospital building.

I called Garth and asked him to keep me company while I walked around Kohler Pavilion (the tower building where Simone and Lauren were staying) and looked for another way in.  It started to rain.  After a few minutes, I rounded a corner and there was an obvious entrance: 3-stories-high glass windows and automatic glass doors that, combined, stretched for tens of yards providing a view into a foyer and, beyond it, a bank of elevators.  Except the automatic doors wouldn’t automatically open, and there was no one in sight in the foyer to whom I could even pantomime my frustration.  Lucky Garth got to hear about it all.  I kept walking.

Ahead, emerging as if from a secret compartment in the side of the outer wall, two white-haired people exited the building.

I ran to catch them, saying, Excuse me, excuse me.  They turned.  My niece is on Floor 14 and I need to get up there but I can’t get in.  The elevator for the parking garage doesn’t work.  

They said, Y, it’s after 9:00.  Floor 14?  I’m so sorry.

Then the woman – who was petite and 80 years old if she was a day – said, You didn’t see us.  I was confused and asked what she meant.  She repeated, You didn’t see us.  Then she and the man conferred, and I understood they intended to use their pass keys to help me get in.  It was so dark and wet, and the building had started to seem so impenetrable that this kindness struck me the way it would have if someone had offered to smuggle me out of Russia during the pogroms.

We found a loading dock further down the side of the building and the three of us strode up a long cement ramp.  The man took out his key and let me in.  Just head down this corridor, take a left and you’ll see an elevator.  

They said, Take care, and good luck.  The woman said, Dinner here is expensive.  Lunch here is expensive.  But if you’re like me, you don’t mind having breakfast for lunch and dinner.  And breakfast here is cheaper.

If I believed in angels, I would tell you here that I’d been sent a couple of them.  I don’t happen to believe in angels in the strictest sense.  But those people, heading home very late after what was likely a long day – well, they could have just pointed me in the right direction.  The Kohler Pavilion surely had another entrance somewhere that would have admitted me.  They could have said, Go that way, and left me to it.  But they didn’t.  They helped me – an act so simple it turned my anxiety and frustration into thankfulness – which in turn made it possible for me to find the resolve I needed to show up for the unfolding night.

What is it about a crisis – especially a medical crisis – that makes not eating seem like a good idea?

There were some practical reasons why eating was more difficult when Simone was in the hospital. If I wanted more than the snacks I’d brought – bananas and Cliff bars grabbed on the way out of the house, stuffed into my bag with the knitting I thought I might pick up (never did) and the books I thought I might read (didn’t) – it meant a trip to the hospital cafeteria. This involved taking the elevator down to Floor 9, walking along several connected hallways, and then taking another elevator to Floor 3. It also meant being around people I didn’t know, lucky people, who looked as if they had showered recently and who weren’t watching the end of a dear life that had barely begun. It was hard to leave the hospital room and swim through all of that merely for food, which seemed such a trivial pursuit in the face of what Simone was struggling with.

But in addition to food acquisition being inconvenient, I also didn’t eat because – well, I’m not sure. 1) Maybe it was my version of bargaining: If I eat only enough to keep going, maybe Simone will come out of this all right. 2) Maybe survivor’s guilt: How can I eat and enjoy it when she cannot eat or enjoy it? (Joyce Carol Oates wrote about how vulgar it felt to her to take any sort of pleasure in life after her husband passed away suddenly.) 3) Maybe it was simply that the world was turned on its head and this was a ready manifestation of how much life had shifted. No longer was food a potential pleasure but only an easily-overlooked “fuel for the fire.” Whatever the reason, there seemed to be intention behind depriving myself of food.

Soto Zen Buddhists recite a mealtime verse that exhorts one to “eat lest we grow lean and die.” I felt a particular affinity with the position of food implied in this verse. Namely, that food was unimportant when held up next to this tragedy – just as petty grievances and misunderstandings became unimportant – and so eating became something I had to remind myself to do so I would continue to be useful, so I would not become one more thing to worry about.

Experiencing self-inflicted food restriction, I can’t help but think of anorexia nervosa. Those suffering from anorexia often seek to exert some control over their lives in the most basic of ways, by controlling what they eat and don’t eat. I’ve never been in danger of developing this particular disorder, but I now appreciate more deeply why someone might feel driven to act out their helplessness by finding something they can control – like what we choose to put in our bodies.

I feel cliched pointing it out, but when we experience the ultimate helplessness of death, how could we not search – at least for awhile – for something that would yield to our will and help us remember that we do have some power? Perhaps not eating is as simple and as complicated as this, an attempt to feel some small sense of agency; maybe this delusion of personal power is the very thing that helps us continue into the next moment.

I seem interested only in speaking with people I believe can talk about loss in a particular way.  Artist Holly Swan wrote: “When you experience a loss, time seems to stop.  You are left with a hole.  But what if that hole is a sacred space you hold in your heart?”  To me, there is no “what if?”  Of course that hole is a sacred space.

I am interested in talking about that hole and how it is we carry it as we move through life.  One moment, we experience it as an ache; in another, it is an abyss; in another, a weight and a darkness.  Then there are moments when its presence is momentarily outside of our awareness.

Being with someone who is dying is a meditation.  Or maybe better put, it is an invitation to meditate (which Jon Kabat-Zinn defines as “attention in the moment without judgment”).  Simone was in the hospital at two separate times over the course of two-and-a-half weeks: once for six days when she was first diagnosed, and the next for three full days and nights when it was clear that chemo wouldn’t buy her any more time.  That first stint, I was in the hospital room with Simone and Lauren two nights and three days, and the second time I stayed three nights and three days.

I saw my main job as being another maternal presence for Simone’s nights while Lauren slept a couple feet away on the hospital cot.  My hope was that Lauren would be able to ease into sleep knowing someone equally watchful was awake, attending to her gravely ill child while she slept.  There were moments, awake at night, when my mind ran ahead.  Perhaps I’d think to the up-coming meeting with the oncologist, or perhaps I’d anticipate the next moment when Simone would awaken, and I’d worry that she would need something I couldn’t offer.  (After all, what could I offer?  I wasn’t her mom and I wasn’t a miracle-worker.)

Thinking ahead like this, I felt a rising panic every time.  In the future, another glass waited to shatter, to send its sharp, hard pieces through the air, to pierce us on the fragile platform we’d made after the last bit of shattering news. How could I prepare in any way for the next wound?  How could I hope to see which direction it was coming from to protect us from it?

Thinking like this for any length of time would clearly render me useless before long.  At some point, thankfully, I’d remember to tell myself, “Just get through this moment.  How is it right now?  You can’t know about the next one; stay in this one.”

Writing about being with someone who is dying – about being with her, her mother and her grandparents, with her boyfriend, uncles and her cousins – is somewhat fraught.  I need to reassure my reader (that is, I need to reassure you for myself, not necessarily for you) that I know the heroes of this story are Simone and her mom, Lauren.  I do not mean or intend to appropriate that.  I need to say explicitly that while I want to write about what I saw and thought and experienced, I in no way mean to suggest – ever – that the role I played was super-hard.  My job in this story was a cakewalk compared to my sister-in-law, Lauren’s.  All I had to do was support the two of them as they made some very hard decisions.  I didn’t have to make any of those decisions myself, and so I was free of second-guessing them later.

That’s the “I” who is writing this.  She is the “I” who had the luxury of being one removed.

This morning , I walked to work early, so the frost – our second day of it – was on the ground still.  I was reminded of a day 37 years ago at just this time of year when I lived in the Willamette Valley.

That morning was, in fact, the first day of November 1976. I noted this fact to myself before I headed across our rural road with my brother to wait for the bus to take us to the high school.  It had been an awful year so far – for my brother and me, and for my parents especially.  (My sisters seemed to fare this year a little better, though they should correct me if I’m wrong.)  The sky was gun-metal gray and low.  But something in the quality of the cold reminded me of New England, where we’d lived until recently, and I was uplifted.

(Actually, it’s the me sitting here writing this – as opposed to the me back then –  who believes the association with New England is perhaps what lightened my mood that day.  I’d lived in that region almost all of the previous nine years and been mostly happy there.  Autumn days on the cusp of winter had been my favorite.)

On school mornings, my brother and I waited beside our mailbox, and on this morning, strung between the mailbox and its post, a spider had made a web.  It was encrusted with frost.

It’s November 1, I thought.  And now here is this jewel-like creation at my bus stop.  Everything is going to be okay.

I often got through the difficult times of my adolescence and young adulthood finding “signs” that it was okay to hope; that if things were hard now, things would get better soon.  I knew this because a heron flew by, or because I smelled wild grapes after a rainfall, or because of a spiderweb that put me in mind of the miniature flocked evergreen tree in our Christmas decorations.

Now, I don’t have such an easy relationship with hope.  I don’t mean to imply that I am hopeless.  But I know that the presence of natural beauty is simply that; it promises nothing other than itself.  Things in life will be as they will be whether a heron flies by or not.

Yet, beauty promising “nothing other than itself” is actually promising a lot.  I like to think that part of me was simply appreciating the image before me and recognizing what a privilege it was to be able to look upon beauty and to know it when I saw it.  It wasn’t hope that got me through, but rather it was beauty that carried me.

As some of you know, three weeks ago, on October 5, my niece Simone died at the age of 18.  She had been diagnosed less than three weeks before that with cancer.  Cancer took her swiftly – too swiftly for us to grasp, really.  That will perhaps take most of the rest of our lives.

Writing can’t help but be part of my journey about this tragedy – just as my daughter’s journey after losing her sister-cousin involves lots and lots of drawing and painting.  It has felt unclear to me how to proceed with that writing though.  The topic of death and its aftermath is not the usual stuff of this blog, and I don’t care to shift my focus here quite so thoroughly.  I have never wanted a reader – accustomed to my shorter form and (usually) light touch – to feel hijacked by a blog post.  At the same time, it feels wrong somehow to proceed with only those topics I deem consistent with the blog’s previous life without acknowledging somewhere that I stand on new ground.

Simone’s death is now part of everything I might do, so in that regard, it will be present in anything I write for this blog.  Likely you will glimpse her – if only sometimes between the lines.  How could it be otherwise?

The other day, I was texting someone, and of course I took shortcuts in my spelling to make it easier to compose the message.  I found myself typing “tho’t” for “thought” – and it took me back to the numerous letters I received over the course of my adult life from my Grandma Gould.  She was a steady letter writer for whom the act was a chance to say “I’m thinking of you.”

Mostly she wrote me when I had responded to one of her letters, though I did occasionally get letters just because she thought it might be nice for me to get one – say, at my new teaching job on the Oregon coast, or when I moved from Austin to Pasadena.  Her letters were full of words like “tho’t” (I suspect the correct text spelling is, in fact, “thot”), and I am sorry to say that – at least in my early adulthood – these writing shortcuts of hers irritated me.

How’s that for self-centered adolescent-like nerve: “You are taking the time to write me a letter but I intend to quibble silently about how you spell your words”!  I cringe to acknowledge the ways that I was a simply a normal teenager (and post-teenager).  I never aspired to be normal, and in this I was largely successful.  I also knew it was ridiculous to be embarrassed by things the adults in my life did, or wore – but that didn’t stop me from being embarrassed.

So even though my grandma hopefully didn’t know she was in a position to be vindicated, I still feel she somehow is by the fact that now her favorite writing shortcuts are all the rage.  Adding a little humility to my stack doesn’t hurt either.