Life in Chicago

On Marking Time

It's late afternoon on Monday and I'm alone in the house. It's a grey, rainy day. I can hear fat rain drops hitting the air conditioning unit outside and more of it streams down the window panes around me. The house is quiet otherwise.

Yesterday would have been my mother's birthday. I hadn't even thought of it until I received a few emails from family in the morning. Those dates used to be so much more important to me than they are. In the first few years after she died I would always try to mark the occasion by doing something in her honor...cooking, writing her a letter, taking a walk by the beach...but these days I'd rather just go about my days as usual. I'd rather not focus so much energy anymore on what I've lost.

So, instead I spent the morning making a vegetable breakfast strada for Sunday brunch and Greg and I spent a relaxing last day with Amber, all of us lounging around the house, reading books and magazines and listening to the rain. In the late afternoon I made an Indian red lentil soup and the three of us drove up to Little India to get samosas and poori to go with it.

This morning though I was thinking about how my mother would have been 70 years old. I was trying to think about what she'd be doing with herself at 70 if she were still alive. I know that she'd just hate turning 70 but that she would probably throw a huge party all the same.  I imagine that if she were still alive she'd probably be doing a lot of creative things...painting, cooking, taking Italian lessons, traveling. I think she'd be just as vibrant and vivacious and irreverent as always.

I wonder if she could imagine all that there is to my life as I sit here on a rainy Monday afternoon on the cusp of my 30th birthday.

Friday Morning

It's Friday morning in Chicago and the house is quiet. Outside the windows snow is dusted across the rooftops and tree branches. The sky is a mottled grey and dark blue. A flock of seagulls swoops and dips over the river, their piercing call deeming the air that much more frigid.

Greg left for work 15 minutes ago and I'm sitting here in my bare feet, a cup of coffee at hand. My friend Amber from Los Angeles is asleep in the guest room. She arrived last night, marking my first visitor since I've moved here and our first guest in our new home. I'm looking forward to the next few days of running around Chicago, of long conversations with a familiar friend.

But for now, the house is quiet and the street outside is still.

My last post seems to have illicited a few reactions regarding the idea that we are not these bodies. It's something I've truly come to believe over the last couple of years and something I first became aware of when I saw my father die.

Closing my eyes and breathing, emptying myself into the the quiet spaces between inhalations, I sometimes get the lightest sense of how much more there is.

Monday Afternoons

This afternoon I went to see a new patient who was admitted over the weekend. She was in her eighties and dying in a nursing home. That was pretty much all I knew. I had received a voice mail from my supervisor telling me that the patient's family was struggling with the impending loss and was not able to be bedside during the day and could I please go out to see the patient.

So around noon, I drove in Greg's little green Honda to a nondescript nursing home in a nondescript Illinois suburb. Inside I was directed to the third floor and on my way to the patient's room the elevator doors opened onto a view of the nursing station, around which were seated in wheelchairs over a dozen of the home's residents, most of them nodding their heads in slumber or simply staring, open-mouthed, at an undetermined horizon. Muzak tinkled out over the scene from speakers in the ceiling.

I quietly walked past all of them and down a hallway where I found my patient unconscious and unresponsive and alone in her nondescript room. She was dying and her breath rattled with each rise and fall of her lungs.

I took off my coat and put down my purse and I pulled up a chair and I simply sat with her. I looked at her face and I gently placed my hand on her arm and I wondered at the kind of life she had led. I wondered who she loved, who she cared for. I wondered what the best day she ever had was and I wondered what moment in her life she was most proud of. I looked at the wrinkles in her forehead and the curve of her lips and I tried to imagine what her smile was like and what the exact moment was in her life was in which she felt most loved.

After a while I just closed my eyes and breathed in and out. Just being.

We are not these bodies.

I'll say it again. We are not these bodies.

It's Not Spring Yet

I woke up this morning to a winter wonderland outside the windows.

Oh, and today is the first day of Spring.

What Change Sounds Like

Last night after we got home from work, Greg and I sat facing the windows in our living room, feet up on the radiators, listening to Barack Obama's speech on the racial divide in America. Dusk was settling over the neighborhood and I sipped at a glass of red wine in my hand.

His speech was just stunning. I don't know if we've ever had a president say things this country so badly needs to hear and every word out of his mouth simply made Hillary and McCain look that much more like political robots saying the same things that every politician always says.

It wasn't until I was in a grad program for psychology that I was forced to really think about and talk about my feelings concerning race. In a couple of different classes that I was required to take for my degree, the focus was entirely on getting students to honestly get in touch with all of their prejudices and fears and beliefs about other races, cultures and classes.

How could we expect to be psychotherapists if there we were going to have clients with whom we could not get past our own prejudices about?

These classes were incredibly hard and very scary and very powerful. We sat in a circle night after night really talking about our ethnic backgrounds, about the neighborhoods and class systems in which we were raised. We talked about our parent's views on race and ethnicity, we repeated the racial slurs our fathers uttered and we said aloud the misconceptions about the person sitting next to us that we'd always carried.

Those classes, those nights sharing some of my most secret thoughts about the people with whom I inhabit this earth, were some of the most eye-opening, heartbreaking, and truly life-changing moments I've ever had. I wish every American could have a similar experience.

And after having gone through this process of finally beginning to explore my beliefs and long-held ideas, I realized that the reason so many of these prejudices exist is because we don't talk about them enough. There is no dialogue about them. People are afraid to explore how they really feel. No one feels safe. And this can only lead to a more deeply seeded and secretive set of prejudices.

Last night Barack Obama opened the doors for this country to begin having a truly honest conversation. Let's not close them again. 

Welcome to the Neighborhood

Greg and I were talking last night about how we can hardly believe that we've only been here two weeks. We're so in love with our new home and new neighborhood that I think we've both slightly erased the memories of our former habitats.

On Friday night we went for our first run in our neighborhood and just as we got started we were stopped again...by the Governor of Illinois, wanting to introduce himself and chat with us. He lives a few doors down from us and while we knew this we hadn't passed his house before.

But on Friday, just as we were running past his place, he was crossing the sidewalk to go inside and he stopped us to say hi and tell us about great running routes nearby. He was very nice and friendly and kept insisting that we knock on his door sometime so that he can tell us more about the neighborhood. I invited him to the housewarming party, natch.

The whole incident was kind of hilarious and Greg and I couldn't stop laughing and shaking our heads as we ran around the rest of our neighborhood. It was a beautiful evening and everyone was out. We ran through two nearby parks, kids out playing baseball and riding bikes, moms pushing strollers and the sun setting into the skyline of trees with the branches just beginning to show buds. Life seemed a little perfect and neither of us could think of anything better than turning back onto our street at the end of the run, our cheeks flushed and our hearts thudding along merrily.

On Saturday we had our housewarming party. Greg spent the day cleaning the house and I spent most of it in the kitchen, up to my elbows in hors' doerves (my favorite thing to do in the world). And it was a fantastic party. Over thirty of our friends came and all of them are just such interesting and wonderful people. I'm so astounded by and so grateful for all the amazing people I've met in Chicago in the last six months and it was really nice to share our new home with them all.

We spent most of yesterday recovering from the party and appreciating a quiet Sunday night at home. I made a homemade pizza and we watched episodes of 6 Feet Under on DVD.

And now it's Monday afternoon. The sky is grey and overcast and snow is just beginning to fall. Spring, it seems is not quite here yet. I did a lot of annoying things today that I'd been putting off. Finishing up articles and following up on my CA car registration which seems to still be in effect. And now all the things I promised myself I would take care of are done and I can look forward to the rest of the evening.

One thing I'd been meaning to do for a while, which I finally did this afternoon, was to call the Illinois Association of Counselors and get my degree and licensure stuff figured out. I'll be filling out some forms in the next week and taking an exam soon to become an LPC (licensed professional counselor) and then in just about a year and a half I'll be eligible to take the LCPC exam. Once I pass that I can open my own practice which is what I really want to do.

So suddenly I have this new vision of my next couple of years. I'm planning to stay at my current job for at least two years and then I'll phase into my own private practice. And I think that sounds like a perfect plan. I can't wait to have my own practice but think that just under two years is the perfect amount of time at my job to get a lot of experience and to get to know Chicago's mental health culture.

Everything is finally falling into place around here.

Of Spring and Impermanence

It's really beginning to feel like Spring. I know that the weather is due for a turn next week and that more snow is possible but right now it's cool and balmy out. Squirrels are scampering in the street and birds are twittering in the trees.

A year ago today I was on a plane to Miami with my friend Lydia who was getting married. I spent a full week in Florida, most of it in Key West where I stayed in a B&B with my friend Timbre. We'd each rented scooters for the week and at night when I got tired of the wedding parties and Key West drinking culture, I'd hop on my scooter by myself and zoom along the darkened stretch of road that hugged the curve of the ocean. I felt freer than I ever had in my entire life.

A year ago I was in a pretty amazing place in my life. I was living alone by the beach and I was about to enter into the final quarter of my grad school program. I was working in two different clinics and on the cusp of quitting my job to write my book.

At night I tucked myself into bed and clicked off my little bedside lamp and I knew that I was in a unique time in my life. I could sense the potency and the impermanence of it all. I couldn't have guessed that a year later I'd be living in a beautiful home by the river in Chicago, that I'd be in love, and that I'd be working as  a grief counselor for hospice, spending my days holding the hands of the dying.

I had dinner with a girlfriend last night who is med school to be a nurse practitioner and we had a long conversation about how we go about assimilating these experiences and this knowledge of illness and disease and death into our beliefs about the world and ourselves.  She spent all of Monday administering chemotherapy to cancer patients and I'd spent the week meeting dying and bedridden patients in their homes. The juxtaposition of the two of us last night drinking sangria at a trendy tapas bar was stark but also a vital part of accepting the impermanence of it all.

I rode the train home last night by myself, tipsy and starry-eyed by my life, by this time we are allotted to live and love and give.  It's the falling in love that makes me want to stay here as long as possible.

A year ago, alone on a scooter in a pale blue linen dress and jean jacket, winding along the darkened curve of an ocean drive, impermanence was something easier to accept.

Quiet Afternoons

I went to see my favorite patient this afternoon. I was in a hurry on my way there, stopping at Trader Joe's for a moment to pick up a last ingredient needed for a dinner I'm cooking for friends tonight. I grabbed a bouquet of bright, yellow tulips for my patient, got lost on my way to his house, even though I've been there a dozen times, and parked while checking email on my phone.

All of this quite thoughtless behavior snapped into focus when I walked in the door to find my favorite patient in a rapid state of decline. It had been over a week since I'd seen him last, and although I know that he's dying -- he is after all a hospice patient -- finding him in this state didn't stop tears from brimming in my eyes, the tulips in my hand slowly lowering to my side.

I've been visiting this patient every week since January and he's just lovely. A retired, 95 year old reverend, we all just call him the Reverend. He's wise and funny and has wonderful stories and each week when I visit I pull up a chair to his and we sit in the window watching the snow fall and sipping coffee.

Today he dozed in and out of consciousness, his lids falling shut only moments after asking, "How is my sweet Claire today?" His hired caregiver had stepped out while I was there and the Reverend and I sat alone together in the quiet afternoon sunlight. The classical station played on low in the corner and the Reverend's hand was warm in mine.

At one point he sputtered, opened his eyes, and said, "You're the girl with dead parents." I nodded, tears spilling over my cheeks. It's something I'm long used to -- not having parents -- and something I can usually talk about freely and with ease -- but the look on his face and the squeeze of his hand suddenly made me feel like a little girl. "I'm just so sorry that happened," he said. And I knew he was. But before I could clear the lump in my throat to speak he had fallen asleep again.

And so I sat, hunched over in my chair so that I could reach my hand out to hold his, and I watched him sleep. Tears dripped down onto my skirt and a swatch of sun fell across my lap.

I know we can't go about living every day like it's our last -- the world just wouldn't work that way -- but all the same I'm so grateful for moments like this when all that matters is my hand warm in someone else's.

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

I had strange dreams last night. Of cleaning out nests of spiders from the chandeliers of my last Chicago apartment. Of elephants stampeding down Ashland as I tried to drive home. Of coming face to face with a giant, angry gorilla, and of closing my eyes and remembering to breathe, breathe.

Spring is upon the city. In the subtlest of ways. Yesterday walking home from the train there were kids playing in the park, squirrels shedding their winter weight as they scampered up and down the branches of a tree. The very beginnings of buds beginning to show along those same branches. And a warm light that floods through the living room in the late afternoon.

Sunday at Noon

It's Sunday, just past noon. Snow is drifting down in slow, fat flakes outside the window. Everyone here seems so sick of winter. There's talk of just not wearing winter coats anymore and at a dinner party last night all of us girls had forsaken our winter shoes for cuter ones, 22 degrees be damned.

Greg is sitting at the dining room table with his laptop, catching up on current events online and drinking coffee. We just finished breakfast and I can't believe it's already noon. The Spring Forward time change always feels like skipping ahead two hours rather than just one.

Life has suddenly gotten very busy. This will most likely be our last quiet weekend for a while. Next weekend we're hosting a big housewarming party and then after that my friend Amber comes to visit from LA -- she'll be my first friend to visit since I moved here and I'm just beside myself at the thought of getting to go to some cozy wine bar with her and catch up as only familiar girlfriends can do.

The weekend after she's here we're out of town for a few days (on our first trip together!) and then the weekend after that my aunt Pam and uncle David are coming to visit. Pam is my mom's younger sister and she and David are really the closest thing I have to parents. They live in a big wonderful house on Cape Cod and have four children and four grandchildren of their own but they've always been incredibly generous when it comes to sharing love and resources with me.

I was resistant to their attempts to stand in as parental figures for much of my twenties. I couldn't get past the idea that they weren't my parents. Finally, in the last couple of years, I found myself able to feel grateful for their presence in my life.

And now I couldn't be more thrilled that they're coming to visit soon. I know I've written about this a bit lately, but I've really missed my mom more in the last six months than I have in years. I feel that this time in my life, more than any, it would be so great to have a mom. To have a strong female role model, to have someone to talk to about this relationship I'm in, about the home I'm making, about the career path I'm following, about the woman I'm becoming. Gosh, just to be able to go over my housewarming party menu with her sounds like a dream.

But all the same, I'm grateful for the woman I've become on my own, for the all the times I've had to figure things out on my own, without the help of my parents. I think it's only made me that much stronger and that much more authentic.

Greg in the window right now, watching the snow: