Life in Chicago

Familiar Places

It's a kind of grey and listless morning. I'm listening to classical violin music and the dishwasher swishes and hums in the background.

I was thinking about my mother this morning. And about how she moved to Atlanta to marry my father, much like how I moved here to Chicago to be with and marry Greg. Thinking about that similarity made me wish I could talk to her all the more.

Over the weekend I was catching up with one of my sisters-in-law who was in town and I was trying to put words to whatever this wanting feeling is inside of me. My words cracked though and the lump in my throat prohibited me from saying very much. It did finally occur to me, as I was speaking, that this is the first place in my life that I've lived where I have absolutely no roots or history or connection.

In all the other places I've lived in my life, I've had other family members  as well as a shared history with that place. Some sort of connection or memory, vital to feeling part of something. When I moved to Atlanta after New York I had two cousins living there, as well as friends. It was also a place I'd been to, a place where my mother lived for a long time, a place with familiar places.

When I moved to Los Angeles my father was already living there, his condominium having belonged to my Aunt Jean -- it was a place that I'd been visiting since I was a child. And after he died and I settled in Venice, by the beach, I had several close friends from high school and college all living in close proximity.

But here, in Chicago, there is nothing of my past. Nothing of my life previous to Greg. There is no one here who has known me for much longer than a year. There are no familiar places for me to go -- nowhere reminiscent of another time in my life, or of family or past.

This might sound insignificant but when I realized it, I also realized that I'd alighted upon the one thing that  has made this move different from the others.

--

Greg and I have a new post up on She Wrote, He Wrote today:
Always a Hit, The Mortified Reading Series Makes Chicago Blush Again

Letting Go

It's Friday morning and I'm not working today. The house is quiet and I can hear a leaf blower down the street. I'm trying to kick coffee so the small amount I had is gone now, the cup washed and in the sink. It's cool outside and the sun is just breaking over the roof next door, the wide swath of yellow light reflecting back at me.

I'm not going to work today. I generally don't work on Fridays, but each week it never ceases to feel like a treat. I spent the evening at home last night by myself while Greg went to a soccer game with his best friend Tarek. I hadn't stayed home alone in a while and it was nice. I went to a yoga class in the early evening and walked home through my quiet neighborhood streets, pools of golden leaves beginning to collect in drifts on the sidewalk. I had soup for dinner and watched television with the cats. Later I put myself to bed, reading for a while before I turned off the light.

I thought back on my last year in Los Angeles, about what it was like to really live alone for the first time in my life. I remembered walking home along the quiet Venice streets at night after dinner with friends, about walking up the stairs to my old little apartment on the canals, the ducks quacking softly in the night air. Those were good days. Hard ones too. The thing I'd been afraid of all along -- aloneness -- something I was finally coming to know and love.

I'm going back to LA in a couple of weeks -- for the first time since I left. I'm nervous and excited. It's a strange feeling to revisit a place you where you once lived for so long. The first time I went back to New York after I'd moved to Los Angeles, I began crying the moment I got in the cab, and continued to do so all the way along the BQE, across the Williamsburg bridge and into the city. Just crying for the enormity of a life lived and fought, teeth gritted and a heart dissolved, something that once was and will never be again.

I've been feeling better the last couple of days, trying to just let go. Always trying to let go.

Update

I have a new blog up on The Huffington Post about going to see Oprah last week:

Going to an Oprah Taping is High on Everyone's List: Why Not Mine?

A Passing Cloud

I've been a little sad for the last week.

I'm not really sure why. Last night I finally tried to put words to whatever it is I've been feeling. I sat on the deck with Greg at dusk, the cicadas ringing in the trees and little drifts of fallen golden leaves all around us on the wood.

Tears dripped down onto my shirt and I stared out through the branches at the river swirling by.

I can't quite put my finger on it. Something is amiss. Would it be wrong to say that I'm not happy? Is it impossible to feel that I still don't have roots here, in my life in Chicago? That I miss California, but no longer feel like that place is home either? Is it possible, in the midst of all the good things in my life, I'm still not satisfied?

In one of the many articles I read following David Foster Wallace's death, I distinctly remember a quoted passage in which he spoke of his depression. He wondered if it was an American thing, this not feeling satisfied even when things are better than they've ever been.

Still, a lingering quiet dullness permeates my days. There are bright moments, flashes of fulfillment, of peace, but overall, a drifting cloud.

I'll try to be patient with myself. To keep walking. To hold still in those bright moments. To recognize the cloud for what it is, to not pretend it isn't there. To remember that life, if nothing else, is always moving forward.

Chicago Public Radio

Yesterday I went down to the Chicago Public Radio studios and recorded an essay for the morning news magazine Eight-Forty-Eight and it was one of the funnest things I've ever done. (That and taking a ride-along with the LAPD are right up there.)

I spent an hour in the studio with one of the producers reading over my essay paragraph by paragraph, taking careful measures to inflect meaning and depth and emphasis into the sentences. I learned a lot about the way I naturally speak, about the way I read words on a paper. I learned how to make something sound like the radio, how to end a sentence down, and how to read something you're really telling a story.

I can't wait for it to air! I'll post a link as soon as it does!

Monday Morning

It's Monday again. I've had a cold all weekend and am feeling a little light-headed and spacey. Toast and water and a quiet morning spent at home is about all I'm up to at the moment.

Although, shortly I'll need to get ready to go down to the Chicago Public Radio studios to record a political essay that I wrote for the morning news magazine's Eight-Forty-Eight program. Despite my subdued demeanor I'm really excited to do this. I can't believe that at some point in the coming weeks I'll be hearing my own voice on the radio.

I've been an NPR junkie since high school and when I moved to Chicago a year ago I began listening to Eight-Forty-Eight regularly. I never really thought much about submitting my writing to the radio but upon completing a recent piece about my father and how his background and values influenced my liberal political stance, I couldn't think of a better place for it than the tinny car speakers in Greg's Honda. And surprisingly, after I submitted it, a producer at Eight-Forty-Eight got back to me within a day to say that she wanted the piece. And so off I go today, to record it. I'll be sure to post a link to the audio clip when it airs.

In other news, the Oprah taping was really fun. It turned out to be a live show with lots of different components. She followed up on some recent shows and then had Ty Pennington from Extreme Home Makeover on to talk about his new book. We had really fantastic seats, up close to the stage, and the audience handlers actually separated Greg's mom from us girls and put her smack in the front row with literally just a few feet of air between her and Oprah. That was definitely the best part of the whole experience for me: getting to see Greg's mom who has sacrificed so much in her life for her kids and others, get to sit front and center and enjoy something that she's always really wanted to do. She was grinning and blushing like a school girl.

Although I don't really watch Oprah's show, it was definitely fun to see her in person. She's such a familiar person, her voice, her hair, her smile, that it was quite surreal to see her close enough to touch. She truly has a lovely and powerful presence. At the end of the show she announced her latest Book Club selection: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, and we were all given books. And since I've been sick this weekend, I spent almost all of yesterday reading it, and I must say that so far, it's a seriously good read.

On Saturday morning I led my first grief and loss support group at work. I've been trying to get this group up and running for a couple of months and for one reason or another it just hasn't worked out. But on Saturday I gathered in the conference room at work with four people who have recently lost someone -- all of them having lost a spouse and some having also lost children or parents.

Those couple of hours on Saturday morning were truly the highlight of my weekend. I felt so privileged to witness and share in these people's experience of their grief and loss. And in turn, I think they found it incredibly powerful to share their stories with others who have been through something similar. We're going to meet again next weekend and I'm already planning how we'll spend those couple of hours together and how I can better work to help them through this time in their lives.

I feel so grateful to be in a place in my life in which I can do this for someone else.

--

Greg and I have a new post up on She Wrote, He Wrote:
It Was Easy to Find the Audacity to Attend "The Audacity of Beer"

 

This Morning

It's 6AM and I'm up and dressed. In half an hour my mother-in-law and two of my sisters-in-law will be arriving at the house so that we can all carpool downtown and go to a taping of the Oprah Winfrey Show.

I've never been to see Oprah and I'm excited but I'm more excited about how thrilled my mother-in-law and one of my sisters-in-law are. I think this might just be the best present I could have ever given them. They are really big fans of the show and have been thrilled for weeks.

Strange to say, but I think this might be my first Boose family outing that doesn't involve Gregory. It's definitely interesting to be assimilating into this big, new family. It's like nothing I've ever done before, if that makes sense. Family is so different than friends and I really just have so little experience being part of one. I'm enjoying it for sure, but sometimes it makes me a little self-conscious and a little nervous.

It's also a little strange to be joining a group that's been together for a long time. They have their rules and customs and social graces -- lots of things that will take me time to get to know and understand. In the meantime, I find myself stumbling now and then, but I suppose it is impossible not to in a process like this.

Anyway, off to see Oprah!

Thoughts on My Mother

I've been thinking a lot about my mother lately.

I've been missing her, which is a strange feeling. It's been a long time since I've missed her. In the few years following her death I missed her so intensely that I literally thought my heart would break. I was living in New York, a place where she had lived for seventeen years. I was 20 years old and just in the beginning fringes of learning how to be a young woman without a mother.

I thought about her all the time. I imagined her walking down the same streets I was. I pictured her in the same smoky bars I inhabited. I fantasized that my cramped little East Village kitchen looked just like hers when she cooked meals for her friends. Sometimes I daydreamed about going out to lunch with her, about what it would be like to sit across from her, to tell her about my life, to ask for advice or comfort. Sometimes I simply imagined what it would be like to see her turn a corner and walk towards me.

After a few years though, all of that mourning and yearning for my mother simply gave way to my life. I began to adjust to not having her there, to making decisions on my own, to seeking advice and guidance and consoling in other places. I began to find myself as a woman without a mother. It wasn't so much of a choice as it was an inevitability. In the beginning of this subtle transformation, I even mourned mourning. I was sad to let go of it, if that makes sense.

It's now been close to twelve years since I've had a mother and I've long since adjusted to not having that person in my life. It's rare that I wonder what she would say about me or the way I live my life and when I do go there, it's almost too hard to imagine. But lately, just lately, I've been really thinking about her and very much wondering what it would be like to have her in my life, to have a mother to share things with, to go to for advice or consoling.

My mother and I are alike in so many ways but we are also very different women. She was married twice before she met my father. Her first marriage was in her early twenties, to a guy she went to art school with. They lived in New York together and had a young and passionate relationship that ended with just as much spark as it did when it begun, five years earlier.

She married again in her early thirties but the marriage lasted less than a year. I hardly know anything about that relationship or  its demise. And then at age 37 she met and married my father. Their marriage lasted for 17 years, until her death. I was their only daughter.

I wept on Sunday afternoon thinking about how much I wish I could talk to her about it all. About love and relationships and marriage and being a wife and the looming horizon of motherhood. I have no doubt that she'd be proud of me and be thrilled about my marriage and life. I just wish we could talk about it all. Two women. Mother and daughter.

Monday at Home

 

It's Monday morning and almost 9AM. I'm still in my pajamas, at my desk, and I'm not going in to the office today.

I worked all weekend, leading a 3 day hospice volunteer training for a dozen people. The experience left me quite drained but also really grateful for the people who drove through record rain falls to spend three days in a conference room with me, learning about hospice, death and dying, and how they can help someone through their last days.

I always end up talking a lot about myself and my first experience with hospice in these trainings. All of us do, really. In each training session I ask various members of our team to come and speak to the volunteers, telling them a bit about themselves and what brought them to hospice. And almost every single one of them -- the nurses, the social worker, our director and our clinical supervisor -- have had a personal experience with hospice.

Yesterday one of our nurses, upon being asked what keeps her dedicated to this work, replied, "I believe that everyone has the right to experience a peaceful death." And I think that's really quite profound. We don't all get a peaceful death, that's for sure. But hospice does its best to provide the most dignified and peaceful passing a person can experience.

I often use my parents as examples -- my mother who never gave up, even when the doctors advised her to go home and seek hospice, and who died after too many experimental treatments in a hospital in Washington, D.C. And my father who chose to go home when there was nothing more that could be done to prolong his life. He had a couple of months in which to tie up the details of his life, in which he had time to sit with the people he loved and say all the things he wished to say.

These trainings are a long weekend of discussing death and how we feel about it. We talk about what we think happens when we die, we talk about purpose in life, we talk about how best to serve someone who is dying, we discuss the emotions and past losses that may come up for us in this work, and often the volunteers become emotional themselves throughout the training.

And after a weekend of sitting at the head of a boardroom table, doing my best to facilitate these conversations, answer everyone's questions, and make sure lunch is arriving on time, I come home drained. Yesterday, at the end of it all, I sat on the couch with Greg in the late afternoon and cried.

But it was a good release and I'm so grateful that there are a dozen people I now know who are willing and prepared to go into nursing homes and sit with our lonely, dying patients, or who are up for running errands for our stressed out families who are too busy caring for their loved one to get out of the house themselves, or who will check in on those same families after our patients die. I'm so grateful that there are people who are willing to give of themselves in this way. And I'm grateful for the strength to help them do it.

--
Greg has a new piece up on The Huffington Post: David Foster Wallace, We Just Met.

Tension

Yesterday, at work, I was sitting at my desk shortly after our weekly interdisciplinary team meeting, and I looked over my shoulder to notice our team social worker organizing some files behind me. Before I could even think about it, I was addressing her.

Hey, Sue. She looked over expectantly.

You following the elections? I saw her eyes narrow for a minute. There was a pause. We sized each other up. My heart clenched, had I made a mistake? I've never heard anyone in our office discuss politics.

Yeaahh, she replied. The word more of a question than a statement.

I gave it a shot. I'm kinda freaked out, I said.

And in an instant I saw her shoulders relax, mine instinctively mimicking hers. And thus commenced a heated and excited conversation about how much we want Obama to win this election and how terrifying we both find Sarah Palin to be.

We sparred back and forth, trying to one up each other on our knowledge of all the reasons it would be a disaster to have Palin end up in the White House. She believes in creationism! She's opposes gay marriage! She's not pro-choice! She opposes stem cell research! She's more conservative than George Bush! She knows nothing about foreign relations!

We couldn't help exclaiming the horrible message electing her and McCain to office would send to the rest of the world. We couldn't help expounding on all of our loved ones and friends whom these conservative values would seek to destroy. We couldn't stop saying how incredible it would be to have Barack Obama as president of this country.

I know I haven't written about it much here, but I'm politics-obsessed these days. Greg too. It's all we talk about. All day long we send emails back and forth with our friends, passing links and news bits around, none of us able to get enough of any of it, all of us giving each other headaches but finding ourselves unable to let it go.

I've never before felt so passionate about these issues or about an election before. It's at once thrilling and sickening. But I think I'm literally getting an ulcer from it all. The tension surrounding these issues and conversations is just electric and I'm simply captivated by the unfolding of these campaigns.