These Days by Stephanie

For the last year or so, I kept telling myself that I should sit down and write a eulogy for my mother. I never did. It wasn’t that I didn’t have “time” or had nothing to say, it was that a eulogy wasn’t a speech or a study or some crafting of words. It wasn’t something I wanted to edit and hone and tweak as I do with “copy” that I write every week for various forums. And, I suppose, it was that I simply didn’t want to, although I did want to make certain that when the time came, I wasn’t overwhelmed to the point where I would regret not saying all the things I wanted to say.

As it turned out, when the time came on Friday morning, April 17^th, 2009 at 11:20 a.m. and the call from my husband came, “She’s gone, sweetheart” (he arrived at her apartment as the paramedics tried to resuscitate her after a cardiac arrest), I was, indeed, overwhelmed. The notion that her heart stopped wasn’t even fathomable. And then, with that resilience my mother ingrained in me, the practical matters of planning a funeral fell on my shoulders since my sister and brother were both out of town. I had to choose what she would wear (a beautiful coral suit that had hung in her closet for the last four years as she was relegated to velour slacks with elasticized waist bands), choose her casket and flowers (she loved violets, but alas, I had to settle for arrangements in purple and white ), plan the service (her first cousin and dear friend Judy is ordained, presided, and amazingly held back tears until the end), contact friends and family, and purchase her grave (there were two “available” next to her parents). And so, I went step by step, and made notes of memories of her during those sleepless nights before the funeral that still haven’t ended. When it came time to deliver my eulogy, I had nothing written…just notes…and so I stood in the chapel and simply spoke. Here, I have taken the notes, remembering (I think) how I put them into cogent sentences.

I post this here to memorialize my mother. It is not to demonstrate that I am a writer. This is simply for my mother. And believe me, as I look back, there was plenty more to say, but there wasn’t enough time to say it all, and each day I remember more and more. Here, however, is the truth of what I said that day of her funeral on Monday, April 20^th 2009 when suddenly the spring weather became wintry and the rain poured down. At the grave side, about twenty of us threw white roses upon her casket before getting back into our cars.

The sun shines today and it is early morning on Tuesday and already 70 degrees as I write this. Although I told people that I would not “crash” as they warned and predicted, now after 10 days of stoicism and tending to practical matters, I was wrong. Yes, she was sick for all too long, and yes, she lived a “good life,” but there is never a time to lose one’s mother. And with that resilience and stoicism she ingrained in me, I try not to cry although my eyes keep spilling over.

It is not the image of her in the casket that I see. It is an almost silly image: her bouffant hair-do that added an extra few inches to her 5′2″ frame when we only occasionally met on weekends at Nordstrom: I would come down the escalator with an overview of the bustling floor of cosmetic counters, and I could pick her out of the crowd right away because of that hair! And I keep picturing her below the earth instead of buying a new shade of lipstick at Lancome, and it’s maddening. I remember the day she bought that coral suit…it never occurred to me that she would be buried in it.

To those of you who were there, and those of you who called and wrote and left messages and sent emails to which I have yet to respond, I thank you all for your comfort. I have decided from this moment on to simply write These Days without the juxtaposed Those Days: this done in the spirit of moving on. Our memories don’t have to be on paper to sustain us. Our memories keep those who are gone and days past still very much alive in our hearts.

I want to thank you all for being here to celebrate my mother’s life.

For the last four plus years, my mother really didn’t have much of a voice. Her words were halting and then ultimately absent. She was confined to a wheelchair. For a woman who loved to walk even in her high heels and who certainly had much to say, this was the ultimate injustice. For a woman who depending upon with whom she was interacting,  liked to either be called Anna or Mrs. Gertler, except by me who always called her Mommy.

I wish she could tell you her life in her own voice. All I can tell you is my perspective on her life. And I will not tell you what I think she wants you to hear or know because I am not certain. So, you’ll have to take my word for something that was hers and as I see her through my eyes.

When I was a little girl, I sang at the piano with my mother as she played tunes from My Fair Lady and South Pacific and Cole Porter. Once, she built me a Barbie house with all the hinges on the outside, but it was perfect anyway. Once when my husband and I stayed at the house in Connecticut before we were married, a nosy neighbor who saw that we shared a room asked my mother how she could allow that under her roof. My mother turned to her and asked, ” What’s wrong with my roof?”

That was my mother. She had a way of disarming people with an elegance and humor that carried greater impact than an invective or angry defense. She would get this imperious look on her face and her voice would raise an octave, and although tiny, she could pack a wallop.

I could never imagine life without my mother. I can’t believe this day is here. It hasn’t quite hit me yet.

My mother always said that it would be a “frosty Friday” before she would do something she didn’t want to do —  that was her expression. Well, Friday, April 17 at around 11:20 a.m. when she died, it was hardly a frosty Friday. It was a perfect Friday – the first true Springlike day this year. My husband, who always made her face light up when he walked in the door, said that after all his years of watching people – watching strangers — die, there is something about dying when the sun is shining and the air is balmy that is a good thing if you have to go.

And so my mother died as gracefully and beautifully as she lived with just a touch of drama which was also how she lived and who she was. She didn’t linger, she went peacefully, and yet there were the ambulance and the paramedics and the detectives who had to come and make sure that her dying at home was acceptable. To that, and you will all forgive me as I echo my mother, she would have said. “Oh, for goodness sake. This is all such bullshit” and then she would have smiled that magnificent smile that made the “bad” language melt into the realm of elegance. In much the same way that my mother flipped cab drivers the “bird” as she tooled around Manhattan in her dinged-up Volvo and before that her wood-paneled station wagon, daring them to cross her path. She was quite the driver – a little speedy. We called her Anna Andretti. She loved to tell the story of her wedding day, how she was rushing about Montreal and the cop pulled her over. In a French Canadian accent he asked, “Where’s the fire?” and in her coquettish and inimitable way she said, “In your big brown eyes, officer” – and got herself out of the ticket.

As much as she loved Chopin and opera (not Wagner, though), and dressing for the evening in her trademark heels and narrow skirts, and loved a fine restaurant and haute cuisine, she loved a good hot dog from Papaya King on 86^th Street and a slice of pizza from Mimi’s on 84^th Street, and tricked Mark into ordering beer when we had Chinese food on Sunday nights in Armonk because she secretly loved Heineken over champagne.

She could carry on with diplomats and then she could be “positively 4^th street” even though she didn’t know the likes of Dylan. She was many women in one, comfortable in any kind of crowd…and threatened only by those who were disingenuous (”phonies” she called them) or those with an agenda that was transparent to her.

And she wasn’t easy. But then again – are any of us easy? Our relationship was both joined at the hip and often trying to escape one another’s grasp. We were best friends in so many ways, and mother and daughter, and just undefined. All I know is that when she left me four years ago, I was pretty angry at the Universe and she was, too, as she often shook her head as she looked at me from her wheelchair.

She was, I think, absolutely beautiful, and yet she never thought she was. She was self-conscious. That’s one little thing I know about her, although I wish I’d asked her more and knew why. Give her a compliment and she’d poo- poo you and make a funny face.

Her favorite book was The Stone Diaries, and her favorite poet was Byron. She once had a crush on Max Baer the prizefighter. She didn’t do “girlie” stuff with me like go clothes shopping and buy make-up. She cautioned me about trusting too much –  especially when it came to men! She was up on current events and especially when my kids were little, she gave me my morning synopsis of the news. She was studying Italian just before she got sick, adding to her French and Russian. Russian was her first language. She didn’t speak English until she was 14. She sang silly songs to me when I was little like “Sally After the Ball” and “Around The Corner and Under a Tree, A Sergeant Major Made Love to Me.” She loved to swim, but didn’t want to get her hair wet as she got older. She looked like a swan.

She painted, but wasn’t a painter. She wrote, but she wasn’t a writer. She played piano, but she wasn’t a pianist. And she wanted to BE something — always feeling that she had no time, that her devotion to her husband was often consuming as she was caught in between the generations of women who tightened their corsets and burned their bras. But she gave me the greatest gift of all: Not to put anything on hold,  to chase my dreams. She never tried to stop me. “Be like me,” she cried to me. “Don’t be like me.” And so I like to think I am and I am not. I like to think I have taken away everything about her that she wanted me to have and accomplished things that she wished she could have done. Once, I gave her a button that said, “I Coulda Been a Contessa,” and it made her laugh. Oh, and we did laugh. To the point when she would have an asthma attack and then I’d feel guilty.

My mother was what people called restrained…and as I look back, I think I wish I knew then what I know now so she could have just let go with that bravado that she had.

When she first became ill, and I went to visit her at the hospital, she said, “You need your roots done” –  and this from a woman who was beginning to speak with difficulty,  but she managed to get that out. Those were probably the sweetest words I ever heard. That couched criticism that makes me smile now.

I have this feeling she is lying there and staring at my outfit. And she wants to say “What is THAT you’re wearing?” And in turn, I would like to say, “What are you DOING in there?”

And now, and maybe only my brother and sister will truly get the meaning of this part, I want to say “Bye, Joe. I love you.”

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There was a significant evening 22 years ago when my oldest, David, was barely four, Ellie was two and a half, and Ben was a newborn: It was 5 p.m. - that “witching hour, ” and they all melted down at once: hungry, tired, wet, spent  and wanting Mommy. I laid them on our bed like little baked potatoes.

“What do you want?” I begged the older two.

“Ice cream,” they whimpered.

And so began The Backwards Dinner: Dessert first while I cooked with the newborn in the Snugli. There were many backwards dinners after that whendessert first soothed them and bought me time.

Life was simpler then. The “newborn” graduates from college in May, and has saved enough to get his own apartment. He broke the news nearly apologetically, and I’m not sure whether he was surprised, pleased, or felt rejected when I said that’s exactly what he should do at 22. And yet I think about aspects of living on his own without the advantage of the college cafeteria and campus safety’s patrol.

Clearly, I can no longer smooth anyone’s path (or my own) with ice cream.

I take myself back to another lifetime when I lived in Miami: Chalk’s seaplanes flying tourists over Biscayne Bay or back from The Bahamas, landing with a bump and then a gentle splash on the soft blue water as they glide to a stop. Back then, I feared flying, yet the Chalk Airline pilot had such control of the plane and the water was not the typical landing strip so it calmed my fears. I focus on that.

We’re called the “sandwich generation.” I question exactly what we are between the bread. For sure, it’s nothing as simple as American cheese, and hardly gourmet or exotic. It’s something we grab from the fridge and wolf down just to quiet our appetites while we muddle through.

The weekly bundle of my parents’ mail arrived yesterday from the care giver. Not just bills, but notices from shops and magazines addressed to my mother: “Hi, Anna! Where you’ve been? We miss you!” I tear them into pieces and toss them in the trash. Just recently, I placed a photo of the two of us on my desk next to a tiny bottle of Arpege (her scent) which I found in a drawer after our last move. Sometimes I inhale the scent of my mother as I knew her. Her condition makes me question justice, and envy people who have more faith than I do in the strange ways of the Universe and a Greater Power. I recall my mother’s words when her father was in a similar state: “If this ever happens to me, promise that you’ll shoot me.” She was always one for hyperbole. My father was a warrior  battling not only those he wrongly perceived as the enemy, but championing those he felt needed a savior. And then there were the windmills he fought so ferociously that Don Quixote pales in comparison. At nearly 90, he remains a warrior, yet the world passes him by at the speed of light with baffling “dot coms.” He clings to his 1950 Encyclopedia Britannica and, oddly, asks for my assistance with everything.

Each day spent caring for my parents is a day of reckoning. I am not unique. I know all too many people in this position. They echo my thoughts as they wearily whisper, “It’s not that I want…” without finishing sentences. No, it’s not that we want them gone. It’s that we don’t want them to be this way, that we wish we didn’t have to deal with this. And in our middle age, as we feel time fleeting, they all but consume us.

Are we running out of patience or running on empty? Perhaps both, and then some given that this is uncharted territory. All the jargon is becoming trite: “reversal of roles,” “baby boomer care givers,” “sandwich generation.” Do we know what we’re doing? Uncertainty prevails. First-time motherhood was different: A natural course where instinct kicked in.

One of my dearest friends has a child with autism. High-functioning, she says all too wryly. A few years ago after my marriage derailed and then got back on track, she stopped speaking to me. My difficulties coincided with her child’s coming into middle school, and his “management” became more challenging. He was “mainstreamed,” yet not accepted by the typical children, less accepted by their parents who viewed him as either contagious or dangerous, and confounded too many ill-equipped teachers. My friend crumbled one day when his school called for the umpteenth time needing her intervention.

He needs to fly on his own, I said. You won’t always be there to catch him. You need a life as well.

She was furious with me.

Back then, I didn’t understand that she was his parachute.

We’re friends again. Now I understand her rage in response to my oversimplification. My life was only derailed. Her life was altered, forever changed, on the day her son was diagnosed. She worries what will happen to him when she is gone. Her infinite patience and selflessness awes me. I can’t fathom her courage as she lives with her fears. This epiphany comes as I care for my parents, a task that requires a deliberate repression of anger and patience as the phone rings incessantly with the same questions and stories repeated much like little children asking “why”  but I don’t have that maternal power to answer “Because.”

Unlike my friend, the parachute who keeps her son aloft, I am the life preserver keeping my parents afloat.

But floating and flying are quite different as I recall Chalk’s coming in for a landing at the end of the tour.

Note: Kevin is now 15. His speech is not always clear in that the words come hesitantly as he can’t get them out quite fast enough and has so much to say. He goes to a special camp in the summer, and has made many friends there. The public school system where he is “mainstreamed” remains a thorn in both Elaine’s side and his. Kevin is handsome, about six feet tall, loves music and movies, is curious about all the latest trends, and loves to socialize. He boasted to me the other day that he has two girlfriends at camp. Elaine, until recently, worked for Autism Speaks until “cuts” eliminated her position. But with Kevin, autism speaks indeed  and it’s all because of Elaine’s devotion and tenacity.

Elaine and I met when we were in our early 20’s when life was in a perpetual state of romantic and professional turmoil, and we basked in the drama and chaos. We worked together editing medical journals enduring long hours of overtime, and then dished over glasses of Jack Daniels and Chardonnay.

She was tall and skinny with that hip urban black-on-black urban chic, knew everything about Harleys and rock ‘n roll and wore the greatest heels. I was dating the quintessential “bad boy.” We had plenty to talk about. As serious as we were as editors, we were fairly wild ones otherwise.

When my husband and I married (I did not marry the bad boy), we had three babies within five years, and moved to the suburbs when the second was only six months old. Elaine spent many weekends at our house after her boyfriend of seven years ended their relationship. At the time, she felt there was no light at the end of the tunnel, but at 31, she married and had two boys one after the other. Her first baby came within an hour of her arrival at the hospital, and the second one even faster. After the second child’s birth, she sat in her hospital bed, and we held hands. It had been a long haul, we agreed, and we both had what we wanted.

Her first baby was a handful: colicky and kept her awake all night. Once he started speaking (at an early age), he never stopped. The second baby, Kevin, was the complete opposite: quiet and easy to please. At over a year, he was still not walking, though he took some steps by the time he was 2. As for talking, there wasn’t even a peep. We joked that once he spoke, his first words would be “Shut up, Jimmy” to his older brother.

The joke weakened as Kevin’s peers began to say “mama” and he sat in his stroller, looking blankly at those around him. Elaine took him for hearing tests and to the pediatrician who assured her that his hearing was fine, and that he was just “one of those kids” whose development was moderately delayed. But the circles under my friend’s eyes grew darker, and suddenly my friend, once the life of the party with the sharpest wit, was morbidly frightened. She took Kevin to a neurologist at Columbia who gave the diagnosis she feared after a mere 20 minutes: Autism.

As medical editors, we knew of the devastation, but only pedantically. We’d read it labeled as Syndrome…Condition..Disorder. What we knew was how little even the academicians knew.

There were calls over the next several months from Elaine where she wept so hard the words were unintelligible.

“What happened?” I’d ask, alarmed, thinking something had happened to her husband, her parents, one of the kids. But it was that nothing happened. No speech, no reactions, nothing coming from Kevin.

She chased state agencies to garner support  both financial and emotional. She took Kevin from specialist to specialist, therapist to therapist, to a “special” school when once, with her antennae raised, she spied on the teacher whom she instinctively didn’t trust, and saw Kevin relegated to a corner of the classroom where he sat alone in silence. She pulled him out that day. She read every book and attended every lecture on autism, and called experts from the local to state to federal levels.

To her frustration and dismay, Kevin was no more than a “classification.”

“Is there even such a thing as autism?” she asked. “What is ’stereotypical autism?’ They have him classified as PDD –  Pervasive Development Disorder. It’s a vague term that gets him nowhere. As autistic, he gets services. And then some people say he’s NOS – not otherwise specified, so he gets nothing.”

At four now, he said his first sentence, “I want the cookie.” We happened to be on the phone for this utterance, and she cried. The words have begun to come, and with the words, there is emotion – some hugs and kisses and only for her. At four, his affect is that of a two-year-old, and because he is big for his age anyway, and surely bigger than a toddler, the other mothers stare at him and pull their children away as he plays in the sandbox.

“Children like him have windows,” says Elaine, who has become a veritable expert now as well, certainly when it comes to Kevin. “Sometimes they’re open, and sometimes they’re closed. Everyone hedges on his diagnosis. I look for the screen instead of the window. I get to him through the screen.”

It is the depth of her son’s perception that my friend longs to know. The jury is still out, and she hopes for a verdict each day. It is the vast verbal countryside that lies beyond as he founders for words, a depth of understanding, a quest for things defined with speech.

“I see the young people bagging groceries at ShopRite,” she says. “I want more for him. And then I think, well, maybe those people are happy and I should be happy if he’s happy. But I want him to know the world…not just his own world.”

Next year he will once again be reclassified so he can be mainstreamed and start kindergarten at the public school There are many people who oppose this “inclusion.” People who feel a child like Kevin will hold back their own children. People who fear what they don’t know or understand.

As we were talking about kindergarten and the ShopRite, just before dinnertime, Kevin walked into the room.

“Cookie and milk now,” he said.

“No, not now,” said my friend, treating him as she does her “typical” child.

“Why not?” he asked.

Two words put together, not just a plaintive “why” but a “why not.” A simple phrase demanding an explanation from a child who until just days before seemingly had no concept of “why.”

I looked at my old friend who once spent her days editing manuscripts from lofty academicians, kicking up her heels at night, jumping on the back of a Harley…who now gets her greatest joy from two simple words that once (perhaps she’s forgotten) took her on every wild ride with abandon as she thought to herself “Why Not?”

I eat corn on the cob with a fork, a remnant from my childhood where chomping down on corn from the cob was forbidden. I’m not sure: otherwise “gauche” or did the chomping frazzle my father’s nerves? There were other edicts of etiquette: no bare feet, and no jars, cans or bottles on the dinner table. Condiments were served in small bowls with small spoons. Paper napkins were used only in lunch boxes, and we poured ice water into glasses from a pitcher in the table’s center. Pun intended: It was no picnic. A friend who grew up in a working class town said the same rules prevailed in his childhood home, so perhaps this etiquette was endemic to an era and not to Manhattan’s “elite.” Although my friend ate corn directly from the cob, he recalls the church clothes his parents wore: his father’s sober suit and tie, his mother’s ensemble accented with short white gloves, and her demure pursed lips. Sunday personas antithetical to those exhibited during the week when sanctity didn’t prevail at home. My childhood didn’t surprise him.

This said, on Sunday evening when my husband and I dropped in on my parents during the dinner hour, mild shock rippled through my body when I saw their take-out meal spread unceremoniously in portable foil containers on the dining table. My father wore a robe and slippers, and my mother wore her velour “running” suit as she sat in her wheelchair being fed by the care giver. Although I’ve become more accustomed to my parents more casual demeanor, where was the father who wore gray flannel trousers and French cuff shirts fastened with golden links even at breakfast? The woman in sheer black stockings and heels? But it was the foil containers that ignited the depths of my amygdala, firing neurons that made me want to cry out. Where were the pretensions of my youth? Where were Emily Post’s rules of etiquette which, if ignored or defied, led to my “excusal” from the table? It was all I could do not to rummage through the now unfamiliar cabinets in search of a china bowl and serving spoons. Was my mother looking at me as I perceived? Pleading as she gripped my hand so that my fingers whitened? She was the one who once created the elegance and the sensibility. Was she embarrassed some place in her post-stroke mind?

This is my brain on overtime.

My sister, Bobbi, lived in Paris for 22 years until three years ago when she moved back to New York after meeting her American husband Edward. For two decades, we saw each other infrequently, and had a relationship that swung the emotional pendulum wildly, not balancing. It is only in the last few years that we have re-connected not merely as sisters, but as women and the best of friends. It’s new terrain for us, and oddly normal if normal exists altogether. Just as strangely, we’ve discovered that our habits, styles, and sensibilities remain uncannily alike despite lives spent at a significant distance.

Last summer, Mark and I spent weekends at Bobbi and Edward’s farm in upstate New York. Bobbi and I were a study in nature versus nurture with more than a hint of Pavlov in the mix. She and I set the dinner table, silently in tandem –  taking mustard, ketchup, sauces and placing them in small white bowls…setting the outdoor table with ceramic dishes and cloth napkins. Edward grilled hot dogs and burgers and we four sat outside under the stars with our dogs. When one of our husbands placed a bottle of barbecue sauce directly on the table, we nearly had a forehead collision as we jumped across the table to grab the aberrant bottle, gasping, “I’ll get a bowl!”

It was a telling moment.

On Monday afternoon at 4 o’clock, Bobbi and I met at neighborhood restaurant. We were the only ones there except for two women lingering over a business lunch. We sat at the bar. Our meeting had a purpose: our endless discussions of pragmatic issues regarding our parents care. As we drank our glasses of wine, I told her about Sunday night. She grasped my arm as I mentioned the “tins.”

“Oh, no,” she said, sotto voce as one does upon hearing of tragedy.

Something so innocent and benign as the containers placed on that dinner table is a powerful metaphor for us. It is all too significant of change that didn’t come deliberately; sensibilities from an era now forgotten. Unimportant in the scheme of things, yet poignant for us.

Sunday’s visit was a test in moving on, a test of my own will, letting old habits die hard as I left the table “as is,” repressing the involuntary responses ingrained more deeply in me than I knew.

I now have a new affect: When my husband and I order in Chinese food, I no longer transfer the food from the plastic containers to bowls, and set the dining table. We eat at the coffee table in the living room, covered with containers, and except for an aversion to paper napkins and paper plates that I still can’t get past, we dive into lo mein and moo shu pork. Usually we have left overs, but none are from my childhood.

When we first moved to our community 19 years ago, I was a dyed in the wool city girl. In retrospect, with that inimitable 20/20 vision, we moved prematurely. The third child wasn’t a gleam in our eyes, the middle one was only six months old and the oldest was two. We went from a high rise on a bustling city street to a red ranch house on a cul-de-sac where every store and sign of life was a two-mile drive. We moved in the spring, so at least the roads were passable since driving was my only diversion: with the kids in car seats, I explored a not-so-brave new world. I did try that first autumn: I planted 100 tulip bulbs around the yard  upside down. Without a doubt, I would never be a country girl…

Four years later, almost to the day, we moved to our present home, a move that was nearly whimsical and something that, to this day, I swear was executed by forces beyond our control. The picture of this “old house for sale” was on the back page of the local paper. It stood on the road we often traveled into town but, strangely, we never recalled seeing the house. We packed the kids into the station wagon and met the Realtor. The ground was covered with snow and the trees were laden with ice and, there, set back from the familiar road, was our aging white Victorian, blending into the ivory landscape. I walked up the porch and if a house could talk, it beckoned me. There was nothing practical about the house at all. It’s the kind of house that people visit and wouldn’t want to live in. They call it “charming” and say “Oh, my!” a lot as they walk the winding corridors, gripping the walls as though they’re seasick. The heating is single zone (we actually saw a boiler similar to ours in the Smithsonian) so we freeze downstairs in the winter and boil upstairs, but there are three fireplaces and, pioneer woman that I’ve become, find the hearth is the most efficient heat anyway. The floors are old and sloped so if you drop a marble in the living room, it will roll into the kitchen in about two seconds flat. Nothing is plumb or flush and the doorways are narrow. The moving company who brought us here 15 years ago made me promise that if we ever moved out, I would call someone else! Come to think of it, the man who delivered the washer and dryer said the same thing. The house was built in 1734. I searched the archives at County when we first moved in and discovered the house had been sold for the first time in the 1800s on my oldest son’s birthday. The second sale was on my daughter’s birthday. The next, in the year that my father was born. One could argue that, statistically, there were bound to be coincidences since the house was an antique but for me, it was further proof that this was home. I remember thinking that when the kids were older they could sit on the porch with friends on hot summer nights. The little apartment over the garage could be a place for the kids to “hang out” in winter. My visions came true.

The urban mind set I grew up with changed slowly over the years, imperceptibly at first. I learned how to plant bulbs, painted, plastered, scraped old wood floors, and built shelves. The kids and I planted a vegetable garden each summer. My youngest wanted to grow pasta!  and I wondered if he wasn’t of my own urban heart. We have buried two hamsters, two rabbits and a pet frog in the back yard. But when my oldest dog, Sandy, died on July 16, although I considered burying him in the yard as well, I decided against it: What if we didn’t stay here? I couldn’t leave him behind. An urn holds his ashes instead. Sandy came to us when the youngest child was eight months old. He had been with us for what seemed forever and the fact that he was gone, even at the ripe old age of 17, was the surest sign that things were changing. It was the age-old question: what happens when the kids leave home and the dog dies?

If you’d spoken to me 18 years ago, I would have said that as soon as the youngest kid left for college, we’d be back in the city. I would have told you that I would never garden and preferred the Manhattan skyline to the vista of the harbor at the end of my street. I would have said that the churning of the garbage trucks and the screaming of sirens were my symphonies, not the voices of my kids and their friends on the front porch on hot summer nights. I know there will come a time when my kids have significant others and homes of their own and children and holidays will be “shared” with someone else’s family. In literature and philosophy, they call these transitions turning points and coming of age. But those are easy catch phrases that barely capture how all of this feels. There are lavender colored mums and pumpkins on the porch right now. I anticipate Thanksgiving when the older two kids come home from college and we five sit with friends and family around the dining room table…and Christmas when the house is scented with cinnamon and pine. I think about a day when the house may be filled with babies again. I hear the echoes of my family and relish homecomings  to what has become a homestead and not merely a house.

And to think, when we first saw this house, I had no intention of moving. Funny thing is, I still don’t.

Yesterday, my husband’s oldest patient died. Jim was 103. When Jim was 100, he threw himself a birthday party at his favorite Irish bar. But in the last two weeks, Jim was tired. He refused nourishment, took to his bed, and with his family around him, simply “went to sleep.” On the night that Jim died, his son asked if he had any regrets.

“Not a one,” Jim replied.

“Can you imagine a life without one regret?’ my husband asked.

And we both shook our heads in both disbelief and envy.

In January 2000, I celebrated the turn of the century, and the publication of my first novel, Jimmy’s Girl, with my girlfriends. Driven by the novel’s plot ( a “what if” story of childhood sweethearts who meet again 30 years later) and the millennium, we asked one another, “What if you could be 17 or 25 again?” And all of us answered “only if we could know what we know now.” Hindsight is a breeze. Would Prometheus have dared to steal fire if he knew he’d be bound to a rock for eternity?

And so comes the part about learning from our mistakes, doing things differently, and the notion of “regret.” Can we use our “regrets” as catalysts to move forward? Can we take the transgressions of our youth and spin them into “positive learning experiences?”

Try thinking of the opposite of “regret.” I looked it up, and found nothing, indicating (to me) that other than not repeating the same mistake twice, learning, apologizing, or feeling remorse, we can’t erase the past. We simply have to deal: Look back, inhale, exhale, move on.

As recently as right now, I can think of several things that I would have done or said differently – and things I wish I hadn’t done or said at all. To calm my soul, I can wax philosophical: If the aggregate of my regrets and that which I feel has been done well have led to the moment when the alarm rang this morning and my husband was beside me, and our children are who they are, then I wouldn’t change a thing. Maybe that’s the reason that I believe in destiny. Entertaining “what if’s” might alter all things I am grateful for in the present tense.

When I tease myself with “what if’s,” these days they all but drive me crazy. What if I had taken that Junior Year Abroad rather than worrying about leaving my college boyfriend behind? I could have ended up falling in love with someone and living in Florence….What if my husband and I hadn’t separated four years ago for 18 months? Did distance give us perspective, and appreciation for what we have now? I’ll never know. Is my fairytale fractured? Yes, and yet perhaps there are different points of view on the meaning of “happily ever after.” And what if I had allowed myself to know my mother more as a woman and less as a mother? She mystifies me. I am nearly obsessed with her now she sits speechless in her wheelchair. What if I had been more objective, allowed her to cross those mother/daughter boundaries she seemed to often traverse? How much of myself is like she was in her middle age?

A psychologist friend of mine says with certainty that if we awakened at 17 knowing what we know now, our 17-year-old brains couldn’t handle the experience.

Regrets are tangled threads in this embroidery called life. Interesting that we are said to “weave tales” – tales stitched with characters, plots, subplots, tangential situations, detours, roadblocks, and yes, regrets. We writers can “tell all” under the guise of storytelling with the legal disclaimer that (to paraphrase) “any similarities to people, places and events is purely coincidental and products of our imaginations.” Are regrets sometimes colored by our imaginations as well?

If I awakened at 17 or 25 knowing what I know now, would I be able to do, say and see things differently? Strangely, I’m not sure. Maybe regrets are instrumental when it comes to re-inventing ourselves, changing our behaviors, giving ourselves the luxury of a second chance without undoing what’s been done. Perhaps I just wouldn’t make the same mistakes – I’d make different ones.

Roughly four days a week, I take pilates or yoga. I get to the studio 15 minutes before the class begins. That’s my stolen time. I stretch out on the mat, eyes shut. No one can reach me there. No cell phones, no doorbells, no emails. I re-group – with me. What might I have done/said differently today? Sometimes I learn something new; sometimes I come up empty. I’ve learned not to make promises I can’t keep.

Perhaps the word “regret,” standing alone without an antonym, is all too negative.

My guess is that Jim did have regrets, and maybe dreams that didn’t come true. But maybe when you get to be 103 like Jim, stating those regrets would have been the greatest regret of all – especially as his loving family stood around him when he chose to say goodbye. Maybe at 103, regrets become memories…stitches in the tapestry.

 A note to readers: This piece was written in July 1998. I came across it as I was blogging about the notion of regret. What could be more compelling than the regrets of those who both administered and ingested thalidomide to control something as benign as morning sickness? Who knew? Thalidomide is still being used today primarily in the treatment of certain cancers.

My summer job in 1971 was at The Rusk Institute for Rehabilitation in New York City. They assigned me to children’s recreational therapy on the fifth floor – assisting them to read and walk, and play. On my first day on the ward, I was assigned to Lynette, a beautiful, delicate, bright little girl with hair braided perfectly in rows and dotted with bows. She looked like a ballerina – if not for the fact that her arms did not exist and were, instead, flippers on her shoulders.

“Want to play checkers?” she asked.

And so we did – she moving the plastic disks nimbly with her toes – more nimbly, in fact, than I did with my shaking fingers.

Then there was Sarah whose head was too heavy for her to hold. She had hydrocephaly. Her hands were curiously small, and where fingers weren’t missing, they were curled helplessly and hopelessly. At least a dozen times during the day, Sarah asked, “What’s your name, Stephanie?” And each time I answered, as she groped for my hand, then lowered her heavy head even more, and walked away.

Lynette and Sarah were what the doctors called “thalidomide babies.” There were other thalidomide babies on the floor, all around 10 years old, mostly limbless or with limbs that were profoundly deformed. There was a large room that housed prosthetics – plastic and metal arms and legs hung from rafters like meat in a butcher’s freezer. The children awaited surgeries that would substitute their claw-like hands and absent extremities so they could manipulate checkers without using toes, or stand upright instead of hurtling themselves down the hallways like a ball.

My mother feared for my emotional balance as I worked at Rusk that summer. One time I saw my father appear in the doorway as I played checkers with Lynette, and he was crying.

In 1960, thalidomide was promoted as a cure for morning sickness. In 1962, it was pulled from pharmacy shelves since 12,000 babies were born worldwide with gross deformities. And now, we find the drug rearing its head again for use in therapies for patients with AIDS, cancer, and other autoimmune disorders.

In 1991, Gilla Kaplan, a scientist at Rockefeller University, discovered that thalidomide could regulate immune response by suppressing a protein called tumor necrosis factor alpha. Scientists at Celgene Corporation, manufacturers of the drug, had been investigating thalidomide for use in AIDS patients while other companies were researching the drug for efficacy in treating macular degeneration (a condition that results in blindness), other immune disorders, and cancers. In the 1960’s, an Israeli doctor gave thalidomide to leprosy patients as a soporific, and found the patients were not only able to sleep, but miraculously their lesions cleared up overnight. In fact, thalidomide never disappeared, and has been available on the black market since the 1960’s with AIDS and cancer patients turning to it as a last resort.

Randy Warren is a 36-year-old “thalidomider.” He is also founder of The Thalidomide Victims Association of Canada and asks the question, “Is the world ready for another generation of thalidomiders?”

Writer Sheryl Gay Stolberg has covered this topic relentlessly in The New York Times. She reports that Celgene and the FDA believe they can achieve their goal of “no birth defects.” Cancer patients including pre-menopausal women with breast cancer (who may have children at home) are obvious recipients with obvious risks. Celgene promises that doctors will work diligently with the pharmaceutical company and that all women of child-bearing age will be required to use two forms of birth control and be required to undergo monthly pregnancy tests in order to avoid any “thalidomide accidents.”

Some patients today call thalidomide a “miracle” in terms of remission and what is perceived cure. Some doctors refuse to administer the drug to fertile women in favor of protecting unborn children. Certain women’s advocacy groups contend this discriminates against women’s entitlement to the same medical treatment as men. Barbara Glesser, a professor of clinical neurology at University of Arizona Health Sciences Center wrote a letter to The New York Times in September 1997 stating that 75% of those suffering from auto-immune diseases are pre-menopausal women.

“The patients who may receive the greatest benefit from thalidomide are also those at most risk for its notorious side effect,” wrote Glesser.

For Randy Warren and the 5000 survivors of thalidomide, the drug is pure poison. They even want a skull and crossbones placed on the label.

Some say the reason for a ban would be purely emotional, based upon bad memories. These are the same people who contend that we can benefit from what know now and use the drug carefully so a generation of thalidomide babies doesn’t happen again. They feel that what happened before was a “mistake” and that the benefits of thalidomide in an austerely controlled program clearly outweigh the risks. Others fear malformations are inevitable.

As I look back, I realize that when I was 18 and working at Rusk, I did not fully fathom the extent of thalidomide’s ravaging effects. Yes, I saw Lynette and Sarah – but I didn’t “get it” in terms of their parents, grandparents, siblings who came to visit. With each baby born to me in my 30’s, I counted fingers and toes and marveled at the redness of their faces with each cry. Now I read the endless diatribes about the re- release of thalidomide, and I shudder as I recall the children on that floor. “Only one more” thalidomide baby would be one too many. And I think of the AIDS and cancer patients for whom thalidomide is the last bastion of hope. And suddenly, the definition of “moral dilemma” hits me.