Another photo from our Memorial Day ride

A ride of a life time

Every year during Memorial Day weekend, there is a steady stream of activity in the skies over my house. One by one, they pass by. First, the B-17, and we cheer and applaud with excitement. We’re awestruck as this lumbering ghost ship passes overhead. We can see the turret where a veteran of WWII operated a machine gun, blasting the enemy buzzing past. Next comes the B-24, then the B-25. We hoot and holler, jumping up and down as though the pilots and passengers can see and hear us as they pass by.

After several years of watching this spectacle, we decided to take a ride ourselves, so we drove out to the local municipal airport, and boarded that B-17 for the ride of our lives, There were 8 other passengers and 2 pilots. Everyone looked thrilled about this once in a lifetime experience.

It was 9:00AM. There were excited faces, some young, some old, some veterans, and some are daughters. On the tarmac, I see a living legacy of our veterans. There’s the B-17, a B-24 and 25, and there’s a P-51, all used in active duty during WWII. There is a sense of great pride among those gathered here on this Memorial Day.

We board the B-17. It smells like machinery and grease. The seats are on the floor. You sit on a cushion, and the seat belt is attached to the floor of the plane. I wonder what good this could possibly do you. On either side there are 2 windows with machine guns sticking out of the plexi-glass. My husband takes a photo of me with my arms wrapped around one of them. I’m playing strafe the Nazi, with an enormous grin on my face, doing my best to make machine gun noises, but I sound lame. We passed though this section of the aircraft, and I sat with my husband in the middle of the plane with elderly gentleman. He served in the Korean War, and it’s his 3rd trip in one of these iconic planes. He had ridden on the B-24 and B-25 in previous years. Greg and the Korean vet are sitting on the floor on one of those cushions, but I get to sit on an office chair where the radio operator used to sit. The old radio is still there, but inoperable. There are old dials and switches, old tubes. I want to play with them, but suddenly become apprehensive. Maybe I shouldn’t touch them. I strap myself into my swiveling office chair with that burlap seat belt, but I’m having a hell of a time figuring out how to lock it, but it doesn’t matter. I’m too excited to care. I looked up and there was an open hatch directly above me. A built in sunroof!

The plane started to move down the runway, but we stopped at the end. It was a “cold” take-off, so the pilots had to spend about 10 minutes warming up the 4 engines. One at a time, the propellers started. I could see them from my little window where I sat. They run the engines full blast for a few minutes, and then we started to move again, but faster this time. Before I knew it, we were lifting off the ground. I quickly unbuckled my burlap belt and stood up. (They had told us we could stand up as soon as we were off the ground) I immediately poked my head out of the hatch and looked out behind. The Livermore Valley glistened in the morning sun and patches of fog. The wind was whipping through my hair, and I suddenly felt like a happy dog on a joy ride in her masters car, head poking out the window, tongue happily hanging out of my mouth; colors and movement everywhere!

We flew north at about 2000 feet for about 15 minutes, and I was transfixed, standing next to one of the machine guns gazing out the window. I saw familiar sights, even my own home as we passed over my town, but what was even more astonishing to me was what I felt. As we lumbered through the sky over Contra Costa County, I felt a great wave of emotion. I soon recognized that what I was feeling was a combination of pride and admiration for our fathers and mothers who lived through a definitive time in history. I also felt a great sense of loss. On average, 1000 WWII vets die each day. In a few years, this generation will be completely lost to us. My father has been gone since 1976, and maybe those moments on that B-17 brought him back to me, if only briefly.

8 years and 10 days

When my 82-year-old mother died in 2006, I thought that I would feel a sense of relief. Finally, everyone’s suffering would come to an end. In fact, I had prayed over the past few years that she would die, but I grappled with this too. To pray for her death was contradictory to everything that I secretly desired. What I really wanted was to have my mom back. I desperately needed for her to emerge from the dementia that had stolen our shared history, and our mother/daughter bond.

To lose my mother to dementia was a “living grief”. When I went to visit her over the last few years of her life, I was aware that our connection would be limited, so I tried to keep my expectations low--usually to no avail. Remaining hopeful in the face of this stark reality I sat with her, silently pleading with her to know me and see me as the daughter that she loved, but she couldn’t respond. She could only sit and stare at me expressionless, or mutter a few nonsensical words. I left those visits feeling distressed, and was forced to start grieving all over again. “She’s gone, and you know this”, I told myself. “If she could tell you that she loves you, you know that she would”, I counseled myself with inadequate reassurance. As long as she had a physical presence on this earth, I couldn’t let go of my childlike hope that she might come back to me.

She had been a person with infinite patience, and had a knack for appreciating smaller pleasures. Things that would drive me to drink wouldn’t faze her in the least. While I would sit and complain about having to wait for an hour at the pharmacy for a prescription, or in a long line at the DMV, she would sit and wait calmly, trying to convince me that there was no reason to put off doing things out of boredom or impatience. While I would scarf down my food so that I could hurry along to the next thing, she could sit and ponder a scone and a cup of coffee for an hour, enjoying every bite. I was nothing like my mother, but as an adult I came to appreciate how invaluable these qualities really were. She lived much more in the present than I could have ever hoped to.

I started to notice that something was changing about my mom in 1998. She had lived in the same town for 50 years, and when she started losing her way along roads that she had driven down countless times, I found myself frustrated to the point of irritation. “C’mon Mom”. I said to her on one occasion, “You know where you are!” I had no idea at the time that something was going terribly wrong inside of her. In fact, she had gotten lost in her very own neighborhood, only a few blocks from her home. This was just the beginning of an 8-year illness that ended in a heartbreaking decision that raised questions about quality of life, and when to pull the proverbial plug.

This story can’t be fully understood without revealing the greatest tragedy of her life. In 1999, my brother was injured in a horse riding accident. He hit his head with full force, and lived for 7 months, first in a coma, then in a devastating vegetative state. My mother, in the early stages of a dementia still undiagnosed, was inconsolable. She clung to the idea that her son would come back to her (a scene that would repeat itself a few years later as she slipped away from me). She drove to the hospital every day to sit by his side-- a dutiful and loving mother who was losing her son.

When we finally removed him from life support, he was septic and dependent upon a ventilator. As a family we knew that it was hopeless--even mom knew. Still, when we made the decision to let him go, she shook her head in disbelief. “What?” she cried out, and then fell silent. She couldn’t see that he had been lost to her that terrible day 7 months earlier. To her, this decision was complete betrayal. She was still holding on to hope that he would emerge, perhaps if only to say the things that she needed to hear before she could let go.

Ironically, I eventually came to understand how she felt.

My brother’s death dealt my mother a blow that she was unable to overcome. Now she was a “double winner”. At age 78, depression descended upon her like a pall, and the dementia that seemed to be only peripheral at first began to have an effect on everything that she said and did. She had previously been a person who enjoyed an ice-cold beer on a hot day, whose greatest joy was gathering her extended family around her for large holiday dinners, who could make anyone feel welcome and embraced with just a smile—that person was slipping away right under our noses.

Over the next few years, I bore witness to a mental and physical unraveling that would take my mother from me bit by bit. I was forced to emotionally distance myself from the only person that I knew who would never abandon me. My mother had always been my emotional safe house, and it was hard to accept the reality that she could be sitting right in front of me, yet be completely unavailable.

Sure, I’m a grown-up, so I ought to be able to handle it. At least this is what I HAD to tell myself to compartmentalize my feelings. My mom was losing her ability to do simple things, like use the toilet. One afternoon when visiting her at her home, knowing that she had to pee, I took her arm and walked her into the bathroom. After a minute or two of coaxing and pleading with her to sit on the toilet, she finally just stood there and peed all over the bathroom floor.

I get it. My mother has dementia, and I have to expect these things, and be able to deal with it.

Why should I be able to deal with it? This is my mother, the person who always took care of me. I watched her as she forgot how to cook. I watched her as she hallucinated, and became delusional. I watched her as she stripped off her clothes and flashed my husband. I watched as she was stripped of her dignity. Sure, I can deal handle this. And inexplicably, I did.

Over the next 3 years, I watched as my mother slowly deteriorated physically and mentally. At the time of her stroke in 2006, she was no longer speaking or making eye contact. She had become a shadow of her former self. Her caregivers, who called her “mommy”, had been feeding her and changing her diaper. Toward the end, she spent her waking hours slumped in a wheelchair, unaware of her surroundings, descending deeper into darkness.

When I got word that mom had suffered a stroke, I was on the big island of Hawaii on a long overdue vacation. My sister called and said that mom had been taken to the emergency room. All at once I wondered why. She had an advanced directive, and it was clear--she was a DNR, do not resuscitate. Why then was she being pumped full of fluids and revived? I failed to see the logic in this decision, especially after what happened over the next 10 days.

It was a lost opportunity to let our mother go quietly, but I don’t think that any of us were really prepared for that moment of truth. Our first inclination was to keep her here with us. We were all afraid of what we would have to face when she was actually gone--that blank space where mother used to be.


Worried and confused, I flew home the next day to see mom, and to meet with my sisters. My family gathered at the care home, where my mother was lying in her bed, face drooped on one side. There was no flash of light or life. Her eyes didn’t open or shut. No sounds came from her mouth. She lay there unconscious, breathing steadily, her heart pumping blood to her organs. Her body was quite alive, but the mother that I had known had disappeared long ago.

The doctor at the hospital had said that it was pretty hopeless, and all that we might hope for is for her to remain bedridden, if she survived at all. As a family, we decided to take her back to the care home with hospice support.

When we made this decision that was so devastatingly final, we intellectually knew that it was the right thing to do, but we were also filled with doubt. Her quality of life had been gone for years; that was true. She was no longer able to speak, or to engage in life in any meaningful way, that was true too, but she was still our mother, and she was still alive and breathing.

There were options. We might have sent her to a skilled nursing facility where they could have inserted a tube into her stomach that would have fed and hydrated her. Maybe with a little time, she’d improve. Who knows, she might recover enough to benefit from some basic therapy. Certainly this crossed my mind, but the question about quality of life was glaring at us. These measures might have prolonged her life, and we were all faced with the grim reality that the quality of her life had been seriously diminished long before this stroke. Was there really any question what we needed to do? Hadn’t I prayed for this in the past?

The next day my sisters and I called a Catholic priest, who came and administered the last rites—then we sat and held our collective breaths. In my frantic grief, I imagined that he would perform the sign of the cross over my mother’s forehead, and that she would magically let go.

Of course, she didn’t.

It wasn’t going to be that simple or painless. For the next ten days, she lingered on, and the guilt and fear that I felt was excruciating. At times it felt as though we were committing a kind of matricide, but we didn’t acknowledge these darker feelings to each other. We knew that we were hurrying her physical death along, but we also knew that the woman who she had been had long vanished from our sight.

We had to let go of our beloved mother, and she had to let go too.

The Alarm Clock

My family moved to a new house when I was 10 years old. The “rumpus” room was downstairs, and the bedrooms, kitchen and living room were on the top floor. My mother never did like this house, but my dad had purchased it on a V.A. loan, and it was bigger than our old house, and in a newer neighborhood. We had been living there for 4 years when all of our lives were traumatically and permanently altered.

It was an ordinary day after school. I was downstairs watching Bugs Bunny and putting hot rollers in my hair, and my older brother and sister were upstairs watching Lost In Space. I always hated Lost In Space, and preferred the sophisticated humor of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd.

My dad had come home early that day from our liquor store. He had told my mother that he was tired, and wanted to come home and take a nap. She would stay at the store until the night man came to work the evening shift and close the store. The store wasn’t working out the way that my dad had hoped. In fact, he was planning on selling the store, and had a business meeting later in the afternoon to discuss going back to work for a brewing company that he favored.

I had heard him come home from downstairs. He had gone straight to his bedroom to lie down for an hour. At about 3:30 PM, I heard his alarm clock buzzing. I didn’t really think much about it, and continued rolling my hair. After a few more minutes, I noticed that the alarm clock was still buzzing, and I felt a touch of anxiety. I walked up the stairs and into the living room where my brother and sister were still sitting.

“Dad’s alarm clock has been going off for about ten minutes. Should we go and wake him up?” I said.

“He’s tired, better let him rest.” Said my sister Mary.

I went back downstairs, but felt unsettled. I could still hear that alarm clock screaming at me. “Danger Will Robinson, danger!” Was that Lost In Space, or fear welling up inside of me?

Once again, I climbed the stairs with the ugly green carpeting to talk to my brother and sister.

“The alarm clock is still going off, and I’m worried.” I tell them. They agreed that this was weird, so the 3 of us went to his bedroom to check things out

The door was locked, which we all found strange, since our parents rarely locked their bedroom door. We started knocking, softly at first, but then more frantically. “Dad? Dad?” We all called out to him. We remembered that they had a private phone line in their room, so we called the number and let it ring, hoping that we would wake him up. No answer.

Lost, we called our older sister Chris. She was 26 years old, and would know what to do. After some anxious waiting, she finally arrived at the house with the bedroom door key. She had to stop at the store first to get the key from our mom. I don’t think that our mom was alarmed at that point. She just gave the key to our sister, not suspecting that a crisis was enveloping her family.

We all huddled around the bedroom door. Chris stuck the key into the lock, and opened it. There lay dad, rolled over on his stomach (he always slept on his back). He was splotchy and blue.

All at once it was pandemonium. “Call an ambulance”, someone yelled. “Do CPR”, my brother Jim cried to my sister Mary, as if a 17-year-old girl would be able to step in and save him. We were all standing half in, half out of the bedroom, in some kind of delirious shock.

I asked my sister Chris if I could go outside. I had to get out of there as fast as I could. I ran out of the house, tearing hot rollers out of my hair as I flew down the street. As I was about to round the corner, I heard the familiar despair of sirens from fire engines, and I ran passed them as they moved toward the house that my mother had always hated.

I ended up at a friend’s house, and from her bedroom window I could see my driveway. I could see a gurney with a figure on it being brought down the cement stairs that led to my long driveway. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. I wanted to be there, but I couldn’t bear it. My entire being has told me to get out as fast as I could. It was an act of self-preservation, a flight or fight response.

A little time passed, and I remember my friend’s mother coming into the room. She said the words that I knew that I was going to hear. I had known it from the minute that I had heard that alarm clock beckoning. “I’m sorry honey, you’re father has died.”

My dad was dead from a massive coronary thrombosis at 54-years-old. He died instantly. No CPR, or a team of surgeons standing by could have saved him, but that would never ease the suffering of one 14-year-old girl.

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

When we arrived at Arlington National Cemetery, I knew that the highlight of the trip would be the Tomb Of The Unknown Soldier. Of course we saw the JFK and RFK burial sites, the Custis Lee Mansion, and the beautiful view of the Mall from above, but there is something special about the Tomb.

We arrived just in time for the changing of the guard. There were people standing all around the balcony and steps of the amphitheatre that sits above the tomb, and yet all was very still.

There were 3 honor guards standing in front of the tomb when I snapped my photograph, and they were in perfect sync with each other, down to every detail. Their crisply starched uniforms are blue with gold belts, and they are wearing white gloves. They sport a very close military crew cut, hidden by blue hats with gold trim. Their boots are shiny patent leather--they dazzle the eye. They sound as if they are made with metal, because as the soldier in the middle takes a few steps, he clicks his heals together one time, and they make a sounds like a firecracker.

The tomb is made entirely of white marble. It’s sits at the top of a flight of steps that leads down to 2 long groves of blooming cherry trees and an expanse of neatly mown grass. Men, women and children are walking on one side or the other of the grass, going off to see another part of this enormous cemetery—this vast monument to our fallen heroes.

On the tomb it reads, “here rests in honored glory an American Soldier, known but to God.”

The guard in the middle is wearing a pistol. (the other two hold a rifle) He’s the one who escorts each guard to and from the tomb. Slowly they all walk, genuflecting toward the tomb. They stop directly in front of the tomb, and the guard in the middle salutes. Clearly he is special. He is the escort; the one who wears the pistol, clicks his heals, and salutes the tomb.

There are remains in the tomb, but they are hidden behind the huge block of inscribed marble. Men who died in WWI, WWII and the Korean War lie there, and until recently the Vietnam War. They identified him some years ago, and buried his remains with his true identity.

I see other things here beyond the landscape and the detail of the honor guard and the tomb. I see generations of men and women fighting for democracy, fighting against tyranny and oppression, fighting against Nazi’s and against slavery; fighting for freedom.

I see unnecessary loss, men and women fighting pointless and futile wars for the sake of someone else’s political agenda.

But in the end, I feel a sense of pride and awe. I feel like a patriot.

30 Rock's on!

I didn’t meet Keith Olbermann—well not directly. We were sitting on a bench at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, directly in front of where The Today Show is produced. It was about 7:45 PM, and we had just finished a leisurely and delicious meal. My husband gestured to me excitedly, pointing to a window on the 2nd floor. I looked up, and there stood Keith, preparing to tape his show Countdown. I sprang up from the bench where I had been sitting, and began to wave to him. He looked at me, smiled and started waving back to me. I immediately gave him a “high-five”, blew him a kiss, and I believe that I made the gesture that “Lincoln Hayes” from the Mod Squad made when he uttered those now famous words “Solid”. Keith was laughing at me, and I at him. What a crazy scene!

After the show was completed and the studio cleared, my husband wandered off for a few minutes, and came back with a huge grin on his face. He handed me his camera, and there was a close up image of Keith. My husband had bumped into him as he was leaving the studio, shook his hand and taken his photo. Greg said that he had a suit coat, shirt, and tie on, but he was wearing jeans. I had always assumed that he was in a full suit when he taped his show. I guess that he could tape in his "underpants" if he wanted to, since he never stands up during the broadcast.

My brush with James Carville

I was recently sitting in a restaurant called The Monocle in Washington DC, and in walked the “Ragin’ Cajun”, James Carville! A bunch of Kerry staffers who were sitting in the bar burst out in applause.

Anyone who knows who he is would recognize him immediately. First, he’s nearly bald, except for some graying patches around the ears. He rather reminds me of a character from Star Wars. Maybe a little like Yoda, with the wisdom that goes with it? I jumped up from my chair, not really knowing what to say, extended my hand, and asked if he would stand for a photo. He graciously agreed with such a Louisiana drawl that I almost giggled. It was my brush with political greatness, at least to some.