A short dissertation on a word

 

Celebrating another birthday on that path to old age
note the walker I'm sitting in

The word that’s on my mind today is resilience. The dictionary defines it as the capacity to recover quickly from difficult circumstances. I think of it as the ability to bounce back. Several years ago I was in the hospital with stage four acute kidney failure, caused by an antibiotic that I should have known better than to take. I had already within recent years been hospitalized for a hip reconstruction (a fractured hip so bizarre that people in the hospital looked at me and said, “Oh, your ‘the hip’” and a diagnosis of atrial fibrillation. By this time I was feeling a bit down when a medical resident, a woman, came in to talk with me.

I said, “I guess this means that my health is going to change forever.” I was having a pity party, but I saw visions of dialysis three times a week dancing in my head. She replied, “Oh, I don’t know. You seem to be pretty resilient.” Right then, right there, that woman, probably unknown to her, gave me a great gift. I began to think of myself as resilient. I was in the hospital for six or seven days, but every day my creatinine (high is bad, low is good) came down. Eventually I went home and over the next months my creatinine came down almost to normal levels. The nephrologist saw me every three months, but my triumph came when he said, “I’ll see you in a year.”

I think so much of resilience is in our minds, and once I began to think of myself as resilient, I began to bounce back. Christian says I’ve been resilient about other things, like moving into the cottage. There are lots of things I cannot do these days, between the confines of the cottage and the limitations of my mobility: I cannot give the big parties I used to love or even the elaborate dinner parties for six that I loved. There are some recipes that I’d love to tackle but can’t with a hot plate and an toaster oven—those that boast of a skillet dinner you start on the stove and finish in the oven are beyond me. I have a closet that is nonfunctional for me—the hanging clothes are so high that I cannot reach them, even standing, and have to plan ahead so that I can ask Jordan to get this shirt or that down. But I love my cottage. Christian says I have made it work.

This is not to brag about my health or resilience to my friends who are walking the eighties path with me but to suggest that it helps to give yourself a message of resilience. When I posted about life in a tiny house yesterday, one friend wrote that she didn’t know if she could do that or not, but then concluded she probably could. My message is that we can do almost anything If we set our mind to it.

It seems to me a companion word to resilience is flexibility. It’s too easy to cling to the old ways, the ways we’ve always done things, from cooking to child raising. Living with one of my grown children who is raising an adorable seventeen-year-old son, you have no idea how hard it is to keep from saying, “When you were his age, you had to be home for Sunday supper.” Or some such. A long-time friend was here the other day and mentioned how angry she was to be quarantined at a daughter’s house for Thanksgiving because she developed covid. “But I apologized,” she said, “Their house, their rules.” That’s flexibility. And perhaps apologizing is resilience.

To my friends walking with me, think about those two words: resilience and flexibility. How do they apply to your life?

Okay, sermon over.

 

A new friend and two words of wisdom

 

A truly worthwhile book by my friend, Stephanie

Sometimes serendipity can lead to the nicest things. Several months ago, the neighborhood newsletter that I edit did an article about Ann Darr, the neighborhood representative to the Fort Worth ISD board. I stressed to the writer that it had to be apolitical, following the guidelines for the newsletter, and it came back raving about what a good school board member she is. I sent it back, explained again about no politics, and got an article Ii thought usable (yes, I got some criticism, but not much). A few weeks later, Ann Darr contacted me and asked if we could meet. We had confusion finding a date, and I had to explain I could not easily meet her someplace for a happy hour drink but I would welcome her to the cottage.

Tonight, finally, was our happy hour meeting. I made a tuna spread—not very original, but it was good and she seemed to like it. We chattered like magpies for over an hour and a half. Found out we go to the same church, one of her children is in Jacob’s class at the high school, and one of her sons is at U of Arkansas where Jacob will go next year. We are politically in sync, though her position, like my newsletter, is apolitical. We chattered about education today—charter schools, home schooling, book bans, intrusive parents (she says that has peaked and died down), the necessity of trade school programs, financing, Abbott’s sitting on funds allocated for teachers because he didn’t get his way on vouchers, and on and on.

I have friends I see often and simply adore but familiarity sometimes results in fairly stagnant conversations (I can hear them now—“Does she mean me? Surely she doesn’t mean me!”). I think we tend to know what our close friends think and not dive deep in conversation. But when you meet someone new, in the process of getting to know them, you go deeper—at least that’s what I found tonight. I hope Ann Darr will come back to the cottage, and we can develop a friendship. PS She’s a dog person, so what’s not to love. After welcoming her with frantic barking, Sophie was as good as gold all evening, pretty much stayed on the patio.

Two words of wisdom for the day: resilience and gratitude. My friend, Stephanie Raffelock, posted in her Substack column this morning about her goals to reach by the age of eighty. I misread and thought she was referring to her seventies as her last decade, so I hastened to send a rebuttal from my advanced age of eighty-five. She called to say I had misread and her goals are to prepare herself to live into her eighties and nineties. We talked about aging, and she mentioned a book that is meaningful to her: Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. A Jewish psychiatrist, Frankl spent four years in various Nazi concentration camps, and he came to believe that the will for meaning was the single most important factor in survival. He got so he could look at fellow prisoners and almost predict who would survive and who wouldn’t. I probably won’t read it simply because I refuse to read about Nazi cruelty. I find it too upsetting to realize such evil exists in the world. But I like the theory.

Stephanie had written that it was a goal to be pain-free, and I told her that was a pipe dream—as we age we all suffer minor aches and pains. The goal is not to let them grow so big in your mind that they become major. I mentioned that as a doctor’s child, I was taught to be brave about health problems and pain. Doctors, my mom told me, laugh at those who magnify problems or pain. I took it so far that my brother once said he thought I was taking Mom’s advice too seriously. But once when I was in the hospital with a fairly serous health problem, I said to a resident physician that I guessed this would change my life, and she replied, “Oh, I don’t know. You seem to be fairly resilient.” So that, for me, is why resilience is important—bouncing back from major or minor upsets.

Stephanie had just been reading about gratitude, and she proposed that as a factor in aging well. Gratitude takes us beyond ourselves. If you can give up moaning and whining about your present state—or about the state of our country or the world—and look for the positive, your whole attitude toward life will change, and you will be healthier and happier. I try, every night, to thank the Lord for the blessings of my day and those of my life in general. I find I have lots to talk about.

Resilience and gratitude: Try them for a week

Two incredible stories

Some people have incredible stories to tell. A recent blog asked writers when they would retire from writing. Like a lot of others, I replied with a sort of blah "I can't not write." But a response today stunned me. A woman wrote that she had published the last of three memoirs three years ago--at the age of 97. She's spent the last three years trying to market them, but it seems to her young people aren't interested in her past. Yet she lived through five years of the Russian Revolution as a child, then the Great Depression, and two World Wars. Such rich, fascinating stories she must have to tell. I cannot imagine young people not being interested--but then I realize to my own children, those things are distant memories. They don't realize the impact they had on the world, an impact that affects their lives today. I just looked--she has several books on Amazon. I'm going to order one, and after I've read it I'm going to write her. Her name is Nora Percival, and she will a 100 next week. She's threatening to write a book about being a writer of books no one wants to read. I would have to tell her how wrong she is. Want to read her story of escaping the Russian Revolution? http://fw.dnslink.com/?domainname=amazon.com&seedterm=amazon&publicid=43f59b77-9ecf-46eb-bf7c-3af1e1893438
The other story is far different but equally touching. Janie Emaus, an author/friend (we share a publisher) writes a column for the Huffington post (how did she get that wonderful assignment?) and did a post that speaks eloquently of the difference between marriage and friendship--and the importance of the latter. Her husband had a lifelong friend he did everything with--ball games, beer drinking, all the things that men do together. When her husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor, the friend was there, in the hospital, by his home bedside. A year later the friend developed a much more serious health problem. Janie and her husband moved him into their home and have been caring for him, although they either have or soon will lose him. But Janie tells the story so much better than I can. Read it yourself: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/janie-emaus/marriage-and-friendship_b_5892894.html
I am in awe of both these women--and Janie's husband and his friend. The old cliché is that God never throws more at you than you can handle. Their strength and resilience is amazing. I guess God knew that.