Capitalism - Feudalism without the King
Tax the Rich 

Knitting Friday 

Absolutely no new knitting so no pictures. But DM has given a fantastic concession: I can start clearing out her old furniture (much is very nice) and "stuff". So, I have been spending every spare minute doing just that.

Probably once we pass teen-hold and establish our first domicile, we start accumulating stuff. Add those beginnings to a lifetime and you can imagine what I'm looking at. I found "rabbit ears", a small indoor antenna which you used on top of your TV to give you just-adequate reception of free (not paid) channels. I wonder if the Smithsonian would like it. I'm looking at her childhood and mine, deciding what to throw, what to save. Through it all, I'm remembering the advice of a real estate agent: Be brutal. Realistic advice, though not comforting.

And why do I call this a "fantastic concession" on her part? Because at the end of life, many of the dying like things to stay as they always remembered them (two rooms she's put off-limits: her bedroom and the living room.) I suppose there is comfort if you are ending your days in the home you created. With away-hospice (that is, in a nursing home setting) this would be different but she's in home-hospice and soon this home may become just her view from her bed.

She has a fantastic social worker who is helping her transition from life to death. You may be thinking: What? You live, then you die. What transition? But apparently it's not that easy. The nurses, the social worker, the literature, all have told us she must accept her death because if she fights it, the time will be longer. A lot of hospice is on the spiritual side of living ("When god says it's your time." "Meeting loved ones in heaven.") but her team is savvy enough to know that DM believes in the spiritual but not the religious so they do not push what I think are their strong religious beliefs. Beliefs which even I, the atheist, understand may make the acceptance of death (the "peace that surpasses understanding") easier.

I've finally worked out an analogy for this non-acceptance of dying by a hospice patient. Think of the mom who sees her child pinned under a car and gets the adrenaline rush which allows her to pick up that load of tonnage and free him. Likewise, the unaccepting hospice patient is producing some type of hormonal rush; the mom uses it to do the impossible and lift a car, the dying patient uses it to do the impossible and stay alive.

I think DM is getting closer to letting go emotionally. Intellectually she let go months ago but her "heart" still doesn't hear fully what her brain is telling her. However, I would be wrong to say that counseling alone, albeit her SW is fantastic, is helping her.

Enter Zoloft, the anti-depressant which was firmly recommended from the get-go by hospice and resisted by us just as firmly. Until about a week ago. I felt Zoloft would only make her spacey and sleeping. Boy, was I wrong. (Though I'm sure other people have different reactions.) Her new calmness, her ability to talk about leaving her family behind without crying, her willingness to allow me to start pre-mortum what Dickinson described as "bustle in a house the morning after death", all can be attributed to this drug. Pharmaceuticals if used wisely, can be so beneficial as I'm seeing here. The obscene greed in the exorbitant cost of these same pharmaceuticals I'll rant about another day.

So we wait for what will be. And unexpectedly, in the middle of all this, cynical me experienced a generous act of kindness from a Ravelry designer. Brief history: just before hospice began, I signed up for a mystery shawl KAL (a knit-along where you get a clue a week, hence, the mystery.) Signed up and lost track of everything until yesterday when I took one last shot with a posting on Ravelry: Does anyone remember this free KAL or was I dreaming? Within minutes, I got my answer (yes, this KAL exists, but it's no longer free) and within hours, the designed contacted me: Yes, you did sign up when the KAL was free as a promotion so let me send you the pattern free. How nice. She didn't have to do this. And while I'm not going to get to knitting this for months I'm seeing this pattern as the light at the end of the tunnel for me; there is still kindness in the world.

Which brings me to the first stanza of a Yeats poem, The Second Coming. Many of us may look at the world today: ubiquitous financial crises, drum rolls for war, wacko-a-do Republicans in the US House, obvious climate change evidence decried and think: This time the sky is really falling. While not to diminish the fact that humans may be finally be walking into their species annihilation fuck-up, here's what Yeats wrote about the post WWI Europe:
 
Turning and turning in the widening gyre (spiral/vortex)
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

See you next week.