Between Storms

Last night, for the first time since July of 2014, I spent the night in Loudoun by myself. At the last minute before we set off from Vienna, Jon was still wrestling with the schedule: his work was all in Vienna today and mine was in Loudoun.  He just didn't really want to come, and I did.  Our own version of the bi-coastal marriage, with work keeping us apart.

Part of the reason I wanted to come, other than being in the right place for work, is we haven't been here overnight in two weeks.  My other job, the volunteer job that occasionally blows up into a demanding all-out attention hog, has been dominating my evenings.  The temple is going through a challenging time, largely due to poor communication habits, no consensus on leadership roles, general incompetence, and personality differences. The cohort of leaders that I am closest to (past presidents, mostly) has been out of the loop for a few years and only recently have we inserted ourselves back into the fray. With mixed results, I must confess.

It is far too early to go into detail here -- the conversations are still ongoing -- but we have got past some of the worst parts. Even though I have not been the president for nearly ten years, I have graduated to an elder stateswoman role and there is always work, under these circumstances.  As always, the basic rules continue to apply:  tell the truth, speak clearly, don't burn bridges, and keep talking.  This is harder than it sounds when we are working with people who won't maintain any of those simple rules. For some reason, drama and posturing is much more appealing to our lay leadership -- even though they too have the best interests of the congregation at heart. I have no doubt about that. They come at it from a different direction, but they truly want the best for everyone, even if it means trading out our current clergy for a cheaper model.

I have spent the last month ranting and raving to Jon, between each phone call and  meeting. He is my main sounding board and he keeps me sane. He sits on the couch and hears my end of the conversations and he says, "wow, I have never heard you be so political."

On the positive side, there is a process for all of this and we are doing our best to honor the process, despite the need for drama and posturing.  And for right this minute, my job is done.  The committee that delivers a report from the congregation (I am the chair) scrambled to do its work, speaking to about 80 people on the phone and in person, collecting the wisdom and experience of the group.  Usually this committee is nearly invisible, but circumstances brought our work into the spotlight and we were bombarded with letters, in addition to the random phone conversations we initiated. We delivered our findings to the rabbi and then to the Board, and we were thanked and sent home. Our findings stated unequivocally that the congregation wanted to keep the rabbi, contrary to the spontaneous plan of some of the leadership to trade him in. He isn't perfect, but we still want to keep him.

So now we wait to see what happens next.  All through this month, I have been comparing the shenanigans of the temple to the national political scene.  There are definitely places that remind me of the U.S. Government.  It just shows that humans, when working as the leaders of an organization, do not always rise to their best.  We come from different backgrounds, we bring our own lifetime of experiences to the shared tasks, and sometimes we just don't get it right. People in leadership might be the worst people to do the job.  Who in the world would want to be President? Only someone with some big ego issues. This is not entirely accurate in synagogue life, but the opportunities for mismanagement are certainly always there, and it is easy to head down the wrong path when you think you know best and aren't so good at consulting the group.

Anyway, I came to Loudoun last night because I could.  I didn't have any meetings or phone calls, I am on the sidelines for now, and sleeping in our airy cabin seemed like exactly the right medicine.  When I woke up at dawn, I looked outside and saw a wild turkey bopping around near the hammock.  When I went to the outhouse, there was a large deer peering at me from Jon's clearing.  I haven't spoken to anyone in over twelve hours.  Bliss.

Kind of Like Camping

Back in the 1970s, when they were in their 60s, our Newcomb grandparents used to pack up their pickup truck and go out to West Virginia on the weekends. They owned some property on a wooded mountainside, with a cabin.  They had been campers since they were young people together -- there are movies of them in canoes, waving from the doorway of a cabin, being silly on adventures.  I don't remember thinking anything was unusual as I watched them load the truck to go to a place with no electricity or running water.  It meshed with the life we knew as kids.

At that time, our farm life was spread over three farms plus a lot of scattered fields in the Tysons Corner area.  There was the home farm which had all the amenities, the farm in Loudoun which didn't even have a place to sleep and we never thought of spending the night there, and the Maryland farm which had sleeping places but no electricity or running water.  The Maryland farm was an uncomfortable destination for me. I never loved going there. I told my father that it wasn't good enough until there was orange juice in the refrigerator. That was a tall order.

When all the kids were still young enough to be controlled by our parents, the whole family would go to Maryland for a few days.  We did this until I was well into high school.  All along the way, my parents were always working on home improvements.  In the distant past, there was a house trailer that served as a kitchen and dining room for the family, parked outside a huge, dilapidated house that still had piles of past inhabitants' belongings in some of the rooms. My parents successfully renovated two of the rooms: a bedroom for themselves and one for us.  The rest of the house I still dream about. (As a little kid, I had no context for thinking about architecture, but in hindsight I now realize the house had a central stairway, four large rooms on each floor, and there were three floors.  Four chimneys. No kitchen. High ceilings.  Lots of windows. It was a house from the past.)

One winter while we were visiting family in Hawaii the house in Maryland was burned down by arsonists and that was the end of that project. My parents shifted their focus to the granary, a building with a roof over two grain bins with an open area between them.  My father cut doorways into the bins and proceeded to make the middle area with the dirt floor into a kitchen and dining area.  The rooms that used to hold corn now became bedrooms.  The space above the central bay became a loft for another bedroom. He rigged up a water system and tinkered with a wind generator to store electricity in batteries.  The usual practice was to bring a charged battery with us so we could have lights at night, after we got past the era of oil lamps.

Anyway, this is all a long way of saying that Jon and I seem to be falling into some of the same patterns as the people who came before me.  When we bought Timothy's property, in the middle of the Loudoun farm, so that no one else would buy it and become an unpredictable nuisance to our farm, we did not really think about what it might mean to the two of us. We really had no idea that eventually we .would begin to be in Loudoun on a regular basis.  It was a whim, buying ten acres that we have never -- to this day -- walked through to the borders. Most of it is woods and most of it is steep and hilly. We just stay on the cleared edge, where Timothy built a cabin and planted a significant blueberry patch.  

Over the four years that we have owned the property, Jon has made gradual improvements.  We have running water in the summers, when the water is in the underground irrigation pipes at the farm. We have an outdoor shower which I adore, with hot water on demand. He installed a gas stove that was getting thrown away because the oven doesn't work.  Compared to my parents and grandparents, we are living in the lap of luxury.  It isn't really like camping at all, except that it is an escape from the tight and busy landscape of our home base.  

At night, when we are sleeping right under the metal roof, on a bed that is at the height of huge screened windows, the breeze moves over us.  Turkeys fuss all night long.  Sometimes foxes do a lot of screaming.  I have never had a night of insomnia in that bed. Even when it is cold (last week it was 37 degrees), the sleeping is great. And I think: Timothy was a genius.  The design of this cabin is unusual and sublime.  This season, for the first time ever, we finally cleaned up enough that it doesn't feel like we are living in a warehouse.  The other broken stove (that Jon is hoarding for some unknown reason) is not in the middle of the room anymore, it is parked on the edge of the living space. Most of the horizontal spaces are clear because there is no junk mail or paperwork that comes to that spot.

The whimsical reason that we decided to buy this property, in addition to keeping it away from strangers, was that we want to create a family compound. A place where our children and their families and cousins and their families will gather.  A place that is not defined by the farm but has its own identity as a recreational spot.  We haven't made much progress on the next big project (building a more-season house), but Jon says he is ready to start thinking about it.  

I would never have predicted, as one who really likes to have a refrigerator with orange juice, that I would willingly spend time in a primitive setting. But it isn't truly primitive, as Jon has made it much more civilized and we also have the Green Barn close by with every amenity (provided by Jon as well: a real bathroom, an insulated room that can be heated and cooled where we sit and have breakfast before the day starts) including a connection to the Internet.  So it is kind of like camping, but really not.

On Being There

A little while ago Dena asked me whether I was going to finish the story that I started to tell ten weeks ago.  I had written just before attending the funeral of a friend, and I had to stop and live life, not write about it, and I never went back to the story.  Of course there are reasons for not going back:  Nancy,one of my most loyal readers, is a main character in this story and I have not wanted to make her sadder than she already is by bringing it all up in this space.  Also, in some ways it is not my story to tell.  However, one of the goals of this evolving blog is to serve as a substitute for the journal that I kept for decades -- I really stopped writing by hand when this way of storing my words became so easy.  And if I were still writing by hand, I would have recorded all of this, without a doubt.  So, in that spirit, I am going back to February 22.  (Nancy, you can skip this one and come back to it in a few more months or years, if this is just too hard.)

As I might have said before, our friend Seldon spent four months trying to get strong enough to come home from the hospital or the rehab center. Starting in November he went through a long series of tests, setbacks, infections, sometimes getting well enough to go to a place that would help him get ready to go home, sometimes returning to the hospital. It was an exhausting winter for his whole family.  And as I said before, their community gathered around them and stayed close.  But it was Seldon's two daughters who took on the job of keeping close tabs on every aspect of his care, including making sure he was never alone. Not ever.

Seldon had the kindest heart and the most powerful intellect, and these two attributes carried him a long way in this really difficult journey from one hospital bed the next.  He also had great anxiety, and he worried about things he couldn't control and things he couldn't understand and he worried about his wife and daughters. He was completely unaccustomed to the powerless state he was in, and this caused him huge agitation. No doubt he was also in pain, but that wasn't the source of his stress. He worried that he would die, and he was unwilling to die, truly. In fact, for most of those months, he wasn't really in danger of dying right away.  He was strong.  But he was gradually declining and he was not in a mental state to process his decline. Even though he was 87, he was planning and expecting to live for much longer, so this experience was not in his plans.

He did get to go home, finally, and while it was wonderful to be together with his family, in one place, it was incredibly stressful for all of them. He had come to a place of constant need, of being unable to calm himself, so very anxious.  They were all in a state of uncertainty since it was very hard to see how to manage their collective future.  Soon he got another infection, as any one of us might have anticipated -- he was weakened by his long winter in bed -- and he had to go back to the hospital again.  At that time, no one knew that this would be his last trip, but anyone who was watching the trajectory (who was a medical person, not us), would probably have anticipated that this time might be different from all other times.

Now we will just switch over to telling the story from my own perspective, and not try to say what other people experienced.

Seldon went to the hospital with a urinary tract infection on Sunday afternoon, Feb 19,  I believe.  Now that we know how elderly people can react to a UTI, this should have been no surprise, but he was very stressed.  He also had pneumonia, which should have told us all what was about to come next, but he had recovered from pneumonia before. Nell and I were at our evening choir rehearsal that Sunday when Nell got a text from Helen (Nancy's sister), asking if someone could please check on Nancy as she was having a hard time at the hospital.  I decided to just go. I told our choir director that I had to leave, right in the middle of rehearsal, and I drove to Reston Hospital, just a few minutes away.  Nancy had not slept for a few nights and she was ragged, did not know what to do. Even though she had never agreed to leave her father in my care before, she had no choice this time.  I sent her home to sleep for a few hours and said I would stay (they had not had time to hire a caregiver on such short notice).  In hindsight, this was an important night for me -- I got to be with Seldon by myself for several hours. I took notes on all that was happening, doing what Nancy would have done, I hoped, and held his hand while he fretted.  He had an oxygen mask on which was very uncomfortable and he continually tried to take it off.  I battled with him in between his brief naps.  Jon brought the bag of medications from the Krugers' house, but he could not bear to stay as it was too hard to see Seldon in this state. I was used to it and did not feel sad or uncomfortable.  I did make one tactical error which caused Seldon more stress -- they had put mittens on his hands to keep him from yanking his tubes, and those mittens made him completely crazy. He could not rest, as he was absolutely focused on removing them.  So I said I would take them off but he had to stop pulling his oxygen tube out. He agreed. Well, of course, at some point he just yanked the mask off and then we had to get help to put it back on and he had a couple minutes of extremely frightening lack of air.  Nancy came back to the hospital right then, which I felt bad about, because I had been part of this mini-drama, and while it didn't cause any lasting harm, it added to the feeling of powerlessness and fear for both of them. I went back home and crawled into bed, leaving Nancy to the remainder of another sleepness night.

After that night, Seldon's decline did not stop. The rabbi and cantor were vigilant and spent lots of time with the family.  Some doctors began to warn the family that this time he might not be able to fight the infections.  It took many conversations over the next days, as the reality of his condition became clear to everyone. Nell got to be the second person who sat with Seldon by herself, while the family had some hard conversations with clergy.

Meanwhile, I was not there. We were in the midst of an unseasonably warm February and the soil was as dry as late May.  Farmers everywhere were tilling their fields.  I resisted that temptation for several days, but on February 22 it seemed like it made sense to spade up the ground that we would want for our first plantings in a month. There was no downside.  I got on the tractor in the middle of winter and spaded up some lovely, loose soil. By late morning, I got messages from both Nell and Nancy, updating me, and I got the strong feeling that I should get off that tractor and go to the hospital. I told Carrie I would not be reliable as a spinach picker that afternoon, I changed into some clean clothes, grabbed some lunch for Nell (who had cleared her day to be in the hospital), and went indoors with some regret. 

It was the place to be, despite the glorious weather outside.  Gradually we all gathered in Seldon's hospital room.  The family had decided to stop trying to heal him and they were now preparing to ask only for comfort care.  Hannah, our dear friend who is a doctor and knows how to do all of this, quietly managed what she could without getting in the way of the doctors in charge.  Roz, our dear friend who is a rabbi and knows how to do all of this, quietly managed what she could without getting in the way of the current clergy.  We filled the room: Nell, Helen, Nancy, two longtime family friends, Hannah, Roz, Ruth the wife of 61 years, Nora the adopted granddaughter, me, Seldon and eventually Michael the rabbi were all there.  Seldon slept quietly, with enough morphine to keep him from feeling anything. He snored, we talked, we sang, we cried, we talked. It was an unprecedented time, in my experience.  At one point I started to feel nervous, and Hannah the doctor looked right at me and asked if I was okay. I said I had never actually been in the presence of someone who was going to die while I was there.  She said it would be really fine, and we had no idea how long we would wait, but it probably wasn't going to be very long. In fact, it was 55 minutes from the time they stopped giving him antibiotics and oxygen to the time he stopped breathing. So very quick. 

His breathing slowed and then it stopped.  There was no drama. The tableau was like a Rembrandt painting -- the elderly man on the bed, one man and many women all around, one daughter draped over the bed, wife holding his hand, all of us focused on giving him our support. He had been afraid of dying alone.  He had been afraid of the night because he didn't want to die in the night.  He died surrounded by people who loved him, in the daylight, and he didn't suffer. We sang him into the next place, wherever that is.

Then there was a flurry of the kind of activity that can only happen after someone has actually died.  Plans started.  The clergy advised the family.  People began to return to their lives.  I stayed with the body, along with a young person who has been part of the Kruger family for her whole life. We sat in the darkening room, quietly together, for a few hours while we waited for the funeral home people to come and take the body. The young person was also a nurse, so she helped the hospital people clean the body. We never left him by himself, as is the Jewish custom, and as he would have wanted.  Seldon always liked company, and it was a tribute to him that we all wanted to keep him company.  He was a special man.

And at his funeral, some of us learned for the first time about how that kind heart and that giant intellect was such a force for good, all of his life. And how much he was loved, all of his life.  And coddled, all of his life.

I was privileged to know him and to be allowed to sit with him during those last months and weeks and hours.  I only knew the last tiny part of who he was, but I am honored to have been close by.