When Holidays Haunt Us With Empty Chairs, Remember This:

“A chair is still a chair, even when there’s no one sitting there …” An empty chair, an approaching holiday, tosses us into a desperate wilderness without a map. And it’s messy off the map, no matter what age — this year, particularly so.

This post is for you, the one who is holding your breath a little too tightly to your heart because this is the season when that chair becomes so much more than a chair — and you feel like you are not going to make it through. You, covering up, yet cracked wide open. I see you.

I see your bravery, navigating through the wilderness of loss. I want to remind you – to remember with you – that this wilderness is not so desperate a place when we recognize that we are the embodied sum of our experiences with love.

COVID-19: Sheltering in with Ethylene Oxide

My voice is muffled beneath a mask, my glasses steamed. I cannot see beyond the irony of a societal mandate intended to keep me and others safe.

Words fall in a heap at my keyboard. I cannot grab them fast enough. There is no sentence structure that makes sense of this, no punctuation that touches what it is I feel when I read the reports, watch the newscasts, witness the social media battles about masks and rights.

Shelter in. Social distance. Wear a mask.

Breast cancer. High risk. Ethylene oxide.

Tucked away, I have the questionable comfort of a home in a high risk zone, a cancer corridor, just a mile away from a medical sterilization plant that uses ethylene oxide. I am sheltering in with unacceptable levels of a known carcinogen as my companion. My underlying health condition caused by the air I breathe.

2020. Vision. Not Hindsight.

If “hindsight is 20/20,” then 2020 is the infamous year for which we’ve all been waiting. For those too young – or smart – to know this phrase: hindsight means “thinking about things after they’ve happened” and 20/20 means “perfect vision.”

The more optimistic, glass-half-full version of this phrase would be, “I always seem to grow smarter in retrospect.” The glass, half empty, would be, “I should have known better.”

THIS is the year when it all comes together, because our hinder will be in clear sight. Hinder, as in “belonging to that part or end which is in the rear,” as in our rear with no regrets to follow, as in no one’s butt to kiss but our own. WooHoo. 🙂

We are heading straight into 2020, the heavily prophesied, magical year when the rear view mirror is replaced with a crystal ball. The year when wisdom is harvested in advance, like low-hanging fruit in an orchard, ripe and ready for the picking.

Let’s take a nice, deep breath here while we imagine the possibilities.

Hitting Pause. Nurturing Essentials.

What do you cherish? What delights you and drives you to devotion? I don’t want to know what you like. What do you cherish?

Heading into my third holiday season after Ray’s transition, I cherish that you will read on, and indulge me in savoring a sweet memory from our courtship days while you search your own heart for that which you cherish.

Honeymoon Photo Booth Fun 1975

I was working in an art studio in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan when Ray and I met. He’d returned to Detroit, after living seven years in New York City, and had been back only a few weeks when we went on our first date. The city had burned him out – he thought – but he was coming back to find me. We just didn’t know it yet.

I was 20. He was 28. He asked me to marry him, one month later. There was no doubt in my heart that YES was the only answer. Within seven weeks, we were married.

Living a Fairy Tale. Embracing the Slide.

With the drama of all my recent posts about cancer and toxic air, it’s time for me to blog a happy tale. One that encourages you to pay attention to the whispers and follow where inspiration leads.

There is a fun, “spooky” story behind this picture of comp book and pen. If you know me at all, you know I like to write. If you know me really well, you know I have to write. Writing helps me maintain perspective, keep my sense of humor, gain clarity, and stay close to the guidance that gets me through this messy life with some degree of grace.

My favorite time to set pen in motion is in the morning during my quiet time, a daily ritual of contemplation, prayer, and reading that sets the tone for my day before the rest of the world does. It was in one of those quiet times that I was given the vision of two women sitting on a hill, silhouetted by a gorgeous sunset. I had the sense that one of the women was older and wiser, perhaps even an angel, when I heard her speak these words.

“Some might say this was a story told to me by a woman mad with grief, but to sit in her presence was compelling; the more she spoke, the more I was drawn in by a desire to believe that what she told me could be so.”

“Wow. What a great lead in for a movie,” I thought, as I took in the scene before me.

“Write that down,” something inside me prompted.

Canaries. Tipping Points. Deadly Toxins.

When I took this shot of the white rose and my shadow, I did not see the larger shadow looming behind me — the shadow of a factory spilling toxic ethylene oxide into the air I breathe. I did not see the loss of Ray to cancer. I did not see a mastectomy in my future.

Instead, I saw a moment, seized: creative play with a single rose and a camera. I saw a blue sky on a clear, crisp day. I saw children running, chasing each other in the playground of the daycare behind my home. I heard their excited shrieks and laughter, as my camera clicked away.

Canary in a coal mine.
For those who don’t know the phrase, miners would carry caged canaries down into the mine tunnels with them. If dangerous gases collected in the mine, the gases would kill the canary before killing the miners, thus providing a warning to exit the tunnels immediately.

I didn’t see canaries on the day I took that shot but, today, I hear their outcry in this community I love. I feel the panic of those around me who scramble to find the door out of this invisible cage within which we reside. I feel the pressure of broken trust and betrayal while the systems designed to protect us now dismiss us. I feel the heartbreak in the stories shared, all while this factory and some leaders insist there is nothing as wrong as “all that.” After all, who really knows what causes cancer in one and not another. Right?

Breast Cancer. Kissing My Breast Goodbye.

Written for every woman who lost, or is losing this intimate partner.

—–Originally posted, August 17, 2017, on my old website. Re-post worthy.—–

I find myself on the merging ramp to a mastectomy and wishing to yield, for just a moment, before this breast becomes a blurred memory in the traffic flow of life.

She is the part I must release to protect the whole, but she will not go without notice or appreciation for what she held space.

There is a body of experience in this sweet breast of mine. She and her sister were late bloomers. No doubt, I got that premature training bra because my mother was tired of fielding questions that always started with a whiny “When…”

As intimate partners go, both breasts have been first class. But she is the one that held space over my heart. For that I grieve her loss. I would love to kiss her for all that we’ve gone through together – but she is not that large nor I that agile.

Sound strange?

Our bodies are living, breathing temples that hold space for a fusion of body, mind, and spirit – from the most elemental level to the most sublimely sacred that life has to offer. And each part speaks to aspects of experience that leave imprints – clues – as to how we maneuver through and integrate events from the significant to the mundane.

Healing Art, Mixed Media, and Paper Flowers.

I saw the vision of a woman. She coaxed me into the studio after these words popped onto the page of my journal one morning.

“He gave her paper flowers,
because he knew that she loved words.
Wax-pressed intent upon her heart,
that his voice within be heard.”

I thought this piece of art was finished when I framed and entered it in last year’s Artful Harvest show, hosted by my local art guild. Since then, she’s been hanging on a wall adjacent to my computer area. I walk by her every day.

She quietly holds space for me, like one of those tent cards that reserve your seat at a banquet table, waiting for me to venture back into the studio. Time in the studio, that once was Ray’s, comes with hurdles. It’s that grace and grief thing, creating a kind of chaos in my heart, healing through a cosmic codependency with my creative compadre, now on the other side of the veil after losing his fight with cancer. Expressing my creativity looks vastly different now as I work to heal beyond not only losing him, but also losing a breast to cancer just five months after his departure.  

Dear Doctors, While you profiled stress, he died of cancer.

He didn’t have to die. Not the way he did. I write these words not for drama sake nor your pity and prayers. I have been silent, up to this point, in order to deal with my own health issue. But now that I am finished with what I hope to be my final big deal in this breast cancer journey, it’s time to speak up.

PLEASE NOTE: The article below was originally posted on my old blog. I am re-posting due to the latest revelations about the ethylene oxide emissions in my community. I am stunned. You will find the link to the update article at the bottom of this post. 

— — — — — — —

February 6, 2018

Denial never sustainably served anyone. I am not sweeping this under the rug. Consider this post a tiny ripple in a vast ocean of health care despair; urging attention, focus and advocacy for solutions in a health care system that breaks as many hearts — in what they miss and dismiss — as the diseases/conditions they work to cure.

“… Ray lived only 50 days beyond diagnosis and most of that in a hospital. And now, I am left to digest that it was a slow-growing cancer, missed by a medical system of specialists and primary care that only looked at their piece of the elephant. A blog for another day.” — Why I’m Not Fighting Cancer Again,  July 2017

Today is another day. Why today? Because on February 6, 2017, I was not sitting at a keyboard in front of a computer screen. I was sitting in the emergency room of a hospital an hour away from home, terrified that someone I loved lost his footing and fell between the cracks within the medical community that was supposed to help him — to the point that suicide now appeared his only option for relief.

Ray Died. I Got Breast Cancer. Ethylene Oxide. Medical Mayhem.

In 2001, Ray and I bought a house in a neighborhood not far from a plant that uses ethylene oxide, a chemical used to sterilize medical equipment. It is a mutagen, meaning that it alters genetic material in cells, and is known by the EPA to cause cancer.

Ray and I didn’t know all that stuff when we moved into our 100-year-old mill house. Didn’t know that we needed to. We were excited about the creative venture of remodeling our new home, and looked forward to experiencing what life had to offer in Covington, Georgia, a small bedroom community east of Atlanta.

March 26, 2017, Ray died of cancer, found too late. Stage IV metastatic. In his liver, lungs, spine, and brain. Just 3 months after he died, I was diagnosed with Stage II breast cancer, invasive lobular carcinoma. The medical devices and supplies used in Ray’s final days at Emory Hospital, and used for my mastectomy at Piedmont/Rockdale Hospital, might very well have come from this medical equipment plant. A plant now on the radar for emissions that could have caused the cancer that took Ray and my breast.

With documented leakages, and questionable self-reporting of the emissions leaving their facilities, I guess we needed to know all that stuff after all. The watchdogs entrusted to do their jobs were sleeping, it seems. Or looking the other way.

Does anybody else see the irony here? A company that makes its money supplying hospitals and doctors with medical equipment also supplying hospitals and doctors with patients?

I can only label this as “full circle medical mayhem.”