PTSD.
Hello old friends!
It’s been a long time. To be fair—I was on vacation for three of the last five weeks that I haven’t posted. Would you be writing blog posts from the Napa Valley, or the island of Kauai?
But I’ve missed you, and missed writing, though the longer I went, the harder it seemed to get back to. Not a case of too little to say, but too much—that old thing. Anyone who has ever heard a seminarian preach knows what I’m talking about.
Honestly, too, there was a lot of trauma on or around our vacation, and I knew I might have my lei revoked if I came home from 3 weeks in paradise and started complaining. But so it goes. Someone asked Peter recently how our vacation was, and he said, “Incredible! When it wasn’t awful.”
First, the incredible. Here’s a little peek into where we went, who we saw, and what we did:
Slate board full of yum, Boxing Day, Oakland, CA with Peter’s sisters, brothers, stepmom, nieces, nephews. Cousins rejoiced!
Fabulous brunch (yes! those are fries at breakfast) in Los Angeles with Aisha and Jeff. Do you see a theme emerging?
After hiking to the Hollywood sign (hard work! You can see the “D” behind us) with bestie Ish.
Making more good memories with my bestie Sarah in Napa Valley, and all our crazy and sweet kids and hubbies:
Wine-tasting in Sonoma with my fabulous sibs in law Carmen and Brett, and one of their beauties:
n S
Tasting sparkling beverages on New Year’s Eve Day at Domaine Chandon winery, with sister Sammy and our friend Steve (another theme emerges…)
Then, on to Hawaii, where we relaxed:
Relaxed:
And relaxed:
We did get a little bit of exercise. Biking the seaside path in Kapa’a town, with sweet Ambrosia snugged in with Carmen:
Hiking Waimea Canyon:
LOTS of snorkeling (sea turtles! butterflyfish! needlefish! humuhumunukunukupua’a!) and swimming:
Rafe and cousin Aqua (knuckles!) swimming the keiki ocean pool at our condo in Kapa’a Town.
There were also good times with the Olsen Ohana, on uncle Rich’s farm above Kealia Beach, eating corn he pulled off the stalk, warm in the husk, and jicama fresh from the ground:
And sister reunion—sweet Tess:
And more treats. Rafe scales his first shave ice, solo:
While Carmen tries to pass as a local:
Celebratory meal at a fancy restaurant with tiki torches (so cheesy, and so darn fun!):
And amidst our bacchanalia of mai tais and local organic yadda yadda food, nature would just stop us in our tracks periodically. Menehune Fish Pond, near Nawiliwili (a town so improbably and hilariously named that Peter wrote and recorded a song about it with the kids. Maybe I will ply him with beer and convince him to let me post it on the blog).
Now, a little of the awful. The second day of vacation, I was giddy with leisure, jetlagged, confused by being in someone else’s space (my sister-in-law’s gorgeous house in the Oakland hills), and maybe the merest bit hung over on Sonoma zinfandel. I poured Carmen cow milk in her Cheerios. She had one bite, and clutched her throat in agony. We went to the ER. Three hours later, and two hours after they had administered all her meds (Epi-pen, Benedryl, Prednisone, Prilosec), her face blew up, like this:
They decided to keep her overnight for observation, because of the secondary reaction. We were far from the worst-off there. There were kids with masks on. Kids missing hair. Kids in oxygen tents. Kids who didn’t seem to have enough limbs, somehow. There were tubes and vitals checks and blood where there shouldn’t be blood. The whole event was traumatizing for Carmen, and re-traumatizing for me (too many hospitals!).
When her face first blew up like that, I started hyperventilating and sobbing, and didn’t stop sobbing for two hours. It is a terrible thing to have the power to kill your child because you reached for the wrong milk, absent-mindedly.
There were a lot of other big and little traumas on the trip. Among the biggest, news that someone very very dear to me was seriously contemplating taking her own life. She got help. I felt helpless, and far away, and scared for her.
We came home to Post Terrific Stress Disorder: single-digit cold, then snow, then various people from my past as a pastor coming at me with all their crazy. This is a peril of ministry. When you leave a church, you establish the idea that people are not really to contact you—they are to bond with their new pastor. But if they leave the church first, then they can find you whenever, wherever they are in crisis—it’s on their terms. And how do you turn them away? It seems so cold-hearted, but I’ve tried to help many of them, and as I think I’ve probably said before here, it’s the people who most need help who are least able to be helped.
In the middle of all of this, I had my chemoversary. The end of chemo. I think it is testimony to the much smaller place that cancer is beginning to take up in my life, that I didn’t feel the need to blog on that day, or celebrate in a big way. The kids and Peter made me a card:
You can see Rafe got my scarred tear ducts anatomically correct.
The message reads:
“Dear Mom,
(rafe) Last year was very hard on all of us. We were all glad when it ended. We’ll celebrate that day from now on. An Aniversery! much love, Rafael
(carmen) CARMEN
(peter) One down, 50 to go. Love, Me
Caring doctors
A lot of saddness
No fun
Caring family
Everyone hated it
Ruins our family”
(not to put too fine a point on it, eh?)
…And the kids bought me some earrings. We decided this will be our tradition from now on, on January 22 every year. I was hoping for a trip to Paris. But earrings are ok, too.
All of this trauma, and re-trauma, makes me realize something in a deep-down way that I only got intellectually before: PTSD is real. And one of the ways we deal with it, is putting distance between ourselves and that which might re-traumatize us. I’ve said before that there were a couple people who took off when I was diagnosed, without a word, really.
I was really hurt, and angry at them. One was a cancer survivor herself, and one was widowed by cancer. I understood, intellectually, why they couldn’t watch me go through it. But I still wanted them to (wo)man up and acknowledge it to my face.
Now that I’m facing so much of other people’s trauma all at once myself, I get the need to flee. The night Carmen was in the hospital in Oakland, Peter relieved me at 4am so I could fly to Los Angeles and drink manhattans with my college roommates. What kind of a mother would do that? I said to myself. But I knew it was exactly what my spirit needed. I could get away, escape, unplug, regroup, and come back ready to feed Carmen another 23,375 meals (some of which will surely send her to the hospital), until she is 18 and on her own.
I wish I could formulate, on the year anniversary of my end-of-treatment, exactly what cancer taught me, and did for me. There’s still too much to make it a tidy blog post. But here are a couple of truths, that happen to conflict. Maybe that’s how this is going play. Every once in a while I can write a little equal-and-opposite Twin Truths of Cancer. Here’s #1:
Cancer made me realize how fragile and wonderful life is. So I cherish it more. I watch my kids tenderly. I give high priority to activities that will make me laugh. I cry easily on behalf of other people. I feel things acutely.
Cancer also made me a narcissistic asshole. I survived. So far. And that just makes me want to party all the time! And not feel the bad things so acutely, and that means: if I can’t naturally dial down the volume on my empathy for others in trauma, and I can’t sometimes, because of the way cancer reconfigured me, then I need to distance from it. This is not as tricky as you might think with parishioners, who expect me to have a little professional distance. But it’s quite tricky with family and friends, who might feel let down if I’m not all up in it with them.
All this is to say to my friends who fled: I get it. I really, really get it. I’m not mad anymore. I really love you, and I’m so glad for all the years and memories we had, and maybe there will be more for us, but I’m not counting on it, and that’s ok.
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