Triptych

Three Months Ago: Incidental Findings

Your x-ray is as expected, read the report: severe degenerative disease in C-4, 5 and 6.  Continue treatment plan as indicated. As an incidental finding, imaging also shows extensive calcifications on the carotid artery.  Please follow up with your doctor.   

Carotid calcifications? I don’t know that term, so I am off to the races with research.  A medical writer for most of my career, I know how to figure things out.  I am what some doctors call that pain-in-the-ass patient. Proud of that.

After extensive searching, multiple tests, and many appointments, here’s the short version. Carotid calcifications are a form of heart disease --- atherosclerosis.  If you have them in your carotid, which is a big tube, you probably have them in smaller tubes, like your heart, brain or limbs.  So, not a great diagnosis.  I don’t have any risk factors for heart disease, except one: age. I am still figuring out what my real risk for heart attacks or strokes is, but the early indications are, probably not too bad.  I have joined the roughly 40 million Americans who take statins, which is fine by me.  I have come to believe that these are powerfully protective drugs.

This has been my year of “incidental findings” – things we weren’t looking for but found anyway. I've come to hate that phrase. My neck x-ray delivered an incidental finding of carotid calcifications.  My carotid ultrasound delivered an incidental finding of a thyroid nodule.  My cardiac CT scan delivered an incidental finding of a mass on my liver.  Every scan prompted another scan—six in two months.  What actual, useful information has all this scanning delivered?  Just about every single one of them said “Yep. That’s what we thought.  But wait! What’s that over here?”  The answer, in most cases, has been: a big nothingburger.  I'm lucky. 

We humans grow lumps and bumps and scars as we age. As biological organisms, it’s just what we do. They’re not attractive.  But most of them aren’t really dangerous either.  A generation ago, we wouldn’t have known about them. As medical imaging gets more powerful, we do know.  But after the merry-go-round of the last three months, and as grateful as I am for the medical care I have available to me, I have to ask:

Do I really need to know all this?

Three Weeks Ago: Visiting Anthropologist

Not long ago, I had dinner with some professional women friends.  This is a group that gets together regularly to talk, eat, drink, catch up on our lives. About half of us have retired in the past few years. The others are still swinging away.

I admire these women.  They have made their way in a man’s world, ascending to the top of their professions.  They have highly challenging jobs, lots of responsibility, leadership roles that affect a lot of lives.  They are hard charging people.  But they are also kind, compassionate, and seek to do good in this world.

As we talked over the remains of our dinner, each shared what she was up to. What their families were doing. How they saw their futures.  When it was my turn, someone asked: What about you, Liz? Are you still counseling?  I answered as I usually do: Yes, I am counseling and teaching; writing and publishing. Leading meditation workshops; a bit of public speaking.

How interesting, someone finally said, in that way that makes you wonder: Really? Is that interesting to you? So I added something I often say: every single thing in my day is something I chose to put there. I feel lucky.

A silence hovered over the table. I thought of that Sesame Street Song:

One of these things

is not like

the others . . .

Credit: SesameStreetGuide

I used to swim in that part of the river. Now, I am that weird meditating/grief counseling/California manifester who thinks she gets paid in karma dollars.  The realization didn’t cause me angst.  But I did feel a bit like a visiting anthropologist, observing another species.  I don’t remember feeling this way the last time we all got together.  Have I moved on? Do I not fit here anymore?

The following week, I sent a thank you note to our host. I told her that the vibrant, interesting, admirable women she had collected around her was a tribute to the person she is. She fired back a message that read, in part:

Thank you for honoring me with your friendship and for helping me get to where I am.  You are the heart of our circle.  Keep being you and the rest of us will try to keep up.  

My friend may have intuited that I was feeling outside of things.  Or, she’s just kind.  Both, I think. But what a gift. That note—which she didn’t have to take time to write -- made me think about the dinner encounter in a whole new light.  It also made me wonder: how often, out of our own insecurity, do we make outsiders of ourselves?

Three Days Ago:  Show Your Scars

It was one of those soft, beautiful Redwood City evenings. A group of us decided to go out to dinner after our meditation circle.  For that night's session, I’d chosen the subject Finding stillness in a turbulent world.  This golden, peaceful evening was the very definition of stillness. We sat outdoors in the gathering night, enjoying mu shu pork, spicy cucumbers and each other.  How long have you been meditating? someone asked me. 

 I had to think.  I tried—and failed—at meditation when I was about 40.  At about 50, I began a practice that was more or less regular.  Since my son Carson died, it’s been essential; I do it about the way I brush my teeth. 

You know, this person said, you wear your life on your face.  All of it. The joy. The sadness. I can see it, every time I look at you.

 I love this idea: You wear your life on your face. 

In my last Writing Through Grief class, we talked a lot about authenticity—showing up in the world as who were truly are, moment to moment.  No performance. No pretense. No hiding the brokenness we carry around after life has tried to kill us.  It’s incredibly freeing.  It’s one thing I think my students take away from the course that isn’t really about grief. 

This group of writers gave themselves over to authenticity wholeheartedly.  They risked a lot and cried often. Without self-consciousness, they showed their less lovely characteristics—envy, pettiness, despair, anger; things we all feel but try to hide most of the time. They were vulnerable with each other from the very first session.  As we say around Kara, they went deep fast. The final session was full of laughter, tears, hugs, flowers, gratitude. We shared food; we kicked around the idea of writing a cookbook called Cooking Through Grief, compiling our favorite comfort foods.  It’s not a bad idea.

In the days after the class ended, I have been tired—really tired -- in all the best ways.  This is as it should be.  It says I poured the right amount of myself into the course. 

People often ask me: Why do you do this grief work? It’s so depressing!  How can you stand it?  I think about my writers; about the courage it takes to show up as your true self. I think about wearing your life on your face. I don’t think I could stand not doing it.

I am glad this old body has gotten to the place where it has the lumps and bumps and deeply etched grooves that come with living a long time. 

I am glad to discover that I can be wrong; that with a little more data, I can come to see that something I thought was one thing actually turned out to be another. 

I am glad to get exhausted doing something I consider important.

Mostly, I am glad to have lived long enough, and loved hard enough, to feel grief the way I do.