Elizabeth Edwards, Saving Graces

I just finished Elizabeth Edwards' book, Saving Graces, and I had such a reaction to it, I wondered what I could write about it. Even though this is not one I will send on to Donna, I do like to keep some sort of track of what I've read because it helps me remember. It finally came to me what I wanted to say.

Well, I need to backtrack a little - I didn't finish the book as much as I read word for word through chapter 5, and then I arrived at chapter 6. This is the one where Elizabeth starts out:

I've come to a chapter that I knew I would have to write. By an unspeakably vast margin there is no part of my life, or any life, that speaks more to what this book is about.... a place of profound pain.... I do not want to endure the writing of this chapter, but I will....

I recognized right away where Elizabeth was in her story, because I knew about Wade.

I read chapter 6, and I understood. I skimmed chapter 7, and I walked part of the journey with her. I knew where she was. And then I skimmed the rest of the book.

Being a John Edwards fan, and a fan of his courageous wife Elizabeth, who has battled cancer and is now engaged in a second battle with it, I wanted to get some insight on this family - primarily, this couple and how they relate to one another. When one is attracted to someone as a potential President of the United States, one wants to know about the spouse because, as I've learned over the years, knowing only one spouse is only half knowing.

I learned a lot about Elizabeth as a woman. She's strong, somewhat impulsive, and a very straight-forward, intelligent woman who shoots from the hip, with amazing accuracy.

I also know that she's defined not only by her strong personality and her intellect, but also by her family - her husband and her children. But of all those defining moments and traits, she's most defined by the death of her son, Wade. I know about that. I know that Wade's death was a defining moment for her whole family. Recounting a story her brother told her, about a tree that has been wounded by a stake which was driven into it, she says:

The tree, obviously, could do nothing about the stake, so it had grown around it, acknowledging the injury but living nonetheless. [Speaking about the wound of Wade's death, she says:] I could not excise that spike even if I wanted to.

Yes, it's a mistake for us, and for others, to expect that we will grieve it out, that we will experience some magic thing called closure and then get on with it. What we really do is just learn to wear it and get on with it clothed in this new reality. It's with us the rest of our lives.

The book is good and full of insights about Elizabeth and her family. People who like the Edwards family will learn to know them better. People who don't like the Edwards family (as the potential first family of the land) will learn about this courageous woman's life. Either way, people will win when they read the book. It's that good, that honest.

This book will go to the library with my next batch of donated books. I'll not forward it on to Donna. It's more of a mother's story than a sister's story, and it's too close to home for Donna to read it objectively, in my opinion. Donna is of the here and now, being the heart of the home for her four children (now three because one is grown) and busy husband, as well as contributing to her community with her own set of strengths. Her job is to be focused on now and the future because her job is so important.

I do hope Elizabeth writes another book and tells us more of her story, tells us how she's fighting this current battle with cancer, and shares her strength with all of us so we can borrow from it as we fight the battles that are in our daily lives.

Elizabeth isn't perfect - none of us are, but by sharing our stories, we DO encourage each other and give each other strength. Thanks, Elizabeth. From one mom to another, from one woman to another!

Amazing! I finished two projects ...

... one started late 2001, and another started in the spring of 2003. I have other projects that need my hand to pick up a needle, but these were my two big ones.

The most recent of the projects, which I finished today, is a quilt I made from scraps I cut from my mother's slacks after she died. I made six quilt tops: three for my brother's children, two for my sister's. and one for Donna. I sent the tops to my sister and my brother's wife at least a year ago, but Donna's has been neatly tucked in my to-do stack since then. Four years after the start date, I'm finished. The quilt is now wrapped in a large plastic bag and placed in Donna's cedar chest.

Each embroideried square represents an event in Mom and Dad's lives together - their marriage, the places they lived, the birth of their children, grandchildren, and those great-grandchildren who were born before Mom died. The quilt is all machine done, including the embroidery on the "history" squares.

The quilt is big enough to lay over you if you're sitting around reading a book or watching TV, or just want a little wrap during a nap. It's a comfort thing, like food.

Family is magic, a way of life for us, our biggest blessing. With family, we love, we fight, we make up, we travel, we handle the struggles and joys of daily living. Family encompasses an entire lifestyle, with everything else falling somewhere in between. This quilt is a representation of the family created by Raymond and Helen.

My other project is that huge bedspread I've been working on, since probably late 2001, which was intended to cover our super-bed - two twins pushed together. It also was my first real experience at paper piecing. I have to confess, I'm not a quilter. With the exception of a quilt I made years ago - a log cabin for a dear friend's first grandchild - two quilts represent the sum of my quilting experience. The real quilters in my family are my daughter, my sister, and my sister-in-law. If I learn enough just to appreciate the work they put into their end-products, I will have accomplished a great deal.

The good news is that the quilt is done and now lays across a bed. But it's the wrong bed. It's too small, by perhaps 12 inches, to fit across our super-bed. And I thought I measured carefully. During my prolonged starts and stops on this quilt, I must have slipped a gear and gotten on the wrong track without realizing it. But for what it's worth, here it is - and I am a new person because this huge project is now out of my to-do stack!




At first, I said to Lauren that I'm not going to do this again. But before the day was over, I started looking through my books for something else I might enjoy learning. I think I've settled on a strip-quilt technique for my next attempt - an attempt I hope manages to create a quilt big enough to cover that bed and hang down the foot and sides to where it covers the top of the dust ruffle. Good luck to me!

So many books, so little time...

As I look around me, in a quest to simplify my life, I realize that my zest for owning interesting writings and how-to-books by others has outgrown its usefulness. I need to unload books, books, and more books. Yet, how can I part with these dear treasures until I have loved and read them properly.

Today, I was fortunate to have a moment of clarity that allowed me to take 20 quilting and woodworking books off my shelves and secure them in plastic grocery bags, suitable for delivery to our local library.

I am rarely successful doing this, because after the 20th book, I move to the 21st book and realize that I can't part with any of them. My mind becomes a muddle and I find myself unable to render a decision about anything! But today, I did ok. The 20 books are on the credenza in the hallway, and Lauren knows the routine to pick them up as he walks out the door, stop by the library, ring the bell at the back door, and deliver the two nicely secured bags to the person who answers.

I like it when Lauren does the delivery work for me. When I'm the delivery person, I always think those those people know I'm guilty of being a bookaholic and they're probably snickering as they help me relieve a tiny piece of my guilty conscious.

Pleased with my success and thinking to fool myself by switching to books of a different topic, I moved to the living room and started on a shelf with books about literature and the written word. The first book I picked up was Ex Libris, Confessions of a Common Reader, by Anne Fadiman. Fadiman used to write the end article in Good Housekeeping (or some other magazine I like to read), and I loved her no-nonsense laced-with-humor style. Her writings are of the kind that make you choke as surprise laughter erupts from your throat. She builds you up with suspense about where she's going next, and then she nails the truth. Erma Bombeck had a similar style of humor that takes you in before you know it. I always have to go back and read the preceding sentences to see where I was caught, where I should have anticipated the gotcha to come. To me, the style is pure genius!

Selecting the Fadiman as my first candidate from this bunch, I fail. It's such a nice, small, and compact book. It measures about 5 x 7, it has a strange green and yellow cover, with brown lettering, and the title is so catchy. It's just cute! Even so, were those the book's only redeeming qualities, I could probably part with it, but I made the mistake of opening it, and I was done for.

The chapter was Words on a Flyleaf, and it describes a period when Anne and her future husband were courting ("courting" seems like a more accurate description than "dating" - courting implies those long looks from the side, the lowered eyelashes, the hesitancy as you give forward a piece of your feelings and hope to receive like feelings in return). They gave each other books for Christmas. He wrote, on the third page of the book he gave her: To a new true friend. The book Anne gave George had been autographed by the author, and Anne recounts her additional inscription like this:

I wrote: To George, with love from Anne. Then I mistranscribed a quotation from Red Smith. And finally - on the principle that if you don't know what to say, say everything - I added fifteen lines of my own reflections on the nature of intimacy... It's a miracle that the book, its recipient, and the new true friendship weren't all crushed under the weight of the inscription.

Overwriting! Do all book lovers overwrite? How many times have I done the same! This was one of the many gotchas in Fadiman's little book, Ex Libris, and I love every one of them.

Ex Libris is the only Fadiman book I own, so it's going to stay on my shelf for a while longer. It's a joyful thing to pick it up and read a few lines. When I first purchased it, I read the whole thing, but reading it all at once isn't a requirement for a jewel like this. You can drop in at any point, visit for a few minutes, and then drop out. It's that satisfying.

With a little luck, I'll have another moment of clarity some day soon, but I won't start with the shelf where Fadiman's book resides. No way!

Paul Farmer, a modern day apostle

I just finished reading Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. It was an informative and thought-provoking book on many levels. I'm sure I could spend hours, days, and weeks, just thinking about the many messages in the book.

I'm not sure where I first spied this book, but I am sure I purchased it because it was written by Tracy Kidder. Kidder wrote Home Town, a much thicker book, which I picked up some years ago on one of my expeditions to Barnes and Noble. Home Town is the story of a town in New England and its residents, primarily about a young policeman and his life in the town. See http://www.bookpage.com/9905bp/tracy_kidder.html for a nicely-written interview by Ellen Kanner with Tracy Kidder. Although Home Town is factual, it reads like a novel, and I found myself involved in the lives of Kidder's subjects. The book was memorable.

I purchased Mountains Beyond Mountains based solely on the fact that Kidder was the author, with little or no thought to the subject matter or to the fact that Kidder later received a Pulitzer for another book he wrote. For more information on Kidder, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracy_Kidder.

Mountains Beyond Mountains is about Paul Farmer, a current-day American who has devoted his life to health care for the poor - primarily in Haiti, and primarily in an effort to control and hopefully eradicate TB. I had never heard of Farmer before I read this book.

In the beginning of the book, Kidder describes Farmer's growing up years in a non-typical family situation, reminding me a lot of Jeanette Walls' story in her memoir, The Glass Castle, also a most interesting and worthy read. Kids from "underprivileged" environments don't always end up as adults living in poverty - or worse, jail.

Farmer is nothing short of genius, and he has used his life in a single-minded, devoted effort to make a significant difference in health care for the poor. To understand the story, you must read the book - and I doubt that anyone who reads it will feel they have wasted any of the time it took. The story is life-changing.

As I read the book, I kept wondering about this fellow. What makes him tick? For myself, I think he's living out his understanding of the Bible in every breath he takes. Every reason he gives for doing what he does goes back to some reference in the Bible. In one quote, Kidder recounts this explanation from Farmer:

All the great religious traditions of the world say, Love thy neighbor as thyself. My answer is, I'm sorry, I can't, but I'm gonna keep on trying... (page 213 of the 2004 Random House Trade Paperback Edition)

In another passage, Farmer quotes and then paraphrases an ending to Matthew 25:

Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me ... Then it says, Inasmuch as you did it not, you're screwed. (page 185 of the 2004 Random House Trade Paperback Edition)

Farmer goes against all conventional wisdom to achieve his goal. He loves each individual and remembers each as an individual, not as a class of people. He'll travel around the world to take care of someone who needs help. He doesn't take care of himself (and oft times, he doesn't take care of those near and dear to him), and he leaves no stone unturned. His quest to not miss a beat in living out his definition of himself is inspirational, but because this quest is within him, not something he decided for himself (my take on it), one can't replicate him or follow a set of basic rules to achieve what he has achieved - and Paul Farmer himself cannot wake up one morning and decide to change the way he lives life.

Why is he this way? The answers to this question alone could probably lead to a multi-session theological and psychological discussion and end up only chasing the wind.

How is Paul Farmer a modern day apostle? This morning, I was studying 2 Corinthians 1 and 2. The questions in this study (Life Application Bible Studies - NLT series) ponder the reasons the Apostle Paul wrote in such an intense letter to those in Corinth, why he needed to establish his integrity with them. Paul sputters and emotes with passion, and hopefully he convinced many (one must believe he did, or Christianity wouldn't be so prominent these days) that he was who he was, he truly believed in his mission and what he did, the way he lived was the only way he could live, he loved these people because he couldn't help himself, and there was no way he could be other than straight, plain, and obsessed with his mission. Such is the Paul Farmer portrayed in Kidder's book. Paul Farmer is driven by the injunction to love his neighbor as himself, to feed the hungry and cure the sick, to make the world a better place because he is here in it and he was given a gift of some truth that is vital to our well being. He has no choice. To do otherwise would be to die.

Is Paul Farmer perfect? No. But I don't think the Apostle Paul was perfect, either. He struggled daily.

There are so many things to learn from this book. Aside from the powerful example Farmer sets, I learned that Cuba has used its limited resources better than any other country in setting up good health and healing standards. After all these years of Castro-bashing, I was amazed. I learned that Russian prisons are breeding grounds for multiple-drug-resistant TB and Aids. I learned something of the workings and politics of the World Health Organization. I'm not expert on any of these or the many other things I learned; but I am more aware than I have ever been.

In my mental dialog as I was reading the book, I came to a conclusion that none of us can fight all the world's ills. They are too many and too wrapped up in the lives and interests of other people. To take on too much results in certain failure. But we can fight for one person, one cause, one battle at a time.

Thank you Tracy Kidder for writing so eloquently and in such a way that I can read some one's story with such clarity and ease. Thank you for the account of your own mental dialog as you worked out your friendship and respect for Paul Farmer. Thank you Paul Farmer for being who you are, for using your gifts to fight battles for those who can't. Thank you that there is no other way for you.

Read this book!

Me in charge? I need to learn a bunch more ...

Yesterday, Lauren had a routine medical test as a hospital outpatient; and because he had to be drugged, I accompanied him so I would be there to bring him home afterwards.

Every time I go through this routine for myself for general lab work (most of the time I don't need to be put to sleep), I remember all the times I have done so as the primary care person for Mom, Dad, or Den. So many trips, so many memories. I will probably never shake them. They will be fresh memories for me all the days of my life.

These memories were even stronger as I drove Lauren to the hospital yesterday.

As our time there progressed, I became surprised to realize how inadequate I felt when it came to being Lauren's primary care person for the day. It's not a role I usually play with him. It became clearer and clearer to me that Lauren is the one who's in charge most of the time when it comes to caring for both himself and for me. I don't recall ever being at a loss to participate in or make a decision for Mom, Dad, and Den. But this was different. I have rarely been in this "superior" position for Lauren, and I would need to learn a lot more about him - this husband of mine for 41 years and counting - before I would be competent to represent him in the event he needed me to do so.

Two things I learned, or was reminded of, yesterday and noted in my organizer: Lauren has metal screws in his left shoulder, as well as metal in his mouth, and he's alergic to amoxicillan.

I was there when the skiing accident happened that eventually resulted in screws in his shoulder. We were skiing in Utah - probably in 1997 or 1998.

I wish I could remember the name of the resort because it would be fun to go there again. Our condo faced the slopes, and we could watch the groomers every night as well as watch the skiers during the day if we weren't out on the slopes ourselves. The resort had a wonderful school-house slope there (translated, means very green and easy slope) where I spent my time while Lauren tackled the bigger slopes. He would come down periodically, as he always does, and check on me.

At this particular time, I was watching for Lauren because it was about time for him to do a routine stop-by to say "hi," and all of a sudden I saw this fellow shoot head first across the school-house run maybe 200 feet in front of me. Uh oh, I remember thinking. Not good. When I got there, I found out that it was Lauren. He had caught his ski on something, shot off the slope like out of a canon, and dislocated his shoulder when he landed.

The doctors at the slopes couldn't get his shoulder back in place, so an ambulance transported him down the mountain to a hospital in Salt Lake City. I followed. They were unable to do anything there, either, so they bundled up his arm in a sling and sent us home.

We had the maroon (or lotus) color Ford truck then, and it was the first time I had driven it. Lauren co-drove from the passenger seat, and we made it home just fine. A couple years of surgeries didn't solve the problem. The rotator cuff was beyond repair without more serious work, so Lauren ended up with a couple screws - and a little less range of motion than he was used to.

It was his choice because there were no guarantees that anything would ever fix his shoulder the way it should be; and he's lived with it, without complaining, since then.

That's probably part of it - Lauren doesn't complain about how he feels, so there's a lot about his physical comfort that I don't know about. I know he doesn't like noise; he doesn't like to be too hot; but I don't know what makes him more comfortable. He doesn't even like back rubs. He just takes care of himself.

The good news is that Lauren's test yesterday came out all A+s. The doctor came to see me as soon as he was through with Lauren and said everything was great. I was very glad. That strong and strong-willed man of mine, the one I don't know how to take care of, was so helpless as he went under and came out of sedation. I never thought about all the things I would need to know if he were to stay in that condition, the ways to take care of him and represent him that he would choose for himself if he could. There's a lot I need to learn about him before I would ever be ready to step in that role if he needed me to.

Even after we came home and he was working off the effects of the drugs, he didn't want me to fix him anything to eat. He went to the refrigerator and took care of it all himself. He had prepared Jello the day before, and we keep the refrigerator stocked with healthy but low-fat and sugarless yogurt and fruit.

The only thing he didn't do yesterday was take care of me, something I realize he's been doing more and more of these past years because he retired before I did. I actually had to fix my own sandwich for lunch and supper last night. I still know how to do it, and it's perfectly ok, but it's not normal around our house.

Lauren's a bit of a control freak, but I benefit so I don't complain. He washes dishes by choice; he fixes lunch and supper by choice (sometimes I prepare the meat or another dish ahead of time, but he takes care of getting it all together). I have laugh to myself when I want him to do something - usually all it takes is for me to announce that I'm going to do it. And there he is. He's doing it instead. He loves to do things, to take care of things. I could do it all for me, but what if I needed to do it for the both of us. Could I?

When he gets home from sailing this evening, I think we'll sit down and I'll make some more notes in my organizer. He does such a good job for me. I'm so lucky. The least I can do is try to learn how to do a good job for him, in case I ever need to.

"I was told...," as spoken by a tour guide

I was just having an e-mail conversation with a friend (Margie at http://www.jamga.blogspot.com/) about the capitol building in Juneau, Alaska. It went like this:

Margie: I just looked at your itinerary and see that you made it to Juneau. Did you see the Capitol?

Sue: ...we didn't visit it. According to what we remember, Juneau's capitol building is one of only two state capitol buildings without a dome. We don't remember what the other one is - but I think they told us.

Margie: Actually, there are several without domes, most notably the four "high rise" ones: Tallahassee, Lincoln, Bismarck, and Baton Rouge. New Mexico's is very southwest and Hawaii's is different.

I got a real kick out of learning that our information was wrong. Lauren and I learned early on, during our Alaska trip, that when a tour guide starts out with "I was told....," anything you hear after that could be fact, fiction, or some blend. We heard a number of "I was told ..." stories from our Alaska guides, and we learned just to sit back and enjoy them for what they were - interesting stories, the makings of myths and legends and fairy tales.

One of our favorite tidbits during our Alaska trip was a bit about the tides - "They just go in and out all day," a tour guide told us. Very true. They seem to do that, for sure!

Travel is good! Your understanding of the world changes as you visit places you've read or heard about in the news. You get some idea of the people behind the news or who are affected by the news. The information you gain makes the news more relevant. Even the "I was told..." stories enhance your experience because then the corrections to the "I was told..." are more meaningful.

I've always felt that a big benefit to traveling, for me, is that I am different when I come home. I see my life in a different light.

Depending on the trip, I may see our own grand country differently when we return home. So many times we have traveled to Europe and gazed with wonder at the magnificant mountains and green valleys, only to come home and realize that all that splendor and granduer is also right here in our own country. We don't appreciate it until we see it somewhere else.

Other times, we see how others live, and that changes our lives. We may bring home a better way to do something, or a way to never do something. We bring home a renewed and closer connection to someone we love, and sometimes we even bring home a new friendship we gained on the trip.