TY - JOUR
AU1 - Freedman, Diane P
AB - We are all dying of this terrible disease called aging. —Leonard Cohen Just past sixty years old, I have done fairly well in the non-failing physical department, which I attribute in part to taking to heart Thoreau’s directive to walk far and daily to shake off the rust of one’s chamber. The work of many scientists corroborates that a stuck body corrals a stuck mind, as Florence Williams reports in The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative. Too much sitting and staring at screens strains eyes and back. Moreover, we miss winged things in flight, changing outdoor light. The body itself seizes up, in the manner of other rust-bound things. Taking a woods ramble or an outdoor swim is curative. Outdoors, we can even work on horticultural rust, garden fungus on roses, phlox, lilac, and bee balm, if we choose. But despite my knowledge of what works for me, a recent summer was a veritable junkyard. May had begun with my then regular seacoast New Hampshire plan of swimming in Mendums Pond as soon as it warmed, and even before—in a shorty wetsuit and neoprene gloves. I was going to plant new flowers in the yard and bike and hike, maybe visiting cooler places, like the UK, as the heat built. My partner and I had very definite plans to drive south for his daughter’s graduation from her medical residency and a college housemate of mine’s sixtieth birthday and also for ferrying to Martha’s Vineyard in late June for my brother’s outdoor wedding. Instead, the summer was consumed by the aftermath of my partner’s gallbladder surgery. After what was supposed to be day surgery the Thursday before Memorial Day, he was instead admitted to the hospital overnight, blood pressure and jaundice rising. A next-day endoscopy revealed that the surgeon had cut and clipped the common bile duct. One can live without a gallbladder but not without the duct. A crowd of procedures, symptoms, setbacks followed: a ride in an ambulance to a major hospital, interventional radiology, biliary consults, narcotics, discharge tubes extruding from D’s abdomen while other tubes brought glucose into his veins. I had medical power of attorney in the ER and became nurse-companion at home, our dog Bartok was boarded out with neighbors, garden helpers hired, and key events with family and friends, such as the graduation, the birthday party, and the wedding, missed. The surgeon had messed up, and all that could take place until it was determined how, that, and when reconstructive surgery could be undertaken was the insertion of the external drains and the restraint from food that produced bile and activity that might dislodge the drains. With the resultant weight loss, a poor cardiac history, the stress, the stopping of blood-thinning meds before each procedure, and the lack of movement, D was vulnerable and uncomfortable. He slept upright, we could have no sexual relations, he was unable to work, and he lost his then new job. After some time back at home before the next step was to take place, D had a second emergency—early morning rigors, suspected sepsis or internal bleeding, an ambulance ride to the local hospital, where I pleaded we be sent south, and another ride, sirens blaring. He crashed in the procedure room upon arrival, his blood pressure on the floor. He needed vessel-tear repair, tube replacement, and intubation for air supply. He—we—spent a whole week in the surgical ICU, where he was able to be extubated after thirty-six hours. Age (then fifty-six) was actually on his side. Back home, fearful of another crisis, we were in compliance with doctors’ orders—in chambers, no travel, no dinners out, no exercise, no intimate relations. Eventually, we went to Boston for another drain check and then the reconstructive surgery, which entailed another week in the hospital and more constrained circumstances at home, visiting nurses, garden helpers, me as the schlepper, getting groceries, mowing the lawn, lugging hoses, lugging dead mower battery to Maine for repair, dogging the vet, fitting in my own heretofore missed medical appointments for smaller midlife struggles—pre-diabetes, Hashimoto’s disease, high blood pressure. By August, although D’s bile duct had been reconstructed out of part of his large intestine, seemingly successfully, he still had pain and external drains. Aching plagued my own neck, back, and Achilles tendons; I could neither walk nor sleep and was putting on weight. I missed swimming, weeding my garden, campaigning for politicians, writing poetry or environmental criticism or advocacy, those otherwise perennial subjects and modes of my professorial life. My primary-care physician referred me to physical therapy, which consisted of massage and ultrasound and encouragement to stretch and move. I was a compliant patient, possibly in more need of muscle- and mind-calming than motivation and movement strategies. But even when I was no longer needed continually at D’s couch-side or in pain, I found I could not undertake my summer swims because the dam that created Mendums Pond had failed to such an extent that the state drew the lake down for dam repair. The lake was now a sodden mud flat, parts like quicksand, difficult for the dog and me to breach, the water out of easy reach. Ecomemoirist Helen MacDonald speaks of how crucial keeping up our emotional and physical attachments to the natural world is in our age of ecological or her–or my–personal disasters (216). Luckily, I rediscovered a pre-Mendums swimming hole, the Lamprey River, even better while my partner was still laid up because it was closer to home. I could quickly drive over with Bartok, cross the one-lane bridge off which brave teens dove and flipped, and scramble down boulders to the tea-colored river, hawks overhead, girls dropping from trees via rope swings along the bank upstream. Things more generally did lighten up, including D being re-employed after seven months, but besides the medical–physical–legal–financial aftermath of corrective surgery on D’s body, we needed a new bed, the decades-old one antagonizing my back and his abdomen. Furniture and equipment become more important aspects of the environment as we age, it certainly seemed. We lay together on a lot of surfaces as store fieldwork—and indecision—plagued us further. At home, pre-decision, we moved about the house, Goldiloxes, trying a kid’s bed, a guest bed, a sofabed, living room and office couches, just to see if temporary relief was available. No go. A mattress combo decided upon at last, there were still complaints. Not even an expensive, unreturnable set-up would do, or a featherbed topper (it was able to be returned, at least), or a new down pillow. Emotional and physical tension rose as we contemplated the confrontation we—or I—would have to stage back in the store. Meanwhile, out the window, our recently glorious, restorative garden and pond view presented another scene of wreck and rust. The septic system had failed, from the concrete tank, with rusty, substandard iron bands, to iron and plastic tubes and pipes. Ken, man of plumbing wisdom, proposed repair, which meant digging up the back lawn and/or covering its length with boards strong enough to support a backhoe (“Goes with the territory,” he said), dirt and rocks flung into perennial beds, Trumpet Vine blown, Lilac cut down, pink Spiriea driven over, Beauty Bush halved, Burning Bushes bound. Under boards, the lawn turned weak chartreuse from Kelly green. D’s own system was but semi-recovered. Biologist-writer-activist Sandra Steingraber has described every mother’s womb as an ecosystem. Truly, the entire body is one. As the earth goes, so goes the body and the baby and the mid-lifers in fifth and sixth decades, all our ecosystems fragile in separate and interrelated ways. September Out at the lake, the clouds gathered, darkly. What had been, when the lake was first lowered, mud-pie flats, was terra firma. Walking on the lake floor, I found my sandals still silty, but I could pick my way over sand, gravel, and rock to the water. I could swim. The water had not its former usual clarity, but that would return when the dam was repaired and the winter run-off and spring rains allowed to do their work. In between, thistles, lake reeds, grasses, and golden and chartreuse close-cropped flowers erupted like grain and big grass. Ducks and ducklings appeared, one recurrent large heron, a usual two loons, some cormorants. Bartok splashed in the shallows after ducks. They flew up. The heron appeared always to lope up. We swam in the deeper water, past the one boat still moored that summer, a small motorboat I had not seen in action, which was a big relief. I was a lone swimmer every time I ventured out, but I was not very visible should the motorboat have fired up. In the summer drought, the pines were thin but not yellow, the maples sporting small shotgun-fungus holes, branches all too easily snapped off both the soft and hard woods. At home, ten miles from there, leafy branches dropped daily without the invitation of high winds and strong rain. They represented the pioneer deaths, with more to come that year. That is just the way of drought and illness, plans and errors, I thought. October On one of the TWO new beds (we had been able to trade the new mattress for two floor models), I could sleep. Until I could not: D snored in little eruptive bursts, while outside a duck quacked in similar bursts—silence then quaaaaack, a slightly higher note than D’s snore but exact in raspiness. Both or either startled me. More and more restless, I had to get up. Plus my back, calmed by nearly three months of physical therapy and new super-soft specialty-foam bed, was wrenched again when I tipped over on my bicycle that week as I tried a shortcut from my bank to the physical therapy practice. So I was back in therapy rotation for a couple more weeks, wrenching my daily schedule. One life protocol is to take it easy, take it slow, eat right from the beginning, replace or repair what needs replacing before it is in the final throes—that goes for gallbladder, pipes, bed, grass, dam—nurture the bodies, prevent rust on the roses, prevent dug up lawn and invaded gut, until we really, really are too old or in crisis. So when March arrived, I replaced aging air conditioners with an energy-saving (if money-sinking) system, ready for the next heat wave. D re-stained the deck before the old coat entirely peeled off, and he repainted a front door. I made travel plans for the very first instant I was free from teaching, lest something happen to forestall a trip. I went off to Vilnius, Lithuania, and to Iceland with the boy (my son, now grown) whose bed I had found too hard. Surprise: when one travels when one is in good physical shape, all six of the borrowed overseas beds feel great, and I came back to Durham ready to run with the loyal dog. Even better: Mendums’ dam repair was completed, and an excessively, unexpectedly rainy spring meant the lake was soon full, unmuddied, clear for clear swimming. Before that—I am talking the prior September again—at my childhood home on Long Island for my birthday, where I visited Dad for the occasion, he and I talked books. Dad presented me with a novel he had just finished reading: Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. He thought it a marvel but did not want it back (in his nineties his mantra was “Don’t Complicate My Life!”). I began the book as soon as I returned to New Hampshire. The story follows a retired British army major who has recently lost his wife, the completely clueless way his children treat him, and his mental and bodily coping with and noting of his changing condition. He finds climbing stairs a risk, driving tiring, putting up with thoughtless others a worsening trial. I realize that my father found in the Major a version of himself, and my heartbroke reading all that. For him, and, in many ways, retrospectively and anticipatingly, for my partner and me. Neurologist Oliver Sacks, in his seventies, suffered knee and sciatica pain, and described it in On the Move: A Life, his very last book, as a pain with an “affective component all its own… . A quality of agony, of anguish, of horror–words which still do not catch its essence …” (378). He reported: I did all my writing standing up: I made a special high platform on my worktable, using ten volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary as props. The concentration involved in writing, I found, was almost as good as the morphine and had no side effects. I hated lying in bed, in a hell of pain, and spent as many hours as I could writing at my improvised standing desk. Some of my thinking and writing and reading at this time, indeed, was about pain, a subject I had never really thought about. (378) Sacks cites Henry Head’s Studies in Neurology, in which Head contrasts “‘epicritic’ sensations—precisely localized, discriminatory, and proportional to stimulation—with ‘protopathic’ sensations: diffuse, affect laden, and paroxysmal.” Sacks concludes, “This dichotomy seemed to correspond well to the two types of pain [he] had experienced” (379). Diamonds are a sign and symbol of love and marriage along with exploitation of land and worker. Geologically, they are produced by heat, pressure, and time. Their clarity is prized. Rust is ferrous oxide, also a process of time and chemical change, something plumbers and homemakers and gardeners try to keep at bay, as it impedes flow (as in the rusted septic system outflow pipe) and mars beauty and shine and a sense of cleanliness, health, and well-being. We have shares in each product or phenomena (diamonds, rust); we earn the epaulets of age and want also the sweetness of rock candy and a serious love affair. We remember where we have been, what we have wished, and see and suffer the red writing on all the walls. Works Cited Baez Joan. “Dimonds and Rust.” A&M, 1975 . LP. MacDonald Helen. H is for Hawk. Grove, 2014 . Sacks Oliver. On the Move: A Life. Knopf/Doubleday, 2016 . Williams Florence. The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative. Norton, 2017 . © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Diamonds and Rust: We Both Know What Memories Can Bring: Rust, Compliance, Resistance, Resilience
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isaa047
DA - 2020-09-03
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/diamonds-and-rust-we-both-know-what-memories-can-bring-rust-compliance-OlacaHlSwb
SP - 210
EP - 215
VL - 29
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -