Liralen's Adventures Through Life

I think the hardest thing about this whole thing was that Mom couldn't really talk or process any of it with us. She couldn't voice her thoughts and couldn't do anything for Dad or us about the end of our relationship with her. By the time we found out the tumor had already taken her ability to word. Oddly, luckily, I've had to make closure for myself quite a few times in my past often without input from the other person that was involved.  We actually had a very good visit with her for the first few days. She was smiling every time we saw her, and she even had a morning where she ate an entire bowl of fortified cereal and we were able to take her out for a walk with Dad. But by the second to last day she'd stopped eating and even drinking.  I got my time with her. Alone. Without the protection of my husband and without the anxiety of my father or the incessant talking of my sister. Mom was asleep, fitful, restlessly so, but even when she woke she would nod off agai...

I'm getting asked a lot these days about how my mother is doing. It's never easy to answer, because she's dying. She's pretty comfortable for all that, all of her needs are being taken care of. She has hospice checking on her every time she needs anything. She's being made as comfortable as possible with modern medicine and care.  Most people end up saying, "That's so hard."  And the only thing I can really do is nod. There's something in my head that always says, "It's not hard the way you think it's hard." It doesn't detract from the fact that everything is pretty difficult right now. I've always hated my emotions. They're always pretty difficult for me to access, except when I have the opportunity to process them with someone else, extroverted emotional expression seems to be one of the few ways I can deal with them. Grief always eats all my energy.  When I first came home from San Diego after the Thanksgiving perio...

Tuesday was absolutely insane. We had two appointments for the radiation oncologist and then the lung cancer specialist.  And while we were talking with the lung cancer specialist, he heard that John and I were here from Colorado and were going to fly back, again, for the brain cancer specialist next week. He said, "I think I can find an opening for you with him. Let me go talk to him."  He talked with the brain cancer specialist, and lo and behold, we got the 1pm appointment we couldn't get through the regular channels, and while we decided to have lunch in the cafe in the cancer center, Kathy and John got texts about the new appointment.  This whole trip has been blessed with so many bits of luck. John and I got two of the last four seats on the non-stop that was most convenient for our flight in. This Friday's flight was half the price of all the other flights around this crazy travel holiday. Our room at our hotel was the very last room left at this Homewood Suite...

My mother took my hand, as we were going to leave tonight, and she very deliberately, gently, and slowly pressed a kiss on the back of my hand. And at the look on her face, I clasped her hand back just as gently, but firmly, and I kissed her on her forehead. She smiled and let me go.  Words are failing her. I find it ironic that the only way that I can process her now word-muddled existence is through my long practice with words.  On November 13th, my sister and father did a video doctor's check with my mother. Their GP was so alarmed at her inability to truly respond to their questions made their primary doctor tell them that they had to go to the ER. That there was something seriously wrong with her and they had to get her looked at as quickly as possible. The three of them spend two horrific days in the over crowded ER at UCSD, in order to get the CAT scans and MRI that showed a very large shadow in her brain.  This was while John and I were in Kauai. We heard the begi...

The most remarkable thing about Kansas was that we were able to beat the Freedom Train to Topeka. Image our surprise at finding out it has been staying in Salida the same night we were. We beat them out. And ran fast until we reached this: This is a campsite by Table Rock Lake on the border between Missouri and Arkansas, where the land went from flat farms to hills and trees again. These are all oaks in winter, and the campsites were closed for the season as they're expecting snow in a few days, but for today it was beautiful. We ended up at the house of a cousin of John's father George, Vera and had a lovely dinner with her and her daughters, Linda and Phyllis. It was wonderful. And, miracle of miracles, my crown stopped throbbing too. I'm so grateful. Vera is Ukrainian descent, just like George was, but she has a lot of ties to the old culture and recent events have hit her hard. So she was very happy to see us. We'd been following each other on FaceBook f...

Lately, I've been feeling like I've been run over by a truck, but got away with it. Bruised, battered, aching all over, but I'm alive, and I'm whole and I can keep going. It's not physically difficult for me to live and do the things that life needs of me, but so difficult mentally and emotionally. The Capitol Riot occurred on January 6th. That reminded me, in a huge, emotional way, of the fact that my family was wiped out by the Cultural Revolution. Armed insurgents destroyed local governments and moved, eventually, on the capitol of China and destroyed the old way of life. On the way there, they killed, detained, or executed most of the countries intellectuals and artists, including half of my mother's family, and all of my father's who didn't move to Taiwan. I had a very emotional few days, and wrote a big thing on Facebook about that and had hundreds of people respond, forward, and eventually one took exception to my equating Trump and his Proud Boys...

I think it was in Ugly Delicious , that one of the restaurant owners said that a recipe is like sheet music, everyone takes it and interprets it their own way. This started as Marc Matsumoto's second take on from scratch Japanese Curry , he's since come out with a newer version that amuses me by making some of the same changes that I made, but after going through mine in detail, my son Jet pointed out that mine is still significantly different in technique as well as a few key ingredients, and since he wanted to give my recipe out to some of his friends, I'm writing this up. Given these interesting times, I've been making this a few times with the frozen bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs we get in six packs from Costco and throw in the freezer when we get them; but I've also made a variation with on-sale beef chuck that is equally delicious and tender, but has a completely different flavor profile due to the beef. And... since we *do* have the curry roux pucks in...

We had a little time with Jet between the Hawaii trip and the end of the Christmas break, which was nice and we had one adventure during that time that was pretty amazing. I'd bought tickets in October for the Monet exhibit at the Denver Art Museum, titled The Truth of Nature. The full photo album can be found if you follow this link. I've always loved Monet, but never really understood why he was an Impressionist when so much of what he painted is so easily recognized for what it is; but then I didn't understand why that title had been made in the first place. The exhibit features more of his paintings than have ever been gathered in one place and it was beautifully organized by all the places he loved. It also included an excellent explanation of Impressionism, what was, at that time, thought of as characterized by hasty, unfinished work that didn't have the level of detail or meticulous finish that "real" paintings had in that day. I was mildly aston...

The move for Mom and Dad went really well. With John's organization and the fact that they'd been working on it for months, there was only the last little bit to do. But we helped them with the last bit, and John did the labeling and put up signs for where all the furniture was supposed to go in the new place. The move itself only took three hours after the guys and truck all showed up, and that was getting everything into the truck and then out again into the new apartment. It went so quickly, the foreman gave Mom $500 off from their initial estimate since they didn't have to pack a thing. She was really happy with that. We spent a little time and helped Mom and Dad finish off the garage as well, including a trip from 1-800-JUNK, who made off with a truck load of stuff. I rescued a small sewing box that was my father's mother's and a Go board from my father's father. He'd brought it with him from Taiwan in the 80's when he came to live with my parents...