2016 WAS A VERY BAD YEAR... A so-so year...Ending in horror.

 

Have not felt much like writing these past few months.  Still physically recovering from the effects of chemo -- never really goes away 100%.   So glad to finally have the cats back at home. They are affectionate but mostly mischievous.  They climb up everything now - and Red eats the leaves of my plants.  Slim loves to attack bags of cat food before they are open.  Today they played hide-n-seek in the covers of my bed.

I started this December 29 to look back at the year and try not to mourn about the year ahead.  But today I got even more devastating news that my friend Becky Borges has died.  She was a dear friend, and although we weren't that close, I felt as though I understood all that she had suffered being diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer several years ago.  She was sent to City of Hope where they used stem cell therapy to cure her.  I know I am getting the details wrong and hope I can read about it from someone.  She did well for quite some time, but the cancer had metastasized and they were unable to make her better in this last year.  

This year 2016 I have lost four friends to cancer. Not just acquaintances, but friends, people I admired and loved.  And then I was diagnosed this year as well.   All four people who died were so special, in that they were people who gave of themselves for the betterment of others.  They often put others before their own needs as well.  I sometimes wonder if that's why some people get sick -- that they spend more time taking care of others than themselves.

A little about Becky Borges who just died (I had exchanged texts with her in November!):  Becky was a twin - she had a twin brother, three sisters, another brother I believe. My details are sketchy because my memory isn't good.  I know she had a loving family -- spent all her holidays with her family.  One sister was a teacher as she was.  We met because Becky was the teacher librarian at Wilson High School.  She was beloved by her school as well.  When she got sick, many people gave her their sickness hours so she could retire with enough money and benefits.  Her students loved her - you could see how carefully she treated all of them, never a harsh word, a homemade cake for a birthday,  a warm fire in the library where they could feel cozy.  It seemed she treated each person as if they were special, were also family, as she would want to be treated.

Our second to the last year in Costa Rica - 2012 - Becky and her husband Tony came to visit. I was thrilled!  They stayed at two lovely hotels -- one right next door to us.  I think they had a good time although I was worried that they were used to more high end vacations than we.  Our digs were inexpensive and our travel wasn't luxurious.  They didn't feel there was enough local food or art -- but I think that was because Puerto Viejo de Talamanca in Costa Rica is a very mixed up place. The influences are many -- Afro-Caribbean being primary, indigenous Bri Bri as well.  There isn't really a "local" feel to it -- much more cosmopolitan in some ways (Europeans from all over find their way to it) and also more poverty stricken.   In the above photo we were eating at Maxim's at the end of Costa Rica right on the border with Panama - a lovely fish restaurant.

This is the Christmas card I received from the Borges -- Becky still looks beautiful to me even though her hair is gray.  She was a beautiful person, and a physically beautiful one!  Always looked elegant to me.  I did learn from her some of the discomfort and downright torture of chemotherapy.  She had so many procedures done to keep her alive.  She had a great spirit and those four men clearly adored her.  I am wishing the very best for them because I think they must be in such great grief right now.

I want to write down all the great things she did so people have a better idea.  I know she loved her students. I see the fact that she put in an electric fireplace as an act of love.  She never had a harsh word for anyone at school. She was soft spoken and perhaps superficially appeared shy and reserved. But she was incredibly strong in her beliefs and actions about how people should be treated and how things should be done.

Becky and I took a special vacation (for me it really was) to Sedona, Arizona. We took an overnight train and reserved a sleeping car.  I found it impossible to sleep but I think she was able to. We arrived in Flagstaff and rented a car which we drove to Sedona. We stayed in a beautiful place on the outskirts that was situated on a river.  Each of us had a massage in an outdoor massage platform (with curtains).  I hadn't really taken a vacation like that before.  We toured the area and the guide explained to us the reasons why the earth there is so red.  I have some photos but now wish I had taken more.  I know I never would have done that if Becky hadn't asked me.  

Over time we had lunch at her favorite restaurants, not far from her house.  I really enjoyed our outings. She spoke so lovingly about each one of her sons - Carlos, Ricardo, and Victor.  As I said earlier, my memory is not that good. So sorry that I did not take notes, did not make a recording of her life story, which to me showed the courage and strength that she always exhibited.  She was a teacher when still still was without papers.  Who would have guessed that this beautiful woman with dignity and uprightness, who had struggled to work, to go to school, to be so beautifully successful was someone "without papers"?

I am hesitating to publish this -- especially as I heard that Becky asked to be cremated and to have no ceremony at all.  While my parents did the same, I wonder how this makes her sons and husband feel?  Perhaps they will do a big family affair and all can talk about how much they love her and miss her.  I hope so.  There is no doubt in my mind that she will be dearly missed by all who knew her, just as my other friends, Scott Folsom, Stephanie Morris, and Kit Kollenberg - are all missed by their friends and family.

MARCH IS WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH - MILDRED GLADSTONE KRAMER - MY MOTHER AND HER STRANGE JOURNEY TO ENLIGHTENMENT

 

My father Charles,  my mother Mildred, my friend's child Yuki, and my daughter Jennifer about 1983.

   

   As I contemplated my new diagnosis of two types of cancer that need both chemo and radiation, I wondered what my mother would have done?  How would she have reacted to such news?

   I looked in the mirror and saw my mother, with bits of my father - his big ears, his high forehead, his curly hair. But I am still my mother. And I wonder can I be as strong as she was?  

Mamie Mildred Gladstone Kramer

   She was born in Tennessee in the mountains where her people spoke Eizabethan English but they moved to West Asheville, North Carolina.   She withstood the 1918 flu epidemic and nursed her entire family.   She was raped in high school and lived through that somehow, she went to New York to escape North Carolina's small mindedness (Thomas Wolfe’s city was her city) only to be met with the great Depression, cutting short her stint in nursing school.  She fell in love with a Red-headed Red, then was jilted by him. 

   She met a lovely man, married him and moved to Berkeley. He became a professor of Psychology at San Francisco State where I met him in my freshman year there.   But she was still in love with Red so left the good man after six months.  Spent three years literally starving, while dishing ice cream, cleaning floors, doing whatever to support herself, meanwhile dating Ed McMillan and Opie (Oppenheim - yes that famous one). When she got poison oak, Opie brought her roses. She couldn’t even afford to buy one.
   
   Oddly and most romantically, Red showed up three years later looking for her.  The woman he’d left her for didn’t work out (an educated woman who studied with Freud - wonder why that didn’t work out?).  Red sent her to Carson City, Nevada for a quickie divorce and took her back with him to Washington DC where he was working. They married on lunch break in a grey suit, went to Niagara for a quick honeymoon.  She never finished college but followed Red around the country when he supported the Flint sit-down through the LaFollette Committee, investigated industrial espionage on the part of big business especially at the Flint, Michigan plant,  solved the mystery of the police shootings of the Memorial Day massacre where the workers were shot for demonstrating. [In the book Selected Writings by Dorothy Day (who was present), the events of the protest are summarized as thus: 'On Memorial Day, May 30, 1937, police opened fire on a parade of striking steel workers and their families at the gate of the Republic Steel Company, in South Chicago. Fifty people were shot, of whom 10 later died; 100 others were beaten with clubs.']  My mother used a doll to prove the workers were shot in the back.  

Memorial Day Massacre

   They continued getting involved in political causes and issues, she even worked for the Russians during the war - our allies — and knitted beautiful sweaters for the RED ARMY - they were freezing over there.  So many things my mother went through - having to let go of all her southern prejudices.  Meeting the most amazing people in the world — Diego Rivera, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois - and more — because my father was a radical, wanted radical change in this world. And so did his many great friends.  Meanwhile she witnessed attacks my father suffered for being Jewish - attacked just driving down the streets of New York.   My mother was beautiful and a white lady. But she loved my father’s passion. I imagine there was nothing so completely different from her small life in Asheville, NC as my father and his passions, his intellect, his wide ranging interests.  I dunno. 

But then there was Truman’s announcement that 8 people in his government were spies for the Soviets.  I was a baby in her arms when my mother heard this announcement and I started crying.  I felt her terror.  And it never left.  We moved to New York, then we moved again, and again. They left us alone after a while in Los Angeles. My mother’s fears, never going away, were superseded by her ability to finally get a good job with the LAUSD and buy houses, against my apartment-dwelling NY father who didn’t believe in private property.  But it served them well - their mortgage was $125 a month and they could survive on $10,000 a year total. Somehow. How I don’t know.  When I inherited their properties I realized that so few good repairs were done to them unless they were essential - toilet, or pipes, or paint.  But nothing to beautify the place. No refinishing of beautiful wooden floors.  No upgrade of the kitchen (without changing the basic kitchen or wasting throwing out good basic cabinets).  So many items needed to be improved. But they didn’t have the money.

   So would my mother be strong enough to have withstood cancer - two cancers and chemo and radiation?   I’m sure she would have though I am grateful she was not plagued with anything worse than a hiatal hernia that felt like a heart attack, or a gall bladder that had to be removed.  Or teeth that had to be replaced. Luckily none were life threatening. She lived until 95, and I think had a cancerous node in her breast at the very end.  That was it. Only dementia did her in in the end.

Mom, sister Anne, Me at Sequoia

Ma and Pa Kramer

My mom and dad with my daughter Jen about 5 (1986)

                                      My mom's house with a beautiful view

Not enough has been said here about my mother's early life as a Tennessee mountain person (whose people spoke Elizabethan English but whose mother thought that was low class and never taught my mom the wonderful Ballads), transition to the smartest and most beautiful girl in her high school, and then her getaway to the big city and how difficult that must have been.
   I have a treasure trove of my mother's short stories which she wrote over several years. The actually show the development of her thoughts as well as give a glance into her terrors.  She was always cheerful and whistling, playing the piano which was self-taught, trying to hide the terror and anxiety with which she lived her entire life.
   And yet I honestly believe she would have fought valiantly against the cancers that are tearing me up and bringing out all the anxiety of my childhood.  I want to conquer this.  So forgive this short bio of my mother for Women's History Month.

1918 Flu Epidemic - https://virus.stanford.edu/uda/ 
History.com -- http://www.history.com/topics/great-depression
Edwin McMillan - http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1951/mcmillan-bio.html  
J. Robert Oppenheimer - http://www.atomicarchive.com/Bios/Oppenheimer.shtml
Encyclopedia.com - http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3401802282.html    
The Memorial Day Massacre - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_Day_massacre_of_1937 
Dorothy Day - http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/ 
The Red Army - http://russiapedia.rt.com/of-russian-origin/red-army/ 
National WW2 Museum - knitting -- http://www.nationalww2museum.org/learn/knit-your-bit/knitting-during-wwii.html 
Knitting for victory - http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&File_Id=5722