I am still here. The past few weeks of 2009 were lost to me in a way. Yes, the domain mapping for my blog expired so if you suddenly were getting dead links that is why, but it is back.
Author: darcee
Just one more Catholic wife and mother on the internet, blogging about homeschooling, living the faith and all that sort of thing.
Memory
My grandmother has been in the hospital for almost two weeks now. She had and obstructed bowel that had to be surgically repaired, then the incision wasn’t healing properly and last night she had to have it operated on again to repair a small hole that was developing in her abdominal wall. I have spent a good deal of time in the hospital just hanging out with her. She suffers from Alzheimer’s/dementia and is 86 years old.
Last month I was reading A Child Called Noah
It is very easy, since Rachel’s experience of time and events is somewhat “off” to say things like “Well, we will do Rachel’s birthday on Saturday because she doesn’t get that the 10th not the 14th is her birthday.” And this is true. Rachel is more than happy to celebrate a birthday or a holiday on an alternate day. Her sense of anticipation doesn’t extend to checking the calendar and as long as cake is eaten, candles are lit and “Happy birthday” is sung the actual day doesn’t matter so much. But her inability to anchor the memory or talk about it later doesn’t rob the event of significance. It is still important. A fact testified to by the way that Rachel is slave to routine, there must be cake eaten, candles lit and “Happy Birthday” sung in order for it to be a “Birthday.” Rachel is very much a creature of the moment. I hope that someday Rachel and I will meet in Heaven and share what all these things meant to us both.
My grandmother’s memories have lost their anchor. She doesn’t know if it is 1958, 1985 or 2002. She remembers people and relationships but there is no timeline. For her it is perfectly sensible that she is staying with neighbors in the town she left in 1968 while talking to me about my daughter born in 2001. Her short term memory is most horribly effected. She will not remember this evening that I was with her last night, she will be just as impressed with the sweater I am knitting for Hannah as she was the last 12 times she saw it and she will not remember what her surgery was for, how long she will need to recover or where she will go once she is discharged – we will talk about those things every 45 minutes or so.
If no one familiar is with her my grandmother not only loses her sense of time, but she seems to lose much more. Paranoia and fear set in with the constant parade of the unfamiliar. The nurse has no place in her long term memory and with no short term memory granny has no way of placing the hospital staff into her current experience. The staff is more than strangers, they are people who seem like they should be familiar, they call her by name and know details about her life, yet granny has no memory of having seen them before – this makes them seem threatening. Especially in the evening when coupled with “sun-downing” this lack of anything familiar aggravates the “normal” emotional effects of Alzheimer’s and granny spirals down into a paranoid, depressed place where everyone loved and familiar has abandoned her and left her alone in a strange fog of unconnected experience. In the morning though the terror of the night before is gone, lost and unconnected to any memory.
It is very tempting to say it doesn’t matter if someone is there or not because she will not remember. But is memory the judge of what is important or does the importance of our actions lie in the moment as experienced? Duty, that sense that she is my grandmother and I must be there for her, gives me a firm kick and says, “go sit with her tonight because being there is what is important”. Being there gives me a sense of importance in a way, a feeling that I am doing something worthwhile and somewhat noble. It allows me to work through the complicated issues with my mother – I can very clearly see that it isn’t “just me” that falls second or third on her priorities, but all relationships fall somewhat lower than prime in her priority list — where career is number one — and I can comfort myself, polish my somewhat bent halo, and note well and again that I am not doing what mom does. I can’t help but remember reading in psychology the perverse theory that all good things we do are in fact, no matter how unpleasant they might seem, actually attempts to gratify some internal need. The martyr proves their faith and fulfills their hopes in God even to death; death is in fact more palatable than forsaking a faith in which they have invested so much of their self-concept. C.S. Lewis muses on the “mother” in “The Great Divorce” where he speaks of the danger of a “mother-love” that becomes its own idol, the mother who loves through a sense of possession – that the child she claims to want only the best for becomes an expression of her own desire to feel needed, wanted and loved.
So, being human my motives aren’t pure, they cant be. How can I ever completely separate the corporal work of mercy, visiting the sick, from wondering if sitting with my grandmother is as much about storing up “karma”, setting up an example and expectation in my children that this is what family does? Will they internalize what the see me doing so that, at some point in the future, they will feel duty kicking them to come spend time with their aged mother? Part of me doesn’t want to disappoint my grandfather, who passed away in 1994 – does he worry about his “little-bride” all alone at night? Is he glad that I am there? Do angels sit with me and wait in this strange place, not quite in the Valley of Death but approaching it? Will she look back when she is on the other side and think well of me? While I am definitely there for her, I am also there for me and the hope that what I do is pleasing to God, my grandfather, my children and to the person I am meant to be but am not quite yet.
In the end none of my internal wanderings and even struggles really matters — what matters is the current moment and the experience that we all are going through right now. It doesn’t matter if she remembers last night, or Sunday, or who her nurse is or even where or when she is. Granny needs a familiar face, a hand to hold, someone to hunt down a cup of ice or the nurse or adjust a pillow — most of all she needs someone to anchor her to her own experience. Experience is more important in this sense than memory, for granny right now they are unconnected. In a way the memories are really mine. They are really her’s also, but for the moment they can’t be her’s, they are just mine and I hold onto them for her and I both in the hope and expectation that at some point we can share them again.
Winterizing
Today we are doing a bit of winterizing around the house. I found a nice site with a good set of checklists for the house here.
My grandmother is in the hospital. She had a twisted intestine that had to be surgically corrected. She is doing well except for being really worried and “out of it”. Her dementia is really causing her a great deal of stress.
A Declaration
Christians, when they have lived up to the highest ideals of their faith, have defended the weak and vulnerable and worked tirelessly to protect and strengthen vital institutions of civil society, beginning with the family.
If you haven’t had a chance to read this I really urge you to do so. The fact that enough religious leaders feel this needs to be done is a little unsettling, but what we have seen in other countries leds me to feel that it is more than just a “fear mongering” over reaction and something that needs to be considered very seriously
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Opting out
I was thinking this morning of how many things in the normal American experience we just “opt out” of or are in the process of opting out of like public school and television. Random thought of the day I guess.
Things that are hard to find on Google
Sometimes I think it is interesting how difficult certain things can be to find on Google. I was searching for “how to avoid advertising” — because I would like to see some ideas on how people avoid advertising.
Pages of “how to avoid adverting mistakes” no, no, no. That is not what I want at all. I had better luck with “how to avoid consumerism.”
I am queen Sarah
She proudly proclaims. Then she pops her thumb back in her mouth and wraps the blanket around her. Ahhh to be three again, queen of the world and not a care in your kingdom.
Food with a conscience
Why I think this SOLE stuff (or something related to it) matters
Virtually every summer my family drives out to Eastern Oregon and spends the weekend in the cabin my great-grandfather build in 1914. We enjoy the same plants, the same deer, the same trout that my grandmother loved when she was a little girl – the land she loved all her life and the land where her ashes now rest. I grew up hearing stories about my Great-grandfather and the land he handed over to the BLM for antelope preservation and the dairy farm my grandfather lost – the tears he shed when he had to sell his “girls”, I planted lots of little trees, and spent enjoyable time hunting and fishing while being taught (as I believe the children in most hunting families are) the importance of conserving healthy habit for the ducks and deer we hunt and eat. My children’s brains are packed with happy memories, the stories of their family and the practical instruction of being good stewards of the land and the creatures we share it with.
I have also lived long enough to be somewhat alarmed by the nature of suburban sprawl, to see McMansions devour farmland and orchards chopped down for strip malls. While I am not against “progress” I often wonder if we have the slightest idea what we are progressing towards and if the destination will worth the trip. I want to see local, small dairymen who love their cows and have names for each of them thrive. Spending most of my childhood on a cattle ranch gave me a halfway decent insight into the dignity of people in “fly-over country”. I honestly grew up thinking that all beef cattle were grass fed till they were shipped off to the local packing plant which was owned and staffed by folks the rancher knew. So my life experience whirls together in my brain with my somewhat pastoral, idealistic world view and I come out with this ideal of a place where farmers are like craftsmen growing food that local people eat, enjoy and most of all trust because they know and trust the families that grow and produce it. My ideal is a world where Tolkin would smile because gardeners are important people, a place where the job title “farmer” is one held in high esteem.
So what is SOLE: Sustainable, Organic, Local and Ethical – that is the acronym, but what do those things actually mean? Sustainable farming and production methods so that our children and grandchildren are given a verdant and fertile world, organics grown without pesticides, herbicides or hormones that protect the environment, local foods that help sustain your local community and limit shipping costs and ethical business practices which promote a living wage, the dignity of food producers and ethical treatment of livestock. My sense is that like me, most people have their own interpretation of this. Just as no one is the absolute authority no one is really completely wrong, but there is a sort of “orthodoxy” of SOLE that nests with the “Green” movement and shares much of their strengths and all of their short comings.
The Strengths of SOLE
Let’s hit the letters one at a time.
Sustainable: one of the things that impressed me most in The Omnivore’s Dilemma was the farm of Joel Salatan. Being a fellow Christian-Libertarian-Environmentalist-Capitalist-Lunatic nearly everything he says seems to resonate with me. The solution to much of our problems isn’t in regulations, government control, more restriction or requirements, the solutions are honestly to be found in more people being able to be “Joel Salatans” and that means dumping government control of our food and that also means doing away with the well-meaning, busy body, disconnected elites in the green movement who tsk tsk about the poor food choices Americans make without addressing the basic problems in reverting to a more sustainable agrarian culture. If you wouldn’t encourage your son or daughter to be a farmer you are part of the problem.
Sustainable farming and ranching are “doable” in fact from what I have researched it would be possible for sustainable agriculture to feed a world, but not THIS world. The suburban world that we live in, a compartmentalized world bounded by an artificial divide between work and home life driven by the ever increasing need for more, new and (arguably) better material possessions and personal achievements and “status” can not survive on the family farm/sustainable farm model. Not because of how many of us there are, but because of the disconnect there is between the production of the essentials for life and the lives most of us lead. Family farms, community dairies, local bakers and butchers could feed the world — but only a world where there were a LOT more farmers, diary men, bakers and butchers. Because there is a mathematically certainty. Just as cost is decreased by an increase in scale — sustainability in agriculture is decreased by an increase in scale as well. As a rule the bigger the agricultural enterprise (in terms of production) the less sustainable it will be. Basically you can have a lot of cheep food of questionable value at a low price or you have to produce food in smaller quantities at higher cost. The smaller quantity model would necessitate an increase in the number of food producers, but that would also mean more producers requiring less from the system as they could support much of their own food needs. Which goes back to my assertion that if you wouldn’t encourage your son or daughter to go into farming you are part of the problem.
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Seasonal: I can’t find a single bone to pick with seasonal other than I would miss my out of season goodies — there are of course some places where cold winters make seasonal a matter of “store-able” but that is in a way seasonal as well.
Organic: The concept of organic is a bit more straightforward. When I can I want to purchase food that has as little chemical additives and as much nutritional value as possible. In theory organic food works toward solving that problem, but since “organic” is a FDA regulated term it might well be quickly turned against the very ideals that breed it. We are already seeing this to some extent. I want to say Organic is great!, but I am not totally sold on it since the lable “organic” doesn’t mean as much as it should, or even as much as it is perceived to. I am convinced of the damage pesticides, herbicides and artificial fertilizers can have on the environment and I question the sustainability of large scale monoculture farming without them and do not trust the argi-business behind it all.
And that is the rub. Agriculture has become a huge corporate enterprise that doesn’t see individual people, doesn’t honor the dignity of the person, it only seeks to squeeze the most production for the least input at the lowest cost possible. This is completely contrary to my ideal of the farmer-craftsmen who are honored by the communicates they serve, yet it may be in some ways unavoidable. Since we are no longer a nation of farmers, since we have endless rows of houses with no space for gardens ( even HOAs that explicitly disallow vegetable gardening) and apartment dwellers who can’t do more than have a pot or two on a window sill we need a mechanism to feed cities.
Large scale organics have a selling in point in that they can, right now, get a large amount of food onto the American table. The problem is that as the food industry has awoken to the idea that “organic” is a new consumer desire, it is not just the reaction of the moment, another Alar scare splash that will quickly fade, the idea of large scale organic becomes something much different than a natural system driven farm like Joel Salatan’s and become something entirely different. The large food production machine has set its sights on organic. Which will inevitably lead to the term organic favoring large commercial interests. The more we allow (or even demand) that government solve our problems the more we place our welfare in the hands of politicians who will sell us out to the highest bidder who will always be big business.
Local: Recently I saw a complaint against the local food movement. It was another take on the efficiencies of scale. Overall what is worse for our selves and our environment: a local hot house tomato in February or one shipped from Southern California? Is Local Food Better? Of course the most local food is the food in your own backyard.
Ethical: And here is the big problem, what is ethical? Is it more ethical to feed the world on conventionally grown food, are we raising the prices of food by pushing for more expensive farming methods?
Admittedly my ideal is a touch different than the typical SOLE enthusiast – who would doubtlessly cringe at my brood of six carbon footprint producing offspring – so it might be more fair to say that I am something all together different. For example I do not shop in fancy fair-trade stores or purchase certified organic clothing or even think for a moment about the songbird holocaust caused by my coffee habit. It isn’t that I feel that fair-trade is not worthy of supporting, it isn’t that I don’t want my clothing to be produced in a way that isn’t poisoning the water table somewhere, and I have nothing against songbirds, but I find there to be an elemental sophistry in much of the “green” movement. The reduction of consumerism is far more relevant to living lightly on the earth than shopping fairtrade. I might love a nifty, colorful purse made by hand by hemp growers in Bolivia, but isn’t it better for me just to do with one sturdy leather bag that I use for five years or more? It is more green to wear organic clothing if your alternative is to own less or shop garage sales and thrift or resale stores? And if I am concerned about the songbirds shouldn’t I just deal with the withdrawal headaches and learn to love mint tea instead of shipping coffee beans halfway round the world? So I find myself more often than not confused by my betters in the SOLE universe. They espouse their particular version of what is sustainable and ethical but I find their views seem wasteful, commercial, based on poor science and basically good for nothing but diminishing a sense of affluent guilt. I am at heart a conservationist not an environmentalist and I am frugal and “simple” more than “green”. But then again I know there are a lot of people much better at putting their ethics in the fore of their families food choices. So I am not at all above reproach on this and I certainly don’t claim any moral high ground.
I am really not sure if this has a point or not, but since this is my own collection of vagrant thoughts called a blog here it is.
Advent is close
Elizabeth Floss has a wonderful Advent post up.
I am still combing through the links.
Monday
Today so far is cloudy and grey.
Saturday I managed to injure my back while working on the basement. It is still a bit sore.
Simply Catholic 