On being happy

Old people are funny. Sometimes they're cantankerous, sometimes their witty, sometimes they go on and on and on and on about their days of yore. I like old people but my busy world and their slow routine don't always mix. I am around them a lot. I enjoy getting to know them, truly. But I come into said old person's home, interrupting their rather uneventful day, and I am a barrage of questions and movement, assessing, answering my phone, emailing, charting, medicating. Sometimes even in my listening I can be distracted. What I must be to them. A flibbertijibbet! A will-o'-the wisp! A clown! (love you if you get this reference).

Watch this little interview snippet below with Terry Gross from NPR's "Fresh Air" and Maurice Sendak. He talks about his greater appreciation for life, how he has fallen in love with the world, and his advice for Terry is "Live your life live your life live your life". 

I mean, we're all out here living our lives. We're not dead. But we can be disconnected. When I think of living my life I can jump to the freedom of being on vacation, of camping, of discovering a new city. Yes this is good living, but it is not every day living. Yet I think, know, that in every day living we can experience the same sort of wonder that we have in the relaxed vacation style state. It requires a very simple technique: Stop. Watch. Listen. Feel. 

There is a pulse to life, even the stillness of my living room at this early hour, there's a pulse, a gentle hum of electronics, a gray sky beginning to change color, the thunk of the newspaper being delivered. Maurice, in his golden years, learned to love this. And this is a lesson we can learn from a "happy old man": Live your life. Even the parts you don't like, the parts you wake up dreading, embrace them as a moment that you GET TO HAVE. You are NOT DEAD. That's pretty great, right? That can change in a moment. Just yesterday I sat with a patient and watched her die in front of me. That will never not amaze me. And it ALWAYS makes me appreciate the fresh air, the trees, the pulse of the blood in my own body. 

I like being alive. And I much prefer being happier while I'm doing it. 

The occasional songwriter

I've been writing the songs, yo!
Garage Band is so completely fun. Time consuming, but fun.
I'm not trying to be a professional anything here, so there's some mistakes. And talk about a random montage of pictures. Honestly I'm too new at this to know how to work out all the kinks. I got me a real job, too!

Take a wissen!

Another matriarch passes

Dear Ellie,
Last thursday, January 31, your Great Grandma Bette Dutton Richards passed away. I will admit that her and I were not that close, we didn't see each other very often, but I was fortunate to see her 3 times in the last 2 years. Grandma was my dad's mom, and you never got to meet my Dad, and this will always sadden me because he was a great man. When I saw Grandma it reminded me so much of my father, her mannerisms and facial features. I won't say that I'm incredibly sad that Grandma died; she was ready. But I'm sad to not be able to see my father in her anymore. Although now, depending on what you believe, they may even be together.

Family is so important, and I hope as you grow older you realize this. My Dad and Grandma's legacy lives on in me, my brother and sister, my aunt Marybeth, my uncle Paul. These are all fantastic people and the small few that really knew my dad and Grandma. I hope you grow up knowing these people, for they are your family. Family takes care of each other. They have history together. They will watch you grow from the adorable three and a half year old you are now to a woman.

Our families do not live close together, and this saddens me, just as it saddened my father so deeply when I moved from Maine to California. So with distance you must keep relationships alive. You call. You visit. You write. You keep knowing each other. With your Grandma I'll admit I did not do this very well. But I loved her. Her passing is a reminder to me about the small time we have on Earth together, and the importance of knowing your family.

You get to grow up going to incredible places like Maine and Los Angelos and San Francisco and Bozeman, MT, because that is where our family lives. It takes more effort to travel to see family, but it's worth every trip.

(RIP Grandma Richards. Give my dad a hug for me please.)

Love, Summer

Grandma and her son John (my dad): 1949

You meeting Grandma for the first time: 2011

You are here.

Do you ever look at your life and wonder "How did I get here?"

I never thought my life would be centered around so much grief, grief of dying families, grief of my own. I never thought that GRIEF would be such a pervasive emotion in my life. I always thought myself to be a happy person, a positive person, yet here and now, my heart tries to navigate its own way through other peoples' dark places, as well as my own. 

I'm not a broken person. I don't believe any of us are broken people. But as we get older things start sticking, neural pathways are carved deeper, and the stories we tell ourselves start to feel true.

There is a lot of sadness in this world that also contains so much joy.  Every person you meet is hurting, in someway, in some capacity. Some are very vocal about their pain. Some keep it hidden. Some are excellent at working through it. Some internalize and let it fester.

But to each person that gets up each morning and that goes out into the world, I call you a warrior. Life is fucking hard sometimes. People hurt us. People die. People say mean things. People kill each other. It's hard to be sick. It's hard to be a caregiver. It's hard to take without giving. It's hard to give without taking. It's hard to know if our decisions are the right ones. It's hard to hurt other people with the decisions that we make.

Now that I'm a mom and can't take off and do whatever the heck I want whenever I want to do it, that adds up. Sometimes I want to take my car and drive straight for the mountains and climb to the top of one of them and let myself yell out my feelings, my anger, my grief, my frustrations, my responsibilities, my hurt, my pain, my past. That's how I want to rid myself of things I call bad. But this is hard to do now. I work. I mother. I have a partner. I need to make money. I need to listen to people that are so darn sad. And I need to listen to them with a present mind, the only kind of mind that does anyone any kind of good.

So what does this all mean? Am I different than you, my reader? Am I different from my patients that are dying? Am I different from my patients' families who are suffering? Am I different from my three year old daughter who screams and cries because she wants to lay on my arm? No, I am not different. We all suffer. It all means something to us. Our individual suffering is our own house of pain and we can live inside of it and shut out the world and let those stories we tell become more and more true for us, or we can be warriors and put our big girl/boy pants on and get out there. We can leave our houses and walk among each other, knowing that we are all carrying some kind of grief. We can walk with our heads down or we can walk with eyes up and even smile at each other. The point is, we keep walking, moving, participating, trying. We are all the same in so many ways. We all suffer, because we are all human. And we all love, because that's what we do. 

I am writing this because I want to feel BETTER. I want to walk in the world with my arms wide open, not hugging them tight to my body to diminish the person that I am. I am a warrior! I fight, every day, to do the right thing. I don't always succeed, but I always keep trying. And this unites us. We all get a new day. We all get to start from scratch. We all have a map that says "you are here" and you can take that map, recognize that this is where you are now, and go wherever the heck you want.

We are all warriors. And we will all be okay.