Jeff was out in the garage when he heard Neighbor Carmen yell for someone to help our 89-year-old Neighbor Anne Marie who had slipped and hurt her foot while getting out of her car. Jeff ran across the street and, after discussing the best course of action, he scooped Anne Marie up and carried her into her house. As he placed her on her sofa she told him that he made her “feel like Cinderella”! Anne Marie iced her foot and was hobbling around okay later that evening.
Our Prince Charming keeps running out of socks.
“Do you need to buy more socks?” I ask.
“No. I just need to do my laundry.”
It seems we haven’t been home enough to catch up on our laundry. I’d intended to wash the sheets last weekend and realized a week later that they were still not done. (“Geez,” Jeff says, “you really are airing our dirty laundry.”) Last week we took care of our slobbery granddog while her family was on vacation. There is no hope of getting two wearings out of a pair of pants with Hidey around! The pile of wash was almost as high as it was in the days when all three of our children lived at home. We just couldn’t get ahead of it.
Rather than worrying about making time for laundry, we celebrate the growing heap as an indication of our busy lives. There’s yoga, biergarten with extended family every Friday night, Friend Kathy’s visit, Daughter Kim’s ComedySportz improv showcases and a “major league” show, a concert, a weekend away... And we’ll be home for dinner only once this week! Heaps upon heaps of fun. Loads and loads of laundry which may have to wait. Oh, well.
Our weekend away was to the home of Rochelle Ostroff-Weinberg in Margate, NJ, for the MDS Family Coping and Caring event. Once again we met a nice group of folks who are dealing with MDS at various stages. Most MDS patients are men but we met a woman who was recently diagnosed and facing a bone marrow transplant. Both she and her husband had difficulty discussing her diagnosis and I believe that hearing about Jeff’s successful transplant may have done some good.
Another woman – a nurse - was there for support for her daughter-in-law, an MDS patient in the Czech Republic. Her son had asked her to attend this gathering. She felt that her daughter-in-law received wonderful care with her bone marrow transplant but was a little frustrated that the immunosuppressant available to her was not the same one Jeff and U.S. patients have access to - and is generally better tolerated. She is learning how to be supportive from a distance and, when needed, flies there to take care of her grandchildren.
Rochelle told us that her husband, Bob, gave wonderful gifts of letters to her and their daughter and that these were delivered after his death. Rochelle wanted us to think about the fact that one of us would predecease the other (Jeff turned to me and said, “I’m going to miss you.”) and what a gift it would be to have shared thoughts with each other in this way – with a shared journal. She gave each couple a journal and asked us to take turns writing, watching as the other wrote. I think she hadn’t figured on how difficult that would be for those of us (all of us!) with presbyopia. It was difficult for a few other reasons as well: my preference for a keyboard to write with, Jeff’s dyslexia, the roomful of others similarly engaged and chatting, the serious and tender subject matter. But what a gift it will be if we purposefully hand-write what we mean to each other, adding to it from time to time, in my own/his own hand, with misspellings and stops and starts, and spots where someone’s tears provided the punctuation. Thank you, Rochelle.
Jeff tells me that he purchased a gift for me a few months ago but cannot remember where he hid it. He’d intended to give it to me on the 6-year anniversary of his bone marrow transplant and now hopes he can find it before my birthday this week. He found the receipt. He has cleaned out his closet and drawers and donated clothes, searched in our luggage (he isn’t sure why he looked there but just felt he should check), behind furniture, in cabinets. He tells me that I can have the gift if I can find it. Then he claims that I actually know where it is and am keeping it to myself so more of the house gets cleaned and sorted out. He says he’ll get me another gift but I think my gift is the sweetness of the thought. Truly, gifts abound.
