Goodbye to you

I don't, as a practice and a superstition, wish time away. I never cross a day off the calendar before it is over.

But I was happy to see the back end of 2023.

I was going to write an end of year post on January 1, but we all returned from travel with consumption or some non-Covid crud.

And so I lay around limply, not so much feeling like writing.

But I forced myself to exercise and bathe.

Start as you mean to go on, and all that.

I'd like to eat black-eyed peas for luck, but I just don't like them. Or maybe I never like how they're seasoned. Anyway, we would have that as a tradition, but we don't.

Kind of like how growing up, we had oyster stew for Christmas dinner every year because that's what my mom was raised with. And then one year we all voiced how none of us cared for oyster stew, and apparently my mom had disliked it since childhood.

So then we never had it again.

Anyway, as the end of 2023 approached, the song that kept playing in my head was Goodbye to You.

In the immortal words of Scandal, "And my heart can't stand the strain/And my love, and my love, and my love/Goodbye to you..."

I didn't make a 2023 photo book. I didn't make a calendar. I simply couldn't handle looking back at photos from January–May.

Our only nod to Christmas at home were door wreaths and a poinsettia, and honestly, we only got those because Jordan was on the hook for selling a quantity of them for a sports team fundraiser and did nothing about selling. Nick and I sold a few. 

Though we'd signed an agreement at the start of the school year agreeing to participate up to this amount, we were caught off guard. And honestly, after the year we'd had, I didn't have the wherewithal. So we bought a bunch of wreaths and poinsettias.

Next year, which turns out to now be this year, will be better.

That's what I kept saying last year. Next year will be better. 

I didn't want to tempt fate and say, "How could it be worse?" Because I think a worse year than last year would actually break me.

That said. I was kind of surprised to realize that on the whole, despite so many years of depression and its accompanying negativity, I might actually be a glass half full person rather than a glass half emptier.

Because yes, 2023 was my absolute worst, most heart-wrenchingly painful, devastating, brutal, scary year of my entire life. 

I always knew that losing Betty would absolutely wreck me. But it's one thing to intellectually know. And it's quite another to feel like your entire body, inside and out, has been abraded by grief.

To wake up every single day freshly scraped down to your core. 

And then, you know, to get cancer on top of it. That super sucked.

But oddly enough, on the whole, I feel like a very lucky person. 

Which maybe makes no sense. Because on the outside, I cannot imagine anyone else would be like, "Ooh, I'd love to have Lisa's luck!"

I get that. I do.

We started the new year with wretched chest colds. There's some kind of crud circling the globe, and we returned from the UK worn down and feeling low. As soon as we got home, Nick and I were felled by it.

It caught me off guard, because I hadn't been really sick since having Covid the first year of the pandemic.

I said this to Nick. I said, "I'd forgotten how it feels to be so sick. Because I've been so healthy for so long!"

And then I was like, "I mean, except for the cancer!" Ha.

Which I know is kind of all, "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"

But can I stick to a point?

Unclear. Because I think the ADHD meds I was so grateful for were exacerbating the effects of anastrozole. And since cutting my cancer recurrence risk is currently more important than quieting my brain, well, you get what you get.

But let me tell you how I'm lucky. You don't have to believe me. It's OK.

What 2023 showed me was how much love and kindness I have in my life. What extraordinary humans I have who love me.

My friends showed up, and they showed up huge for me. For me, for my family, for my mama.

You know I had my dear Nicole here for two weeks after my surgery taking care of me and making sure my family was OK. What kind of priceless gift is that?

On a side bar: I had to look up priceless, because I was like, un-pay-backable? Not enough money for? 

Becuase whether is is grief brain—which is a thing—or menopause, which I'm super duper in with the anastrozole working hard to make sure my body has no estrogen available, I keep lacking words.

Seriously. Yesterday I actually said, "You know, the wrists on your legs."

Ankles, my friends. The word for leg wrists is ANKLES.

But back to love. 

I had, I guess, three big traumatic events last year. My mom fell, spent 12 days and then passed away in GW Hospital, a place I will hate forever and absolutely refused to consider for my own treatment. Then we had her memorial service in September. And then, 10 days later, I had my surgery.

I haven't really talked or written at about my mom's memorial service. It was September 17.

That was the date I had to get past before I could start focusing on my future and how to be a yoga teacher. 

Until, of course, that all got derailed.

So maybe one day I'll write about that. But for now I'll say that my Leigh, who I asked to provide the floral arrangements (because she owns a wedding and florals company and has exquisite taste), created and installed the Betty-est flowers I could ever have hoped for. She made a beautiful chapel so much more so.

My mom would've loved them. Absolutely loved.

And through them, I had friends holding my hands. Physically, in some cases, and long-distance emotionally in others.

Maude and my high school friends came and stayed and rallied around me and cried with me and made me laugh and just offered their whole soulful selves in solidarity.

And I got flowers and gifts from friends I adore, but who I have barely spent time with in person because we live far apart. 

They're deep in my heart, and as it turns out, I am in theirs.

I cannot risk listing people, because I will leave some out. Grief/menopause brain. And then I would feel terrible. But my gosh, there are so many people.

I still owe a tremendous number of thank yous.

After my surgery, my community of moms here kept my whole family fed. Overfed, honestly.

My friend Andrea (sometimes lives near, sometimes far) set up a Meal Train, and we had so much food. People were incredibly generous.

Nicole had to cancel some lovely offers, as we were in the lucky position of having too much, and the freezer was full, and we couldn't bear to see good food go to waste.

One mom friend signed up multiple times before my surgery. I messaged her ahead and said please not to trouble herself like that.

And you know what she said?

She said we didn't know each other that well, and she was grateful to have a way to do something for me.

She was grateful for the opportunity.

This made me cry.

She's since messaged and said she was making a dish I particularly liked, and would I like a pan of it? Yes, oh yes, thank you.

A Cuban friend made me Cuban soup, the name of which I cannot remember. She told me to tell my surgeon, who is also Cuban. 

My Russian friend made me various soups, dropping one off every single week.

She started doing this after my diagnosis. She comes from a culture of food as medicine, and I needed the fortification.

Another mom friend, whose meal got canceled, asked if she could leave spiced tea made by her Kenyan husband and treats. (Ohhh, yes!!!) So her daughter picked out the cutest travel mug, and I had special tea and donuts.

I don't know if it sounds bad, listing all I received.

But I will tell you that my inclination—really, the way I was raised and trained—is always to tell people not to trouble themselves.

I love asking for advice and recommendations. I love knowing what books people are reading, or what kinds of skin care products they use.

I am always open to suggestions, and seriously love hearing. 

When I have to make choices, I get overwhelmed. So then I ask friends. It narrows things down and helps me a lot.

But those are things that cost people relatively little in terms of time and effort.

Prior to last year, it would've been unimaginable to me to ask someone outside of my family or absolute closest friends to make me a meal.

But the advice I got from a friend with cancer—which was just like the advice I got when traveling to Spain, but fortunately didn't result in eating fried pig ears—was say YES to everything.

Let people do things for you. Allow people to help you. Say yes to the kindness.

So I said yes. Yes, please. Yes, thank you.

I had so much soup. I love soup. I am a terrible soup maker, sadly, and I love soup.

You'd think it would be simple. But good soup is not simple. Anyway, not for me.

So at one point Nick was all, "WHY do we have so much soup?"

(Spoken like a non-soup lover.)

And I said, "It's for me. I love soup."

Also, I am not a quid pro quo person. I'm really not. I do things for people I care about because I want to. 

Kindnesses bring me joy.

And I pour a lot into people I care about. 

And it turns out there are lots and lots of people I love.

What I've learned is that there are lots of people far and wide who love me back.

When I was young, I'd get jealous if a good friend added another bestie. Because I thought of love as finite. But as I've aged, I realize it's infinite.

Time and energy, yes, finite. Love, so vast. I do think the more you feel, the more you give, the more you have available. Our hearts are immense.

So in the horribleness of the worst year of my life, I had so much love.

And love and kindness came from unexpected places.

The first time I cried in class in Bali, I was lying on my stomach on my yoga mat in an anatomy class. We had no chairs. We could sit, lie down, stand, squat, use bolsters. But no chairs.

So we were on our mats pretty much all the time.

And the anatomy teacher was talking about diaphragmatic breathing.

And all I could picture was how shallowly my mom breathed. And how, if I'd known what I was starting to learn, I could have helped her.

If she'd breathed properly, would she have been strong enough to survive?

So I was lying on my mat in class with huge tears rolling down my face.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, and a voice quietly asking me if I'd like to go outside.

Jessie, this extraordinarily beautiful young woman, had been on her mat a row ahead of me. I wasn't making any noise, but she somehow knew, and came over to offer kindness.

I came to learn she was so tuned in to the emotional world around her. She could feel the room.

We went out in the rice paddy, and I cried and cried. I apologized for taking her out of class and she waved a hand and said, "I just graduated pre-med. I already know what she's talking about."

She's so young, so smart, so beautiful. Like, so pretty she could be shallow or not that bright, or unkind and just go through the world on her looks and people would do things for her. But she's deep and thoughtful and funny. 

I'd be delighted if my girl grew up to be like her.

And you already know about Fiona, my Bali yoga bestie who has turned into a lifelong bestie. 

I just got to see her two weeks ago. It was amazing but too brief. An evening and a morning, where we hugged goodbye at the train station, smiling for a selfie, and then I walked away in tears.

While we were there, the whole of England was being barraged by a storm called Gareth or something equally English, and trains were canceled and roads were flooded. Roofs had been blown off houses. Crazy stuff like that.

Fiona was coming down from the north, and had two trains canceled, and then was on a standing-room only train so packed that people fainted and one kid threw up.

But she came down to Oxford for the night, and we had a glorious time!

This is a whole nother post, or series of posts, because I have vocabulary, new treats, and travel stories to share.

Which I will do soon.

I wasn't writing for a while because I was just so relentlessly sad. Not depressed. Just sad. 

And I figured that it was probably tedious for readers to face another slog through grief kind of post.

But then my friend Sarah called, and out of the blue she said, "I love your blog! My mom loved your blog!"

I told her my fear of the ponderous griefy sadness and she said no. Keep writing. Post.

So I am.

I got through my first birthday, Betty's birthday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and New Year's without my mom. I feel...relieved?

Goodbye to you, 2023. Hello to you, 2024.

Exercise, bathe. Eat a fucking vegetable. Feel lucky to be alive.

These are for me. I'm not telling you what to do, though you're welcome to join me. 

Oh! I also want to start sitting in cold plunges, and grinding my own grain. And learn to knit, crochet, quilt...But those are also for another day.

Start as you mean to go on.