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“Dare To Dream Of Better Endings”

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The spring/summer issue of the Bloomberg School of Nursing Alumni magazine, Pulse, is devoted to death and dying. The authors, all nurses,  are eloquent and compassionate. Their comments underscore my motivation for having written Autumn’s Grace.

Dean Sioban Nelson notes that “until we see death and dying as part of the continuum of care, Canada will remain a poor place to die”.  I concur. We need to”lift our game”.

I am so proud of my alma mater for starting the conversation within the Faculty of Nursing and the alumni community.

Read the spring/summer edition of Pulse at http://bloomberg.nursing.utoronto.ca/news-events/pulse-magazine

Questions About The Expression Of Sexuality In Older Women

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As I engage in the distractions of summer (gardening, cycling, golfing, socializing), I continue to puzzle my way through the lives of the four elderly women who are the characters in “The Memory Boxes.”  Their lives are full and interesting, probably because they still have each other to watch out for, to be challenged by, and to be entertained by. That observation made me realize that with their husbands gone, through death or divorce, that men may well be a topic of conversations from time to time.

Men may come up in different contexts—as a memory (father, brother, teacher etc), a friend, a colleague, a pest, a handyman, a cheat, a partner (bridge, golf, tennis) and as a current romantic interest. The latter then made me wonder about sexuality and the older woman (late 70’s-early 80’s). For the three that have been widowed, I have many questions like:

  • How do they bridge that transition from long marriage to widowhood to “dating”?
  • Once dating, how do they move toward a full expression of their sexuality?
  • How, when gravity has had time to re-shape their figures, do these women manage the exposure and familiarity of “getting between the covers” for the first time?
  • Once successfully in bed, what are the accommodations necessary for arthritic joints, amputations etc?

As I try to imagine these situations I can feel a nervous giggle beginning much like used to happen whenever another one of my brothers was being baptized. As a pre-teen and teenager, my mortification was that my parents were standing in front of the congregation, and the minister, holding the product of their mating for everyone to see. The warning quivers of a nervous giggle make me worry that I may never be mature enough to write about sex and the older woman!

Readers, if you have insights/books/movies to offer, I welcome them. Here is one article that I think is wonderful….

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/health/sex-after-60-calls-for-intimacy/article15015746/#dashboard/follows/

Ego Integrity vs. Despair

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Writing time has been limited of late as I have tended to gardens, and prepared for the book launch. However, these activities have not stopped me from trying to define my elderly female characters in The Memory Boxes  more clearly. They are always at the edges of my mind. The result is that I have been “clipping” items from the Globe and Mail, Macleans and the Economist and filing them, and reviewing theories about human development.

The theory that I am returning to for the moment is Erikson’s stages of development as it applies to the stage called Maturity (age 65 to death). The basic conflict that an older adult wrestles with is ego-integrity vs. despair. It is important for the older adult “to look back on life and feel a sense of fulfillment. Success at this stage leads to feelings of wisdom, while failure results in regret, bitterness, and despair.” 1

The prospect of someone dying with regret, bitterness and despair is unsettling. Is it because in looking back at life one is trying to reconcile events and relationships? Is the despair because the events or relationships were challenging? Were the opportunities to address the challenges evaded by turning a blind eye, by turning down, by assigning blame, by leaving the country, by leaving the relationship, by……?

Would regret, bitterness and despair necessarily be the outcomes if, from the distance of decades later, one asked “What if…?”

I am thinking that if one could acknowledge the past crisis of conscience, or failure to act and resolve to “learn” from the prior experiences, and then from that moment forward conduct each day with positive intent, then wisdom could be the outcome.

Perhaps one can prevent regret, bitterness, and despair by developing insight and resolve. I certainly hope so.

1. http://psychology.about.com/library/bl_psychosocial_summary.htm

An Observation on Life Imitating “Art”

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I am having an unusual day and it’s because of the freezing rain. I had spent the morning happily working at the computer. Rainy days are perfect for writing. My husband however was feeling trapped: unwilling to drive, and not able to work outside. He was wondering what he might do, when he realized “we”  could tackle the files in the basement that have been accumulating for decades. They had been stacked and waiting for a ‘rainy day’; this one was perfect.

After having made my contributions to the broad categories— keep, shred, re-cycle—and sorting some of the obvious items accordingly, I left him on his own. Now it was time to look at my office. Books have been accumulating on top of the credenzas in a less than orderly manner for some years. The credenzas are full, hence no space for books. My plan was to make space for the books but that meant hauling out the multitude of cardboard magazine files and searching through papers and journal articles.

To my surprise, I found a treasure trove—abstracts and papers I had forgotten about, and journal articles that still seemed timeless. It suddenly occurred to me that life was imitating “art”.  I am writing about an elderly woman who needs to make sense of the boxes in her basement before she can put her home on the market. And while I’m not at that point in my life, it was a curious juxtaposition of my two worlds: reality and fantasy.

I find it interesting to be engaged in this process of sorting and clearing, noting my own reactions (joy, reticence, surprise, relief etc. ) and simultaneously wondering about the range of my character’s responses.  If I were to have a conclusion today, it is that life imitating art is superficial and uni-directional. It is more likely that life informs art, and art informs life  and when both happen the outcomes may be transformational…Piagetian if you will, because one can never view the world again as one did before. It will have become more differentiated, more complex and interesting, richer and more engaging. It is because of these experiences that I write. The outcome is never certain  but the journey is always informative.

A New Beginning

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It is a curious experience to be in the simultaneous process of launching a book and beginning work on a second project. This time I trust that the characters will guide me through their stories.

It is a different stance than the one I took with Autumn’s Grace. During that first encounter with writing fiction, I remember looking at the computer one morning and saying out loud, “No! You cannot speak!”. It was the character Jessie who provoked the outburst. As a narrator, I was having difficulty expressing Jessie’s challenge of being a health care professional who felt powerless in the care of her father. In time, Jessie did get to speak, as did the other characters, but not until I had taken a year off from writing to re-read my favourite authors who knew their way around dialogue. Learning to let my characters tell their stories was a way of releasing ownership and unleashing creativity. The characters had insights that surprised me.  Some made me laugh out loud; a few made me angry; others made me cry. What was striking was that they were observations that I would never have had without the writing experience.

This time I am telling a story through the eyes of four women who range between 74 and 80 years of age. They are widowed/divorced, fit, observant, irreverent, and adventurous. I am just getting to know them, and look forward to working with them each day. The working title is The Memory Boxes.

Finding my passion

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It would have been a long shot for anyone at Newmarket District High School to predict that I would find my passion as a writer. English classes terrified me. Although I read extensively and enjoyed reading, I was completely unprepared for the keen observations that classmates had about protagonists, themes, metaphors etc. The course textbook covered grammar, not literary devices; the library, which I knew well, had no reference books to guide me. Had I been a confident girl I might have posed questions, but I was not and did not. Consequently I left class feeling stupid, inarticulate, and incapable of writing adequate book reports and essays. These early experiences may have been the motivation to pursue a career in the sciences.

It was not until my final year in the MScN program at the University of Toronto that I realized that I enjoyed writing. My thesis explored the factors underpinning “Hope” and their application to the nursing care of agitated cognitively impaired elders. It was a subject I found endlessly fascinating; my only struggle was to contain the number of pages.

After that, the act of writing happened easily: annual reports, abstracts, papers for conferences, submissions to journals, and letters to the editor. At a Canadian Nurses Association Conference in the early 90’s I was approached about writing a chapter for the first edition of Nursing Management in Canada. The writing experience was intense. It squeezed into the tiny spaces left between other roles as a new mother, a nursing director and wife. But I loved the writing and was disappointed when it was done. A few years later (and with the second babe in arms), I was asked to submit to the second edition. The die was cast.

Humber College’s distance writing program and the summer residency program buoyed my confidence and helped me to find my voice. It appears that my motivation for writing is embedded with the things that worry me: palliative care, elder care, learning disabilities, environmental threats, family health, disconnected communities, and so on. My husband and two sons worry that I may never stop writing; I hope I never need to!