Hearts Are Breaking

Shattered. Heartbroken. These words appeared in my Twitter, er, X, feed this afternoon. 

Kelsie Snow posted that her husband Chris, who has ALS, suffered cardiac arrest yesterday with a subsequent catastrophic brain injury from lack of oxygen. He is not expected to wake up. 

Kelsie, who describes herself as a writer, podcaster and storyteller, blogs at https://kelsiesnowwrites.com/ and has a podcast called Sorry I'm Sad. She and her husband have two school-age children. He's an executive with an NHL club in Canada and was diagnosed with familial ALS three years ago (that means other people in his family, including his father, have died of the disease). But his progression was slowed significantly in a drug trial. The story of all this, with the accompanying emotional roller coaster, is told in Kelsie's blog which I have followed, as I follow other ALS stories, in the years since my son Kris died of ALS.

It is hard to watch others go through this, even over the distance of social media. I'm not just watching, I'm feeling and remembering. And imagining. There's the loss to Chris's family, Kelsie and their children now living through what they've long feared. There's the loss to others in the ALS community -- families with fathers and mothers and school-age children, people with ALS who are looking for morsels of hope and find them in accounts of a treatment that worked for someone, even in a small way, even for a short time. 

Instead today, a day when an FDA advisory committee is meeting to review the potential benefits of a new therapy, they are having to think about their own death or their loved one's death, even as they grieve for a fellow warrior. I remember Kris telling me, or maybe Michelle told me, how hard it hit him when one of his friends with ALS died. Loss. Over and over again. I'm sitting with that today. 

But I just spent time glancing through Kris's blog. I thought I remembered reading about that friend who died and I wanted to link to that post, but if it indeed was a blog post, I couldn't find it.

But I did get a lively taste of Kris's voice and spirit. A few more tears, yes, and sadness -- so much hard stuff that he and Michelle went through, and the rest of us, too. 

But also love and grace.

Blessed are those who mourn. 

Hoping the grass will grow

Over the course of the summer my backyard, most of it, has been transformed from weedy suburban wilderness to yard of hope and promise. (And still some weeds.)

Back in June I paid a local tree service to cut down the weedy mulberry and slippery elm trees and grind out the stumps that could be ground away. The ones that remain, too close to the house or garage for grinding, I'll be poisoning, salting and hacking at for the next five years, if I keep at it. 

This week, landscapers removed the old broken fence, lots of tall weeds and some very dead grass and graded, tilled and generally cleaned up the soil. There are new empty beds along the neighbor's fence and the back boundary of the yard, where someday, when I find a contractor, I will have a new back fence. In the middle there's a large area seeded with new grass. 

The last thing the landscapers did before they left for the day was to hand me a sheet of instructions for watering new grass. It's all up to me now. I am to water the new seed for five to ten minutes morning and evening until the seeds germinate, which could take 5 days, the paper says, or 30. After that there's a lot of watchfulness and judgement as the grass grows, and maybe one mowing before winter comes. 

I've been kind of worried about this part. I can remember to do something night and morning without fail for at most four or five days. Currently I am remembering to take a dose of Paxlovid every morning and evening after a recent positive covid test. This is not hard to remember to do because the stuff works great. Also, the bitter, metallic taste in my mouth, a common side-effect of the drug, is with me constantly. I'm counting the doses until I'm done. 

There are no such sensory cues for remembering to water the grass. The pots of zinnias and petunias on my patio tell me with a look that they need water, and bless them, they manage to recover even when I've let them go until they're drooping and dry. But the grass seed just lies there. And watering it requires stepping carefully through the mud as I move the sprinkler from the middle of the back yard to the position needed to water the side yard. I have designated a pair of muddy flip-flops for this operation and I have a new $40 sprinkler from Amazon with adjustable nozzles and guides, but no good overall strategy. 

But once it's going, it is nice to sit and watch the water go back and forth. I think about the green that will fill my yard next spring, and the new prairie flowers and grasses I'll plant along the fences. 

There is work to do, weeds to be dealt with in other corners of my property. My overgrown lilac bush needs some thoughtful pruning. And what about that basketball hoop? The torn net hanging from the hoop has been known to attract gold finches and hummingbirds. They hang there briefly before flying off to find real food. Should I hang a bird feeder from the hoop instead?

 It is an achingly beautiful and fragrant summer morning. The crickets creak on, not yet silent in the sun. A tiny, odd bit of something glitters in the sun shining low on the cement patio. The birds are somewhere else this morning, two or three backyards down the block. 

Yesterday on a late afternoon walk I startled a whole flock of goldfinches out of a bush next to a house on my west-east path. Or rather, it was they who startled me--so small, so yellow and so many. Their excited chirping was decidedly different from the house sparrows I'm used to in the morning. 

I read Better Living Through Birding, by Christian Cooper, recently, and also installed the Merlin Bird ID app on my phone. You hit the button on the app and it listens and records the sounds around you. Bird names pop up. I got an unusually long list this morning (five possibilities) but the persistence crickets are creating interference. Meanwhile I hear a phone alarm going off across the street as a neighbor leaves for work or school. There's a plaintive sound coming from something that I can't see high in the maple tree, while a squirrel on a low bough has fixed his attention on the tree's trunk. He's been completely still for several minutes, stretched from tail to chin to nose. What's he watching for? A juicy insect? A small bird? Something else that's alive? Me walking around the base of the tree bothers him (her?) not at all, though now he's found a new position, alert but upside down on the tree's central trunk. I do not have his patience, this morning, maybe not ever. He watches, I search for words. 

And now he's gone where I can't see.